Deconstructing the Serenity Prayer

Life's tough. It's even tougher if you're stupid.

-John Wayne

Children tend to react to stress and temptation as animals do. They are much more sensitive to immediate payoffs than to long range consequences and so are vulnerable to simple traps. A guide to more advanced cognitive tactics is the Serenity Prayer: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Stoic Wisdom: The things you can change include your behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes. The things you cannot change include the past, what other people think and do, and pretty much everything else. For more on this see: Attachment

Acceptance & Being Mode

Since you cannot control the events that happen nor your initial reaction to those events it is important to develop a pathway to serenity. The Being Mode solution is to mindfully accept whatever experience is elicited by the events that happen. The word "mindfully" is used to indicate that this requires will. The natural response to the demands of life is to get pleasure where you can and avoid discomfort.

You inhabit a creature that has been dealt a particular genetic makeup, conditioning history, and current social circumstance. You do not control your reactions to the events that happen, nor do you control the events that happen. Have some humility and accept the fact that you are just a bio-psycho-social entity who is subject to the cause-and-effect principles that determine the reactions of such a creature.

There is nothing sinful, defective, or wrong about craving pleasure or relief when stressed. That is what living creatures do. Nor is there anything wrong with being vulnerable to the PIG, or perverse motivation, or the Karma of your past behaviors. Rather than be taken in by these traps, you can make a Meta-Cognitive Shift and observe the subjective phenomena dispassionately. From the dissociated perspective you can notice the experience of desire, suffering, and other psychological states for what they are: the temporary experiences of a living creature.

The Being Mode exercises described in Awakening will help you develop the serenity to accept the things you cannot change without judgment or motivation to do anything about it. Paradoxically, shifting to Being Mode can awaken you from the autonomous behavioral sequence in which you are doing something [using the incentive] to achieve the goal of pleasure or relief.

Doing Mode and Intentional Trance Formation

To change the things you can change involves Doing Mode. You may not be able to change the high-risk situation or the emotional reaction it elicits, but you can change your perspective and thinking pattern. It is often easier to change your psychological state than to change how you react to provocations when you are in a particular state. Once you begin thinking about how good it would feel to use the incentive, it is difficult to get yourself to shift your attention to how bad it would feel to relapse. However, it is not impossible, and most people with good cognitive abilities can develop this faculty. . This is not the case for the challenge of resisting temptation through white-knuckling. Few if any humans can exert that kind of willpower that for long enough to achieve good outcome.

 

The Power of a Will > >

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