Card #21 – Turn that Frown Upside Down!

“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”
— Tolstoy

Turn that frown upside down! You may feel alone in a toxic wasteland but don’t give in to despair. Studies show that pessimists outperform optimists in reality testing, but in every other way — health, wealth, life satisfaction, fulfilling relationships, etc. — optimists are better off. Choose optimism as a perceptual stance despite what this troubled world seems like.

Necessary optimism is not the same as Pollyanna optimism (“It’s all good.”) or glib “positivity nazis” who seek to impose an upbeat tone and interpretation on themselves and others oblivious to authentic suffering.

It is because human incarnation involves suffering, hardships, and privations that we need a somewhat optimistic stance to keep going. Survival research shows that survivors maintain morale and convince themselves and others that they can make it.

Optimism should not be allowed to jump over realism. But realism can also throw a wet blanket on the possibility of outlier success. An appropriate dose of realism, however, can prevent the suffering of excessively optimistic expectations.

We need a dynamic balance of realism and consciously chosen optimism to deal with a world that easily but unproductively supports a pessimistic stance.

see: This card is a brief version of what is discussed more thoroughly in this card (and especially the YouTube version which has a lot more content than the written version): Eclipse Emergence
Antidote to Worry

https://positivepsychology.com/pessimism-vs-optimism/

For those willing to read some more, consider this brief meditation on what I call “interpretive magic.” Read here or go to INTERPRETIVE MAGIC ON YOUTUBE.

It is a common and limiting assumption that only one interpretation of an event or situation is correct. But the phenomenal world is rarely so cut and dried.

Interpretation may often be more usefully regarded as a choice rather than flattened into what is believed to be the single correct answer. For example, I recently had to send in my laptop, my only computer, for repairs. Due to some improbable mishaps, it had to be sent in two more times, and the problem that should have taken days to fix has taken weeks. An extremely reasonable and plausible interpretation is that I have been meaninglessly inconvenienced due to mechanical forces beyond my control. An alternate interpretation is that the improbable mishaps were “meant to happen,” and that I needed space to open up from a long period of laborious editing I was doing.

Which of these interpretations is most likely? The first explanation easily passes that classic test of logic, Occam’s Razor, that would have us prefer the simplest, least fancy explanation that accounts for all the facts. By contrast, the “meant to happen” point of view is often used in ways that seem glib and reeking with sentimental rationalization. Mysterious forces, or the principle of synchronicity, would have to be employed to justify this interpretation, and that means that this hypothesis is significantly fancier than the first. But in some cases of interpretation, likelihood and strict rules of logic are not the most useful when choosing among possible interpretations.

In the case of the improbably prolonged laptop repair, both interpretations are potentially valid. Instead of deciding which of these interpretations was “right,” I recognized that it was much more helpful to choose the interpretation I intuitively preferred. When I tried the first interpretation — the mechanical forces beyond my control interpretation — I found that it did nothing for me except increase stress and a sense of helpless frustration. I could feel my blood pressure rising and my jaw clenching. I realized that this interpretation adversely affected both my body and psyche. The second interpretation provided a sense of space opening up, a sense of serendipity and unexpected possibilities. By choosing the second interpretation, I entered a different timeline than I would have if I had chosen the first one. I decided to read a couple of books I probably wouldn’t have had time to read if I had access to my laptop. Some parallel realizations of my own accompanied these two books, leading to a vast, life-changing breakthrough in an area of my life that I had struggled with for decades. In this case, choosing the interpretation that felt more empowering and life-affirming seemed to lead to a much more positive outcome.

The act of consciously choosing an interpretation of an event or situation is an example of what I call “interpretive magic.” The creative interpretation of life elements is not merely a matter of passive perception.

Once you realize you have the right to interpret and reinterpret certain elements, you usually need to act on the new interpretation to establish the timeline it opens up.

The opposite of interpretative magic is fundamentalism or orthodoxy of any kind, where one’s right to interpret or reinterpret is judged by orthodoxy as sacrilege or heresy.

I have found that many people who are not overt fundamentalists fall for a similar delusion I call the “museum curator fallacy.” Such people view everything, especially things found in nature, as sacred and never to be touched or interfered with. Such museum curator types often have a hands-off attitude toward people, especially from an exotic culture, as if they were members of a Star Trek away team with an overly orthodox interpretation of the Prime Directive (cultural relativism often contributes to this blindspot). Intruding their will on anything seems to them like a sacrilege and an interference with a divine plan. They don’t recognize that they incarnated as human beings, the most interventionist organisms we know of, an attribute that is as much a part of nature as everything else.

On the other hand, there are cases where we should not apply interpretive magic. For example, when trying to solve a homicide, there is probably only one correct answer to the question: “Who was the shooter?”

Scientific methodology and interpretive magic should obviously not be mixed. If you need to create a falsifiable conclusion and test it, you don’t want to apply interpretive magic. While you may be justified in reinterpreting your personal history to transform victim consciousness, if you did this to collective history, your reinterpretation should be based on evidence, not politically convenient revisionism, etc.

Arnold Toynbee, the great historian who studied the lifecycle of civilizations, concluded that a civilization was in decline when it no longer had a ruling mythology. Your personal mythology is the aggregation of your significant choices of interpretation. Keep your interpretive choices creative and life-affirming so that you have a healthy personal mythology. If you don’t have a positive ruling mythology, then your life will be in decline.

Consider the occurrence of this card an auspicious time to boldly and creatively apply interpretative magic to some area or areas of your life.