But the societies and individuals who keep on growing most don't just move back and forth from
hypothesis to antithesis and then back again; their process is more like a pyramid than a pendulum.
They create a synthesis that incorporates the best parts of both beliefs into a new hypothesis, which
they know they'll eventually outgrow. And the whole synthesis process keeps repeating in a growth-
producing dialogue between the parts inside ourselves and life, as we keep learning more and more.

This synthesizing process is called Hegelian Dialectic in philosophy. Harvard psychologist Kohlberg
identified the fact that individuals grow the best in their moral development by engaging in a dialogue
with some person or influence that is an achievable level above where they are in their development.
In psychology of growth we call this "Organic Dialecticism" to describe the way in which we grow. 

All synthesizing means is stopping to ask, "What have I learned here that makes sense to hold onto,
and include in my tool kit and more make use of in my life?" Synthesizing is learning how to include
more levels and greater complexity in making choices in order to handle more parts of life better.

Like tacking in sailing, each successive course correction synthesis brings us closer to our goal of
making use of more of the wisdom from our experience in our life.  We learn from life how to live
in order to make our life better.  Getting free means going for longer and longer periods free of old
problems that used to sabotage us.  And it takes a greater confluence of circumstances to trip us up.

And we can participate and influence that process of our growth on a daily basis, by stopping to
reflect each day, and asking ourselves, "What happened in the last 24 hours and what’s it trying to
say to me?"

This is particularly valuable when we have self-sabotaging parts to our personality that seem to want
to undermine us.  Those parts are almost never trying to do or say what they seem to be saying on
the surface, so we have to learn to listen for what they’re really trying to say to us when they seem
to be pushing us to act in self-sabotaging ways.

The problem starts when we ignore them or push them out of our consciousness, or only give our
attention to things that make us feel better.  Because these parts are often scared, ignoring them
doesn’t work because it only makes them more scared. So they act up even worse. So we're even
more reluctant or afraid to face them, and thus push them even farther out of our consciousness and
thus down into our subconscious, where they act up even worse. And it becomes a vicious circle
where the more they act up to try to get our attention, the more we try to ignore them. And so they
act up even worse.

But if we stop and face our self-sabotaging parts, we find the "facts are always friendly" if we’ll
only listen to what they're really trying to say to us.

One good way to do that is to meditate on what they’re trying to say to us.  To learn how to do that,
click back to the MAGIC NUGGETS index page below, and then click on "Directed Meditation."