Emotional Control and Winning

 The Traveler's Championship, 18th hole today, final round.  Hovland and Scheffler are tied, both on in two, each putting for birdie.  Scheffler putts, it goes by-- no birdie.  Hovland scopes out the green, takes a long, long, look.  He putts, no birdie, then taps it in for par.  Scheffler has a longer comeback putt.  He takes a long, long look.  Putts, and it goes in!  They are tied after 18 and will play a tiebreaker at 9AM tomorrow, June 29, 2026.

The real story here is emotional control, one of the pillars of my generic game plan.  It is seen here in action in a high-stakes golf game.

A word about Scottie Scheffler.  He showed his mettle in Louisville KY, some time ago when he was arrested, by an overly zealous cop, for a parking violation.  It was on the morning of a match.  His reaction, after release and not quite an apology, was magnanimous.  In the interview he was unphased by the incident. He went on to win the tournament later that day.  In what way he got to this point in his emotional control is unknown, but it showed, not only in Louisville but in the match today, and probably every day.

We strive for this, work for this, and find it on some level.  Not at the level of these professional golfers.  Performers in general, have good emotional control, but professional golfers take it to the next level.  Four days, 72 holes, and on each hole, there are three, four or five opportunities to make a little mistake.  How that mistake is handled is one of the keys to success. 

Strategy for Success

 

When alone, reflecting, working, studying, practicing, it's all about me, and what I want.

When with others, associating, forget about me, it's all about them, and what they want.

This is profoundly succinct and has been found to be totally successful when relating to others.  You can be productive by staying mentally engaged with your dreams when alone.  If you become mentally engaged in relationships when alone, you are wasting valuable time and psychic energy.  You are in the distractions of imagination and inner considering.

When with others, if you only focus on them, magically, they tend to regard you as someone with whom to associate.  Then good things happen.  If you talk primarily about yourself during encounters, others quickly lose interest. 

Collective Thinking

On a road trip, during the summer of 2019, my wife and I were driving along I95 through the countryside.  As we went along, we approached a slow-down of traffic, our GPS instructed us to exit and follow a route around the stoppage and back to I95.  When I recounted my amazement to my daughter, wondering how in the world?  She enlightened me.  She said it was the cell phone location signals that, when analyzed, identified the slow down and sent advice to our GPS!  This technical application leads me to the subject of this post.

The compilation and analysis of cell phone signals is an example of data collection and analyzation, and it may just be an example of a phenomenon of nature, Collective Thinking.  Herds of herbivores, such as cattle, or bison, or those on the plains of Africa, panic and stampede.  It is the result of a similar circumstance, where a reaction to a threat is passed along from one animal to another in a sort of chain reaction and, voila! we have a stampede.

This same phenomenon occurs in crowds of humans in a confined area when all of a sudden, they fear for their safety and run. The panic spreads very quickly and people have been known to be trampled to death in the melee.

Then there are financial panics where panic selling drives down the cost of stocks for, often, no more than rumors that circulate among investors.  The resulting reaction is often unfounded, and smart investors take advantage of such a dip in the market price of good securities.

Organizations attempt to guide our thinking in ways that are favorable to their programs and policies to so that they will be supported by those who are in their sphere of influence.  In times of prosperity, it is easy to accept the propaganda and go along with the program.  Then when it is seen to be fraudulent and/or detrimental to the population, the house of cards comes tumbling down.  We use elections to "right the boat." When the scale of the fraud is national, revolutions occur and whole governments are displaced.  Populations that are oppressed, rise up and take down the establishment.  Some great examples are the American, French, and Bolshevik revolutions.  Totalitarian governments find ways to suppress rebellion before it gets traction.

That to which all of this leads is Collective Thinking where, at first, the ideas, and the activity  they engender, are innocuous, but as more and more get involved, and the reactions are amplified, the results can be either constructive to an extent not thought possible or destructive to a similar degree.  Each individual feeds off of the emotional reactions of the others and the fire can burn out of control.  It is a good analogy of this phenomenon, that of the wildfire, because that's what it is, an emotional wildfire.

Other strange examples of Collective Thinking are what we know as prayer, and "Positive Thinking."  It defies reason, at times, the way the desired results occur for no apparent reason, or for some out-of-the-blue reason, it happens, just the way the participants wanted.  Could it be that Collective Thinking instigates forces in the immaterial, or spiritual, world to produce desired results?

Philosophy

There is a Haiku blog post, in By John Lina, entitled Do or Die, that asserts philosophy to be (a) subjective and (b) opinion.  All of our rules are subjective and based on opinion; religion, law, and even the boundary lines.  There have been a great many people, and animals for that matter, put to death as a result.  

The two basic extant philosophies (opinions) are atheistic and religious, that there is, or isn't, an immaterial world.  Many members of the scientific community are of the opinion that there is not. All of those in the religious community are of the opinion that there is.  Who is right?  And if one is right, is the other wrong?  This schism is a good example of my assertion that opinion rules. 

In the above example both sides use their opinions as a basis for action. On both sides there are nuances. On the scientific, or atheistic side, mathematics and experimental research support assertions.  As reliable as these are, there are instances where experience has proven them wrong, or inadequate. Conclusions based on the scientific method are eroded by experience. It is, however, to their credit that when proven wrong, it is admitted and a new understanding is reached.

The other side, the religious, is less inclined to ever admit to later, better conclusions.  The nuances on that side are numerous, with the major religions leading the way, followed by sub-sects within them ranging in size from very many to a few adherents.  It is in these sub-sects that, what are thought to be, refinements are made.

The opinions of all are born in imagination, which is highly developed in humans.  It was sparked somewhere in history, and Sumerians are the oldest identified humans who demonstrated highly developed imaginations. That would have been about 3000 BC.  And there may be other, older examples.  The quest for the origins of our enhanced capabilities goes on, and it is to our credit that it does.  There seems to be a need to satisfy our curiosity about origins.

In any event, we are governed by opinions.  We uphold, protect, and defend them, sometimes to the detriment of others, who may have conflicting opinions. We should not lose sight of the fact that it is all opinion.  And, perhaps, because there are so many, we can conclude that not one of them is totally correct.  We are reminded of the three blind men describing the elephant.

Perhaps

Cancelled my t-time today, the course is too wet from yesterday's all-day rain.  Then a producer sent me an Email, by mistake.  No big deal and it reminded me that we all make mistakes and it doesn't affect us.  People forgive, forget and move on.  They don't pay any further attention to it, and, by golly, neither should I! This refers to my mistakes.

Then I thought, is my core-being evolving? Now this is a new concept, a new idea, and I think, yes, he is.  It's reasonable that he is, otherwise, the vagaries of my choices, which exist because of free will, wouldn't make any difference.  His existence would be like an old movie, or television show re-run where the ending never changes and the characters don't develop any further.  We human beings are agents of that evolution.

Then I got into some strange territory.  The one writing here is a collective noun, known by (name.)  And everyone that knows him, has their own interpretation, or opinion, of him. Furthermore, all of them are based on incomplete information.

One aspect of (name) is a resident spirit, core-being, in this physical body, who has, and will continue to, live on in a timeless existence.  And, just like the physical world, of which (name) is a part, evolves everyday due to the choices of all living beings, so too does core-being because he, like it or not, is affected by the choices of not only his host human but also all the rest of the living beings with whom he comes in contact.

A basic resonant truth is that we are created in the image and likeness of the creator. Accepting that, we get a glimpse of the spiritual world by observing and examining the living organisms of the physical world.  Our large human organizations are, perhaps, likenesses of the spiritual world.  That brings on a whole plethora of possibilities.

Whoa, what I have just created in my mind is like a large mass of tangled string, a string without ends.  The qualities needed to untangle this mess are not available to me.  We have the tools of imagination and reasoning, but limits to them preclude understanding the entirety of what this thought attempts to describe. It behooves me to stop here.  It is as if I stumbled into a large pool and I don't know how to swim.

Evil in the World

 

Previously, I defined evil as excess.  Excess of almost any kind and it has been given a name, The Seven Deadly Sins. 

An aspect of evil that we have historically seen, and are seeing today, is when numbers of adherents to the excess (evil) unite to force it upon others, who otherwise would not ascribe to it.  Examples are slavery, and the accompanying  racism, which haunts us even today, but not in an organized manner, Nazism, where the organized evil took the goal of eliminating an entire race of people.  And now radical Islam in the form of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, et al and their oppression of women and anyone who doesn't ascribe to their belief, who will not rest until the state of Israel is eliminated. 

There is a bible story of a pack of demons who were wandering the neighborhood when they found a herd of swine, into which they inhabited, and then were driven off a cliff.  Racism, in the form of the CSA, Nazism, and now Iran and the H's, are those demons wandering the neighborhood, and they inhabited swine.  The CSA and Nazism were driven off cliffs, it is time now to do the same to Iran and the H's.

The individual grasshopper does very little damage, but transforms into a locust under certain conditions and swarms, causing devastating damage to agriculture. This is analogous to the individual slave owner, the individual Nazi, or the individual Islamic extremist.

The U.S. stopped locust swarms through a multifaceted approach: early warning systems, targeted insecticide use, crop and farming adaptations, and destruction of breeding grounds, all coordinated at local and national levels. ( The Civil War, WWII, America's war with Iran.)

Perhaps, a game plan for dealing with radical Islam, just as it was for the other great evils we have known. The U.S. has not had major swarms since the early 19th century.

Clues

Monumental works left behind by deceased civilizations offer clues indicating that prior inhabitants of Earth understood this world, and the universe in which it exists, better than we do.  And they seem to have accomplished this with just their brains and minds.  We don't know to what extent they used mathematics, if at all,  and the scientific method, beyond trial and error.  It seems they did not have computers or artificial intelligence, but they understood.  And we don't know how they reached that understanding.

For example, the meter was defined by the French Republic in 1793 as 1/10,000,000 the distance from the equator to the pole of the Earth.  Yet it appears in doorways of South American stonework that pre-dates  that definition by 400 years.  Was the unit of measure used long before it was defined by the French?

What we often have done, during our approximately 2500 years of civilization starting with the Greeks, is rediscover and redefine what was already known and understood by others.  We've added some to it, in mathematics, chemistry, medicine, et al, for examples.

There were civilizations in the Middle East that predate ours, some fragments of that knowledge may be extant in the people of that region.  Our religious and cultural differences seem to preclude our ever sharing that heritage and knowledge. 

All to often we lose the realization that we, those alive on Earth here in the 21st century, are not the first, not the smartest, not the best, and have much more to do to reach those same levels of understanding.