The Rubinshteinic Technique to Deal With The Past - For a Better Future

(Philosocom's Subcategory On the Past)

Alex Mos's Synopsis

The Rubinshteinic Technique to Deal With The Past teaches us that, studying our past helps us navigate life's hardships morally and leads us toward our desired life. Past experiences allow us to understand our deepest dreams and teach us what to do and avoid. Even traumatic flashbacks can be an opportunity to learn how to prevent similar misfortunes by moral conduct. We must be strong and determined to reflect on past experiences constructively and use them to overcome new challenges in life. 

Contemporary hedonistic culture conditions us to escape hardship through pleasures, weakening our discipline and tenacity. Submission to pleasures deprives us of strength and can lead to addiction.

We must endure hardship to gain wisdom and become stronger, more moral beings. Ultimately, we might suffer less as we can prevent or reduce misfortunes using the lessons learned from the past. 

We must examine our past activities, break bad habits, become open-minded, and analyze how to alter our behavior to improve. Life can be compared to a maze with many possible choices. If we carefully follow the superior conduct of our choosing, we will reach the desired destination. Learn from the past to make better decisions toward the future of your dreams. 

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Introduction: Why We Must Confront the Past

Within our past and the past of others, lies the key of a better future. Within our personal and collective struggles, lies the key towards a greater cultivation of a more functional moral code, capable of helping us better navigate the hardships of life, and the hardships in which we may face. Therefore, neglecting the past is also the neglection of much-needed study towards living the life we truly want to live: A life that correlates with our deepest desires.

The point of an ethical code is largely functional, and as such, ethics are the most practical asset of all of philosophy. With ethics we can gain much power, necessary to transform both our lives and others' lives, towards a more bearable existence. If not a loveable existence, too.

Have you ever asked yourself if you love being alive? Did you ask yourselves if you're ever going to achieve the achievable notions of your dreams? By studying the past according to our deepest desires, we can better understand what we should do in the present, and what to avoid entirely.

As such, flashbacks, as tormenting as they may be, and I suffer from them too, can be regarded as opportunities. As possible resources towards studying our misfortunes. By studying our misfortunes, we can also learn how to avoid repeating them again. How to avoid them from repeating, lies in the conduct of our actions. Or in other words, towards our moral behavior.

As much as uncanny as it may sound to you, flashbacks can be quite functional. And the wisdom we distill from the past cannot be distilled if there is no memory of it. And as such, if we refuse to confront our memories, we won't be able to distill the necessary wisdom required to avoid experiencing them again!

Of course we do not want to suffer from the same misfortunes we had before. And if we have the power or influence to avoid them, why not act on that power? At the very least, we could decrease the probability of experiencing misfortune again.

See it like crash tests. A damage being made is useless if we refuse to learn from it! And in order to reflect on the damage we experienced, we must have the virtue of strength.

Why We Must Strive For Strength

Strength might not be the sole factor for our survival, but it can surely reinforce it. Why then, not seek what is beneficial for interests? Strength can be regarded as the combination of tenacity, discipline, endurance and power. In order to overcome the challenges of life, past events included, we must be strong enough, as well as determined, to handle the lessons that await us in our reflection of the past. While we cannot change the past, its most functional role lies on our tenacity to return to it in our thoughts and feelings, and relive, mentally, the misfortunes we endured, once more...

This contemporary culture of hedonism is how we are conditioned collectively to be weaker than we should. As we submit to life's many pleasures, they become a form of escapism and an unnecessary bond of dependence, which can bias our thinking, and not understand the importance of other values. Values other than joy.

We shouldn't rest on the laurels of life when we still have much to learn from the past. The socially-engineered notion of fun as this higher good, is how we depraved ourselves from greater strength, necessary to endure the hardships of life. That is how fun therefore weakens our tenacity and our discipline, and compromises our own power on the altar of hedonism.

The strong, the tough, are those willing to endure hardship, and embrace it, even in the temptation of distracting pleasures. They would actively resist pleasure, for the last thing they morally aspire to, is to be weak. And the weaker one is, the less control he or she has on their own lives, instead falling into the allure of addiction. Much of addiction stems from joy.

The addicted mind is compromised of its powers to act independently and long-term from their source of addiction. Overcoming our addictions, is how we can become stronger. Strong enough to resist the desire to escape our confrontation with the past. And how can we work towards a better future, if we're too busy thinking about other things, other than the misfortune we had?

To prevent or reduce misfortune, mere escape to the embrace of pleasure is insufficient. No. Misfortune is the enemy, and as the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu said:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

We must be willing to endure the hardship of study, if we wish to reap the rewards of wisdom. We must be strong-willed enough to explore our traumas, and still remain there, as we once again relive it in our minds.

As you can see, morality isn't as simple as "Do good, avoid bad". "Good" and "Bad" are in constant interplay with each other. What if we must suffer, if suffering lies the key to less painful life, in the long run? What if adversity could also be like a medicine for the mind? Hard to swallow, but effective for it to become accustomed to it?

Therefore, the ability to suffer can make us more moral beings. In other words, learning from the pain caused by the past, can equip us with the wisdom necessary for better conduct with the world around us.

Avoid suffering entirely, and you will deprave yourselves of not only insight, but also greater strength. It's through this strength that we can better explore the darker sides of reality, and come out of them, victorious and with the practical idea of either preventing or reducing such misfortune again.

Revisit, and Act Like You're the One in Charge

The past, never to be physically relived in the exact way again, becomes a sandbox for our personal thought experiments with it. Thought experiments are important in philosophy because reality consists not only from the present, but from what that present might become. Much of what the present might evolve or devolve to, depends on our actions.

We must examine our activities, both in thought experiments and in general, if we want to break the same bad habits that led us to the past's misfortunes. We mustn't be so hell-bent on not being open-minded, nor not being considerate of looking both ways. No. We must see where we did wrong, and think of ways to do better. While we cannot fully control others, we can either influence them, or at the very least, control our own behavior.

Morality is largely a guide to how to act. We might see morality as this lofty value, but we all act upon our own moral conduct. From a functional standpoint, a moral code is inferior when it unnecessarily meddles with our own planning. Therefore, the notion of subjective equality in ethics is flawed by default, if we are to regard morality as a means to an end, rather than an end of itself. Your means either delivers results, or it foils your own hopes and dreams.

The past can be revisited like a place in a maze we were once in. A maze of different choices, each leading to a different outcome. The superior conduct, therefore, is one that actually brings us to the desired destination, the desired outcome. Why would we want to follow a code of conduct that places us in outcomes we don't want to experience? Thus, to play on a Socratic quote, the unexamined morality is not worth following!

When we treat life as this practical, intricate series of mazes, we may realize how powerful we really are in actually working towards the destination we wish to find ourselves in. The length towards it, while important, does not compromise this allegory, as long as we're determined enough to walk the right "lanes" of the "mazes".

Imagine the outcomes. Imagine how your life would've been if you chose a different route with people, with your resources and so on. What lanes did you overlook? What lanes did you underestimate? Life is really this logical series of paths we can walk in. All we have to do is to be aware of the vastness of our choices, at any given time.

Must we choose to be submissive during interpersonal conflicts? Must we walk the same path others walk in, all because their paths are the normal ones to walk? What if these normally-chosen paths are fundamentally flawed? Why, then, bother to follow them at all times, if at all?

Ask yourself these questions, and do not yield to fear. If you want to better navigate the courses of life, you must be aware of what you're truly capable of! And to work towards the expansion of your choices, some aspects might have to be sought, while others must be sacrificed. Reality is that it is intricate as well as it is subtle. Make one bad move and it's like an unwanted turn in a highway road. You're going to find yourself entirely in a different place if you haven't done that move!

Do not blame others too much, when in reality, you can be capable of being in greater charge of your own decisions. For your own decisions influence others! Blame others for acting unintentionally due to your own choices, and you'll deprive yourself the opportunity to be a better decision-maker!

Do not deprive yourselves opportunities to learn, when they have the power to teach us how to be better at making decisions. Making the decisions we want towards our hopes and dreams, and not towards the very misfortunes we seek to avoid!

Alex Mos's Review

The past is our tutorial, the testimonial of who we are and who we like to be. Society and tribal communities require every member to be an "actor" in its grand production of norms and expectations. Yet, in every thought and every action lies the truth of our authentic selves.

Some are so talented in masking that they "forget" their core identity and become the role-playing character of the life's reality show. They might be successful and powerful, cruel or compassionate, yet they will not be at peace if they don't know themselves.

Every pleasure is like a loud shout of joy with an echo fading to silence, leaving the true inner self empty, hungry for more, and unsatisfied. To find answers to our frustrations, we must first see ourselves under the coatings of mental makeup and scars of self-inflicted mutilations to fit, succeed, and please.

We must look back at a character we play and strip the inner self to its core, layer by layer of societal and tribal conditioning, honestly analyzing the reasons for our actions, causes, and effects. The journey of self-discovery is for the courageous because it's long and uncomfortable.

Ultimately, we must be prepared to discover what we dislike or despise. What we find deep inside ourselves might not align with the norms we consciously value in our personal play's setting, such as moral weakness or strong moral values, absence of empathy or too much empathy, and extraverted or introverted characteristics.

Also, we might find long-forgotten, neglected interests like artistic, sportive, philanthropic, or intellectual ambitions. Knowing ourselves means accepting our subjective weaknesses or objective individual characteristics, which is the first step in personal growth. Understanding the precious and repulsive within ourselves enables us to find our purpose to improve and polish till we become the best version of ourselves: the saints, the demons, or the philosophers. The choice is ours.