Were you free to make a choice you didn't know you had? Where free will begins.

In a previous post, I asked you to consider the example of someone insulting or offending us, we get angry and immediately think of things we would like to say or do in response.  What would our motivation be for saying or doing any of them? Although you could spin it in several directions, such as to clarify the others’ mistake, to defend yourself, to get back at him/her, to put the other in his place, to just hit him, etc., they actually have one thing in common – they are motivated by the feeling that they will make you happier if you do it. 

Now here’s the funny thing – if you were to examine the motivation behind why the other person said or did whatever it was that he did, it’s exactly the same reason.  He thought it would make him happier.  In this respect, you two are always on the same wavelength. So one way to work with the negative feelings is to recognize that there is no fundamental difference between either of your perspectives. The problem is that our perspective usually does not include the other’s perspective. 

Humans suck at seeing another’s perspective.  There are many reasons for it, but a lot of it is just how the human brain works.  There is a cognitive bias that is so basic to all human thought that it is called the Fundamental Attribution Error.  When someone does something, especially something annoying, we tend to attribute the causes to something internal and/or essential about that person - he is just a jerk. In contrast, when we do something that could be annoying, however, we tend to attribute the causes to external situations.  We had no other choice, or we're in a hurry.

It's interesting to note that to ourselves, we always have a “good” reason for why we are doing whatever selfish thing it is we’re doing.

The corollary to the fundamental attribution error is what might be called the fundamental self error – that we relate everything to ourselves as if everything is a personal affront or benefit. The other part of a fundamental self error is that we believe there is a fundamental self – something unchanging at the core that things happen to. If we’re a stable permanent thing, then any changes that occur are from the outside happening TO us. We get to pretend constantly that we’re the victim, even of our own feelings. For example, how often have you said, “That thing you did MADE me mad,” or “I fell in love with you because you’re so sweet?" We interpret even our own feelings as something that happened to us because of external circumstances.

The irony is that we take no responsibility for our own actions and reactions, but we call this freedom.

Wouldn’t true freedom be the ability to not feel controlled by the situations and our emotional reactions? Wouldn’t true freedom be the ability to see all the perspectives?  If we believe that free will is the ability to make our own choices, when our perspective is so narrow that we can’t even understand the choices available to us, how can we have any free will? Were you free to make a choice that you didn’t even know you had?

Psychologist Roy Baumeister said, “Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it. The most recently evolved parts of the human brain have an extensive mechanism for overriding those impulses, which enables us to reject food when we’re hungry, whether it’s because we’re dieting, vegetarian, keeping kosher, or mistrustful of the food.” 

So freedom begins when we STOP acting, or at least slow down the reacting. This is also the first step to being open to seeing other perspectives.  As long as we continue to act in our habitual ways, getting into the same arguments over and over again, continuing to believe that we're right, we will never be free.

This is where meditation can be such valuable training. One technique that can help us begin to slow the automatic processes of reacting down is called Urge Surfing, which can be read about here and there is a nice short guided example available here.

Image sources: Here and here.

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.

I Had Friends on that Death Star...

I’m wearing one of my favorite ϋber-geek t-shirts (shown to the left).  It reads, “I had friends on that Death Star.”  It makes me cry.  It makes me laugh.  It reminds me that there is always another side to consider.  My point of view is the minority.

In Buddhism, we often talk about “compassion,” but it’s sometimes unclear to me what we mean by it.  The English word comes from the Latin com- (together or with) and passio (to suffer), and therefore properly means to suffer with.  This strikes me as more than simple sympathy, where we can feel pity for someone’s suffering, or even empathy, where we can understand what it is someone else is feeling.  It is a dagger through our own heart.  We share someone’s suffering.

In Buddhist texts, the word that is most often translated as compassion is Karuṇā, and could also be translated as “mercy.” Elizabeth Harris notes that compassion seems to have three aspects in Buddhist texts:

Yet central to all is the claim that karu.naa concerns our attitude to the suffering of others. In the Buddhist texts the term often refers to an attitude of mind to be radiated in meditation. This is usually considered its primary usage. Nevertheless, the definitions of Buddhist writers past and present, as well as the texts themselves, stress that it is also more than this. Anukampaa and dayaa, often translated as "sympathy," are closely allied to it.[18] In fact, at least three strands of meaning in the term "compassion" can be detected in the texts: a prerequisite for a just and harmonious society; an essential attitude for progress along the path towards wisdom (pa~n~naa); and the liberative action within society of those who have become enlightened or who are sincerely following the path towards it. All these strands need to be looked at if the term is to be understood and if those who accuse Buddhist compassion of being too passive are to be answered correctly.

Psychologists note that empathy has both cognitive and emotional aspects to it.  We can cognitively understand someone else’s situation and why it may be difficult without having empathy for it.  To have empathy, we need also to have some understanding feeling that is compatible with the other person – we have to be able to see things from their point of view for a while.

It is surprisingly difficult to take someone else’s point of view, actually.  I have a little demonstration that I like to do in my college classes.  I get two volunteers from the class to come up front, and I make them sit back to back.  I give them each a baggie with about 10 or 12 Lego pieces in it.  The pieces are all distinctly different from each other – different shapes, sizes, and colors.  I tell one of the students to build whatever he or she wants but to describe it along the way so that the other student can build exactly the same thing.  The other student is not allowed to speak, ask questions, or make any noise – just to listen and build the same thing.  This really should not be that hard… it’s only 10 easily identifiable pieces.  Yet, in over 10 years of doing this exercise, the students have NEVER built the same thing.  This demonstrates how deeply egocentric we are.  When I see something, it seems so intuitively understandable to me that I can’t even guess how you might see it differently. 

Perhaps this is why compassion is one of the four “divine abodes.” We need to go beyond ordinary seeing to truly be able to understand someone else’s point of view.  But even the ability to see from someone else’s point of view may only get us to empathy.  What makes compassion different from empathy?

My current perspective on this question gets back to the Latin roots.  If we truly “suffer with” someone, we (1) begin to understand their perspective, (2) we feel what they are feeling, and (3) most importantly, we gain the motivation to reduce or end the suffering. 

Let’s be honest.  How many of us American Buddhists found our dharma practice deepened as a result of some trauma, loss, or other painful event?  Suffering brings with it the desire to end suffering (c.f., Brahmana Sutta and here).  This motivational aspect is one of the real benefits of suffering.

Compassion brings with it the motivation engendered by suffering.  In contrast, sympathy doesn’t require action – it just acknowledges someone else’s suffering.  Compassion, that is, suffering with someone, makes us want to do something.  It can help set us on the path to end suffering for others.

Image sources here and here.  This was originally posted on the Interdependence Project blog.