The 365 Commitment

Day 248 – Automatic vs. Deliberate

The world is full of positive and negative charges. In fact the earth itself has a magnetic pole with a positive and negative charge. Atomic particles have charges as well, positive and negative. Even the blood cells in your body transfer and communicate via positive and negative charges.

If we extend this to our mind and body you can almost say that the same thing is going on. In fact, I think the negative charge is the automatic, instinctual, primal nature of ourselves and the positive side is when we are doing something deliberate and with purpose.

Acting deliberately helps prevent you from being acted upon. We can either act, or  be acted upon. When we allow our base instinct to take too much control, we are running on autopilot and rarely will one of your days be exceptional – because you are not acting deliberately.

Allowing yourself to be controlled by the subconscious, primal self has consequences. Simple consequences are easy for us to see. For example, if we let our desire to eat control us then we gain weight or our health fails. When we let the primal desire to reproduce take over, that has obvious consequences as well. We can probably think of many more. This concept has been around a long time. Almost every religion teaches the concept that the natural man is separated from God in some way due to the basic primal natures within them.

The are more difficult consequences to understand. For example, allowing ourselves to be controlled by fear, stress, anxiety and other controlling moods is giving into this primal nature. This is harder to recognize. A key is to understand the triggers. One for me is the mail. When I walk into my office and I see a bunch of mail sitting on my desk, I immediately think all is lost, I am hopelessly disorganized, I will never get on top of things. I might as well just give up, or get angry, and many times both. I have trained myself to allow this thought to trigger my primal instinct and I let that take over and sure enough I spend the rest of the day staring at that pile of mail with a weight of discouragement bearing down on me.

Need to recognize that when we follow an automatic thought process, we are usually allowing preset patterns to control us. For example, a person might assume that they are worthless and they are just automatically going about the day collecting data that further enforces that concept. They are reinforcing past experience and this becomes more and more comfortable for them. It is hard to believe, but we humans actually like feeling miserable because it is that path of least resistance.

Taking action and being deliberate is hard, but well worth it. You start to change, alter and control the prebuilt automatic patterns you have created for yourself.

Guy Reams (248)
365 Member

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