The
second month
BASIC PRINCIPLES OF SELF UNDERSTANDING
YOU'll agree, no doubt,
that one of the most important things in your mental life is self-understanding.
You'll agree also that most of us have much too little self-understanding and
therefore need some sort of training along these lines. And, further, you'll realize
that we all possess a natural and inherent tendency towards self-deceit.
It
seems that each of us in the ordinary way has a "sense of ego", an unreasoned
conviction that he a distinct ego or self, unique and separate from the rest of
life.
In some cases, you find a person whose sense of ego is so strong that
he finds it necessary at all costs to feel the rightness of everything he does
and the rightness of everything he says, as well as the rightness of everything
he possesses. When he can feel this rightness (and too often it is a false rightness),
then he feels superior. When he can feel this rightness, he feels inferior and
inadequate; and thus he develops various complexes and neurotic trends.
Because
of this false need to feel a false rightness, he must continuously deceives himself
in various subtle ways; he must pretend to himself that his motives are better
than they are, and he must repress all unwelcome knowledge about himself and about
all things that are his.
All this, just to keep his sense of ego intact.
How
on the other hand there are those who have learnt honestly to recognize their
own deficiencies and just as honestly to evaluate their own virtues. These few
have made some progress in self-understanding.
Most of us, however, stand
somewhere between these two extremes. While we are not entirely free from self-deceit,
we haven attained tocomplete self-understanding; we need, therefore, to develop
and to practice some kinds of psychological techniques directed towards an increase
in self-knowledge.
One of the difficulties we find is that we treasure some
of irrational loves and hatreds; we cling to our emotional biases and try not
to lose our complexes. Because we have grown up with them we have become attached
to them. In some way or other, these irrational loves and hatreds, biases, and
complexes, seems to provide a barrier against something we prefer not to face.
This barrier has been called the "dread of enlightenment".
This dread
of enlightenment is to be found to a greater or less extent in all of us except
the few who have attained a considerable degree of self honesty. Thus it is probable
that, in common with the majority of people, you tend to resist the process of
self-analysis because it demand that you let go of these treasured evils. You
resist the process of disentangling the web of attachments.
Why is it so? Why
do you prefer self-deceit to self-knowledge? Not only do these irrationalities
give you a barrier against mental factors that you don wish to face, but they
also give you a kind of individual character, a sort of distinction that helps
to build up your sense of being different from others.
Another reason is that
you want to retain unaltered all those concepts connected with all the things
you love. If you subject any of your emotional-laden concepts to the scrutiny
of self-analysis you might have to alter it, and in altering it you might need
to apply effort. It is much more comfortable to leave things as they are.
It
is much the same with the things you hate or dislike; if you subject your concepts
of these things to the strong clear light of self-examination you might have to
prove yourself wrong, and to relinquish your hates and dislikes requires a great
deal of adjustment. Again, it is more comfortable to leave things as they are.
Self-analysis
may sometimes turn out to be temporarily very painful. What, then, is the point
of it all? If you can be just as happy without self-understanding, why bother?
This,
of course, is like saying since you are quite comfortable in your dark cave, why
bother to build a house with windows? Once your mind becomes firmly established
in its habit, the general trend of awareness becomes less acute and your whole
mentality becomes less adaptable. It tends to become more lethargic and to resist
change.
Then you think more emotionally - that is to say, more subjectively
and less objectively. You become disturbed with less cause, your judgment is more
like to be impaired, you lose your poise more readily, and your self-control crumbles
easily. All this, when you prefer self-ignorance to self-understanding.
What
is needed, then, in order to break down self-deceit and to increase self-understanding?
Buddhism offers a principle of right mindfulness.
You'll find this principle
of right mindfulness to be simple enough in its general concept; it's primarily
the development or cultivation of the ordinary normal faculty of attention; it's
applied to many different field of experience, but in particular in needs to be
directed inwardly. In this sense, mindfulness can be described mainly as self-observation.
While
simple enough in its general concept as the cultivation of attention, there are
so many filed of experience to which you can apply mindfulness that the whole
sphere of mindfulness becomes very comprehensive.
For example, ordinary everyday
activities - those of work, family life, and leisure, for example - offer a broad
scope for increased self-understanding. With regard to your ordinary actions,
the Buddhist system states that you must have a clear comprehension of your own
motives and purposes. Without this clear comprehension you may be caught in the
unthinking drift.
You know, of course, your own motives behind many of the
things you do. But it may be, with some other thins you do, that you do them merely
because other people do them. If so, on self-examination, you'll find that you
do these things largely to gain the approval of the people with whom you associate.
The mind feels a need to retain a sense of importance and superiority, and to
keep this sense of importance and superiority intact it must employ self-deceit
in various forms. And to discover your real motives, you must learn to break through
this self-deceit. The clear comprehension of motive, then, once of the major aspects
of self-understanding.
It maybe that you have a clear comprehension of your
overall motive in life, of your ultimate purpose, or it may be that you have no
sense of purpose and perhaps no ultimate purpose at all; yet some sense of purpose
is necessary for progress. Mindfulness in the form of self-observation is a forward
step in the process of gaining a purpose of life and of becoming aware of what
that purpose is.
You, in common with mankind as a whole have inherited an
emotional jungle, a profuse and tangled growth of greeds and hatreds existing
side by side with more noble tendencies. It's a natural tendency - even though
poor psychology - to try to ignore the vicious elements of the mind, and this
is how self-deceit arises.
In its early stages, self-deceit is a refusal to
recognise these vicious elements of the mind; but at a more advanced stage it
may become a complete inability - much more than a conscious refusal - to recognise
them. Sometimes the mind plays tricks on itself in order to keep undamaged its
sense of rightness and superiority, and these tricks serve to hide its real motives
and desires.
Sometimes the mind twists and distorts the meanings of experience;
it avoids thoughts which offend it and which show it up to itself in an unfavourable
light, and it diverts its attention from unwanted thoughts to those which bring
out its pleasant aspects.
Psychology knows these tricks as the mental mechanisms,
such as the mechanisms of avoidance, divertance, and fixation.
Another aspect
of self-observation is concerned with the sensations as they're perceived through
the various sense organs as they're received in the mind with special regard to
their pleasure-pain content.
The point about sensation in relation to its pleasure-pain
content is that it's at this level that attachment has its origin; and attachment
is a major cause of unhappiness. All things in the world change; all things arise
and pass away; and the more you become attached to anything at all the more you
will suffer when you lose it.
To control attachment, therefore, you must keep
watch at the door of sensation. As you become more critically aware of all your
experiences at the level of sensation, you learn to prevent the pleasure in one
and the pain in another from taking control. That is, instead of being controlled
by your pleasures and pains, you learn to pass through them without being swept
away by them. It's when you allow your pleasures and pains at the sensational
level to dominate you that you become swept away by your emotions, pleasant and
painful; and you're then fully enmeshed in the web of attachment. And then you're
incapable of objective reasoning and wise decisions.
You can see, then, that
it is desirable to train yourself to keep a critical watch on your experiences
at the level of sensation, and just as critically to evaluate the pleasure and
pains at this level. You can extend this objective self-observation, then, to
the factors that go to make up your mental state.
According to the Buddha-doctrine,
there are three basic mental factors that retard the mind's progress. One of these
is called selfish desire. It exists in various forms such as greed and possessiveness,
and it may be either intense on the one hand or mild and unobtrusive on the other.
Then there is aversion, which we find also in the guise of anger, hatred, and
resentment, and irritability. And the third is called delusion; this also appears
in different forms, principally as self-assertion and self-deceit.
The observation
of the mental state is a form of mindfulness whose objective is to shine the full
light of consciousness on to theses "roots of evil," as they are called,
and on to all mental factors derived from them and allied with them. These include
not only such factors as envy, conceit, and stinginess, but also rigidity of mind,
morbid remorse, and restlessness or agitation.
When, by self-examination,
you become aware of these tendencies, you are of course more able to deal with
them, and the very realisation that they exist will often act as a controlling
factor.
However, it's desirable to discover and uncover not only your adverse
and retardant mental elements, but also your good qualities, because these need
to be nurtured and developed as instruments of progress.
*
You can see,
then, that the principle of mindfulness can be of value to you in various ways;
it can help you to avoid the traps laid for you by your own pleasures and pains,
and it can help you to evaluate your progress in breaking down the retardant elements
in your own mind and in developing the progressant elements.
While development
along such lines is largely a matter of self-observation, and while this is of
the utmost importance, it can well be supplemented by observation directed outwardly.
That is to say, the observation of other people, together with the understanding
that comes from this observation, can be of great value in the task of observing
yourself.
In fact, this works both ways; as you observe your own behaviour
and learn to know your own motives better, you see this behaviour reflected in
other people, and their motives become more transparent to you. In the same way,
as you learn to interpret other people's behaviour in terms of their motives (sometimes
hidden from them), so your own motives become more transparent to yourself.
So
you see that the Buddhist approach to self-understanding is by way of mindfulness,
directed primarily internally, and secondarily externally; or in other words by
the critical observation of yourself and the penetrating but kindly observation
of others.
Practical work
THE PRACTICE OF INWARDLY DIRECTED MINDFULNESS
While
the extravert directs hi attention mainly to the external world around him, one
who is introverted tends to neglect this objective observation of his external
world. He is concerned, not so much with what is happening, but with his own emotional
reactions as well as his own likes and dislikes of what is happening.
This
form of introversion brings with it subjective thinking, and carried to extremes
it becomes pathological. Objective thinking, with its clear evaluation of facts
and conditions, becomes impossible when emotional thinking of this kind takes
over.
Now in view of this it may appear strange that Buddhism advises a kind
of introversion - an "inward turning" - as part of the technique of
right mindfulness; but it is an introversion of a completely different sort. It
is a process in which the mind is trained to turn inward on itself, but in an
objective manner instead of in the emotional way of the other kind of introversion.
Your practical work for this month, therefore, consists of forming the habit
of objective and unemotional self-observation, taking in your mental processes
as a whole.
In other exercises in this series you take specific retardant
tendencies and watch for their appearance. For example, in the Third Month you
look for false valuations, in the Sixth Month for undue anxiety, and in the Seven
Month for irritability and resentment, while in the Eighth Month you watch for
self-assertive tendencies.
During this moth, however, the work is not so much
the observation of specific retardant elements; it is more a matter of watching
for that subjective type of thought that is governed by emotional bias and prejudice.
It's a process of replacing one type of introversion by another, of replacing
emotional thinking by self-analysis.
Assuming that you are working on a self-contract
basis, at the end of each day, or at some convenient time, you can think back
to see whether your introvert tendencies have taken a constructive and analytical
form, or whether you have allowed yourself or become emotionally dominated. You
can then enforce your self-contract accordingly.
The
third month
THE PROCESS OF REVALUATION
IF you think back, you'll most likely
find that many of the values you now place on things have been established, in
part at least, by outside influences; by your parents, for example, and by your
teachers, and by the books you were given to read in your earlier years. Added
to these are the entertainments you enjoyed then and those you enjoy now, the
opinions of your friends, and the vicious and continuous blare of advertisements.
Thus very little of your thinking is really your own.
As a result of all this,
you are saddled with many false valuations, valuations which are not your own
because you haven't arrived at them by a process of independent thinking. They
may be good valuations in some sense or other or they may not, but they have been
imposed on you from outside and have not been developed within you by your own
thought.
To examine your own valuations and, where desirable, to break free
from them - assuming, of course, that there's a need to do so - you must exert
a sustained effort of mindfulness.
The first work of mindfulness in this connection
is to make you aware of your false valuations, in order to help you to realise
what is of real value and what is useless mental baggage. As the realisation of
false valuations takes hold, new valuations of things tend to take their place
as a natural process.
You will agree that what you most highly value will largely
determine what you most ardently strive for, and conversely, what you most ardently
strive for is an indication of what you most highly value.
The infantile mind
arrives at its beliefs and opinions by imitating others, or else by the impact
of authority (and often of spurious authority), but it is only the most mature
mind that evaluates things by the process of independent thinking.
In the same
way, while the infantile mind formulates its code of values by superficial and
immediate considerations, the mature mind takes a long-range view of all things,
and penetrates to the ultimate values of things, as distinct from their present
effects.
The process of revaluation is a slow one, for most of the ideals of
the world around us run counter to the true values that we seek.
You will usually
find that the opinions of those around you, your obligations to your dependents,
and your need to conform - outwardly at least - to other people's standards, all
act as obstacles to the inner process of correcting your scale of values. You
find that you are forced to spend time in many ways on things that, left to yourself,
you would consider insignificant, while you may unwillingly have to give too little
time to things of greater ultimate value.
Often you may be led into valueless
byways because of economic necessity or social pressure; and this fact you must
generally accept, because it's easier to adapt yourself to the world than to adapt
the world to yourself. Often, too, there are some futile activities you may take
on in the search for excitement or in an endeavour to escape from boredom; and
these too, although futile by ultimate standards, are sometimes useful in providing
an immediate purpose. But when such activities and interests grow out of proportion
they retard your progress simply because of the time and energy they consume.
From
the Buddhist viewpoint many such false valuations arise from craving, from that
incessant thirst for personal gratification that springs from ignorance. With
craving and ignorance at the root of all personal life, false valuations are inevitable,
and to break down these false valuations it is necessary to attack them at the
deeper levels of the mind.
Now the basic ignorance, in the Buddhist sense,
is the inability to know the true nature of existence, just as blindness is not
merely not seeing but the inability to see. This basic ignorance is ultimately
found to be the root of all suffering, and the whole of the Buddha-way is a course
of self-training directed towards knowing, knowing in its fullest sense.
Stating
this in another way, the final aim of the Buddha-way is enlightenment, the breaking
down of ignorance.
One of the characteristics of existence as emphasized by
the Buddha-doctrine is that of impermanence. It needs no profound thought to show
that all things arise, last a longer or shorter time, and finally pass out of
existence; and to labour the point may seem unnecessary. But do you really accept
this fact of impermanence? Does it affect your valuations of things? Or does it
pass over your head? Perhaps you do accept it up to a point, but generally it
needs a tremendous emotional jolt to bring it right home.
To the extent that
you accept the fact of impermanence you relinquish some of your futile valuations
because you realise their futility.
It has been pointed out that the harder
you grasp a handful of water the more of it slips through your fingers, for the
best way to hold water in the hand is to hold it loosely. And in the same way,
the best way to hold anything in the mind is to hold it loosely. Thus, slowly,
you learn to grasp things a little less tightly; but for a long time you continue
to grasp, and thus continue to lose.
If only you could stop grasping, if only
you could relinquish the wish that the transient would become permanent, then
you could enjoy the pleasure while it lasts and be ready for the next experience
when it comes, whether it be one of happiness or of sorrow. By one approach to
life you increase its unsatisfactoriness by seeking to prolong your pleasures,
while by the other way you leave yourself free to gain the fullest value from
every experience.
Whatever experience life brings to you, whether bitter or
sweet, it has some value if you use it skilfully, and you can use it skilfully
only if you take it when it comes and accept its imperfections.
The Buddha-doctrine
points out that, within personal life, everything is imperfect, everything is
ultimately unsatisfactory. Nowhere within the sphere of personal life is permanent
happiness to be found, and only by attaining to the "existence beyond existence",
only by breaking free from the bondage of selfhood, can permanent freedom from
suffering be found.
The more comfortable are your external conditions, the
less incentive is there to make an effort towards the final enlightenment. The
more comfortably you pad out the walls of the cell of your own personal life,
the less you will feel its shocks and jolts. But is this comfortable upholstery
of any ultimate value? A padded cell is still a cell, and all the padding can
never give you freedom.
Not only so, but the padding eventually wears thin,
and the question arises: which requires less effort - to keep on repadding the
cell, or to fight your way to freedom? It has been said:
"The wise man
obtains liberation by a hundredth part of the suffering that a foolish man endures
in the pursuit of riches."
The Buddha-doctrine affirms that there is no
permanent freedom from suffering and unsatisfactoriness within the bondage of
personal life, and that while you are perpetuating the delusion of selfhood you
are perpetuating suffering.
Further, the Buddha-doctrine emphasises that the
self is a delusion, and that life is one indivisible whole. Thus everything you
gain at the expense of another's loss is of no ultimate value; the gain is transitory
and eventually becomes a burden to carry. If you gain by knowingly depriving another
of something, you eventually become the real loser. Every self-centred valuation
carries within itself the seeds of sorrow.
It is, of course, often very difficult
to detect the self-centred valuation behind your desires and actions. If you're
influenced by a possessive valuation, in which your aim is to possess more and
more property or material objects, the element of self is quite obvious in the
motive, but the same possessive valuation might apply just as definitely but much
less obviously in your attachment to your own children in the guise of love. In
this guise it can cause more unhappiness than when it applies to material things.
This
same possessive valuation is often at the back of love problems, for many love
problems are not so much concerned with love in its higher meaning as with possessiveness,
at least in part.
Then there is what we can call the aesthetic valuation. Here,
when applying a penetrating self-analysing mindfulness, you might find that your
high appreciation of art, music, or one of these finer and less mundane things,
is really a means of bolstering up your own self-esteem. No doubt this appreciation
of finer things really exists, but its virtues are often vitiated when it is used
as a means of asserting your own superiority.
The same may be said of the intellectual
valuation, in which scientific knowledge, an intellectual grasp of a subject,
or a love of hair-splitting argument provides a means of self-assertion.
It
may be just the same with a religious valuation or a highly moral valuation -
there may be a good deal of self present in the form of self-righteousness.
Even
when there's a predominance of altruism in the major valuation, it may be possible
to find an element of self-interest in the shape of a desire for admiration or
thanks, or perhaps a feeling of self-approval.
In the process of revaluation,
then, from the Buddhist viewpoint, you must first adopt a philosophy which emphasises
fundamentals rather than superficialities and places ultimate effects higher than
immediate ones; then you must recognise and assess your own dominant valuation;
and finally you must progressively move the point of interest away from self-interest
and towards the interests of life as a whole.
In order to work from the inside
outwards, you must gradually work on your valuations of things in general. This
means that you must become increasingly aware of your false values, and, with
this increased awareness, you must progressively discard these false values.
In
time, then, you'll find that many things which previously aroused your anger,
resentment, possessiveness, and other adverse emotions will then fail to do so.
You will then move your focus of interest away from the things that arouse these
retardant emotions, away from the emotions that retard your progress.
This,
of course, will in general be a long and continuous process, and one that involves
many readjustments of the values you now place on all sorts of things.
Practical
Work
THE PRACTICE OF ALL-ROUND MINDFULNESS
We can use various synonyms for
mindfulness. We can speak of it as expanded awareness and intensified awareness,
as increased attentiveness, and in a certain sense as presence of mind. Lack of
mindfulness, similarly, can be referred to as unawareness, inattentiveness, and
absence of mind.
In this last-mentioned expression - absence of mind - we can
each recognise lack of mindfulness both in ourselves and in others. Putting aside
for the present the more profound aspects of mindfulness, let us consider its
application to the more mundane and superficial matters of the workaday life.
You
are familiar with a situation in which you ate writing a letter when the telephone
rings in the next room. On your way to answer the telephone you put your pen down
somewhere - but where? When you return to your letter-writing you're unable to
remember where you put your pen, and you have to waste time in searching for it.
You may feel that this kind of absentmindedness is unimportant except for the
exasperation and inconvenience it causes; but the point is that if you have too
little mindfulness to observe where you put your pen you must also have too little
to make much progress on the path of self-development.
You may consider that
the example just given doesn't apply to you. However, you would probably find
a number of minor situations in your own life in which you could profitably employ
greater presence of mind. This increased mindfulness will give you greater efficiency,
but this is only its secondary objective; its primary aim is to increase your
inner alertness.
For a period of a month or longer, then, set out to develop
a greater degree of all-sound mindfulness in the small routine activities of your
life. To do this it will be helpful if you slow down these activities whenever
you can and do them more deliberately and attentively; this slowing-down will
help to establish more mindful patterns of thought and action which - if continued
over a long enough period - will extend or infiltrate into other activities, activities
which must of necessity be carried out more hurriedly.
It is helpful if you
increase your awareness of your actions by verbalisation. For example, as you
put your pen down, say to yourself "I put my pen on top of the book-case."
Os having bought a bus ticket and put it in your pocket, say, "The ticket
is in my left-hand side pocket." This form of verbalisation assists in the
general development of all-round mindfulness. It would be pointless to try to
apply it to too many things, but it's especially useful in relation to the few
small activities in which you happen to be absentminded.
One way in which you
can apply the self-contract method to this discipline is to make a mental note
of each time you act absent-mindedly. For each occasion of absent-mindedness mentally
note one point; and, when you reach a total of, say, ten points, make the next
twenty-four hours a discipline day.
You will need to define just what you yourself
mean by a discipline day. It may mean that you'll smoke only half your usual number
of cigarettes, or that you'll go without sugar in your tea, or that you'll eat
no sweet biscuits during the twenty-four hours.
The exact nature of the pact
you make with yourself is unimportant, so long as you use it to increase your
general level of awareness.
The
fourth month
THE PATH OF INCREASING AWARENESS
FROM certain viewpoints it
can be said that the evolution of the mind consists largely in the intensification
of awareness on the one hand, and, on the other, the expansion of awareness.
Let's
consider it in this way. In some situations awareness needs to be intensified
but not expanded. If you're carrying out a difficult repair on a delicate piece
of mechanism, such as a watch, your consciousness needs to be concentrated and
you need to be aware of only a limited range of sense-impressions, covering only
those relevant to the work in hand and excluding all others. That is to say, your
awareness must be intensified but not expanded.
In other circumstances your
consciousness needs to take in a very broad field of sense-impressions. If you're
driving a car in heavy traffic, for example, it is very necessary to be conscious
of a large range of sense-impressions without generally concentrating on any one
of them. You need to be aware of the car ahead, of pedestrians crossing the road,
of vehicles coming towards you or darting out of side streets, and of anything
and everything that could conceivably constitute a hazard. You may have a chattering
passenger or a back-seat driver, or perhaps a restless child in the car.
All
these factors and sometimes others as well demand that you spread your attention
over a broad sphere of awareness: your awareness needs to be expanded, not concentrated.
It must be intensified in a certain sense as well as expanded, also, in that you
must keep at a high pitch of alertness, but it is not intensified with regard
to any one object or at any one point to the exclusion of others.
Now while
some things that you do demand some degree of alertness or awareness, either in
a concentrated form or in an expanded or diffuse form, there are many other activities
that you carry out with little or no awareness. These activities are largely the
things that you do by habit.
In any habit, your awareness tends to sink to
a lower level, and because of this you give little or no thought to the purpose
of the activity or the exact manner in which you carry it out. It takes on a mechanical
character.
In many cases this mechanical nature of a habitual activity is a
good thing, for it leaves you free to devote your awareness to more important
activities. It is true also that if too many of your general activities are based
on habits, both of thought and of action, your whole life tends to sink into the
unthinking drift; but in its sphere habit has a real function. That function is
to set the consciousness or awareness free for more important things.
When
you set out to work on the problem of breaking a bad habit - a habit that gives
rise to adverse consequences - you must first realise that you probably retain
some of your habits, good and bad, largely because they yield some form of satisfaction;
and this is true, very often, even if they also cause dissatisfaction of another
sort.
Before you begin to use self-discipline on a habit, then, it may be as
well to make some attempt to analyse it in order to find out whether or not it
yields any satisfaction, and then to find the nature of the satisfaction it yields,
a satisfaction that in some cases may not be apparent on the surface. And if you
are successful in doing so, it may then be necessary to find a way to gain the
same satisfaction in another way.
In this matter it is not possible to do much
more than generalise. The main point is that you may I find that self-discipline
alone is not always adequate in attempting to break a bad habit, and in many cases
it is necessary to develop an increasing mindfulness of your own mind - its hidden
motives, its half-recognized greeds, hatreds, and delusions - in order to clear
a field in which self-discipline can work more effectively.
In any form of
mental culture it is generally better to work for an all-round improvement in
the mental operations as a whole than to devote too large an effort to one isolated
characteristic. There are exceptions, of course, as for example when that characteristic
, is so bad that it justifies concentrated effort.
In any case, no single trait
can rightly be considered on its own; it must be considered in relation to or
as a part of the whole mental structure considered as a totality.
*
Many
of your habitual activities have no special moral significance and play little
part in strengthening or weakening the mental functions.
In driving a car,
for example, your habitual response to situations encountered on the road - traffic
signals, a dog darting across the street, and so on - have no moral significance.
But sometimes, perhaps, you habitually respond to traffic jams by impatience,
or you thoughtlessly become angry with pedestrians who foolishly wander into the
road without looking. Impatience and anger are habitual responses which need to
be dealt with, not only because they are of an adverse or retardant nature in
themselves, but also simply because they are habitual.
There are other examples
of unmindful or habitual responses which may need to be handled, largely because
they are habitual. There is the habit of complaining about the weather, about
the rising cost of living, and about what other people do or fail to do. The point
is that when you complain about these things it may be that you do so as an automatic
or mechanical release for your adverse emotions. In the present context, it is
in the mechanical or habitual nature of these complaints that the fault lies;
your complaining may be justified, or it may not, but that's another matter of
secondary importance from the present viewpoint.
You need some sort of release
for these emotions, of course; but habitual and unthinking releases are retardant
because they come about without mindfulness, and because your mind is then in
a rut.
The thing to do is to try to develop an awareness, a watchful attitude
towards your own responses, and to try, whenever the situation allows it, to act
in a manner directly opposite to the old mechanical way. If you want to raise
your voice in anger, try to speak quietly. If you feel a tendency to turn away
without speaking, try to make a courteous reply. If you feel a desire to strike
out verbally or otherwise, try to react in a kindly way.
In all such situations,
the thing to do is to react in a manner directly contrary to the automatic, mechanical,
or habitual response. This will help to weaken and break down the adverse mental
factors involved and also make the mind keener.
Building up new habits involves
the use of increased awareness or attentiveness. One habit worth cultivating in
most cases is the habit of observation, and this forms the subject of the practical
work for this period.
Practical work
OUTWARD OBSERVATION
Mindfulness
has many aspects. That is to say, there are many things towards which you may
direct increased attention and many directions in which you may cultivate greater
awareness. From the Buddhist viewpoint, the chief value of mindfulness lies in
directing the attention inwardly and in cultivating a penetrating awareness of
the physical and mental phenomena that together constitute your own "current
of existence", your own self.
However, from the viewpoint of greater efficiency
in the workaday routine, there is generally some scope for increased mindfulness
with regard, to external things as well as for inwardly-directed attention. Some
of us need to cultivate a penetrating awareness not only of our own mental state
but also of the things around us.
This applies more to the introvert than to
the extraverted type of man or woman. If you are naturally an extravert, you will
tend to have an inherent tendency to take notice of things around you and of events
going on in the external world; you will have an acute power of observation together
with a retentive memory for all such things.
You may then conclude that you
have no need for increased outwardly-directed mindfulness. But this practice,
although primarily one in which. the attention is directed to things and happenings
outside you, doesn't stop there; it is meant to be linked up with self-observation
as well. In other words, you can use your observational powers to take notice
of your own emotional reactions to things and happenings around you as well as
of the things and happenings themselves.
If, on the other hand, you tend to
be a little too introverted, and if you feel that your powers of external observation
need to be developed, you may feel that the cultivation of attention towards external
things would help you, not only towards greater efficiency in your workaday life,
but towards a better standard of general mindfulness. It is quite possible that
an increased attentiveness towards your outer environment would reflect itself
in a greater awareness - and thus in a greater control - of your emotional biases
and faulty perceptions.
To undertake this practice, then, you make up your
mind to observe the various objects in your immediate environment in greater detail
and with greater care. If your powers of observation are already good, your primary
objective would be to pay special attention to your own emotional reactions to
the things, people, and events that affect you.
Some things will stimulate
your desires and start trains of thought in your mind. Some people will irritate
you and arouse resentment and other forms of aversion. And some events will bring
out your self-assertive tendencies.
The three basic mental factors that most
retard progress, according to Buddhist psychology, are selfish desire, aversion,
and self-assertion; and to deal with them the essential step is to become aware
of them.
If your powers of observation are already well developed, you can
give primary attention to your own reactions. If, on the other hand, your powers
of observation are not as good as you would like them to be, you should use this
practice to improve them. In that case you can make the detailed observation of
external matters your primary aim in this practice.
In any case, it will help
considerably if, whenever you can, you slow down your own activities in order
to observe or to perceive things more carefully. For most of the time you will
probably be unable to do this, but if you set out to slow down when you can, you
will establish better habits of observation which will carry over into the more
hurried periods.
At first, perhaps, you would do well to restrict your increased
observation to one small sphere; for example, to the people you meet in the course
of the day's work and other activities. At some convenient time recall several
people and jot down the colours of their hair and eyes, their facial characteristics,
and some details of the clothing they wear. Or if you prefer if, take the houses
you pass on your way to the, railway station and set out to observe them in greater
detail; then, later on, see if you can describe them in yourself in detail.
It
is worthwhile to take an occasional walk with the specific objective of observing
the details which you normally miss.
The essence of this practice is pure observation;
it is not meant to be a form of memory training, although, of course, the memory
will benefit. There are systems which employ various tricks of mental association;
the rhyming and alliteration of words, acid the building up of vivid and sometimes
ludicrous mental images as aids in memory-training; but these tricks - useful
and beneficial as they are - should play no part in the present practice. You
are, in this connection, interested in pure observation as an aim in itself and
not as a memory aid.
Apply the self-contract method of self-discipline to the
practice, and when you find you have neglected to use an opportunity for pure
observation impose on yourself some small penalty.
The
fifth month
THE PRINCIPLE OF ACCEPTANCE
WHAT we know as the conscious level
of the human mind is only a very small part of the mind in its entirety. General
usage of the concept of two levels of the mind, distinguished as the conscious
and the subconscious, suggests that the mind has two separate and well-defined
compartments; but this concept is by no means an accurate one. It would be far
better to compare the mind as a whole to a blackboard in a very dark room, with
many words and phrases chalked over the whole surface. Because of the darkness
of the room you can't see any of the words or phrases. However, if you shine the
beam of an electric torch on to the centre of the blackboard, you'll be able to
read the word that the centre of the beam illuminates, and you will be able also
to see the words around the outside of the torch beam where the light is less
bright.
The centre of the torch beam where the light is brightest can be compared
with full consciousness, the chalked word that the beam fully illuminates being
like the focus of consciousness. The words within the less bright area on the
outside of the lighted area are like the ideas in the fringe of consciousness,
while those on the test of the blackboard represent the multitudinous ideas in
the subconscious mind.
As you move the torch beam on to different areas of
the blackboard different words and phrases come momentarily into the centre of
the beam, with others, less brightly lit,towards the outer edges of the beam.
The rest of the blackboard remains in darkness.
In just the same way, the focus
of consciousness moves and brings into full consciousness one idea after another,
with generally a few associated ideas in the fringe of consciousness. At all times,
the rest of the ideas remain in the subconscious mind.
If the blackboard were
to be completely clear of obstructions you could shine the torch on to any and
every word or phrase and bring it into the focus of the beam. But let's imagine,
for the purpose of illustration, that some parts of the blackboard are concealed.
A tall filing cabinet stands in front of one corner with a poster pinned over
another corner, while on odd parts of the board numerous pieces of sticking plaster
obscure various words and phrases. You can't illuminate the hidden words with
the torch beans unless you can remove the filing cabinet and the poster as well
as the pieces of sticking plaster.
In a similar way, the mind of the average
person has many regions which are inaccessible to the torch beam of full consciousness.
These are the regions which, over the years, have been blocked off by pain and
fear, by horror, guilt, and inferiority feelings. To clear these away and make
the concealed ideas accessible to consciousness is generally a much greater task
than can be accomplished by the average person during his lifetime.
However,
even though you can not discover and remove all the fear, guilt, and inferiority
feelings that both in childhood and in later years have blocked off some regions
of your mind, you can at least endeavour to accept yourself as you are, with your
inheritance of primitive urges and your acquired hatreds, fears, and greeds.
This
acceptance demands continuous mindfulness, for this is the key to self-improvement.
Mindfulness in Buddhism has many forms, and that form which has a special value
in this connection is called mindfulness of the mind. That is a matter of training
yourself to be aware of your own emotional state at all times and to recognise
it for what it is. If at a particular time the emotional state is one of annoyance
and resentment, or of envy, ill will, or some other retardant mental factor, then
the honest recognition of this factor, freed as far as possible from feelings
of guilt and attempts at repression, is in effect the acceptance of yourself as
your are.
It is necessary also to develop an awareness of your own progressant
mental qualities, such as those of generosity, goodwill, and the discernment of
the illusory nature of your own ego, without any element of personal pride or
smugness.
Thus the simple recognition of both the retardant and the progressant
mental factors, as and when they arise in your daily contacts and activities,
is seen to be the first application of the principle of acceptance.
The acceptance
of yourself as you are must be balanced by the acceptance of other people as they
are. As your self-knowledge increases so also your knowledge of other people increases.
While people vary tremendously in their levels of self-development as well as
in their reactions to circumstances, their most basic instinctive and emotional
structures are very similar to your own.
*
They too, deep below the consciously
accessible regions of their minds, have their own heritages of primitive urges,
carried over from their pre-human and caveman ancestors. They too were subjected
in childhood to varying degrees of parental mishandling and repressive control,
and they too need some degree of deep understanding.
By way of this deep understanding
of others, you learn to accept them as they are, so that, to the degree that you
understand and accept them (but only to that degree) you will be likely to react
to them without annoyance and resentment.
You may not be able to eliminate
annoyance and resentment entirely from your dealings with others, of course, but
you can use such occasions for the recognition and acceptance of both your own
and others' failings. With this acceptance must come greater harmony, both internally
and externally.
*
So here are two spheres of life in which to practise the
principle of acceptance - one's own emotional and mental structure and the emotion-laden
reactions of other people. There's a third sphere in which to apply the same principle,
and this is the world as a whole with its mixture of pleasure and pain.
If
you were to become a prisoner you could adopt any of three attitudes towards your
prison. Firstly, you could kick the walls, thump the bars, shout abuse at the
guards, and reject it at every point with bitterness and resentment. The effect
would be to make your imprisonment more severe and traumatic in every way, and
to increase the very things you reject.
At the other extreme you could sit
in passive resignation and brood in an inert manner, making no effort to find
a means of escape. Your apathy would serve only to magnify your misery and resentment.
Both of these extreme attitudes would tend to paralyse your powers. However,
there's a third kind of attitude you could adopt: you could accept your prison
as a problem to be solved, assessing it realistically and in great detail, searching
for its flaws, and remaining always alert and ready to take the first real opportunity
to escape. This attitude, ideally, should have no resentment in it, for resentment
and its kindred mental states cause emotional biases, which in turn impair your
judgement; and impaired judgement brings unrealistic action.
The acceptance
of the world as it really is must embrace the acceptance of yourself, of all the
other people in your environment, and of everything that in any way impinges on
you. Positive acceptance doesn't mean inert resignation. It means acceptance of
things as they are as the starting point in the long trek towards freedom.
This
mental attitude of acceptance makes it easier to deal with life and effectively
to resist all the difficult things in the environment, as well as all the difficult
things in the mind itself.
This non-resentful acceptance of things as they
are is a matter of squarely meeting all things, a matter of learning to control
anxiety, to conquer resentment, and to keep self-assertion in check.
With this
attitude of non-resentment and positive acceptance you learn not to tense up more
than necessary against adversity. This is not passive resignation; it is the positive
acceptance of every problem as the raw material out of which you can build achievement.
With all your problems miraculously taken away you would find yourself without
any raw material and thus without any possibility of achievement.
This principle
of non-resentful acceptance must seep through the whole of life; it cannot be
made into a specific practice or a concisely-formulated exercise. The practical
work for this period, then, is only the first step. It is meant to help you to
acquire an insight into the degree to which you resent the problems and difficult
things in your life, and from this insight the rest will follow.
Practical
Work
A SELF-QUESTIONNAIRE ON NON-RESENTFUL ACCEPTANCE
In answering the following
questionnaire, you could probably go through the whole series of questions and
give an immediate answer to each question. In many cases an immediate answer will
readily come to mind; but it will not necessarily be a true one, nor will it be
of real value to you.
The aim of each question is not so much to arrive at
an answer as to start a train of thought, and the aim of this in turn is to give
you some degree of self-understanding.
Take one question at a time, then, and
think about it at odd times during the day; the resulting train of thought will
be of greater value than a clear-cut snap answer to the question.
As a result,
it may be that other questions and other ideas, related in some way to the original
question, will come into your mind. These, too, will help in the process of self-understanding.
To
start these trains of thought, then, ask yourself the following questions:
1.
Do I resent my problems and the difficult things in my life?
2. Or do I accept
these problems and difficult things as the raw material for achievement?
3.
Do I resent being dominated or controlled by others?
4. Do I deeply envy the
good fortunes of others?
5. Do I resent being ignored by others?
6. Do I
accept these problems and difficult thing in an inert, defeated way?
7. If
so, has this brought about a half-repressed bitterness and a smouldering resentment
towards them?
8. Do I tend to resent any particular religious group?
9.
Or any particular racial group?
10. Have I a defensive attitude towards life
or people as a whole?
11. Or an aggressive attitude?
12. Or a suspicious
attitude?
13. Do I harbour any grudges or desires for revenge?
14. Do I
have any strong motivations which are based on resentment?
15. Do I react to
criticism by hostility or resentment?
*
Assuming that you are employing
the self-contract method of self-discipline, look back every few days to see if
you have used the questionnaire consistently and in a sufficiently penetrating
manner; and, if you feel you have not done so, deprive yourself of some small
pleasure.
The sixth month
THE
AWARENESS OF EMOTION
IF you want to control something - whatever it is - the
more you know about it the better you will be able to control it. If you want
to drive a car, you can manage with a minimum of knowledge of its workings while
conditions are good; but when it breaks down, miles from help, the greater your
knowledge of its mechanism the greater will be your chance of getting it on the
move again.
It is the same with your own emotional problems. You can go only
a small distance in life without emotional problems, and while you need no special
understanding of them when the going is smooth, you do need all the self-knowledge
possible when you enter a rough phase.
Can you imagine a motor mechanic who
has no clear understanding of what goes on under the bonnet of a car? Yet many
of us have no clear understanding what goes on under own bonnets.
The greater
the self-knowledge you possess the better, and this is true both of knowledge
gained by your own self-observation and of knowledge gained by book-learning.
One supplements the other; and this applies particularly to the knowledge of emotion.
Let us therefore consider; emotion at the theoretical level.
Emotions are accompanied
by certain bodily changes or perhaps we should say that emotions consist of the
awareness of the bodily changes that take place under certain conditions.
In
order to illustrate this point, let us take the condition of fear. When you become
frightened it begins with some frightening idea in your mind: this frightening
idea is the cause of your emotion of fear, and is accompanied by a nervous current
in certain parts of your brain.
From the brain, this nervous current travels
to your adrenal glands, and this causes these glands to discharge into your blood
stream a substance known as adrenin (or less accurately as adrenalin). Your blood
stream conveys this adrenin to various organs of your body.
The adrenin hag
a definite effect on many of these organs; for example, when it reaches your liver
it causes it to discharge into your blood stream an extra supply of sugar, this
sugar giving to every muscle that it reaches an additional energy supply.
As
further results of the adrenin in your blood, your heart beats more rapidly, your
eyes open wider, and your blood itself clots more readily should you be wounded.
You
can see that all these bodily changes would have a very definite value during
actual physical combat or any rapid muscular activity; there are the extra supply
of fuel to your muscles, for example, and the quicker heart-beat and circulation
which replenish this fuel supply and remove the ash from your cells; these are
all valuable to you if you are fleeing or fighting, running or climbing.
There
are some side-effects, too. For example, your hair tends to stand on end. This
does not help you, of course, but it does help some of your sub-human relations
when it happens to them. It helps a cat to appear bigger and more formidable and
thus more frightening to an enemy, and it helps a porcupine because its quills
are an actual defensive weapon.
When your hair stands on end, then, you are
automatically responding in the same way as did some of your pre-human-relations.
But in you it is an obsolete mechanism.
The bodily changes are of no real use
unless the need for action arises; but that is not the whole story. Man of the
civilized world does not generally solve his problems in the same way as did his
cave-dwelling ancestors or his primitive brothers, because his problems and his
outside conditions are different. Nevertheless his involuntary reactions are much
the same.
In most cases when a man becomes frightened, fighting or fleeing
will not solve the problem, as there is often no tangible aggressor to fight and
no place to which to flee. Yet the bodily changes occur just the same.
Your
bodily changes during fear, therefore, are often inappropriate; not only so, they
are also frequently an embarrassment because too much fuel is released into your
blood-stream without any purpose to fulfil. In this way you may have various physical
and nervous disorders as a result of repeated emotional disorders, disorders arising
not only from fear but also from anxiety, jealousy, resentment, anger, and inferiority
feelings.
But the story is not yet complete. During an emotional disturbance,
in order to allow full activity to various muscles - those of the legs for running,
the arms for fighting, and so on - the arteries that serve the digestive system
are contracted so that they receive a diminished blood supply. To divert their
fuel to the other muscles, the muscles of the digestive system are deprived of
it and in consequence the digestive activities are held up for the time.
Such
disturbances may last for hours, and you can see how easy it is for digestive
troubles to arise as a result of fear, anxiety, jealousy, resentment, anger, and
inferiority feelings.
It has been shown by experiment that adverse emotions
generate poisons within the bodily system, and that under extreme conditions some
of the brain cells may be temporarily or permanently injured by intense emotion.
So
from all this you can see that some sort of emotional discipline is desirable.
Of what possible use are the bodily changes of fear or anger when a man insults
you over the telephone? Certainly they give you extra strength to throw the telephone
out of the window, but this solves no problems. If a man falls in love with a
screen actress, his heart will beat more rapidly to enable him to begin a primitive
love-chase; but in the circumstances of modern civilisation where would this chase
end - or begin?
*
Now there are three aspects to the matter of disciplining
the emotions. The first aspect of emotional discipline is the development of a
habit of self-observation with regard to your own emotional conditions. In Buddhist
terminology, this is called the detailed observation of the mental state. The
second aspect involves the control of emotional manifestations as these arise.
The third aspect is a matter of developing a new set of values of such a kind
that many of the circumstances that previously called out the responses of fear,
anger. self-assertion, and so on, then fail to do so, or at least do so to a reduced
extent.
Little need be said about the need for controlling the powerful emotions
that lead to both external discord and internal conflict; their effects are in
most cases distressingly obvious. Racial hatreds, religious prejudices, political
biases - these lie at the root of many quarrels between individuals and between
nations. Ambivalent feelings of love and hate towards others within the family,
as well as irrational fears and guilt complexes, give rise to neuroses and other
mental aberrations.
To wait until an emotional problem reaches major proportions
before dealing with it is like waiting until a trickle becomes a flood. The Buddhist
method is to keep constant watch - to apply constant mindfulness - while an adverse
emotion exists as a trickle, and to deal with it at this stage; for when it reaches
the proportions of a flood much of the damage, inwardly and outwardly, is already
done.
To try to deal with major emotional problems by any sort of repressive
emotional control either drives the real causes into other channels or else intensifies
the outer effects, so that emotional control requires something better than any
possible form of surface treatment can offer.
Emotional control must begin
with what in Buddhism is called the detailed observation of the mental state.
This is a matter of continual self-observation with a view to detecting the presence
of any emotion which might retard the mind's progress towards enlightenment.
The
recognition of such retardant emotions in their mildest and most unobtrusive forms
is regarded in Buddhist practice as highly important, for it is necessary to see
them for what they are before they reach greater proportions. Recognition is the
first essential to control.
In order to control your emotions you must know
what you are controlling, and this knowledge (apart from its theoretical aspect)
is the work of mindfulness. Without it attempts at control by will-power alone
might degenerate into harmful repression.
Repression is a matter of pressing
unwelcome mental states below the level at which they are accessible to consciousness.
The work of mindfulness, on the other hand, is the work of bringing the full light
of sharpened awareness to bear on all mental states, unwelcome and otherwise,
and this is the very opposite of repression.
There are, of course, occasions
in your everyday life when you must exercise a great deal of effort of will to
prevent an emotional outburst. You must bottle up your emotions even though you
know that this bottling-up is building up harmful tension, tension of mind and
body.
At other times you feel that it is absolutely imperative to give vent
to your adverse emotions, hateful and petty and spiteful as you know them to be.
You feel you must have your emotional splurge whatever the consequences.
Which
is right and which is wrong? Right and wrong are conventional words which sometimes
obscure the real point. The real question is, which does the less harm in the
long run? You must either keep control at all costs - and this, according to some
standards, is the right thing to do - or you must let go and give your wrong emotions
an outlet.
The answer, in part at least, is that whatever you do you must do
it as mindfully as possible in the circumstances. If you must let go and have
your emotional splurge, if you must give way to your annoyance, self-pity, envy,
or whatever it is, you should be as fully aware of it as you, can and realise
its nature. In this way you will keep some control over it; but once you seek
to justify yourself or deceive yourself as to what you are doing you begin to
lose this control.
You must, of course, consider its effects on others, and
from this viewpoint an emotional outburst is often quite wrong. From one viewpoint
- from the viewpoint of your own development - it is better to do wrong mindfully
than to do right mindlessly; it is better to be fully aware of what you are doing
and why you are doing it - however conventionally wrong it is - than to do the
conventionally right thing without knowing why.
When your emotions are too
strong and you give way to an emotional outburst, this outburst can be considered
a failure; but because you are an ordinary human being and not a superhuman these
failures will occur from time to time. If you train yourself in mindfulness -
especially in the detailed observation of the mental state - such failures will
occur less and less frequently. The important thing is that progress is taking
place.
Practical Work
THE CONTROL OF ANXIETY
To become tense in circumstances
of stress is easy; to remain calm and free from agitation is difficult. Being
difficult, it requires self-training, self-training not only at the level of muscular
relaxation but also at the mental level. Methods of muscular relaxation are of
great value in bringing about a generally relaxed condition of both mind and body,
for mind and body interact; but muscular relaxation needs to be supplemented by
mental relaxation.
Let us consider, therefore, how best you can approach the
problem of tension at the mental level. To do this, of course, you must go further
back than the tension itself; you must go back to the tension-causing factors
in the mind; and these can be defined in broad terms as anxiety, resentment, and
self-assertion.
These three factors arise from what in Buddhism are called
the three roots of mental evil - selfish desire, aversion, and delusion. From
selfish desire arises anxiety; from aversion arises resentment; and from delusion
arises self-assertion. Of these three tension-causing factors - anxiety, resentment,
and self-assertion - let us take just one as the basis for an exercise in mindfulness.
Therefore,
during a period of a month or more, take in hand the problem of anxiety. Make
a contract with yourself to the effect that after each time you allow yourself
to become unduly anxious about anything at all you will apply some small self-imposed
penalty on yourself.
Just what penalty you use is for you to decide, but it
should be an easy one, one that you can impose on yourself without tending to
throw it aside. If you find it too irksome you will need to break it down a little;
on the other hand if it becomes too easy and ineffective you will need to stiffen
it up to some extent.
You must recognise that anxiety is related to desires
of various kinds (selfish and otherwise), to attachment, and to possessiveness.
In tackling the problem of anxiety, then, you are working on these other factors
as well to some extent.
The seventh
month
THE MECHANISMS OF SELF-DECEIT
THERE exists within the mind of every
normal person a heritage of primitive urges, brought over from mankind's early
human and pre-human ancestors in their battle for survival. To recognise that
these primitive urges exist in you is one of the first steps you must make in
your progress along the path of self-understanding; to refuse to recognize them,
to refuse to see them as parts of your mental make-up, is to build up a wall of
self-deceit within your own mind.
In your early life, because other people
disapproved of these primitive urges, you learned to disguise them and in some
cases to be ashamed of them. At first you learned to refuse to admit them to other
people, while at a later stage you refused - at least, you tried to refuse to
admit them to yourself.
One reason for this refusal was that you wanted to
think highly of yourself, to keep your sense of ego intact at all costs. It is,
incidentally, this sense of ego which is the focal point of self deceit, and it
is also the same sense of ego which is the focus on which the Buddha-doctrine
centres its attack.
*
As to the mechanisms which the mind uses in its efforts
to deceive itself, it will be helpful if we consider them in terms of brain structure
end function.
In a certain sense you may regard the brain as a highly complicated
system of pathways or circuits along which the nervous energy travels. Each such
pathway is called a neurogram. When the nervous energy travels along one particular
pathway or neurogram, a corresponding idea tends to arise in consciousness, and
when the nervous energy moves into another pathway or neurogram the first idea
fades and another one arises in consciousness.
Now if one of these nervous
pathways becomes impaired or damaged in some way it will be able to carry the
nervous energy only with difficulty, if at all. You can compare this situation
with a road which develops potholes, so that a car travelling along it does so
in a series of bumps and lurches. The driver whenever possible avoids this bumpy,
difficult, and painful road.
This simile will help you to understand the "avoidant
mechanisms" of the mind, for in a similar manner the nervous energy will
avoid travelling along or through a neurogram which has been made difficult and
painful.
It needs no technical jargon or psychological training to say that
we all tend to avoid the painful and unpleasant. That, of course, is what defines
the painful and unpleasant we tend to avoid it.
Let us consider an example.
A child undergoes a frightening experience; it does not matter much what sort
of experience, but he is very frightened by it. When it has been over for some
time he tries not to think about it, because when he thinks about it he becomes
afraid again. This is reasonable and easy to understand, and it all takes place
at a conscious level. Later, it becomes subconscious.
But this does not mean
that the child immediately blots out all memory of the frightening experience;
the process as a rule is a gradual one, and the child's refusal to think about
it is at first ineffective. Later, however, it gradually becomes successful, and
at the same time it becomes habitual. When an activity, mental or bodily, becomes
habitual, it also becomes less conscious.
Thus the mechanism of avoidance,
at first conscious, gradually sinks to the subconscious level.
There are other
types of experience besides fear that set in motion the mechanism of avoidance;
those of horror, nausea, and physical pain, for example. The feeling of inferiority
is another of these, and so are the feelings of guilt and unworthiness. No one
likes to feel inferior, guilty, or unworthy, and the mind at both conscious and
subconscious levels tends to avoid these feelings.
But back to the car driver;
having found the road full of potholes, difficult, and even painful, h, avoids
it; but he nevertheless wishes to reach his destination somehow, and he does not
abandon his journey just because the road is in poor condition. He finds an alternative
road, even if it means a lengthy detour and a longer route.
In the same way
the nervous energy refuses to cease its activity because one neurogram is pain-blocked,
and it finds another neurogram which offers it a pleasant pathway. When this happens
in the brain there arises in the mind a substitute-idea, for while the mind refuses
to allow the pain-blocked idea to arise in consciousness it diverts its energy
to a more acceptable idea. This is the mechanism of "divertence".
Because
of the mechanism of divertence, there are times when you experience emotion but
deceive yourself as to its true object. For some reason or other you do not wish
to attach that particular emotion to that particular object.
For example, a
child both loves and hates his mother. It must be realised that practically every
child has ambivalent emotions towards his parents. In fact, he has ambivalent
attitudes towards many significant things in his life, which means that he both
loves and hates them. He loves his parents at one time because they look after
him and he hates them at another when they scold and punish him; but both opposites
exist potentially in his mental structure all the time.
But while his expressions
of love are well received by his parents, his expressions of hate bring him disapproval,
scoldings, and spankings, and perhaps lectures on the wickedness of not loving
one's parents.
In the case of the sensitive child all this disapproval and
lecturing produce a sense of guilt and unworthiness, and when - later on - he
becomes aware of his hate he tries to suppress it. But, without any real understanding
of the way his mind functions, his attempts to control his instinctive upsurges
lead only to their repression.
But any mental factor which is repressed is
not thereby destroyed, and the repressed emotion of hate must find its outlet.
As the child's hate cannot attach itself to his mother it must attach itself to
something else, something less likely to arouse the disapproval of his elders.
This substitute object may be his school teacher, for example.
Thus the disapproved
emotion is displaced from its true object, his mother, to a substitute object,
the teacher.
You can see, easily enough, that the avoidant mechanism and the
divertant mechanism work hand in hand. The nervous energy avoids travelling along
a brain pathway or neurogram that arouses ideas and emotions of guilt, inferiority,
unworthiness, and pain, and it is diverted into neurograms that avoid these unpleasant
feelings. And if these neurograms arouse ideas of self-righteousness, superiority,
or self-importance, so much the better; or at least so it seems in a superficial
sense.
*
Now just as pain and unpleasant emotions can damage a neurogram,
so pleasure, physical or emotional, can smooth and improve another neurogram and
thus facilitate the passage of the nervous energy through it.
To revert once
again to our car driver, he will avoid a narrow road whose surface is full of
potholes, and he will divert his course to a road which is in good condition.
But if there is yet a third road which has been broadened and well-surfaced, and
which gives beautiful views and interesting vistas throughout its whole length,
then he will travel on this road whenever he can. And he will do this not always
because it leads to any special destination but for the sheer pleasure of travelling
along that road, with its views and vistas. He may even do this when he should
be travelling to his work or attending to other responsibilities.
In the same
way the mental energy will flow along a neurogram that yields pleasure, even though
there is no other purpose to it than the pleasure it yields, and even though it
solves no other problem or brings about no particular decision. This describes
the mechanism of "fixation".
As an example, if a child is spoilt,
if his mother fusses over his comforts and pleasures, if sire overprotects him
and gives him excessive praise, all at the expense of his character-development,
then his mental energy will become fixated on the mental image of his mother.
*
So
here you have three basic mental mechanisms - avoidance, caused by a pain-blocked
neurogram; divertence, dependent on an alternative neurogram; and fixation, arising
from an over-facilitated neurogram.
If you accept the idea that - in common
with humanity at large - your mind employs various modes of selfdeceit, you can
see that these mechanisms are at the root of much of this self-deceit, and it
is the pain-blocked neurograms that account for the very natural resistance that
sometimes comes to the surface when you are required, in the process of self-understanding,
to face the less savoury aspects of your own mind.
This resistance arises when
someone questions the rightness or value of some self-deceit you have been treasuring.
Such a resistance comes to the surface as annoyance, fear, or maybe some kind
of irrational mental attitude. Its function - if you can call it a function -
is to keep the self-deceit intact.
Until you can overcome this resistance and
face all your self-deceits you are helpless against them; they dominate your thinking,
and this is one of the greatest difficulties in the task of self-understanding.
Practical
Work
THE CONTROL OF IRRITABILITY AND RESENTMENT
Few of us have entirely
overcome the tendency to speak or respond irritably in difficult circumstances,
nor are many of us free from a tendency to harbour some degree of resentment.
This resentment generally concerns petty injustices and hurts, inflicted - in
reality or sometimes in imagination - by others.
*
For present purposes
we shall assume that you are amongst the majority in this respect. For a month
or longer, then, take in hand your own tendencies towards irritability and resentment,
however slight they happen to be, and use them for the basis for an exercise in
mindfulness.
In the ordinary but unnatural tempo of life it is difficult to
maintain a condition of tranquillity in all circumstances, for there are often
too many petty annoyances in the daily routine and in consequence the mind is
too often aroused to a state of anger. Now this anger does not have to take the
form of rage or fury to be anger; very often you are merely mildly angry, and
you fail to realize just how often in the ordinary course of the day your anger
is aroused in a mild way.
This practice, then, is a matter of watching yourself
critically and dispassionately, with a view to realizing just how often and under
what conditions your anger is slightly aroused. In this practice you are not interested
in the major displays of anger that sometimes occur, for you are fully aware of
them; it is the occasional small annoyances, the petty irritations, that should
be the object of increased awareness in the daily routine, for, once the minor
forms of anger become well-controlled as a matter of habit, the major displays
of anger are easier to control.
It is essential at this point to note that
control does not mean repression, for the repression of an emotion-laden thought
means that it is pressed down below the level at which it is accessible to consciousness.
Such a process is the very opposite of the process of mindfulness, which in one
sense is the process of extending the range of consciousness.
If you can develop
the habit of dispassionate observation with respect to your mental state at all
times, you can progressively increase your control over your reactions to the
outside world and gradually find a greater degree of inward balance and tranquillity.
In
acquiring a more detailed awareness of the functions and contents of your own
mind, an essential part of the process is the work of making the acquaintance
of its more unsavoury elements, the retarding factors of the mind. If you become
more familiar with your hidden hatreds, fears, and jealousies, you then know better
how to deal with them.
Make a contract with yourself, a pact-resolution, to
the effect that you will impose on yourself some small penalty soon after any
occasion on which you respond irritably or harbour resentful thoughts.
The
eighth month
THE BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF EGOLESSNESS
SELF-ASSERTION, the assertion
of one's own rights and privileges, of one's importance, and of one's individual
and distinctive existence: this is one of the major modes of instinctive response
to many of the circumstances of life. It is one of the prime elements in the search
for personal gratification.
It is a never-ending search, this search for personal
gratification; for each satisfaction that is achieved is only a temporary one,
and sooner or later the search must be resumed. To seek happiness by way of self-assertion,
according to the teachings of Buddhism, is the surest way to perpetuate the sorrows
and unsatisfactory factors in personal life, for enduring happiness can be found
only by breaking free from the false belief in a self separate from life as a
whole.
The most distinctive feature of Buddhism is the teaching that the innermost
core of individual existence is not a fixed unchanging ego or self but a momentary
and ever-changing current of forces. This, if followed through, leads to a policy
of non-assertion instead of self-assertion; and therefore non-assertion must be
cultivated in the quest for ultimate happiness.
*
One of the basic characteristics
of the world around us is the complete absence of permanence. Some things last
a long while, it's true, and seem to change very little over the years; but nothing
is permanent in any true sense. You will find that the fact of impermanence is
easy to acknowledge in a superficial way; but you will also find that it' s very
difficult to accept it with all its implications.
We live in a world of impermanence,
yet at the same time we try to stave off this impermanence by making our desired
things last as long as we can. Growing old, we try to keep up some semblance of
youth. While recognising the fact of impermanence, we find it unpalatable and
therefore refuse to accept it. Up to a point, we succeed in rejecting it; and
to this extent we delude ourselves.
We know, of course, that we must accept
some suffering, some pain and sorrow, mixed in with our happiness in this round
of birth and death; but knowing of no other existence, we have no option but to
keep on seeking for happiness by gratifying our desires. We think that this is
the only way in which we can gain happiness; and here again we delude ourselves.
In
our efforts to stave off the impermanence always closing in around us, and in
our struggle for happiness in a universe of mixed pleasure and pain, we are impelled,
much of the time, to assert ourselves and to act from self-interest, not knowing
that, in the ultimate, self-assertion is the arch-enemy of happiness. Here, once
again, we delude ourselves.
So we are deluding ourselves in three main ways.
In seeking for permanence in a world essentially impermanent, we are reducing
rather than increasing our happiness. In looking for happiness within the round
of birth and death we are looking in the wrong direction. And in asserting ourselves
we are doing the very thing that makes complete happiness impossible.
So the
Buddha-doctrine states, in effect, that we must understand and fully accept three
salient characteristics of existence, namely:
1- the fact that everything in
the relative universe is impermanent;
2- the fact that everything in the relative
universe is in a constant state of agitation, a state which in conscious living
beings may become suffering; and
3- the fact that no being possesses a fixed,
unchanging, eternal self, soul, or ego.
You will find that these three characteristics
of the relative universe - impermanence, suffering, and egolessness - are of fundamental
importance in Buddhism.
The first of them, the characteristic of impermanence,
is emphasised again and again, as our attachment to the impermanent keeps us imprisoned
within the wheel of birth and death.
The second characteristic, of suffering,
is the starting point in Buddhism, for the Buddha-way is concerned primarily with
suffering and the cure of suffering. In terms of fundamentals, every particle
of the universe is in a state of agitation, and in conscious living beings the
higher degrees of this agitation become different degrees of suffering. Some of
the lower degrees of this agitation are known as pleasure, and the differences
between pleasure and suffering lies in the intensity of the agitation.
The
third characteristic, egolessness, is the focal point of the whole of the Buddha-doctrine,
the central element in the whole teaching. You can't understand the Buddha-doctrine
unless you understand the meaning of egolessness from the beginning. It doesn't
matter a great deal if you miss the technicalities of the law of action and reaction,
or the subtleties of Buddhist metaphysics; but it does matter if you fail to grasp
the meaning of egolessness. Everything is focussed on this point, and without
an understanding of it many things in Buddhism may fail to make sense.
In the
practice of the Buddha-way the emphasis on the doctrine of egolessness is even
more important and vital. If you want to practise Buddhism, as distinct from making
it a parlour-game like chess, you must focus your attention on the problem of
subduing your ego-concept and of realising its falsity.
Following the outer
forms of morality is just the first stage of the work. The traditional customs
of Buddhism as carried out in the East are conventionally right in their own place,
but those customs imported into the West may merely provide side-interests which
weaken the attack on the self-concept. Talking about Buddhism until the jaws ache
may enlighten others, but too often it mainly functions as a means of self-assertion.
None of these things - superficial morality, the observance of customs, and talking
about Buddhism - has any ultimate value unless it leads up to the effort to eradicate
the self-delusion.
The reason for the supreme importance given to the teaching
of egolessness is that the belief in a separate permanent self is the salient
point in that basic ignorance which, in Buddhism, is regarded as the source of
all suffering; for when the delusion of selfhood is finally broken down the basic
ignorance also is destroyed.
This matter of egolessness is really a particular
case of impermanence; for it means that a being does not possess a permanent or
unchanging soul at the centre of his existence, but consists of an impermanent
and ever-changing life-current, which is never the same for two consecutive moments.
There is, according to this, no hard core at the, centre of a being's existence,
no eternal soul, no fixed or unalterable ego. In this sense, the self doesn't
exist.
However, to say that the self doesn't exist, flatly and baldly like
that, doesn't give a true picture. It is much better to say that the self doesn't
exist in the way in which we think it exists. The self doesn't exist as an unchanging
entity, but it does exist as a fluid or fluctuating life-current, an ever-changing
stream of existence.
A living being has been described, according to the Buddhist
concept of things, as "a flame-like process which burns by virtue of a force
peculiar to itself." Note particularly the term "a flame-like process":
this expresses the idea very concisely, for you will find that, over and over
again, the Buddha-doctrine insists on the dynamic nature of existence, with no
static entity to be found anywhere.
This flame-like process (which is the nearest
approach to a self or soul you will ever find in Buddhism) is the life-current.
In the human being it manifests in a five-fold way. Firstly, it builds around
itself a material body. Secondly, by way of this material body it experiences
existence in terms of pleasurable feelings, neutral feelings, and displeasurable
feelings. Thirdly, it experiences existence in terms of perceptions. Fourthly,
it reacts to these experiences by way of volitional tendencies, or determinants,
whereby it sorts out the feelings and perceptions and determines lines of activity.
And fifthly, there is the basic cognitive faculty functioning as consciousness
and also operating on the subconscious level.
In other words, the flame-like
process we call the life-current consists of a multitude of components, some material
and some mental; these components, for the purpose of analysing the individual
human being, are classified into five groups. These five component-groups, which
we have just touched on briefly, can be described more fully in the following
way.
Component-group 1 - the body. You as an individual human being consist
of a mind and a body; and your body, broadly speaking, can be spoken of as the
group of material components that help to make up your life-current, your so-called
self.
Component-group 2 - the feelings. You are aware of the world around you
by way of your five physical senses and also by way of ideas that you build up
out of your sense-impressions. In thus becoming aware of a stimulus - that is,
either of a sense-object or of an idea - you experience either a pleasant awareness
of it, unpleasant awareness of it, or a neutral awareness of it with neither pleasure
nor displeasure. This quality of awareness is called feeling, and all pleasant,
neutral, and unpleasant feelings are included in this second group of components.
Component-group
3 - the perceptions. In Buddhist psychology there are six different kinds of perception.
These are (1) vision, (2) hearing, (3) smelt, (4) taste, (5) body-sense-perception
(or, to use the neurological term, somaesthetic perception, including the perceptions
of temperature and contact), and (6) mental perception. The word translated as
perception embraces also awareness and the faculty that recognises, identifies,
and compares the differences and similarities between stimuli.
Component-group
4 - the determinants. The previous two groups of components (the feelings and
the perceptions) consist of somewhat passive mental factors. That is to say, the
feelings and the perceptions are forms of awareness that occur in relation to
the reception of incoming stimuli. In contrast, the fourth group comprises components
of an active or dynamic nature. These centre around the volition or will, and
determine the person's activities; and for this reason we can call them the determinants.
There
are fifty of these determinants as usually listed, and I do not intend to bore
you by discussing the whole lot of them. However, I will mention a few.
The
first is contact-awareness, the initial impingement or meeting of a sense-object
or a mind-object with a sense-organ and consciousness.
The next to be mentioned
is the volition or will. This dominates all the other determinants and to some
extent controls their activities, thus influencing the tendencies of thought,
speech, and bodily action.
Then there is one-pointedness, whereby the mind
is centred on one sense-object or idea at a time. Mental vitality is next, and
is roughly parallel though not identical with the nervous energy. The next is
attention, the mental faculty which brings a sense-object or idea into the focus
of consciousness.
These five that I have just mentioned are present in all
forms of consciousness, together with feeling and perception, which make, in all
seven universal mental factors.
Others in the group of determinants are application
(the initial application of consciousness when a new impression enters the mind);
discursion, which is the faculty of searching within the mind for the identification
and associations of a newly-entered impression; mental effort; interest; intention;
and decisiveness, or the faculty of deciding between two courses of action.
None
of the determinants so far mentioned has either a moral or an immoral character.
The remaining members of this component-group, however, do have such a relationship,
and they are classified into twenty-five morally-skilful determinants and fourteen
morally-unskilful determinants.
Included in the morally skilful determinants
are generosity, goodwill, and non-delusion; while the morally-unskilful impulses
include greed, ill-will, delusion, dogmatism, envy, and anxiety. Another, generally
called conceit, is practically the same as the Western concept of the inferiority
complex.
You will no doubt see that some of the determinants can be roughly
equated with the instincts of Western psychology, the desires and emotions that
arise with the operation of these instincts, and the thought-habits that arc built
up by the frequent repetition of thoughts.
Component-group 5 - the basic cognitive
faculty: In Buddhist psychology the mind - both in the form of full consciousness
and in its subconscious functions - is a form of energy, in the same sense in
which light and electricity are forms of energy; and, without the presence of
this special form of energy, the other mental component-groups could not arise.
The
basic cognitive faculty operates in a sixfold way through the various sense-organs.
Firstly it operates as visual consciousness when it functions by way of the eye
and the total visual sense; secondly, as auditory consciousness through the car
and the auditory sense; thirdly, as olfactory consciousness by way of the sense
of smell; fourthly, as gustatory consciousness by way of the tastebuds of the
tongue and elsewhere; fifthly, as body consciousness through innumerable sensory
end-organs of contact, temperature, and other somaesthetic senses; and sixthly,
as mind-consciousness - the perception of ideas - through the organs of mind.
All
mental states are regarded as having a degree of consciousness, even those states
which appear to be unconscious; but in so-called unconscious and subconscious
states the consciousness is too low in intensity to register in the memory, and
therefore cannot afterwards he recollected.
Now this analysis of the individual
being into five groups of components may appear to you to be dry and somewhat
overburdened with technicalities, and perhaps rather pointless. But it has a point,
and a point that bears directly on the doctrine of egolessness. The point is that
each of the component-groups is impermanent, fluctuating, and ever-changing; and
in the multitudinous components of individual existence nothing whatever of a
fixed or permanent nature can be found.
The first component-group, the body,
is changing all of the time, slowly or quickly, growing larger or smaller, wearing
out, or repairing itself, getting warmer or cooler, or changing in some way.
The
four mental component-groups are equally transient, or more so. The feelings arise
and fall away from minute to minute, and the perceptions behave in a similar manner;
while the determinants, conditioned by or dependent on the feelings and the perceptions,
change accordingly. The basic cognitive faculty, functioning as consciousness,
continually changing from instant to instant, is just as impermanent as all the
rest.
You can see, then, that the purpose of this analysis of individual existence
is to show that nowhere is there any possibility of a permanent self, soul, or
ego. A wave arises on the ocean of becoming, and you arc that wave; another wave
arises nearby, and I am that wave; while all around us are other waves, other
beings, people, ants, elephants, cats, and dogs.
In time, each wave hack into
the ocean of becoming; but the forces that comprise it cause a new wave to arise
somewhere else. I he new wave is not identical with the old one, but it is not
altogether different; there is continuity, but there is no fixed unchanging identity.
In the same way, when a being dies, certain of the forces of which the life-current
consists cause a new being to come into existence. The new being is not identical
with the old one, but the new being is not altogether different from the old one;
there is continuity, but no fixed entity.
Since the focal point in Buddhism
is the realization that the self is a delusion, the final goal is naturally the
annihilation of the delusion. This final goal is the Unconditioned, the ultimate
bliss which lies beyond the ordinary happiness of personal life. In a sense it
is annihilation, but only the annihilation of the unreal. The Unconditioned is
the state beyond words and beyond thought that supervenes when the delusion of
selfhood is destroyed; for it is the world of impermanence and suffering that
is found to be unreal when measured in ultimate terms.
Now what is the significance
of egolessness as far as your daily life is concerned? Its significance is that
the self you so lovingly nurture, the ego you love to expand and hate to withdraw,
is a delusion and the ultimate cause of your suffering. Every act you carry out
on behalf of the self-delusion is just so much energy tipped down the drain. Once
you realise this fact of egolessness, once you learn to become constantly aware
of it and to discipline your behaviour accordingly, it roust of necessity modify
your life-style and enable you to stand up to the rebuffs, neglects, and denials
that the world heaps on you from time to time.
The doctrine of egolessness
can be concisely summed up in this way:
"You who are slaves of the self,
who toil from morning until night in the service of self, who live in constant
fear of birth, old age, sickness, and death, receive the good news that your cruel
master does not exist."
*
THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX
You may find it
interesting to consider the Western concept of the inferiority complex in the
light of the Buddhist doctrine of egolessness. You will recall that, in discussing
those components of personal existence that we referred to as the determinants
- the active or dynamic mental factors - we mentioned one which is generally called
conceit. This determinant, according to the Buddha-doctrine, is of three kinds.
Firstly,
there is the conceit which makes one think "I am inferior to another";
then a second form of conceit gives rise to the idea "I am equal to the other
person"; and thirdly there is the kind which causes one to think "I
am superior to the other."
From this, it is apparent that conceit in this
sense means a factor of the mind which not merely makes one feel superior to another
(the meaning which is ordinarily attached to the word) but which prompts one to
be concerned with one's own inferiority, equality, or superiority by comparison
with another person.
You can see, then, that the meaning of conceit is closely
paralleled by the Western idea of the inferiority complex, which arises from one's
own self-centred and pathological concern with one's inferiority, equality, and
superiority as compared with others.
Let's consider this matter of the inferiority
complex as seen from the standpoint of Western thought.
We all know how it
feels to be left out of a conversation. We all know what it feels like when others
in a group are talking about things of which we know nothing, and what is worse,
talking about them almost as if we were not there at all. No one - neither you
nor I nor any other normal person - likes to be ignored.
To be ignored when
we want to be recognised means to feel inferior.
We all know, too, what it
feels like to be painfully self-conscious. You, no doubt, can recall a situation
in which you were expected to say something or to do something when attention
was focused on you: you halted and you faltered without quite knowing what to
say or what to do.
To be given too much attention when you feel unequal to
the occasion, then, means to feel inferior.
This means, then, that there are
situations in which you welcome attention, because you know that you can deal
adequately with the matter in hand. You then feel perhaps a little superior. And
there are times when you prefer not to be brought into focus but to remain on
the outskirts of things, so to speak.
Sometimes attention shows up your inadequacies
and you resent it because it gives you a sense of inferiority; at other times
attention shows up your good points, so that you welcome it; it makes you feel
superior and important.
Your feelings of superiority and inferiority depend
largely on whether or not others applaud you, or at least approve of what you
say and do.
Throughout the course of your life, no doubt, you have had experiences
in which you have felt inferior, and all these experiences have been built up
into a complicated mental structure that is generally known as the inferiority
complex.
All of us, as normal people, have some sort of inferiority complex.
Your own may be a powerful one or it may be only a mild one; it may be so strong
that it dominates you, or you may have learnt to understand and control it; but
unless you happen to be superhuman you must have an inferiority complex of some
kind. It is a piece of standard equipment in the human mind and it has had its
own special evolutionary value in the past.
You seldom hear the superiority
complex mentioned. Why? The fact is that the superiority complex - apparently
the direct opposite - is the same as the inferiority complex. To want to feel
superior is largely the same as the dislike of feeling inferior, and the mental
mechanism of the one is the same as the mental mechanism of the other.
Let
us consider the meaning of the term, the inferiority complex. Apart from its psychological
implications, a complex is a number of things all held together in some way so
that they all function as one unit. In this sense you could call a sewing machine
a complex, because it consists of a number of parts all held together so that
they function as one unit; you could not, of course, call these same parts a complex
if they were all piled in a heap.
In its psychological meaning you can take
a complex to mean a number of ideas all held together so that they all function
as one unit.
One such complex may be related to the aggressive instinct and
arouse the feeling of anger. Another complex - or any idea that forms part of
it - may set to work the instinct of escape and thus generate some form of fear;
such a complex is called a phobia.
Yet another complex may stimulate the instinct
of self-assertion and bring with it a feeling of superiority and self-importance,
or if it is thwarted, a feeling of inferiority.
The particular instinct to
which a complex is related - aggression, escape, or self-assertion, for example
- is the binding and co-ordinating element in the complex.
Now when you assert
yourself in some way and are thwarted, or when you attempt to display your superiority
and fail, you naturally feel inferior, and every such defeat you suffer leaves
its vestige in your memory-store.
The sum total of all the vestiges of these
thwarted attempts at self-assertion constitutes your inferiority complex. The
inferiority complex is not the same as the inferiority feeling, for this is the
feeling that arises when the complex is stimulated and then thwarted.
On the
other hand, when your inferiority complex is stimulated into activity and this
activity is successful, you have a feeling of superiority.
Why should the inferiority
complex be as important as it is? In the evolution of man from his pre-human ancestors,
we can see that the individual with the strongest instincts of aggression and
self-assertion would be the most likely to survive under difficulties. In a fight,
the one who is less aggressive is likely to perish. In a scramble for food, those
lacking in self-assertion are likely to go hungry, to weaken, and to die.
Aggression
and self-assertion are closely related instincts; the main function of aggression
is to defeat an enemy or a rival, while that of self-assertion (in part) is to
intimidate the enemy or the rival. Self-assertion also has another aspect, for
we see it at work in the form of self-display in courtship.
You can see, then,
that self-assertion has a survival value not only in the sphere of individual
survival, but all so in the sphere of race-survival.
Because your self-assertive
instinct is so important, then, your inferiority complex also is important; and
because of this, in turn, it has deep-reaching effects on your life as a whole.
THE
PRACTICE OF NON-ASSERTION
If you find your inferiority complex has adverse
effects on your life, and if you decide to deal with it by some form of mental
culture, there is an ancient Buddhist technique which has a direct application
to this matter.
A major working principle in Buddhist psychology is to strive
always to see things as they really are, to work always for clear discernment
as opposed to self-deceit or delusion. The technique used for this clear discernment
we know as right mindfulness, and one aspect of right mindfulness is called the
detailed awareness of the mental state.
The detailed awareness of the mental
state is designed to give increased self-understanding, with specific regard to
the emotional quality of various mental states.
This does not mean a theoretical
knowledge of what goes on in people's minds in general, although this theoretical
knowledge is sometimes very helpful; it means a detailed and direct awareness
of what goes on in your own mind.
It is a sharpened awareness of the emotional
quality of each mental state as and when it arises, and also to a certain extent
in retrospect. It is a form of self-observation designed to break down self-deceit
and to keep the stream of consciousness free from delusion.
The technique consists
of the formation of a new habit, the habit of bare attention. Note this term,
bare attention; it means attention which is stripped bare of all emotional overtones
and under-currents, attention free from bias, free from prejudice, and free from
self-deceit.
It is only by bare attention that you call see things as they
really are, for emotion clouds and colours your perception.
To form this new
habit is not easy. Your mind, as you know, likes to run in its old deep ruts,
and it needs persistent self-observation and self honesty to break out of these
ruts.
There is no easy way and there is no quick way to form the habit of
bare attention, but there is a valuable guide in relation to the matter of the
inferiority complex. It is this: every time you feel self-important or superior,
you should try to realise that it's merely a primitive instinct dominating your
intellect. When your intellect can dominate your primitive instincts, you will
be well on the way - not to a better feeling of superiority - but to true superiority.
As
you learn to apply the detailed awareness of the mental state, you will see the
part that the self-assertion instinct plays in your own life. You will see that
while your inherent tendency to assert yourself in primitive circumstances had
a survival value, under the conditions of modern civilisation this tendency can
sometimes do more harm than good.
You have seen that when your self-assertion
instinct is stimulated it brings about certain activity on your part, and if this
activity is successful you tend to feel superior or self-important. But when,
on the other hand, this self-assertive activity is thwarted or does not meet with
success, you feel inferior.
Time after time in the course of life your strivings
towards self-assertion are defeated; time after time your self-importance is challenged,
and in consequence you feel inferior and inadequate to meet the challenge.
Now
with so many attacks on your self-importance, your strivings are largely motivated
by your self assertive; tendencies; but this motivation is largely subconscious.
Many
of your strivings against the great outside world are attempts - conscious as
well as subconscious to adapt your environment to your own wishes; but the people
in this great outside world have their own self-assertiveness, just as self-centred
as yours, and, in the mass, vastly more powerful.
The result is conflict, and
very often defeat. Another element is added to your inferiority complex; another
vestige in the memory-store, being painful, must be pressed down to a level at
which consciousness can not reach it.
As a result, either you become more timid
or retiring on the one hand, or on the other you develop along more bombastic
and self-assertive lines. There will be effects of some sort in your general life-style,
tending frequently towards either one extreme or the other, unless very early
in life you have learnt how to handle the whole situation.
Undoubtedly there
are some occasions on which your self-assertion centres around someone else's
success or defeat. Maybe your young son becomes dux of his school, or perhaps
he loses his first job through inefficiency, and so you share his success or failure;
but in such cases your feelings of superiority or inferiority arise because something
that belongs to you is involved and is an extension of your own ego.
It is
your own self that feels superior and enjoys it, and it's your own self that feels
inferior and seeks some way or other to feel superior.
Now it is precisely
the . importance of the self to the self that you must break down if you want
to deal adequately with the inferiority complex, and for this reason you must
realise that in order to get rid of the inferiority feeling you must get rid also
of the superiority feeling.
To be free of this feeling of inferiority you must
be free of the feeling of superiority.
You will see, then, that the ancient
Buddhist teaching of egolessness is very up-to-date; for hand in hand with the
deep-rooted belief in the importance of one's own self goes the equally deep-rooted
assertion of superiority.
As I leave already said, it is important to understand
the teaching of egolessness if you want to understand Buddhism. On the other hand,
whether you believe in this doctrine, merely because it is a part of the teaching
as a whole, is somewhat less important. It's quite unnecessary to believe anything
uncritically or to accept anything without thoroughly examining it. What is really
important is to realise that you can never achieve any enduring happiness by way
of self-assertion.
At the very least, it is necessary to understand and accept
the fact that excessive self-assertion causes conflict with others and conflict
within your own mind.
On this basis, then, your self-training in this connection
is a matter of endeavouring to keep all your actions free - as far as possible
- from self-assertion.
You begin by self-observation, for self-observation
is the key to self-training. You begin by critically observing your reactions
to external events and situations with a view to finding out when and how you
assert yourself; and this self-observation must become habitual and continual.
You must learn to turn the searchlight of mindfulness on to every one of your
actions and reactions.
This increasing mindfulness, this inwardly-directed
attentiveness, helps you discover your own mental mechanisms, those of rationalisation
and repression, for example, which are motivated by your own reluctance to confront
the things in your own mind.
Then, as you gain increased self-understanding,
you will begin to see your own self-assertive tendencies as they really are. You
will begin to see yourself pushing to the fore in circumstances which give you
an opportunity for self-importance, and hanging back from a duty when that duty
arouses feelings inferiority.
The increased awareness and self-understanding
will act as a brake when you would otherwise seek a superiority feeling, and will
spur you on to action when you' d otherwise hang hack for fear of an inferiority
feeling. Superiority and inferiority in the subjective sense - that is the feelings
of superiority and of inferiority - will gradually disappear and just as gradually
be replaced with a true superiority. And this true superiority will be quite distinct
from the spurious superiority of the emotions.
As the work of self-observation
goes on, you may find it helpful to exert some disciplinary pressure on yourself;
and this self-disciplinary pressure will work in three main directions.
Firstly,
in thought. You may be offended, for example, by something said to you, or because
you have been left out of a conversation, or because your good qualities have
not been recognised. You may tend to brood, to reflect unwisely on whatever it
is that has hurt you, to dwell on the incident. Thus you magnify its importance,
you magnify your own sense of inferiority, and you magnify your own wish to find
a feeling of superiority to displace it.
Secondly, in speech. You may be such
a good talker that you are a poor listener, and you may interrupt other people's
conversations in order to have your say. Your speech may be full of self-references:
when, for example, if the conversation turns to gardens, you boast about your
own garden; or if someone mentions having had lumbago, you set out to show that
your own lumbago was far more painful and crippling than was the other person's.
Thus you tend to blowup your own ego with hot air like a balloon.
And thirdly,
in action. You may, perhaps, find yourself elbowing to the front because you like
the limelight, or else hanging back because of stage fright; both extremes being
due to in over-valued ego.
Whether your self-assertion shows itself in thought,
in speech, or in action, it's a potential source of unhappiness in some way or
other. It lays you open to hurt feelings or deflation. If you work always towards
a progressively increasing mindfulness of all of the forms that your self-assertive
tendency takes, coupled with a continued effort to control it as and when it arises,
you will attain a calm and balanced state of mind in which feelings of superiority
and inferiority have no place.
And as these disappear, so also the consequent
outward and inward conflicts disappear.
*
Practical Work
If you want
to place the various things that have been said on a practical basis, I suggest
that you set yourself a period of at least a month - or, better still, a period
of three months or longer - and during that period set out to discover and to
become more aware of the various ways in which your self-assertive tendencies
find their expression - expression sometimes in terms only of thought, sometimes
in the form of speech, or at other times by way of bodily action.
It is in
the daily round of work, your domestic life, and your social contacts with other
people that the delusion of selfhood does its damage and it is therefore right
in the middle of this daily round that you must take the first corrective steps.
When
your self-assertive tendencies are curbed by your own understanding and your own
will, it's good; when they are curbed by fear or by intimidation by others, it's
not so good. You are then not following the principle of non-assertion at all.
However,
the essence of the exercise is mindfulness. If you can observe your self-assertive
tendencies as and when they arise, so much the better, but, failing that, you
can recognise them in retrospect; but the main point is to become aware of them
in some way or other.
Place the exercise on a self-disciplinary basis; make
a contract with yourself to impose on yourself a small penalty whenever you unreasonably
assert yourself, not only in bodily action and in speech, but also in thought.
This
element of self-discipline is an important one. You will find that if you merely
resolve to correct your self-assertive habits you will be likely to forget your
resolution after a while. However, if you make a self-contract and, whenever you
find yourself unduly asserting your own importance, you go without cigarettes
for a few hours or have less sugar in your coffee, you will be more likely to
keep to your resolution.
In this way, you will be using the principle of self-discipline
side-by-side with the principle of mindfulness.
The
ninth month
THE PRACTICE OF THOUGHT CONTROL
IN most communities the thoughts
of the average person are governed by the thoughts of the majority of other average
people, and this holds good from early childhood right through to old age. Only
to a limited extent does the average person think for himself.
During early
childhood you learnt largely by exercising your senses; you looked at things,
you listened to sounds, you smelt and tasted things, you touched and handled them,
and you experienced physical pain and physical pleasure from then. Thus by direct
first-hand sensory contact you became acquainted with the fundamental elements
of experience.
When by exploring the world with your senses you found something
that yielded pleasure or satisfaction, you regarded that thing as good, and similarly
when you encountered something that gave rise to pain you regarded it as evil.
Good and evil at this stage were identical with pleasure and pain.
But your
elders soon complicated matters for you by scolding you for enjoying your pleasures
and by forcing you to do things which, although unpleasant, were called good.
As you learnt the language of your elders your concrete concepts of good and evil
became further confused with the abstract concepts of right and wrong, while the
rightness and wrongness of things were measured by the approval and disapproval
of others.
From the beginning, then, your thoughts were governed largely by
the thoughts of those about you, conveyed to you by their approval and disapproval.
There
were other external influences to shape your thoughts as you grew older, but to
a large extent the effects of these later influences - although less definite
- followed the patterns laid down in earliest childhood.
You tended to approve
of those things that were approved by the people you liked and admired, and to
disapprove of the things associated with people you disliked.
In your present
phase of life, whatever it happens to be, you still largely follow the childhood
patterns. Sometimes, perhaps, it may be that you believe a thing because it pleases
you to believe it, and not because your reason supports it. Or you believe it
because everybody around you believes it, or because, years ago, your parents
taught you to believe it.
For the childlike mind, authority forms the only
basis for belief; but even if your mind is more mature it probably still retains
old beliefs and builds new ones on inadequate foundations, mainly because you
are never called upon to apply the critical function of your reasoning powers
to the matters concerned. You take them for granted.
There is a very powerful
factor in modern life that continually conditions your thinking, or perhaps your
lack of thinking. The patterns and channels of your thoughts are conditioned to
a large extent by the continual blare of advertising This uses both blatant and
subtle means to keep at the highest pitch both your desires for sensory enjoyment
and your sense of self-importance.
You can realise that it is of vital importance
to develop a technique of thought control. In this connection, Buddhist psychology
offers a method called bare attention.
This is one of the most important forms
of mindfulness. In bare attention, the attention is stripped bare of all emotional
biases, prejudices, self-references, and associated thoughts. This emotion-free
attention is essential for seeing things as they really are, because emotional
biases, prejudices, and uncontrolled associations bring about falsifications or
distortions of perceptions.
Bare attention thus means the bare uncluttered
awareness of a perception, without any reaction to it in the form of deed, speech,
or mental comment.
If you were to examine your normal everyday perceptions,
you might find that they are often muddled, cluttered up with mental material
that belongs elsewhere, and obscure or distorted.
Sometimes these falsifications
cause misunderstandings, conflict, and discord. You can see that, if you apply
the principle of bare attention to your everyday thinking, you can reduce the
misunderstandings that sometimes occur, together with their consequent conflict
and discord.
It is not until you become aware of your own mental functioning
that you realize just how widespread and deep-seated your strong emotional biases
really are. They are, in fact, so widespread and so deep-seated that without special
self-training it is impossible to perceive a sense object, to form a clear idea
of a situation, or to recollect an event without some distortion or other.
In
the jungle of emotionally-distorted ideas that constitutes a large part of the
average mind there are danger zones, and when these are stimulated they give rise
to irrational thinking, bad temper, and misjudgments. Any of these can cause quarrels
and heartaches when they intrude into your associations with other people.
And
it is important to recognise the fact that you cannot as a rule see the danger
zones in your mind, because the tangled masses of emotional undergrowth make them
inaccessible to consciousness. Until the light of full consciousness can be brought
to bear on them, to identify them, and to clear them away, they will remain as
danger zones.
Much of this undergrowth was planted during childhood and before,
and if you really want to arrive at the detailed awareness of your own mind in
its fullest sense you must learn to break the false emotional connections formed
in your early life. It's probable that many buried complexes exist in your mind
and are at the root of your irrational behaviour, of your unaccountable likes
and dislikes, and of your fears and resentments.
Now it is not my intention
to discuss methods of self-analysis or systems of reaching buried complexes. This
is a specialist's territory and any endeavours to enter the danger zones of the
mind by a frontal attack could raise more problems than it solves.
The practice
of bare attention, at least in the sense in which we are considering it here,
does not make a direct or frontal attack on such problems; it works by establishing
a foothold in the observations and perceptions of the present and cleansing these
of their biases and prejudices; and then, as these current experiences are purified,
the cleaning-up process extends backwards, so to speak, into the past. In other
words, as your current experiences are progressively stripped bare of their retardant
emotional clutter, the increased awareness extends to the memory-patterns of earlier
emotional experiences.
Whereas a direct frontal attack in approaching a touchy
complex is practically certain to fail, the gradual and subtle influence of bare
attention seeps through into lower layers of the mind - layers normally inaccessible
to consciousness - and cleanses them at their own level.
However, it must be
realised that this is not the work of weeks, or months, or years; it must be considered
as a process of decades at least; in fact, it is a lifetime task.
There is
another point of interest in applying bare attention to that jungle of emotional
undergrowth called the human mind. As you employ the technique of bare attention
to your current experiences - as you endeavour to keep your present observations
and perceptions clear of bias, prejudice, and irrelevant emotion - so your mind
itself changes. It is like cleaning a mirror which has accumulated spots and splashes;
as you proceed with the cleaning process, so you find the reflection becoming
truer and clearer. In the same way, as you gradually clean up the perceptive faculties
of your mind, so you enable it to see into itself with greater clarity and so
to reach to greater depths.
*
This matter of bare attention forms an extremely
important factor in the Noble Eightfold Path, which is the core of Buddhism. To
make this point clear, let's run through the eight steps.
Right understanding
is the first step. In one sense, this is intellectual understanding of the Buddha-doctrine;
in another sense it is the understanding of the true nature of existence; while
in yet another sense it becomes a direct insight into the ultimate reality beyond
all things.
The second step, right thought, is one of the specifically psychological
aspects of the Path, since it involves the control of mental processes. Next in
order come right speech, right action, and right livelihood, which three together
summarise the moral aspects of Buddhism.
Then comes the sixth step, right effort,
which being the training of the will, is an essential part of Buddhist psychology.
The seventh step, right mindfulness, is also psychological, since it comprises
the process of perfecting the normal faculty of attention; while the last of the
eight steps, right concentration, takes us beyond the realm of normal psychology
into the cultivation of supernormal faculties of the mind.
Now it is the second
step of the Eightfold Path, the step called right thought, that we're primarily
concerned with at present. Right thought is usually described as thought which
is free from uncontrolled sensory desires, from ill-will, and from cruelty.
To
a large extent, mental processes involve the use of words, not only for expressing
thoughts but also for formulating them; and therefore the control of these mental
processes can be assisted by the use of the verbalizing function of the mind.
Before
we deal with verbalized thought, however, it will be of interest to consider what
Buddhist psychology has to say about the nature of thought in a broad sense, and
later on we can discuss the type of thought which uses words as its instruments.
The
Buddha-doctrine describes thought (in the sense of the general process of cognition)
as a conscious process, as a process whereby various stimuli affect consciousness.
Thought,
of course, must always be conscious. There can be no such thing as unconscious
thought; and, although we may speak of subconscious mental processes, these processes
cannot properly be called thought.
Just as thought must be conscious, so any
kind of consciousness must have a stimulus or object. This stimulus may come from
outside by way of one of the five physical senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste,
and body-sensibility), or it may come from within the mind itself in the form
of an idea or a mental image.
Thus, if there be no stimulus (no sound, no odour,
no recollection, nor any other sense-object or mind-object), then there can be
no consciousness.
Under such conditions, the state of mind that prevails is,
in Buddhist psychology, called the mental subcurrent; it is that form of mental
energy which gives to the body its life, and without this mental energy the body
could not live.
It can be visualized as an undercurrent of mental life from
which full consciousness arises. In English writings on Buddhism it is often called
the subconscious mind: but to avoid confusion with Western concepts it is better
to use the term mental subcurrent.
The mental subcurrent may be illustrated
by a stream of water flowing placidly and evenly; and, when this flow of water
is disturbed, waves arise on the surface. Similarly, when the subcurrent is disturbed
by stimuli (either external sense-objects or internal mind-objects) then consciousness
arises, as waves arise on the surface of the water.
The mental subcurrent is
the essential foundation of individual life and without the mental subcurrent
individual physical life, cannot exist. In it are stored the resultant impressions
of all previous experiences; and these sometimes enter consciousness in the form
of memories.
The subcurrent possesses no volition of its own, since volition
belongs only to consciousness; but the subconscious mental processes that go on
within it are directed by habits which have been formed by conscious will-activity
in the past.
During ordinary waking life, consciousness seems to be completely
continuous, but the Buddha-doctrine teaches that this is not as it seems, since
ordinary waking life consists of conscious phases rapidly alternating with subconscious
phases.
If we were to look at an electric light being switched on and off
many times each second, it would appear to be a completely continuous light, whereas
there would actually be a rapid alternation of light and darkness. In the same
way, what appears to be continuous consciousness is really a rapid alternation
of conscious and subconscious states.
Each mind-state lasts for an inconceivably
small fraction of a second and then passes away, to be followed immediately by
the next mind-state. In passing away, each mind-state transmits its energy to
the following state, which is thus in sonic degree similar to its predecessor.
But this new mind-state is not necessarily similar in all respects to that which
preceded it, for new external stimuli may have arisen.
Thus any mind-state
consists of the energy of its predecessor, plus sometimes some degree of modification.
In
waking life, consciousness arises from the mental subcurrent and sinks back to
the subconscious condition millions of times a second, and the rapid succession
of these alternating states gives the illusion of continuous consciousness. The
unit of time used in describing the processes of cognition is called a thought-moment;
millions of thought-moments go to make up a second.
When the mind is in a subconscious
state and a strong stimulus occurs, full consciousness may arise, and the process
of its arising will occupy a period of seventeen thought moments.
The following
description of the process describes these thought-moments one by one:
Moment
l : The mental subcurrent is evenly flowing below the level of consciousness and
the sudden strong stimulus occurs.
Moment 2: The mental subcurrent is irritated
of disturbed.
Moment 3: The mind turns towards the stimulus or object.
(This
stage is called advertance, but it must not be interpreted as attention since
as yet there is no mind-consciousness).
Moment 4: Consciousness of the sense-object
now commences, but this is sensation and nothing more, for it occurs as yet only
in the physical sense-organ; it has not as yet been received by mind-consciousness.
Moment 5: The stimulation is now conveyed via the nerve-fibres to the central
nervous system and is received into mind-consciousness. This function, called
reception, is more or less under the control of the will, and unless it takes
place no further perception of the object can occur. In the case of a weak stimulus,
it may be possible volitionally to cut it off; but in the case of a strong stimulus
it is not normally possible to keep it out of mind-consciousness.
Moment 6:
In the next phase, the function called investigation takes place. Now investigation
as ordinarily understood is a process spread over a period of time, so we are
not to suppose that in one thought-moment the whole process of investigation of
the nature of the sense-object takes place. What is meant is that in any conscious
period of this kind, the mental energy seeks to connect up the new sense-object
with the existing impressions left by earlier sense-stimulations. In each succeeding
phase of cognition this momentary process is repeated.
Moment 7: Following
on the previous thought-moment's activity (the investigation phase) some degree
of connection with the impressions of earlier similar sense-stimulation is effected,
and by virtue of this connection the mind is able to begin to classify the particular
sense-object. Here again, the process is repeated in each cognitive process until
the classification is complete.
Moments 8 to 14: During the next seven thought
moments, the mind determines an attitude of liking or dislike towards the object,
an attitude of either good-will or ill-will. This phase in the conscious period
is called impulsion; it is mentally the most active part of the process, and to
an extent it is under volitional control. During these seven impulsionmoments,
reaction-forces are generated within the mental structure, and each separate thought-moment
brings into being its own particular kind of reaction force.
Moments 15 and
16: During a period of two thought-moments, the process is finally impressed or
registered on the mind, or in other words it is passed into the memory-store.
Moment
17: In the final thought-moment, full consciousness ceases for this period, after
which the whole process of cognition may be repeated over and over again while
the stimulus lasts.
The above description applies to a strong sensory stimulus,
but if the stimulus is very weak there is no more than a slight disturbance of
the mental subcurrent.
When the stimulus is not a sense-object but a mind object
in the form of an idea or a recollection, the process is slightly different; but
the effects of the impulsion moments are in general the same. Conscious and unconscious
periods alternate with so great a frequency that there is an illusion of continuous
consciousness.
*
Now as the word thought is used in the second step of the
Noble Eightfold Path - the step called right thought - its meaning is to a large
extent restricted to what is called the verbalizing function of the mind. We carry
out a great part of our thinking by means of words, for words are symbols for
ideas, while ideas in their turn are the mental representatives for things, ideas,
processes, and abstractions.
Whereas an idea of a complicated thing is necessarily
complicated, it can generally be condensed into a simple word; thus while thinking
with ideas (in the absence of words) would be clumsy and laborious, thinking with
words is much quicker and easier.
Thus thought-control largely means the control
of the verbalizing function of the mind, of the "inner speech" whereby
we silently use words to consider a problem, to reason about it, to reach a decision,
and to plan out a line of action.
We can see, then, that we use words not only
to express our thoughts but also to formulate our thoughts. While it can't be
said that all our thinking takes the form of silent speech, or thinking in verbalized
form, we must realize that a large part of our thinking does take this form.
Obviously,
then, if the words we choose to formulate our thoughts do not accurately represent
the ideas they are intended to represent, our thinking will be loose and inaccurate,
so that any tendency towards self-deception we possess will be accentuated.
Few
of us are free from some tendency, however slight, awards self-deception. While
we are generally aware of the extreme forms of sensory desire, ill-will, and cruelty
as they appear in our own make up, we are not always aware of these adverse qualities
when they appear in their mild and unobtrusive forms.
Thus when we allow one
of these adverse qualities to operate in our mind in a small way, we may tend
to gloss it over, to excuse it, and to make no effort to deal with it. We feel
it is too unimportant to worry about it.
Yet the small everyday operations
of an adverse mind-factor in its minor manifestations strengthen it little by
little, and thus lay the foundations for its major appearance at some later time
when, perhaps, a crisis arises.
In cultivating the second step of the Noble
Eightfold Path, then, it is essential to watch the small everyday outcroppings
of sensory desire, ill-will, and cruelty, and recognise them in their many mild
and unobtrusive forms. It is almost useless to wait until they appear in their
extreme forms, for then they are too powerful to be handled effectively.
As
long as we allow our thinking to remain vague and fuzzy, we are unlikely to recognise
the lesser forms of adverse qualities. If, on the other band, we verbalize our
thoughts in the form of precise words, we are likely to discover these qualities
and can then more easily deal with them.
This brings us to the use of the verbal
formula as an instrument in thought control. A carefully-worded or well selected
phrase, silently repeated, can act as a kind of mechanical aid to direct the thoughts
along a particular channel, or alternatively to divert the thoughts from unsuitable
or unwanted mind-objects.
Thus if we are suffering from an acute sense of loss
- as for example after a bereavement - it may be helpful to use a phrase like
this:
It is in the very nature of things that at some time or other we must
part from all that is dear to us; and by yearning for a return of that which is
past we merely prolong our sorrow.
Of course, the main problem here is to remember
to use the formula at the times when it is most needed, for a t these-times we
are generally overwhelmed with our sense of loss; but this is a matter of developing
the habit of mindfulness, which in itself is a major part of Buddhist mind-training.
Ideally,
we should not wait until a severe loss occurs to begin to train ourselves in detachment.
One aspect of right thought is that it is characterised by mental detachment from
objects, people, experiences, memories, and anticipations that give pleasure.
Since
ordinary life largely revolves around such things, we generally become enmeshed
in the web of attachment, and to break free from this web is normally beyond us.
Thus
when a severe loss does occur, it becomes very important to use every aid - such
as that afforded by the mental repetition of a formula - to make an adjustment
to the new circumstances.
*
Now we must admit that thought free from all
sensory desire is a good deal to expect from average people, like ourselves, who
must live ordinary lives in equally ordinary environments. Perhaps it will help
us to understand the problem if we consider what is meant by sensory desire.
Briefly,
sensory desire is thought loaded up with the desire for enjoyment by the six senses,
namely by impressions of visual objects, by sounds, by odours, by tastes, by body-sense
impressions, and by mental reflections on any of these.
Sensory desires include
the wish to see a sunset, the lights of a town seen across a valley, a beautifully
patterned wall-paper, or a glimpse of a loved one's face; these are all visual
things. Many desires are auditory; the desire to hear a piece of music or even
a single chord, the trickling of a mountain brook, or the sound of a loved one's
voice. There are desires to experience pleasant perfumes, tastes, and body-impressions,
such as of comfortable warmth, and there is the desire to look back on any of
these physical sense-enjoyments or to look forward to them.
Now freedom from
all these forms of sense-desire would seem to be freedom from all ordinary forms
of motivation; and up to a point this is true. Ordinary motivation is based on
the desire for sensory or mental enjoyment of some kind; and without the prospect
of enjoyment many of our activities would come to a stop.
All this is so, of
course; but the Eightfold Path is not the path to ordinary life with its ordinary
enjoyments, but to the Transcendental, the realm which lies outside and beyond
the relative world that we ordinarily know; and attachment to sensory and mental
enjoyment becomes an obstruction to one who is aiming to transcend the relative
world.
Nevertheless, for those of us who do not feel yet ready to follow this
high aim, some degree of control over the desire for sensory enjoyment is necessary
if we are to gain. the fullest value from life. While this limited application
of sense-control may not involve a complete renunciation of sense-pleasures, it
must bring about some degree of detachment to be of any value; and this detachment,
instead of reducing the pleasure of living, increases them by cutting away the
grasping tendencies which often tend to vitiate these pleasures.
Sometimes
we are advised to be aware of the present and- not to live in the past. At first
glance this appears to be good practical advice; but when we try to put it into
practice, how often do we succeed?
We are told: "Kill in yourself all
memory of past experience. Do not look behind you or you are lost." But if
we were to follow this literally - assuming it to be possible - the ordinary processes
of thinking would cease.
We are told also that "the past must not control
the future, where each minute is a new birth." But if we were to follow this
to the letter, we'd be unable to add up next week's grocery bill because we refused
to allow our past (during which we learned arithmetic) to influence our future
household shopping.
Does this mean that the advice is useless? No: it means
we have misunderstood it. What it really means is that we should accept the past
with its losses and mistakes, its sorrows and heartbreaks, its joys and pleasures.
We must accept the fact that the joys and pleasures of the past had to come to
an end at some time or other - this is inherent in the very nature of this universe
- and if we look back on them and yearn for them to return, then all we are doing
is to vitiate this present moment.
If we look hack on a happy event of the
past and gain from it the pleasure inherent in a happy recollection or memory,
without yearning for its return, memory - as then we are living in the present,
for that happy memory as a memory but not as an event - is apart of this very
present. As an event, it is part of the past, but as a memory that comes into
our consciousness at the present moment, then it is in fact our present experience.
As
a memory, we may enjoy it without vitiating the present; but if we yearn for its
return or its repetition we are divorcing ourselves from the present and trying
to throw ourselves back into the past, which at this moment is non-existent.
*
So
much for the matter of that type of right thought which is called freedom from
sensory desires.
Another aspect of right thought is freedom from ill-will,
or, expressed positively, thought that is characterised by good-will. Sometimes
even the most even-tempered of us become annoyed with our fellow-men; and although
often this annoyance evaporates when the occasion for it has passed, it sometimes
leaves a residue of resentment or ill-will which needs special handling.
It
is easy to see that no progress is possible to a mind that is poisoned by ill-will
or hate, or by any of its associated mind-factors such as revengefulness, annoyance,
or anger.
Again, right thought is thought that is free from cruelty. While
cruelty often springs from hate or anger, much cruelty also arises through an
indifference to the suffering of others or to thoughtlessness. Right thought,
then, involves not only the absence of active and positive hate, but also the
absence of its more negative and passive indifference to the sufferings of others.
The
second step of the Eightfold Path - right thought - must be based on the first
step, right understanding; for it is necessary to recognise right thought as right
thought, and wrong thought as wrong thought. Without the attentive mind developed
by right mindfulness, right thought is not possible in the fullest sense. Thus
you can see that the second step of the Noble Eightfold Path must be carried along
parallel with various other steps, and each one is inseparable from the others.
In
particular, the practice of right thought must be carried along parallel with
that of bare attention, for without the practice of bare attention - an aspect
of right mindfulness - all thought processes tend to become cluttered with emotion.
Practical
Work
BARE ATTENTION
In ideal circumstances, if you wished to establish the
mental patterns of bare attention in a complete form, you would put aside all
responsibilities and other interests for a period of some weeks and devote yourself
to a strict course of self-training. Under such conditions, you would avoid all
but the barest essentials in the way of physical work, and you would put aside
writing and reading, and even talking as far as possible.
But these ideal circumstances
are beyond the reach of most of us. Unless you are fortunately situated, it is
probable that you can't find sufficient time and freedom from responsibilities
to carry out the strict practices of mindfulness to the exclusion of other activities
for a long period. How, then, are you to establish the practice of bare attention?
What
you can't do in its entirety, then, you must do in part. Since you are unable
to place yourself in ideal conditions, you must use your daily activities as the
basis for your inner development; and it may be, in fact, that these daily activities
are really more ideal for the purpose than a life of seclusion would be.
In
order to establish the mental patterns of bare attention you must slow down some
activities. As a starting point you can select one definite activity so that,
without detriment to anything else, you can carry out this one activity more slowly
than usual. If you have to catch the 8:17 train every morning, you obviously cannot
slow down in that particular activity. If you are a housewife with children to
look after you can hardly slow down the chores involved in getting them off to
school. Again, if you are a bus conductor you cannot use the peak travelling periods
to inaugurate the practice of bare attention.
However, there must be some daily
activity that you can use as a basis for the establishment of the practice. There
must be some short periods when the pressing urgency of duty subsides for a time.
Maybe
the office worker can relax in a cafe at lunch time, or the housewife can pause
for a few minutes once the children have been bundled off to school, while the
bus conductor has a few minutes at the depot during which he can smoke a cigarette.
In
each of these cases there is an opportunity to make a start on the development
of bare attention, even in a small way. The office worker can usually slow down
during his lunch time and mindfully observe the weight of the knife and fork in
his hands, he can chew more slowly and observe the taste of food, and he can observe
the colour and shape of his cup and saucer. And, more important, he can at this
time observe his own general muscular state, feeling whether his muscles are taut
or relaxed.
In the same way the housewife, when she pauses, can intentionally
slow down the process of making a cup of tea for herself, in order to give her
full attention to it. She can then become more conscious of the steam rising from
the kettle, of the sequence of her own muscular actions as she makes the tea,
lifts the cup to her lips, sips and swallows the tea, and so on. fn this exercise
in attentiveness she can become more aware of the details she normally misses.
These details are unimportant in themselves; the point is that they can supply
an opportunity for an increase in mindfulness.
Again, when the bus conductor
smokes his cigarette during a few minutes' rest at the depot, he can apply increased
attention to the sensation of the cigarette between his lips, to the taste, and
to the appearance of the wisp of smoke rising from the glowing tip.
Obviously
these small attempts at bare attention will be of little value if they end where
they begin. The value of taking one small frequent or regular occasion for mindfulness
and consistently applying bare attention to it lies in the fact that it helps
to establish a foothold. Once this foothold exists it is relatively easy to extend
the practice to other small things throughout the day. However, to change the
simile, it is only the thin end of the wedge, and unless the wedge is driven right
home it effects very little.
Your approach to the practice of bare attention,
then, should he to select one small thing that you do with some degree of regularity
and which you can do more slowly and mindfully than usual. You should resolve
to give this one small activity increased attention for a period; and to do this
without looking for results, but purely as an exercise in mindfulness.
You
will find, of course, that to make a vague resolution that when an opportunity
occurs you will slow down and apply increased mindfulness will be of little use.
You will need to be more specific, and you will need to enforce your resolution
by a self-imposed penalty.
To be specific, therefore, resolve that during
a period or at least a month you will take twice as long as usual over some small
task, such as the task of taking off your shoes each night before going to bed.
Should you neglect or forget to slow down this one action and to give increased
mindfulness to it, you can impose some small penalty on yourself the next day.
Then,
later on, you should search for another activity and use it also for the same
purpose, slowing it down and giving it increased and sharpened awareness. Once
the initial phase is established it will be somewhat easier to give increased
attentiveness to other activities without the need for greatly slowing them down.
While
this exercise relates mainly to your physical actions rather than to your mental
functioning, you will find that it will help in your general overall plan of self-observation,
and in this way will reinforce the effects of other practices.
The
Tenth Month
THE CULTIVATION OF DETACHMENT
ON looking at life as a whole,
you will agree that it is a mixture of pain and pleasure, effort and rest, dissatisfaction
and contentment. You would like this mixture to he proportioned differently, of
course; you would like to have less pain and more pleasure; you would like a little
less effort with a little more rest, and then you would be less dissatisfied and
more contented.
But you must realise that without some pain and some sorrow
in life there would be no incentive for effort; and without effort you cannot
make progress. Without dissatisfaction your life would become too static to be
of any ultimate value. It has been said:
The bread of bitterness is the food
on which men grow to their fullest stature.
From the Buddhist viewpoint, liberation
from suffering can be achieved only by transcending personal existence and by
attaining to a state beyond words and beyond thought, a state which is sometimes
called the Unconditioned or the Transcendental. This "existence-beyond-existence"
is a state in which all traces of craving, aversion and ignorance have been destroyed,
and in this state there is said to be no suffering. The attainment of this "existence-beyond-existence"
is the ultimate goal of Buddhism.
However, while the separate self remains
- while personal consciousness with its separation from life as a whole still
exists - some degree of suffering is inescapable. Nevertheless it is possible
to lessen its impact by the cultivation of detachment, or, stated differently,
by the progressive reduction of attachment to the pleasures of life.
There
is a Buddhist practice which consists of becoming aware, as fully as possible,
of the feelings of pleasure and displeasure as and when they arise and at the
same time observing them as dispassionately as possible. The aim, of course, of
this increased attention is to evaluate more clearly the pleasures and displeasures
of life and thus to avoid becoming overwhelmed by them.
Without this dispassionate
or detached mental attitude you sometimes tend to become too immersed in your
pleasures, and, at other times, to swing to the opposite extreme and become immersed
in your sorrows and pains. There are times, perhaps, when you wallow in your emotions
and let yourself be completely governed by them.
The objective, then, is to
learn to stand off from your experiences both of happiness and of sorrow and to
observe them dispassionately, without being swamped by them. You need to learn
to do this in retrospect with regard to experiences of the past, and to try to
do so also with experiences of the present just as they come to you; while in
the same way you must learn to anticipate the experiences of the future without
undue emotion. As you learn the futility of grasping at things of the present
and yearning for things of the past and future, so your mind develops greater
flexibility.
Whatever you depend on for your happiness is an object of attachment,
a prop on which to lean; and whenever you lean on any prop at all you lay yourself
open to sorrow. At any time there is the possibility that some of your props will
be knocked away, for life has an unpleasant tendency to knock your props from
under you.
Your youth disappears in the passage of time; you lose a loved one,
perhaps, and the old familiar externals in your own individual world give place
to new and strange externals. If your mind is not flexible enough to keep pace
with the losses and changes as your props are knocked away, you suffer all the
more in consequence.
Generally, however, on looking back, you may find that
you manage to keep pace with the changes and the impermanence of life by exchanging
one prop for another, so that in the long run you are little better off; you are
still dependent on props of some kind.
And this applies not only to the outer
world of sense-objects but also to the inner world of mind-objects, for attachment
to memories of the past and anticipations of the future is just as strong a bondage
as is attachment to external things of the present.
There is a Buddhist statement
that goes like this:
From attachment comes grief, from attachment comes fear.
He who is free from attachment knows neither grief nor fear.
The stronger is
your attachment to something you love, the greater is the happiness you experience
when circumstances allow you to enjoy it; but, when it is wrenched away from you,
your suffering then is just as great as your happiness previously was.
If you
strongly desire something, this thing becomes an attachment-object. You naturally
cling to your attachment-objects, you grasp at them and clutch them tightly. When
they are away from you, you long for their return. But all that this clinging,
grasping, clutching, or longing does for you, in the long run, is to make the
sorrow of loss so much greater.
It is axiomatic in the Buddhist philosophy
that at some time or other you must part with everything that is nearest and dearest
to you, and that the stronger is your attachment to these near and dear things,
the harder will be the wrench when it comes.
Once the vice-like grip of attachment
is established, it is impossible to break it by philosophising, and the strength
of attachment depends on the strength of the craving for that which has been lost.
Once the craving for the lost thing has gained a foothold it cannot be dislodged
by theorising, and this craving can arise only when you allow yourself to be dominated
by your feelings of pleasure and displeasure.
This is the Buddhist view of
attachment and its related factors, a view that can be expressed in a simplified
form in this way:
Attachment depends on craving; craving depends on the feelings
of pleasure and displeasure; and the feelings of pleasure and displeasure depend
on the contact of the senses with the external world.
In ordinary life, it
is impossible to solve the problem of attachment by cutting off the contact of
the senses with the outer world of sense-objects, and it is equally impossible
to prevent pleasure and displeasure from arising once this contact is made. This
means that if this chain of "dependent arising" (or, less accurately,
this chain of cause and effect) is to be broken at all, it must be broken at the
link of pleasure or displeasure. The chain of sorrow must be attacked at the phase
of liking-and-disliking, desire-and-aversion, attraction-and-repulsion.
Now
all this, at first glance, seems to mean that you must give up everything that
gives happiness or pleasure; but this is not the idea at all. What it really means
is that you must learn to be independent of your feelings of pleasure and displeasure,
as far as possible, and not to be controlled by them. It means that your intellect
must control your life, not your emotional complexes or, your irrational likes
and dislikes; and thus it is essential (in the Buddhist technique at least) to
become as fully aware as possible of all that goes on in your own mind.
In
this technique, an ever-increasing mindfulness of all feelings of pleasure and
displeasure as they arise is of great importance. Thus, in the first place, it
is essential to be fully aware of the true value of your feelings of pleasure
and of their real significance in order to prevent them from causing emotional
biases and prejudices.
The same applies, of course, to your feelings of displeasure,
for they also tend to give rise to emotional biases and prejudices if not well
controlled. Aversion gives rise to craving and attachment just as does desire,
and you are just as much in bondage to the things you hate as you are to the things
you desire.
If you can reach even a partial degree of detachment, if you can
even partially lessen your grasp on the things that hold you in bondage, you are
then more free to enjoy them without attachment, and for the same reason your
sense of loss will be less when they have gone.
The fully-alert mind can make
an objective assessment of each experience as and when it arises; but for many
of us this dispassionate self-observation cannot be made at the time and can be
made only in retrospect. But whether you make it at the actual time of the experience
or afterwards, the main thing is to prevent your pleasures and your displeasures
from controlling you.
Once a strong emotional charge of a pleasant or unpleasant
nature becomes attached to an idea, this emotional charge can easily get out of
hand and cause all sorts of inner disturbance and outer conflict. Only by increased
mindfulness can you free the mind from the false emotional associations and the
consequent disturbance and conflict.
The cultivation of detachment, then, aims
at freedom from emotional domination and from the domination of pleasure and displeasure;
it aims at freedom from attachment to external things, from memories and anticipations,
from desires and aversions, and even from the desires for detachment itself.
Practical
work
THE CULTIVATION OF EMOTIONAL DETACHMENT
In the human mind there are
many blind spots - blind spots which are sometimes the causes and sometimes the
effects of prejudices and emotional biases - and because of these the mind is
unable to see itself as it really is. Such blind spots prevent us from realising
the extent and ramifications of our false attachments, and any device that we
can use to reduce them is an aid in the work of inwardly-directed mindfulness.
The following questionnaire is meant to be such a device and to aid you in
the process of discovering and evaluating your own attachments.
In answering
the questions, you may find that the first answer that comes to mind may be the
correct answer or it may not. Therefore it is desirable that you go through the
full questionnaire about six times during the month; allow it to start trains
of thoughts rather than trying to arrive immediately at clear-cut answers.
A
question that is difficult to answer will as a rule be of much greater value to
you than one which is easy to answer. The real value of the answer lies, not in
itself, but in the amount of self-observation or mindfulness employed in arriving
at it.
There is no need to try to make your answers consistent in any respect.
You must realise that normally you have ambivalent attitudes towards many of the
important things in life; for example, you could both love and hate the same person
at different times, or you could feel attracted to one aspect of something and
repelled by another aspect of it.
With ambivalent attitudes of this kind, it
may be that one of the two contrary emotions has been repressed, but from some
consciously-inaccessible region of your mind it continues to influence your mental
life.
It is impossible to isolate your objects of attachment from your sense
of possessiveness, your valuations, your self-assertiveness, or various other
aspects of your mental life. The questions which follow, therefore, are intended,
not to pinpoint specific objects of attachment, but to help you to develop a greater
awareness of your own mental contents; and in the process specific objects of
attachment - and perhaps of misplaced attachment - may emerge.
Here, then,
are the questions:
1. Do I agree with the following statement? "From attachment
comes grief, from attachment comes fear. He who is free from attachment knows
neither grief nor fear."
2. Am I unduly attached to material possessions,
as a whole, or in other words do I have a possessive attitude to them?
3. Am
I possessive with regard to other people-my family, my children, my friends, for
example?
4. Do I desire power of some kind, not for what I could accomplish
with such power, but purely for the sake of having power?
5. Do I have any
attachment that interferes with my mental and emotional tranquillity?
6. Am
I selfish or self-centred in any particular sphere of life?
7. Am I more dominated
by emotional bias and prejudice than is the average person?
8. Do I like to
dominate my friends, children, and other people?
9. Do I resent being dominated
by others?
10. Am I too attached-rigidly or inflexibly so-to my beliefs and
opinions in any sphere of thought?
11. Am I held back in any way by an excessive
or misplaced attachment to anything or anyone?
12. Do I like people to admire
certain of my possessions to which I am attached?
*
Any form of dispassionate
observation-whether directed inwardly towards the mind itself or outwardly towards
the world of events - is an aid in the cultivation of detachment. As a specific
exercise in mindfulness, you can endeavour to apply the principle of dispassionate
observation to your relationships with other people.
Sometimes you misunderstand
something that another person says or does, perhaps because you happen to be upset
or annoyed about something quite different. In such a case you give to the other
person's meaning a completely false colouring. Or perhaps you misinterpret a question,
and give an answer which more properly applies to an altogether different question.
In this practice, then, and in your daily contacts with other people, you
set out to pay unbiased, dispassionate observation to the other person's meaning,
uncoloured by your own emotions or prejudices. You will often find that the true
meaning is quite different from your own first interpretation of it.
You may
find it necessary to train yourself not to interrupt others without good reason.
Few people are good listeners, and you may be one of the few; if you are not -
if you hear only half of what another is saying, and if you tend to interrupt
with irrelevant side issues - then you need to teach yourself to listen, as far
as possible, without allowing your own emotional associations to interfere.
Good
listening demands effort, for good listening means listening to all of what is
said and interpreting it as correctly as possible. In the process of good listening
you will learn to pinpoint any emotionally-charged words and ideas that arise,
words and ideas that bring into play your own biases and prejudices. Thus, by
pinpointing such words and ideas, they will no longer be able to work from the
subconscious levels of your mind, and thus you will gain greater knowledge and
control of your own mental processes.
The practice of dispassionate listening,
then, consists largely of careful and attentive listening, coupled with an endeavour
to keep free from emotional reactions.
*
Assuming that you are employing
the self-contract method of self-discipline, look back every few days so see if
you have used the questionnaire consistently and in a sufficiently penetrating
manner, and if you have carried out the practice of dispassionate listening to
a sufficient extent. If you feel that you have not done so, deprive yourself of
some small pleasure.
The eleventh
month
THE ATTAINMENT OF TRANQUILLITY
IN his evolutionary history, man has
attained to the dominant position in his world by virtue of his intellect; but
nevertheless he's been governed largely by his instincts and emotions. Man's primary
motivation has come from his self-preserving and race-preserving urges towards
fighting, escaping, mating, and so on; his intellect has functioned, in part at
least, by steering him where his instincts have urged him to go. However, without
his instincts and emotions, man would never have survived. It has been said:
Were
it fully understood that the emotions are the masters and the intellect the servant,
it would seem that little could be done by improving the servant while the masters
remained unimproved. Improving the servant does but give the masters more power
of achieving their end. (Herbert Spencer)
These primitive urges, then, have
served a purpose in man's evolution, but in general they are appropriate to primitive
conditions; they were evolved under primitive conditions, and in many ways they
fail to fit into the circumstances of civilized life. Thus for further human progress
and for the fulfilment of man's potentialities, it now seems that his motivations
must be transformed and refined.
Progress so far has been racial rather than
individual; that is to say it is mankind as a whole that has progressed or evolved,
and the individual in most cases has been simply a unit in the evolving race.
Now, however, it appears that many individual human beings have reached a point
at which their progress along the evolutionary path is largely in their own hands.
Thus
it seems that some of us have reached a point at which our further evolution can
be consciously motivated and individual, rather than unconsciously motivated and
racial.
Nevertheless, the primitive urges are still with us, still integral
parts of our mental make-up; and in one way or another they are responsible for
a great deal of our emotionally-biased thought processes and for many of our falsely-coloured
mental attitudes. They are at the root of many of our inner disturbances and of
many of our conflicts with others. In this way, these primitive urges - once the
essential factors in our earlier evolution - are now (to some extent) retarding
factors. They can become obstacles to the attainment of tranquillity.
The Buddha-doctrine
stresses a number of mental fetters and various inner hindrances which prevent
the mind's proper functioning, and therefore stand in the way of tranquillity.
Among the retarding factors are scepticism, the feeling of separate selfhood,
and ill-will; these, and others, are spoken of as the paralysing defilements of
the mind.
Let's consider these obstacles or retarding factors one at a time,
beginning with scepticism. From the Buddhist standpoint, scepticism is a state
of mental rigidity, and this condition is no better than the opposite one of gullibility.
The middle way between the extremes of scepticism and gullibility is a state of
mental flexibility, a state of readiness to examine new or strange ideas and to
evaluate them without pre-judging them.
Scepticism or rigidity of mind is
an obstacle to tranquillity because it is a refusal to examine and evaluate new
ideas without emotional pre-judgment. The dominating emotion in many cases may
be a feeling of superiority, or there may be some kind of fear or an element of
resentment towards the source of the new ideas; but, except where the intellect
is incapable of grasping the new ideas, the rigidity is due to the domination
of emotion of some kind or other.
The conception and conceit of selfhood is
another obstacle to tranquillity. According to the Buddha-doctrine the self is
an illusion. It has been said:
The self is a label with nothing attached to
it.
You may agree with the theoretical considerations of this "doctrine
of egolessness", as it is called, or you may not; this is unimportant at
this stage. The important thing is your own inner attitude, your own feelings
about it. As you feel for the sufferings of others (and for their enjoyments too),
so to that extent you have broken down this obstacle, the illusion of selfhood.
As
further progress takes place, the focus is slowly and gradually removed from self-centred
interests and transferred to the welfare of life as a whole; and, as the steel
grip of self-centredness loosens, so an inner tranquillity begins to take the
place of anxiety, resentment, and self-assertion.
This inner tranquillity may
not yet show itself outwardly in the form of completely calm and unruffled behaviour:
it is felt at first as a still centre, even though there is yet a great deal of
turmoil around it, and to establish this still centre is the first stage in the
attainment of tranquillity. It can be expressed in this way:
Enlightenment
is the one still point in the centre of the turmoil, just as the axle is the one
still point in the centre of the moving wheel.
Now another obstacle to tranquillity
is ill-will, and this includes all grades of ill-will, from the mildest and almost
unnoticeable resentment up to the most raging fury. While you probably think of
it as ill-will directed towards the people you dislike, you must recognise that
ill-will towards your problems and your circumstances can be just as great an
obstacle to tranquillity as is ill-will towards people.
It is essential, then,
to approach all your problems with an attitude of goodwill, and to break down
all resentment towards them. This applies to the bills you have to pay and the
unpleasant chores you have to do, just as much as to the people who have harmed
or hindered you in some way, and equally to the impersonal things that have caused
you delays and worries.
A mental attitude of non-resistance towards the difficult
things in your life will help in this respect; but this does not mean that you
must cease to resist them physically if you feel they are wrong. A mental attitude
of non-resistance does not mean a cessation of effort towards improvement; what
it does mean is breaking down of anxiety, resentment, and self-assertion, which
are the primary causes of mental tension.
As a mental attitude, non-resistance
must be applied to anything and everything that comes into your life - to the
people you meet, to the jobs you must do, and to the problems you have to solve.
If you resist your daily work, if you find it too boring, too unskilled for your
talents, too much like drudgery, then this resistance will bring about greater
fatigue; and so it will form a vicious circle.
Life presents you with many
opportunities to learn, but these opportunities are often disguised as drudgery.
It has been said:
Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the
mind as harrowing and planting those of the earth. (Margaret Fuller)
If then,
in doing something irksome, you can realise that it may enable you to call out
the treasures of your mind, then the attitude of non-resistance will follow. If,
in dealing with someone you dislike, you can use the occasion to develop goodwill,
you will thereby take a step towards tranquillity. And if you are in a difficult
situation, or even a painful one, and you are determined to learn from it everything
it has to teach you, then you will have learned the secret of the great attainment.
This secret of the great attainment is to love whatever you hate.
So, with
greater flexibility of mind instead of rigid scepticism, with the understanding
of the illusionary nature of the self, and with the growing ability to love whatever
you hate, then you have made a good start. You have begun - in theory at least
- to break down some of the main obstacles to tranquillity.
There are other
obstacles, of course. There is conceit, which is just an over-valuation of the
separate self - an over-valuation of a delusion, according to the Buddha doctrine.
There are envy and stinginess, which again spring largely from the self-delusion;
and there is agitation, the churned-up state that comes from anxiety, resentment,
and self-assertion.
Now you can deal with all these obstacles to tranquillity,
in the Buddhist technique, by mindfulness and self-discipline combined. Mindfulness
in this connection means dispassionate self-observation; it means an honest recognition
of the retarding mental factors in whatever guise they appear. Self-discipline
involves a gentle yet persistent effort to keep them in hand without harmfully
repressing them.
All this reduces itself to a matter of forming new habits
and thought-patterns and breaking old ones.
The task may become easier and
more specific if you take one of your own mental factors at a time and subject
it to observation for a period, to the exclusion of other factors.
For example,
it is possible that in the course of your daily life various occasions arise which
cause you to become agitated or flustered; minor critical situations arise from
time to time. If you train yourself not to be easily agitated - to refuse to panic
- then your judgments will be more accurate, your decisions more wise, and your
life more harmonious.
To begin, you must at first form the habit of observing
yourself closely to discover when and under what conditions you tend to become
agitated. You may be serving behind the counter in a shop during a rush period,
with an impatient customer making things difficult; you may be driving a car when
the engine stalls at a busy intersection; or you may be looking after some troublesome
children. In such circumstances, you tend to become more agitated than you realise.
You
need first of all to become aware of this fact, and with this increased awareness
a gradual improvement will come about. This natural improvement can then be assisted,
as necessary, by a definite effort of self-discipline.
*
The attainment
of tranquility, then, is not a matter of finding ideal circumstances or of finding
freedom from outer disturbances: it is a matter of discovering the inner mental
obstacles to tranquillity (one by one) by dispassionate self-observation, and
of removing them (one by one) by a gentle yet persistent effort of self-discipline.
Practical
Work
THE DISPASSIONATE OBSERVATION OF EMOTION
To become a little flustered
during a minor crisis seems - and generally is - only a small failing. So also
are slight anger against frustrating circumstances, mild anxiety, and a limited
degree of conceit. These are all normal and small failings, even if they are not
ideal states of mind.
If any one of these minor mental factors is allowed to
become excessive, it becomes pathological. It is one of the main tasks of mindfulness
to bring about a precise and clear-cut awareness of emotional states when they
are mild and ill-defined, for at this stage they are far easier to control than
when they reach a pathological degree.
At any stage, not only in their extreme
forms, these mental factors are obstacles to the attainment of tranquillity. At
any stage they need to be kept under close observation.
For a period of at
least a month, then, observe yourself closely with a view to discovering the emotional
factors within yourself that prevent you from attaining tranquillity. This self-observation
will help you to understand and thus to control those emotional factors that work
against tranquillity.
Several times during the month you should decide that,
for a period of two or three days, or even a single day, you will make a mental
note of all the emotions you experience during that period. You can regard these
as experimental periods in which you try to hold a mental attitude of pure observation,
at least as far as conditions allow.
As an aid to dispassionate observation,
it is helpful to identify and name each emotional state as it arises, if possible,
or if this is not possible, to do so in retrospect. It will help to keep it in
check if you can pause, observe yourself critically, and say to yourself "I
am becoming envious," or "I am becoming agitated." The idea is
to register the fact clearly in your mind without becoming further disturbed by
it and without either feeling guilty about it or excusing yourself for it. The
simple process of clearly naming the mental condition will sometimes help you
to deal with it.
This may not necessarily be so, of course, in the case of
strong emotions, but its greatest value is in the recognition of mild ones whose
significance may be much greater than at first appears.
In your home life,
in your work, and in your social contacts with other people, you must of necessity
react by word and action of some kind, but during the experimental period you
must try to make these reactions as free as possible from emotional biases.
But
more important than the outer reactions of word and deed are the inner reactions
of thought. You must observe your currents of thought to see how much misplaced,
inappropriate, and excess emotion they contain, how much they are biased by prejudices,
and how much inner conflict they express.
This self-observation, growing more
and more dispassionate, will bring you greater harmony within your own mind. You
will tend to react to things with less misplaced or excess emotion, and thus with
less inner conflict and less misunderstanding. The greater harmony in your relationships
with other people will in itself repay the effort of mindfulness involved.
Assuming
you are working on the self-contract method of self-discipline, you can impose
on yourself a small penalty whenever you become lax in this form of self-observation.
The
twelfth month
THE PRACTICE OF CLEAR COMPREHENSION
IN developing an efficient
approach to the problems of life, one of the first essentials is to reach a clear
comprehension of what you really want from life. You could simplify - or over-simplify
- the answer to this question by saying that all you want from life is happiness.
On the other hand you could enumerate a multitude of hopes and ambitions which
might become so complicated and so mutually contradictory that you would need
to undertake a lengthy process of self-analysis before you could sort it all out.
Some
sort of answer half-way between the too-simple and the too-complex is what is
really wanted. Without a well-defined understanding of what your central aim in
life is - that is to say, without a clear comprehension of motive, as it is called
in Buddhist psychology - there is a tendency to sink into the unthinking drift
of life; and once caught up in the unthinking drift your whole life lacks focus.
To
know what you want is very important. To know why you want it is also very important,
and it will help you to do this if you understand in theory the nature of your
desires, their origins in the instincts, and the emotions associated with them.
To
understand your emotions and desires, you must first understand your instincts.
These instincts are inherent tendencies to act in specific ways in specific circumstances.
The instincts themselves exist below the level of the intellect - that is to say,
below the level of your conscious reasoning processes - and being so much older
than the intellect (in an evolutionary sense) they are so much stronger.
While
your instincts are subconscious, your emotions and desires are conscious - sometimes
too much so. In fact your emotions and desires are upthrusts into consciousness
from your instincts. An instinct is like a volcano; it exists largely below ground
level, but when it becomes active it throws lava and smoke upwards. In the same
way, an instinct exists below consciousness, but when it becomes active it throws
emotions and desires upwards into consciousness.
You can see, then, that the
emotions and desires are upthrusts into consciousness from the instincts; but
an emotion is not the same as a desire. An emotion is a comparatively vague and
diffuse form of awareness at the level of bodily sensation, while a desire is
a form of awareness at a higher level, at the level of ideas.
Your desires
are, in fact, ideas of a sort; they are ideas of activities you want to carry
out or else ideas of sensations you want to experience.
Thus if you are angry
you have the idea of striking out at something; this can be called a motor idea,
an idea of muscular activity, and it is aroused by the instinct of aggressiveness.
Again,
if you are hungry, the sensory idea of food arises in your mind, energized or
aroused by the inherent tendency to eat when the body requires food.
Perhaps
the classification into motor desires and sensory desires - into desires to act
and desires to experience - is an over-simplification; perhaps all desires include
both motor ideas and sensory ideas; but the main point in the present context
is that a desire exists at the ideational level of the mind while an emotion exists
at the level of diffuse bodily awareness.
Let's look at it in this way; when
one of your instincts becomes active your body automatically prepares itself for
the appropriate activity by various changes. You become aware of the bodily changes,
and the diffuse awareness of them constitutes an emotion.
At the same time,
some specific idea of undertaking some action or undergoing an experience may
arise in your mind; this also is a result of the instinct which has been aroused.
This idea is emotionally charged - that is to say, it is energised by the energy
of the instinct - and thus it becomes a desire.
In sub-human life all activity
is primarily instinctive, and whatever intellect does exist is directed towards
finding ways to satisfy the instinctive promptings.
In human life the situation
is not basically different from the situation in sub-human life, but it is vastly
more complex. Most activity is primarily motivated in the first place by the instincts,
represented in consciousness by the emotions and desires. The intellect functions
mainly by seeking ways - most often very devious ways - to gratify the desires
and to produce pleasant emotions. This means that the intellect functions mainly
by seeking ways to satisfy the instincts. The instincts are like the engines of
a ship while the intellect is like the rudder.
Very little activity, if any,
is motivated primarily by the intellect, and intellectual motivation is secondary
to instinctive motivation.
Thus your thoughts, your beliefs, your opinions,
and your plans - these are all largely conditioned by the way you feel, by what
you like and dislike, by what you want to do, and by what you want to avoid.
*
So
you see that most of your thinking is emotional thinking, and very little of it
is objective or dispassionate thinking.
In emotional thinking, facts and observations
are falsified or wrongly coloured by desires and biases and prejudices. On the
other hand, in dispassionate thinking - what little of it there is - the same
facts are seen clearly and the same observations are unbiased and free from desires
and prejudices, with no false colouring.
In emotional thinking, you tend to
believe a thing because it pleases you to believe it or to reject an idea because
it displeases you. In objective thinking you accept an idea if it is reasonable,
whether it pleases you or repels you, and you reject an idea, however much you
like it, if it fails to measure up to reason; or at least you accept it only tentatively
and in an experimental spirit.
*
It is true that one of the main factors
that gave primitive man his supremacy over his sub-human rivals and enemies was
his intellect, his ability to use ideas as tools with which to reason, and to
use simple words as shorthand symbols, so to speak, for complex ideas.
At the
same time it is important to realize that when opposed to emotions and desires,
the intellect shows up as a relatively feeble and sometimes ineffective force.
Emotions and desires are upthrusts into consciousness from the tremendous instinctive
forces, and even the most powerful intellect may find itself powerless in the
face of such opposition.
To control a desire by simple will-effort, then, is
often very difficult, sometimes impossible, and at times perhaps harmful.
It
is difficult when the desire is anything more than a superficial one. It is impossible
when the desire serves as an outlet for a powerful instinct. And it may be harmful
when the desire serves as an outlet for an instinct which has been denied other
outlets. This is especially so when there is a guilt sense or a feeling of shame
acting as a repressing force.
It is then that extensive and deep-reaching self-understanding
becomes necessary in order to understand and control your desires; but you cannot
deal adequately with strong desires unless you train yourself to handle the small
desires that crop up from time to time in your every day life.
While some forms
of Buddhist mind-training can be best undertaken in a quiet and secluded environment,
others can be woven into the fabric of everyday concerns and thus can be made
an integral part of these concerns.
The practice of clear comprehension is
one of the latter kind, for it has considerable scope for application in the busy
workaday routine.
While the term clear comprehension is fairly self-explanatory,
it would be well to discuss, for a short time, what it means in terms of Buddhist
mental culture. In the first application of the term, clear comprehension means
the clear comprehension of the motive or purpose of an activity.
In other words,
whatever you are doing, you should clearly comprehend why you are doing it. Instead
of having a vague or fuzzy idea of what you expect to achieve by it you should
try to get a clear-cut idea of its purpose, which is to say a clear-cut idea of
the desires that prompt you to carry out the activity.
Secondly, having clarified
your mind as to the motive of an activity, you should get an equally clear-cut
idea of whether or not it is really suitable for its purpose. Thus the Buddha-doctrine
shows the need not only for a clear comprehension of the motive of an action but
also for a clear comprehension of the suitability of the action for its purpose.
Thirdly,
there is the need for absorbing the element of clear comprehension into every
activity. In other words, the whole of one's life, embracing every activity and
every experience, is the domain of mindfulness, and thus, by extending the domain
of mindfulness into every activity and every experience, the whole of life becomes
the basis for mental culture.
Finally there is a form of mindfulness called
the clear comprehension of non-delusion. The full implication of this clear comprehension
of non-delusion involves the fundamental Buddhist teaching that the separate self
is a delusion; thus the clear comprehension of non-delusion is a sharpened awareness
that breaks through self-deceit and penetrates right through the delusion of selfhood
to the reality of one's own being.
Let us now return to the first kind of clear
comprehension, the clear comprehension of motive. When you apply this to the whole
of your life, to your hopes and desires, and to all your planning and striving,
it presupposes that you have some fundamental purpose in life. You may not have
an overall motive in your life, however; you may be caught in the unthinking drift,
and if this is so the first thing to do is to become aware of this fact, and if
possible to define some kind of overall motive.
Assuming however, that you
have such a motive or purpose in life, it's desirable, in the interest of efficient
living, that you give thought to your activities as a whole to see if they line
up with the focus of your life or whether they take you into all sorts of unprofitable
side-issues.
This is not to say, of course, that you cannot have side-issues;
these are unavoidable in ordinary life. There are many things you have to do,
quite contrary to your central purpose, which left to yourself you would never
even think of doing; yet because of your need to earn a living or your responsibilities
and duties towards others, you must do those things.
Now if you allow the need
to do these things to build up resentment and annoyance, they certainly will take
you aside from your central purpose, whereas if you use them as opportunities
to develop patience and tolerance you then bring them into line with your central
purpose.
Thus by the clear comprehension that every experience is the domain
of mindfulness you can make the best use of activities that otherwise would be
unprofitable.
While it may not be easy to define your ultimate objective in
life, you can generally define the immediate purposes of your everyday activities.
You know why you always catch a certain train every working morning; you know
why you go to work; and you know why you must earn money. You know also why you
buy the necessities of life, and perhaps you know why you also buy some of the
luxuries of life.
Do your luxuries really make life more enjoyable? Some of
them do; others make life more difficult. These are the luxuries you must buy
for their prestige-value, because your neighbours have them, perhaps, or because
in your social set you are expected to have them. But these luxuries may become
burdensome necessities, and because they must be paid for and maintained they
cost more than they yield.
This is where the clear comprehension of non-delusion
comes into the picture. To what extent are you motivated by self-assertion, for
the desire for prestige and approval?
Perhaps having found the answers to these
questions, and having found them to be not very flattering, you find you must
continue to do things of no ultimate value. Because of family obligations, or
responsibilities to others, or business necessities, you must continue to do things
that cut across your fundamental purpose in life. You have applied the principle
of clear comprehension of suitability and found certain activities quite unsuitable
for their ultimate purpose; but such situations are often unavoidable.
But
at least you are not deceiving yourself. It is when you unmindfully take on unnecessary
activities - activities that cut across your central purpose - that you sink into
the unthinking drift. The important thing, then, is freedom from the unthinking
drift, and the key to this freedom is clear comprehension - the clear comprehension
of the purpose of an activity and of its suitability, the clear comprehension
that every activity is the domain of mindfulness, and the clear comprehension
of that non-delusion.
This is the Buddhist practice of clear comprehension
in its various forms.
Practical Work
RECOGNITION OF MOTIVE
In the path
to self-understanding you will find that it is of great importance to gain a clear
comprehension of the true motives of your various activities. It is in the sphere
of motivation that the human mind finds perhaps the greatest scope for self-deceit,
and in consequence self-centred anxiety, resentment, and self-assertion are often
at the basis of activities which on the surface seem to have nobler and less self-centred
motives.
Your practical work for this period then, consists of constant endeavour
to become critically aware of the fundamental motives behind your everyday activities.
An activity which appears to you yourself and to others to be generous, full of
goodwill, and devoid of self-interest, may on self-examination prove to be motivated
by self-centred anxiety, resentment, or self-assertion in some form; and the recognition
of your true motives is an essential part of self understanding.
The exercise
of a constant endeavour to become critically aware of these motives is, as you
can see, essential; but this constant endeavour may tend to become swamped by
the pressure of everyday concerns. This is where the self-contract method of self-discipline
will prove most useful. To apply it, every day throughout the period of a month
you will look back at the day's main activities and critically examine your various
motives. When you fail to do this, impose on yourself some small penalty.
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