mindfulness Archives - The Naked Monk

Resist Groupthink & Make Up Your Own Mind

“There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone about him.” —Leo Tolstoy

Nothing unsettled my life more than leaving Buddhism. It was the only community I’d ever felt a part of, and although I knew with certainty that my time was up, it was years before I really understood why—there were so many contributing factors.

stone labyrinth with moss and a ray of light

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear. I had to get away from the groupthink. The price of belonging was to believe what everyone else believed, and it had been getting harder and harder to know my own thoughts.

The Perplexing Wisdom of Gotama

At first I’d found the community comforting—all I had to do was follow along—but everything started to change when I heard what Gotama told the people of Kesamutti, “It is fitting for you to be perplexed, it is fitting for you to be in doubt.” He went on:

“Do not go by oral traditions, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of scriptures, by logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reflection on reasons, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of the speaker, or because you think, ‘That wanderer is my guru.’”

Does this mean, “Don’t join a religion?” How do you follow someone who suggests you follow no one? And if we’re all deluded, as he also suggests, how are we supposed to think for ourselves? Thinking entirely for yourself leads to wrong conclusions, intellectual overload, confusion, disrespect for expertise, intellectual isolation and arrogance.

The answer lies in the next bit:

“When you know for yourselves, ‘These things are blameable; these things are censured by the wise; these things, if undertaken and practiced, lead to harm and suffering,’ then you will let go of them.”

The Importance of Direct Experience

Rather than “thinking for yourselves” he talks about “knowing for yourselves.” No matter how much you think about something and believe it to be true, knowing it is different. Even centuries-old scientific discoveries can be disproven, but when you see that the road ahead is clear or witness the mental patterns that undermine your own happiness, you act on that knowledge. It‘s not theory. This sort of direct knowledge depends on immediate experience and sensory evidence. The state of your body, how you carry tension, how you respond to daily events, what moods you project in body language, facial expression and manner—all reflect your emotional states and the thoughts they trigger. Everything else is just cogitating, guessing, projecting, imagining and made-up. The way to fully know what is “wholesome, blameless and praised by the wise,” is to live it.

So if you start to let go of your reactive habits and become more compassionate you’ll notice that you communicate better—you’ll open up, take more risks. The most effective way to learn not to touch a hot stove is to touch the hot stove. It’s a visceral lesson.

That’s why it doesn’t matter how much you polish your Buddha statues, how many prayers you recite, how much philosophy you debate—if you’re not learning from your own experience, nothing’s changing. Regular body scans are soothing, but the idea that they’ll lead to awakening is magical thinking. Those scans are just practice—a reminder to keep digging, to keep connecting physical sensations to feelings and thoughts, to see causes and consequences as they play out—to know yourself deeply and immediately.

Learning Through Experience

Gotama spoke to the Kasamuttis like this for a reason. Their land had been overrun by dozens of spiritual teachers and their disciples, each one disclaiming all the others, every one of them proclaiming their own theories of life, death and what comes next.

“How to choose?” they asked him.

“Don’t,” he said.

I always imagine him smiling at this point—challenging them to drop the shiny spiritual baubles back in the box and recall their mortality.

So what is the path? What is dhamma? And what about sangha—community?

The Community Paradox

To work in a community without acknowledging the potential for groupthink means denying the fundamental human need to belong, and the mental contortions it leads to. In any organisation—business, political, social or religious—the pressure to conform is a constant threat to critical thinking and good decision-making. Everyone pulling together creates immense strength, but that sort of strength can be rigid. And as much as we love to think of Buddhism as scientific, objective and evidence-based, it too can be a cult. Even scientists are human—ambitious, competitive, envious, biased, defensive. No matter how smart you might be, being fully intelligent means also taking the time to manage your emotions and the social space they create around you.

Weighing & Letting Go

There is no absolute objectivity, but weighing our opinions, judgments, expectations and biases makes us less subjective. We take things less personally. Then, with practice, we glimpse the weight of our emotional baggage and our distorted sense of self. With those visceral insights at hand, letting go comes naturally.

You are invited to comment BELOW. Our gallery of blog posts is HERE.

Unapologetic Conversations on Religion & Spirituality

Introduction

It’s been eight years since I last blogged as The Naked Monk. I’ve missed it!

I started The Naked Monk to talk, listen, learn and share my ideas about religion—Buddhism in particular but also Roman Catholicism, which I grew up in. I’m not a traditional believer—in fact I’m not a believer at all, even though I was a Buddhist monk for eight years and, even though forty years later I still turn to the Buddha for inspiration.

My Journey with Buddhism and Christianity

So I’m no longer a Buddhist and I don’t identify as Christian. However, I can honestly say that the two historical figures who have most affected my life choices and my thinking are the founders of these two religions—Gotama and Jesus. I still find the sermon on the mount inspired. The suttas still trigger new insights. But to get to where I’m at today, I had to get past the formulas, the dogmas and the groupthink of both religions. I had to figure things out for myself.

Gotama‘s story brought me a profound sense of purpose not because he was the omniscient superbeing presented by traditional Buddhists, but because he was not. He was just another human being like you and me. The more you study his life and times, the more you see that he was on to something much simpler and more down-to-earth than the absolute truths of mystical Buddhism.

The Importance of Personal Exploration

I‘m surprised sometimes by my own thoughts, but I get energy from comments from visitors—especially hostile ones. I have an audience to challenge me! I feel the outrage when I question sacrosanct beliefs. That’s particularly significant because Gotama did not tell people what to believe. He worked with experience, not ideas, and encouraged everyone to figure things out for themselves.

This is what sets Buddhism apart from all other religions. It’s why many of us came to Buddhism in the first place.

Gotama and Jesus: Influences on My Life

There are literally hundreds of variations on Buddhism and Christianity, most of them claiming to be absolutely true. I think that would make Gotama smile. He explained how preconceptions, biases and opinions shape our perceptions and explained that we prefer to see what we want to see—not what’s actually going on. We deliberately shut it out. Wilful ignorance, he said, is why we suffer so much.

Shoulds and shouldn’ts play no role in Gotama’s path to freedom. The world is filled with well-intentioned people who believe they should be a certain way and yet find themselves behaving otherwise. Some admit it, but most can’t—they lock in their denial with guilt and shame. The idea is to let go of that sort of emotional baggage, not to pile it on.

Challenging Beliefs and Embracing Experience

I’m not just making this up. For eight years I studied the three vehicles of Tibetan Buddhism and the scholastic commentaries known as abidhamma. After returning to lay life I narrowed down my search to the earliest literature—the Pali Canon (named after the language they’re written in).

My colleague Stephen Batchelor has identified at least six different ‘voices’ in the Pali Canon—poetic, dramatic, skeptical, pragmatic, dogmatic and mythic. Putting the last two aside helps shine a much clearer light on Gotama the man.

There’s guesswork involved—lots of trial and error. To process the story I have to explore myself. I know that to accept it as factual is to render it lifeless, but am I interpreting all the meaning out of it? That’s what true believers say.

Conclusion and Invitation

I may not be a card-carrying member of any belief system, but I’m committed. Gotama’s life and times didn’t happen in a vacuum but in a historical context. How did this affect his decisions? His teaching? Not one of my teachers ever suggested it was significant even though Gotama’s central teaching is the dependent arising of all things. I see the man and his mission in my own way. Isn’t that what commitment means?

Neatly packaged answers to existential questions are useless. The only way forward is to accept them as unanswerable. We keep exploring, and here’s the place where I’ll document my findings and musings.

Please share and comment. If you disagree, or if you’re offended by my posts—speak up! I like a good debate, and I want to hear from you all.

Please comment BELOW. Older blog posts HERE.

Why Meditate?

“Emptying the mind of thoughts; concentrating on just one thing.”

The Buddha didn’t say this. It’s a contemporary definition of meditation; how most people conceive of it.

It certainly has a ring to it. When I sat on my bed fifty-odd years ago and tried meditation for the first time, I wanted to forget humdrum thoughts and drift off into the universe. Being young and rather stupid, I didn’t realize I was already in it.

Later on, emptying the mind became more imperative. The more I tried to figure myself out, the more I got entangled in my own thoughts. The mental chatter drove me nuts. That’s when I started looking for some serious training. I needed to believe just one thing: that the mind could be emptied.

Can the mind really be emptied of thoughts?

I had no experience to go on, no hard facts. I believed it because I wanted it to be true. I think that’s true for most people, why it’s still such a popular idea.

The Buddha claimed that his path brought an end to the effluences (āsava). He never said anything about stopping thought. To achieve this dubious goal, many people (myself included) have retreated from everyday life to focus on focusing. It’s a difficult experience that delivers some wonderful moments, but its contingency is never more apparent than the day you return to the world. When I realized that my hard-earned detachment, concentration and clarity depended on an artificially minimal environment and an unsocial lifestyle, and that leaving that environment returned me quickly to the busy mind, I finally questioned my premise. Could the mind really be emptied of thoughts? More upsetting still was this question: even if it could, what was the point?

The meat and potatoes of life lie in how we act and how we see

The great attraction of mindfulness is the idea of dwelling in the present moment. Anyone who tries it soon admits they can’t sustain more than a few moments at a time, and yet that’s okay. The effort has its rewards: a relative slowing down, greater comfort in our own skins, a more thoughtful stress response. Just attempting to do it helps.

This is the clincher. We don’t meditate to think less, but to think better. The mindless version of mindfulness may inflame our imagination, but what sustains us is considerably less sensational.

Talk of emptiness, non-duality, non-discursive awareness and enlightenment might spur us on, but it’s just abstraction. The meat and potatoes of life lie in how we act and how we see. The more plainly we do those things, the more human we become; all the more real.

Slowing the mad rush of thoughts is a great idea because it enables us to think critically (yoniso manasikāra) — to process all that data we’re being mindful of. That means neither emptying the mind nor taking off on flights of philosophical fancy, just using your wits to keep things in perspective.

That’s why we meditate.

How Meditation Improves Relationships

I was talking to a friend this week about my upcoming workshop on relationships. He went silent for a moment, looked me in the eye, and asked, “What the f*** do you know about relationships?” He didn’t stick around for an answer, but I thought it was a good question anyway.

The full question is: How (the hell) has my training as a Buddhist monk and a lifetime of mindfulness meditation improved my relationships?

If you think of meditation as just a way to clue out, it’s hard to see how it can help anything. Mindfulness meditation, however, is anything but. Rather than trying to escape the ickyness of difficult relationships, the goal is to listen and learn. The twist is that we’re listening not just to the other person, but also to ourselves. It’s not uncommon for our inner dialogue to say one thing and our behavior to say another.

Two people shouting at each other hear nothing

The most complicated thing we do in life is to interact with people. To create good business relationships, make friends and be loved we need to suppress knee-jerk reactions in order to establish trust and avoid trouble. We also need to be honest and not fake. We practice this and get better at this balancing act, but it’s an ongoing process; we never get it perfect.

Sometimes it’s hard to be entirely honest about underlying feelings even with ourselves. We have the ability to put a face on anything, and tend to use it as a matter of convenience. That’s when relationships grow strained. The way my friend spoke to me the other day upset and baffled me. I tried to answer his question literally, to explain what I’d learned about relationships, but he only became more incredulous. If I’d been listening to myself I would have realized that I was being defensive. If I’d really been listening to him I would have realized that the question had nothing to do with what I know or don’t know. It wasn’t even really a question. He was expressing a frustration or bias of his own.

The ability to separate our reactivity from our thoughts can be bad, but it can also be good

There’s so much nonsense spoken about forming perfect relationships, finding your soul mate and exercising power over others. However, the very existence of that conversation means it’s an issue.

Two people shouting at each other hear nothing. It’s a pointless exercise, yet some people don’t just do it sometimes, they do it routinely with colleagues, friends and family. All relationships take on habitual patterns; sometimes those patterns are dysfunctional, even toxic. Returning again and again to conflicted relationships and strained silence is a strange comfort zone that no other animal on the planet would likely put up with. We humans are a strange lot.

That strangeness lies in the ability to separate our reactivity from our thoughts. It can be bad, but it can also be good. We can modify our behavior, though whether get it right or not depends on the role models we grew up with, the effort we put into improving ourselves and the wisdom we bring to it. Mindfulness meditation is a threefold approach to behavior modification, using ethics, intelligence and concentration. The goal is to become less reactive and to act more thoughtfully. That’s not just good for relationships, it opens up an entirely new way of relating to ourselves and to life.

Meditation is No Escape

Buddha talked occasionally about meditative states (jhāna), but he was clearly more interested in bhāvanā, or ‘cultivation:’ literally, cultivating yourself as a moral person. Bhāvanā is about how you relate to all experience, not just sitting quietly. It’s about how you see yourself and how you consequently relate to others.

That isn’t to say that formal sitting meditation is a waste of time. The quiet room and prepared space put you in the mood. The lack of distraction helps you focus, though as every frustrated meditator knows, you don’t necessarily focus on the right things. Once you give the mind all that space it tends to take off on its own.

Meditation is not about calming down and feeling good;
it’s about watching out and growing up

That’s when people declare that they can’t meditate, not realizing that it’s a natural feature of the human mind and that they’re already doing it; it’s just not what they expected. We naturally mull over our experience and try to grasp what’s happening but when we spend too much time thinking about how we’d like to be, we forget to pay attention to the way we are, and end up judging rather than helping ourselves. Meditation is not about calming down and feeling good, it’s about watching out and growing up. Here’s an example:

I was walking the other day through grey rain, under a grey sky. The rising mist met the falling cloud as I plodded along one foot after the other, steady as an animal. In that moment I saw myself as exactly that: a temporary presence on the face of the planet. My heart sank. I felt myself resisting the gloom, wanting the day to be sunny, my heart to be cheered. I invested my attention in that wanting, cultivating my own gloom.

Whether I tug myself away from the gloom or towards the
light the problem is the tugging, not the direction

Then I saw through it to the bawling baby I once was, unhappy with how things are. I almost identified with him but pulled back, realizing that whether I tug myself away from the gloom or towards the light the problem is the tugging, not the direction. Instead of opening myself to life’s fragile contingency, I obscured my situation and added to my burdens. Reaching out for what we want sometimes answers an immediate need, but it also become a habit that leaves us constantly unfulfilled.

Whether you’re sitting in a quiet room or walking through the woods, the meditative mind recognizes habitual reactivity and steps out of it. In an instant I saw the absurdity of resisting my experience. My eyes opened. I embraced the gloom and returned to my surroundings. There was a smell of must in the air, a rustling in the leaves, a familiar contact with unknown nature, a little dangerous and spine-tingling. I no longer felt comfortable. Instead I felt alive. My heart sank but my senses were acute.

Meditation is not an escape from this world but an intimate contact with it.

The Denial Reflex

Theory will never impact you the way experience does. Mindfulness works because it deals with what’s actually happening, not with ideas about how things are or should be. Putting this into action on a cushion is what I call practice. The next step is to bring it into everyday life, and that’s where mindfulness becomes a reality.

For example, as soon as I woke up this morning I saw Caroline was having a hard time.

“Vertigo,” she said. She hates vertigo. Can’t walk, can’t sit up in bed, can’t stand the light. Can’t work. The first MS attack I saw her go through was vertigo: ten days of it. That’s when I found out that physical symptoms are only half of the MS story. You never know how long they’ll last. A day, a week…might be for good. It’s horrible, but it keeps you focused.

“Damn!”

I heard it in her voice, the sense of the unknown. Now what? How long?

ethics that don’t translate into behavior are worthless

Since I’ve been with her I’ve faced stuff I’d probably have avoided if I’d had the choice. For one, I never paid attention to the way I — like most healthy people — regarded chronically ill people. Those who meet Caroline for the first time often say, “Oh, I knew someone with MS,” On two occasions they’ve blundered on, “Yeah…she died!” They even laughed, or tried to.

They weren’t malicious, just scared stupid. Fear shuts down sensitivity, and civility goes out the window.

Caroline and I saw this big time when we visited the Boston Aquarium and she decided to use a wheelchair. Discomforted by the sight of an invalid, just about everyone avoided eye contact and pointed their backsides in her face.

I try to understand behaviour like this by looking into myself. On the surface we’re different, but underneath we’re all guided by the same primal drives. I had to admit, I too had been insensitive in similar situations, instinctively turning away from someone in a wheelchair. Why? Guilt, discomfort — or, if I was truly honest with myself, horror. Weakness and disease await us all; it’s just a matter of time. Some instinct tells us we’re better off ignoring this truth. Watch out for instincts.

if life weren’t such a bitch we wouldn’t
spend it trying to justify our existence

Facing the ugly stuff may not be pleasant, but nothing is more liberating. If my self-image as a philosophically compassionate and caring man involves denial of my insensitivity, what use is it? Ethics that don’t translate into behaviour are worthless.

Now when I see someone in a wheelchair, I make eye contact; I smile. I’ve developed an inner eye for that ugly side: the denial reflex. I know myself better now; when I’m not who I want to be, or think I should be, I face it.

Living with Caroline has honed my listening skills. It’s taught me that helping out is an art: it takes practice. It’s much easier to take over, and much less compassionate.

Life is a paradox, sometimes a bitch. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t spend it trying to justify our existence. Our only option is to approach it as a moving target. Who knows what’ll happen tomorrow; or even if we’ll make it that far?

mindfulness is not just
to feel calm and collected

The healthy forget; at least, they try. For Caroline that’s not a choice. I don’t carry her burden, but I do share her sense of the precarious. Living with her is a slow-burning emotional explosion. In facing each day head-on, I’ve tuned into her courage. I see the depth this brings to her work as a life coach.

I sometimes imagine all the fun we’d have if she didn’t have MS. Then I wonder again: what would happen to that special intimacy. It’s deeper than love.

We hope and dream, but fantasies are futile. There’s no cure for MS, not even close. Caroline gets emails from well-wishers all the time offering a ‘new cure.’ She tells them that nobody knows more about their own disease than MS sufferers. It’s a long, slow burn and there’s plenty of time to ponder. Attempts to fix MS may or may not work, but close attention to the present moment, especially to your reactivity, can free you from fantasies and unrealistic expectations. There’s no need to compound the suffering. Anxiety is — of all things — a comfort zone.

This moment is all we have. We too quickly forget that simple truth, though we can scarcely afford to. This is what mindfulness is for: not just to feel calm and collected but to face what we’re trying to avoid.