When I mean the latter, but voice the former, that's where everything gets really hinky, because that's where the arguments about objective truth (did you or did you not leave the seat up) become attacks on my subjective truth (I felt unloved).
See, now we're getting somewhere by cracky! So when Johnson writes in Peaks and Valleys that
Quote:
"if you want to have fewer Valleys, avoid comparisons. If you enjoy what's good about the moment, you feel more like you are on a Peak."
he's really getting at this subjectivity of the truth in the moment.
That, I think, is similar to watch @Gypsy and @Kalni were alluding to in re: the past. When you sort-of wallow in the past -- which is what I think @Gypsy was really talking about -- you're avoiding the Truth of the moment. You're dragging that Past forward into the Present, in other words, contaminating it. That's the opposite of detaching (or at a minimum counter-detaching behavior) because you're predicating today's evaluation of today on today's evaluation of yesterday.
This, I think, is what I find somewhat dicey about the DBology -- "figure out" what you did "wrong" smacks to me of retrospectively evaluating the Past and using that evaluation to reconstruct the Present.
With respect to @Coach's favorite quote re: the Stockdale Paradox, there's a lot of consistency there too. It's not about the phony reality, Stockdale said, of wishful thinking, of "we'll all be home by Christmas," but the Stoic reality that today's Truth is all the Truth there is.
It's interesting too (to me, at any rate, but then I'm a pointy-head) that in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stockdale did his graduate work at Stanford, fwiw), Dirk Baltzly spends a considerable amount of time in his entry on the Stoics wrestling with the debate between the Stoics and the Skeptics over the nature of Truth. He notes that for the Stoics the defining characteristic of a disciplined mind (like Stockdale's) was the ability to discern Truth -- and Truth was discerned merely on the basis of a "cognitive impression." Because the Stoic trained himself to recognize and avoid false impressions, by definition his impression of some thing, X, was an impression of the Truth of that thing. So for Stockdale, as the Paradox @Coach so often cites would suggest, the "trick" in DB'ing is to recognize the Truth by disciplining your mind to avoid Untruth. That is a survival mentality -- a SERE school, "the only easy day was yesterday," don't think about tomorrow mentality.
But that, it seems to me, is a very difficult row to hoe indeed. It is extremely hard not to think about the future, even the future 12 hours from now. Harder still when one is "separated" but co-living, a la @Thinker. But the future is unknowable and largely unpredictable, because it appears to be the nature of this process that one is moving through, as in the Woody Allen movie, shadows and fog (pun unintended, but happily retained).
What I find challenging to some aspects of DBology in all that is this notion that one should "identify what works" -- as if one can correctly assess the causal relationship. I 180 and do B instead of A; WAW's behavioral responses to A, which are negative towards me, change. Therefore, sez I, by doing B I have done something "that works."
But correlation isnae causality, said Professor McStats. What if B is every bit as irritating as A, and WAW's behavioral change came from some unknown C (OM, for example)? Whither the DB'ing?
No, to that end I think it's @Ketticken's "subjective" (or "personal") Truth that ought to be the rightful focus of our efforts. What is it that is True for me? By doing this 180 instead of that, am I acting out of my Truth?
But the continuing challenge is that one's subjective Truth not be indexed -- tempting as it is to do -- to a subjective evaluation of the presumptive "Truth" we believe WAS wants to see. In other words, we must do what is True for us, not what we believe WAS would interpret as True for us and therefore true for WAS.
Man, I like knocking my head against a wall like this from time-to-time!
