Question:
Do you have any products based on Plato's Euthyphro? How about the
Timaeus?
Answer:
Individuals can benefit enormously from various self-help products and
techniques. Such products include books, audiotapes, videotapes, and more.
Such techniques include sentence completion exercises, relaxation techniques,
thinking exercises, and more. However, today, many self-help products lack a valid philosophical base. Self-
help products that are based on a primacy-of-existence philosophy are valid.
Self-help products that are based on a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy are
invalid. In other words, self-help techniques that logically arise from the
facts of reality are valuable. But self-help techniques that arbitrarily arise
from mystical notions are worthless—-and may even be harmful.
For example, praying is based on a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy. Using
mystical notions and mind-willed realities, one "solves" one's problems
through prayer. In reality, however, praying does not and cannot solve
problems. Instead, prayer prevents the conscious mind from exerting the
effort needed to perceive reality and solve existing problems.
Choosing one's values, by contrast, is based on the primacy-of-existence
philosophy. Using reality-based principled thinking, one consciously
discovers and ranks the values one wants to achieve in one's life. This is a
tremendously valuable self-help technique. It leads to clarity of thought,
clear-cut decisions, and confident action, since one knows what one wants to
achieve. Choosing values is not dependent on mystical notions or supernatural
dimensions. It simply requires integrating the facts of reality into rational
thoughts and ideas.
By differentiating valid self-help techniques from invalid self-help
techniques, one can boost the quality of one's life. One can bypass losing
techniques and apply winning techniques to make one's life joyful rather than
painful.
Ah, a person after my own heart. You are speaking of rationalism vs. faith. Just read a little while ago Wittgenstein on why people believe, or have faith
in things that can be clearly refuted empirically.
Belief is a passion, or feeling.that does not enter into the realm of reality,
in that the belief usually cannot ever be tested by the only way we have
acquired knowledge to date. A process of scientific thinking and using logic
and probability theory.
They are just two worlds. People become vey attached to their beliefs and will
not budge, even if given factual evidence.
Love your post, but you cannot get conversion from faith to logic. I think it
is difficult the other way around too. If I contemplated believing in a
supernatural god, I wouldn't know where to begin. That is because I use
rational thought processes to help me learn about anything. But, say I became
very vulnerable (moi?) under certain conditions you might change my behavior or
beliefs because I am emotionally needy. As in "brainwashing".
Nonetheless, I loved to see your post. This wouldn't be inspired by the profit
motive, would it? Naaaaaa. Of course not. You are simply informing people
--not trying to sell them anything. Who would want to make a profit on
rational thought processes?
as far as I'm concerned, all help is self-help. YOU decide where to go
for help, YOU decide what help to accept, etc. There are people who will
repeat what their therp said as though it were gospel, then they will
slam their therp left and right. depends on what suits their purposes.
Ultimately, YOU decide what help to recieve and what help to reject. ..and this thing called "self-help"? It covers such a wide variety that
it's a useless description. You need to be in charge of your own
healing, wether you're buying $5 books or paying somebody $100/hr to
"help" you, you're in charge!
oops. sorry. I just reread your post, and we're not talking about the
same thing. Too bad - I like my answer so I'll post it anyway.
Do you have any products based on Plato's Euthyphro? How about the
Timaeus? Hehehe, I really liked it too. I agree 100%. It goes with my "it's about
me, not about you" philosophy. That is, in the usual parlance, one might
thank their therapist, doctor, priest/rabbi, favorite author, etcetera for
helping them (and that is all well and good to do), but I think the person
one should really thank is one's self for being helped. And the "helper
person" should thank you for your being helped too (because of course they
feel good about it, if they didn't, they would not have been trying to
help people.) I don't know, I feel like I am seeing everything sort of backwards, but
there are not the correct words of constructs to describe it well.
