Silverblade’s Guide to Discerning the Truth

Rebecca Silverblade's Guide to Discerning the Truth

Rebecca Silverblade is another one of my inner characters. She embodies such traits as presence, precision, discernment, and the ability to handle situations without reacting to them. And one thing where precision can serve an important purpose is in discerning the truth from falsehood. This doesn’t just include facts, but also things like the truth of what’s important, the truth of how to act, and the truth of the basis for one’s own emotions and emotional responses. For example, on an inner level, I’ve found that she’s been able to give invaluable perspective at times of confusion or self-doubt.

Like was explained in Creativity’s Guide to Problem-Solving, the below guide was written by way of me trying to let the perspective, embodied by Silverblade, speak on the subject of how to discern the truth. This topic was the prompt, basically, and what follows is my sense of how “she” handled, or would handle, speaking on it.


 

SBGuideT1So you want to discern the truth, do you?

SBGuideT2I suppose you expect me to give you some hint, or proffer some guidance, is that it? This is called a “guide”, after all – I would hardly expect you to expect any less.

SBGuideT3And here it is – the question of the truth. An inquiring mind, looking for it. And what truth are you looking for, pray tell? Continue reading

Becoming at Peace with Your Own Path

Maybe you’ve been perturbed at someone who seems to know a lot more than you do. Yep, even today I felt the same way. And I know it’s not always just because of jealousy, but because the way they live their life makes you reflect on your own path.

“Is my way wrong? Am I missing something?” These were the kinds of questions I was asking myself.

Sometimes I worry about these things. I wonder if there might be something, just outside of my awareness, that if I was aware of it, it would make a huge difference in my life.

Then people come by who seem to have it all figured out, like they’ve found the thing, and yet, what they say doesn’t seem helpful to me at all. Frustrating!

Continue reading

False Modes of Being

The Six False Modes of Being I’ve Identified so far: The Heart of Negativity, Emotional Vampire, Dull Giant, Philosophy Knight, Demanding Critter, and Emotional Cynicism

Today my Self-Doubt was fed up with always having to struggle to get things done. You know the feeling: When you try to do something, but then all these other thoughts come in that make you want to just forget about what you wanted to do, and engage instead, perhaps, in some pleasant distraction.

Well, my Self-Doubt (with the help of my Critic), decided it would be a good idea to try and come to a compromise with these parts of myself who were always getting in his way. Rather than fight with them, he thought he could get them to all come to an agreement about what to do.

As soon as he had decided on this task, a number of forces became evident to me. I began to visualize them, and six made themselves apparent at that time:

  1. One appeared like a hawk, hovering over the rest of the forces. An ominous feeling came from it, and it had blood-stained wings. It was extremely negative, so negative, in fact, that I call it “The Heart of Negativity”, thought I don’t know if that’s accurate. This part of you shuts you down with hopelessness, a lack of faith, joylessness, and negativity.
  2. The next (going off the picture above), was one I’d run into before. This was the “Emotional Vampire” – this guy likes intimidating people, finding pointless but pleasing things to do, and doesn’t care how he accomplishes what he wants to. He puts thoughts in your head that get you to start doubting or defending yourself.
  3. This guy, the “Dull Giant”, appeared first. He is concerned with physical needs, and will easily abandon things that you think are important in favor of things like eating, sleeping, exercising.
  4. The “Philosophy Knight” is always checking his beliefs against what is going on. He seems almost mechanical, just thinking about whatever is true or false without much emotion. This side of you decides on a course of action and just keeps going even when it doesn’t make sense.
  5. The “Demanding Critter” gets impatient, angry, uptight, and creates a huge fuss whenever it’s not doing something it wants to do. And when it is doing something, it often does it for reasons such as: proving a point, winning, getting some cheap feeling of superiority or excitement.
  6. “Emotional Cynicism” is the part of you that frowns at “Free Hugs” videos. He doesn’t give a crap about all that touchy-feely emotional stuff, in fact, he’s downright suspicious of it. Your idealism, your upbeat attitude, all of them just seem misguided to him.

As my self-doubt soon found out, not only do these guys tend to not agree on anything, but when questioned they get very explosive, giving you those kinds of feelings that, when you want to get things done, make you want to give up. After going through this encounter, my self-doubt decided that it wanted to become more powerful, so it didn’t have to just bend to the demands of these guys anymore, but could stand up to them. Let’s see how that goes.

P.S. I call these guys “False Modes of Being” because the way they go about things seems backwards, wrong, and petty. But then again, these sides of me don’t think so. They’re quite pleased with their mode of being.

Frustration with Myself

So I was feeling some frustration after watching some stuff from Tony Robbins, since he’s very capable in many areas of life that I also am working on, like being able to work people through long standing insidious life issues within a couple minutes. Given the time I’m taking to solve my own things methodically, one at a time, I got frustrated. How could he do it with other people so easily? Was my approach wrong? This frustrated me even more, since I didn’t want to feel anything that resembled envy. Then I was frustrated more because I didn’t want to have to be repressing or denying any emotion. Shame got mixed in there too. Anyway I was a bit of a mess until a few minutes ago, when I went in my head to my gruff side, who had some solutions for me that I thought I’d share:

  1. There are no easy solutions. What a guy like Tony Robbins does looks easy, but really, all he does is look for source of conflict inside other people, and by exposing it, can easily point out a new direction for that person to take. He’s been through this process many many times and knows what works and what doesn’t. It’s not as if he has a magic solution. As I’ve seen in myself, once I lay out all the pieces of an inner puzzle, and delve into something, it’s easy to see where the fear or injustice is and face it to move forward. The seeds of change are in the depths of the conflict itself, always.
  2. Yeah I might have a lot of stuff going on with me right now that I’d rather not, but that’s me, and I need to just handle where I’m at and what I’ve got. To learn how to handle all these things I may want to handle better some day (so many vague ideas), I need to work with it within myself. What I’ve been doing has worked for me, and that’s enough
  3. I don’t need to push myself so damn hard! If I set out so many vague goals for myself and am willing to punish myself if I don’t immediately get results, I will just end up with a bunch of chaos and confusion.
  4. I could say “this mode of thinking is wrong” for anything, but that doesn’t get me anywhere, it just creates a bunch of anger and frustration. So – deep breath, and carry on in the ways that I know work for me. Even if something’s wrong, saying that it is doesn’t give me the solution that works for me.

Decisions from Fear vs. Self-respect

Latest thing I learned from my self-training: That just because you make decisions toward one end doesn’t mean you need to fear its opposite. All it means is that you respect yourself enough to lead yourself towards a prosperous future. This may seem like a small distinction, but it means the difference between constantly running away from something and being at peace with wherever you end up. That is, you can face whatever comes your way, while at the same time guiding yourself toward something positive. After all, no matter how much information you gather for your decisions, there will always be uncertainties in the outcome.

Honorable Self-doubt

There is a part of you who earnestly wants to do the right, honorable thing, and is often thrown into doubt about every little thing where he might be doing the wrong thing. Other parts of you can try to cheer him up, tell him he needs to be confident, but he won’t ever trust the advice of others enough to actually give up his self-doubt. What he needs is experience, and one of the best places for him to get it is around those parts of you who ACT, and who view fear and doubt as a weakness that hinders a person from getting things done. Why them? Because your self-doubter can examine where these other parts of you are being honorable or dishonorable, while at the same time gaining some experience in acting despite his doubts (aka: courage).

This part of myself is currently the understudy of a black-haired, ill-tempered woman commander, with an eye patch, who doesn’t take any crap or fluffy idealism, and whose business is action in the face of adversity. Part of this involves accepting all adversity that exists, and dealing with it. Not sure where this is going to go from here, but just thought I’d share.