Perth Diary 543rd day, reading and practice, how to avoid the formation of ideological superiority

In general, I'm not a bookish person, especially when I was in school.

When I was young, I liked to read "One Hundred Thousand Whys". After going to school, the first book I spontaneously picked up was "Linux Kernel Design and Implementation", which is far from the field I am interested in now, whether it is philosophy, psychology or education. But it was the first time I started to learn other people's knowledge for my own long-term benefit-successful graduation.

The first philosophy-psychology book I picked up should be "Can Talk to Everyone" because I was troubled by my ability to get along with others and questioned my ability to interact with others. Then, I read "The Courage to Be Disliked", "The Road Less Traveled", "Inferiority and Transcendence" and so on.

In general, I have read very few books, and only when I want to draw on the energy of others, I will pick up and actively look for related books.

I think my philosophy of life comes more from my own life practice. The reality is that the greater your enthusiasm for a thing, the greater the damage you will suffer. Correspondingly, the more painful the growth is, this is consistent with the content of the articles I shared in the past.

Almost all of my life philosophies come from my life practice. When the principles I learned after practice coincide with a certain book or a famous quote from a certain person, I feel like I have found a confidant.

In this way, I got to know Adler, Russell, and Greece: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Recently, I started to study Carl Jung. Of course, my understanding of their theories is not deep enough, because I think it would take several years to study any one person, but my luck is that my ideas are extracted from my own experience. Subconsciousness, in addition to making me believe that I am on the right path in life, their more truths that I still cannot fully recognize and understand also guide me in the direction of exploration in my subconsciousness.

This gave me the opportunity to find a direction that I think can stand the test of reality among the many philosophical views and the healing ability of psychology.

On the contrary, many of my readers and friends have read many more books than me, and their ability to cite classics is much stronger than mine. Many of my opinions are organized with my own simple words, but I occasionally find simple and crude enough philosophies that have been practiced in my life, and I will use them many, many times.

So, I was thinking about the relationship between reading and life practice. Even after I had familiarized myself with and fully used the definition of superiority in "Inferiority and Transcendence", I was always questioning myself and asking my wife whether I used my philosophy of life to form a sense of superiority to form a sense of happiness that crushes others. Because I see signs of it in many people around me, especially in many subscribed friends who like my views.

When we read a lot, sometimes we associate our erudition with our solitude, or even our friendship, thinking that other people can’t understand us because they haven’t read enough, and I think that’s a dangerous way to go.

I am reading "Speculation and Standpoint" recently. I have learned about dialectical self-criticism, and I always look at my own behavior and way of thinking from another perspective. In Carl Jung's description, this kind of introspection ability should appear in childhood-adolescence, but unfortunately, I have not seen it from many people around me. Maybe this will be the first stage of the personality defects that many people do not admit their mistakes until they die.

I think it is precisely because of this ability to always criticize self-reflection that people began to have the second passion that Russell said supported his life: the desire for knowledge.

For a period of time in the past, I always thought that I had clearly recognized the objective development law of things, which caused my speed of absorbing new knowledge theories to slow down. I began to find that it was too slow to absorb philosophical principles from my life experience, so I began to want to acquire more principles that I had not experienced in my life experience.

For example, I recently got close to a self-centered friend. The first time I began to question myself was when I was in junior high school. At that time, I hated going to school. I always imagined that if I didn’t show up in this classroom on sick leave, would other people in the classroom still appear in this place, and would the world still work as it should? I think this is the first time in my life that I questioned that I am the center of the world. The test of the law of the world, so I am walking on a road of striving, I think this is also the basic cognition of being able to love others and strangers.

Although I have not been involved in the past, or I cannot understand the life experience of self-centered people in the world, but reading related books has begun to give me another way to understand others.

I think a lot of times, when we read books, we read about our own life experience. There are many truths that we can’t understand and empathize with. We can’t remember them deeply, but they may become the source of our sense of superiority.

There are many life principles and philosophies that most of us have in life, in books, and in getting along with others. However, if we just read it instead of using our own life to feel it, it will never become a step for us to move towards the beacon of life. Instead, it may become a reason for refusing to try because of fear of being hurt.

Perhaps, this is the source of the phrase "It is better to have no books than to believe in books".

Knowing the world also requires painful collisions. The more passionate you are, the more intense the collisions will be. The more reserved your attempts, the shallower your life experience will be.

Whether it is the desire for love, the ups and downs and confusion about the unknown future, doubts about one's ability, and anxiety about whether one has the ability to change the status quo.

Compared with simply reading to acquire knowledge, I think brave, fearless, and all-out attempts are the only way to gain a deeper understanding of the truth of life.

Knowing a lot may not be a good thing sometimes. Many truths are actually contradictory. We cannot know whether this truth is the essence or the dross. Knowing from our own experience is the most reliable way.

Trying every philosophy of life that you have learned from yourself will prevent a truth from becoming a source of superiority, and these truths will become thicker and deeper. After experiencing it yourself, you will also feel more understanding for others who have never experienced it.

Force yourself to go through it yourself with cognitive fortitude, so that you will change from seeking superiority to self-confidence from the bottom of your heart.