Doing

[Muxel]

It's laid out in Chapter 6 of ISOTM and goes roughly like this: (1) So you have an aim? (2) first be master of yourself (3) then only are you capable of "doing" (4) start with knowing yourself (5) just watch yourself initially (6) and do not wish to change yourself immediately (7) because true "change" is another ball game entirely

Our adversaries being: (1) what G termed "imagination" and "daydreaming", (2) habit, and (3) the "expression of unpleasant emotions".

All of the above if done correctly will lead you to the singular realization that (1) you are not in control of yourself.

 

[Muxel]

One possible reason as to why we might be resistant to the idea that we are not in control of ourselves:

(bolded parts are mine)

Again, from "You are not so smart" by David McRaney:

In the early days of psychology there was a prevailing belief among scientists. They thought just about everyone had low self-esteem, inferiority complexes, and a cluster of self-loathing neuroses. Those old beliefs are still reverberating in the public consciousness, but they were mostly wrong. The research conducted over the last fifty years has revealed the complete opposite to be true....

Self-esteem is mostly self-delusion, but it serves a purpose. You are biologically driven to think highly of yourself in order to avoid stagnation. If you were to stop and truly examine your faults and failures, you would become paralyzed by fear and doubt. Despite this, from time to time in your life, your personal hype machine sputters to a stop. You get depressed and anxious. You question yourself and your abilities. Usually it passes as your psychological immune system fights off the negative attitudes. In some places, like the modern United States, this hype machine is reinforced by a culture of exceptionalism.

This tendency to see yourself as above average is also bad. If you never see how much you are screwing up your life, mistreating your friends, and being a complete douche bag, you can destroy yourself without realizing how bad things have become.

...research shows... that you tend to accept credit when you succeed, but blame bad luck, unfair rules, difficult instructors, bad bosses, cheaters, and so on when you fail. When you are doing well, you think you are to blame. When you are doing badly, you think the world is to blame....

This sort of thinking also spreads to the way you compare yourself to others. ... just about all of us think we are more competent than our coworkers, more ethical than our friends, friendlier than the general public, more intelligent than our peers, more attractive than the average person, less prejudiced than people in our region, younger-looking that people the same age, better drivers... better children.. that we will live longer than average...

AND... NO ONE thinks that he or she is part of the population contributing to the statistics generating averages. You don't believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. ...

You are incredibly egocentric, just like everyone else. Your world is subjective by default, so it follows that most of your thoughts and behaviors are born of a subjective analysis of your personal world. The things affecting your daily life are always more significant than something happening far away or in the head of another person. ...

...it's difficult to see yourself as average... you find the idea repellent and search for a way to see yourself as unique. ...

You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. If you win, you tell everyone. ... But self-serving bias keeps you going when the hype machine runs low on fuel.

 

[edgitarra]

So then, what could be an useful strategy in order to learn to DO without anticipation? Because anticipation seems useful for one when he tries to protect himself in some cases, but it is also hindering the process of self observation and self-remembering when one expects a result and he finds himself getting a different one. Anticipation(which in my opinion is getting more and more under the name of daydreaming) for me is a good shock to bring myself back in the body. But it is still vague for me to discern between the right use of anticipation and the wrong one.

 

[RflctnOfU]

Thanks for the reminder! It is important though to add that G emphasized that Doing (with a captial letter) is something very far from us. This is difficult to accept, since we are 'doing' stuff all the time. But G said that regular 'doing' just happens, and if a man achieves something, then it is purely by accident. After which one lies to oneself that everything was fully intended and could not have gone wrong -- whereas it could have gone wrong just as easily

It seems that we have the possibility of Doing only when we have fully, viscerally seen in shock, that we are unable to Do. This may sound a bit paradoxical at first but makes sense when you think about it in terms of problem solving: You only can solve a problem if you have thoroughly seen it and studied it.

I want to mention a possible subtlety regarding G's pronouncement on 'Doing'. Do-ing. As in striking a "Do". Do Re Mi, etc.. Knowledge of the law of octaves...

Kris

 

[cerogers]

Thank you for encouragement. :)
I'm having problems especially with going against the flow of habit.

Yes, thanks here too, it’s a good reminder. The problem with going against habit sometimes is if we try to tackle the big ones, and fail or succeed for a while only to fall back again. It happens for us all but can be discouraging, frustrating! Maybe better to tackle smaller habits first, a few at a time, and gradually work up the scale to move on to include larger problems.

It might seem silly at first, to make one’s aim what might seem like only a very small habit. But you can come to see even in this, that it can be far more difficult than we might at first suppose. Yet the tendency is often to jump ahead and try to tackle some big themes right away (and all at once!), only to get completely stuck in our tracks when we see that we cannot DO. But I guess at least we learn to see this for a fact in trying and failing, whereas most of the time we never even notice that everything just ‘happens’, the idea that we cannot ‘Do’ makes no sense. So all is not lost, at least you got to see something of the scale of the problem!

Baby steps is the way, I think.

This is an excellent point. Going against habit is difficult. With habit there comes an idea of expectation. I think that's where the difficulty lies. Habit makes it easier. But, to go against habit is to move closer toward who we are, I think. It's interesting to think of starting with the small habits first and moving up. All interesting notions to go forward. Thank you very much for the reminder of Doing.