Day 15: Shattering Myself To Pieces – Part 1

Yesterday the point opened up of how I tend to – whenever I see that there is a part of me that I am unable to trust – shatter myself to pieces completely in the idea that if I can’t trust myself entirely then I should not trust myself at all. Because often – I will only realise after a while that what I believed was a stable and trustworthy point in myself and my application – was not truly so. And then I go into the fear that: well, if I thought that I was trustworthy in relation to that point and it turned out not to be so – then what is to say I am really trustworthy in any other point? And then – within that singular moment – it’s like I take a sledge hammer to my self-trust and shatter it to pieces – where I then place myself in a position where I have to start all over again and re-establish my self-trust in relation to all points in my world – re-building my foundation of self-trust from scratch, from which I am able to stand and walk.

The point opened up through the word ‘falsification’ and falsification is basically a method proposed by Karl Popper in the philosophy of science as a way to rule out false theories. What he proposes is that one just conjures up random theories of how things work – and then put the theory up to the toughest tests and see if it survives. This stands in contrast with the method of confirmation where the idea is to make predictions based on your theory and finding as many points of evidence in the physical world in support of this view or theory, so that – let’s say if the prediction you make based on your theory comes true a 1000 times, you can be pretty certain that the theory is true or confirmed. Popper, with his falsificationism, suggests instead that we should actively attempt to falsify our theories. Meaning that – we should make predictions based on our theories and if they don’t turn out to be true – then the theory must be rejected, but if the prediction does come true, it doesn’t mean that the theory gains in reliability, because, for instance – no matter how many times we see a white swan – the spotting of a white swan cannot count as evidence for the statement ‘All swans are white’ – because a black swan could just always be right around the corner. However, spotting a black swan is definite evidence that the statement ‘All swans are white’ is not true and should be rejected.

So – just to give you some background and also in terms of tying it in with how the same system I am working with is manifested in various ways in our world, such as in science, for instance – where in search for ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ the exact same method is used of simply rejecting an entire point, when a part of it is proven to be false.

Falsification, of course, is rather an extreme way of dealing with points – and scientists don’t actually work according to this principle, because it would just take way too long to make any progress if, each time a part of the data doesn’t fit the theory, the entire theory must be rejected. And in the same way – within myself – it doesn’t make sense to slam my entire foundation of self-trust to pieces because I saw that part of it was not real. In science – scientists will rather take the theory apart and see where things went wrong so that the theory turned out to be inconsistent with some of the data. The theory will then be adjusted in light of the new information and from there it can be put to the test again. So – that is what I saw I can apply within myself as well – where, instead of just undermining my self-trust completely – I investigate my self-trust in all its aspects – check which points are valid and in which points the self-trust was not valid. Then – I can investigate why the self-trust was not absolute within the points where it was invalidated and re-align myself in such a way that I am able to trust myself within those points. So – it is like taking my self-trust apart just for a moment, investigating the invalid parts – correcting them – and putting it back together again. This is a far more effective method than just slamming the whole thing to pieces and then having to start over from scratch – re-establishing my self-trust in each piece individually all over again.

Within my next blog-post – I will take a closer look at why this tendency of using the method of falsification exists within myself. Thank you for reading.