Developing oneself through crisis
The following is an excerpt from a private exchange. I am sharing it with permission without disclosing the identity of my correspondent. The indented/quoted parts belong to them. In short, this is an exchange of views covering themes of hardship, faith, willpower, and the meaning of crisis.
Iâve been thinking about an interesting topic, related to philosophical maturity, and that is how to actually face life according to your beliefs. I mean, for example, you can be the most stoic man alive, you read Marcus Aurelius, SĂ©neca, etc, but when the time to rise to the ocassion arrives (for example, someone close to you dies or you have to face newage problems like feeling stuck or depressed or whatever) you chicken out an recurr to escapism through drugs, social media, porn, food, videogames, you name it.
There isnât a real answer to this since most tendencies just tell you to man up or provide ridicule solutions which avoid the main problem.
To me, this scenario is a case of âbook smartâ versus âstreet smartâ. The person has a good grasp of theory but not much in the way of practice. A college graduate may fall in this category. They have a lot of ideas of how the world ought to be, but have yet to see the ugly side of our reality. Their understanding of hardship and adversity comes from some piece of literature and is devoid of a visceral response. When a person operates in the world of theory for too long and when they do it from the comfort of a safe space, they lose sense of danger or urgency. The matters they wrestle with have no emotional component. They are mere nodes in a graph of conceptual connections.
Book smart is highly rated in our society because it is tied to formal qualifications. Those are a proxy for intelligence and a track record of conformity during school years, but also for social status and future outcomes. Street smart is not formalised, does not have a vocabulary rich in obscure professorial jargon, develops without checks from authoritative figures like teachers, and lacks that aura of sophistication higher education bestows upon a person. Yet it provides an unfiltered insight into the phenomena. The world is seen as-is, stripped of its pretences to intellectuality but also to all those piles of etiquette, politeness, and nicety, which obfuscate whatever underlying savagery.
The desert fathers, specially St. Anthony the Great, said that you must face life itself at is comes, pushing forward, because otherwise youâd have done a pilgrimage to the desert just to flee away, this is also theoretically explained by many other figures such as St. John of the Cross and his Dark Night of the soul.
But the point here is that no one is able to provide a real solution that can fit the average Joe (one size doesnât fits all, but I think you get the idea).
This sounds right to me. Fundamentally, talk is cheap. As the English football legend Jamie Vardy said âChat shit? Get banged.â This is the kind of crude language you develop when you are street smart. Its defiance of manners shocks the polite society. There is not enough euphemism to it perhaps; no je ne sais quoi. Yet it speaks the truth. And it does so by going straight to the point: you have to back up all those lofty words, otherwise they mean nothing. Same principle for deeds that are done to seek attention/validation, which are virtue signalling writ large.
To me, the role of theory is to give us a big picture view of the situation. It helps us connect the dots in our experience. Though it is no substitute for our day-by-day struggles. As such, it cannot provide a solution for everybody. That is not its job. Each person is dealing with a unique configuration of factors at each time. Only they know what ultimately can and cannot work for them under the prevailing conditions. Some general points hold true for everybody, though those are not enough to provide clear guidance.
This is where communities come in. No-one is equally good at all tasks. Some are better at practical skills while others excel when they deal with abstractions. They all need each other. People benefit from such arrangements materially but also emotionally. If a friend asks to talk, there is trust between us: we know not to divulge secrets, but also not to mince words.
How can we make oneselves truly inherit that knowledge and willpower? Should we resign and just wait for life to teach us this kind of things through suffering and failure?
I think willpower is overrated. And no, I do not mean it in the sense that âyou do not have free will whatsoeverâ because that line of thinking takes you nowhere: as soon as you follow it up with a call to action, you are contradicting yourself. Willpower is overrated because it is assumed to be this boundless force that we can tap into on a whimsy. But we cannot fake it. Some tasks are incredibly hard to do when there is no necessity for them.
I think the way it works is that we have this reservoir of vitality that is there for moments of crisis. Call it âsurvival instinctâ, or âthe wolf withinâ, or âsuper saiyanâ. I do not care. It is that untamed side of ours. It only comes forth when we are pressed to the brink by the prevailing conditions. At the point where we are close to breaking, we either break and wither away or find the mental fortitude to fight back. When you are in the mode of grinding your teeth as you are doing important stuff, you know that you are powered by that inner force. It does not last forever though, so you have to make the most out of the opportunity.
Willpower, that capacity for initiative, does exist, though it is counterbalanced by inertia. Practically every fibre of our being resists change. To actually force things to happen, we have to either be in a moment of crisis, as noted above, or try to introduce small tweaks to our life, one at a time. For example, start by making your bed every morning. Put cold water on your face as soon as you wake up. Shake that sense of stability a little bit and make it a little more malleable in the process. These sort of small things, which are kind of boring and uncomfortable, add up to benign habits.
The key is to do them consistently. There is no excuse not to. The few little things gradually become the many little things and then those turn into the plenty major things. It is a matter of keeping the momentum going, day after day, year after year. As such, when you see someone who is disciplined, you know they have worked a lot on the basics which often go unnoticed. It is not difficult to do the basics, though it requires patience because change does not happen overnight: this sort of commitment is for a lifetime.
As Iâve told you before, while I do understand the implications of human nature and the limits of wit and willpower, I think that those concepts are subjugated to the soul and oneâs beliefs, which can enhance our capabilities and performances inmensely. I recall the drowning ratsâ experiment, where the one that was âsavedâ once tried to survive for 60 hours, while the one that was left stranded only lasted 15 minutes.
Yes, this is a great example and I agree with your point. What is inchoate in my writing is the view that our behavioural patterns are both (i) informed by our core beliefs and (ii) feed back into our beliefs to ultimately refine or alter them. This is best understood in the conception of selfhood, which evolves to reflect the stimuli we are exposed to: it is in a process of becoming, subject to a feedback loop. In the example of the drowning rat, its prior experience of survival has taught it something that it internalises as âI am actually capable of this and it is all a matter of committing to the task in earnestâ, which then makes it put in that immense effort. The rat which drowns quickly effectively believes that it cannot do anything, because it has no experience of ever doing it, which is thus internalised as âI am inherently incapable of doing it.â
Couched in those terms, the habits I allude to are not important in themselves. They are there to put us in the flow of pushing against inertia, of trying to up the intensity in a controlled environment, and discover more about our limits. Maybe we do not want to subject ourselves to near-death situations, though the mechanism is the same: the more we explore, the more we broaden our view of self and the associated beliefs.
I suspect this would apply to a believer in God as well. Someone who casually believes in God will likely not show that unshakeable commitment when crisis strikes. Why? Perhaps because their faith is of the âbook smartâ sort that I mentioned earlier and is thus devoid of any experiences that make the faith feel real.
Mechanical actions and small steps towards a goal are necessary, and even compulsory in certain situations, when it comes to get out of depression or self harming behavior, but itâs not enough to âevolveâ or to âmatureâ as a human being.
No, they are not enough. What they do is help us build up some capacity and set things in motion. The evolution happens in response to some greater force, which we will check right below.
Getting back to Dragon Ball Z, let me recall in the Cell Saga when Gohan was training with Goku in the time chamber; he went through a lot of small habits, routines and habit schedules, but he struggled like hell to become super saiyan for the first time. Something snapped inside of him, same as when Vegeta got his SSJ for training on the moon at the verge of death - in those scenarios, something greater that efford emerged and trasformed them (literally).
I mentioned super saiyans earlier exactly because I think this story is didactic. Though I did forget the details of Gohanâs saga, my view is that the heroes in the story reach that point when they are faced with an immense challenge combined with a powerful emotional impulse. Of course, they are long in the habit of doing the âlittle thingsâ I have mentioned, which in their case is the continuous training they subject themselves to.
Goku only turns into a super saiyan for the first time when (i) he witnesses his loved ones die at the hands of a villain, hence there is a visceral response and not simply some thought experiment, (ii) the planet he is on is about to explode, so there is no more time for indecision and he has to operate with a ânow or neverâ mindset, and (iii) he finally lets go of the self-inhibiting belief he likely had that the super saiyan level is some exclusive club that he was not meant to be a part of. The circumstances force our hero to focus and to let go of now-irrelevant beliefs, to realise that he can be more than what he always thought he was capable of, and to continue pushing the boundaries.
The way I see it, someone has to keep practising to improve their self. But only when crisis comes will they be ready to grow beyond the normal limits. It is no coincidence that âcrisisâ, a word derived from Greek, literally means âjudgementâ (hence âcritical thinkingâ, âcritiqueâ, and related). The moment of crisis is the moment of separating truth from falsehood, the tenable from the untenable. Through the crisis, we learn who we truly are, not who we think we should be. In its most common form, this will be expressed as the letting go of our persona, of our elaborate role-playing propensities which we internalised as our selfhood, such as âme the quiet and obedient labourer who never complainsâ, in favour of the now-emerging âme the assertive individual who will henceforth face challenges head on.â
Saint Agustine, who was once a cultist heretic, started his conversion and battled most of his life against lust, even saying once âO Lord, give me chastity, but not yetâ, as he knew that his behavior was contrary to his beliefs, but still struggled with it for almost a lifetime. Later in life, he finally found ârest in the arms of the Lordâ, but the thought process and the developing as a person he went through (specially after his sonâs death) isnât explained in depth, and still, even if someone could fully understand his reasoning, they wouldnât be able to simply live on St. Augustineâs image.
I think we would not be able to live accordingly exactly because our knowledge of his life would be theoretical. Without that visceral part, we are not subject to the forces that push a person to transform. Also, without the day-by-day experience, we cannot put ourselves in the flow of creating new possibilities while abandoning old ones. We are not in the same state of being.
The question here is, what changed in these individuals? What made figures like St. Teresa DâĂvila endure that much pain, be righteous, holy even, at their time? Out of the religious area, what kind of perfected willpower, of spiritual fortitude, of incredible belief in oneselfâs truth, made Socrates accept his death in one of the most honorable and calm ways? How did Sisyphus become happy?
I do not know the specifics for those examples. All I can give you is speculation. My suspicion is that they went through the rigours, experienced events as opposed to talking about theories of events, and thus found the strength to commit to their faith. Though for there to be a faith in the first place, they must have been exposed to something which instilled in them the sense that what they believe in is real. Just as with the example of the drowning rat which has already felt what escaping death is like and is then empowered by hope to keep trying for as long as possible.
Think of it this way. There are lots of monks but considerably fewer saints. They all go through the same rigours of the monastic life, but only some of them become saints. Is it that most of them are faking it or that there is something there in the prevailing conditions that does not push them past the edge? I have to believe that the latter is generally the case. We may then say that âthe circumstancesâ, or simply God, decide who will be put to the test and thus who will ascend to the next level. It is not a matter of the individual to decide. All the individual can do is the daily work.
This all connects to the notion of willpower. It is not simply because those people wanted to be better, saintly, super saiyans, or whatever. They were forced to become as much. The crisis, the judgement, was about their character: it showed them who they really were.
In most of these paradigms, necesity wasnt inheritantly there, so they created their own way forward. This wasnt about watering the plants because if not those would die, rather about having such a stric beliefâs system and moral code that it could outlast anything, even death.
We are saying the same thing but focusing on different parts of it. I agree that watering the plants does not push you to the next level. What I do say though is that watering the plants with commitment prepares you to be in the state of body/mind where you can endure increasingly more challenging events. If Goku is sitting on his couch all day, he is not going to become a super saiyan. Yet training all day does not make him a super saiyan either. It is the continuous training combined with the necessity of the situation which pushes him to the next level.
Nowadays the risks of being killed for oneâs faith are little in most of the world, and that scenario is kinda out of our daily life scope, but for me, a secular scholar, its something I aspire to be able to do if the time comes. I shall not be afraid, as the righteous hand of my Lord, the Living God, protects me, but will I?
We mentioned core beliefs earlier. The test is whether we are prepared to let go of aspects of our self that we once cherished, or if we are willing to abandon some prior state of comfort. This is how the old self dies when crisis hits us. Unflinching commitment in the face of death is proof of oneâs readiness. Though even less severe situations may prove as much. For example, someone is willing to abandon their career to become more virtuous, even if that comes at a high material and social cost. It is not death, though it is the end of a certain lifestyle which is pleasurable in some ways.
The main answer I am seeking is how does this maduration process go; when does someone achieve that raw ataraxia-like state of mind, how does someone truly overcome the trials of the post industrial revolution world, specially those that are designed to screw you like social media, hiper palatable foods and such. How is it that someone is able to put the knowledge, gnosis even, he gained through life experiencies and otherâs experiences (friends, books, you name it) in practice? I understand that this isnât achievable in days, nor months, or even years, but still, is a question that bothers me.
How does one actually become what he is ought to be?
Since you mention food, let me give you my story. Twenty years ago, I decided to stop consuming junk food. I also quit drinking so-called âsoft drinksâ which are equally harmful. I used to eat junk food from time to time until I suffered a major injury which ended the prospect of a career in football. It was then time for me to recover my strength and get back to the fitness levels I had. Junk food is delicious, sure, though it is among the most unhealthy meals you can have.
The first days were extremely hard because I had to force myself not to desire those meals. I would physically withdraw from places that served them and would even take a different route back home just to not subject myself to the temptation. The temptation is that inner voice of self-deception which is like âoh, I will just cheat this one time, but then I will try harder for the rest of the week.â This never works: it is all or nothing. Otherwise, you keep falling back to where you started and may even be worse off each time.
Anyway, at the beginning I had to do all this active effort, but over time I felt the draw less and less, until the very yearning was gone. Now, even if I have junk food in front of me, I do not feel tempted to grab a bite. Same idea for sweets, alcohol, etc.
What I experienced is a transition from active effort, to a habit that is second nature, to evolution in conscience. I always knew that junk food was unhealthy, but it was only until I started to suffer that I understood what had to be done and found the requisite decisiveness.
To your final question then, one becomes the best version of their self when (i) they meticulously work on the little things and (ii) go through crises which effectively kill whatever self-inhibiting falsehoods were there. Both are essential. Having only the first is okay, but ultimately keeps you stagnant in the realm of whatever comforts you were always in. While getting the second without the first will likely destroy you (imagine if Goku fought Frieza without ever doing any trainingâhe would be annihilated in an instance).
I have to reach those heights (metaphorically, I hope), because if not Iâll be incomplete. I cannot bear the pressure of being a hypocrite, of knowing how should I behave, how should I act, that the Truth and the Living God has called me by name and I am not ready to answer because Iâve been socially engineered into extreme doses of dopamine.
For nowadays standards I am doing good. But I seek something deeper. I have discipline to work, study, workout, and mostly do fine navigating the old issues of life (for now), but I still donât have it yet.
The socially engineered part is the challenge in this case. It does not have to be a life or death situation, but any kind of dynamic that involves overcoming the inertia, the conformity with what is, the easy way out, the established norms, the conventional wisdom.
Getting back to the Saiyans, not all of them attained a transformation through despair and suffering; Trunks and Goten, the sons of Vegeta and Goku, were able to attain this form effordlessly, with a playful approach and attitude towards it. There is something beyond calamity that can push us to new heights. Something greater, more realible. But I do not know what that is yet.
Yes, it is entirely possible for another way here. Note that âcrisisâ is not the same as disaster though, even if the two are closely related in many cases. It is about some situation forcing us to challenge the accepted view of how things are.
About Trunks and Goten, this connects to what we covered earlier about the importance of the community, which empowers us in different ways. They learned from their relatives, all of whom were high achievers. Trunks was training hard every day with Vegeta, who always had that single-minded commitment to push himself to the limit. Goku was the same in practice, but would not make a big deal about it. Also, the Trunks who time-travels to the past to tell Goku of the bad news, is living in a dystopia: androids are destroying his world and he is not capable to fight them back. And then, we have to consider how Gohan, once considered superior to Goku, could never reach the same heights again and even regressed as the story went on, exactly because he could not recapture that ânow or neverâ kind of decisiveness due to the lifestyle he adopted; a lifestyle that effectively limited him in this regard.
[âŠ] And that Works most of the time with everyday issues, but not always when it comes to triggers dessigned to mess around with my reptile brain and my dopamine receptors.
There may be something here with regard to dopamine and compulsive behaviours that needs more attention. You may not be able to name it because it is deep inside and it is not clear yet what it is. This is where faith comes in to keep you going. You have done well. It is a matter of continuing.
I converted due to an extremely terrible state of affairs which you already know about. And, at first, I was thinking that I was about to become the greatest mystic, the best Christian, that everything would go smoothly, and development would come steady. Oh boy, could I have even been more wrong. To progress I had to attune myself to daily prayers, study the bible, the mystics, theology, outside traditions like gnosticism, mysticism and apocrypht texts, and it wasnât after countless hours of struggle, of small stepts, that I and the people that surrounded me, started noticing changes.
I want to recall an especific moment that may be dull, dumb, beta or chilldish to many, but that I think you will appreciate:
One of the things that caught my attention when I started lurking into philosophy was the idea of overcoming lifeâs challenges; Plato, Hesse, Papini, Borges even, Stendhal, Marcus Aurelius, SĂ©neca, Epictetus, all of them had something interesting but that felt âemptyâ. And then I found a stream of consciousness that told me that I must forgive my enemies and pray for their wellbeing; âwell thatâs retardedâ, âthat goes against human natureâ, âthatâs impossibleâ. Four years later, after countless hours of kneeling, praying and studying, it came to me, I understood something, I was able to ignite a flame within, not driven by calamity but love and virtue. I found myself crying at prayer, forgiving people whose actions have been torturing me for years, even thanking them for the lessons they made me learn even unintentionally. I grasped Grace, or gnosis, or consequence with my beliefs. You name it. But it was gorgeous.
That must have been a unique experience. You forgiving those people was you relinquishing control over the relevant thoughts+feelings. In effect, you were leaving behind something that had become a part of yourself. The âold selfâ is no more.
After that, the main questions that I provided you arrived. How does one surpass our nature and challeges inmobility of the soul, how does one push forward and look into the eyes of the desert? Are we bounded to rutine and pain-linked learning? How does one achieve something that they doesnât understand? Does belief create strength, or does strength create belief?
It think it is circular: belief feeds into strength and strength into belief. This is what we also saw with the drowning rat. Though for belief to feed into strength and establish this virtuous cycle, it has to be believable. Belief pushes us to try and to keep trying, while signs of progress tell us that our belief is justified.
I guess, Iâll have to keep focusing on the basics. Feets on the ground, eyes on the stars.
Indeed. The âbasicsâ are the small things, but also those that pertain to the âbasisâ, i.e. the ground upon which everything else is established. Working on the basics is a way to keep the foundations strong. But the foundation is not the same as the rest of the house: one requires the other to exist and their combination is what constitutes a house.