Confirmation Bias and Emily Dickinson

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A friend recently introduced me to the concept of “confirmation bias” which refers to the human tendency to accept into his/her reality only that which is consistent with a pre-existent bias. In other words, we see things as we want to see them. We see only the “small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken). Decades ago I read someone’s observation, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”

Now, of course, being a mere mortal I would like to say that this no longer applies to me, that I have gone a step further and see things clearly, that I see things objectively. But I’ve afraid that I can no longer “lay that flattering unction to my soul” (Hamlet, to his mother). This is a human problem and we cannot escape it. We only see things through a prism, we do not see things objectively.

But, if we understand this notion, it can humble us a bit and we can be a bit less arrogant about our certainties, we can be a bit more accepting of people who are different than us. We might even be a bit more accepting of people who respond to this notion with a blank, bewildered stare!

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about this tendency to construct our reality and then shut out everything else:

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

We do tend to “close the valves of (our) attention like stone” and shut out any further feedback from the world. “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”  This is called insanity.

 

St Augustine Opines on Being and Nothingness

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St. Augustine and I are pals!  I never would have thunk it!  This is a profound observation about the majesty of God and his creation.  (This was posted this morning on (http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/)  By the way, I intend to do a better job of giving credit for where I “steal” some of this stuff!

 

My brothers and sisters, where does time go? The years slip and slide past us, day by day. Those things which were, no longer are; those things yet to come, are not here. The past is dead; the future is yet to come, but only to pass away in turn. Today exists only for the moment in which we speak. Its first hours are already over and behind us, the remainder do not as yet exist; they are still to come, but only to fall into nothingness.

Nothing in this world has constancy in itself. The body does not possess being; it has no permanence. It changes with age; it changes with time and place; it changes as a result of sickness or accident. The stars have as little consistancy; they are always changing in hidden ways, they go whirling into outer space. They are not stable, they do not possess being.

Nor is the human heart any more constant. How often it is disturbed by various conflicting thoughts and ambitions! How many pleasures draw it, one minute this way, and the next minute, that way, tearing it apart! The human spirit, although endowed by God with reason, changes; it does not possess being. It wills and does not will; it knows and does not know; it remembers this but forgets that. No one has unity of being in himself.

After so much suffering, disease, difficulties and pain, let us return humbly to God, to that one Being. Let us enter into that heavenly Jerusalem, that city whose citizens share in Being itself.
Augustine,Commentary on Psalm 121 (Hebrew Ps. 122); CCSL 40, pp. 1801-3; quoted by Robert Atwell,Celebrating the Seasons, Canterbury, 1999, p.416

Lowell

 

“Within be fed, without be rich no more”

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The Republicans have helped me appreciate the gravity of the national debt. And I’m glad to see that the Democrats at least have it on their radar. This problem reflects the penchant that our culture has for preferring unreality, opting to live as if the world is something to exploit and that its resources are endless. At some point reality will when this contest.

This makes me think of an old poem by Stephen Crane:

Said a man to the Universe,
“But sir, I exist.”
Said the Universe in reply,
“That fact creates in my no great obligation.”

We are a nation of addicts and “stuff” is our drug of choice. We just can’t get enough of it. And Gerald May noted decades ago that all human beings have an addiction problem, those who merit the designation “addicts’ are merely the reflection of the spiritual malady that besets us all. The rest of us are just more subtle with our addiction than are substance abusers.

I think the root problem is the sin of misplaced concreteness, taking for real that which is only ephemeral. As John Masefield noted in the 19th century, “Like a lame donkey lured by moving hay, we chase the shade and let the Real be.” The resulting inner emptiness gnaws at our soul and has to be assuaged. W. H. Auden described this spiritual hunger as our “howling appetites.” And I blame our moribund religion for this problem. Our churches rely on a steady diet of dead platitudes, “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken) As Shakespeare noted, “With devotions visage and pious action, they sugar o’er the devil himself.”

I would like to close with my favorite Shakespearean sonnet which addressed this issue, encouraging us to “within be fed, without be rich no more.”

Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,
[Thrall to] these rebel pow’rs that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
  So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
  And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

Auden on the Incarnation

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The Incarnation is the story of the Word being made flesh, the “enfleshment” of the Holy to provide us a model for our life. This incarnation has many dimensions. I like to think of it as the process of “coming down” from our head into our heart, dwelling in our flesh, the mind-body duality finding some degree of resolution. In some sense “coming down from on high” is coming down from our head into our guts, the Word being woven into the fabric of our day to day life. The Gospel becomes experience, no longer consisting of mere dogma that we have imbibed from our Christian culture. Read the following excerpt from W. H. Auden about this process, especially that powerful notion of “flesh and mind being delivered from mistrust.”

If…like your father before you, come
Where thought accuses and feeling mocks,
Believe your pain: praise the scorching rocks
For their desiccation of your lust,
Thank the bitter treatment of the tide
For its dissolution of your pride,
That the whirlwind may arrange your will
And the deluge release it to find
The spring in the desert, the fruitful
Island in the sea, where flesh and mind
Are delivered from mistrust.
(W. H. Auden “The Sea and the Mirror)

“Climb the Rugged Cross of the Moment”

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One thing I love about being involved in the blog-o-sphere is that I learn from my followers. Just yesterday I discovered through one of them about Parker Palmer who I had not heard of before. Here is a note from Wikipedia about Parker’s views on faith:
Faith is not a set of beliefs we are supposed to sign up for he says. It is instead the courage to face our illusions and allow ourselves to be disillusioned by them. It is the courage to walk through our illusions and dispel them. He states the opposite of faith is not doubt, it is fear – fear of abandoning illusions because of our comfort level with them. For example, not everything is measurable and yet so much of what we do has that yardstick applied to it. Another illusion is “I am what I do …. my worth comes from my functioning. If there is to be any love for us, we must succeed at something.” He says in this example that it is more important to be a “human being” rather than a “human doing.” We are not what we do. We are who we are. The rigors of trying to be faithful involves being faithful to one’s gifts, faithful to other’s reality, faithful to the larger need in which we are all embedded, faithful to the possibilities inherent in our common life.

I think it was W. H. Auden who encouraged us to “Climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.” These “illusions” (or pretenses) are flotsam and jetsam we have picked up from the vortex of human culture, a veil we have spun to hide the void. They are essential dimensions of our human, ego identity but when they are the whole of what we know as our identity, then the words of Jesus become relevant, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul.” The teachings of Jesus tell us that there is another dimension to life that we need to access if our life, our ego life, is to have meaning. Having this access does not destroy our very necessary ego life; it merely gives it meaning.

W. H. Auden on Love and Marriage

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W. H. Auden is one of my heroes.  He led a complicated, often tortured life, and out of his pain came some beautiful, inspiring poetry.  As Emily Dickinson  noted, “Essential oils are wrung.  They are the gift of screws.”  Here are several stanzas of one of my favorite Auden poems, “In Sickness and in Health”:

 

Beloved, we are always in the wrong,
Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long,
Too careful even in our selfish loves:
The decorative manias we obey
Die in grimaces round us every day,
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command—Rejoice.

Rejoice. What talent for the makeshift thought
A living corpus out of odds and ends?
What pedagogic patience taught
Pre-occupied and savage elements
To dance into a segregated charm?
Who showed the whirlwind how to be an arm,
And gardened from the wilderness of space
The sensual properties of one dear face?

Rejoice, dear love, in Love’s peremptory word;
All chance, all love, all logic, you and I,
Exist by grace of the Absurd,
And without conscious artifice we die:
O, lest we manufacture in our flesh
The lie of our divinity afresh,
Describe round our chaotic malice now,
The arbitrary circle of a vow.

That this round O of faithfulness we swear
May never wither to an empty nought
Nor petrify into a square,
Mere habits of affection freeze our thought
In their inert society, lest we
Mock virtue with its pious parody
And take our love for granted, Love, permit
Temptations always to endanger it.ty

 

Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear

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Fear abounds today. I see it in the news, I sense it in my day to day social life, and I feel it in my heart. I’m made to recall my early youth when fear really abounded, intensely, when I did not have the grounding that I now have in my life. At times that childhood fear beckons but I’m able to resist.

There are so many who have not been as blessed as I have been and who do not have this “grounding”. With them I see their fear abounding even to the point that paranoia rears its ugly head. And then I see how politicians, with the help of the media, exploits this fear to accomplish their goal—election. It is very sad. I’m made to think of the words of the New Testament (1 John), “Perfect love casteth out fear.” I think of that verse often when this fear besets me.

A favorite blog of mine (http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/) shared an old story I’ve heard from my youth which is so relevant:

I’m reminded of the old Cherokee tale. A Cherokee elder is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil — he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good — he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you — and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Reason has its Limits!

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when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because (e e cummings)

 

This is another one of those poems that I cannot explain but completely love. It is so complicated and inexplicable. To some of you it will probably be nonsense. And it is about “non” sense in that it is about reality that lies beyond the grasp of reason. It is about reality that lies beyond the time-space (i.e. “cause-effect”) continuum.

And to take a quantum leap…as I am wont to do…it is about God for He lies beyond our paltry little world, our rational “dog-and-pony” show. And, yes, He was “made nigh by the blood of Christ” but that doesn’t mean we can apprehend Him with mere reason, with Christian (Biblical) syllogism. We apprehend Him only with faith which means we apprehend him in the context of a whole lot of doubt. We “have Him” only when we “don’t have Him”. This is to allude to the Zen koan from the ‘60’s, “First there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was.” God is present only in his absence.

(AFTERTHOUGHT: Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, only to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”)

(COMIC AFTERTHOUGHT—Quip from David Letterman, re cause-effect, “Mobile home parks cause tornadoes.”

 

Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow

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I share here with you one of my favorite poems but I can’t really tell you why I love it so much. I don’t really understand it. But, it speaks powerfully to me and I share it just in case it speaks to one of you.

It is about reality and its mysterious origin and nature. Reality is just mind-boggingly complicated and we cannot wrap our mind around it, try as we may. I love science and I am so glad we are trying to “wrap our mind around it” but I really thing we will find at the end of our pursuits what Einstein described as “a mystery.” And Einstein said that it was this mystery which gave rise to his “religious sentiment.”

I think we should always be thinking, exploring, hungering, questing but in the end we will have to recognize that mystery and, perhaps, bow down and sing, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”

HOUSE
By E. L. Mayo

House
Vast and ambiguous
Which was before we were

Did you
Build yourself and then grow populous
By taking thought, or

Did someone leave a tap on long ago
In You
Which with its spatter

Affirms at the very least a householder
Who will return at the last if only to
Turn off the water.

Carolyn Briggs: Salvation Lost and Found

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I would like to recommend a very important book for spiritually-minded people, Higher Ground: A Memoir of Salvation Lost and Found by Carolyn Briggs. This is Brigg’s story of being raised in a very hyper-fundamentalist religion and her struggle to escape its oppressive grip on her life. It has now been made into a movie, Higher Ground, which which made Roger Ebert’s April Eberfest and was feted by the Sundance Move Festival in 2011.

I had the great honor of meeting this lovely woman at my church last weekend where she previewed this movie and then was interviewed by our rector about the movie and some of her experiences. Ms. Briggs emanated a lovely spiritual presence as she described her experiences, admitting that there is a sorrow that follows her to this day due to the loss of the certainty that once was such an essential part of her faith. She now recognizes that doubt is part of faith and shared how that now she has a deep, abiding faith in God even though she no longer has the comfort provided by the close-knit (and close-minded) group that she was part of. But she does have the comfort of like-minded kindred spirits, many of which have followed a similar path in their life.

I would also recommend that you read an article by her in Religion Digest last year about her trip to an atheist convention. Her observations are very amusing as they show just how fanatical and obnoxious some atheists can be, much like the “compulsive Christians” that they decry and redicule. (Google Brigg’s name and “atheist convention” and you will find it on the net.)

Let me clarify something about the notion of rejecting one’s faith, evangelical/fundamentalist or otherwise. This “rejection” does not have to be the end of one’s faith. This “rejection” can be merely letting go of the “letter of the law” and embracing the “spirit of the law.” The Bible and Christian dogma is no longer merely ideology with which one has been indoctrinated. It becomes personal and has meaning that it did not have before.

This experience means that we become willing to realize, and humbly experience, that we only “see through a glass darkly.” We do not know objectively the truth. Therefore we can be a little more tolerant of those who believe differently. We do not have to go on witch-hunts, medieval crusades, or jihads. We merely have to let our faith become articulate in our own day to day personal life and any evangelization that needs to take place will come naturally without our manipulative wiles and machinations.