Tag Archives: Hamlet

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.

 

Prayer

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“My words fly up. My thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” King Claudius uttered this lament as he knelt in prayer with young Hamlet hovering nearby with murderous intent.

I think this is one of the pithiest notes about prayer that I’ve ever come across. Shakespeare was saying that for prayer to take place, words and thoughts must be conjoined and offered up wholeheartedly. In other words, there must be a singleness of purpose, a sublime focus. There must be meditation.

To Be or Not to Be

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“To be or not to be, that is the question.” That famous observation of Hamlet cuts to the heart of everything, “Do I ‘be’ or do I opt out and choose to no longer ‘be’” Actually, I think this decision is made very early in our embryonic development as our identity, i.e. our be-ing, begins to formulate. Sometimes in that early stage of our life we choose to “not be” and step back into the void that begat us. And even after our birth, as our tenuous ego begins to constellate, I think there are occasions when some people decide, “Hmm. No, don’t think I want to do this” and SIDS takes place.

But most of us opt to decide to “be” and join the human race. But that “be-ing” is very fragile so we must put on a suit of clothes, an ego, and that ego will help us bear those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” So each day we wake up, quickly don our ego once again, and go out into the world and hope and pray, “Please world. Mirror me. Validate me.”

Shakespeare and Self Restraint

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“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking  makes it so.”  This is one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare.  He recognizes the role that reason had in ascribing value to our behavior and formulating social parameters so that we did not ever retreat to our violent, primitive past.  (Oh, let me be honest!  He saw that we could with reason sublimate our nastiness and pretend that we are civilized!)

Where would we be without this filter, though  I’ll take sublimated violence any day of the week over murder and mayhem.  I heard someone quip recently that the U.N. ought to solve recurrent outbreaks of tribal violence by giving th0se tribes N.F.L. franchises.

In another one of Shakespeare’s plays he attributes the beastly behavior of one of his characters to having his passions “outrun the pauser reason.”

And I’ll admit that my “pauser” has not always been operative and it has sure led to some poor decisions.

The Time is Out of Joint!

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“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that I was born to set it right.”

But Hamlet’s observation was skewed by his own personal demons. It was his time (i.e. world) that was out of joint and from his anguished perspective he deemed the whole of Denmark “out of joint.”

The doom-sayers, the proponents of “apocalypse now” always trouble me. Been there, done that…but grew out of it at some point. Yes, the world is always “out of joint” in that it is populated with individuals who are all too human. And, yes collectively we need to attempt to address this “dis-jointedness.” And even individually we have some responsibility to participate in this collective purge of the commonweal.

But our main focus always needs to be on our own “dis-jointedness”, our own brokenness, our own grave limitations. It is much too easy to avoid our personal woes and obsess with how evil the world or particular individuals are. The evils of the world can most effectively be addressed when we focus mainly on the evil that lurks in our own hearts; yes, even our noble, kind, loving, Christian hearts.

The Hamlet Syndrome

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I love Shakespeare. I think he is the profoundest individual I have ever come across, demonstrating more insight into the human imagination and heart than anyone else has even approached. And of his work, I prefer the tragedies and especially Hamlet.

Hamlet was a very depressed young man who was stymied by indecision. This indecisiveness stemmed from obsessive thinking, a thoughtfulness which he noted, “if quartered would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.” Shakespeare valued thoughtfulness but realized that being lost in thought was as much a problem as being incapable of thought.

In his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy he concluded “thus conscience (i.e. “consciousnessness”) doeth make cowards of us all and the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great kith and kin, in this regard, their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.”

Shakespeare realized that excessive “self-awareness” was merely a ruse, an escape from the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day grind of life. He realized I’m sure, that self-awareness was critical in life but needed to be balanced with a willingness to plunge head-long into the fury of life, to make a commitment in action.

Hamlet’s indecisiveness has given rise in the past few decades to the clinical conception, the “Hamlet Syndrome”, describing young men…usually they are young men…who are similarly stymied and incapable of taking the plunge into life.

And I close with a relevant observation from W. B. Yeats:

God, guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He who sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow bone…

Or perhaps, from an anonymous source:

The centipede was happy quiet
Until a toad in fun, said,
“Pray which leg goes after which?”
This through his mind to such a pitch
He lay distracted in a ditch
Considering how to run.

Stuck in a repetition compulsion

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I sometimes think I should rename my blog to some variant of “Shakespeare”.  I quote him so often.  And there is no need to quote anyone else.  No one said more.

On the subject of change, he explained why we resist it so much, noting in Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy that we, “cling to these ills that we have rather than fly to others that we know not of.”  To put it in plain red-neck English, “Hell, as bad as things are, if I fool around and make changes, things are gonna get a whole lot worse.”

This is best illustrated in a standard psycho-dynamic explanation of why a woman stays in an abusive relationship.  She usually has such low self-esteem that unconsciously she feels she deserves nothing any better.  In fact, if she manages to extricate herself from one abusive relationship, she will end up in another one very quickly.  Some unfairly and unkindly opine, “Well, that is what she asks for.”  But she is merely caught in. or trapped in, what Freud call a “repetition compulsion”,  repeating a pattern of behavior which recapitulates an emotional trauma that she lived through.

Scott Peck said in The Road Less Traveled that neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering. He was suggesting that suffering is a basic part of life and that enduring pain from time to time is just part of life. Failure to do so is to get blocked or “stuck” in life.

The key to gaining release is always to “feel” the pain, the avoidance of which keeps one locked in a maladaptive behavior pattern. Or. to use a popular bromide, “No pain, no gain.”

ADHD and “the pauser reason”

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Th’ expedition of my violent love
Outrun the pauser, reason.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare wrote, “The expedition of my violent love, outrun the pauser, reason.” I would like to translate that into, “The exercise of my fierce passion outruns ‘the pauser’ reason.” Though Shakespeare did not have modern neurophysiology to outline the role of the forebrain in handling impulsivity, he knew that a basic human issue was human emotion, or feeling, run amok. In Hamlet, he noted re the title character, “He cannot buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule.”

With the “pauser reason” we can introduce what Deepak Chopra calls “the gap” into our experience. We are at times consumed with passion, but if things work out right we will have learned to “pause” briefly and consider the possible outcome of our behavior and/or words.

Years ago I had as a client a 16 year old male who had been diagnosed with ADHD. And he could have been a “poster boy” for that diagnosis, being unable to control himself in the classroom and at home. He was very intelligent and could articulate quite well regarding his subjective experience, even those times when he was totally out of control. And when he finally relented and followed his MD’s recommendation and took a stimulant medication, it had a remarkable impact on him. He noted to me one day, “Now, I have a choice. I have the same urges to “trash talk” and be “difficult” to my teachers, but now I have the choice of whether or not I want to follow through with my urges.” He had obtained “the pauser reason” (aka “an observing ego”) psychopharmacologically.

Unfortunately, he got tired of this restraint and began to balk about compliance with the stimulant medication. Soon thereafter his family moved and his treatment with me ended. But months later there was a sad ending to this anecdote. Apparently having stopped taking his medication, he was driving his ATV crazily across the countryside one afternoon. Something went awry, he wrecked, and was killed.

I was so sad and am very sad now as I relate the anecdote. He was such a handsome, intelligent, passionate, and insightful young lad. But as one of his teachers noted to me, “He simply could not live inside his own skin.”

Meditative prayer…again!

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I have often quoted a line from Hamlet re prayer.  King Claudius is on his knees, in prayer, saying, “My words fly up.  My thoughts remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

That is a very subtle observation as is often the case when something is profound.  Shakespeare noted the distinction between a prosaic, formal, perfunctory prayer and one that is essentially meditation, “thoughts” and “words” conjoined.   Richard Rohr’s blog posting of today presents this notion more eloquently:

In what is commonly called prayer, you and your hurts, needs, and perspectives are still the central reference point, not really God. But you have decided to invite a Major Power in to help you with your already determined solution! God can perhaps help you get what you want, but it is still a self-centered desire, instead of God’s much better role—which is to help you know what you really desire (Luke 11:13, Matthew 7:11). It always takes a bit of time to widen this lens, and therefore the screen, of life.

One goes through serious withdrawal pain for a while until the screen is widened to a high-definition screen. It is work to learn how to pray, largely the work of emptying the mind and filling the heart—that is prayer in one concise and truthful phrase. Or as some say, “pulling the mind down into the heart” until they both operate as one.

The Power of Thought

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Just a couple notes re the power of thought.

Mike Dooley noted, “Freedom from the past, or anything else for that matter always comes in the very instant you stop thinking about it.”

For, thought has a powerful hand in perpetuating our reality. This is true individually and collectively. It makes me think of an old bromide, author unknown, “Our thoughts become us.”

And peripherally related, Shakespeare noted, “Nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

And I close with another observation of Mike Dooley, “Thoughts are things. Choose the good ones.”