control vol 1
2004-05-17 - 11:12 p.m.

Been thinking a lot lately about peoples need for control. About how people strive so hard to be in control of their lives. They call it different things. Order, stability, sanity, even freedom. But in the end it�s all about being able to control what you experience. But why is this need so strong? One thing people say is so great about life, what they look for, is unpredictability, and yet they strive to eliminate anything that might cause surprises. What causes this paradox? If we are truly successful, life will be removed of anything out of our control, and then what is life? I know for myself, I had things pretty much in order. I had a plan for the next 5 � 10 years of my life. Then something happened, something that I could not have done anything to prevent, and absolutely nothing is the same, and nothing is certain, the illusion of control ripped from my grasp.

So what causes desire, and why such diversity in means and definitions, and how much control do we really have over any of this? There's always a cause for everything, and common sense says that the cause is probably from something in our past. So how much control do we actually have over these desires and means we use to get them? When our root desires comes from childhood influences, and the means we use to acquire them come from mostly the same sources, when does our own will come in? When can we tell the difference between our own desires and the desires trained into us from childhood? Is there a difference? Where does self begin and conditioning end? Makes you wonder how much free will we actually have, and maybe there is something to that whole fate or predestination thing. I mean, the majority of who we are comes from childhood conditioning, and we learn how to handle life from our parents or other examples throughout childhood. Our parents, in turn, learned from their parents. One with enough knowledge of human responses and adequate control of the environment could predict how someone several generations down the line would respond to certain stimuli.

To truly understand someone, you must understand their upbringing. To have a fulfilling relationship, you must understand someone. Don�t get me wrong, one human being will never fully understand another, throughout a long term relationship, the connection will grow, the understanding will grow, and, like all living things, change occurs. But understanding the root, and the elements affecting its growth, will give you a far better grasp on the whole plant. If you think of a human being as a linear equation (hardly accurate, I know, but a useful analogy for the time being), you see where they are, out of context. If you know where they were, you can find an equation to connect the two points, define reactions to situations, and discover situations causing reactions. As you learn more and more about them, you will find responses lying outside the range of your equation, and modify your equation thusly, becoming more accurate. Of course, you have to realize that individuals react differently to the same initial conditioning. That�s part of our individuality. So knowing who they are now will help you know who they were. That�s a whole other subject though in which I�d talk far more about genetics and quantum mechanics than I�m qualified to.

Once you learn these things about someone, you can know more about what they think it is important to control, and what means they will find appropriate to control those things. Understanding these things will assist in harmony in any relationship, or at least the realization that the seemingly unreasonable demands or bizarre means the other uses are deeply rooted, and while change is always occurring, and indeed necessary to accept and understand where they are coming from. Though I have used the word understand much, I will restate that it is all about levels of understanding. You can never fully understand someone, but that should not be an excuse for being completely clueless.

Well, this whole thing has gone from being about control to relationships. Guess you can tell what�s on my mind. I suppose I�ll delve into the actual subject some other time. And this is where I trail off.

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