CONFIDENT THINKING: COMMANDMENT NO. ONE

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF CONFIDENT THINKING

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., PH.D.

© JUNE 2006

AUHTOR’S NOTE:


This is a little book that I have promised myself I would write someday when I had a break. Such a break has occurred as I am between writing another “big book.” It is written for all the people I have encountered in my life that have thought that “I,” meaning me, had certain advantages or nascent talents that they lacked to do all the things that I have done. They have failed to note that my life has been filled with failures, false starts, demotions, divorces, depressions, and yes, deceptions. It has been to my benefit, and I don’t say this lightly, that I have been able to overcome many of these by simply living a long and persistent life. I have followed the commandments that I now share with you, and they have served me well. They have been my best friend when I had no other, the succor of my rebound when it looked as if I was down for the final count, and have led to my eventual happiness, health, wealth and good fortune. I have lived Walt Whitman’s cry, “I am great,” not in the sense that other men think of greatness, but in the spirit of our greatest poet. May you always be well and find in your heart the rhythm of God in your nature, pulsating with the spirit of the universe, and in that knowledge know that you walk in the company of Mother Nature, whom you were meant to treat well, and in treating her well, will be one with yourself, which is the key to confident thinking.


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CONFIDENT THINKING: COMMANDMENT NO. ONE

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF COMPLETELY. HAVE FAITH IN YOUR ABILITY TO DO ANYTHING YOU DESIRE.

From our earliest memory we are doing what others tell us to do and what these significant others tell us is important, not only to do but what to think. These significant others are our parents, or other caregivers, our teachers who instruct us in the lessons in books created by those significant others who think what is important for us to know, by our priests, ministers, or rabbis who instruct us on the lessons of life and what is good and evil, desirable and undesirable, and from countless contacts among friends and relatives, all of whom are constantly telling us what we should believe, think important, and why we are here.

Added to this is the constant bombardment of television, which subliminally and aggressively engages our attention to desire what is packaged in a way to make “whatever” most wanted. If this were not enough, we are now exposed to the Internet, and video games, and handheld electronic devices that have nonsense caricatures of aggression to energize our animal instincts to crush, plunder, destroy, and punish those characters the electronic designers have declared the enemy.

And still if this were not enough, noise which has been declared music, noise that its creators insists is art, also bombards our senses with bad language and even worse images that offends what it is to be human, loving, caring, and innocent.

The constant cacophony is for us to grow older, but not grow up so that we can purchase this noise or these games, when we have not had time to listen to the music of Mother Nature in the singing of birds, the chirping of insects, the quiet patter of rain, or to study dancing clouds in the sky.

We are made almost from the moment of birth a stranger to ourselves filling out the agenda of others who claim they have our best interest at heart, when it is too often only their own.

We are a greedy sponge for all this attention, instruction, noise and pontification, and we absorb it all without complaint or comprehension because it is the wisdom of life and we are but a fledgling member.

We are an amorphous mass of tissue and bone, hope and longing that must be molded into the proper form to lower the anxiety of those who have come before us, as they, too, experienced the same anxiety as they came into the world. We are a willing sponge because the source of the information comes from someone we love, admire, respect, or fear, and often a combination of all of these.

Consequently, much of our early training has a tinge of anxiety to it, not because of what and who we are, which is not clear to us, but a cause of anxiety to our significant others. They have their reputation, which is already established, and we are meant to enhance that reputation, allowing them the opportunity to project their own self worth on our innocence, praising ours and so by proxy praising their own. They have their reputation, prestige and standing amongst their kind to protect, which has much to do with how willing a sponge we are and how reciprocal we perform to their attention and bias.

So, the first breakdown in belief in self is suffered before we even know anything about self or belief or faith in oneself. It is the result of the punishment we take from those who love us and are responsible for our development. Much is made of when we first walk, or talk, or show evidence of the intelligence, dexterity, or altruism that they lack in themselves but delude themselves into believing is a mirror reflection.

Self-interest and aggression are discouraged as if they were mortal sins when self-interest and aggression are the foundation of confident thinking in terms of belief in oneself.

Well meaning though these significant others may be, they introduce us to a cultural disease: compare and compete.

So, almost from the beginning of our consciousness, we are aware of how well someone else does something compared to how poorly we do the same. This results in our attention being not only directed outside ourselves for approval but outside ourselves for what is important to us, when what is unique to our make up, and important to us is buried deep in our soul, crying out to be heard, but cannot be heard for what we are told we are is too loud for us to hear it.

We are not only compared by parents and teachers but by our own siblings, should we have them, and certainly by our friends and acquaintances. This happens at the earliest of age. It first happens in our home, then in school, then on the playground, as a hierarchy of skill is quickly established among our playmates, and such skill is only a small dimension of all the possible skills inherent in the human spirit. It may find us badgering ourselves for seemingly an eternity to perfect what is not there at the expense of what is.

If we are slow of foot or hand, or don’t see well, or don’t have good hand-eye coordination, playmates are quite perceptive of these shortcomings, and brutal in their evaluation, choosing us last when in games, or not choosing us at all.

This finds many of us drifting towards others of similar deficiencies or moving away from everyone. We think of ourselves as losers and them as winners when the only game we have failed to understand is the game of life that is going on inside us, which has a rhythm and range, a character and composition totally unique to that of everyone else, including those to whom we have drifted towards.

The tendency of the rejected is to become obsessed with those demeaned winners, which only deepens the pain of being losers, when neither is relevant. We mark this to immaturity, and adolescent jealousy, but unfortunately it can become a lasting scar on a child’s psyche, only to be perfected into an embittering lifetime mindset.

With those so inclined, there is a tendency from the youngest of age and throughout one’s entire life to exaggerate the qualities of others, whatever they may be, and always at the expense of the qualities that one actually possesses, which are taken for granted.

One thing there is certain: great people have great weaknesses. They make headlines when their greatness becomes public knowledge. We expect our heroes to be less human than we are, when they tend to be more human. They are more self-interested, greater risks takers, and more ambitious.

Some buy into their celebrity of their greatness, taking seriously such accolades as being brilliant, beautiful, geniuses, and great, when the talent they possess is God given, as it is with us all, and as God has a sense of humor, He puts in their bonnet a select bevy of evil temptations that proves them often only too human.

It is a law of nature that people of tremendous talent also possess tremendous demons as well, which if not accepted by them and managed by them, and cautiously controlled by them, inevitably destroy them.

Greatness is the energy of the conflicting chemistry of talent and demons that sparks the creative verve, and without it nothing of consequences ever sees the light of day. So, it is well for us to be charitable to the most gifted among us because the war they fight every day to master their demons is a war that would humble most of us very quickly.

People which we deem “great” or “famous” or “holy” or “intelligent” or “genius” or “gifted” and managed to somehow earned the recognition are the same people who learn at an early age to hide what they are not, to bury their misgivings, their fears, their sense of being inadequate, a fraud or pretender, their sense of being stupid in so many ways, while at the same time, marveling at their instinctive ability to maintain the pretense.

They accomplish this by developing the unique skill to have us focus on their strength obliterating the darkness of their weakness. Likewise, knowing the economic value of strength, they also know the emotional value of weakness, recognizing that others adore and envy them at once because the focus is on what they don’t have and aren’t rather what they do have and are. In a celebrity culture, others define everything that should matter, and we are inclined to adore them for it.

Confident thinking is complicated by the ambivalence and ambiguity of desire. Desire is a most noble aspect of confident thinking, but is complicated by the fact that we often want what we don’t need, and need what we don’t want. When desire is driven by want, there is never any peace, never any closure, and seldom any happiness.

Want is a hole in the psyche that can never be filled. Want is a prison of self-en-cage-ment. Want is the road to self-destruction, and often in the process destroying everyone and everything that is near and dear. Want is the constant mantra of the advertiser, the pundit, the television guru, and the criminal. Want is the separation of the soul from the body.

Want is the ultimate punishment of self-haters. They strive “to please others,” and never do, while finding little inclination to understand much less please themselves. Want is a cagey game of self-deception, the thinking being they are pleasing themselves when they want to be envied as they have envied. Also, they want to become another, which is impossible, at the expense of being themselves, which they hate. They are perfect fodder for the advertiser, the con, the flatterer, and the sycophant.

Need is fundamental to existence. We need food, shelter, clothing, human contact, love and work. But want separates us into groups, classes, categories, declensions, and communities. Advertisers know this, housing developers know this, social architects of culture know this, and so we imitate those of whom we envy most by existing in communities that are downscaled models of their designs, sacrificing our heritage, customs, culture, domicile and nature.

Now, every place looks like every other place; everyone dresses like everyone else dresses, everyone eats what everyone else eats, everyone works where everyone else works doing what everyone else is doing, and everyone mates and marries or relates to others like everyone else does.

Even the least expensive car looks like the most expensive car; the least expensive clothes look like the most expensive clothes, and so on. When need becomes synonymous with want, there is no longer originality, no longer authenticity, no longer real contact with anything that is real. It is an artificial existence spinning out of control in an artificial world spinning into oblivion, and no one seems to notice because the focus is always on the spinning and not on the spinner.

There is no way of having confident thinking when what you are doing is not what you desire to be doing or need to be doing, but only what you want to do, believing want is legitimate when want is always someone else’s idea that you bought long ago and now think it is part of you. The evidence of the falsity of want with true desire is in where we are now doing what we are now doing. If we needed to be doing something else, desire would insist with so overwhelming pressure that we would be doing it.
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