for goodness-sake go out of your mind
TRANSCRIPT
For Goodness sake,go out of your mind!
Transforming fear into happiness through Stoicism, Zen, and Poetry
by hacking your behavior algorithms
Eric Driggs
Stoicism
Sees you when you're sleeping
Knows when you're awake
Knows if bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
The Santa ParadoxParents: Be good so you get presents• Is it goodness when you only care about
rewards?• Rewards cannot live up to our expectations
Stoicism: Be good for Goodness sake!• No expectation of reward• Virtue is its own reward• Being good (character) is the purpose of life
Stoicism
Myth Truth
Repressing emotions Awareness of emotions
Cold & unfeeling Kind, positive, and supportive
All work and no play Appropriate leisure strengthens virtue
No pleasure Love of virtue more than pleasure
Suffering through self-denial Freedom from suffering and addiction
The power to choose
“Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
(Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning)
Pain is a stimulus, Suffering is a response
“Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.
Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death that it is terrible.
When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles.”
(Epictetus, The Enchiridion)
Danger is a stimulusAnxiety is a response
• Anxiety comes from the belief that our well-being is not under our control
• If our goodness determines our well-being, and our goodness is under our control, there is nothing left to be anxious about.
Meta-habits create happiness
• Our habits and beliefs determine our responses
• Happiness is a response
• Meta-habits help us debug our habits and beliefs
Stoic Meta-Habits(Relentlessly pursuing better ways to relentlessly pursue
better ways)
Meditate on Challenges & Responses Premeditate Trauma Connectedness (Hierocles Circle) Study goodness Be fully present (Mindfulness) Journal of Challenges & Victories
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.
But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own …. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together….”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
Meditate on Challenges & Responses
(Stoic Meditation)
Imagine the challenges you may face today and how you can respond with • Wisdom • Courage• Self control• Calmness• Kindness
Premeditate Trauma(Premeditatio Malorum)
Imagine a trauma which takes away something which you value (e.g. death, injury, rejection) and how it would not affect your worth or moral value.
Imagine losing anything from Maslow’s pyramid.When trauma happens, we can respond with grace.When trauma doesn’t happen, we can be grateful.
Connectedness(Hierocles circle)
Imagine your mind and body in harmony together.
Now image yourself connected to and in harmony of purpose with those you love most, your family and friends.
Expand the circle of your group by imagining yourself connected to and in harmony with your neighbors and co-workers
Imagine yourself connected to and in harmony with your entire state and country.
Imagine yourself connected to and in harmony with all of mankind and all of earth. Make room for everyone to be connected with you, in harmony together, loving and being loved.
Expand the circle to the 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy, all 100 billion galaxies in the universe and for all time: past, present and future.
Love bigger. Everyone is on your team, whether they realize it or not.
Stoic Habits - DayMindfulness– Pay full attention to whatever you are
doing– Consider the morality of any decisions– Acknowledge distractions then let them
go– Don’t multi-task– Eat the current bite.
The next one hasno flavor.
Study Goodness “What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my own friend. That is progress indeed.
Such will never be alone and you may be sure he is a friend to all.”
Seneca (Letters to a stoic)
• Read a quote or passage from a book which teaches goodness.
• Restate the message into a theme in your own words
• Make the theme your quest for today. You are the hero of your story. Fulfill your quest!
Journal of Challenges & TriumphsBeing your own best friend
Challenges• Where could I have done better? • Which stimuli triggered negative
responses?• Which virtues would have helped?• What responses will I try next time?• What questions am I seeking answers for?
Triumphs• What did I do today that was good?• How have I improved?• What lessons did I learn or apply?• What gave me joy today?
Regression testing for the soul.Unit testing for habits
Overcoming Fears and Bad Habits
Socratic Feedback Loop:Rewiring stimulus and response
• Measure: What am I feeling?
• Compare: What judgments are behind those feelings? Is there another perspective which would make an different judgment?
• Adjust: How would someone I admire respond to this situation? How can I achieve a different result?
Example: Rewiring snack trigger
• Measure: Am I hungry? What else could I be feeling?
• Compare: Is there an event triggering this? (restroom break, post-meal, walking by snack bar, stress, time of day)
• Adjust: Recondition by initiating trigger with opposing response. (e.g. looking at snacks but not taking one at that time OR fast for one day to reset hunger baseline)
Hedonic AdaptationHappiness is relative to a baseline
Opponent Process Theory• The more we are exposed to a stimulus, the
more tolerance (opponent process) we build to it.
• Intensity, frequency and duration of stimulus increase the intensity and duration of the tolerance.
• When we have a high tolerance for something, the effect of the opponent process can be greater than the stimulus.
Tolerance: Opponent Process becomes stronger than stimulus
Tolerance to pleasure can lead to addiction
• Substance abuse ( alcohol, tobacco, caffeine)
• Internet Addiction
• Overeating
• Excessive TV / Video games
Tolerance to discomfortcan lead to well-being
• Intense exercise• Cold showers• Spicy food• Fasting• Meditation• Self-discipline• Facing fears• Public speaking
Zen
Zen Meditation• The art of doing nothing• Nothing is hard to do• No thinking• No thinking about not thinking• Seriously, let your thoughts go• Try observing your breathing
without changing it
Go out of your mind“To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses.
And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.”
(Alan Watts)
What is Zen?• Zen is the experience of being fully present
with all aspects of our selves.• It embraces intuition.• Unmasks the ego as part of us, not all of us.• Reminds us who we are• It brings us back to our senses, to breathing
reality, and away from the recursive world of thinking about thinking.
• It can only be experienced, not understood through words.
Self-improvement Paradox
“The reason why you want to be better is the reason why you aren’t.”
(Alan Watts)
“When the police enter a house in which there are thieves, the thieves go up from the ground floor to the first floor. When the police arrive on the first floor, the thieves have gone up to the second, and so to the third and finally out to the roof.
And so, when the ego is about to be unmasked, it immediately identifies with a higher self. It goes up a level. Because the religious game is simply a refined and highbrow version of the ordinary game: ‘How can I outwit me?… How can I one-up me?’”
(Alan Watts, Comparative Philosophy)
Higher self
Poetry
“The discipline of poetry is in overhearing yourself say difficult truths from which it is impossible to retreat.
Poetry is a break for freedom....to create a door through which others can walk into what previously seemed unobtainable realms, in the passage of a few short lines.”
( David Whyte)Freedom is losing the desire
to retreat
"In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost.
It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear.
It is scarcely less bitter than death: but, in order to tell of the good that I found there, I must tell of the other things I saw there."
Dante (The Inferno)To find ourselves again,we must face our fears
"....What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great. If only we would let ourselves be dominatedas things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternaldoes not want to be bent by us.....
Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.
Rainer Maria Rilke (The Man Watching)
Struggle and failure stretchthe bounds of the possible
“You must learn one thing: the world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.”
(David Whyte, Sweet Darkness)Freedom is inside you.
Silence unlocks its cage.
Conclusion• Be a stoic:
build meta-habits for goodness sake
• Be zen: go out of your mind
• Be a poet: seek the truths you can’t retreat from
Books“Search Inside Yourself” by Chade-Meng Tan
“The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America” by David Whyte
“Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius
“Letters to a stoic” by Seneca
“The Wisdom of Insecurity” by Alan Watts
“The Enchridion” by Epictetus
“The Art of Loving” by Erich Fromm
“As a Man Thinketh” by James Allen
Articles“How to be a stoic” by Massimo Pigliucci http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/how-to-be-a-stoic/
“Opponent process theory ” by Massimo Pigliucci http://gettingstronger.org/2010/05/opponent-process-theory/
“Science Behind the Factoid: Lottery Winners Are No Happier than Quadriplegics”http://science.tumblr.com/post/69234644764/science-behind-the-factoid-lottery-winners-are-no
50 Stoicism quotes by Marcus Aureliushttp://www.kratosguide.com/50-life-lessons-from-marcus-aurelius-emperor-of-rome/
“Stoic Week Handbook”https://philosophy-of-cbt.com/tag/stoic-week/
