The Brain (by Andrei Dorokhin/deviantArt)

The past week has been really interesting for me from in many regards. My new found motivation for deeper understanding of myself has made me introduce a significant amount of change to my routines and daily activities. I would like in part to credit Steve Pavlina for this. I spent around 5 hours on his blog devouring a good few of his articles and they all rang so true with me. Brilliantly written, clear, he inspired me.

About a week ago I decided to start this blog with the overall purpose of acquiring a better understanding of myself and my surroundings. One of my goals was to find a guiding purpose. Nothing big, just the meaning with life, mine in particular. While I’ve not yet found it I think I’ve made some progress. If you perhaps have read my previous blog post about Is there room for Science? you might have figured out that I will begin to take a somewhat more scientific approach to personal development.

I hope to provide a somewhat unique approach to personal development. Obviously it will still be from my perspective and I can’t promise that it will make any sense or even be valid but my intention however is to provide scientifically supported evidence for a given idea, or at least some background material that might support it. I hope to achieve a couple of things with this approach.

1. Provide a solid, scientifically verified (or somewhat supported) foundation for understanding our minds
2. Contribute something useful instead of adding more noise
3. Bridge science with philosophy and psychology
4. Make science cool :-)

Okay, so number 4 is obviously never going to happened, but who knows? Anyhow, let me explain one, two and three.

The first goal is my intention to distil the science behind the functioning of our minds and translate the sciency language into something we can use and apply to our daily lives.

The second goal is probably the one I feel most strongly about. There are so many personal development blogs out there and most of them simply reiterate what others have already said, many times before. I’ll probably do the same, but hopefully to a much lesser extent. And if I do, it will be from a different perspective. (I’m not obviously not saying all blogs are nonsense, but most of them are just out there contributing to the noise, and we really need less of that!)

The third goal is about not going all scientific, but rather attempt to find the synergies between philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. I feel this is an area not well covered in the personal development area and might be something I could contribute.

I feel it’s important to point out the fact that I’m not going all sciency geeky here. I’m an experimenter and believer in what I can see and do myself. I’ve tried many things that would definitely not be qualified as scientific, such as Out-of-Body experiences, lucid dreamig, and so forth. But I’m still very much interested in finding ways to bridge these “explorations” with rational, repeatable and scientific underpinnings.

I sincerely hope that you will join me on this journey through science, time, mind and explore what lies beyond. (and perhaps learn something on the way!)

It recently struck me how incredibly afraid people are of the unknown, of doing something outside the norm. If you give even the slightest hint at doing something differently the response is almost always the same, uncomfortable squirming, a smirk or an immediate slur of defensive propaganda of why you’re clearly wrong. “Nooo, it doesn’t work that way, everyone knows that. I’ve tried it for years and it doesn’t work.” Notice how the last sentence infer personal knowledge and experience, but without substantiating the claim with an explanation. Always the same kind of empty nonsense.

I didn’t bother explaining my thoughts because it would have made little or no difference. While I must admit that I too have been on the “other” side of this type of conversation, I don’t think I ever responded with the same kind of refusal to learn something new. But as with everything else it takes practice and dedication to become a more open-minded person.If people never dare to question the known it’s no wonder why people use all sorts of self-medication to maintain “happiness” and contentedness. As soon as an unknown feeling surfaces we find a way to conveniently remove it. Either we do this by simply ignoring it, or having another bite of that tasty fatty burger or turn to our group of sheep (friends), comforted in the fact that they too are living the same life as you are.

If this is the instant reaction people have to the unknown, how can we expect to move society forward in a meaningful fashion? Would it even be possible, or is it a lost cause from the very beginning? Being an optimist I clearly believe it’s possible, but finding the right tools for the job is the difficult part.

Why?

Running from fear (by flickr/stuant63)

Few people give themselves time to assess the knowledge and wisdom that have been passed down from previous generations. More often than not we blindly accept what we’ve been told by parents, family and friends. Somewhere in this mess there is very likely room for genetic coding as well. It’s however not a bad thing to question what we’ve been taught, but it’s also equally foolish to assume that everything we’ve been told is bad. The kind of reaction I get from exposing some of my quirkiness could be considered a measure of how comfortable a person is with himself.

An interesting analogy can be drawn from innovation. True innovation is hard to come by because it requires a lot of effort and hard work. It’s much easier to wait for someone to do the necessary hard work and then copy it. Do you see what I mean?  True innovation represents a deeper understanding of oneself, which require a lot of work. But copying someone else’s behaviour or belief is much easier and requires little effort. Could it be that the human mind has evolved to into a copying machine because it’s more efficient? Fear is then used as the tool to discourage free thinking and adaptation.

In some regards we’re in control over evolution, but we also have to understand the power that social conditioning and fear can have on a person. Then consider this in combination with peer pressure and you have got yourself a potent combination to completely remove free thinking and instil conformity.

Conquering fear…

I’m not sure what made my own fear of the unknown slowly diminish. It certainly hasn’t always been like that. Looking back it has only gradually changed and it began with a simple question: What are the consequences of my actions? Overcoming fear of the unknown will hence, according to me, take time. I also can’t remember that I’ve consciously tried to remove my own fear, but it would seem as if it came with the package of questioning the known.

That actually kind of makes sense. If we question the known we indirectly open the doors to the unknown which I guess in some regards means accepting the unknown.

… to take control.

I’m not entirely sure about my conclusion but suffice to say, conquering fear of the unknown is nothing but empowering and can only lead to new discoveries of oneself. Question the known to conquer the unknown.

/ Christoffer