As for "believing in yourself is not fully up to you," gotta disagree in the strongest possible way. If it's not then nothing you think or do is really up to you, so you might as well just panhandle under the overpass. Your mind is yours; own it and operate it accordingly.
I fail to see the logic. I’m trying to be charitable and understand your statement to mean that if we don’t have control over our minds then we don’t over our actions either. I think it can get semantically messy trying to figure out what we mean by “control,” so let me try to approach it another way.
Your mind/body has conscious parts and unconscious parts, and the unconscious part is most of “who we are.” The unconscious part is pretty much by definition something that we can’t do anything about because we don’t know it’s there.
I think you understand that and that’s why you are such a proponent of getting to know yourself and being aware and whatnot, so that we can recognize more of the unconscious parts and condition our minds to change them. What I hear you saying is that it’s not easy, but it’s worth doing, and it might even be the *only* thing worth doing. Shit’s going to happen that I don’t like, and if I let the unconscious side of me rule, it’s going to destroy me. That’s why I’ve got to prepare for it.
This seems to be the fundamental part of our disagreement, Bob. You credit it to my age, and you may well be right. You want to have some control over how you react to stuff, and what you “allow” into your mind. I, on the other hand, just want to accept that the biggest part of who I am – who we all are – is unconscious and uncontrollable, and rather than “conditioning” myself to be more conscious and in control – which I agree with you is possible at the margin – I’d prefer to just notice it and be in awe of it. That may make me a zombie, but it doesn’t limit my options to panhandling.
