We often speak of objective proper behavior or a non-subjective attitude toward the outside world. Most physicists, psychologists and physiologists agree that people yearn to change yet tend to remain the same. It is unquestionably a fundamental human paradox. A key factor in this resistance to self-transformation is that most of us behave as if our future is completely and irrevocably forfeited by what we have done in the past.
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I have touched on this subject numerous times, as recently as a couple of posts ago, and I keep coming back to it. My contention has been that the maturing process should never come to a standstill in any place of human activity if life is to be a healthy, fulfilling experience. We do not have to lock ourselves to our past, particularly if it is a negative, self damaging past that can only hold us back from realizing our full potential and ultimate enjoyment of life.
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What I am saying here is that we all have been subjected at varying stages of our life to expedient truths that have never been tested in reality. We should not, at any stage of our existance, deny the impulse to contradict beliefs and concepts that have been imposed on us if they are personally troubling. We perpetrate old fairy tales created out of societal expediency only at our own peril.
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There is nothing that we know with absolute certainty that warrants acceptance without contradiction. The things we have accepted with utter confidence are simply those which we have taken for granted habitually for a long time without feeling the need to question them. To be truly mature, we must be capable of separating past experience into its component parts and using only those that fit in present circumstances. We are the sole judge of our behavior and the propriety of our judgment depends on personal experience of the world.
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By all means, it behooves us to nurture experiences from the past that comfort us or bring us a feeling of achievement, but there is no rule on God's green earth that says we have to be continually victimized by concepts and situations that we had little control over in the first place.
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The past can be useful only when we use it to provide building blocks for a creative future and to make the road to maturity just a little smoother and less treacherous for those who follow.
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There has to be a reason why I feel compelled to reinforce all of this.
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