Unexpected Success

Self-doubt need not be crippling.
Without apology I claim there are processes above the intellect which can be distinguished from emotion, and superior to any formal reasoning. Most people become vaguely aware of it through intuition, a process just outside the conscious intellect by which we arrive at conclusions without formal reasoning. We intuit an answer based on something more subtle, and going with it works well enough we learn some measure of trust for it. In essence, it’s a mental shortcut, an ability to process outside the conscious mind. That’s as clinical as I can get, except to note you can improve your intuition by asserting some effort in learning patterns.
During my military training, I was fully conscious of the whys and wherefores of what they were doing to us. I disagreed with most of it, but understood why they thought it was necessary. The military presupposes the most untalented mass of humanity. Because it teaches to that level, and constructs training based on that assumption, it actively interferes with human talent. Most of your real abilities will be rudely shoved aside. You won’t be permitted to use your talents, and promotion depends on forcing your talents to fit the pattern. The point, of course, is maximum survival in combat, as it were. Everyone has to be taught to act the same so the dummies can keep up, so it’s all dumbed down. It boils down to drills which ensure approximately appropriate responses to surprises.
It works okay, but the long term trend sucks the life out of innovative thinking which keeps things improving. We are stuck with tactics that don’t work so well against our current enemies, but well enough they can get away with trumpeting their successes. Our troops tend to survive okay, but they aren’t beating anybody who doesn’t use the same tactics. We get that much only because our enemies are even less competent. A truly competent enemy would eat our boys alive, and require far less men and resources to do it.
But life remains full of surprises. We continue to see how training is okay, but only if someone in charge has an actual education to go with it. Someone has to absorb the whole purpose, and also have a broad acquaintance to how humans operate. Even with the military now requiring some college for even enlisted troops, we lose it by having such a complete failure of colleges to actually educate, and the military still assuming the lowest common denominator — doing so with a vengeance. The whole point is to make everyone with the same certifications interchangeable, which requires dehumanization. So while such training is not a waste for someone with a full awareness, we could surely do better all the way around.
At one time our education did recognize the necessity of cultivating non-conscious operations. It wasn’t in the same terminology as I use, but you can detect it by how it worked. Well educated men knew there was something some men had which could be caught, but not taught, and they made the most of it. We can reliably expect future generations as a whole to ignore it even more completely, even as a handful rediscover it. I don’t claim to have it, but I’m willing to bet I have a piece of it.
Some fifteen years ago the Internet was new to me. I made all the same idiot mistakes as most people typically do, in terms of interacting with other users. This was aggravated by a very powerful turmoil in my soul as I began shifting from the Western orientation to something long forgotten. I ran through a serious depression, among other things. In other words, my netiquette failures were far worse because of other serious issues. The symptoms were a very slender clue to things much more serious. So a serious improvement will also manifest the same.
Twice in the past few weeks I managed to respond to something far better than I knew at that time. I was confronted with something unexpected, not just in what someone else said, but in the full context. I was agitated, but the emotions didn’t get in the way of a really good intuitive response. I wasn’t fully aware of just how appropriate my response was until much later. You have to understand how dramatic a change this is for me, when blundering and making a fool of myself was previously ubiquitous for me.
This is just a small sample of other things going on in my world right now. It’s far more than mere intuition, as I strive to walk the talk of someone who claims there is a spirit-Spirit communion possible which can steer our behavior far better than mere human logic. On the one hand, I was gripped by this belief, held by it for several years before I actually experienced anything I could point to and say, “There it is.” Well, it’s starting to show up. Now I’m getting a taste of how it can actually work.
Something inside me was utterly certain of this long before I tasted it, and I knew the problems were in me, not the ideas.