Wrong Views on Suffering and Happiness –What, How, the Lie and Why Part 3
Dear Reader — this blog is a direct continuation of the last entry, Wrong Views on Suffering and Happiness —What, How, the Lie and Why Part 1 and Part 2 — if you have not yet read that post yet please head back there and read it before you continue.
The Lie: The problem is that my 3s and 4s (memory and imagination) –my self — is a liar. I know this because I have watched and gathered so much evidence of it. My favorite story though is about the way I always viewed my Mom and Dad. Mom was evil, Dad a saint. Every story I remembered from my childhood supported this narrative, the way I interpreted, the things I chose to remember–it all served to strengthen my resolve that my parents were flat characters, they were one particular way. It was only after I began contemplating gratitude for my Mom that I remembered times she was good and my Dad was a dick. Stories where she cared for me, where she supported me, where she made me feel happy and loved. It makes me see that there are a few particular ways in which the lie unfolds:
1) I am always the reference point –I just caught this one as I was writing. I read what I thought was good behavior from my Mom and its all about me. She cared for me, she made me smile. I was in a review with my new employee today along with my supervisor. We were both giving her feedback of the positive qualities we think she brings to the job and all mine were about the things that make my life easier. All my boss’ where about the things that make her life easier. So what exactly are the good qualities of my employee? If my priorities change what happens to my sense of her goodness? If I am the reference point, and I continually change, then how can there be an absolute good, a safe zone? Worse, it means that as my expectations change, as they grow –my employee’s virtues, the things Mom does to make me smile, the ‘zones’ I think are happy — all these things will need to grow too in order to adapt to a changing standard.
2) My 3s (memory) and 4s (imagination) have an agenda — when I look at the way I construed my Mom and Dad, I see the way I kept gathering evidence to “prove” the point I already “knew” –Mom was bad and Dad was good. Information that went contrary to this I sorta just forgot about, or I ignored it as an outlier. I do this so often. I think of the guys that park my car at work very fondly. I think they are efficient, they are always on time. But sometimes they are not, so I give them a pass –I think they are having a bad day, its a one off, but I “forget about it” and don’t let it erode my sense of their goodness.
3) My 3s and 4s self confirm/self fulfill prophecies — this is similar to #2 above. But its worth a separate note because its such an active process. Here is how I see it working: I associate being on a trip with being relaxed, therefor on a trip I tend not to do things that stress me out like checking email or making appointments. It is like, in my mind, the trip gives me permission not to worry or do worrisome things and, in turn, I record to memory that trips are stress-free times.
4) The only way my 4s (imagination) are able to interpret and value my experiences is relatively. In Japan we stayed at a disgusting hotel one night. The bathroom was moldy, the bed hurt, the heater was broken. We couldn’t even make it all night (it was not up to our standard, not what we were used to) so we went and found another place. The second place was so much better than the first we felt such relief and slept with ease. Eric and I remember the time there fondly. But in truth the 2nd place wasn’t nearly as nice as many places we often stay at and the first was way less bad than places we deemed acceptable in the past (you should have seen some of the hotels in Morocco when we were broke grad students). When we moved on to the next hotel our affection for the second place faded a little because the new place was nicer. This I guess gets back to the suffering, which is there is no way to ever hit a zone of comfort and stay there because not only will it change, and I will change, just having it as a new point of relative reference means that I will go reinterpreting it as soon as a new experience comes along. So the big question…WHY DO I DO THIS ALL?
