Adam’s Peace

Note: This is part 2 of a 4 part series, not including the introduction and conclusion. The introduction is titled Peaceful Virtues, and has links to the rest of the articles in the series.

Does a good farmer neglect a crop he has planted?
Does a good teacher overlook even the most humble student?
Does a good father allow a single child to starve?
Does a good programmer refuse to maintain his code?

– The Tao of Programming

Acceptance and Forgiveness are the virtues needed to find peace within our own subjective world.

Before going further, though, I do want to make a distinction. When many people see the phrase ‘forgive everyone,’ they think that it includes the people who have hurt you the most and who remain unrepentant.

Well, that’s exactly what I mean. Forgive the worst people around you as much as you forgive the best intentioned.

I am not saying that you should turn around and let them continue hurting you. Forgiveness and forgetfulness are separate concepts, even though they seem to go hand-in-hand. Forgiveness is a form of acceptance… I would like to describe what acceptance is, and how it leads to peace.

Defining the Virtues

Acceptance comes from the root word accept, meaning to receive. (Please don’t confuse accept with except… An exception is something unusual, and to except something means to separate it from a group.) The complement to accepting something is to give it, where we find the root for forgive. Of course, the beginning of forgive, for, signifies that we give first, or before.

Acceptance is the state of always receiving. Forgiveness is the state of always giving first.

[edit: I was wrong, sort of. See Jeff’s comment below]

Forgiveness First

All of evolution rests upon the principle of continuing the species. For some animals, that means looking out for yourself, and only yourself, until you are able to breed. Examples of these would be various spiders, fish, amphibians, insects, etc. These creatures tend to have a large number of young over very short periods of time, and among the carnivorous, cannibalism is common. They would be described as being independent The next group of creatures, which includes most mammals, as well as some spiders, fish, amphibians, insects, and most birds, have evolved to nurture their young until they become competition. These species often have smaller numbers of young, rarely travel in groups, and cannibalism is rare, but not completely unheard of. They are also usually described as being independent. A third group, composed entirely of insects, cares for every member of their family, with only one breeder (often called the queen). They are described as being co-dependent.

The final group is made up of creatures that have formed a community, yet each member still remains an individual, trying to breed and survive while remaining in the group. Examples are wolves, meerkats, lions, elephants, humans, and generally most large mammals, although some birds fall under this category as well. Their best description is being interdependent. These social animals all have one rule in common: To receive, you must also give.

What does this have to do with our own inner minds and subjective realities?

Well, among any animals we’ve studied, humans are perhaps the most social. There are species of monkeys that have thousand member clans, but outside of human society, it is extremely rare to find a united social group that has over 50 members. Humans, on the other hand, have millions of people living in different cities… There are nations with billions of residents, each person identifying themselves as a part of the whole.

Maps, Territories… What’s the Difference?

I think that our ability to have such large social groups is what allowed humans to use technology.

The English language doesn’t have a phrase for what I want to describe… Instead, I’ll use a psychological trick involving visualization.

Take five seconds to think of a block of wood.

Now, without trying to imagine a new block of wood, only remembering what you had imagined during those five seconds, answer these questions:

What color was it?
How much did it weigh?
What shape was it?
Was it rough, sanded, or splintered?
Was it thin grained or thick grained?

Here are my answers. For those five seconds, I had a clear block of wood that didn’t have any weight. It had the proportions of 1×2x4, was not splintered, but there was no texture to it, and it was thick grained.

While thinking about the questions, of course I tried to come up with answers that matched most blocks of wood… My first thought about color was that it was light brown… but when I first visualized it, I wasn’t thinking about color at all… Color simply didn’t matter.

It seemed that what did matter to me was that the block of wood had a rectangular, blocky shape, and it had a wood grain. If I thought to ask about a stick, then I would have imagined a small branch with dark brown bark and one natural bend… but I would not have thought of a grain, length, or weight.

In fact, throughout that entire visualization exercise, I never thought about the smell, taste, our sound of the wood… A lot of information was left out… yet I know that I thought of a block of wood.

This is how our memories are organized… We store the fewest details possible to identify something as unique, and we’re almost always wrong about those details. If you think back to your dinner last night, can you remember noticing the design on your plate? Can you remember how your plate was oriented?

Of course, these details are useless in our day to day life, so we don’t even want to remember them… Yet, it leads me to believe that our minds are extremely storage efficient; we can’t simply think of a block of wood and instantly get all of the information we need… We have to dig into the wood with all of our senses before we have a complete visualization.

And, we do the same thing with other people. Inside of our own memories, each person is identified by their most unique traits. I’m certain that I’m identified by many readers by how I meander through topics, take short tangents, and write monolithic posts. (Trust me, today’s meandering through topics is well worth it… I have a clear goal and a path to get there.)

Just as we have a ‘generic’ block of wood in our minds, we also have a ‘generic’ person in our minds. This generic person has all of the rules that we think people will follow… It is our model from which we build all other people in our minds. Unfortunately, if we found someone who exactly matched this generic model, we would quickly forget them.

We identify specific blocks of wood by putting unique labels on top of our generic block. If I wanted to remember my dad’s workbench, which was made up of three 8 inch by 12 inch by 4 foot logs that had been squared off, then I would assign labels of size, weight, color, grain, smell, texture, and the fact that it was always cluttered with tools. There isn’t enough detail for me to draw the bench from memory… but I could compare it to any other bench and identify it uniquely.

We do the same thing with people. Besides putting an appearance on our generic idea of a person, we also put personality quirks, voice, and long time behaviors on top to make a doll in our own minds of who that person is. Anything that we don’t know about that person remains generic… it gets inherited from our idea of a generic person. If we believe that most people are Jehovah-fearing Christians, then you’ll label your generic model of people as Christian. Only when someone doesn’t match your ideas of the generic Christian will you question your ideas and put a special label on your mental doll.

Taking Care of Your Generic Model

Our generic model of people comes from a combination of the most common traits that different people have. Fortunately, we don’t have to decide what is most common and what makes a person unique… Our dreams do that for us automatically.

Unfortunately, however, if we know a lot of people who we don’t like, our generic model of people will start taking on those same traits. By far, the vast majority of people want to be good. The problem, though, is that these people will match your expectations unconsciously… I personally guarantee that I’ll be the person you expect me to be.

This means that people will unconsciously fit within your generic model. It does create a question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, but it also gives us a lot of subjective control over our environment. (Think about the Law of Attraction… This is where that partial theory of subjective power really comes from.)

If we change our subjective generic model, we change our expectations of how people would behave. As our expectations of people change, they subconsciously pick up on those new expectations and start acting accordingly. As people’s behaviors change, it changes our subjective generic model… It becomes a feedback loop that gets easier to maintain over time.

Starting a New Loop

How, then, do we jump-start the process of changing our expectations and our generic models?

Well, the same things that work on people in the “real” world also works within our subjective models. Humans are social creatures, which means that we respond very favorably to gifts of any sort… from money to cars to food, and even (especially) simply expressing your appreciation.

We can’t give gifts to our generic model directly… It is nothing more than a shadow and a script of default behaviors. There would be no point, because our generic model resides purely inside of our subconscious minds, and the best that our conscious mind can do is catch short glimpses here and there.

Instead, we can give gifts to the dolls that flesh out our generic model… We can give directly to our memories of people.

To find out what gifts would be most appropriate, we simply have to look at what we ourselves want. Remember, these imaginary dolls are a part of ourselves, and while they’re based on other people, they also respond the same way we would respond, if we were in their situation.

I know that if I ever hurt someone, guilt would eat me up… I would have two choices, either to ignore the guilt and justify my actions, or to seek to ease their suffering. If I saw that a person wasn’t willing to accept my apologies and gifts of penance, then I would ignore the guilt and patch up my ego as best as I could. This is actually how I see other people reacting to me as well… The best thing that I could do to someone who hurt me is to give them a gift of accepting their apologies and penance… of appreciating their concern.

Now, I don’t know if the real person would be willing to admit guilt or not until I’ve tried to accept their apologies… Perhaps they’ve sheltered their egos from harm so much that they’re incapable of understanding that they’ve hurt someone. That isn’t my problem yet, though. My problem is that my mental image of them is hurting how I view other people. If a person is being carried away by a raging river, I can’t help them if I’m stuck in the same river… In that situation, the best I could do for them would be to let them use my body as a flotation device… and then, I’d only be able to help one person once. If, instead of jumping in the river to save them, I brought a boat with plenty of line, then I could continue to save people until I ran out of room… then I’d only have to return to shore before venturing back to the river to save more.

Along those same lines, I can not ease the suffering of someone else’s ego if my ego is suffering… At best, I could only let them step on me and exhaust my ego’s usefulness. If, instead, I put my ego into somewhere safe (until my ego no longer causes any suffering… which is still years away), then I can go in and ease other people’s suffering as much as I want.

So, if I’m to help anybody, I have to be on a firm foundation and be the first to throw out the rope… I must give first, or forgive by appreciating their desire to ease my suffering… even if they have not yet shown that desire.

This is the key to starting a new feedback loop to change our expectations of others… We must be the first to give them a gift, even if they aren’t offering one in exchange.

Often, with people who have a heavily defended ego, it would be viewed as an assault to forgive them directly. Instead, sit down in visualization/meditation/prayer with their subjective doll and have that doll apologize. Return that gift of kindness by honestly accepting that apology, then treat the real person as though they had apologized in real life. More often than not, you’ll find another apology following from the person themselves.

disclaimer: If the person is a threat to your health and safety, avoid them, no matter how much their subjective doll has apologized and how honestly you have accepted them. I am not advocating you putting your life in danger. Use your best judgment and if you have realistic doubts, keep this as a mental exercise. Still forgive the person subjectively, because that will vastly improve your relationships with everybody else, but don’t put yourself into danger unnecessarily.

Staying in the New Rut

Forgiveness is wonderful for getting out of your old rut. Remember, though, that forgiveness is simply the first time that you accept and appreciate a gift from another person. The important thing to recognize, though, is that a rut exists simply because it is the most traveled portion of a road… Depending on the road, a rut can make travel easier or make it harder. Ruts in stone roads can smooth out the bumps, but ruts in dirt roads collect water, making the wheels eventually grind to a halt in the mud.

Forgiveness gets you out of the rut in the dirt road, but unless we find a different road made out of stone, then the moment we relax, we’ll find that we are back in the rut.

Acceptance is the stone road of the analogy. Acceptance is receiving everything into our lives as though they were gifts. If we accepted gifts all day, every day, wouldn’t we be very happy indeed?

It takes practice to recognize things as gifts, and some things take a wild stretch of the imagination to see as a gift. Personally, I can only see a silver lining in my hip going bad at a young age… the rest is a giant storm cloud for me right now. This is one area of my life where I recognize that I need to find more peace and acceptance.

The question is, how do we accept a gift?

Do we open the wrapping, thank the giver, then place the box in a closet? Does that really show that we accepted the gift?

How about if we took the gift, thanked the giver, and placed it in the trash? At least we’re not lying to ourselves like we would be doing if we placed the gift in a closet and never used it.

The way to accept any gift is to use it. If you’re given a sweater around December 25th, then you haven’t truly accepted the sweater until you have used it. At least take it out of the box and hold it for a moment. (I promise, I won’t be giving anyone any sweaters at the end of this year, even if they do have reindeer and snowmen woven in. Everyone can breath a sigh of relief now.)

How to Use Our Gifts

It may seem silly for me to have a section devoted simply to using gifts… Please bear with me, I do have a point coming up.

How do you use any object?

You simply pick it up and use it, right?

For large objects, picking it up might be inappropriate… A car, for instance, would be very difficult to lift. In this case, “picking up” the car would be getting inside and turning it on. Using it would be driving it to your destination.

What a lot of people forget, though, is that once they’re done using something, they set it back down. When you’re done with dinner, you put your fork down. When you have reached your destination, you turn your car off and get out. When you have used your remote control to change the channel, it gets placed on the couch so that it can slide between the cushions.

Our memories and emotions are gifts too. They must be used in order to accept them. If we don’t accept them, then we’re violating the first virtue, Honesty, and we drift away from reality. Even the most painful memories exist as gifts, and their purpose is to bring us closer to reality.

How do we use them, then?

Well, first, we pick them up. We search our memories for something that might be bothering us, or look for emotions that might be raw, and we pick one. Often, our subconscious mind will very quickly volunteer an event or emotion for us to work with.

Next, we remember what happened… Exactly what happened, not what we would have liked to have happen. If there were emotions involved, then we feel those emotions. If we have visualizations attached to those feelings, then we see those visualizations.

The last and most often overlooked step is to let go. Once we are done with that memory, we thank it and put it back in place… just as we are grateful to our forks so that our hands don’t get dirty while eating, or we’re thankful for our cars so that we can travel quickly. We don’t have to sub-vocalize a statement of thanks… simply appreciate that you had the opportunity to study it, and then let it go.

Just like you wouldn’t carry the fork you used for dinner around until you went to bed, you shouldn’t carry your memories and feelings around in your conscious mind until a new memory comes up. It is either the reluctance to pick up or the reluctance to let go of our feelings that keep us from accepting our own thoughts honestly and living within reality.

The feelings will still be there, if we want them again. When we let them go, we aren’t dropping them in the trash, they go into the care of our subconscious, which then re-examines the feelings and files them away. If we have memories that are somehow important, our subconscious will bring them up… We simply have to pick them up, remember/feel fully, and then give it back to our subconscious. If we missed something, then when our subconscious goes through its sorting routine, it will notice and give us back that memory. Fortunately, it will be easier to use that memory/feeling the next time it comes up, until we don’t have to worry about it any more.

Letting go is just as easy as setting a paper on our desk and walking away. The night crew (our subconscious) will file the paper appropriately, and let us know if we have more work to do in the morning.

Just as people appreciate having gifts accepted graciously, our own subconscious appreciates this as well. The more that you accept from your memories and feelings, the better the quality those memories and feelings will be.

Link Love

Just in case anybody was wondering, I do have a purpose for placing the Link Love section above the Reader Question section. This is so that there is always a little more interest in continuing to read, and because of this, people will read through the link love, hopefully find the presented site interesting, and when they’re done answering the question, will remember the last thing they read. In this case, it is presenting Adam Karemer’s site, JoyChaser.com, and highlighting his article How My Laptop Is Helping Me Lose Weight. It gives a useful tip in multitasking: Do something that commits you to doing something else.

In Adam’s case, he walks to his local coffee shop so that he can write his posts in a comfortable setting. This also forces him to walk back as well, pushing him further than if he had simply went out to walk around his neighborhood until he got tired. He starts with a goal in mind, and because he is looking for ways to group different activities, he ends up achieving two goals at the same time.

Reader Question

I have to admit, I’m tempted to ask who you would have the hardest time forgiving. That’s not a fair question, though, because there are a lot of defenses built up around the ego that prevent that question from being answered, and it isn’t my goal to destroy the defenses of the ego, but to lower them one layer at a time, at a comfortable pace. Also, there are some people who have been forgiving others for a very long time, and it’s not fair to give them such an easy question.

Instead… I’ve presented my analogy for human consciousness as a model that computers can host, both with the right hardware and software. Everybody has analogies, models, and symbols that help them understand topics better… What is your analogy for consciousness, what are its symbols, and what type of model best describes it?

For those who don’t care to look back in my archive, here is my model of consciousness once again:

Analogy: Computers

Symbols: Database arrays for long-term memory; “hashed” numbers for compressed ideas (immediate thoughts aren’t the actual experiences); processors for individual collections of neurons; sensors, keyboards, cameras for the different senses.

Model: It is a computer system made up of a lot of generic processors… different computers all built the same way. Each processor has different software running it, performing tasks such as taking in information directly (i.e., from the cameras, temperature sensors, keyboards, etc… the system’s senses), organizing and filtering the information, and either making decisions (the main consciousness), or sorting the information for future use (the sub-consciousness).

Note: This is part 1 of a 4 part series, not including the introduction and conclusion. The introduction is titled Peaceful Virtues, and has links to the rest of the articles in the series.

I said in the introduction to this series that Honesty forms the foundation of peace.

The reason why is simple: Honesty is the connection to reality. It is the only means that we can use to change ourselves and change the world.

Now, some people may ask, “Aren’t we already living in reality?”

Well, of course, yes we’re living in reality. At least, our bodies are. Our consciousness, however, doesn’t touch reality directly. Our thoughts can not smell a rose, or climb a tree. Our ideas can not write a program or get a promotion. Only our bodies can do these things, under the guidance of our minds.

I can imagine writing a program, but unless I guide my body to take action, the program never gets written. I can imagine the smell of a flower, but if my nose had never smelled a flower before, how can I know what one smells like?

The very essence of our thoughts lie just outside of objective reality. Every physical experience must be translated from the objective world into the subjective world before it can enter our conscious awareness. Every thought must be translated into physical action, whether it be moving muscles or pushing air past our vocal cords and tongue. Without this translation into action, none of our thoughts will manifest in the objective world.

Because our consciousness is separate from the objective world, we have the ability to experience things that aren’t real. This is great, because it lets us plan and remember, but if our consciousness is focused on the ideas that don’t match with the objective world, our actions will have little effect.

Paradigms, Pair o’ Dimes

Our lower-level neurons are wonderful at filtering out our environment, giving us the information that is the most useful. The problem is that we’re not born knowing what is useful information in today’s world. When you’re reading this, you see words on the screen, and your thoughts turn to the audio version of those words, so you can ‘hear’ without hearing… This is an example of certain neurons being trained to tease out useful information from your environment, and it happens very automatically. Nobody was born with this ability, it had to be learned.

What about the recent stock market turbulence? For most people, the turbulence says that investing in the stock market is unsafe… there is simply too much risk. It tells me, however, that the stock market is having a sale and it is prime time to jump in. The only reason why I think that it is time to buy is because I have changed the filter that processes information about the stock market. My paradigm is different, and it has been changed by a conscious decision.

This is one key to honesty. You must look at the world as it is, then change your paradigms to match. If we turned things around, looking at the world through our paradigms first, then deciding how the world really is, then we only reinforce the paradigm, no matter how close to objective reality that paradigm is. The Law of Attraction is a wonderful example of reinforcing a paradigm this way, especially because we are told to look first through the paradigm of Intention-Manifestation to see if that paradigm is good.

The Law of Attraction is not a bad paradigm, in my opinion… I simply see it as incomplete. If you believe that the world is flat, and you never needed to navigate far enough for the curvature of the Earth to matter, then your paradigm works, and works wonderfully. If you wanted to fly across the Pacific, though, you’ll find that the curvature of the Earth matters a great deal, especially when it comes to minimizing fuel costs, if you can even find your destination.

The Law of Attraction is part of the Placebo Effect. Unfortunately, it looses its power when viewed that way, because placebos require the subject to believe that the power/drug/law/solution is real. Fortunately, if you have been working under a placebo, you can look at the reality of your situation and realize that you don’t need the placebo in order to achieve the same results… You have already been succeeding on your own, and the training wheels were only there for looks.

Being Honest

First, to be honest, you must be honest with yourself. Doing this takes time and practice, and requires stripping away both pride and humility, if only while you’re exploring reality.

What prompted me to start taking an honest look at myself was when I noticed my pride getting in my way. As I’ve noted in a previous post, my pride prevented me from sharing what I viewed as failures, which limited the help that I could both give and receive through this site. I had tried to quit smoking, posted about it, and made it two weeks before returning to the cigarettes. Because I was prideful about quitting, I wouldn’t admit that I had started smoking again. Looking back, if I had kept my pride, I wouldn’t be able to relate my story of quitting smoking and the insight that it gave me about people’s expectations.

On the same hand, humility can be just as limiting as false pride. I am good at writing software (I’m not the greatest out there, of course), but for a very long time, I hid my talents simply because I wasn’t the best. This kept me from taking chances and trying new things. Looking back, I believe that taking chances is one of the best educational tools I have.

Neither pride nor humility are honesty. They are versions of our perceptions. Neither are empowering and neither give us peace. False humility can help us in our relations with others, if we’re unwilling to show them our true self. False pride can open some opportunities to continue to challenge ourselves… yet the problem comes when we have to continue to live outside of reality, and we have to limit ourselves to fit within our stated humility or we have to continue to create deceptions to prevent the true nature of our pride from showing through.

These are easy to see, when we’re being humble or prideful to someone else, but what about ourselves? Can we tell when the only thing holding us back from success is our own humility? Or, more likely, do we continue to use external excuses to explain why we don’t challenge ourselves and grow internally? Can we tell when our pride is keeping us from seeing the reality of the situation? Or, more likely, do we continue to blame poor luck and terrible circumstances for why we can’t perform beyond our abilities?

How to be Honest with Ourselves

This creates a question: How can we be honest with ourselves?

We can’t, unfortunately, simply step outside of our paradigms and examine reality as it truly is… Our minds are built upon several layers of nerves and different filtering systems that are essential to gain the most basic understanding of the world. No matter how flawed our view of reality might be, if we did not have paradigms, we would not have any connection to reality to begin with, and would never be able to examine reality. We will simply never have access to reality in the raw, because our consciousness doesn’t exist within the objective universe.

What we can do, instead, is look at the filters that we have in place, and ask ourselves if there is any other way to look at the world. This is a very slow process that is both methodical and intuitive, just as most discoveries about the nature of reality are. Sir Isaac Newton revolutionized physics by asking why objects fall towards the ground, which was started off by a sudden burst of inspiration followed by methodical measuring and several more sudden bursts of inspiration. The bursts of intuition were built upon the methodical observations, and these observations led to more bursts of inspiration.

First, most importantly, we need to be alright with proving ourselves wrong. I have taken on a new saying: I don’t care if I’m right today, as long as I’m right tomorrow. Being honest with yourself means accepting that the beliefs you hold right now might not match up with reality, and it is the process of moving closer to the reality of the situation which is important, not starting out being close to reality.

Just as a board game where everybody begins at the last square is not one worth playing, if we were born knowing the truth about reality, there would be no way to improve ourselves. Looking at what I have learned already, as well as at the questions left unanswered, I don’t think that I will ever learn all that there is to learn… yet it is the process of moving forward which provides the most joy and which gives me the greatest sense of peace.

Question of the Day

Alright, I want honest answers from everyone. What is your primary purpose in life, and what virtue makes up its foundation?

And, since I haven’t said it for a long while, I’ll repeat my chosen purpose: “To bring peace to everybody.”

Link Love

I’ve already featured him, but Albert of Urban Monk has written a very thought-provoking article that touches on my latest rounds of philosophical musings. While his article may be more appropriate for next Wednesday’s post on Awareness, a huge part of me is impatient, and I want to share what he has written right now. In his latest article, The Beauty of Impermanency and the Illusion of the Ego, Albert cuts to the core of philosophy, asking where the ego and consciousness reside… It is the same question that I am struggling with right now, especially after writing about how an artificial consciousness could be possible with today’s technology.

The reader comments on the post Subliminal Subjective Expectations from Friday have given me a few things to think about.

First, I’m noticing that people expect me to be honest. Vitor of The Fractal Forest was the first person who used the word honest, but our resident Urban Monk Albert started the ball rolling when he said that I should be myself, living the ultimate form of honesty. Kara-Leah (who is no longer blogging, so unfortunately I can’t link to her site) didn’t write the expectations that she wants me to live up to… rather, she proposed a new idea: to live without the filter of expectations. Using her advice could most certainly lead to living the truth, since without expectations, only the truth remains. Finally, Jonathan of Advanced Life Skills points out that people expect an uncommon amount of honesty from me.

For those who haven’t done so yet, I highly recommend reading each comment on the last post.

What is my opinion of all of this? Well, I’m flattered, and a part of me feels undeserving of such high expectations.

Which came first, the expectation or the behavior?

Vitor said that an expectation that other people have for him is that he will be responsible. Expectations like these are both created within and reinforced from outside. People expect Vitor to be responsible because he is responsible… and he continues to be responsible because people expect him to be. It creates a nice little paradox, and a question of which came first, his responsibility or the expectation of his responsibility.

I haven’t always been expected to be honest. Indeed, the opposite was expected out of me for a very long time. Just as in the movie The Matrix, nobody knows who started the war between AI and humans, the fact remained that there was a war. It seems more likely to me that it was a mutual distrust, slowly building up until each group, from their own point of view, could honestly say that the other group started it all.

One of the strengths of the much-hyped Subjective Reality model is that it concentrates on what is happening right now, without blaming the past or the future. After all, if neither are set in stone (since we can always change who we are right now), then the past and future have less relevance to our lives. It turns out that it doesn’t matter how Vitor started being responsible, except if you want to duplicate his first steps. It matters that he is responsible right now, and if the feedback loop were to fail at some point, it would be more difficult for him to remain responsible.

I grew up thinking of myself as a liar. It was easy to think of myself that way, because that is what I saw other people expecting out of me. Perhaps I pushed my boundaries a few too many times as a young child… Perhaps my father was too quick to judge my behavior… How I became a liar doesn’t matter, and both my father and I could rightfully argue about why I became a liar… but that doesn’t matter today. I changed my expectations about myself, and I changed my behavior. When other people noticed my behavior change, they changed their expectations about me. This change in their expectations made it easier for me to continue the behaviors I wanted, because I didn’t have to worry about living up to those ideals… I could now enjoy living up to those ideals.

Scott H Young of the eponymous site ScottHYoung.com seems to be working on people’s expectations about him partying. Now, personally, I think that partying is a great thing. It allows us to find pleasure which, if used responsibly, greatly relieves our stress and allows us to open our minds to new experiences. From what I can tell of his latest post, Partying and Personal Development, Scott (probably rightly) believes that people have certain expectations about people who party, and vastly different expectations of people working on personal development. After all, the poster-boy of Personal Development is Steve Pavlina, a color-blind vegetarian who listens to new-age music and uses his desk water fountain as a type of clock. The typical party-goer gets D’s and C’s in college, rarely studies, and is often found on the street at night combating alcohol poisoning by regurgitating their stomach’s contents. (To be honest, I’ve fought off alcohol poisoning more times than I care to admit. For nearly two years, I would be violently ill from drunkenness about once a week.)

Scott is trying to change the expectations of his readers by describing his motivation for partying. Instead of going to clubs in order to get drunk (as I’ve done many, many times), he goes to meet people and improve his social skills. I went to bars in order to escape from an unimaginative life, where he goes to challenge his shyness and gain inspiration. The methods are the same… We go out, find a bar or club, and order drinks… but the results are different because our expectations are different.

Jump Starting an Expectation

Probably the most empowering part of this whole process that I’ve been going through has been sharing it with others. By admitting that I have lied (or at least not been completely honest) before, and publicly stating that I am working towards changing my motivations, I created both the chicken and the egg at the same time. When I started being completely honest on this blog, I had my own doubts about how successful I would be. I just knew that if I couldn’t be honest, then it wasn’t worth the trouble of writing here. It was becoming an exhausting chore to keep up the false image, especially when so much of my life was pushing me in different directions. Once I put it down in words and saw that people were reading it, I gained motivation to keep up the ‘new me.’ After I noticed people’s expectations about me change, it became much easier to be honest, and the ‘new me’ simply became ‘me.’

Of course, it isn’t all roses and kittens. Lying is addictive, though fortunately there aren’t withdrawal symptoms like with physical addictions. Lying gives me adrenaline, which gives me pleasure. I still have to recognize when I’m starting to lie, and interject a short pause while I take stock in myself. Fortunately, my wife has become very observant, and recognizes that the short pause means I’m considering a lie, so at that point, there is absolutely no way for me to lie and get away with it. Just as she expects me to continue to get better at telling the truth, I expect her to continue to be wary and hold me accountable, so that I don’t lie again.

Another expectation that I’m working on is to get housework done. Unfortunately, there is no way for people online to double check on me and hold me accountable to myself, so I can’t ask you to change your expectations here. Besides, if I ever did master the act of cleaning the litter box daily, then what example of irresponsibility would I have to write about? It would turn into an example of responsibility, and I would probably sound like I’m preaching when I explain how I was finally able to get past this hurdle.

Perhaps that is part of the problem, though. I am concentrating on overcoming my problems so much that I don’t actually act.

Yes, I do suffer from the common Personal Development Newbie problem of thinking instead of acting. I am improving, though, at a drastic rate. Each time I rate my progress though, I keep seeing the horizon get further and further away, instead of noticing that the place I started at has dipped below the horizon behind me.

Quote from KL: In this gap, joy and love explode effortlessly. Or they don’t.

There is one more thing that I’d like to add before wrapping this up. KL left a comment that seemed to be a little cryptic. Here’s my understanding of what she said, and if I get it wrong, KL, please correct me. (I’m also adding in a few of my own thoughts that I’ve had since after reading her comment as well… I definitely threw my own tangent into this)

Talking about changing your expectations is all great and wonderful… Actually changing your expectations is also great, if that is what your goal is. What about not having expectations, though?

Well, the truth is that our expectations are tools of the ego. Our expectations about ourselves are the very foundations of the ego, and our expectations of others are the tools that the ego uses to gain control of our environment. If we live without expectations, then we are outside of the control of the ego. Trust me when I say this: I am nowhere near the ability to suppress and overcome the ego. I am, however, taking the first steps.

It is said that the state of mind that comes with overcoming the ego is one of bliss, joy, and peace… as pleasurable as any drug without the nasty side-effects. That’s quite an ideal to live up to… yet it takes a discipline that I’m barely becoming aware of in myself.

I’d like to throw in an analogy, simply because I like analogies so much. Think of your own muscles. Chances are, you’re able to sit still for long periods of time… your arms and legs don’t go flailing about randomly. If you tossed a wadded up paper at a trash can, you can usually make it in, or at least get very close. The wadded up ball of trash doesn’t go flying behind you, at the very least.

What about children, though? Infants don’t stop moving except when they’re asleep… They’re always doing something. If you have ever seen a toddler learning how to throw a ball, you know that the ball has just as much chance of landing on the kid’s head as it does of landing anywhere else. The reason why you can sit still is because you have learned how to move your muscles. The reason why you can toss paper in a garbage can is because you have practiced and fine-tuned your movements so that, rather than clumsily dropping the paper behind you, it is second nature to move your arm in just the right way… you don’t even think about how you’re moving your arm anymore, or even notice when you lean slightly forward as you make your toss.

The same could be said about our expectations and the ego that these expectations create. I feel like the toddler learning how to toss a ball so that it at least lands in front of me… I have just recently learned that I actually have control over my expectations, just as infants have to learn that they have control of their arms and legs. With practice, perhaps in time, I’ll be able to wield my expectations like a professional. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to hold my expectations still long enough that I can feel that bliss, joy, and peace. Until then, it is a matter of testing and trying… of changing my paradigms to see which ones produce the best results, and changing my expectations until I find a mold that I fit in perfectly.

Of course, if I do decide to live without expectations, then I wouldn’t expect the peace and joy… It would come, or it wouldn’t, depending on what was really there.

Link Love:

I already included Scott H Young’s site in this post… and I think that this would be a perfect time to introduce him to everybody. I found Scott’s site after looking at some of the features of Google Reader, and seeing his site as one recommended for me to read. Scott is a pantheist, as I am (though he prefers the label atheist, because it is easier to explain). Scott is a vegetarian, as I am not. And, Scott has some pretty good articles, such as the one about partying and exploring personal development.

And now, the reader question: If people had to sum up their expectations of you in one word, what would it be? Do you feel that you deserve that expectation? And, what did you do to earn that expectation?

You might want to ask your friends and family about this one… I certainly didn’t expect my main expectation to be honesty.