TO RECEIVE DIFFERENT OUTCOMES FROM LIFE YOU HAVE TO COMPLETELY CHANGE YOU!
Ozodi Osuji
Sometimes, I ask, how could I have received different outcomes from life? I could have received different outcomes from life if I am a different person. Being a different person from who I am would have made me think and behave differently hence receive different outcomes.
As I know myself to be, I am an idealist. I rejected my body as it is and rejected my real self (whatever that is) as it is and used my mind and imagination to construct a different self and want to become that different self. I pursue ideals, perfections, how things ought to be.
Nothing as it is, is ever good enough for me. People, as they are, are not good enough for me, I want them to be different, to be like my ideals of how they ought to become that they are not.
Society, the political economy, and social institutions had to be ideal before I accept them. Nature had to be different before I accept it.
My biological constitution that is weak and made me reject it, had to become different, become sturdy for me to accept it and not seek alternatives to it.
When I was at college, I realized that what I was studying is within the parameters of what is called realism, hence imperfect; I despaired of it and wanted to study something else, what seems perfect. So, I tried other things, but they all deal with imperfect people and their imperfect world.
Psychology, for example, accepts imperfect people and studies them and deals with them as they are; psychology does not aim at making people perfect, but merely understanding them and helping them to make the most of their imperfect selves.
Emil Kraepelin, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, the founders of psychology and psychiatry, and their followers did not seem to understand that the problems they see in their clients are rooted in their clients attempts to adapt to the sick world, biological and sociological, that they live in.
Consider the USA. The USA is a capitalist society; capitalism is a sickness of the soul; for a healthy soul seeks ways to love not to use people for gains; people attempt to adapt to capitalism’s sickness with their own personal sickness; thus, you do not see healthy Americans. The same goes for people in all countries for the world is a sick place, the sickness is in people’s bodies and societies, a place that ought to not even exist.
It is not other people’s fault that I am seeking perfection. Seeking perfection is my problem and not necessarily the problem of other persons.
Since I do not accept things as they are and yearn for ideal alternatives to them, it follows that if I want alternative outcomes in life, I will have to give up my idealism and embrace realism.
My choices based on idealism are delusional for there are no ideals in the real world; pursuit of ideal goals gives one failure for ideals cannot be attained in the real world.
But pursuit of ideals, delusion gives my life motivation and direction. That is, desiring delusion is what gives me, the idealist motivation. Seeking madness is what gives idealists motivation to do things.
Seek ideals, what you will never get, is what gives idealistic egos energy to work. Ask for ego perfection and you will never get them. The ego’s philosophy is this: ask and you will never get what you ask for, so that you remain frustrated and live a frustrated, unhappy existence.
I would have to pursue non-ideals and non-delusional goals to receive different results from life.
Pursuing ideals meant that I was afraid of spontaneous behaving least I make mistake, fail and appear imperfect; to seem perfect I stopped trying.
Pursuit of ideals restricted my affect and made me introverted and not extroverted. So, it is not a question of pursuing different professions to be successful; all professions are not ideal.
So, what is a gratifying profession for me? I would have liked to study something that has positive ending, such as leading to a non-dying universe and a people that live forever and ever. But that does not exist.
Realism means accepting imperfect reality and stop seeking ideals. Religion and spirituality are escapes into imaginary ideal worlds after we die. Therefore, a realist must not seek religion and spirituality. God was invented by people.
Religion posits God and ask people to pray to him. Imagine praying to a narcissistic God to give me what I desire, that is absurd. The better option is atheism or agnosticism.
To have different outcomes from life I must become a realist and give up my idealism. But my idealism is rooted in my problematic body and my desire to use mind to overcome the problems of that body.
Well, I cannot use ideas to change my body. You can study your body as it is, via science and use medical technology to intervene and make some improvements in it but the human body is made of flesh and will not become perfect.
The human body cannot live forever. The human body is made from the vegetables, fruits and meat that we eat. Plants and animals are made from the various elements in the universe. Those elements will decompose into particles and particles decompose to light and light returns to the nothingness from which it came during the big bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
Our bodies are nothing; indeed, our bodies, matter, space and time may not even exist; they may be dream things, but that line of inquiry is for a different paper.
In the meantime, one must accept one’s imperfect body, imperfect other people, imperfect society and universe.
As Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) said, it would have been better if the universe did not exist and did not produce us.
But the universe seems to exist and have produced us and the best that we can do about them is to use science to study the universe and produce a technology to make the best use of the universe without the illusion that it would ever become perfect and ideal.
The material universe and my body are a mistake and ought to not exist.; its existence is an imperfection and is the source of human problems.
DISCUSSION
You can only understand this essay if you have proclivity to thinking, to philosophy; if you are normal and find existence beautiful, keep it that way, and do not venture into the world of thinking, for, if you do, your beautiful life would be disturbed.
You may not know it, there are people who find your body that you find beautiful filthy and say that it ought to not exist!
Whoever created this universe made a mistake; to start with, he created nothing of value, for everything in the universe are temporary and will die; the creator then must be powerless for if he were powerful, he would only create the permanent, eternal and changeless.
May be, there is an aspect of us that is eternal? Ah, sweet metaphysics, but I will not go there here.
In pursuit of idealism, I could not get me to do certain realistic things. For example, in the real-world people do use people to achieve their material goals. White folks use black folks to make economic profits; strong people use weak people to make a living; employers use workers to make profits. I cannot use anyone.
Once a person did something that made my grandiose ego feel humiliated, I felt angry and was tempted to use him for my gain. I did not. But suppose that I did? I would get what I wanted but given my tendency to guilty feeling I would have felt guilty most of my life.
Oh, I know that sociopaths do not feel guilt. I am not a sociopath. God, I cannot even take a penny I see lying on the ground.
CONCLUSION
Since everything that I have done with my life is due to my idealism and they yielded less wealth for me, it follows that I had to be poor, for there was no way that I could have behaved like the brutes called normal persons to become wealthy.
My life is therefore what it had to be.
Of course, I can change my thinking and behaving patterns and receive different results. That is the objective of this essay, to move from idealism to realism to receive different results.
Arthur Schopenhauer died in 1860; before he died, he had what folks now call near death experience, life review, saw what Hindus call the Akashic Records. He said that the events of his entire life flashed through his mind’s eyes, and he realized that every thing that had happened to him had to happen to him and happened at exactly the time they had to happen to him and that they did so for him to learn from them.
Apparently, there are no accidents in our lives; we have to experience whatever we have to experience; people will do to us what they have to do to us and we will do to them what we have to do to them; it is all impersonal lesson plans for us to learn on our journey back to our real self, unified spirit self, a place we left to experience separated selves housed in bodies.
Despite my good intentions, I have not really done any kind of job that I consciously like to do. Consciously, I would like to do philosophy. I was a mismatch for most of the jobs that I did, teaching, mental health; however, they were a step to gaining experience that enables me to do real philosophy, not the nonsense called academic philosophy. I had to do what I did to gain the experience that gives me wisdom.
Every person, in effect, is doing exactly what he must do to gain the experience he needs to have to enable him to relinquish his attachment to the ego in body and regain the awareness of his real self, part of unified spirit self.
Ozodi Osuji
November 14, 2021
References
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1818). The world as will and idea (also written as the world as will and representation).
Essays and Aphorisms, being excerpts from Volume 2 of Parerga und Paralipomena, selected and translated by R. J. Hollingdale, with Introduction by R J Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 1970, Paperback 1973
An Enquiry concerning Ghost-seeing, and what is connected therewith (Versuch über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhangt), 1851 Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, Volume II, Berg Publishers Ltd.