Do you believe most people, who seriously commit to the work, can self-actualize?

[benny]

This question has been on my mind for a while. I think most people, with true determination and reasonable intelligence, can grow and reach high levels of personal growth.

 

Then there are factors such as character and genetics. On the one hand, It's a trap to blame "bad genes" on one's poor results in life, and on the other hand, someone with down syndrome simply doesn't have the same capacity as an "able-minded" person, and can therefore not hope to reach the same levels of growth.

 

Then there's strength of character. Personal development involves heavy emotional labor and a lot of discomfort. Are some people fundamentally unable to stomach this? Are they simply too weak, and are therefore incapable? I know there are people who are unwilling, but that's different from unable. Do you believe there are people with a fixed character that makes them too weak to do the work? Or do you think any able person can gradually build the strength to do the work, if they make the choice? I believe most people can. But I also believe most people won't.

What are your guys' opinions on the matter?

Edited July 12, 2021 by benny

[Mason Riggle]

It's a combination of factors that determines what occurs. 

Consider the way flowers bloom. All the flowering plants don't make big beautiful flowers.. just the ones that get enough water and nutrients and sunlight, and they must be in the fortunate circumstance of being a healthy flowering plant, rather than a damaged one.. or rather than a non flowering plant.. or rather than a rock. 

We are products of circumstances. 

[Thought Art]

@benny There are so many factors in peoples situations depending on their genetics, up bringing, tastes, interest, mental faculties, heavy metal toxicity, access to information, age, financial problems, education etc to really say. 

I think people can do this work if they are willing to try it. I myself fuck up all the time. This work has benefited my life in amazing ways. But, also the misapplication and abusing of self actualization materials has created problems. You really don't know what you know unless you are willing to suffer through loss, confusion and the pain of admitting to yourself how self deceived you have been. 

We will all take our own path, and have our own capacities. There are so many ways to live in the world and I think that is one of the great things about being human. 

Edited July 14, 2021 by Thought Art

[Eph75]

@benny

I'd say that anyone can self-actualize, everyone have the inner potentiality, and really, self-actualization has a gravitational pull, it wanting to happen. Circumstances happens that is calling out to us to take make steps towards self-actualization, increasingly so with age, characteristically experienced as increasing suffering, but it needs some key shifts in the mind in order to get over some essential thresholds that hold us back.

It's not so much in how much effort you put in, you can try really hard and essentially get nowhere.

It's more about the quality and the direction of that effort, and the counterintuitiveness of the efforts needed. Spending that effort to more efficiently facilitate those shifts.

Gains by removal, and the shifting of focus from outwards focus to inward focus is a good start. But usually not the route taken, as we desire more, that which we lack and we're not as interested in the removal of unbeneficial internal phenomena. 

We're so distracted by that which we see as undesirable, and the desire being to change or remove such undesirable external phenomena. Looking for fixes external to us. 

With external distraction, our energy is consumed by mere coping, and without need to cope that energy will spend itself on gravitating towards self-actualization.

It just happens, and with time that gravitational pull grows so strong that it becomes self-serving and greatly accelerated by the effort we add. 

What those shifts are can't really be communicated, the words can be communicated but it needs to be experienced first-hand as milestones on the self-actualization journey.

You can't tell anyone how to self-actualize. You have to figure it out yourself, and grow increasingly able to facilitate those shifts in your own sense-making that are needed to reach "the next milestone".

The counterintuitiveness makes this hard, as gaining knowledge and understanding tend to strengthen the ego, and deconstruction and disidentification of the ego being the path forward. 

All justification or blame strengthen the ego, and takes us further away from where need to get.

"Push" someone towards self-actualization and you are met with just that, resistence, justification, blame, shifting away from responsibility, and so on, and the ego strengthen in that process. 

The only way is to attract interest, and allow that gravitational pull to happen, when the time is right, if that time should present itself. 

Edited July 14, 2021 by Eph75