I’ve heard people praising persistence in the face of difficulty and failure in so many places, from business lectures to spiritual advice, it’s making me sick, because my experience is quite different. In my experience, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. If something you have been doing has fucked you up, maybe, just maybe, doing more of it and harder isn’t the brightest idea. Instead, how about stopping to think and change your approach, maybe even revise your goals? Because if things are not working, you have several possibilities, and you can present them in simplified form as a 2×2 matrix, where the possibilities are that you are doing either a right thing or a wrong thing, and you are doing too much or not enough. So, the troublesome possibilities are that you’re either doing too much of a wrong thing, or not enough of a good thing. At the point of failure, assuming that you are doing the right thing, and only failing because you’re not doing enough of it is simply stupid.
Let’s put it this way. Life is a process of learning, from the point where you’re pissing into diapers to the point where you are reading articles such as this one. You had to go through certain steps in order to get where you are now. You didn’t get here by doing more of the things you did when you were 5. So, assuming that the first thing you will try will also be the last thing you will ever need is to assume you will die failing there. If not, you’ll outgrow it. You will either try it and see it’s not working, in which case you’ll find something more useful for attaining your goals, or you will try it, succeed and progress to the next level, of both understanding and methodology, and, quite possibly, of goals, because if your goals are still the same you had as when you were 5, you’re retarded. Your goals need to change with your growth in understanding.
The next issue is not that of right or wrong, but of approaching the problem adequately. If you don’t have a hammer at hand, it’s probably ok to hammer a nail or two with pilers, but if you didn’t get up to find a hammer after the second nail, you’re a lazy fuck. You need to change your approach as you do things; you need to adapt, learn, think. If your problem is something simple, such as unloading a truck full of cement bags, it is completely solvable by linearly scaling work. The more you work, the more gets done, and the more bodies you throw at the problem, it gets done faster. However, such problems are usually solved so quickly you can’t really call them “problems”. The stuff where you are likely to get stuck or fail is usually the stuff that requires a change in approach, basically you need to do things with your brain turned on and with your eyes open, observe what’s going on and focus on accomplishing your goals, and not necessarily on keeping your methods the same.
In spirituality, this is the most frequent reason for failure, and reason why failure is the norm and success is the exception. The way it works is that religions and cults assume their way is the right way, that more of it gives better results and all kinds of failure are due to not doing it enough or in the right way. Essentially, their basic assumption is that there’s nothing wrong with them.
Really?
Islam, for instance, thinks that solution to all problems is more islam. It doesn’t understand that the problem of islamic countries is that they are islamic. Ataturk understood that and worked on removing Islam from the position of Turkey’s solution-seeking paradigm. The result was that Turkey became the most advanced “islamic” country, but that’s a misnomer because it became advanced exactly because of not being islamic. Of course, there are always those who don’t understand that, and who think that the way to solve the remaining problems would be to introduce more islam, because that would make it better; of course it would, since there’s nothing wrong with it. Right. Also, in order to survive in the modern world, religions adapted by stating that you can take just the spiritual and ethical part of them, and for the rest you can have science and modern technology. However, if a religion fails at science and technology, if its approach is a dead-end there, what reason is there for you to think that its approach to God and ethics is any different? Most likely, its’s the same kind of failure, only more difficult to demonstrate because people were taught to accept bad assumptions as axioms.
Every stupid cult in the world thinks like that, and that’s why they are all dead ends. They are not solutions, they are problems. If you start from the premise that you already have all the important answers, you’re deluded. Spirituality is a process of transformation, and if you stick to all the ideas you initially brought with you, there’s no transformation, and doing more of that same shit will just waste more time.
No, the way to get somewhere is to assume you are on the starting point and you don’t have all the answers. When you get stuck somewhere, you can’t just assume that you need persistence. What you need is to stop and think, to see if you’re doing something wrong and that’s causing the difficulties, or you are in fact doing everything right and it’s just hard.
Persistence, of course, is essential when you need to do something that is difficult, takes a lot of time and effort, and you can’t just stop every now and then and check if 2+2 is still 4. Sometimes you indeed do have to persist and just grind the problem away. However, to assume that all problems are like that, that’s going to put you in a world of fail.
if you do what you always did, you get what you always got. simple as that..woohoo
That’s one layer of the problem, true. However, another layer is that you sometimes actually have to persist blindly without having obvious results to show for your efforts. For instance if you drive from Zagreb to Split, it takes more than 4 hours by highway, more than half of which you’re not even driving in the direction of Split, but in the general direction of Senj. Only during the last 5% or so of the travel can you actually see Split. So, what do you do? If you don’t trust the roadsigns and if you only trust your personal experience at the moment, you won’t get anywhere because you will decide that since you’ve been driving for 3.5 hours and you’re not there yet, there’s no point in persisting for another 0.5 hours.
So, on this layer Lahiri Mahasaya is right with his “work, work and at one point it’s done”. You can’t keep second-guessing yourself.
I always laugh when people accuse me of changing my mind all the time, because problems like this one are the reason; I just understand that each issue can have multiple layers on which you can have apparently contradictory answers to the same questions. On one layer, if you keep banging your head against the same wall you need to consider the possibility that you’re doing something wrong. However, it’s also possible that you’re doing everything right, it’s just a difficult problem to solve and requires faith and persistence.
So, how is this conundrum to be solved? First, one needs to have brain turned on. Simple rule-based thinking is useless in complex situations, you need to “grok” the actual situation in all its complexity and the answer is usually personal, for instance for one person it makes sense to finish college, for another it does not. Rule-based thinking would prescribe one universally valid answer, and this is not how things work in real life.
The second thing is one of Carl von Clausewitz’s sententiae, the one about the fog of war. Essentially, you make a good plan and you set it into motion. You can’t second-guess yourself and change it every five minutes just because you currently don’t see the results. However, my amendment to this is that one needs to have a way of figuring out when the plan had actually failed in order to make corrections in time.
So what I actually want to say is that one of the main problems that people have when they try to use reason and logic is that they didn’t have high enough math in school and they expect logical processes to give one-dimensional unequivocal results, such as “yes” or “no”, or a number. In reality, even a quadratic equation will give you a set of valid results. In fact, you can say that you for each problem you get a set of valid results, it’s just that you have different cardinality of the result-set depending on the problem. You only have a problem when you expect cardinality of the result-set to be either 0 or 1; essentially, that the problem either has no solution or it has one.
selbstverstandlich. and if you percieve 0 and 1 at the same time you go out of one-dimensional system, and the solution eventually arises by itself, out of the blue (not so simple at the beginning though, he he)
0 and 1 are actually a bad example because it implies a simple answer and a Boolean dichotomy as the sole problem. I was thinking more in terms of a set of inequations, where you have unions or intersections of intervals as the solution-set, or a function, which also gives you a solution-set by design, where for instance sin(x) is a subset of R. An even better example is something like tan(x), which is well behaved until you approach π/2. It is a good explanation why some models work just fine for normal circumstances, but they have a breaking point where they start failing seriously.
So, basically, the problem people have when approaching things is that they don’t understand that mathematics can model some things better than logic. In logic, something is either true or false. In mathematics, you can say that a statement (for instance that y>0) is true if x∈ and false if x∈[pi..2π]. So you basically have an interval or a set of intervals as validity range for any logical statement about f(x).
never mind 0 and 1 and especially sin and tan – not much fond of it anyway. to conclude, in decision making and solving problems of everyday life i find total perception much more useful than logic, for the above given reasons. as you said. pozz (is usage of foreign language obligatory here? i’m bit more productive in our mother tongue. surely faster!:)
Since Croatian-speaking visitors (including everyone from the exYu region) are about a third of the overall audience (according to GeoIP mapping), using Croatian would exclude the majority of the audience from the discussion.
Regarding the usefulness of “total perception”, it’s an easy statement to make, but what does that actually mean, in reality? I have to side with Wittgenstein here and say that language is a limit of clear thinking, basically if you can’t formulate your thoughts clearly in linguistic terms, it means you can’t think clearly about the subject. For me personally, I can say that experience in mathematics and programming frees my thought-processes from the simplistic limitations that seem to be prevalent.
For instance, if you observe the graph of tan(x), you can understand more about the concept of consistency than from all the self-help new age bullshit literature, because it very graphically illustrates how something can enter and leave the area in which you can say something meaningful about it. And I also prefer mathematics and physics as languages in which I model spiritual realities, because it filters out poseurs who like to think that they are able to have a relevant opinion on God or truth, but are unable to comprehend linear algebra.
i couldn’t agree more. pozz
Yoshigasaki, K.: Inner Voyage of a Stranger, Werner Kristkeitz Verlag, 2002., p. 17.