Guard Your Mind Like the Precious Resource It Is

I’m concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood; I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence.  Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)

Something I’ve been working on personally is becoming more in control of my emotions and, more importantly, trying not  to immediately respond when something makes me angry. In order to do this, I’ve found it necessary to be conscious of the anger itself. Specifically, I’ve noticed that when we get angry we tend to move into a state of mind that is obsessively focused on the source of this anger. We dwell on how we were wronged over and over in our minds like an uncontrollable movie, which then makes us even more angry. In an attempt to stop the movie and momentarily feel better about the situation, we tend to lash out. It feels good for a second, but it almost never gets you anywhere.

Anger and fear are two emotions that serve important evolutionary purposes and certainly have their place, but I’ve found neither to be productive when it comes to solutions to serious problems, or to establishing better relationships with those you care about. When one is angry or fearful the instinctual response is to do whatever might make you feel better in the moment. Allowing oneself to react from a state of fear or anger will almost always lead to poor decision making, unless you are actually in a situation that requires such a response.

I discussed this concept in May’s post, Do Ends Justify the Means?

I think many people will quickly answer the question “do the ends justify the means” without putting enough thought into it. The question is meant to be considered when it comes to premeditated voluntary actions of questionable ethics taken with a defined objective in mind. It has nothing to do with matters of self-defense, or anything in that category. For example, if someone is coming at your family with an intent to inflict harm, the ethical decision might be to harm the aggressor to protect your family despite the fact that harming another person in itself is an immoral act. Pretty much everyone can agree with this, so it doesn’t add anything to the argument of whether the ends justify the means.

What about if you’re walking down the street and you see someone come from behind an old lady, hit her on the head and then struggle with her on the ground in an attempt to take her purse. You aren’t being directly attacked, so should you intervene with violence if necessary against the perpetrator to help an innocent bystander? Again, I think the right and ethical decision here is to step in to try to help the victim if possible.

In both these cases the negative “means” of violence you might be required to use against violent aggressors do indeed justify the ends — in the first instance the protection of your family, and in the second a vulnerable old lady. Given these examples, one might be led to believe that the ends can often justify the means, but I would argue that this only holds true in extreme examples such as the ones described above, and that for a principled person, the ends almost never justify the means.

When people seriously consider whether the ends of a particular action justify the means, it’s almost never in relation to scenarios like the ones described above for two reasons. First, those are extremely rare situations that many people (in the developed world at least) will only experience a few of times in the course of a lifetime, if that. On the other hand, many of us face constant but often overlooked ethical dilemmas on a daily or weekly basis. We all face situations where we are confronted with the choice to do something we know is wrong, but perhaps do it anyway either for instant gratification or in the pursuit of a larger goal.

The point is that most of us (at least here in the U.S.) rarely find ourselves in situations where the proper course of action would be to respond instinctually from a state of fear or anger. For most of us, the best course of action is to become aware of our anger and acknowledge that it is a normal response, but to also then recognize that this state of mind must be transcended in order to come up with conscious and productive ways to overcome the root problem. This is the wisdom the spiritual masters of all faiths throughout history have taught us. Easier said than done for sure, but that doesn’t make it any less true or important.

This is part of what it means to be more conscious, or aware. It means you’ve learned to acknowledge the constant presence of the crazy “monkey mind” which tends to dominate human thought. Recognizing it is the crucial first step, taming it is a whole other ballgame, and one I am only beginning to work on.

For the purposes of this piece, the key thing I want to hammer home is that people are much more easily manipulated when they don’t realize they’re being manipulated. Moreover, the easiest way to manipulate someone is to ensure they get in, and stay in, a state of either fear or angry, preferably both. Whether intentional or not, the media seems to be professionals at creating such an environment, which  is why it’s so important to tune from 90% of the nonsense they publish. It’s quite literally brain cancer.

It’s not just the corporate media though. I’m seeing it across the political spectrum, whether from “new right” pundits, or anti-free speech leftists advocating violence. Becoming your enemy to fight your enemy has become a new rallying cry for the unconscious across the political spectrum. “But they’re doing it, so now we’re gonna do it.” Is this political discourse, or toddlers throwing sand at each other in the playground?

The bottom line is if you ever hear anyone advocating such tactics run away from them as fast as you can. These people are poison.

Only conscious people can help create a better world, unconscious people never will.

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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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15 thoughts on “Guard Your Mind Like the Precious Resource It Is”

  1. Mike, excellent post.
    I get worried when I read a post like this that I agree so much with. How can someone be sure your blog is not just the next echo chamber.
    Anyway, I’ll take that risk…You just flipped me over to make my first Patron donation.

    Best regards
    Shane in Canada

    Reply
    • Thanks Shane, for your words, and for your willingness to financially support my efforts.

      Not to worry, I think this sort of thinking is very far from reaching any sort of mass echo chamber status.

  2. This is taking the message a whole stage further than the usual left/right conflict that is constantly reinforced by MSM.

    Both left and right want their ideal to be the reigning paradigm but there is very little attention paid to the means to get there. If there is mass violence and injustice on the way to either model prevailing, the world will be WORSE off than it is even now.

    What we do in opposition to a position we feel is wrong is important to deeply consider. We are not just acting in the moment. We are constructing what comes after this historical moment. We should be careful what we are building.

    Reply
  3. There’s whole rivers of words and stories
    leading to Grandma’s house where all is safe
    but as Marcel Marceau was trying to show,
    that’s why TechGods gave you a mute button.

    Reply
  4. Eating a healthy diet for you as an individual, meditation and completely unplugging are keys to growth as an individual. It’s very rare we have a thought that is truly our own. We are fed streams of narratives from a dishonest, hack media (completely agree with Trump on this). We need time in nature, alone to really dig deep into our hearts to know who we are. Through understanding ourselves we can become better people and therefore make the world a better place. This process can take years and is often a lifelong but necessary for spiritual growth.

    Reply
    • I agree with most of your comment. I became vegetarian so as to avoid participating in utterly needless slaughter of helpless animals. I have spent much time in nature, and still do, usually kayaking the Fraser river (southern BC, Canada) and taught myself to essentially create my own thought patterns and thought forms, never accepting anything I hear as “the truth” until I test it for myself. If I do not have the means to test it, I let the matter drop until “next time” if there is one. The one essential missing from your offering here is the all-important service. It isn’t enough to focus on one’s own life. The real fulfillment of a life’s purpose comes in service to others. By that I don’t mean paid work, I mean being there when needed, or when a need is perceived – to act upon need through compassion, pure and simple: no agenda, no expectations. One aspect of this is learning to
      “butt out” if/when one’s offer of help is not wanted, again with no equivocation. That’s all I wanted to add. When we all get there we will have the better world so many of us long for and despair of ever seeing.

    • A persons life purpose can come in many forms and may or may not come to the service of others. If someone lives alone in the woods and runs an animal rescue that is just as much fulfilling a life purpose as is being a service other people.Often times a life purpose is something really simple and not grand. You don’t have to save lives, be a guide or teacher to be having profound impacts.

    • **Helping animals would be service to others I suppose as all life on the earth comes from the same source. Everything is interconnected.

  5. You’ve hit a few nails on the head. If we have even a moment, anger is never the answer. But it is stoked to serve the ends of the …. sociopaths. Opened eyes will see and act independently. Thanks for your contribution : )

    Reply
  6. I keep this on the wall of my office as a constant reminder:

    “Self-importance is man’s greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. Self-importance requires that one spend most of one’s life offended by something or someone.”

    – Don Juan Matus

    The keyword there is “weakens”. As soon as you become angry and feel offended by some perceived or real transgression, you drain your own personal power.

    That is the real meaning of turn the other cheek and “resist not evil”. “resist not” meaning don’t react to darkness by fomenting more darkness.Which is what the quote from MLK is addressing.

    It’s not easy. Personally, I’ve always had a bad temper once I got really pissed off. It often served me well on a football field, but not in day to day life.This applies to individuals as well as collectives. If you’re angry, you lose. Because you’re anger weakens you.

    Reply
  7. Thank you Michael for an excellent post. I would like to add my two cents. I do agree with what you are saying and this type of thinking has been with me for most of my life thanks to been brought up with that mentality. I would like to add to the discussion by mentioning three points below:

    1- These feelings are the mechanisms that nature/evolution has created to allow us survive like you said. While these help us survive they can and for the most part are harmful if we don’t want to be purely reactive beings. But most importantly, these feelings may be hiding or blocking reality (whatever reality is). Donald Hoffman proposes the thesis [1] that says that evolution selects for organisms that don’t care about reality, they just care about maximizing their driving needs; which for me are these feelings.

    2- We need to understand, in the full sense of that word, these feelings. We need to study them and reflect on every aspect of their existence; from their creation to their demise. For this reason I try to spend some time in the morning and at night reflecting on my behavior to try to identify and study these feelings. It is important to do so because it is the only way to see them. If we don’t, then we never see them coming and take over our behavior. Understanding these feelings is fundamental and I finally realized it after listening to the NPR podcast on emotions [2]. For the longest time I would not do this because I refused to believe that this was key.

    3- Meditation is fundamental. It helps increase your self awareness which allows you to see from a mile away when a feeling is emerging. I cannot recommend enough the Vipassana Meditation retreats [3].

    If I would have to condense all that I have understood until now is this: meditate to increase your consciousness using the Vipassana or other technique and meditate on your feelings or emotions to free yourself from them and then and only then you may see reality for what it really is and not the shared hallucination that we call reality [4].

    1- Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is?
    https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is

    2- NPR’s Invisibilia: Emotions
    http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/530718193/emotions

    3- Vipassana Meditation
    https://www.dhamma.org/en-US/index

    4- Reality is a Shared Hallucination
    http://reactor-core.org/reality-hallucination.html

    Reply
  8. Conscious or unconscious has always been the question.

    The entire controlling governmental and political system is completely unconscious. You cannot be a conscious being and say yes to endless wars, killing, mayhem, chaos and corruption. It’s . . just . . . not . . possible.

    But that’s those people’s evolution issues. Each of us can choose to be something completely different. It’s much easier when you are not connected to that unconscious toxic soup of negativity, anger and fear that always wants to pull people into it. We are not food. We are conscious eternal beings.

    Reply
  9. Tough dynamic. You don’t want to submerge your own consciousness in negative states, because then you’re giving away control of your core resource to others. Bad move.

    At the same time, you have to relate to others on the level at which they are operating. Or at the very least, in a way which their level understands, and will respond to in a useful fashion.

    Sometimes, the only useful program available is called “deterrence through pain.” And it often has to be used in a very obvious way, in order to drive home the point that someone just chose poorly and needs to stop. There are times when “they do it, therefore it’s a fair tactic now” actually is the optimal response (q.v. Game Theory and the “tit for tat” algorithm).

    When we say that we need to use this truth consciously, what do we mean?

    We mean that if you’re going to use pain as a response, you had better be able to think though the 2nd and 3rd order consequences. Because it can backfire, and sometimes backfires spectacularly. If you can’t reliably anticipate that far ahead, you need to use the pain options less often then you might ideally like. And you need to put in some advance time understanding and anticipating when and why you will flip the switch, because real life comes at you fast.

    No-one said this would be easy. The really worthwhile stuff rarely is.

    Reply

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