The Two Arrows

I've been thinking about how relationships, mindfulness, and meditation work.  All of them seem to share a striking characteristic.  When everyone is happy, they all seem to flow easily.  But when someone is feeling a strong emotion (e.g., anger, fear, jealousy, sadness), they all seem to get harder. This is perhaps one of the real benefits of working on mindfulness in a supportive group - it's not like we're leaving the world behind.  We bring it with us all the time.  Meditation offers us an opportunity to practice the hard things in a little simpler and safer way, so that then we can practice them in the "real" world more easily later.

So, this is one of the goals of mindfulness: to allow us to go through the ups and downs of daily life with a sense of ease, to gain clarity into what is actually happening so that we can act skillfully and thereby make problems better rather than adding fuel to the fire.  In this spirit, the next several posts will examine aspects of dealing with relationships skillfully, even when we're in the middle of a difficult emotion.

To start, consider this question: How often do we say “You did this to me!” when what we really mean is “I didn’t get what I wanted?"

There is a classic Buddhist parable of the two arrows. In brief, the idea is that most people, when hurt, add to the hurt. If shot with an arrow, we spend a lot of effort focused on wondering why we got shot, how we didn't deserve that, how the person who shot the arrow is a  jerk, what we are going to say when we get in front of him/her, etc.  It's like being struck by a second arrow - the first one is physical and the second is mental.  In contrast, if we are able to maintain our mindfulness and not spin off into a story about our pain, we only get struck by one arrow. (For the geeks, here is the original Sallatha Sutra).

I might even go further than this - once we start down the story road, we not only make ourselves feel worse (the second arrow), but then we are more likely to do something that makes the situation worse.  This is a third arrow!

We need to take responsibility for our emotions. We need to stop thinking that something outside us will make everything better. All you can work with is yourself, and this is true even for recurring situations. If you have a difficult boss who makes your life difficult, it is unlikely that you can change your boss. You can, however, change your reactions, your work habits, or even your job.

If we look a little deeper into any interaction, we will notice that whenever someone does something to you, you are at the same time perceiving it.  To quote Ethan Nichtern's riff on the classic Zen koan, "If a person is an ass and there's no one around to see it, is he still an ass?"

We expect that our perception and our point of view is accurate and that any other observer would agree with our perception. This is called the False Consensus Bias, where we assume that whatever we think/feel, most people would agree with.  The classic study (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977) had people read stories that included a conflict and asked them which solution most people would pick, which one they themselves would pick, and what people who pick each of the two sides would be like.  In general, people estimate that most people would pick the same choice they themselves would, and rated them more positively than people who would pick the other choice.

Attention is a narrow spotlight - look at something in your room right now.  As you focus on that 5% of the room, you can't pay attention to the other 95% of what is actually happening now. Your perception is therefore always 95% wrong, and your memory is even worse (especially once you start telling yourself a story about what just happened). So although we can’t overcome the false consensus bias, we can start to recognize that we never have all the information, and that from the other person’s point of view, maybe you’re the ass. 

In truth, usually no one is the ass. We actually just have different perspectives, attention to different aspects, different goals, different motivations, and different approaches.  But because we assume that everyone else must have the same perspective, goals and approaches, we then decide that anyone not following our script must be being difficult.

If we can begin to see that we are very changeable based on what we pay attention to, it may give us the space to pause before we shoot ourselves with the second arrow.

What can Mindfulness Meditation do for you?

One of the arms of the Buddhist Eightfold Path is "Right View."  There are many meanings to this, but one that I find under-utilized is the idea that when we set out on the path, it is useful to have a "view" to where we are going.  It's like looking at the map before we set out.  It's also useful once you've been on the path for a while, because then you can take stock of where you've been.  In this context, I want to consider some ways of thinking about what the goals of Mindfulness Meditation are.

Broadly speaking, there are two styles of meditation practice - Familiarizing and Cultivating.  Mindfulness meditation focuses primarily on the first of these.

It is important to start the journey by familiarizing yourself with your mind and emotions.  How can you change or improve something until you understand how it works?  If my car isn't running smoothly, just wishing for it to work won't help. Buying new seat covers or putting an inspirational CD in the CD player won't make it run more smoothly.  By knowing how the car works, we can focus our efforts to the place that can actually make a difference.  Similarly, we need clarity about our circumstances and ourselves to be able to make a difference, but often when things aren't going the way we want, we get caught up in blaming and feeling that it "shouldn't be this way," and then we make a bigger mess.

Mindfulness meditation starts us on the path to understanding how our minds work.  As we gain familiarity, it also begins to cultivate three properties: Tranquility, Stability, and Clarity.

Tranquility is often one of the goals people explicitly have when they begin meditating - they want to slow the mind down and have some sense of peacefulness or stress reduction.  It is worth noting that people often also have the belief that the goal is to stop thinking.  This is not correct.  The mind will always think - that's what it does.   The goal is to not be so hooked by the thoughts.

As we slow the thoughts down, we begin to be better at focusing our attention intentionally rather than being so easily distracted by the next thought.  This increased stability is sometimes called one-pointed focus.

As we gain stability and tranquility, we also begin to gain some clarity by seeing deeper into our true natures.

The classic analogy in Buddhism is if you scoop a glass of water out of a muddy river, it is undrinkable at first. There is too much sediment floating around in it, and no amount of effort will change that. You can't get the mud to settle out by shaking it hard or trying to force it to the bottom. Instead, if you let it sit quietly, the impurities will slowly settle to the bottom of the glass, leaving the water tranquil and clear.

The goal of meditation, therefore, is not to get rid of thoughts, but instead (1) to understand how our thoughts are constantly changing, impermanent, and empty, (2) to stop believing them as if they are "true," and (3) to stop believing that your thoughts are you.  These realizations lessen the control that your thoughts have over you, and opens up the way that you can begin to change.

Another way we can think about Mindfulness Meditation is that the focus is always on being present.  But what do we mean by that?

There are at least three different aspects of "being present" in Buddhist practice.  The most basic and stereotypical is a heightened state of focus.  You can test this by staring at an object or space on the wall. You may notice as you focus on it that the rest of the room may darken, blur, or get wiggly.  This one-pointed focus is ironically equally a rejection of all other things that are also present.  You can, however, learn to focus on the target yet also notice all of the things in the periphery, noticing the full environment. Therefore, heightened focus doesn't necessarily have to just be about one object (such as the breath), although it's often beneficial to start here.

The second way of being present is noticing a heightened vividness, vibrancy, clarity, and specificity of your experience.  I notice this most clearly doing walking meditations, where I am astounded by the colors, the vividness, and the detail that exists in the world.  Each leaf and blade of grass is distinct and clear and interesting.

The third way of being present is focusing on the Karmic momentum of each moment and being present in the "gap."  Ethan Nichtern describes this as "where the past is creating a tremendous momentum of feeling and impulse, but we haven't yet figured out how we're going to react to it....it's the awkward vulnerability between impulse and action."  That is, based on all of our past conditioning and all of the present causes and provocations and emotions, we experience some feeling.  We usually react to these feelings with habitual responses, but what if we didn't?  What if we instead were present with feeling the momentum of the moment?  (This is the gap between steps 7 and 8, or between 8 and 9 of the 12 Nidanas for those of you who want to be Buddhist geeks.)

So these are three more aspects we gain from Mindfulness Meditation.

What takes our mindfulness away?  Strong emotions and habits -- the momentum of the past and all of our conditioning and the present causes.  As discussed in a previous post, we tend to react to each new stimulus with either grasping, pushing it away, or ignoring it.  These are the Three Poisons of greed, aggression, and ignorance.  Every time we act based on one of these feelings, we strengthen our habitual responses, so we can no longer see the gap between feeling and our habitual reaction to the feeling.

Once triggered, emotions have strong energy.  One technique that Buddhism teaches to help us deal with these emotions is that of antidotes.  For each of the afflictive emotions, there is a series of things one can meditate on to counter them (see here, for example). Note that the core assumption underlying this approach is one of change.  We are trying to break the powerful link of our habits.

Once we have achieved some level of tranquility, stability, and clarity, we can begin to work with our minds and our habit energies, but Mindfulness Meditation isn't really designed to change them.

We usually enter a spiritual pathway and practice in order to change something about ourselves.  We want to reduce our suffering, to find ease in the midst of turmoil, to be of more benefit to others, etc.  Yet, Mindfulness Meditation doesn't get us too far down that path, but it's the first step on the path. Other meditation techniques focus specifically on changing our habitual responses.

But there's a paradox present here.  We know that we're really just a quivering mess.  We don't want to be a quivering mess.  But to be the kind of person we wish we were, we have to stop being a quivering mess.  But since we are such a mess, we're not the kind of person we want to be.  So how can we break out of this conundrum?  The way out is to practice capacities that you already have, such as compassion, joy, and love.

This moves us into the next style of meditation technique - those that focus on cultivating rather than familiarizing.  We use these techniques to help grow something that already exists in us.  The next post will begin to examine meditation techniques on what are called the Brahma-viharas, or the four heavenly abodes.


These thoughts adapted from talks given by Ethan Nichtern and Alan Watts, among others.  Image sources: Here, here, here, and here.

Cynicism and the Three Pillars of Zen

I enjoy visiting New York City, a city famed for its cynicism.  In fact, being a New Yorker is largely equated with being a cynic.  Cynicism is not confined to one group of people, however.  In fact, it often seems that cynicism is culturally celebrated to the point that it is almost considered an art form.  In contrast, consider skepticism.  Instead of an art, skepticism is at the heart of science.  We do not want to believe anything until we have some reason to believe it.  This appears to be very similar to the Buddhist view, that you should not believe things just because someone told them to you, but instead to trust your own experience.  So what is the difference?  Shambhala senior teacher Ethan Nichtern once gave a talk that discussed this distinction, which I largely summarize here.

 In the Japanese Zen tradition, it is said that there are three pillars of an approach to life that can bring us understanding and balance.  The first of these is dai-gidan, which is often translated as "great doubt."  Doubting has immense power. It allows us to remain curious and to consider multiple alternative perspectives.  This is deeply important because as soon as we think we understand something, we stop paying attention.  We then miss the truth about it because nothing is ever as simple as our minds try to make them.  Once we think we think we have the answer, we stop questioning.   Once we understand something, we grow bored with it.  Consider the example of your family.  Perhaps you have had the experience that your parents and siblings treat you similarly year after year, not realizing how much you have changed.  This is one danger of thinking that we "know" something.  Great doubt is so valuable because we can continue to pay attention to see what we haven't seen before.  It helps us to keep from closing off our minds because we believe that we are "right" (and everyone thinks they are right, even though the truth is that we are almost always wrong... but that is a subject for another post).

Doubt is clearly valuable, but on its own it is shallow.  The second pillar is dai-shinkon, or "great faith."  These two seem contradictory, don't they?  How can one have both great doubt and great faith?  The faith of Buddhism is not the blind faith that many religions have (such as the Christian faith I was raised in – where one is simply asked to believe certain things without any particular reason and without questioning them).  As Sharon Salzberg states in her book Faith, faith is better thought of as a verb than as a noun.  Faith isn't something you have, it's something you do.   Therefore, the great faith is a faith in the power of scrutiny – it is faith that the power of genuine curiosity and openness will lead you to something valuable.  It is a faith in your own experience. 

So what is cynicism?  It is great doubt without great faith.  Think about something you have been cynical about.  In my life, I have often been cynical about romantic relationships and marriage.  When you are feeling cynical, what types of things do you think about?  You think harsh things, often bitter things.  You often blame someone (perhaps even yourself, which can be a good thing).  You may say very clever things that express your cynicism (as examples, the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said, "90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name," or American writer Ambrose Bierce defined love as "a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.").  These witty cynical sayings betray three deeper issues – there is a deep hurt or disappointment underneath, there is a sense of helplessness about the situation, and there is a desire to regain control (or at least to appear to have some control).  But if we do not temper the doubt without faith, then we will not see the opportunities to change the situation.  In fact, if I am always cynical about romantic relationships, this would be likely to scare off many people with whom I could have had a good relationship. 

As a university professor, I am surrounded by smart people and people who wish to appear smart.  One thing I have witnessed countless times is that people are often critical of things simply as a way to appear smart.   Imagine going to a movie with some friends and after seeing the movie you ask your friends what they thought of it.  If one says that he liked it because the characters developed in a believable way and another says that he didn't like it because he thought the plot was too simplistic, we will usually feel that the second person thought more deeply about the movie and somehow has a smarter opinion.  It is funny that we value criticism so much, but it is very human.  Humans have what is called a "negativity bias."  We overvalue negative information relative to neutral or even positive information.  For example, if you are considering what type of car to buy and you hear one positive thing about a type of car and one negative thing, you will make your decision based far more on the negative information than on the positive information.  In fact, you will likely override five positive things if you hear one negative thing! (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001) It is actually very easy to criticize things and people.  So why do we think that criticism demonstrates something smart, when everyone can do it without actually knowing anything?  Therefore great doubt is not sufficient.

Great faith by itself, however, is no better.  If all we have is a deep belief in our own experience and thoughts, we will be arrogant.  We will have a tendency to become fundamentalists, where we think that our way of believing is the only possible correct way.  We will think that we are "right" and we will dismiss other's ideas, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.  This way of thinking will not bring us happiness, only conflict.

Faith cannot simply be equated with belief, however.  Faith must mean that we are searching.  Faith implies a questioning, and that we believe/have faith that we will be able to make progress. We will find a truth.  But is this Truth with a capital "T?"  Only if we forget great doubt.  Great faith without great doubt is blind belief that we have found Truth.  Yet our own experience teaches us that truths change constantly.  Who we are is constantly changing.  The world and all the people in it are constantly changing.  Our relationships with ourselves, each other, and even with God are changing.  In fact, we often become cynical because some Truth turned out not to be as permanent as we had hoped.

How is skepticism different from cynicism?  It is great doubt in balance with great faith.  We do not hold tightly onto any capital-T truth, although we constantly seek truths.  We understand that our conception of truth may change as we learn more, and we believe that our seeking will be useful.  We have faith that we can trust our experiences, yet we doubt that we have ever learned everything that we need to.  I might even go so far as to claim that skepticism is a type of wisdom.  It is wise to rely on what you have learned, but to know that you do not yet know everything there is and are therefore going to make mistakes. 

Great doubt and great faith are only two of the pillars, and although they bring a balance they do not bring progress.  The third pillar is dai-funshi, often translated as "great effort."  This is the effort needed to keep questioning, to keep exploring, to keep from becoming cynical.  Cynicism takes no effort, which is one of the reasons why it feels so good.  It's a way of feeling in control of something that we aren't in control of without putting in any real effort. 

Great effort is what moves us back and forth along the balance between doubt and faith.  It is easy to believe we are right.  It is easy to stop being curious.  It is easy to rely on the prejudices and stereotypes we have.  In fact, the reason we have these prejudices is often beneficial much of the time. 

Consider this story:  You know a girl whom you think of as your best friend.  You like to confide in her, to tell her your secrets.  You feel that you can always rely on her to stick up for you.  But you learn that she actually always tells your secrets to other people and makes fun of you behind your back.  It would be foolish to continue to consider her as your best friend.  On the other hand, if she has a history of betraying your trust, then it is to your benefit to change your idea of her.  But if you now assume that she is likely to be unkind to you, you will probably treat her very differently.  This may make it harder for you to be friends again in the future. 

We like to put labels on people.  We give them labels such as friend, enemy, Republican, Democrat, liar, stupid, funny, etc.  The problem isn't that we have the labels.... the problem is that we believe the labels to be Truth.  People are more than what we see.  Reality is always more complex than we perceive and remember.  As long as we believe in the label, we will always miss seeing the real person.  If someone has stopped being our friend, as long as we believe that she has become an enemy, she cannot become our friend again.  It is hard to hold both points of view at once – that she often acts unkindly, but maybe she might act kindly sometimes too.  This is where great effort is needed.

Reference: Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good.  Review of General Psychology, 5, 323-370.  This post originally appeared on The Interdependence Project blog.  Images sources here, here, here, and here.