We Foolish People

It often appears that we foolish people do not clearly know what we want...or at least don't understand that much of our usual behavior leads us away from what we most desire. Human beings of our culture are notorious for doing just the opposite of what is in their own best interests. What could be productive outcomes are delayed due to fear, doubt, incorrect learnings, and bad reasoning. Many human mistakes and oversights can be avoided. Error is an expected part of the human condition, but aren't we capable of governing ourselves better than we do? It seems we often engage in action that is clearly avoidable, not growth enhancing, and quite radically out of phase with our basic need structure.
Do we have to continue to poison ourselves with fears, mistrust, self doubts, strains and stresses, and unusual and inappropriate expectations, all of which result from our selected lack of awareness about the negative effect of our own past experiences and circumstances? Must we engage in chronic doubt, aggravation, and unparalleled misery produced, in the main, by toxic attitudes of others? We don't have to if we accept that we impose much of our own distress on ourselves. If we can replace negative attitudes and feelings with an easily obtained nurturing outlook and, through this newly gained nourishing process, come to release new found energy and potential, we can live more healthy and complete lives within the reality of present existence.

The Positive Outlook
Self development experts have shown us that we have within us an amazingly strong, but often unmet need to undo and eliminate the negative effects of past experiences and situations. The critical components in this are our own efforts at self development. Negative, self defeating patterns of behavior, developed mainly from past events and our responses to these effects, trap our potential for more effective thinking and acting. We are told that any individual can enhance his ability to promote his own inner personal growth and self dynamics and to push toward more meaningful and rewarding responses. The main theme of modern writers on self development topics is that concepts forced on us as to what is ideal, pretty, valuable, stylish, desired, etc., are held as to what everyone should aspire. Very few of us fully measure up, leaving so many of us to dislike ourselves for essentially impossible reasons. Some writers present substantially sound reasons why all of us should avoid victimizing ourselves and move toward solid self determination of what each wants.
The process for doing this, however, requires using essential human reasoning skills, and not many of us have well learned these. Factors of social pressure, expectations, demands brought about by parents and others, and internal struggles with this, cause us to fall into behavioral snares set among us. The rest of these pages are dedicated to helping one learn to see these situations more clearly and to take a renewed responsibility for self, not responsibility to others. Change results from analyzing events, happenings, requirements, social pressures, worry, and complaints from others, with regard to the decisions made by each of us as separate individuals. We can escape this, and these pages show how.
It is unfortunat that so many of us choose the unnatural path of burying, discarding, and diminishing our potential. We tear ourselves apart with unnecessary inner conflicts that threaten our emotional and spiritual, even our physical health. We struggle against fantasized enemies of our own making, place ourselves in untenable and uncomfortable circumstances, and then project our irresponsibility and indecision, our foolishness, our insanity onto others who can't, or won't help us...and could not care less. We are affected daily, hourly, by a large and somewhat confusing accumulation of experiences, data, teachings, nuances, demands, etc., that have been promulgated throughout our lifetimes. For the most part, we grow up with overwhelming restrictions on how to assume our own identities. We are compromised at every turn when we try to allow our individual uniqueness to develop and find it's own outlets. We are enveloped by the attitudes and valuing systems of others, established without our agreement. Certainly, we are not really free to be our own persons...or are we?

Overcoming Our Foolishness
Some philosophical "truths" can lead most of us away from behavioral error. These truisms are paradoxically described as "traps"--assumptions accepted without personal challenge--that have been forced on us and, in most cases, to which we are expected to conform and accept as almost heavenly ordained. This invariably leads to acting in ways that result in a great amount of wasted time, worry, undue stress and fatigue, fighting foolish no-win battles, and attempting to do the impossible. Now just how much more foolish can we get?
With clear, precise, topic-centered information, our friend, Dr. Browne, whose work we describe more about later, points out that most of us unwittingly keep on trying to change things that cannot be changed by any action we can personally take, keep on struggling with old problems that cannot be solved, keep on doubting the inevitable and mounting the unsurmountable without realizing we are choosing to do so. In other words, we foolish people all to often act strongest against ourselves! It is lucidly clear that we can be our own worst enemy, but must we take that route? Must we do to ourselves, voluntarily and with free will--if you will grant there is such a thing-- those things against which we would fight tooth and nail if we were aware that others sought to impose them on us? We wish to show that this is not the condition we must choose. A simple plan, and even simpler understandings can show us other roads: Roads of strength, pleasure, knowledge, trust, and, most importantly, roads that leads to that all elusive goal; internal, personal happiness.

Getting Approval
The need for approval from significant others; parents, spouses, sweethearts, children, teachers, employers, is strongly, and rightly so, developed in most of us from an early age. Approval from strangers and even enemies is sought by almost religious fervor by many of us. We need to gain the freedom to give our own self the approval we deserve. We foolish people entrap ourselves by not realizing the potential in all of us to rid ourselves of many of our self-inflicted maladies. We present more of our ideas on this in some of the following pages. Some of you might want to read on just to see where we're going. By putting thoughts down that we want to share with others, we get a better understanding for ourselves. At this point, we encourage you to just do what is best for you, honor your own true self, but we invite you to come along while we do that for ourselves. Return to the home page and select another site of your choice to read more.