What Are People Doing Wrong?

Many people say they want to change, but everything they do, reinforces the way they are -- and so they remain so.

Nowhere is that more true than it is when people say they want to lose weight -- while maintaining that their favorite pastime is eating.  That is the obvious problem.  One has to develop another pastime besides eating -- and not simply exercising so that one can eat more. 

Even when they do go to gyms to workout -- they choose a style of working out, that allows them as much inactivity as possible -- which is to choose an overheavy weight, perform five repetitions of that movement, and then take the next ten minutes to recover for their next set.  In the meantime, they are commiseerating with others of the same problem, that it is very hard to lose weight -- even exercising, but it sure has worked up an appetite, that they now feel fully justified in indulging.

Their entire lives is one of indulgences -- and that becomes the way they are, quite visibly and palpably. There just can be no other way -- but the truth, of how they live.  So when they go to the doctors, as they frequently must do, there's a whole litany of ailments -- caused by the way they live, and everything they do, and do not do -- that cannot be hidden or erased.  That truth is manifest -- and not what one would simply like it to be, in spite of everything they do -- that makes it so.

One has merely conditioned oneself to that denial of reality -- and what is -- and no amount of wishful-thinking, will make it otherwise.  The task, is to align the reality with what one would like to believe, until they areone and the same, and not fragments of every half-truth one wishes to believe.  The result then, is an integratedhuman being living in that one reality -- and not the many fragmented ones that is the reason for their mental illness and disintegration, decline and demise.

A life in increasing integration -- which means oneness, is a life getting stronger, more efficient and purposeful, while that which disintegrates, is losing its cohesiveness and sense of direction, to become better as a result of knowing its purpose for being and doing, and not increasing its randomness of activities and behaviors that overwhelm those sensibilities.

Death and dying, doesn't just happen -- but are the result of one's behaviors, as much as those designs and desires that foster growth and vitality.  So just doing anything -- in any ol' way -- will not be sufficient, to attain the precise outcomes one hopes to achieve by practice -- of doing the right things.  And how does one know that? The results are usually obvious -- and have been for millions of years of evolution, that there is a reason it has to be this way -- and not to be aligned with that reality, makes extinction imminent.

One still has to be the best one can be -- despite the welfare and Social Security, that says we don't have tobe, as all the margin of safety we need.  For life surely, at that level, is guaranteed at the minimum, and not the maximum of what it can be -- beginning with one's baseline health and functioning.  That is mental as well asphysical -- and beyond that, firing on all cyclinders as a complete and fully-developed individual -- which means to be indivisible, and unfragmented in every way -- so as to be a total human being.

And that is what is now possible, in an age of affluence -- instead of just eating and consuming more -- because that is now possible too.  But those were the solutions for an earlier time -- and regressing to the caveman, is not the extent of human progress, and its highest form and achievement.  

The thoughtful and creative people of any time, are focused on the frontiers of these developments and different possibilities -- and not just a return to the good ol' days, when life was brutal, short and nasty -- as the ideal of how it should be.  And that is why history and patterns repeat themselves -- in thinking there cannot be a liberation from this past, and chain of suffering and torment.  But it means having the insight to see that possibility -- and not just accept the fate everybody around them says they must.

That is a huge part of the aging dilemma -- as people don't know how to live their lives beyond the brutal, short and nasty -- but to assume and accept that fate, because they cannot imagine and create any other -- because nobody taught them how.  That is what they had to teach themselves.  That -- is the meaning and purpose of their life.