Finding excuses? - Fear Rules You
A surreal morphogenesis culminating in Reality?
Looking into the Inner Chambers
Read carefully. You met a person yesterday and talked to him or her for a few minutes. You can decide at what time and where. You don’t have to recollect the topic about which you talked.
Now, try to recollect the person, the face, the clothes and the mannerisms of the person. What can you see in your imagination.? How much of the person can you remember? Do you remember the colour of the shirt/blouse the person wore? The colour of the trousers or skirt? The type of shoes he wore? The colour of the bag that was carried?
Reality
“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” - Bertrand Russel
How many details could you remember? How much of the details could you visualise? If you are honest to yourself, you will admit that you do not have a “clear” recollection. You only have a vague representation in your mind. To put in other words, you have a generalised image and that image was painted with the generalised “ideas” of that person, that you had acquired from past meetings.
Looking at the situation truthfully, one is forced to ask, is there any such as reality? Each of our experience is conditioned by the variables active at the time the mental representation was made. Hence, we have only an aspect of the scenario that we interpreted. So what was the reality? That question, my dear readers, I shall leave it to you to think upon and come to a conclusion.
Think about the word recollection. You are “re collecting” data that was “collected” by your sense organs.
Back to the Current Moment - Goals
The topic I introduced is, are you finding excuses? Undoubtedly, the question is applicable to me, as well. I, too, need to do introspection. If we do not do that, we are being dishonest to ourselves. We cannot create the night by simply closing our eyes.
We all have goals and find ourselves finding it difficult to reach the goals. All of us, I dare say, have to admit that we have, at one point or the other, abandoned at least one of our goals.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62d08398-b352-4a33-aa65-7d39694e32fe_1920x1280.jpeg)
We had argued that we had one reason or the other because of which we could not accomplish the goal. Let us be honest: we found reasons. We superimposed a logic of our own creation to console ourselves, why we could not fulfil our goals.
The right term is excuses. We found excuses. We were trying to play righteous. The reason was that we were ruled by fears and found it embarrassing to admit the truth.
Consolation by Compensation
Even though we found and superimposed a logic of our own creation, we cannot deny that it had its source in our own volition. It was our doing. We were afraid of something and this fear was rooted deeply in ourselves. We were conscious of the presence of that fear. We were afraid that we might not succeed. That fear was the stimulant and the stimuli was we gave up. We abandoned that goal.
However, we do not want to be known as cowards. Even if we refuse to use that term, we need to see that truth that we were afraid to face the truth that we did display weakness by giving up.
However, we need to agree that, at least initially, that is at the time of giving up, nobody actually accused us of being weak. We were face to face with out own truth. That truth was not acceptable and we were not ready to face it. The action that followed was compensation.
We compensated for the loss of face by inventing a logic. The line of thought was “I cannot accomplish that goal” or “I do not have the time to accomplish that goal” or “I do not have the means to accomplish the goal”.
Whatever be the compensation, the truth is that there was a hidden factor that led us to that argument. The factor was not visible to us. We only concluded that we might not reach the goal.
The Unasked Question
We came to the conclusion that we might not reach the goal. However, we did not put an important question, WHY. That was the question we avoided or refrained from asking ourselves.
Why would we have not reached the goal? Now, we need to stop finding excuses. We do have the human tendency to find a reason and we shall find innumerable reasons. We are, indeed, quite good at it.
The Hidden Truth
A stimuli has a corresponding stimulant. The effect has a cause. The effect was that we did not ask the question why we would not succeed. So what was the cause? What was the stimulant that caused the reaction of not putting that question. That stimulant was fear.
What fear was that? Fear of what? Introspection begins here. We saw earlier that, we only save a certain amount of information in our memory. A lot is left out (deleted), another lot is manipulated (distorted) and most of it is generalised.
We were aware of the fear in the background, which acted as the stimulant that generated the response of giving up the goal. The immediate sensation was that we may not reach the goal because this or that reason. Again, the reasons were unknown to us. The reasons were manifestation of a fear. A fear of which we were not conscious.
Confronting Accepting Solving
Fear is usually the fear of the unknown. We need to face it, accept it and find a solution. We should not keep accumulating fears. We need to get over the fears. Else we will have many more cases of abandoning goals.
It took me years to find out the hidden causes. All my fears were related to my childhood and youth. All that I did was compensating but compensation never really solved any problems. I ended up with a heap of unaccomplished goals and innumerable reasons for the same.
Born to be Free
We are born to be free. Why shackle ourselves in fetters and chains. Fear has not brought anybody any success. By free I do not mean free from money problems or job problems. We need to be free from our own fears.
Replace Fear with Joy
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. - P. B. Shelley, Ode to a Skylark