My Philosophy
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.” ~Henry Ford
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever” ~ Chinese Proverb
“Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” ~ Chinese Proverb
It pains me to talk about my philosophy straight here in my blogsite but I had to in order to remind myself about it or refer to it if ever I do change or if there’s anything interesting that will influence my life in a certain way that it even leads me to changing my views about life backed up with reason. With writing this, I also put in mind all the people around me. I sure hope this will also help others in a way or two. However, this list will accumulate and change as time passes by, so don’t just go through this page once.
One thing I would like to request the passers by. Please ask questions and have a little discussion with me with regards to these things that I have laid out. I want to learn from you as much as I have learned from a lot of other sources. Always a pleasure to meet you and you’re always welcome.
Contents:
1. Optimism
2. Open-mindedness
3. On Critiques I
4. On Critiques II
5. Our Individual Choices
6. Destiny vs. Choice
7. Change
8. Against Ignorance
9. Against Discrimination
10. About Words
11. Harmonious Conversations
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Intro [WARNING! I'M SPEAKING WITH PASSION ON THIS PART SO DON'T COME UP WITH NON-SENSE PREJUDGMENTS. IF YOU DON'T WANT TO FEEL DISAPPOINTED, SKIP READING THE INTRO AND READ MY PHILOSOPHIES INSTEAD.]:
First of all, let me talk about who I am through intuitive introspection. I am a wild thinker where despite being part of a religion, I find free-thinking really important.
I love discussions and I despise anyone who are ignorant and those who do not know how to listen and acknowledge ideas and thoughts.
I think i’m 50-50 altruist-egotist depending on the language I use. People judge me as either because of how I speak and how I communicate my thoughts. But naturally, I’m an altruist because I do show concern to other people’s ideas and thoughts and I want to contribute to their well-being and their development as mature human beings. It’s unfortunate that there are people who don’t want to go through that and instead be selfish - not that it’s bad.
Ignorants think of me as annoying. It’s not my fault ignorants are getting pissed; it’s ignorants who choose not to listen; it’s ignorants who do not know the difference between a discussion and a conversation; it’s ignorants who don’t use their brains but rather use their emotions as a really good tactic to shut me up. Talk about civilized people.
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MY PHILOSOPHIES:
1. I am an optimist. And being optimistic meant that one does not think about fear or disbelief in doing the impossible. In order to attain what we want in our lives - whether it may be impossible or not - we must have the passion and enthusiasm towards our goals in life. With passion, we can never think of anything that can hold us behind our goals, we won’t even think about the complexities of life. We will just find ourselves enjoying our time doing what we thought is hard and difficult because of fear, because of being too realistic, because of being too practical, because of mere excuses of our limitations as human beings. BELIEVE THAT YOU CAN AND PURSUE IT!!!
2. But being an optimist requires me to become a pessimist too and vice versa. If one stays to become an optimist or a pessimist, then they won’t realize a hundred percent the realities of life that is in front of them. The idea behind this is that we should always have an open-mind! We will never improve when we ignore the full truth and live in the bliss that we wish to digest. We improve through introspection and through introspection, we have to be considerate to all of the things that we perceive and that is fed to us. We have to make sure of what makes us move on in life through what we are encouraged or discouraged to do daily. We must be reasonable. And we have to gain more knowledge as we reflect on a lot of things that we see in our surroundings everyday of our lives. We think to be able to come up with what is possible rather than what makes sense in our lives - because we can never trust our senses let alone intuition (intuitions are just used when gambling). THROUGH POSSIBILITIES, WE CAN FIND THE RIGHT PATH IN OUR LIVES!!! BELIEVE IN THE POSSIBILITIES!!!
3. However, improvement is not merely a self-reflecting process. It does involve feedback from the people around every individual. Never be close-minded to all of these - much better, never be close-minded at all.
In order to improve through feedback, one should consider critiques. Whether it’s accompanied with a compliment or disparagement, the most important part is on looking at what we have accomplished so far, what have we done wrong and how do we grow through those lessons that we have learned through critiques which are basically the analysation of a certain aspect of an entity (person, thing, idea, etc.)
But here’s something that one has to bear in mind: Critiques are not negative, NEVER EVER CONSIDER CRITIQUES AS NEGATIVE AND NEVER REACT EMOTIONALLY TO CRITIQUES!! Critiques were never negative from the very first time it came into conception.
A proper critique has sound reasoning. Those are the ones that will lead someone towards improving their lives. An improper critique is fallacious, condemning and is more intuitive than reasonable - which is sorta like: “I think you suck just because.” or “You suck because I said so.” or “You’re bullshit!” or “You don’t know anything.” or “You don’t deserve anything.” which is something worth ignoring most especially if there are no reasons where they could back up these expressions.
If people do not know how to express themselves, then why take them seriously? You want to improve, you want to learn, you want to listen to what will benefit you! The opposite of a bad critique is a compliment and one should only respond to it with a humbling response or an appreciative response (i.e. Thank you).
4. Of course that doesn’t mean that one will just have to listen to critiques. Critiques are meant to be discussed. They are meant to put great importance towards the understanding of ideas and knowledge in any discourse. DON’T BE AFRAID AND DON’T BE TOO RASH! QUESTION THE CRITIQUES! ASK FOR A CLEARER UNDERSTANDING OF THE CRITIQUES IF YOU NEED TO!!! CRITIQUES ARE FOR IMPROVEMENT!
5. I reflected on this while I was at work and I meditated on the idea that we are individuals and it’s only us who could control our lives, no one else.
With this in mind, I believe that people can do anything and become anyone in this world throughout their lives, the only thing that brings us there is our choices that we ourselves control as individuals - we have a certain approach towards learning, we restrict ourselves to a single mindset which then becomes useful towards our goals, we accept a certain ideology that makes sense to us, we practice in accordance to some certain ideal.
Freedom of choice is definitely a good thing, but people become too rash about the idea that if they make a choice, they can never make another choice. I don’t know why people do that and suddenly become so xenophobic.
Life is not two-sided, nor does life restrict us to a single choice that we have to preserve for the rest of our lives - you can count in those who only consider what they’re naturally composed with. Which goes back to improvement. If we want to improve, we have to open our minds and look at all the possibilities in life. And through choosing smart, we can open ourselves to even more opportunities. When we fail, we learn and we change right away.
WE HAVE ALL THE TIME AND OPPORTUNITIES TO MAKE CHOICES IN OUR LIVES!!! DON’T WASTE THEM (time and opportunity) IF YOU FEEL LIKE FAILING!!! Like I said earlier, Believe in the Possibilities!
6. (Still in relation to choice) Much worse than this is that people are so obsessed with destiny and the fact that they can only live with their destinies. We weren’t born with destinies, we’re born with choices. WE create our own destinies which result to our successes and failures in life. We must fill ourselves with the knowledge that can open us to all doors, to all kinds of possibilities, to everything that we can attain. OUR CHOICES IN LIFE SHAPES OUR DESTINIES IN LIFE!!! WE CONTROL OUR LIVES (first before our parents)!!!
7. But if we want to live lives that we ever thought about attaining, of course we want to improve ourselves towards that goal, and the key is CHANGE! No one cannot change in their lives. With all of the things happening around us, we will always integrate those events in our lives; therefore it gives us the chance to think about how we should approach life once again after having that learning experience that we get through our surroundings. Change is inevitable!
The main problem is that we’re picky, not in the sense of choosing what we want to believe in, but we’re picky in what things we want our lives to be affected with. Some of us hate reading books, watching documentaries on TV, listening to talk radio, and the like. We need to investigate how people think and why we should agree or not agree with it in logical and objective terms. If it disagrees to what we originally believe in, then we should reevaluate ourselves and decide if change is something that we need to move forward and improve. Should we allow ourselves to stay stubborn with sticking to what we religiously and obsessively believe in?
8. If one is going to argue that, “people have the right to choose the things that will affect their lives,” I don’t disagree with that but what it shows is that we are promoting ignorance.
There is a saying that “Ignorance is bliss.” That is true because if you preach to the ignorant, you will get killed. The ignorant people live up to their beliefs and stays with it because they feel satisfied with it and anything that will go against their beliefs will have to be destroyed in order to keep the ways that surround their beliefs.
I am campaigning against ignorance because it is the source of xenophobia, prejudice and discrimination in all forms: racial, religious, political, ideological, ethnic, geographic, linguistic, age, social, sexual, etc. I can never let anyone justify - despite the realities - all of these non-sense ignorant ideologies. Their knowledge is constrained, they do not want dialogue, they show no interest towards understanding, and they choose to be close-minded. For one thing, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SUPREME!!!
People should be considerate despite having the freedom to think and express. We cannot afford another world war because of prejudice caused by ignorance.
9. We are all different. Apparently everyone agrees with that, though I dislike the idea that there are people who are better than others. Why is there such thing? The reason is because of discrimination. People accept the fact that there are people who can be compared by their abilities.
This is something I detest the most. One reason is because people can learn. And when people learn, they open their minds and become great people. Then there are those smart people who become lazy and eventually we find out that they’re living far worse off. Who are the victims now? Who are the ones laughing?
Which is why human beings can never underestimate or overestimate each other. We all are different but we all do not have all the knowledge to claim who is supreme or who is not. We live as individuals who aim for the top, the top is something that is ideal for us. Just like beauty as the saying goes “Beauty is on the eye of the beholder,” the “ideal” is on the mind of the individual but it does not exist in reality.
10. Language is power! I sure would love to get my hands on Michel Foucault’s books. But I have a personal ideal about language. It sure hurts me to know that people become violent just because of words - it does show how language is powerful. But I don’t think we should act violently when we are being challenged verbally.
In our childhood, we learn to speak, read and listen. But those words we learned in childhood produces meaning as we grow up. We take for granted the fact that ‘words have meaning’. We act when we hear something unpleasant when in fact it’s not intended to be unpleasant. We become violent when we are given disparagement when it was actually a compliment. We deny ourselves from listening when to what is important. We close our minds to other interpretations and other contexts to a certain utterance. We forget that those are just words when we put meaning to it which then justifies our actions towards it.
11. With simple utterances, we need to be patient. If we feel uncomfortable because of a certain statement, we should ask what people mean, we should open our minds to what those words given to us indicate and how we should respond on it so that there will be no misunderstanding or any unnecessary action.
When people communicate, it’s important to know that both speakers want harmony in their conversation. BUT TAKE NOTE that a simple conversation (talking about how’s life, how is the family, how is work or school, how to fix my computer, do you have money with you, etc.) is different from a debate and a discussion (talking about issues and ideas) which breaks the harmony for the sake of attaining new knowledge or for the sake of understanding a certain knowledge in an even higher level.
12. An effective discussion aims to understand an idea or an issue. A failed discussion is when people talk about what they believe in and not contribute towards the issue being discussed.
13. To relieve myself of my passionate words from the intro after tons of reflecting about the relationship between two people talking, I realized something really important. And that is the fact that we must always be good listeners and we must never ever give in to our egos because everyone and everyone’s ideas are important. SEEK FOR THE UNDERSTANDING OF OTHERS IF WE WANT TO BE UNDERSTOOD. BE PATIENT AND NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE PEOPLE WHOM YOU ARE SPEAKING TO. ALWAYS ASSUME THAT SPEAKING IS EDUCATING!!!
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The rest of my philosophies are found in my daily blogs under the category “Philosophy”.
