H) Uncertain Gods

Indecision can be very unsettling. Yet it can save us from being precipitous, from being harmfully spontaneous, from being reactionary rather than responsive. But indecision, as a prolonged habit, can be debilitating. We generally tend to be making up our minds.

In the plethora of choices (especially once we free ourselves, at any age, from a predicated set of Expected Memes to that of searching for our own fields of autonomy) we are called upon to practice self-reliance, which becomes new habits of non-reliance upon the provision of others, financial, familial, obliged, or even wanted, or not. Yet most of us, the research would have it, retrench into the known rather than voyage overlong in the seas of chance and exploration. We want our perceptions verified. We want our knowledge substantiated. We want our contentions affirmed. We make our decision to adhere to a given set of paradigms the which our parentage has prepared us for. And so we may become affiliated with a political, religious, philosophical, economic, educated, national, or contentious group, or not. Who do we think we are so to feel different from the norm, the average, the regular, the expected? How dare we declare our individuality so strongly as to leave behind the familiar, the avowed, the regulated, the conditioned?

Before we adopt the next predominate meme, at any habituation, we feel disintegration, yet we can become successively comfortable as we acquire the now new paradigm, individually or collectively, or else discomfort retrenches us to the old Meme and we do not evolve, change, advance potential. Historically it is easily observed. We carry within the atavistic impulses of Cro-Magnon man, yet are simultaneously as sophisticated as the current year, or not. Clare Graves would have it that we collectively or individually move from Survival through Family, through Ego-Centric, through Socio-centric, through  National-centricity, then Global-centricity, toward Universality (to hereby bastardized his correct concept, ha!) Getting things right is our fundamental problem. We innately feel that unless others think as we do they are getting it wrong. And hence our perpetual strife with each other, if not with ourselves. We like to feel secure. Yes? Get it right!

Correctness is essential for a whole lot of rational reasons. To cross a bridge with one's heavy payload takes great trust in the precision of the makers. Some just do it, specially if having been that way before; others want every detail verified before commencing the traverse. Paradigm shifts do not necessarily crack open the shell of potentiality; we may peck away at the enclosure of our metaphorical birthing a long-long time, and even try retreats back into the metaphorical womb, depending upon the innate potentiality as well as circumstances of nature, nurture and entelechy (our innate-drive). Trouble is, the bridges of our neuronal activity, repeatedly habituated, are scarcely checked for ongoing veracity once we've established them as our preferred pathways. The research would have it that we are generally very slow to change our routes of thinking, and that those of us caught overlong in the uncertainty of new roadways, new signals, new maps of contentions, can be suicidal with insecurity about who we think we are, especially if we feel alone, vulnerable, unprotected, unsubstantiated, and crazy. Who do you think...?

Many a career was as facetiously chosen as by the flip of a coin. Many a destination too. To be or not to be, to think or not to think for oneself, herein lies the rub. How can I  possibly deny God and include all the others, or vice versa? Who are you to play God?