Gerry Cueto

Worldviews are a lot more complex than most people make them out to be. That’s why people often do things that contradict their own worldviews, like a priest molesting a child, a preacher caught in a homosexual affair, or a president lying about his sexual conduct to the masses. It is extremely unlikely to keep a black and white morality system when even the most remedial moral philosophy course is far more complicated, but when you begin to understand the complexity of moral decisions, you can have more control over your general worldview.

I always wanted to live the best possible life, but being entrapped in a religious worldview and not being allowed to think outside of its box, left me fantasizing about the life that I always wanted, but since I was not really allowed to make it happen on my own, I would rely mostly on prayer. I believed that I was supposed to surrender my goals to Jesus and he’d make anything happen according to his will. I was always reminded to cast my cares upon Him because He cares for me. I didn’t start learning about setting my own goals till I was 18, which is pretty pathetic.

When I was a Christian I had the same goals I do now except for the fact that I have a little more control over the results I get because I don’t need to pray to anybody to make things happen.

“Strengthening” my Faith

I always expected to be Christian for life, so when I did my research on Christianity, I knew it would strengthen my faith. I then looked at the apologetics side to see what they were saying, and then to be fair I compared it to the polemics side… like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins… Unfortunately, they don’t teach that kind of unbiased inquiry at my church, but I took on the challenge anyway because if Christianity is the Truth with a capital T, then it can withstand any sort of crappy polemic argument… Well, when I found out the polemic arguments were a lot stronger, I started sharing them with the members of my church. However, they accused me of being biased. Oh really? Me? Biased? No wonder they only tell Christians to listen to apologetic arguments that only seem to be preaching to the choir, and ignore those diabolical polemicists. Hmm, I wonder who the biased ones are now.

The problem with the apologetic arguments is that they’re all based on circular reasoning. Even if they start with some tangible evidence, all I need to do is question the evidence, and the apologists start pointing to the last piece of evidence they used and it all keeps going around in a circle. Furthermore, they’ll accuse me of avoiding the real issue at hand by asking circular questions. For instance, take the problem of Jesus, “How do we know Jesus is God?” They’ll point to a Bible verse that affirms Jesus’ divinity. Then ask, “How do we know the Bible is right when it says that?” Then they’ll turn to another verse in the Bible to answer that last one. The next thing you know we’re back in the first verse. This is circular reasoning at its worst and they’ll accuse the skeptic of asking circular questions and avoiding the evidence presented. I’m sorry, but it is perfectly logical to question evidence until you find a contingent source.

Evilution

Another question I had while growing up was, “Why do Christians attack evolution so much?” I’m not a scientist, but I kind of know how peer review literature works and that those scientists have to be intellectually honest with their findings. If they fabricate anything, they get kicked out, but in Bible class we’d find out that they fabricated all sorts of evidence for evolution and that there’s a big conspiracy to keep Creation Science out of public schools (on top of that, they’d point to some Bible verses that “prophesied” the persecution of Christians). These are the same scientists who lose their tenure for intellectual dishonesty right, or are we talking about the authentic scientific community here?

Well I decided way after high school, when I was 20 years old, to do my research on whether these claims were true or not and I discovered that there is a lot of evidence to support evolution. You can search up “observed instances of speciation” which has to do with species mating and evolving into other species that can’t mate with their ancestors anymore. Other fossil evidences like the Archaeopteryx, a reptilian bird, and the Tiktaalik, a four-legged fish, convinced me that there were massive transitions even among different types of animals. The evidences started piling up and were outstanding proofs for macroevolution while on the creationist side I kept getting crappy arguments like “irreducible complexity” which is a thought and research-terminating idea because “if biology is so complex, we need to stop our inquiry and introduce a magic supernatural being as the solution”. However, the theory of evolution has enough information and evidence already to answer why life is so complex.

One Size Fits All

The general problem I noticed with the religious worldview is the need to always have a simplistic “God” answer to both unique and complicated problems. Let me use a moral example here. A Christian believes pornography is always bad. When something is always bad, it should always have a bad effect when applied. Why does pornography not always do this? Religious fundamentalists give all sorts of convoluted rationalizations for this failed prediction, like “sooner or later it will have a bad effect”. That’s a weak argument because it leaves the consequences up to chance, and that rule can apply to any recreational activity. If you become addicted to anything, it can have a bad effect. Why does pornography get the badge of honor for being an intrinsically vice-filled addiction while a TV addiction or a video game one is something to take less notice of? Apologists provide a lot a slanted anecdotal evidence for pornography being evil because it “leads to rape and murder” and will use a rare, fringe case to prove their point. Well let me provide some examples where pornography can be a good thing. Let’s assume a hypothetical, typical, conservative married couple with a sex life that isn’t all that hot, and the man his and wife decide to watch a porn flick that provides new positions and ideas to try out to enhance their sex lives. Where is the evil in all of this? The wife is finally sexually satisfied and the man is happy. Let’s paint a more extreme situation. A man’s sex life is so bad that his woman is banking on leaving him, and then he watches and analyses some porn and his performance in bed improves 10 fold. In his case, porn was what saved the marriage, and his wife is extremely happy and satisfied that he bought the porn flick…but I guess that doesn’t satisfy the Christian apologists. I constantly keep hearing the black and white religious argument that if she was planning on leaving him in the first place, she wasn’t grounded in Jesus enough or didn’t have enough faith that God would keep them together. Give me a break. There is no simplistic one size fits all answer to every problem. What happens if she gets more faith and still wants to leave? What would one do then?

Science has answers that supersede religion a million times over even when it comes to moral dilemmas. The problem is that people don’t want to deal with science because it’s so complicated and filled with trials and errors that they would rather have easy consistent solutions, black or white, true or false, giving them a higher probability of getting the right answers. Unfortunately, life is not a true or false question, that’s why we see countless examples of dogmatic solutions failing us. We have pastors that become homosexual (against their own code of ethics) or pedophiliac. Apparently they had the God solution but it didn’t seem to work pretty well.

There’s a funny saying on Jarkko’s blog, “Got to have a plan because having a plan makes it all better,” which is totally true. An effective plan doesn’t need to include every possible misfortune, yet a lot of times my plans are very detailed to the point where I try to be a perfectionist. They plan for every single possible worst-case scenario, and even though I can never have a 100% secure plan, I can be detailed enough to the point that I won’t leave the planning phase until I feel motivated enough to start putting it into action. When I feel the intuitive itch to start doing something, then I know I have a good plan on my shoulders and it’s time to move on.

Start small

Focus on the smallest things instead of just the greater goal at hand. Have a detailed plan that starts you off with the easiest thing you can do to get started. There’s nothing wrong with having a detailed complex plan as long as it contains simple beginnings. Chances are, if it doesn’t, you’re not going to follow through with your goals

When you’re planning a step-by-step process to accomplish goals you’ve never accomplished before, keep in mind that your plan is just an educated guess. So you can’t be dogmatic about it. When you’re finally taking action towards your goal, you want to detach yourself a bit from the plan and flow intuitively, that way you’re more likely to be open to opportunities that will help you reach your goal faster. When it comes to goal-setting, your intuition is far smarter than the detailed plan, so build your plan around it. Do you need to know every step along the way? No, but you should be able to visualize your goal to enhance the accuracy of your hypothesis.

Personal Development Parallels

Sometimes there are concepts in personal development that fit various different scenarios. I’ve had areas in my life where I would simply revisit old journal entries and copy their hypothetical solutions into my new journal entry and realize how they work pretty well together. For instance, I found similarities between dating relationships and business relationships. When I get stumped in a business relationship, sometimes I’ll go back to my dating journals and copy one or 2 paragraphs out of there and rework it for the business relationship. Even though they are completely opposite kinds of relationships, they both involve social dynamics. Make a mental note and write down the actions that worked and refine or throw out the ones that didn’t. If you have the drive and ambition and never give up, you’ll achieve your goals.

When you have a strong personal, emotional connection to a belief and you’ve internalized it, it causes you to focus 100% on goal and not give up, but the question is how do we use self-discipline to keep that strong connection to that goal? You can do it by coming up with new ways to keep the goal psychologically appealing. Personal development should be fun! For instance, if you read my “Having Fun Getting Organized” article, it comes up with some really interesting ideas to make you want to stay organized. The purpose of self-discipline is getting you to WANT to accomplish your goals instead of just needing to do them. Ask yourself how to turn your need into a desire.

I was reading Steve Pavlina’s “Thought vs. Action” article and I totally agree that thoughts, actions, feelings, and beliefs play a vital role in success and must be wholly congruent. I don’t have a problem with imagining a spirit that helps me get my belief system about success and personal development together, but I see no positive evidence how a belief in the spiritual makes life more efficient. I do believe that the importance of taking objective reality into account when it comes to self-improvement in general is being undermined by a lot of great personal development writers. Nonetheless, Steve Pavlina is really great at what he does and has a lot to show for it.

Every thought, action, feeling, and belief is stored in your brain. You don’t need to create imaginary characters to get that point across, but if it helps you then that is okay, as long as you realize that they’re only imaginary. Albert Einstein himself said that imagination is better than knowledge because with imagination you can create new knowledge. A lot of my personal solutions and development ideas start in my imagination but go through the process of considering them with the real world by putting on the lens of objective reality.

There is a great blog series by a practicing physicist entitled “Imagination without Knowledge Is Ignorance Waiting to happen,” citing various common examples of how Einstein’s quote is often bastardized to mean that any subjective reality can be true and useful. What really makes a subjective reality true and useful is a firm understanding of what’s already known about the objective reality we live in.

Ask questions

Many times intuitive advice can be vague and fuzzy. So I use counter-intuition to question whatever I intuitively plan for a goal. I keep doing it until I come up with a concise plan and receive basic small steps I can implement to move to the next part of my goal.

I love analyzing things, and because of that, I don’t find myself in analysis paralysis often because I’m always coming up with new ways to define and solve a problem. If you do feel like you’re in analysis paralysis, maybe you’re not questioning the analysis enough. A great analysis will make you want to take the first step of action because you’ve factored each step to its lowest common denominator.

What I mean by factoring each step to its lowest common denominator is planning for the worst case scenario and for the best case scenario. Downgrade your goal. Take a specific question or problem and make it general. For instance, when I was selling physical therapy in my previous job, instead of using the actual company name and saying that I was selling physical therapy, I would tell the potential customer that I was a home health employee doing a medical inquiry. People were more apt to listen to me, and later on I was able to tell them about the company and its services without any problems.

Many Law of Attraction advocates believe that it’s all about focusing on the positive, which is true to degree, but the negative situations and worst case scenarios are a great place to start. Come up with positive solutions for these issues incase they are to arise before you implement a new goal.

Today I had writer’s block all day. I tried all sorts of different techniques to try and cure it, from recording myself talking for an hour to reading a ton of personal development material to watching motivational speakers on YouTube for some ideas, none of which seemed to work.

What finally cured my mental block was a shift in my perspective. I imagined that I was writing to a young teenager who was a little down on his luck, which to me, was a more empowering mindset than writing to a bunch of people I’ve never met on the internet. I got so caught up in making my article meet everyone’s standards that I lost focus on why I started writing in the first place. Changing your mindset can make you more comfortable sharing the great ideas hidden within you.

Mental role-play

Focus on simply changing your perspective. Redefine your problem and see how someone else in a different career or situation would solve it. How would a particle physicist solve your problem? How would a health coach solve your problem? How would you solve your problem 10 years from now? Attack the problem directly, and use as many perspectives as possible till you find the right one. Small changes in your beliefs can make whatever you’re doing a whole lot easier.

I talked about the courage sheet in my “Finding a Meaningful Career” article and the “How to Be Confident” blog post. It can be used to write down the problems you may have and the reasons why you think they’re there. Then write all sorts of random solutions down until one debunk the reasons you have for the original problem.

Take the first step

You want to consider the problems you have, but bear in mind your situations aren’t impossible to solve. With the right mindset, you can get whatever you want done without any extreme stunts. Unrelated “solutions” are pointless. People who fire walk just to get out of debt aren’t going to refinance their home nor have their co-workers treat them more nicely. Focus on the little things, and find the smallest way to tackle your problem directly to get you started.

If reading is the first step, then do it. Tony Robbins said that his goal in life was to have an answer for everything so he would always be reading. Get an accountability partner to get you going if you need to. When I was figuring out how to go to bed early one day, I grabbed a long black sock from my dad’s drawer and tied it around my eyes as a blindfold. I was finally able to go to bed at whatever time I wanted and wake up early.

Use the best of each perspective to form a strong identity

To use a dating example, the thing that helped me the most was focusing on building my personality. I read a lot of books and articles on the internet of all sorts of subjects. A strong identity is the most attractive asset in social relationships. Use as many perspectives as possible to build who you are.

Intuition is a very interesting subject. I don’t know if science has a lot of explanations on it, but it’s one of the most valuable resources in our brains.

Basically I see intuition as fast information when you need it most, based on your social conditioning, how you were raised, your culture, and your life experiences. Instead of taking a lot of time to think critically in an urgent situation, intuition gives you a fast boom of information you can use right away.

I also see intuition as a collective unconscious, like an antenna tuning into your surroundings. At first I wasn’t much of a believer. I thought it was all confirmation bias, but I kept noticing that my intuition kept making these social decisions that felt above chance. It felt like I was tapping into the minds of other people, not in an intrusive mind reading way, but in an informative way. It felt like situations became a little more predictable. I think there are things in life that can’t be explained fully, but just seem to work and we enjoy the benefits of. It might be a mixture of my own social conditioning working from the collective unconscious of other humans. Maybe classic religious and spiritual literatures that talk about beings like the Holy Spirit or spirit guides might be talking about intuition because it’s the closest evidence I see for any sort of spiritual guidance. However, I see intuition more as a mental skill that can be developed, than a spiritual force.

Applying intuition

I like to follow my intuition in most situations, detaching my logic/critical thinking from them and just following intuitive guidance. It actually lets me think logically later on. I can put the events together and see why my intuition told me to do certain things.

Using intuition to change your current situations

Your current situations aren’t always your fault. Life is like a game and other people are playing. You may have been playing well and somebody else didn’t want to make it happen for you. When that happens, take off the dual mindset and focus on walking the person through your idea or solution as if you both were already on the same team.

You may have lost with one company or partner, but if it wasn’t for that loss you wouldn’t have found the right company to work with or the right soul mate for your life. So don’t take loss like it’s the end of the world because you might actually be in a better position.

Everything is a learning experience. We’ve all done stupid things. Focus your shift from winning the war to winning small battles. That’s how I train my intuition. I take a look at the big picture later on and see how it all worked together. Even if I’ve conquered a fear, that’s considered winning. I won courage, a valuable asset to the bigger picture.

Coming Soon… Does the mind shape reality?