Adventures in Enlightenment: Gratefulness

Well my ethical experiment of controlling my flatulence has come to a conclusion. It was a tremendous success if I do say so my self. I'm now a more ethical person. My wife was thrilled with the noise reduction and improvement in environmental conditions. Her main criticism is that I saw this as a limited experiment and not a permanent life long behavior change. All I can say is, "that's science for ya". Some how she's not buying that explanation.

As you can see I've upgraded this project from merely improving my ethical state to one of increased enlightenment. If you can't achieve enlightenment through improved ethics, then what's the point? As if being ethical was a noble end in itself. Puh-lease! My next phase for May will be a month of gratitude. This was inspired by reading some John Horgan essays (highly recommended). One of these essays pointed me to this site. If an enlightened mystical monk recommends gratefulness as a practice, who am I to disagree?

Now one possible problem with this phase will be that I don't technically believe there is anything to be thankful to in some big cosmic sense. Perhaps surprisingly I don't think this matters. If it works to be thankful to a figment of your imagination then why not just be thankful to a non-figmentary nothing. Not much of a tweak really. Anyway my thought is that religion is a big evolutionary meme experiment. If they've hit on some successful techniques the point is "do they work" not their possibly mistaken interpretation of why it works. In any case, gratefulness it is.

My plan is to be grateful for one thing a day. There won't be any implied order of importance in this day to day ordering of gratefulness subjects but I will start with the thing that I truly am most grateful for and that is my wife and kids.

I am grateful for my wife and kids! They are awesome. They make it a pleasure to work my little programmer fingers to the bone.