Barney Gumbel

There's a theory in psychology called Confirmation Bias.  This is a tendency for humans to seek out people and sources that confirm what they already believe.  This is most apparent in politics, of course, where many of us look for "news" sources that say what we want to hear.  It's an efficient way to justify the stupidest, most ridiculous viewpoints.  Consider a group of drunks sitting at a bar at two in the morning, complaining about their spouses and their jobs and the courts and the general disorder in the world.  Show this to a impartial third party and they laugh and shake their heads at the insanity.  We drunks would shake our heads right back at the doubters.  We're with people who think that sitting in a bar at two in the morning is a great, great idea and they confirm our insanity.

There's a great scene in a Simpson's episode where Barney comes to in Moe's Bar after a long bender, complaining about the state of affairs, and then he looks down at his arm which has a handcuff that is attached to the door of a police car.  "And where the hell did this come from?" he asks.

His two fellow barflies respond: "Haven't you always had that?" the first one says.  "Yeah, I can't really picture you without it," says the other.

That's confirmation bias.  Listening to people saying what you want to hear.

"We are sure that God wants us to be happy, joyous, and free.  We cannot believe that this life is meant to be full of sadness and tears, although it used to feel that way for many of us.  Now we know that we made our  own misery.  God didn't do it.  So we take care not to go on creating more misery.  If trouble comes to us, we use it as a reason to think about the wisdom of our Higher Power."

Plain Language Big Book PP 118-119.

Quoting People Wiser Than Me

"The lesson I learned is that if you have all the fresh water that you want and enough food to eat then you don't have anything to complain about."

Eddie Rickenbacker (An airman shot down over the Pacific who spent three weeks floating in a lifeboat before being rescued.)

"The more attached you are to something, the more your vision is obscured and narrowed, sometimes to the point at which you are convinced that there is only one way to proceed.  Your attachment to a specific belief cuts off your ability to see beyond that one possibility."

The Toltecs

"Many of us have spent time thinking that our spirituality makes us superior people.  Eventually, we see that this is childish.  That attitude is replaced by a great sense of purpose, and a growing understanding of the power of God in our lives."

Plain Language Big Book PP 116-17

Spiritual Awakenings

 I wanted to write today about the concept of a spiritual awakening.  A good starting point is to Google something and shuffle through the responses, see if anything catches my eye.  One of the frequently searched terms if you simply type in "spiritual experience" apparently is along the lines of "am I having a spiritual awakening or spiraling into  psychosis?"  Did not see that coming.  (laughing, shaking my head emoji.)

Seriously, though, a spiritual awakening is characterized by a deep change in how a person feels, thinks, and sees reality.  Those of us so blessed will often display a clear mind, one that allows us to feel a deep sense of calm, joy, and love.   We feel grounded.  We know who we are and we stay connected to everyday life in a meaningful way.  We grasp the concept of humility in a deeply insightful way.  We feel more humble and this allows us to be kind to other people.  There is a profound shift in consciousness and a growing realization that you are not just your everyday thoughts, emotions, or ego, but part of a deeper, infinite awareness.

These spiritual awakenings may include a questioning of long-held beliefs and a strong need for occasional solitude.  We find an increasingly heightened intuition and begin to feel a deep, genuine empathy which leads to giant improvements in our relationships.  Peace in everyday life becomes not just a possibility but a reality.  We lose interest in material things.  OK, nobody loses all interest in material things - More money!  More sex!!  More power!!! - but we're able to keep those drives in a reasonable balance.

Here's a personal example of what I believe is a benefit of having some kind of spiritual awakening:

I always tip food service professionals.  In my humble opinion it's ridiculous that wealthy corporations try to shift their employee's compensation off of their balance sheet and into their customers' wallets but when I am elected Ruler of the World I'll get that squared away.  I bought a drink from a Starbucks that was inside a Kroger.  I paid with a credit card and was confused that there was no way to add a tip to the charge.  I opened my wallet which contained approximately zero dollars and then noticed that there wasn't a tip jar, either.  I asked the barista about this and she said that because the coffee shop was located in a Kroger that their policy of no tips took precedence.  I can understand this - you don't want cashiers and stock personnel hassling shoppers for money - but I wasn't thrilled with this policy.  I talked with the woman a bit about the difference between a no tipping culture and a tipping culture and agreeing that every employee should be fairly compensated for their work.  She was calm and reflective about the situation while agreeing that a little more money would be nice.

I left with my coffee.  (I should add that I was only at the Starbucks because the line at my regular spot was too long and I'm a busy, important guy.  That didn't stop me from using their bathroom before I walked home even though I didn't buy their product.)  I went to the bank and got some cash and walked back to the Starbucks.  I asked for some inspiration on timing and what an appropriate response would be.  The barista was alone so I stopped and said: "Excuse me, miss, but when you turned around this fell out of your pocket" and I dropped ten bucks onto one of the inventory boxes.  (Balance is my best friend!  I wanted to give her $5 but I could have given her $20 so the tenner was a good choice.)  She looked at me with a confused expression before she got it.  A smile and a mouthed "thank you" and I was down the road.

This was a few days ago and I'm still living on the fumes of the experience.  While the money was appreciated I bet that it was the kindness, the recognition that she enjoyed the most.  It's wonderful to feel seen, to be noticed.  I try to learn people's names and to remember a little, tiny speck of information about them so I can inquire after their pet or their family or their schooling.  I definitely do NOT talk on my phone when I'm in line.

I Intend to Make Sense

Intention:  A plan to do something.  It is what you mean to do and not what you actually do.  Or as it has been said with some beautiful snark: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."  The hidden purpose, heart motive, or inner will behind a person's thoughts or actions.  In psychology there's a keen interest in the fact that before we take any action - even something as pedestrian as getting up from a chair or taking a sip of coffee - we have to intend to do it.  I find this an arcane concept and not worthy of my attention until I'm reminded that the benefit to me of being aware of such an ordinary intention is that it helps me to pause and consider before I act or speak and this is a big, big help when I'm getting prepared to do something more weighty than drinking a cup of coffee.  That's a joke, of course - there is nothing on God's green earth more important that coffee.  If I can't smoke a joint or drink whiskey I'm telling you that coffee is all I got.

The daily reminder I remind myself of is that the world is going to judge me by my actions even though I would love to be judged by my intentions.

Acting with intention means making conscious, deliberate choices aligned with your core values and goals, rather than reacting on autopilot or impulse.  How many times in my drinking/using life did I hear someone ask me: "What were you thinking?" as we discussed what stupid thing I had just done or what stupid thing I had just said.

In spirituality, intention is the core energy, the why or inner state of being behind your thoughts, words, and actions.  It's a conscious choice to align your personal energy with a higher purpose, love, or truth and serves as a blueprint for how you move through the world.

I don't always understand what's going on when I consider these weighty questions.  I lived in a world of Impulse - Action where thinking or planning wasn't foremost in my mind.  Consequences?  Bleh.  Figure out how to correct the damage later.  I'd rather beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.

My muse, sponsor, and spiritual advisor Homer was defending against some criticism by arguing that his plans were well thought out as the animators opened up a thought bubble inside Homer's brain which showed someone passed out on a broken Merry go round that was slowly circling in the wind, rusty gears complaining.  I get it.  For someone who considers himself a deeply profound thinker I was living on a remarkably shallow plane.

To set a spiritual intention I find it helpful to find a quiet space, to clear my mind with deep breathing, and reflect on the inner qualities and energy that I want to embody.  Intention begins when a thought or desire meets a goal; a goal predicated on human needs or wants.  It's gotta be so deep inside us!  My meditation practice helps me get into the brief, flickering space where what I want clangs up against how to do I get it.  Are the getting actions going to be pure or evil-ish?

Intentions are responsible for initiating, sustaining, and terminating actions and are frequently use to explain why people engage in a certain behavior.  I feel like all of this is trying to explain how a thought begins.  What happens to set off that electrical spark and get things moving?

I think I should intend to watch an episode of The Simpson's to take my mind off all of these unanswerable questions.  I'm sure Homer explains it somewhere.

Negativity Bias

"For us, material well-being always followed spiritual progress; it never came first."

The Plain Language Big Book P 113  

Dammit!  That is SO unfair.  If I had a lot of material stuff then I'd be more inclined to do spiritual stuff.  If I'm not going to get a lot of nice stuff why the hell would I work on my spirituality?  A wise man once said: "The more expensive the chair . . . the more profound the meditation."

"Another principle we live by is this: We do not share the private or secret experiences of someone else unless we know they will feel okay about it.  Usually, we just stick to our own stories.  Any person may criticize or laugh at themselves, and other people may laugh along.  But criticisms coming from another person create the opposite reaction.  We alcoholics are sensitive people.  It takes some of us a long time to outgrow that troublesome trait."

The Plain Language Big Book PP 113-14.

I am famously sarcastic among my friends and neighbors.  I guess also among my enemies and competitors to be honest about it.  The point is that I get away with it - mostly because it's so over the top and transparently kind but also because I can take a punch, a shot.  I'm an idiot!  I know I'm an idiot!  So if you want to call me an idiot I'm with you, dude.

Repeating myself, saying the same over and over, saying the same thing using slightly different words, I adhere ferociously to the maxim that I don't say anything about anybody that I wouldn't say if the person was standing right next to me.  I don't want anyone to accuse me of talking shit behind their back.  If I can't say it to you I don't think it should be said. 

Negativity bias is a cognitive bias that results in adverse events having a more significant impact on our psychological state than positive events.  This bias occurs even when adverse events and positive events are of the same magnitude, meaning we feel negative events more intensely.  Most of our instinctual responses to the world were hard-wired in when the world was a much more threatening place than it is now.  We had to worry about starving or freezing to death or being eaten by something large that had lots of sharp teeth.  The fact that most of us are no longer in those kinds of circumstances hasn't eradicated that instinct.  I've always considered myself a negative, suspicious person.  Hurray for me and no shit!  I'm a survivor.  I can see now that my eyes are opened - or opening, at least - that most of us are like that although I tend to take things way, way too far.  One study suggests that we need to hear something positive six times for it to really take hold while we get the negative thing on the first attempt.  The fact that most of us have a negative bias suggests that all the positive people have been eaten up.

Not me, man.  Nothin's going to catch me today.

Forgive? Never!

It's an interesting word, forgiveness.  It's an interesting concept.  Before I came into Alcoholics Anonymous I had very little grasp of what it meant.  I had absolutely no concept that the magic of forgiveness is what it does to me.  While it can be a real gift, a real blessing to the person I'm forgiving there's no guarantee that it will change that person's life - the guarantee is that it will change my life.  This is the basis of A.A.'s action Steps: admitting my faults - my faults - and then admitting to another person where and when I've behaved poorly with no expectation that this will be well-received or that I will be forgiven by the other person.  The whole idea is to set myself free and to leave the reaction of the other person entirely up to them.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.

I guarantee very few things but here's a doozy and ironclad to boot - you are not going to be able to change the past.

It's the intention to forgive that's important.  It frees me from having to actually forgive someone in that moment.  That can be hard.  If I want to forgive someone who has harmed me - or who I think has harmed me - I can at least start with intending to forgive them and I have found that the forgiveness will come, the resentment will fade, the freedom will manifest itself.

A resentment is like eating poison and hoping the other person will die.

I have found this to be true - that there is no one alive today that I think owes me an apology.  I hold very few resentments and when I do I don't hold them for long.  This, naturally, has some nuance.  It doesn't always hold up under the withering light of inspection.  But mostly I'm at peace with other people.  And, critically, I don't have anyone that I need to apologize to today.  When I fuck up I take care of it, right then, right there, stat.  I cannot abide with that feeling of guilt.

Screw Guilt.

Forgive is a word that arose in the 5th century or so in England.  So not that ancient a word.  Maybe we knew how to do it and what it meant intuitively but the concrete concept is not that old.  The Biblical concept is to release, pardon, or forgive a debt.

Forgive:  To forgive means to stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone who has done something wrong, choosing to let go of the desire for punishment or revenge; it is a persona choice to release negative feelings, rather than a requirement to forget, excuse, or reconcile.

 A true apology is a repair process; it requires taking total responsibility for a mistake, acknowledging the pain caused to the other person, felling sincere regret, and committing to changed behavior so the action is not repeated.

The Past, The Present. and The Future

We don’t remember every single thing that has ever happened to us.  There’s a mistaken belief that it’s all in there somewhere and that if we could only properly and efficiently access the memory files then we could relive each instant of our lives.  Our brains are too smart for this.  Our brains fill in cracks.  The simplest analogy is our eyesight - there’s too much going on in the world and it’s happening too fast so our brains fill in the gaps.  There are plenty of studies done on people who have had retinal tears or an optical disease that deprives them of a chunk of their eyesight but they’re unaware of this - the brain combines the images of both eyes and glosses over the missing visuals so that the person manages well enough.

What’s even more interesting is that our brains seem to screw around with our memories to make them conform to our current perception of ourselves.  For instance, if you were cruel to an animal long ago and you’re no longer cruel to animals that sets up a dissonance in your head.  You’re uncomfortable with the fact that you were cruel.  It’s incompatible with the image you have of yourself so your brain begins to subtly alter this memory so that you think you didn’t behave the way you actually did.  Often this dis-remembering leads to some outrageous and easily disproved lies.  We look at people who have been caught making something up with our mouths agape and our eyes agog.  “How could he/she think she could get away with that bald-faced lie?” we think.  It may very well be that the person isn’t lying but rather listening to the crap his/her brain has made up.  Some people, of course, are actually lying.  There are lying liars out there.

Our brains have a lot going on.  The speculation is that some of this rewriting of history is a way to make sure that we don’t go absolutely batshit crazy.
Life gets lifey sometimes. If you keep doing what you've been doing you'll keep getting what you've been getting.
Time is seen differently backwards and forwards. Write your own obituary.  Being productive versus being on vacation.