Don't Compare Your Inside to Other People's Outside

In a recent John Water's interview in the Guardian he is quoted as saying, "My policy is 'unless you know the full story, don't judge', and you never know the full story." He said this as a plea for tolerance, people are quick to feel superior to others when confronted with conspicuous difference. But I would expand this belief to the way we perceive others full stop. Don't judge other people's projected identities based on what you perceive those projected identities to mean based on your own perceptions, you may be, and most probably will be, very wrong.

When we go around comparing our inside feeling to other peoples outward appearance. What else can we do? We have no way of knowing what is happening in someones mind. I always tend to think other people are happier than they are, rationally I know they are not, and time and again people shock me with tiny revelations as to the real complexity of their inner, personal lives. But the myth persists. I have to keep telling myself not to judge my inside feelings against the illusory outsides of others.

I often feel confused about myself and my identity. I wonder whether I'm doing the right thing, living the right life. I wonder whether people like me, or secretly gossip when I leave a room, whether I'm intelligent enough to hold an opinion on anything, or whether I'm just a chancer or bore, a half baked ponderer. Everyone has problems with their relationships, with their sense of identity, with their jobs. But most people's outward face has a similar expression, mostly brave. We smile at each other and make small talk; whilst our inward dialogue is a mass of contradictory statements, negative and positive, banal and entertaining, paranoid and confident. 

We see a smiling couple and we assume that this simple outward appearance is all the information that we need. 'Look, they're happy. I wish I was that happy. Why am I not that happy?' But what people say, and especially how they look, is never the whole story. People talk themselves up, both to present a confident face to the world and also to prevent others from having to feel responsible for their problems. I am often amazed by how bad I am at judging other people's inner lives. I will always assume the best in others and the worst in myself.

Our life is not our life

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.

― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Is Happiness Nothingness?

I'm taking a stand against myself, against my past, my present and my future.

I found this article form the New York times that I obviously found incredibly interesting!

When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays:

I've said before that I think that depression can be an illness related to perception, but I think that it can also be an illness of misdirected hyper-focus. When unhappy I become the most important creature in the world, I cannot think of anything but who I am (or believe myself to be), who I have been (or believe myself to have been) and what I am to become (or what I speculate may happen sometime in the future). When I begin to drift out of my low state I know I am feeling better because I start to have minutes and hours where I am not obsessively looking inward and analysing my situation with pity. I have minutes, followed by hours followed eventually by days where I forget to remember I am ill.  I don't become "happy", I just stop being aware of myself obsessively thinking. This leads me to think that happiness, perhaps, isn't about gaining anything, it is the opposite, a lack of the presence of our internal voice.  A state where, briefly, conscious thought retreats and for a moment we have no-thing to grasp on to.

For me, the moments when happiness, or perhaps joy, invades are the moments in which everything else retreats. Moments of high concentration when you are not thinking about the past, or creating various scenarios about how your future will pan out. Moments that you forget the person that you think you are. Getting lost in music, reading, exercising. This can be a moment when a great rush of your present "aliveness" fills your mind.  I feel this sometimes when I am lost in music (caught in a trap!) or at the perilous apex of a roller coaster, just before the drop. Conversely it can arrive when you are concentrating hard on the thing that is there, in front of you. One aspect that I enjoy about meditation is the conscious attempt to remove all thoughts of the future and the past from my mind.

Perhaps happiness isn't a thing to be maintained, it is a mind state that we can only ever glimpse. In fact perhaps once you are aware of it, and begin to examine it, it disappears. Like, we are told, when a Buddhist briefly glimpses nirvana. We rarely say "I am happy now" but we often say "I was happiest when..." or "I was so happy then". Perhaps happiness is something that can only exist in the past, a state of mind relative to how we are feeling now?  Perhaps the best we can hope for is contentment, a state of mind achievable when we become aware that all worry is temporary, even illusory, and will pass this time as it has a million times before.

Drinking and narcotics are very good at replicating these feelings. For me they obliterate everything but that which is happening NOW. It's not that drugs and alcohol make nothing matter to us, I think that they bring the present into sharp focus and relegate the past and the future to their rightful places as speculative, ephemeral concepts that shackle us in our, very sober, everyday lives. No wonder they are so addictive.  Strangely, Perhaps, travelling also elicits in me similar feelings. When my starting point is in the past and my destination is some time away It is easier to for me to embrace the present. Time spent on the journey is enforced powerlessness, you can do nothing about your present reality but go with the flow. It often gives me a unique sense of pleasure.

Of course religion and faith also replicate these feelings.  As well as reinforcing certainty, and therefore lessening doubt, a Christian might be absolved of responsibility for his past deeds, and guaranteed a rapturous future beyond his imagining. A belief that heaven awaits will tend to make your present life on earth of very little consequence. Joy and happiness, even bliss in this regard, come from complete absolution. You no longer have to feel guilty about your past, or constantly pensive about your future, you have been given a get out of jail free card, nothing Earthly matters.

What happiness isn't for me is the model which is sold to us everyday. An obsession with achievement for achievements sake, mundane avarice, shallow pride, the constant approval of others and, above all else, the fetishising and accumulation of objects. Why do I crave new possessions when the thousand times I have wanted something, and got what I wanted, it has never once made me content beyond the fleeting feelings of reward achieved by my making the object that was once imaginary in my life become reality. The objects I crave promise everything but always deliver almost nothing. In fact the frustration that my desire for them caused, and the subsequent disappointment with them when they failed to give me what they promised, means they are actually a cause of net unhappiness. These objects become symbols of my pointless craving and my naive optimism in thinking "this time it will be different". They are reminders that I am constantly blinded by the false promise of advertising as they join the bag of "previously desired things" that I drag through my life.

But we all know that when the worries of the future fly past the present they always turn into the worries of the past but the void that is left is never filled with calm. It is always filled with something else to be concerned about, either regret or guilt at something we have or haven't done or fear and apprehension about some terrible thing that we predict is going to happen. Both sets of fears are our minds creating realities that we can often do nothing about.

 We can either seek to work hard to destroy all of our worries by dealing with them one by one, a herculean task that will never be complete, or we can attempt to become aware of the many ways in which our flawed perception differs from reality and to gain some clarifying perspective on our constant struggles.  Happiness and perspective.  Sometime I am filled with a terrible feeling of dread, or an impending sense of doom, apparently for no reason that I can bring to mind.  In these moments the world seems like a terribly worrying place.  But sometimes within moments this tangible, tasteable dread can vanish if I receive the smallest piece of good news.  On another day this dreadful thought would never occur to me and I would be content.  What has changed? The event that I have made large is entirely illusory; the attention and importance that I gave it at the moment of its appearance is what makes me unhappy.

I'm very interested in the Buddhist concept of being awake to the illusion (a difficult word) of individual conscious experience, and of the human perception of time, the future and the past. I am just beginning to understand the idea that these are concepts that we create and that, in turn, we use as the foundation stones of our identity; pillars on which we balance our subjective perceptions of who we are as we move through time. Maybe if we can try to grasp that these concepts are false structures that we torture ourselves with daily, then perhaps we can attempt to live more for the present, constantly mindful of our present actions and feelings and begin to grasp more often the contentment that comes simply with being alive and aware.

Subjective Reality: Where is the real New York?

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are" Anais Nin .

"The map is not the territory" Alfred Korzybski.

For months before I visit a new place, I hold within me a sense of what the place will be like like. I imagine what the people will be like and what sights, sounds and smells that I will experience when I arrive. If I visit a new city I might study maps of the road layouts around the hotel where I am going to be staying, watch video reportage from it's streets and imagine the different types of food I will eat. For all of my in depth research, these pre-experience activities can never come close to describing the experience of actually being in the place, it is never the same.  In one hour in New York you will know as much about the "New Yorkness" of New York than you could in a lifetime of study.  I desperately wanted to visit New York when I was a teenager.  The city as it existed in my mind was constructed from a hugely detailed database of images and sounds, friends descriptions, food tastes, films, graphic art, television shows and a hundred other secondary sources.  But a construct is all that it was, and such is all pre-experience understanding in life.  

But which is more real, the visceral sense experience of being alive in New York at that particular minute? Or the extensive knowledge of history and culture that a lifetime of learning about a place can bring? Are they as real as each other?  Is my experience of standing on a New York street any more real that my ad-hoc collection of a priori New York knowledge? I say this because no matter how many times I am waiting to travel, no matter how much i think I know what to expect, experiencing a place first hand has always blown my previous perceptions out of the water. I will always end up saying to myself, "This place is nothing like I expected it to be."

Of course an obvious answer is to say that in order to "know", or to have more authentic understanding of a place or thing it is always better to have both prior knowledge and also direct experience of it.  The trouble with this answer for me is that even though i have now been to New York a number of times, the thing that reminds me of the place the most, that gives me the Proustian rush of a whole body memory of New Yorkness, is listening to this piece of music, Angela by Bob James.  





I heard this song every week whilst growing up in Coventry, years before I ever went to the States, and yet listening to it reminds me of the New York I visited 25 years later.  The theme from Taxi is as much a part of my experience of New York as central park zoo and the smell of side-walk hot dogs. I consciously know that this facet of my New York knowledge relates to a vision of the place that is romanticised and created entirely for TV, but my subconscious doesn't care, it treats the experience of primary source material and secondary fictional source material as being of equal value; In fact it selects the secondary material as being more representative of the thing itself!

Unravelling the spaghetti-like network of thoughts that one has about where our understanding of any particular thing, idea or moral value comes from is practically impossible.  Our views are made up of such a huge web of learning, experience and myth that the best we can hope to do is have an inkling of the stereotypes and predudices that we hold in our minds.    But we don't need to understand where our prejudices and beliefs come from in absolute detail, we only need to know that our views are pretty likely to be best guess assumptions based on a limited number of the total facts available to us at any particular time.  Accept that some of the feelings and beliefs that you hold dear may very well be based on shaky foundations and whenever you feel yourself drifting into a certaintist position think of Ben Goldacre's brilliant phrase and tell yourself "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that". Taking an interest in this difficult area of self knowledge and identity forces us to ask some very tricky questions about who we are and exactly what it is that we believe to be true.  What is quality? What is moral? What tastes nice? Which music is the best? Is TV bad for kids? What is the best way to bring up my children? Is Israel justified in its policy towards Gaza? Does Homoeopathy work? What is truth?

I believe that Robert Anton Wilson had a sensible idea.  He described himself as a "model agnostic" and believed that one should never regard "one model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial."  He also said, in Cosmic Trigger, that "belief is the death of intelligence".  Sage advice I think.