"Argue for your limitations and sure enough they're
yours."
— Richard Bach, 
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
"We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior "soul" has emigrated from one person to another. The world is still full of bêtes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves.""
— C. G. Jung, Civilization in Transition, p. 130; quoted at: Projection of the Shadow
"Man will always howl and rage / against the infinite
cage."
— me, in
poem, lost and undated
"I'm not a nag, I'm a motivational speaker."
— magnet
slogan on file cabinet next to this desk right now
"You cannot be a fierce force if you're always running
around apologizing for it."
— me, in email, 2005.02.05
"Right now I'm into 'reversing questions' about life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness in order to break open some new
energetics. The process is simple. Instead of asking, "Why don't I have
enough?" you instead ask, "Why do I have enough?" Every negative
thought that percolates up from my subconscious in the last four days, I've
done this Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy approach mentally, and lo and
behold, this calm, relaxing sense of well-being bubbles up from inside and my shoulders
let go. I like this method; I want you to try it next time you get writer's
block and tell me if it works."
— my friend Romy, otherwise known as "Leane Roffey Line
" (who got inspired after getting The Great Little Book of Afformations [sic] by Noah St. John and
Denise Berard (ISBN 0-9715629-6-2) from a close friend for her birthday on March 17. The statement (in email, 2007.04.01 a/k/a April Fool's Day), is her synthesis of what they had to say.
Okay, so I didn't wait until I had writer's block. I keep having writer's blog.
Hee haw.
I sit typing at this window, and in the morning, birds might fly across the yard and momentarily rest near me on the other side of the
glass. Sometimes I get the camera raised and focused soon enough, sometimes
not. Due to the zoom lens' delay, I just missed a shot of a particularly
beautiful bird, which would have been my first picture of a mynah. So I said to
myself, "Maybe the oncoming generation of new digital cameras will be
faster at this. Maybe I should get one." And then, without even thinking,
I said out loud, "This camera is good enough. I get lots of good bird
pictures." (Click on my birds link, HERE, and you'll see what I mean.)
So I think I'm using this "reversing questions"
technique a lot already.
I'm also pushing myself to lead life from an even less defended
position than I already do. So far it's working well. It feels like I'm gearing
up for yet another quantum leap in psychic growth sometime down the line (six
months to a year, I'm guessing). I can see new cracks forming in the current
perceptual façade — even as I write this article.
In other words, my reverse-thinking friend's perceptual shaking-up exercise has been shaking up things for me here in lava-land this week, boosted by a three-day visit from one of the most active reverse-thinkers I have ever met.
Yet even the visitor, who is highly scrupulous and honest, seems blindsided at times by confirmation bias and ego projection.
It's tough not to be. It was also tough for me to be such an active listener for three days, despite plenty of experience with other highly verbal, extroverted thinking personalities. To complicate matters, I have a giant ego too. Or not. To paraphrase "Karma Chameleon," I come and go. How do you measure an ego, anyhow? Is it based on the strength of one's need for attention? Or how cranky the observer is on a given day?
In fact, here's an ingenious little reminder you can use, the next time you catch yourself having a difficult moment. I just made this up. Whenever you feel the need to find a SCAPEGOAT — for anything! — ask yourself:
Where's my
SCAP <—click this!
EGO
AT?
In other words, what am I at war with, within myself?
Right now?
(Re-read the Jung quote at Projection of the Shadow if you need further information.)
Because this is the kind of reverse-thinking that's going to keep us from getting into World War 3. I mean it.
(But humorously, folks:)
Every mind needs candy.
So this is my gift to you today, a mind-candy mnemonic designed to short-circuit your mind-gamey [squawk! phew!] ego. No more scapegoats! (Hmmm, and goats smell pretty gamey, too, come to think of it.... Hens and goats; do they sound [or stink] like anyone you know?)
I like myself as I am, clown-shoes and all. But self-importance makes it hard for me to hear others. With my guest, though, I pushed myself not to tune out, and it really worked. So even though my extroverted side is out of practice (and not particularly strong to begin with), the visit was highly invigorating.
Remembering the Aloha Spirit LAW helped me meet the challenge, although I've noticed this week how sketchy my hearing and retention can be, whenever someone is steadily talking into my ear while I'm concentrating on driving. So at times I experienced mental overload and missed cues, even though the conversational content was rich and I didn't want it to stop.
(Some, stretching a metaphor nearly to its breaking point, would identify this as my "addictive behavior," whereas I would reply that I was merely raising the bar on my willingness to split focus while remaining in control of my vehicle. See what I mean? Unless you can somehow free yourself from your usual context, every perception will suffer from confirmation bias. To free yourself, allow yourself to get lost at least once whenever you travel somewhere new. Solitude works best for this. Ask a stranger — yes, a stranger! — for directions, and follow the yellow brick road.)
Our interaction entailed a rapid, nearly constant cross-referencing
of my brain's contents with my guest's, and while the high level of quantity
and quality was at times exhilarating, at other times it nearly wore me out.
Yet persistence pays, and you are reading part of the dividends right now. The experience brought to mind Ladybird Johnson's description of LBJ:
"He's just more."
Thus I was called to draw upon a much greater degree of
extroverted thinking
and
extroverted sensing in three days than I am used to in a typical week of solitude here. I'm quite used to free-associating for long stretches of time and rarely interacting with others for hours, if not days, at a time. It's delicious.
So I have a question for you, reader: Do you think that we tend to be better multitaskers when we are younger? Or is it simply that we have more energy and thus can get more done overall? I don't know whether I'm imagining that it was easier to be more interactive then, and to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, or whether I am more focused now and less overcommitted. In any case, I am beginning to realize how distracted I must have been in my twenties, to have multiple giant commitments in motion around me at all times, requiring a constant division of my attention. I probably didn't even notice.
Okay, some observations now:
- Akin to Emily's epiphany in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, most of what we call our "experience" — including this post! — is a half-remembered, half-submerged history we embellish to convince ourselves that we are perceptually accurate, morally correct, mentally sound, factually complete enough, interesting enough to be listened to, etc. (i.e., "okay"), when it is in fact mere wish-projection. This is most true when we blame others for faults we fail to see within ourselves. It's that SCAP EGO A-Talkin'.
- Yet this is not even the distorting lens of retrospect (that so-called "20-20 hindsight") at work; that would be tragicomic enough, yet most of us simply don't pay enough attention at the moment of interaction to accurately see (perceive) much of what is really going on around us in the first place. We are too busy planning our next speech, or thinking back on something we remember badly, or cross-referencing mentally with others.
So we try to fill in the gaps by remembering what wasn't even there. Yet this is what passes for truth. (NOTE: As driver, I was often aware of a magnificent scenic moment that flickered past, and which my friend did not observe because he was busily — and happily, for that's the main thing after life and liberty (so they say) — thinking out loud. So we got to share his moment, but not our moment, if you follow my meaning. Sharing a rich and full mutual moment often entails both parties' being present and silent, inside and out. Sharing a joke may be the best exception to this rule. Sharing a song is probably a close second. All of this, of course, depends upon the level of mutual pleasure of the experience. The consistent inability to achieve such moments — I refer to them sometimes as "the moments between the moments" — accounts for the failure of most long-term relationships.)
- Often I had a sense of déjà vu, due to my having driven around another hyper-thinking friend while in this identical tour-guide role, even over many of the same roads, back on August 1.
- Conversely, I found myself saying "I don't know" nearly constantly this week. When I was younger, not knowing something used to bother me to the point of guilt; it doesn't bother me so much anymore. (Such is the bargain of aging.) I find it very difficult, not to mention treacherous, to feign knowledge; actually, it's quite repulsive to me because it's a form of lying and cheating. That's bully behavior.
- Those with the clearest integrity of thought and action are the least likely to be in positions of political power because that kind of power is typically sought by men and women who prefer setting agendas for others to experiencing life from a position of observation and inquiry. Oh, and most politicians started out as bullies. Someone, give me funding for a study, access to the poli-ticks, and a polygraph machine, and I will prove this.
(Dream on, LitBoy! But you can leave me a penny for my thoughts, anyhow, in the Tip Jar — it's at the top of this page.)
- Just before we departed the other evening, I treated my friend to ice cream. Later that night, I told hubby that someday I will reach a point at which my force of character (visually aided by a bit of gray hair) will be so strong that all I will have to say to discourage distracting people is to look them in the eye and state, "You don't want to make an old man angry," and they will just drop it, whatever "it" may be. I did a coded version of this at the ice-cream store, when I told the chatty employee that I'd had a grueling day and I wanted to eat my ice-cream cone in peace. He understood, and set about closing up the shop instead. This will happen more.
- So why wait to be old? I deserve that much respect right now.
Sold.
I'm not a scientist, although I have gone through several major life-stages characterized by a habit of testing boundaries (perceptual as well as more subjective-moral-societal ones). Mostly this has served me well.
(Thus stated an astute therapist to me once. He did not seem to intend it as a compliment.)
So ... is it a canonical piece of scientific inquiry to examine defective functioning in order to determine what is normal? How do we know this works? Wouldn't this process give rise to many cases of simply ignoring the obvious? How much of the time do we need to compare apples to oranges in order to understand apples? OTOH, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, that could still mean that it only appears to be a duck, right? Especially nowadays.
Isn't perception a product of our categorizing brain at least as much as it is of the five senses? For example, my hyper-thinking friend says he is afraid of swimming in the ocean, although he did discriminate between a fear of sharks versus whales at one point. He claims he's more afraid of the whales. Why is it that we can formulate theories, likely scenarios, and opinions (formed by us, or likely in our minds to have been formed about us by others — ah, the house of mirrors!) without needing direct sensory experience? Sharks versus whales? A man being attacked by either during a swim is a pretty unlikely scenario. This is imagination in action, right? Isn't imagination a perception just as much as any sensory input? So why is confirmation even necessary in order to have a perception? That's putting the cart before the horse. How do we ever really know for sure, anyhow, when a perception is "valid?" Validity is subjective.
Any conflation of "information" and "meaning" destroys objectivity. A cognitive process does not equate to objectivity, either. (I'm sure that the logical-fallacy camp has a rejoinder for that one, boiling down to some "proof" akin to: "'Everything's subjective, nothing can ever be proven for sure' is a load of crap." You can visit Maturana on Cognitive Strategies if you're ever curious to hear a contrasting point of view. Be prepared to engage your brain and take your time.)
So much of what we perceive is based on confirmation bias rather than direct experience anyhow. Why do we so often create inaccurate expectations of outcome? Sometimes that happens because we see what we want instead of what's right in front of us. If you thought that George W. Bush wouldn't get re-elected, then it is possible that you suffered from confirmation bias. We all miss evidence constantly. It's Stone Age wiring in action: magical thinking, overconfidence, or "psyching ourselves up" to take on anything difficult and potentially life-threatening, such as hunting big, scary animals (then) or war (then and now). A more rational approach would dictate self-preservation; save yourself, then worry about the village.
So if confirmation bias is hard-wired into our species, then arguably, it could have won George W. Bush a second term as the leader of the so-called free world, by appealing to an electorate's emotions; i.e., the need to believe "we" are invincible. (And yet somehow "we" invincibles are supposed to feel threatened by Weapons of Mass Destruction? Wow, talk about a perceptual gap... and a stunning display of SCAP EGO.)
Oh, and how to start living large? You mean, the self-help portion of this rap? Aside from all of it, already? Well, that's the simplest part, right here:
Step 1. Just keep doing the next right thing.
Step 2. When you are not sure what that is, ASK SOMEONE YOU TRUST.
...and if there's no one around whom you can trust, then ask yourself: why the fuck not?
Don't forget to check where your SCAP EGO is AT.
Oh, and the next time you find yourself starting to settle for less than you deserve, ask for more instead. That's one more secret.
You may not get what you want, though.
You may not need it anyhow.
...but once you can learn to discriminate reliably between a want and a need, you'll be truly invincible. Bigger than life.
Wishing you a beautiful, wise and foolish day,
Bill Brent
[this page last updated: 2007.08.10, 5:12 p.m. Hawaii time]
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