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.

Evolution

Our community is reserved for people who are over 55.  People over 55 are a famously crotchety bunch.  Many of us are way over 55 and most of us are retired.  So if you're still young let me say this: do not fuck with old, retired people.  We don't have anything to do except keep an eye on our neighbors.  A critical eye.  We look out the front window and if we see someone we don't know we say: "Who's this?  What's he doing?" We don't like noise or messes or big dogs and we loathe children with all of their yelling and running around and making a racket.  Ironically, as people age they express a great deal more happiness and satisfaction in their lives but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who'd admit to that.  If you move into a community for older adults you'll find that there are more rules to follow than you can imagine. There are rules for infractions I don't know what the infractions are.  I assume they're made up infractions.  I assume that most of the rules - many of them seem petty and obvious - came into being because someone violated a common sense practice.  For instance, you are not allowed to wash your car in you own driveway, having instead to take it to kind of a washing bay.  I, personally, do not do this.  Call management and complain if you will but I'm not going to drive my car with all my car-washing gear and wet chamois and soaps somewhere else to do the washing.  There are car-washing establishments if I want to drive somewhere else.  I'm a pretty good neighbor and I get along with my neighbors so no one has ratted me out yet but I see some fluttering curtains.  They're keeping an eye on me.  They know what's going on.

Anyway, one rule is that you can't work on boats in your driveway.  Boat Guy did this.  And you can't store bags of crap in your backyard and - guess what? - there's the birth of Garbage Bag Guy who is the same Guy as Boat Guy which is doubly irritating while also being convenient when you finally get fed up enough to rat someone out.  You're supposed to have plants in your little front yard but the weirdos across the street don't do this but I don't care.  I like them.  The man next door is pretty deaf so from time to time he'll blast Mexican music while he's grilling skirt steaks or whatever tough, inedible meat he likes to grill.  Fair enough and no harm, no foul.  My car is loud when I head off to the Keep It Complicated meeting early in the morning.

So Boat Guy/Garbage Bag Guy has been storing a lot of wood and other random garbage-ey crap in his backyard which is definitely not allowed.   We shrugged and let it pass . . . until we had our second rat infestation in the crawl space under our house.  I have no proof that his crap is the genesis of the rats but if I was a rat a big pile of musty, dark wood might make a nice home to raise my rat family.  SuperK has now christened him Rat Boy which is an excellent nickname.  An excellent third nickname which is one nickname too many.   No plants in your front yard?  Eh.  Loud salsa music sometimes?  Meh.  Rats under my house which are expensive to eradicate?  Fuck that.

Assume:  To accept something as true without proof (commonly held definition); to pretend to have a different name or to be someone you are not, or to express a feeling falsely (how interesting!).

I assume most people are idiots while assuming the identity of someone who doesn't think most people are idiots.  A Win-Win for Seaweed!  The evolution of words can be so interesting.  Assume was a Latin word that roughly meant to take on oneself but evolved into this more sinister meaning over the years.  An assumed identity.  I assumed that I knew what the fuck I was doing.  No one else assumed this but I assumed I was fooling them.

There is a very human tendency to write a story based on assumptions.  I see someone in a Porsche I assume they're rich.  I see someone digging a ditch I assume they're not smart.  I see . . . I see . . . I see . . . There was a man in Cincinnati who had more sobriety than I did but no front teeth.  He dressed in clothes that suggested a life of manual labor.  Arrogant prick that I am I created a persona for this guy and I was way, WAY off.  I took the time to get to know him and this dude read more that me and I read a LOT.

The Toltecs warn against this tendency of our flawed minds to filter everything through our past experiences, to supplement new information with these existing beliefs and experiences.  And voila! we know the future!  Assumptions based on past experiences can wreak havoc on our lives.

If I draw two thirds of a triangle on a piece of paper or an incomplete circle or half of a bicycle most people will finish the picture in their minds based on what they have already experienced.  I assume this satisfies some ancient instinctual impulse but it also can lead to mistakes in our awareness.

Because I love thinking about the human mind, trying to understand why we do what we do, I'll toss in something called the Action Bias which is the tendency to choose some action over doing nothing.  The best example is a soccer goalie defending against a penalty shot.  The goalie will almost always try to anticipate an attempt to the left or to the right and dive in that direction while - statistically - standing in the middle of the goal is going to give him or her the best chance to block the shot.

Eck-wah-NIM-eh-tee

Equanimity:  (In many spiritual traditions) A balanced, stable state of mind that remains undisturbed by life's ups and downs.  It means meeting pleasure and pain, praise and blame, or success and failure without clinging to them or fighting with them.  It is an alert, caring presence and not emotional coldness.

The Eight Worldly Winds: (In Buddhist traditions) Gain and Loss.  Pleasure and Pain.  Praise and Blame.  Fame and Disrepute.  Equanimity lets a person watch these shifting conditions pass by without letting emotional storms control their actions.  

True equanimity cares deeply while staying non-reactive.  This doesn't mean doing nothing - it means creating the clear mental state needed to make wise decisions.  It's the liberating quality that  allows us to keep our hearts open and balanced, quiet and steady, in the midst of life's inevitable vagaries.  We don't scream "Foul!" when things don't go our way and we don't sit there with a self-satisfied look on our faces, nodding smugly, when we get what we want because we don't know what we want, most of the time, and even when we get it we're just going to want more.  If that's not frustrating enough sometimes when we get what we want it doesn't work out in our favor in a real meaningful way.

I'm reading a Mark Twain novella right now which is centered around a dude named Satan.  Not that Satan, who we all can agree is a pretty bad dude, but a nephew named after his uncle.   Nephew Satan is slumming around on earth, really quite dismissive of humans and their often cruel, self-centered natures, always preferring the company of animals who he believes have purity in their actions and intentions.  In the course of his wanderings he befriends three young boys and tries to teach them that all of our actions mean something in the long run, that if we get what we want that it may cause incalculable suffering later on.  As an example, he tells the boys that one of their friends is going to sneak out of the house one evening and then drown in the river while attempting unsuccessfully to save a child who was swept into the current.  The boys are bereft and ask Satan what they can do to change the course of events so that their friend stays alive.  Satan agrees to do this but only if they will allow him to show them how their friend's life will play out in this changed reality.  The friend contracts polio and lives for many years, bedridden and in pain, trapped in an iron lung and the small girl is forced into a life of prostitution when her parents are killed in a train accident.  The lesson is we are not assured that if we let our puny human minds decide the future will  improve.  It is the reminder that we need to stay present and enjoy every minute, doing the best we can to be good, decent people, certain in the knowledge that life is unspooling in a manner that we'll never be able to comprehend.

Equanimity is a profound quality of strength and evenness of mind undisturbed by emotional upheavals.  The ability to maintain an inner balance and calm, no matter what may be happening around us.  We try to strengthen our observation skills so that we may see and understand the whole situation instead of one little part.  The Pali word is upekkha which means "balance" and it refers to our ability to arrest the mind before it falls into extremes.

"When you listen to the voices in your head, do you hear words of fear and judgment and stories that cause inner conflict and struggle?  Or do you hear words of support, unconditional love, and self-acceptance?"

The Toltecs

Root Canals!

 Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment on purpose and without judgement. It is the basic human ability to be fully aware of where you are, what you are doing, and how you feel, rather than being overly reactive or overwhelmed by thoughts.

Mindfulness means maintaining a moment by moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment through a gentle, nurturing lens.  Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them.  Without believing, for instance, that there's a "right" or "wrong" way to think or feel in a given moment.  When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we're sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.  Life slows down.  I make better decisions when I'm listening for that small, still, inner voice instead of careening down the freeway at a hundred miles per hour.

This is from a Hazelden meditation book: "Today we can slow down the pace and notice the things around us."  More mindfulness.  More reminders to be present.

The Toltecs: "If I see working through the filter of 'I want to" it is because I have placed my intent in that direction; I am working willingly.  Remembering this makes all the difference in the world.  Recognize you always have a choice, and once you've made a decision, follow through without  resistance.  You don't 'have to' do anything; but do choose to do many things, for many different reasons."

I dunno.  This is one lovely intent but it's pretty tough to willingly go and have a root canal.