Learn to accept yourself: People always have to learn to be self-consistent.
"Fei Yao dor is a very peculiar person, he lives himself very garbage, very annoying, but he is very self-consistent, has his own set of logic, one link after another, and gives all his actions the right."
A friend sent me the above comment while reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
"The Brothers Karamazov" tells the story of the father-killing of the Karamazov family, showing us the story of the morally corrupt old Karamazov Feyodor and his four sons. Feyodor monopolized the inheritance left by his wife to his sons and clashed with his eldest son Dmitry for the affair of the woman Grushenka, and was mistaken for the real murderer and arrested, the second son Ivan went mad, the illegitimate son Spyrgakov committed suicide, and the third son Alyosha also generated more philosophical speculation from the incident.
Everyone in the story has our shadow.
Alyosha is pure and kind, a little angel, someone that almost all of us will love and yearn for. He has faith in his heart, and although he is only a pale and powerless ideal person, he is full of love and hope for the world in his heart.
Dmitry's character is depraved, indulgent, and life is disorderly and chaotic, just as we really live in reality. But in him, in the struggle between good and evil in human nature, in addition to the evil of lust and debauchery, there is also the guilt of betraying Katerina and the strong love for Grushenka. After he had a dream about dolls, Dmitry realized his sins and believed that suffering could wash away the dirt of the soul, thus returning to faith and saving the soul.
Each of us has had moments where ideas are contradictory and radical. Ivan does not believe in God, but he cannot eliminate his own need for faith, and he hates and loves almost everyone, suffering between belief and doubt. Trapped in the nightmare of being an accomplice for the rest of his life because he had the idea of hoping that his father would die soon, he ended up going crazy.
Spilgakov had longed for a better life, but his identity as an illegitimate son and a slave became his cage, and his neuroticism, inferiority, jealousy, and perversion, like the darker and invisible part of our hearts, finally, he committed suicide because of the sin of killing his father.
And their father, Feyodore, was lustful, greedy, and insane. He said: "I do always have this feeling in front of people, like I am more despicable than anyone, everyone thinks of me as a clown, so I thought: 'Then I will really play the clown, what you think and what you think I don't care, because you are more despicable than me!'" So I became a clown, a clown out of shame, a great elder, out of shame! I was playing with it purely because I was overly sensitive. ”
He became a cuffian figure because of his humiliation, but his acceptance of himself, the self-consistency of the logic of his thoughts, made him a debauchery but able to derive pleasure from pain.
I do not deny the suffering of the likes of Feyodor, Dmitry, Grushenka, and Alyosha, but they are able to walk between the worlds after thinking because even in spite of the suffering, they still accept themselves and understand their own worth. And why Ivan went mad, why Spilgakov committed suicide, is precisely because of their understanding of the world, their thinking about life, and the logic of the whole thinking cannot be satisfactorily solved.
Putting aside the distinction between good and evil in human nature, we will find that what the protagonist of Toshi's novel pursues is actually the logical self-consistency of inner thinking.
For example, Raskolnikov in another book of Toshi, "Crime and Punishment", why he was able to pick up an axe to kill people in the first place is precisely because of his set of killing theories: people are divided into geniuses and materials, and a small number of genius geniuses can cross the line to kill people. This theory is valid in his heart, it is logical, it is feasible to link one link at a time. But the reason why he suffers after killing people is that he thinks that he has discovered the road to killing people and does not change the real reality, and this set of theories has become incomplete.
The logical self-consistency of the human heart is not necessarily correct, but the self-consistency can bring pain.
For example, the well-known two-two-four, we think it is right, this is a truth, it exists in our minds without thinking, just like the daily diet, but one day you suddenly feel that two two is not equal to four, and you don't know why it is not equal, nor do you know why some people believe that two two is four.
When you meditate on this all day, this is how suffering arises.
In our knowledge system, we have established a theoretical thinking system that can convince ourselves, and this thinking system echoes the end of the hand and achieves self-improvement. According to this theory, the causes and consequences of what happened can be justified by themselves, can convince themselves that it must be so, and then they are at ease, and they are logically self-consistent.
Self-consistency reduces suffering.
So how do you achieve self-consistency?
The elders in the book say this: "The main thing is not to lie to yourself. The person who lies to himself and listens to himself will fall to the point where he cannot discern even if there is truth in himself or around him, and the result will be neither self-respect nor respect for others. If one does not respect anyone, there is no love; to have fun without love is nothing more than indulgence in lust, to indulge in primitive sensual pleasures, to degenerate into animals in the quagmire of sin, and everything begins with constant lying to others and to oneself. "
The so-called self-consistency, that is, to become yourself, to understand yourself, to accept yourself, is also equivalent to saving yourself.
Acknowledging that you are an ordinary person with both strengths and weaknesses, and being willing to correct shortcomings and mistakes, is the first step in self-consistency and salvation.