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?

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 Do You Mean, "You're Welcome?"

I was recently in France and Spain, trying pathetically to at least speak the bare minimum of niceties in each country’s language.  This brought me face-to-face with some of the differences in phrasing, and potentially some differences in meaning.  In America, we’ve all been taught to say “You’re welcome” when someone thanks us for something.  In fact, most of us have learned this polite response so well that it’s almost a nervous tic.  We say it automatically, with little thought other than perhaps a vague feeling that we should say it.  Yet, it is a surprisingly remarkable phrase, especially when contrasted with the equivalent phrase in other languages. 

Buddhism teaches us to examine the routine aspects of our experience, especially those we do habitually or automatically.  It also teaches us that our intentions matter, which become especially interesting to consider for habitual responses.  Do they even have an intention once they’ve become automatic?

When we say “you’re welcome,” it can be perfunctory, with no intention and little attention, other than to complete a ritual or to be perceived as gracious and polite.  Yet at its core, this is a profound statement of intention.

In many other languages the corresponding phrase is dismissive.  “De nada” in Spanish, “Ne rien” in French, “Nincs mit” in Hungarian, “Bú kèqi” in Chinese, and even “No worries” in Australian all basically mean “It’s nothing, don’t mention it, it’s no problem.”  This approach can certainly be gracious, but it also seems like it could be taken as not paying attention.  It ignores what might have taken genuine effort - It doesn’t acknowledge intent.

In contrast, “you’re welcome” demonstrates intent.  It offers the other person freedom to act.  If I welcome you to my home, I am setting you free in it. I am giving you access, and am not guarding or protecting or clinging to it.  This seems to me to be a profound intent to let go, to allow, and to honor the other beings.  It doesn’t cling to the idea of a certain outcome.  In this way, “you’re welcome” seems very different from “It’s nothing.”  Although we often say it with very little intention, we could change that.  With a small amount of effort, we can pay attention to this little letting go with compassionate intent.

Examining the differences between these meanings, however, is only one approach to consider.  How are these ways of saying it similar?  They all seem to demonstrate an understanding of emptiness (shunyata) and non-self.

De nada.  It’s nothing.  I see the gap.  There is no necessary action required.  There is no outcome needed.  There is nothing to cling to (even if I have an intention of lovingkindness).

No matter which phrase we use, it expresses an openness to whatever is occurring and will occur, without worrying about what I need to do next.  I am not feeling indebted to you, nor do I expect something from you.  When we say “it’s nothing,” “no problem,” “you’re welcome,” can we see the emptiness we’re pointing toward?  Can we have the intention to allow the moment to unfold without our control, trusting in the inherent fecundity of the emptiness?

(This article was first published on the Interdependence Project Blog.  Image sources not by the author are here and here.)