Complete Being: Finding and Loving the Real You

The Complete Being

Loving Healing Press

Chapter One

"Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it." -William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)

What exactly are mental aspects?

The best way to think of the mental aspects of your life is as the training, knowledge, or resources that you need to achieve your objectives. The specific intellectual elements required by you depend upon your situation. For instance, you may want to gain education or instruction to succeed in your job, career, or calling. Alternatively, you may feel compelled to explore deeper into your religious philosophy or may require additional information to help improve your emotional or bodily health. Thus, the precise intellectual ingredients you need will depend entirely upon your distinct purpose.

In your life now, you have a certain assortment of skills and expertise. This mixture includes various things you learned in school, from your parents, with your peers, and from your own experiences. If you are happy and content with your life you have just the right combination of traits for your situation. However, if you find that you are stuck in a jobthat you hate, can't get a promotion at work, feel that your life is in a rut, or just want to make changes in your academic level, then you may need to modify or change your current situation to better suit your needs. Simply put, you have to exercise these skills to create healthier ones to suit your life and your aspirations.

It is important to note that education does not necessarily have to come from formal learning situations, from a professor, or from reading books. Training may take both formal and informal forms. Knowledge may be gained from a master, from a peer, or even from a child. Data may be gained from a book, heard from another, learned through your own personal experiences, or be acquired while watching someone else. In this way, the specific type and method of your mental aspect exercise is not as important as how that individualized mix of know-how relates directly to your distinctive needs and desires. In other words, you need to find the right tool for the right job.

How do mental aspects affect daily life?

For much of human history, people have lived in small communities in which one single culture and way of thinking prevailed. Although this condition continues even to modern day, mostly in rural towns and villages, it is probably best illustrated to you as the life your parents or grandparents might have led. Had you been born into this type of life, most of the knowledge you would have needed would have been learned directly from your parents.

In the not-so-distant past, sons were trained to undertake the work of their fathers. Thus, if you were male and your father was a farmer, he would have taught you to be a farmer. If your father was a shopkeeper, he would have trained you to run the family business. Similarly, in the past, daughters were normally trained by their mothers. Thus, if you were a girl, you would have learned to assist the male household head, manage the household chores, and take care of the family's childcare needs. Included within these lessons, for both sexes, would have been embedded information about proper behaviour, ideal lifestyles, and correct viewpoints. These ideas would have been further reinforced by the like actions of other members within your immediate peer group who would have lived nearly identical lifestyles to your parents.

In this way, had you been born in such a traditional culture, almost all of the intellectual characteristics you would have gained would have come from an informal teaching situation through watching and doing. Since most of the people in your hometown would have held similar values and lived in like situations to your own, you wouldn't really have needed to seek out new information. Life circumstances wouldn't really have changed enough from one generation to the next to warrant such efforts. In this way, all of the know-how you would have needed to undertake your job, raise a family, and live happily in your world would have already been given to you through your parental and societal teachings. Moreover, this information would have been presented in a very personalized way so that you would have easily been able to comprehend, directly relate, and replicate in your daily life.

On the whole, you would have been fairly content with your daily existence despite the normal hardships, traumas, and tragedies associated with living life. Since the overall makeup of the population would have been fairly homogenous, additional instruction or new skills wouldn't really have been needed to compensate for the presence of novel concepts or innovative notions. In fact, such things would have invited potential confusion and chaos. Such complications would have required guidance and tools not already built into your communal learning system, thus, making this conventional system inadequate to the needs of yourself and other people within your culture.

To protect against such concerns, you and other members of the group would have tended to quickly extinguish any novel ideas or innovative concepts that you came into contact with. This action would have ranged from the correction of an unruly child to induce proper behaviour through the segregation and exclusion of individuals who acted or thought differently from the norm to the violent attack of people with alternative viewpoints and lifestyles (including renunciation of the potential wisdom of these individuals and ultimately war).

Unfortunately, these reactions would have been more out of fear of traumatic upheaval than the realities of such situations. Yes, innovation can create change and confusion. Change sometimes makes standard ways of learning inadequate requiring alternative education. However, this new data could also potentially benefit both you as an individual and your culture as a whole.

For instance, the introduction of inventive farming methods may make crops more productive and less susceptible to disease. Likewise, new details about basic home safety as well as alternative views on food preparation and preservation methods may make lives more enjoyable, more comfortable and, less dangerous.

New ideas may also create a brand new outlook on an old situation. For instance, you may have thought of a nearby mountain as merely a pretty view. However, to another culture, this same mountain may be seen as a good source of minerals or a great place to ski. In having had contact with these alternative mountain interpretations, you may be able to use this new information to make new types of goods from the raw materials or start a healthy fitness activity alternative through skiing. Thus, change isn't always good, but by the same token it isn't always entirely bad either.

Instead of living in the traditional world of the past, however, you live in a modern global society. You may not want to replicate your parents' exact career and lifestyle choices. If you want to become an architect, you are going to need a bit different instruction than your father the farmer or your homemaker mother can provide. However, just because the training you require to become an architect is different than the knowledge of your parents does not mean that your skills are somehow superior (or inferior) to your parent's wisdom. This parental information simply may not be able to give you all of the tools you'll need to become a happy and successful architect. If, however, you want to become a farmer or a homemaker and live in the exact same circumstances as your parents, then this parental training may be more applicable to your needs.

Thus, the right type of education (formal and informal) is specific to the required task. In this way, instruction that aids your personal aims is appropriate while information that does not help your aspirations may not be as suitable. Therefore, since your parental instruction often does not fit your individualized situation, you may need to look for alternate guidance.

While undertaking this task, you'll have to learn new ways of undertaking tasks, be open to alternative interpretations, and perhaps even discover different ways of living. As you gain these new opportunities, often in formal learning situations, you may also come into daily contact with people with other occupations, cultures, personalities, and skills. To better communicate, understand, and interact with these individuals, you may need to learn a little about how other people live, what types of jobs they do, what they value, and the ways in which they interpret the world around them.

From these experiences, you will realize that others have differing opinions and interpretations of what jobs are important, how life should be lived, and the ways in which the world can be explained. Like your parents' wisdom, the education of these other individuals is also not automatically superior or inferior to yours. Again, some forms of learning may be more desirable in certain situations (when helping your goals) and not so helpful in others instances (when these resources hinder your aims). Once again, if you happen to be in the exact same situation as this individual, then their form of training may also help you in your objectives.

Since your world is such a mix of differing possibilities concerning career, lifestyles, and belief systems, you can't necessarily develop your interpretations of this world directly from your culture as there is no one common right way. In the modern world, there is no common indicator of job success, no right way to live, and no single interpretation of life, death, and the world at large. This shift in attitude is due to the overall transition from small homogeneous ethnic populations comprised mostly of likeminded individuals that share like norms, values, and lifestyles to a larger more global culture containing a variety of different viewpoints in these areas.

Simply put, the continuous barrage of innovation and new concepts stemming from the combined knowledge of several thousand different communities can no longer be controlled by using the standard methods of extinguishment through correction, exclusion, or attack. Moreover, the world is changing so rapidly and in so many different directions that your parents' traditional know-how no longer answers or addresses all of the questions or the problems that you may encounter while trying to reach your life's aims. Basically, in this modern world, the game of life has been modified to a point where the rules of the past can no longer adequately tell you how to play the game.

In terms of our analogy used at the start of this book, you have completed your research and have decided that you may like a specific book. However, once you opened the cover, you realized that this text is actually an e-book. If you have access to a computer, laptop, or other electronic reader then you can read and potentially enjoy the book fully. However, if you don't have access to one of these devices or refuse to use these tools because you feel you've been wronged or because you are afraid of change, then you may miss out on reading and potentially enjoying this story.

Similarly, in life, if you stubbornly refuse to increase your education even though your current knowledge doesn't make you happy or doesn't suit your needs then you are going to miss out on the opportunity to really enjoy life. However, if you make a rational decision to gain new skills that will help aid your ambitions and then follow through and make these modifications, you will then have the opportunity to determine for yourself if this new opportunity makes you happy and fulfilled.

What does this mean for you in particular?

Unlike your ancestors, like it or not, you are a member of a modern global society. Though you may appreciate and respect the traditional instruction methods of your parents or of another culture, these elements may not be wholly applicable to your situation. Thus, grasping onto these conventional ideals completely and without question may hinder your future, create obstacles in your life, and may actually end up causing you even more unhappiness as you continue to live in a stagnant world of expectations that are not your own.

Likewise, as a member of this global population, you cannot simply choose your form of education based upon a common or popular perception from your peers. The range of variation and seemingly conflicting possibilities within these very different factors is too vast to easily define a simple comprehensive common universal set of wisdom.

In this way, trying to find or adopt some sort of common teaching is an exercise in futility and confusion. Likewise, defining one right system and then defending that system as the ultimate one true system for everyone is ridiculous. Again, the tools needed for your life goals are specific to your situation and therefore may or may not be right for someone else in their personal ambitions.

This quandary may leave you feeling overwhelmed, tired, afraid, and defensive. Like most people, you may like to be surrounded by people just like yourself so you can ensure that you are right and are validated by others in your peer group. You may want quick answers and easy solutions. You may feel comforted by absolute truths and universal knowledge. Therefore, instead of searching for the life that would make you as an individual content, energized, and fulfilled, you may be vegetating and trying to blend in with everyone else's ideals of the right ways to live and the proper ways to gain wisdom. Of course this situation creates a vicious cycle as the majority of individuals are joining the common group trying to blend in, with only a few people actually happy with this type of life and this way of learning.

Likely, you may have been trying to find your place in your world. You have possibly experienced some success in achieving what you perceived to be the pinnacles of the learning process. Perhaps, you've gotten formal education in some sort of professional capacity feeling that such training would make you successful. Maybe, you've studied in depth or memorized by rote various sections of a religious text, feeling that this act would make you superior to other individuals. You may have learned all the latest ways to parent your children or take care of your emotional or bodily health thinking that this information would make you a better person. Just as likely though, these experiences left you feeling empty, lost, and alone wondering why you couldn't just be normal.

Sorry to break it to you, you are not normal. Your parents are not normal, your kids, are not normal, and your friends are not normal. In fact, there is no normal and possibly never was such a condition.

Normal is a myth. The term normal or abnormal is simply a way that homogeneous communities used to determine which individuals posed a threat to the stasis of the communal norms, those with differing life requirements and those with new innovations. As previously explored, such individuals would then be corrected, excluded, or attacked in order to make them conform or to destroy the source of the idea.

Unfortunately, the problem with this type of logic is that as an individual you do have unique knowledge requirements due to your unique personality. Had you lived a few hundred years ago, you would have kept these issues to yourself. Being like everyone else in the group would have been the safest and easiest way to live. Even today, you may instinctually try to become some sort of perceived image of normal. Unfortunately though, instead of one clear definition of right as in the past, in today's world you may encounter literally thousands of differing definitions of proper ways to live and learn. Whose norms should be the measuring stick of perfection in this global society when your parents define right know-how in a completely different way than other members of your peer group whose parents came from other areas of the world?

The answer to this quandary is simple and straightforward in theory but difficult and ever challenging in practice. The quick answer is that you need to decide your definition of normal for yourself. You must decide what your needs are, what your life ambitions are, and what guidance is needed to reach these objectives. This will be your normal. This will be your measuring stick to rate and judge yourself.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Complete Being by Tami Brady Copyright © 2006 by Tami Brady. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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