The 6th day of Holly Days focuses on Gratitude. It is amazing how much more we have than we know or can appreciate. It’s going to be 2020, and yet when I was 20, I was pretty certain I would not get to experience the 21st century, let alone the first quarter of it. Somehow that has made it so much more sweet.
We tend to just react to the movie unfolding before our senses, without pulling back and regarding the way it is made. It is a fairly recent discovery that this perception of reality is more of an ad-hoc construct, a simulacrum, carefully filtered by the structure of our minds, to leave only the details most useful for survival. So despite the vivid sense of this reality, it is actually constructed much the way a film crew determines the mise en scene, montage and other details to tell a particular story. When we watch a film, we can often be critical or suspect of the choices, and back up into a more meta perspective that can free us from the manipulation of the storytellers.
We are much less likely to be able to free ourselves from the manipulation of our own subconscious. With this qualia of reality, most of us are completely uncritical, never taking our biases into account, let alone the other manipulations that direct our attention. Listening to the news today in my car–of a young coed stabbed and her even younger attacker, of a bombing on the other side of the world, of the crash of a helicopter full of tourists on the opposite side–my first reaction was of course horror and sympathy, grisly fascination and revulsion. But then, looking around at the hundreds of folks and cars and trains and buildings just within my line of sight, consisting of some tiny fraction of a percent of all the people and places in the world, I was struck, as I often am, at how incredibly safe and peaceful the modern world is.
The loss of the handful of lives being reported to me, as sad as it may be, is such a miniscule fraction of the possible mayhem. Murphy’s Law says anything that can go wrong will go wrong. That is of course, bullshit, but it also makes clear just how tuned our perceptions are to highlight and solve problems. In my line of sight were thousands of tons of cars hurtling by on the highway, just as there are on the other 20 million miles of roadway on earth. All these have their own millions of tons of cars and trucks, in direct contradiction of Murphy, proceeding, almost universally, safely together. In that moment, as I lamented these tragic stories, how many of us were airborne in airliners at that moment? How many in helicopters, how many with access to terrible weapons capable of awful violence? Almost 10 billion of us that share this planet, and in each moment we each have the power and ability to twitch the wheel of our cars, push forward the plane’s yoke or perform any one of thousands of action that could cause disastrous mayhem around us. If Murphy, or our ever-present fears, were accurate, highways would be piled with burning hulks of wrecked cars, aircraft would be falling from the sky into every city and bullets would be raining on us from every direction.
The truth is we measure good and evil in the tiniest of margins of possible mishaps and ill will. Mayhem would ensue if even .000000001% of everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Things actually work remarkably well, with people getting along so well the vast majority of the time, but paying attention to that tiny margin provides a strong survival advantage. Better to freak out and run at every rustle in the bushes, and be wrong about the threat 99.9% of the time, than be compancent and wrong about the threat 1% of the time, and be eaten by the tiger.
But, from a spiritual orientation, it can really soothe our troubled minds, to step back to a meta perspective. In fact aren’t many of the religious philosophies just such an adaption to mitigate this cognitive bias for disaster by imagining a benevolent super power that loves and protects us? Isn’t the hope for the miraculous a refutation of Murphy?
When I pull back from this Murphy-interpretation, governed by my amygdala, to a meta perspective of a more neutral and comprehensive objective reality, untainted by this melodramatic coloring of my mind’s editing, I find a similar sort of spiritual comfort. One where I become deeply grateful that the world is so much more peaceful, beautiful, and creative than it seems to my sense-of-self in any moment.
Happy Gratitude, and
Happy Holly Days
HOLLY DAYS 