Why every experience you have is 99% wrong

I sat outside on a lovely early summer morning. The sun played hide-and-seek with the clouds, who in turn were playing chase with the breezes. The garden had turned a rich green from the recent rains, and the strawberry flowers whispered of treats to come in a couple of weeks.  I set my meditation timer for 24 minutes, and set an intention to be aware of the arising and passing of sensations.

As the sun came out, I felt my skin warm.  As the breeze played tag, I felt my skin cool. Birds of many types sang from unseen places, although sometimes they passed before my eyes. A male and female cardinal eyed me suspiciously as they considered the bird feeder nearby. Their suspicion proved well-founded once they realized there was nothing in it.  The sound of cars arose and passed. I tasted my coffee, and savored the bitterness tempered by the teaspoon of sugar I had added. I noticed the heat of the coffee through the cup, and also saw the feeling of dislike arise as the heat felt like a threat.  I quickly put the cup down, but later picked it up again just trying to feel the arising of heat without judging it as aversive. I watched my thoughts sometimes follow my experiences, and sometimes lead them.

Perhaps this sounds like a "good" meditation session. What surprised me was the thing I called "my experience."  I was aware of each of these aspects of life's flow around and within me.  How disappointing.  I was aware of each of them.  One.  At.  A.  Time.

This thing we call our experience is only a tiny slice of what we are actually experiencing.  When noticing the breeze upon my skin, I wasn't also noticing the birds or the color of the grass.  In fact, I wasn't even noticing the breeze upon my skin - I only noticed it on certain parts of my skin where I focused my attention.  I was actually feeling it on my whole body, but only attended to how it cooled my legs or chest. Once it passed, I noticed the sound of some bird, but just that one - not all the other sounds, such as the wind in the trees, the myriad birds farther away, the sound of my heart beating, or the strawberries flowering. Tasting my coffee clouded all awareness of sights, sounds, feelings. Yet, all of these experiences were occurring at once.  Why do we believe experience is singular?

Attention is like a spotlight - it can focus on only one thing at a time. Worse still, it's a very narrow beam of light.  It can pick up only about 1% of what is happening at any given moment. To put it another way, that means that our understanding of what is occurring at any moment is 99% wrong! And still we persist in the belief that we are always right and know what's going on.

How would it be if we could truly experience the emptiness and multiplicity of experience, without the constant narrowing, labeling, and solidifying?

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.

What is happiness?

In the last post, I discussed how we evolved to look outside ourselves for danger and opportunity, and how this creates a bias when we're looking for happiness.  But we bypassed a more fundamental question - what is happiness?  It seems like we should know what we're looking for if we want to have any hope of finding it.

I have the belief that Americans have a lot of trouble recognizing happiness, for several reasons.  As children, we recognize that getting what you want is more fun than not getting what you want.  There is a wisdom in this, actually.  We recognize enjoyment and beauty partly because they are often healthy for us. But as we grow, we are bombarded with advertisements that work to subvert this natural wisdom into something unhealthy - we are told that happiness comes from a bottle, a car, a lifestyle.  The programs between the commercials are little better - they teach us that happiness comes from how we look, "getting" the girl/boy, and how they look.  These reinforce our bias that we should look outside ourselves for a way to be happy, but they also teach us (1) to consume as the method for becoming happy, and (2) that having consumed, we need more, because happiness doesn't last.

This has at least two additional consequences.  It trains us to believe that happiness is a special kind of reaction to something, and that happiness is a very strong joyous feeling, like winning the Superbowl.

This is perhaps the most insidious of all the ways our natural wisdom is subverted.  We forget that there are many other things that happiness can mean.  It can mean comfort,  bliss, calmness, contentment, and enjoyment, but we tend to focus only on the more extreme side of elation, ecstasy, and euphoria.  By focusing on the extreme version of happiness, which we know can never last (partly because it is extreme), we set up an impossible goal for ourselves.  In fact, what strikes me as I see my children buying into this world view, is that getting what you want isn't happiness - it's actually a form of suffering!

When we look outside ourselves for something that will make us happy, what happens when we get it?  I don't deny that at the time of receiving it, we feel happiness.  We definitely do.  If we get that Ferrari we've always wanted, we'll be really happy about it for at least several days.   But we also know it will get scratched if we drive it around town.  We know some day it will break and cost us a lot to fix it.  We worry that others might envy us for it.  And after we've had it for a while, we become bored and start looking for something else that can make us feel as excited and happy as we once were with this.

Because the idea of happiness has been so co-opted by Hallmark, Disney, and movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, we haven't even questioned if part of the reason we feel unfulfilled so much of the time is because we are looking for the wrong thing.

Let me suggest a different definition of happiness, and see if you agree with me that it is both worth pursuing and more attainable than the ever-shifting definition that happiness is getting the right product/experience/person.  As I have grown in my practice, I have come to believe that what we really mean when we say we want to be happy is that we want "ease."  We want to be able to move through our days, our work, our challenges, our difficulties, our bodies, and our relationships with ease.  We want to have harmony with our minds, feelings, actions.  We want to be "in tune" with our friends, spouses, children, bosses, students, etc.  We actually don't want to sit on a beach all day every day sipping fruity drinks with paper umbrellas.  Sure, that's fun for a while, but most of us would probably start feeling unproductive, disconnected, and out of sync with others.  We want to be involved in all the parts of our lives, but we want to be able to go through them with ease.  When we are successful at this, we feel a great sense of contentment, achievement, and some joy -- namely, happiness.  When we are frustrated in our goals, have arguments with our family or co-workers, we feel ill at ease.  When our bodies get out of sync, we have dis-ease.  In fact, when we're not sick or injured, we're at such ease that we don't even usually notice how remarkable the sense of ease is - our bodies just do what we want easily.

As long as we continue to believe the lie that happiness comes from getting the "right" thing, we will never be able to achieve lasting happiness.  We are constantly changing, therefore the thing/person that we feel is "right" at this point in time, will not feel the same way in the future.  But if our goal is to feel at ease with ourselves, our partners, and our lives, then when we change, that peaceful easy feeling can go with us.

Of course, even if you accept this as a better definition for what we really mean when we say we just want to be happy, it doesn't tell us how to achieve it.  Here is where Buddhist practice can really help, as it has many methods to train us in how to become at ease with ourselves and our lives.  I'll talk about some in future posts.