Category: rules to live by

thought distortions

Recently someone said this to me, “Observe yourself without judgment.” Just that.

I had told her about the judgments I constantly make, after understanding that hard and fast judgments about myself and others are, in fact, thought distortions because they don’t include context. Context is everything. Most of our judgments stem from prejudice and create a false context I had said. And this was her response.

After practicing this for a period of time, my mind started coming unmoored and I had a minor satori. It was almost zen-like. Practicing observation without judgment leads to freedom and anyone can do it.

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Another of Werner’s aphorisms that I particularly liked was this: Want it to be the way it is. Like the others, it sounds simple on its face. It’s a kind of anti-prayer. Instead of wanting god to change things for the better, you tell yourself to feel the full force of reality and get on with it. It is like a version of the Serenity Prayer. If you can’t change it, deal with it.

Over the years, however, I’ve come to realize that this saying doesn’t really make sense. It is impossible to know anything with enough certainty to change or accept it. Reality is not binary. Our perceptions can shift on a dime and are often beyond our control.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t have control at times. We do, but much less than we think. We are a bunch of contradictions held together by a very deep core of knowing, and, as such, mysteries. The sad part of living is that we put a false veneer of simplicity and control over everything. We constantly judge ourselves and others and imagine those judgments are true.

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One of my favorite Werner Erhard aphorisms is this: Life works when you keep your agreements. From what I’ve heard and read, Werner wanted things his way, and I sometimes thought this expression was also a form of control. You know, Get off it! You said you were going to do it, now do it!

To me, this epigram is ambiguous for two reasons (1) I am not enlightened (as Werner briefly was), and (2), there are so many agreements in our lives we are unconscious of, or barely conscious of, that I couldn’t possibly manage them all. It’s a great expression though—pithy, ironic, and true—a koan.

Anyway, over time, I boiled it down to something much simpler, something I could get my head around. Here’s my way of saying it: Life works when you stop feeling sorry for yourself.

press the :mute: button

No one (not your mother, your sister, your sons, or your wife) knows you the way you know yourself, nor should you expect them to. The corollary is similar. One knows almost nothing of the real reasons and motives of how those you love interact with you, and the fact is you don’t need to. It is this hunger to know, to create meaning, which generates the cognitive dissonance that makes us crazy. One must stay relaxed and firm in oneself. There is no need to project.