Do you remember the feeling that you get after a sickness when you first realize that you are well? Perhaps your experience differs from mine, but for me it is a really wonderful experience. I notice things to a very large extent based on how they differ from the things around them. When contrasted with sickness simply not being sick is great.
I feel a pervasive good feeling, a pleasure in my own body's ability to walk, or see. This pervasive good feeling extends to my senses, so that the world around me appears more beautiful. The pervasive good feeling extends into my attitude because it is based on my experience right now, and a good feeling about right now removes anxiety.
Buddhists talk about the natural state of people being ego-less bliss, achievable through years of dedicated practice. It seems to me that the second part of the previous sentence defeats the claim of the first, but it may well be that the natural state of humanity is something akin to bliss, and that the Buddhists are right that the goal is recognition of our situation rather than a change in it.
What would be a natural state? I'll assume that we can get passed the absolutely true objection that everything is natural and so the question is foolish. However, we can derive some meaning from the question and answer. A natural state is one that has not been affected by humankind, which makes the question doubly problematic, but let us assume that the natural state of humankind is one unaffected by other people. Another definition of "natural" is being in keeping with the environment around us.
The natural state of humanity would therefore be one of a person fitting with the environment they are in without thinking one way or another about other people, stresses,plans, hopes etc.. I would say part of fitting in with the environment is an absence of extra descriptors of the experience, e.g. hunger, cold/hot, and sick. The natural state is wellness, in accord with the environment in which we are, unconcerned about the cares of the world. This is as Taoist as it gets, which is why I'm a big fan of Taoism.
This may seem to be a stupendous feat, achieving a natural state of unconcerned mindfulness, but is only difficult because we habituate ourselves to non-natural states. The achievement of the natural state requires, as the name would suggest, the doing of nothing. The hardest part of doing not-doing (a favorite term of Taoism, which seems mysterious until you get how simple and direct it is) is doing not-thinking. A method that works for some people is to notice what their brain is thinking (I hope my children are happy in school), label that thought (a worry), and then let that thought drift away.
On this blog I spend much of my time, too much of my time, concerning myself with problems and worries. That's alright with me because only saints shouldn't worry less and I am a long way away from being a saint. Still, I think I give somewhat of the wrong impression as a result. Today I felt well and it was, is, wonderful. Today I looked at sunshine glinting on the water without a thought for being anywhere else. I felt a very quiet, calm sense of bliss. I realized, without words, that it is a wonderful thing to be alive.
Such moments are difficult to describe in any way other than very prosaically, such as above, and tend to be repetitive. I was somewhere when I noticed something and realized that life is good. As a result I talk much more about external problems and worries than is actually representative of my life. Most days I have at least one moment similar to the one I have described and I do try to have more. All it takes is noticing, which becomes easier if you practice, but much easier if your natural state is made constantly apparent by experiencing non-natural states. It is easier to notice how great it is to be well when you have just been sick.
I would say that the great secret of life is finding our wellness, getting to the place where we notice what we are, where we are. It is no coincidence that so many spiritual teachers implore us to, "wake up!"
We evolved to be essentially hunter-gatherers in a relatively simple environment. Such a life was greatly subject to the sudden calamity of death and disease, but it also led to long nights of restful sleep, little work, a focus on a time scale of days rather than years, and much less stimulus than at present. Why do people on vacation go to a beautiful, quiet place, where you can get food and drink without effort, sleep whenever you want for as long as you want, and try to get away from their worries? Because we want to get back to the best parts of our natural selves and we don't know how to do that at home.
I have some hope that as a global society we will move back towards greater recognition of our natural selves as various forces align themselves in this direction. The medical profession is slowly managing to shift from the goal of "health" to "wellbeing" where the experience of the patient is more important than whether all the bits work perfectly. Psychology has rather recently become quite excited about studying happiness. There are the first sprouts of moral and political systems being designed around maximizing happiness. The future of employment is that fewer and fewer people will work, and yet we will still get richer. As we learn that hard work, stress, lack of sleep, etc. cause both ill health and unhappiness, and we learn that meditation, relaxation, sleep, etc. promote both health and happiness, and societal systems move towards a happiness-based system from economic-based systems, and most people will not be able to productively work much, I see a movement towards the natural state of humanity without the lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
The Latest
I haven't been posting much recently, a possible reason may become apparent a little further down, but big deals maybe happening and someone may be interested. I'll start with what I think is the biggest deal although it may well not be what most would consider the most important.
It seems that my "magic blue pills" are no longer magic. For the last two months I have been ill on over half the days. The last couple of days I have been truly exhausted. Saturday night my hands were writhing trying to keep myself under control from the energy. The cycling between different states has been the fastest in my life, although I have had far more severe experiences in the past. It used to be that I didn't really know who I would be the next week or day, now I don't know who I will be between the morning and evening.
There are several possibly reasons:
The first possibility is that the pills have changed. This is a generic drug and while it has worked for me in the past some generics don't work for me, and industry quality assurance is very poor. Fortunately we have different insurance and are fortunate to have enough money to pay the co-pay (down from $150 to $35) for the brand name version. So my psychiatrist and I have agreed to try this approach first.
The second possibility is that my disease has simply progressed to the point where the pills cannot entirely cope. Since my disease was worsening (after all that's why I got help) this seems quite reasonable. The psychiatrist's suggestion would then be to try another mood stabilizer in addition to what I am taking now. I am extremely wary of this having seen people slowly but surely poisoned by the side effects of their medications, some of which would be considered. I absolutely despise the idea of a choice between unpredictable misery and poisoning myself. Someone with rapid cycling bipolar disorder who hates all of the possible choices they can make is an extremely, extremely bad situation.
The third possibility is that this is simply a particularly bad time for me, something that might happen every few years for the rest of my life. I have coped with much, much worse than this in the past and can cope with such periods happening once in a while.
In summary; I am going insane again and I find this quite alarming.
The other part is quite different. My darling wife has been offered, and has accepted, a new job in a different company, doing quite different things. It amounts to an enormous promotion, from an extremely advanced level of keyboard monkey to the director of an entire department of seventeen people. I am very proud of her for her courage to take this great leap, very proud of her for knowing she can do it, and most proud of her for negotiating a better compensation package. This is the sort of feminism I really like, a woman taking risks, being confident in herself, and believing that she is worth as much as any man. In the business world meekness is punished. My love has come a long way, what a woman!
Now for my selfish bit. This means we will be staying in Houston, I expect for at least three years, bringing our time here to a minimum of eight years. Or using a different scale, about 1/10th of my life. We will be moving closer to the city, closer to this new job. The area looks much more promising than where we are now, but it is still Houston and I hate it here. I hate the pounding heat in the summer (although October through March is lovely). I hate the willful ignorance, the lack of caring, the machismo, the certainty, the superficiality, the lack of creativity. I am probably, on average, happier than I was in Portland but that has nothing whatsoever to do with where I live.
It seems that my "magic blue pills" are no longer magic. For the last two months I have been ill on over half the days. The last couple of days I have been truly exhausted. Saturday night my hands were writhing trying to keep myself under control from the energy. The cycling between different states has been the fastest in my life, although I have had far more severe experiences in the past. It used to be that I didn't really know who I would be the next week or day, now I don't know who I will be between the morning and evening.
There are several possibly reasons:
The first possibility is that the pills have changed. This is a generic drug and while it has worked for me in the past some generics don't work for me, and industry quality assurance is very poor. Fortunately we have different insurance and are fortunate to have enough money to pay the co-pay (down from $150 to $35) for the brand name version. So my psychiatrist and I have agreed to try this approach first.
The second possibility is that my disease has simply progressed to the point where the pills cannot entirely cope. Since my disease was worsening (after all that's why I got help) this seems quite reasonable. The psychiatrist's suggestion would then be to try another mood stabilizer in addition to what I am taking now. I am extremely wary of this having seen people slowly but surely poisoned by the side effects of their medications, some of which would be considered. I absolutely despise the idea of a choice between unpredictable misery and poisoning myself. Someone with rapid cycling bipolar disorder who hates all of the possible choices they can make is an extremely, extremely bad situation.
The third possibility is that this is simply a particularly bad time for me, something that might happen every few years for the rest of my life. I have coped with much, much worse than this in the past and can cope with such periods happening once in a while.
In summary; I am going insane again and I find this quite alarming.
The other part is quite different. My darling wife has been offered, and has accepted, a new job in a different company, doing quite different things. It amounts to an enormous promotion, from an extremely advanced level of keyboard monkey to the director of an entire department of seventeen people. I am very proud of her for her courage to take this great leap, very proud of her for knowing she can do it, and most proud of her for negotiating a better compensation package. This is the sort of feminism I really like, a woman taking risks, being confident in herself, and believing that she is worth as much as any man. In the business world meekness is punished. My love has come a long way, what a woman!
Now for my selfish bit. This means we will be staying in Houston, I expect for at least three years, bringing our time here to a minimum of eight years. Or using a different scale, about 1/10th of my life. We will be moving closer to the city, closer to this new job. The area looks much more promising than where we are now, but it is still Houston and I hate it here. I hate the pounding heat in the summer (although October through March is lovely). I hate the willful ignorance, the lack of caring, the machismo, the certainty, the superficiality, the lack of creativity. I am probably, on average, happier than I was in Portland but that has nothing whatsoever to do with where I live.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Decisions
We all make decisions all the time. They vary from the insignificant to the vital, and from the easy to the difficult.
On the scale of significance the only thing I really wish to say is that I believe that human beings essentially have a (largely) fixed scale of significance. That is that the most important things you ever deal with feel as significant as the most important thing that a subsistence farmer in Africa encounters. Suddenly put yourself in the shoes of a subsistence farmer and then all of your previous worries will suddenly seem insignificant, but until that happens the hot water tank leak seems horrendous. Mostly things don't matter as much as we think they do.
On the scale of difficulty I think there is an interesting effect whereby decisions become easier at each end of a perceived scale of difficulty. I'll try and explain.
The simplest decisions have very few components (a rock, a head and an arm for bashing one with the other) and very few outcomes (head bashing or no head bashing) and a substantial difference between the outcomes (ouch! or not.) It is a very simple decision as to whether to hit yourself in the head with a rock.
The most complicated decisions have very many components (career advancement, personal satisfaction, a good view, how friends and family feel about it, will I ever see Paris?) and usually these components are conglomerates of other, simpler components. More complicated decisions will also have smaller differences in outcomes so that each individual component may be enough to swing the balance from one side to the other.
Generally we conflate the complication of a decision with the difficulty of making the decision, but I think that is a mistake at the highest levels of complexity. What I think is that at a certain point a decision becomes complicated enough that the outcome of our decisions is so unpredictable that it passes beyond an" event horizon" in that we simply cannot make a rational judgment on a decision. There is a reason why in science there if the concept of "statistically significant" and that is that below a certain threshold you cannot make any reasonable judgments.
You are going to have a party in late May in a week's time. You could have a barbecue outside in the lovely spring air, or a cosy event inside. If the weather is nice then an outside event would be much nicer, if the weather is awful then inside would be much nicer. Do you plan for the event to be inside or outside? The thing is that you simply don't have the information necessary to make the right decision, you cannot predict the weather reliably a week in advance. Sometimes you just have to guess, and guessing is easy.
So, let us take a very complicated decision that I think is actually easy to make. Let us say you are an 18 year old about to go off to college. You can go to an expensive school with a good reputation and study economics, which you have never studied before, or go to an easier, more relaxed school and study psychology for the first time. As an 18 year old, who has never lived away from home or studied any of these subjects, the choice is extremely complex and the consequences seem to be large. This seems like a difficult decision. However, the amount of information available to predict the outcomes of either choice is so low compared to the difference between the decisions that tossing a coin and going with the result is a completely rational way to proceed.
When I decided to leave Michigan for Oregon there is not one chance that I could have predicted meeting someone who asked me to play music in a band, or that a girlfriend would dump me at a convenient time for me to fall in love with my wife. I left Michigan because I had few ties there (and I had fewer in Oregon) and I was sick of the weather. I hadn't even thought of what turned out to be extremely important consequences of a decision made for entirely different purposes.
People don't like this. People don't like unpredictability, or the idea that a vast amount of our experiences just happen to us. Humans like to understand, plan, and control their lives. When the situation is complicated and unpredictable we want to simplify and predict. The cognitive dissonance between the reality of a situation beyond our understanding or prediction, and our view as the controllers of our own fate is what I think makes big decisions so painful.
When a decision seems really hard to make the truth is that at the point where you can make a decision which choice you make doesn't matter, that is that you cannot make a bad decision. This may seem weird, after all the wrong decision can have all sorts of terrible consequences, but that's not my point. Someone asks you to guess which way up a tossed coin will land. Guess right and you get $10;000,000. Guess wrong and you get fifty lashes with the cat o' nine tails. The consequences are enormous, but you cannot make a bad decision guessing heads or tails. The decision is not hard, just pick heads or tails. Worrying about what decision you should make is a waste of effort.
One of the things about Americans is that they/we really like doing something. Americans don't believe in the idea that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all. Take Syria right now. What a horrible situation, a chaotic maelstrom of hatred and violence. Any sane person wants the situation to be improved but not one person can legitimately say that they now what the outcome of almost any action would be. It may well be, and I believe it is, that anything the USA does will simply make things worse. That doing anything makes things worse s a more common condition that people think.
If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren't afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can't achieve.
Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter's place.
When you handle the master carpenter's tools,
chances are that you'll cut your hand.
Tao Te Ching Chapter 74
On the scale of significance the only thing I really wish to say is that I believe that human beings essentially have a (largely) fixed scale of significance. That is that the most important things you ever deal with feel as significant as the most important thing that a subsistence farmer in Africa encounters. Suddenly put yourself in the shoes of a subsistence farmer and then all of your previous worries will suddenly seem insignificant, but until that happens the hot water tank leak seems horrendous. Mostly things don't matter as much as we think they do.
On the scale of difficulty I think there is an interesting effect whereby decisions become easier at each end of a perceived scale of difficulty. I'll try and explain.
The simplest decisions have very few components (a rock, a head and an arm for bashing one with the other) and very few outcomes (head bashing or no head bashing) and a substantial difference between the outcomes (ouch! or not.) It is a very simple decision as to whether to hit yourself in the head with a rock.
The most complicated decisions have very many components (career advancement, personal satisfaction, a good view, how friends and family feel about it, will I ever see Paris?) and usually these components are conglomerates of other, simpler components. More complicated decisions will also have smaller differences in outcomes so that each individual component may be enough to swing the balance from one side to the other.
Generally we conflate the complication of a decision with the difficulty of making the decision, but I think that is a mistake at the highest levels of complexity. What I think is that at a certain point a decision becomes complicated enough that the outcome of our decisions is so unpredictable that it passes beyond an" event horizon" in that we simply cannot make a rational judgment on a decision. There is a reason why in science there if the concept of "statistically significant" and that is that below a certain threshold you cannot make any reasonable judgments.
You are going to have a party in late May in a week's time. You could have a barbecue outside in the lovely spring air, or a cosy event inside. If the weather is nice then an outside event would be much nicer, if the weather is awful then inside would be much nicer. Do you plan for the event to be inside or outside? The thing is that you simply don't have the information necessary to make the right decision, you cannot predict the weather reliably a week in advance. Sometimes you just have to guess, and guessing is easy.
So, let us take a very complicated decision that I think is actually easy to make. Let us say you are an 18 year old about to go off to college. You can go to an expensive school with a good reputation and study economics, which you have never studied before, or go to an easier, more relaxed school and study psychology for the first time. As an 18 year old, who has never lived away from home or studied any of these subjects, the choice is extremely complex and the consequences seem to be large. This seems like a difficult decision. However, the amount of information available to predict the outcomes of either choice is so low compared to the difference between the decisions that tossing a coin and going with the result is a completely rational way to proceed.
When I decided to leave Michigan for Oregon there is not one chance that I could have predicted meeting someone who asked me to play music in a band, or that a girlfriend would dump me at a convenient time for me to fall in love with my wife. I left Michigan because I had few ties there (and I had fewer in Oregon) and I was sick of the weather. I hadn't even thought of what turned out to be extremely important consequences of a decision made for entirely different purposes.
People don't like this. People don't like unpredictability, or the idea that a vast amount of our experiences just happen to us. Humans like to understand, plan, and control their lives. When the situation is complicated and unpredictable we want to simplify and predict. The cognitive dissonance between the reality of a situation beyond our understanding or prediction, and our view as the controllers of our own fate is what I think makes big decisions so painful.
When a decision seems really hard to make the truth is that at the point where you can make a decision which choice you make doesn't matter, that is that you cannot make a bad decision. This may seem weird, after all the wrong decision can have all sorts of terrible consequences, but that's not my point. Someone asks you to guess which way up a tossed coin will land. Guess right and you get $10;000,000. Guess wrong and you get fifty lashes with the cat o' nine tails. The consequences are enormous, but you cannot make a bad decision guessing heads or tails. The decision is not hard, just pick heads or tails. Worrying about what decision you should make is a waste of effort.
One of the things about Americans is that they/we really like doing something. Americans don't believe in the idea that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all. Take Syria right now. What a horrible situation, a chaotic maelstrom of hatred and violence. Any sane person wants the situation to be improved but not one person can legitimately say that they now what the outcome of almost any action would be. It may well be, and I believe it is, that anything the USA does will simply make things worse. That doing anything makes things worse s a more common condition that people think.
If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren't afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can't achieve.
Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter's place.
When you handle the master carpenter's tools,
chances are that you'll cut your hand.
Tao Te Ching Chapter 74
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