From the author: The article was published on my blog “Thinking errors or conversations for awareness” Are you familiar with this question: “do you want to be right or happy”? Now I’m asking you this, what answer will follow? In most cases, we answer: “of course, happy!” At the level of the mind - yes, it’s natural that being happy is better than just being right. But what happens in reality? As soon as we encounter something that we don’t like or doesn’t correspond to our beliefs, we immediately begin to defend our rightness, assuming that if we prove it, we will feel happier just because we were right. Have you ever wondered why it is important for us to be accepted when we are right? Remember a time when you were wrong. What feelings did you experience at that moment, what sensations arose? Most often - a feeling of guilt, one’s limitations, regret, a feeling of “the ground being knocked out from under one’s feet.” Agree that these are unpleasant feelings, and they do not appear when you are right. That is why, choosing to be happy, we still try to be right and therefore enter into argument and struggle. But in this article I do not set out to prove that it is better to be happy than to be right. I propose to understand why sometimes being right is more valuable to us than happiness, mutual understanding, mutual acceptance and community. I asked myself: “I wonder where one’s own rightness comes from?” Beliefs acquired in the process of education. Our parents, the parents of our parents, etc., received some specific experience, on the basis of this experience a belief was born and in the process of education they passed it on to us, and we accepted it as our own. We received such a “gift” of upbringing without feeling the need to check whether this is so in reality. For example, a father told his son that crying in front of people is weakness, the son took this as “truth” and now raises his son this way, condemning him for showing emotions. “Rightness” was born: men should not show their emotions. But whether this “rightness” makes the son happy or not, neither father nor son thinks about it. And at any opportunity, the following phrase will be heard: “You dissolved your nagging, showed everyone your weakness, what kind of a man you are after that!” Personal experience. To see how rightness is born from our personal experience, let's look at two examples. But first, since I will use the words “subjective” and “objective” in the study, let’s define what stands behind these words. “Subjective” - inherent only to a given person (subject), biased, biased. “Objective” - existing outside of us and independent of us, real, devoid of partiality and bias. Imagine, you fell in love for the first time, and you are overwhelmed with the desire to share your most intimate thoughts and feelings with your beloved, you want to give your beloved all of yourself. And you, without hesitation, share all this. And your boyfriend or girlfriend, in a private conversation with friends, voices these innermost thoughts of yours. You will evaluate this behavior of your loved one as betrayal and will experience severe pain from it. You gained this experience and based on it you made a decision for yourself: you cannot be open with anyone, they might betray you. And this decision turns into your “truth”, which on the one hand is subjective, but if you focus on how others betray, then this truth will be perceived as objective. Now your attention will be directed only to confirming that you are “right”, and believe me, you will find a great many such cases. And your “rightness” will already leave its mark on subsequent relationships. You gained experience when your openness was responded to with betrayal, you made your verdict and established your “truth.” Until you have had another experience, your subjective experience will be objective for you. And then howin the first source of “truth” in beliefs, you will pass on this experience you have gained to your children, telling your daughter how easy it is to become a victim of betrayal if you do not hide your thoughts and feelings, thereby passing on a certain stereotype of behavior to the child. Another example, more everyday. You are faced with the fact that in a store the seller has weighed you down. You are outraged by the injustice, you have experienced deception, and you have the feeling that sellers deliberately overweight so as not to pay for the products they take home. Influenced by this experience, you will now watch the scale very carefully during your purchase, expecting to be deceived again. And if in a conversation with friends it comes up that everyone thinks only about their own benefit, you will gladly accept this “truth”, since you have already received experience confirming this “truth”. What do these examples show us? That in both cases a person received a certain experience, an experience happened to him. And at that moment his subjective experience became an objective truth, his truth “as it is.” Until a person receives another experience, does not receive another experience, the first experience for him will remain the only truth. Moreover, no matter how much we convince this person, no matter how much we show other examples, no less objective than his examples, he can only agree with us at the mental level. “Well, yes, probably not all are traitors, I just haven’t met others in my life” or “probably there are people who think not only about their own benefit.” But the actions of this person, his emotional reactions, behavioral choices, will come only from his subjective experience. In the subconscious of this person there is no objective truth, only subjective experience as objective. This is how your own “truth” appears. And proving to us that he is right, a person will be extremely sincere, because he had this experience. There was no other experience, for example, when sincerity became the basis of the relationship, when the seller was extremely attentive and honest with the buyer, and if he encountered something similar, he considered it his merit - to check everything with the seller. This is the truth of one side, with which a person is identified. If he meets a person who has had a different experience, for example, that only sincerity can create deep relationships, then it is likely that a dispute will break out between them, in which each will prove his own subjective truth, passing it off as objective. After all, insisting on one’s point of view always leads to one thing - to struggle, to argument, to quarrel and misunderstanding. A sketch from the course “Development of Conscious Attention”: - There are situations when I know for sure that I am right, that it is better this way, and I want to explain why. Explain to everyone, including the opponent, that this will be better - I sincerely believe in this, so I feel annoyed, even angry that he cannot understand this, although everything is already clear to me. - At the level of the mind, he may agree, but until he receives this experience, he will resist, since he has another, his own, subjective experience, his own truth. - What to do in this case? - Or negotiate to gain a different experience, but then the responsibility for what is happening will fall on you, and you must accept this in case something goes wrong and be prepared for the fact that you may be blamed. Or allow a person to gain his own experience, even if he repeats the negative one, but then the responsibility for the choice will already be on this person. The more a person has a stock of different experiences, different experiences, the calmer he is about the “truth” of another person, since he has different interpretations in stock for different events. The more different experiences you have, the less you will set restrictions on other people and enjoy life more without regretting what you didn’t do. The less experience a person has, the more conservative he is in his choice, since he sees only in the narrow perspective of hislimited experience, and the more fiercely he will defend his rightness, the more he will limit other people, depriving them of the joy of life. Conclusion: gain more experience so that your life is more multifaceted, so that you can understand both yourself and other people. So that you allow your children to live their own lives, and not follow the restrictions you have passed on. Generally accepted. We looked at how one’s own “rightness” is born from subjective experience, subjective experience. But there is something else generally accepted, to which the word “objective” is often applied. When a person does not receive subjective experience, personal experience, but only somehow comes into contact with it, accepting it as the “truth”. For example, a person may hear in the news several times a day about officials who take bribes. He may not have personally participated in this, did not give or take bribes, but he heard about it so often that he took it on faith that all officials take bribes and chose this as his “truth.” And the examples heard will now become confirmation of this “truth”. There was no personal experience or personal experience, but everything heard is perceived as an objective reality. Often we do not think that this is only one side of reality, the side that is shown to us. What is the point of reporting on the honesty of officials, who is interested in this, who will watch it? Think about it, who introduced this objective truth? Isn't this objective truth the subjective truth of the one who prepared this report and the participants in the events? As a result, an opinion is created that becomes generally accepted, which is supposedly built on objective truth. What is the result? The more often we hear some information from the outside, and if it still resonates with our idea of ​​“how it should be” (beliefs, “gift” of upbringing) and with our some kind of subjective experience (our personal experience), the faster we will accept This information is the “truth” and we will defend it as our own. And this applies to any information. Someone expressed their truth, which was born from a subjective experience, someone agreed, having the same experience, someone simply accepted it on faith, and someone remained silent, not wanting to enter into an argument. And then this information becomes generally accepted. Do you know how public opinion is born? A certain number of respondents are interviewed. Those answers that occur more often are accepted as “public opinion.” But is this really one hundred percent public opinion? This is only a n percent general opinion. That's all. Recently I came across a phrase: “collectively shared beliefs about reality.” What it is? These are beliefs that are shared by a certain number of people, a group. These beliefs about reality are truth and truth for them. Either these people received their subjective experience of the designated reality or resonated with the ideas and experiences of people who received their subjective experience. For others, it will not be either truth or truth until a certain experience occurs, no matter how much you convince that it is truth and truth. In our world there are no right and wrong. “One person likes it and says: “Wow, what delicious Evian water.” Another tries it and says: “What is this! It’s much tastier in our puddle.” Who is right? Both. For many people, the fact that everyone is right turns out to be a sad circumstance. There are no leftists, everyone is psychologically right, because they think so, because they believe in it, because they are convinced of it, because their personal subjective experience has led them to the subjective experience of this as truth, and not something else. What is the moral? Take care of yourself, and you will succeed.” (I. Kalinauskas) Look inside yourself and you will see the habit of confirming that you are right. Why are we doing this? Mostly to confirm its existence. And from the huge variety of events that occur in the outside world, we will pay attention only to those events and situations that will confirm our.