Our Divided Minds – Part 1

Two books I’ve read recently – The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – offer some surprising new insights into how our minds function.  Both authors are social psychologists renowned in their field (Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winner), and each describes the mind as a divided entity, with two components  working in complementary yet vastly different ways.  Kahneman’s broad focus is on the mind’s decision-making process across all aspects of our life; Haidt’s is a more narrow focus on how the mind formulates our political and religious convictions.  Kahneman’s ideas enrich our understanding of the concept of mindfulness; Haidt’s ideas have the potential to enhance our skillfulness in engaging with others more mindfully.

Let’s start with Kahneman.

He identifies the two aspects of the mind as simply “System 1” and “System 2”.   Here is how he describes their individual roles and their joint functioning:

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no sense of voluntary control.  System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.  When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do.  Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero, effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2.  {pp. 20-21, hardcover edition}

Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake.  System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode.  System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings.  If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs.  When all goes smoothly, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification.  When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment.  System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.  System 2 is also credited with the continuous monitoring of your own behavior – the control that keeps you polite when you are angry, and alert when you are driving at night.   {p. 24, hardcover edition}

We might think of System 1 as the “automatic pilot mode” that efficiently guides us through our familiar daily routines.  Getting dressed, driving to town, shopping for groceries, conversing with family members over dinner – these and the countless other habitual behaviors that make up such a large part of our days – all are managed by this System 1 that has learned through repeated trials exactly what is required in each situation.

If we consider System 1 to be the mind’s automatic pilot, then we can view System 2 as the actual pilot, monitoring the cockpit instruments and taking control when situations turn from familiar to novel.  Planning a large-scale home improvement project, driving through the unfamiliar streets of a foreign city, pondering a mid-life career change – any unforeseen or non-habitual circumstance emerging in the course of the day calls upon the services of System 2 to devise a program of action that meets the requirements of the novel situation.

In this scheme of things, System 1 is our default mode of being – the “fast thinking” that Kahneman refers to in his title.  System 2 – or “slow thinking” – is invoked only when needed, and revoked as soon as the need is met.  System 1 does the easy work, System 2 does the hard work – an efficiently designed bit of neurological teamwork.

Very neat, we might say.  But, unfortunately, too neat – and not nearly as effective as we might think.

The problem, as Kahneman reminds us on more than one occasion, is that System 2 is lazy.  It doesn’t want to exert any more effort than it has to, and is always eager to hand the controls back over to System 1.  Too eager, in fact.  All too often, in keeping with its lazy disposition, it shies away from the difficult work of slow thinking, and looks instead for an easier, faster solution.

Kahneman refers to these shortcuts in slow thinking as “heuristics”, and identifies quite a few varieties of them.  What they all have in common is the tendency to substitute a simpler question for the more complex one actually being posed.  As an example, he cites the challenge of predicting a politician’s chances of success in a planned bid for higher office.  A reliable answer requires a large investment of System 2 slow thinking – studying the demographics, understanding the issues, assessing possible opponents, just to name a few.  But, Kahneman claims, we are more likely to shy away from the difficult effort of analyzing these unfamiliar factors, and instead base our prediction on the much easier task of looking at information that we already know, or that is readily available – for example, how successful was the candidate in her last election bid, or how charming was he in the interview we just saw on the morning news?  We arrive at an answer much faster and with much less effort, thanks to System 2 passing the task back to System 1 – but our prediction has much less reliability because we didn’t take the time and effort to answer the difficult but more relevant questions.

Taking into account this natural tendency of our mind to go for the easy solution, to engage in fast thinking even when slow thinking is called for, can help us move toward more effective decision-making – one of Kahneman’s stated goals in writing this book.  His hope is that, having learned about heuristics and the trouble they can cause from the many studies he reports on in his book, we will become more alert to those situations where we truly need to be in System 2 slow thinking mode, and more disciplined about resisting the temptation to slip back into System 1 fast thinking mode.

That’s a worthy hope.  But, is just knowing about the trap of heuristics enough to keep us from falling victim to them?  Remember that System 2 by its very nature is lazy, and will take any opportunity to hand things back to System 1.  To alter such a strongly programmed pattern of neurological functioning will take more, I fear, than a mere intellectual understanding of heuristics.

And here, where I believe Kahneman’s good intention falls short, is precisely where our understanding of mindfulness can push us forward and help us achieve his objective.

For mindfulness – the habit of being continuously self-aware and self-observing – is strikingly similar to what Kahneman describes as System 2 thinking.  Recall this assertion he makes in the excerpt quoted above …. System 2 is also credited with the continuous monitoring of your own behavior – the control that keeps you polite when you are angry, and alert when you are driving at night. 

And, as anyone who strives to cultivate the habit of mindfulness well knows, it is by no means our default mode of being.  That distinction, unfortunately, belongs to the habitual, automatic patterns of behavior we have acquired over the course of our lifetime – thoughtless speech and actions that resemble nothing so much as what Kahneman calls System 1 thinking.

Applying Kahneman’s typology to the concept of mindfulness, then, we see that our normal un-mindful state corresponds to his default fast-thinking System 1 mode, and that the more deliberate state of mindful awareness we achieve only with some effort corresponds to his slow-thinking System 2 mode that arises only when summoned by circumstance.

Thus, the System 1/System 2 dichotomy enriches our understanding of mindfulness by giving us a scientific framework from which to realize that the mindful state is not our natural way of being, to appreciate that it will always take a certain effort on our part to enter into and then sustain a state of mindfulness, and to recognize that our minds will naturally slip out of that mindful state at the first little breeze of distraction.

And, we can return the favor to Kahneman by enriching his too facile prescription for how we can become more skillful users of our System 2 capacities – the intellectual grasp of heuristics and their pitfalls – with the physical rigor of meditation practice, the most potent tool we have for developing mindfulness.

Think for a moment about the disciplines we bring to our practice of sitting meditation – physical stillness, concentration, and inquiry.  The thoughts and feelings that continually parade through our mind while we sit are manifestations of System 1.  They are fast, random, and often dazzle us with their appeal; they pull us away from our intention in meditating.  By contrast, the calm focus we aspire to while sitting has all the attributes of System 2.  It is slow, deliberate, and aware of but not easily seduced by distractions; it pulls us further into our intention.

We practice meditation on a regular basis for no other reason than to become more mindful and to bring that mindfulness into all our daily speech and actions.

It seems quite plausible that when we practice meditation we are coincidentally, if unintentionally, strengthening the System 2 part of our minds.  And furthermore, it seems equally plausible that, as a result of a continuous daily meditation practice, our strengthened System 2 grows less lazy, and more capable of resisting the allure of heuristics.

One of the great paradoxes with meditation is that, when we practice with the hope of getting something out of it, we actually undercut the practice by our grasping after some imagined benefit; but when we practice without hope of gain, we strengthen the practice by our very lack of grasping after something, and do in fact benefit personally from our practice.

Accordingly, I am by no means advocating that we sit in meditation with the intention of building up our System 2 strength.  That would be grasping – precisely what we strive to avoid in meditation.  Rather, I am simply proposing that a stronger System 2, one that actually does the hard work of slow thinking when called upon, may be an unintended gain that results from the discipline of meditation.

Kahneman would, I think, describe a person with such a strong, competent, and effective System 2 as a good decision-maker.

Another way to describe such a person would be, quite simply, as “mindful”.

 

The next post will take up the views of our second author, Jonathan Haidt, on our divided minds.

In the meantime, here is the review of Thinking, Fast and Slow that got me interested in Daniel Kahneman’s work …..

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html?ref=bookreviews&_r=0

 

Mindfulness Quotes and Comments

Every writer must, of necessity, be a reader as well.  Every one of the topics I write about in this blog has been informed in one way or another by what I have been reading on the subjects of mindfulness, meditation, and Buddhism. It’s one of the cornerstones of my daily practice, and in this post I want to share a few favorite quotes on mindfulness from my reading over the past few years.

Insight always has the power of liberating us.  The energy of mindfulness enables us to look deeply and gain the insight we need so that transformation is possible.  ~~  Thich Nhat Hahn, “Peace Is Every Step”

What we need is a fundamental change in our orientation to life – toward a willingness to see, to learn, to just be with whatever we meet.  There is nothing more basic and essential than this willingness to just be.   ~~   Ezra Bayda, “Being Zen”

Instead of gathering many pieces of information seeking to gain knowledge, you should clear your mind.  If your mind is clear, true knowledge is already yours.  ~~  Shunryu Suzuki, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”

The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very instant.  How we relate to it creates the future.  What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.  ~~  Pema Chödrön, “When Things Fall Apart”

The imperfect is our paradise.  May we attend with mindfulness, generosity, and compassion to all that is broken in our lives.  May we live fully in each flawed and too human moment, and thereby gain the victory.  ~~  Phillip Simmons, “Learning to Fall”

When we are just ourselves, without pretense or artifice, we are at rest in the universe.  In this ordinariness there is no higher or lower, nothing to fix, nothing to desire, simply an opening to the joys and sufferings of the world.  ~~  Jack Kornfield, “A Path With Heart”

Every thought, every feeling, no matter how mixed up it may seem, is wise at bottom.  Every thought, every feeling, has some Buddha message for you, if you can only get close enough to listen.  ~~  Norman Fischer, “Sailing Home”

Each of these quotes has its own unique beauty and wisdom, and I believe that each of them offers an insight that has the power to transform us.  For the past several years, each quote served as a masthead on one of the seven pages of a website I maintained for a consulting business I operated.  Having recently closed that business and now in the process of shutting down the website, I re-discovered them while archiving the site contents for possible future use.  I thought that they deserved a second online life here in my blog, and hence this post.

Over the next few months, I plan to re-visit the books from which these quotes originate, and will write in more detail about each of them in future posts.

In the meantime, I hope that reading and reflecting upon these brief gems of wisdom will be as useful for you as it was for me.  And if any of them particularly resonates with you, please feel welcome to share your thoughts via a comment.

Our Tragic Hunger for More

“Please, sir, I want some more.”

When young Oliver Twist makes his famous request for a second helping of the miserable food being served to him and his fellow orphans at the start of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, it’s all but impossible for the reader not to be moved by the simple humanity of his plea.  We all understand what it feels like to be hungry, and so we all readily empathize with Oliver’s hunger for more.

But in David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas, as well as in the recent film adaptation of the book, we encounter the phrase “hunger for more” in a strikingly different context.  At the center of a sweeping plotline that encompasses several centuries of real and imagined human history, we find ourselves in a future post-apocalyptic world where humanity’s long forward progress has slipped into sudden and steep reverse.  Here we encounter a peaceful group of survivors who live as simple hunter-gatherers in a forested island community, dwelling in makeshift huts, under the sway of superstitious elders, and in constant terror of a marauding band of savage warriors who prey on them as much for the sport of killing as for the plunder of their food and belongings.  A small contingent of a dying race of humans known as “prescients”, descendants of the scientific elite that ruled the world prior to the apocalyptic event known simply as “the fall”, arrive on the island for one of their periodic trading visits to exchange goods with the peaceful tribe.  On this trip, however, the prescient group’s emissary, a woman named Meronym, has a more ambitious agenda.  She enlists Zachry, an overly nervous but otherwise capable adult member of the tribe, to guide her on a dangerous journey to the top of the island’s imposing mountain, where tribal lore says that the devil resides.  In fact, as the prescients know, this mountaintop is home to what is left of a long-abandoned intergalactic communications station, which they must re-activate in order to establish contact with another prescient civilization on a distant planet and arrange for their migration before they, and the remnants of the technology they have managed to preserve, pass away forever.

Over a campfire on the second night of their trip to the mountaintop, Zachry asks Meronym how else the fall could have happened, other than that the devil he so fears at the top of the mountain made it happen.  Meronym’s answer – that humans caused their own demise – elicits disbelief from Zachry.  In the stilted language used by his tribe, he protests ….

“But Old Uns’d got the Smart!”

“Yay, Old Uns’ Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’humans, yay, a hunger for more.”

“More what?  Old Uns’d got ev’rythin’.”

“Oh, more gear, more food, faster speeds, longer lifes, easier lifes, more power, yay.  Now the Hole World is big, but it weren’t big ’nuff for that hunger what made Old Uns rip out the skies an’ boil up the seas an’ poison soil with crazed atoms …. “

What a stunning contrast!  On the one hand, we have the Old Uns’ “hunger for more” to which Meronym attributes the fall of humanity, and on the other we have Oliver’s request for more which strikes us as so reasonable, even heroic.  Is it conceivable that this most basic of human traits – the hunger for more of whatever is good and pleasurable – could turn out to be the most fatal of human flaws?

Quite possibly, yes, it is.

And not just because Mitchell makes such a compelling case with the nightmarish vision of the future he presents in Cloud Atlas.  There are more than enough warning signs right here in the present day.

Consider just a few:

– the growing trend toward luxury seating at concerts and sporting events, on airplanes, and most recently in neighborhood movie theaters.

– the unending stream of new social media sites, new movies, new reality TV shows, new tablet computers and smartphones, and new apps.

– the well-documented and long-lamented preference for large portions of food on our plates and oversized containers for our beverages.

– the rapid expansion of wealth inequality, as the incomes and assets of a privileged few rise disproportionately relative to the less-privileged majority.

Each of these four phenomena has its own unique aspect, and each requires its own separate analysis in terms of why it is occurring and what impact it is having on us as a society.  But in all of them we can recognize the underlying cry of “I want more!!” – a cry driven by an instinctive craving for self-aggrandizement, a cry completely bereft of the dignity inherent in Oliver’s noble plea.

Of course, Buddhist teaching has for centuries been calling our attention to the detrimental effect that indulging in this kind of craving for more pleasures can have on us as individuals.  Cloud Atlas calls our attention to the devastating effect such indulgence may have on us as a society.

There is a long and tragic arc connecting Oliver’s orphanage to Zachry’s mountaintop.  While those two places are the fictional products of their respective authors’ imaginations, the link between them lies in the very real human craving for “more”.

More and more, it seems, mindfulness demands a new human cry ….

“Please, everyone, we could all make do with a little less.”

Dismal Prospects: The Looming World of Wealth Inequality

A film I recently saw, and a book I’ve just finished reading, both have me contemplating the growing world-wide phenomenon of wealth inequality with a renewed sense of urgency.

The film is Elysium, a science fiction thriller set in a dystopian future in the mid-22nd century.  In this bleak new world, the wealthy few have fled the earth – ravaged beyond repair by unspecified ecological disasters – for a luxurious existence on Elysium, an artificially constructed world housed inside a huge wheel-shaped satellite orbiting earth like some monstrous metallic moon.  Left behind are the masses of humanity – abandoned to live on the remains of the dying planet’s surface, forced to subsist on the barest of necessities, and watched over by a corps of brutal robotic police.

Among the many deprivations suffered by these earth-dwellers, lack of access to adequate medical treatment is paramount – and it is this lack that drives the film’s gripping story.  When its hero, Max, a factory worker with a droll sense of humor and a fierce determination to survive, is accidentally exposed to a lethal dose of radiation – in no small part as a result of the inhumane conditions in his workplace – he undertakes a recklessly dangerous flight to Elysium, where medicine has reached a state of near-perfection in which any disease can be cured by lying for a few moments in one of the healing pods that are a standard feature in every citizen’s home.   The problem for Max is that the security protocols in place on Elysium to protect itself from incursions by earth’s “non-citizens” have reached an equal state of near-perfection, making capture and even death a near-certain outcome for any such unwelcome visitors.

How Max deals with the challenges that arise as he pursues his quest, and whether or not he succeeds, will not be disclosed here, so as not to spoil the pleasure for any readers who plan to see the film but have not yet done so.

( If you’re still undecided about whether or not to see it, perhaps this trailer can help you make up your mind:  http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/460650/Elysium/trailers )

The point to be made about Elysium is that its dismal dystopian vision of our world a mere 140 years from now is in fact manifesting itself in nascent forms right now.  By all reliable accounts, the wealthy few – those in the infamous 1% – are growing ever-wealthier, able to afford ever-more lavish lifestyles of privilege and entitlement, while the prospects for financial success and security continue to shrink for the rest – and shrink all the faster for those at or near the lowest income levels.  It barely taxes our imagination to entertain the possibility of this gap someday stretching across the heavens to an Elysium-like haven for the richest among us.

Turning now from the science fiction world of Elysium to the real world of today’s America, the book referenced in the opening sentence above is The Price of Inequality, by Joseph Stiglitz.  Over nearly four-hundred pages of impassioned analysis of our contemporary political and economic landscape, the author argues passionately and persuasively that while wealth inequality, if it persists, will inevitably lead to the kind of societal breakdown envisioned in Elysium, it is decidedly not inevitable that we pursue this disruptive path.

Rather than attempt to distill the essence of his wide-ranging analysis into a few paragraphs, let me instead quote at length from Stiglitz’s inspiring closing chapter, optimistically entitled “The Way Forward: Another World is Possible”:

While market forces play some role in the creation of our current level of inequality, market forces are ultimately shaped by politics.  We can reshape these market forces in ways that promote more equality.

Our democracy provides two routes by which reform might happen.  Those in the 99 percent could come to realize that what is in the interest of the 1 percent is not in their interests, that we could actually have a more dynamic and more efficient economy and a fairer society.  We live in a democracy – but it’s a democracy that has increasingly not reflected the interests of large fractions of the population.  The people sense this – it’s reflected in the low support they express for Congress and in the abysmally low voter turnout.

And that’s the second way that reform could happen:  the 1 percent could realize that what’s been happening is not only inconsistent with our values but not even in the 1 percent’s own interest.  Alexis de Tocqueville once described a chief element of the peculiar genius of American society, something he called “self-interest properly understood.” It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest – in other words, to the common welfare – is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being.  It’s a mark of American pragmatism.  Looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul; it’s good for business.

There are two visions for America a half century from now.  One is of a society more divided between the haves and the have-nots, a country in which the rich live in gated communities, send their children to expensive schools, and have access to first-rate medical care.  Meanwhile, the rest live in a world marked by insecurity, at best mediocre education, and in effect rationed health care.  At the bottom are millions of young people alienated and without hope.

The other vision is of a society where the gap between the haves and the have-nots has been narrowed, where there is a sense of shared destiny, a common commitment to opportunity and fairness, where we take seriously the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which emphasizes the importance not just of civil rights but of economic rights of ordinary citizens.  In this vision, we have an increasingly vibrant political system. 

This second vision is the only one that is consistent with our heritage and our values.

And, I would add, this second vision is the only one that is consistent with the principles implicit in the practice of mindfulness, which in its most basic definition means seeing things as they are, with as little self-interested bias as possible.

The contrasting signs of this burgeoning inequality of wealth are evident all around us – high-end hotels and restaurants doing booming business on the same urban streets populated by scores of the homeless and destitute; privileged corporate executives commanding ever larger salaries and bonuses while discouraged long-term unemployed workers exhaust their insurance benefits and abandon their job search; gated communities of luxury condominiums nestled out of sight and proximity from their surrounding cities and towns where the housing is decaying, the stores are closing, and the infrastructure is crumbling.

These, and many other signs large and small, are all out there in plain view.  We just have to allow ourselves to see them as they are.  And then, contribute in whatever way we can to bringing about a reversal of this worldwide trend of rising wealth inequality.

Else, if we fail, our future may be playing right now in our movie theaters and on our home entertainment systems.  If we fail, our looming world may turn out to be Elysium.

What We Could Build

One of the more absurd episodes in last year’s U.S. presidential contest came about after President Obama made the following remarks during a campaign appearance in Roanoke, Virginia, in July 2012:

…. look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

That infelicitous phrase “you didn’t build that” was an instant flash point, igniting a veritable forest fire of heated debate (or, perhaps more accurately, hot air!) as to Obama’s alleged “socialistic” views with regard to successful individuals.  By isolating “you didn’t build that” from its surrounding context, conservative commentators launched an emotionally charged campaign of condemnation.  The culmination of this onslaught of unreason manifested as the repeated, ritualistic chanting of “We built that!” from the floor of the Republican convention in the days and nights leading up to the nomination of Mitt Romney.

Lost in all this mindless chatter, of course, was the common-sense assertion – clearly stated in the full context of the offending phrase – that we are all significantly influenced, for better or for worse, by the cirumstances of our birth and upbringing.

Yes, Obama’s speechwriters could have done a better job.  The sentences that gave rise to all the commentary would have been less open to misinterpretation had they read “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build it in a vacuum.  Other people helped create the conditions in which you could build it.”

But, Obama’s”critics could have done a better job as well.  They simply had to take the trouble to read the full context of his remarks, and to comment accordingly.

This regrettable piece of political distortion came to mind as I recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, his penetrating exploration of the social and cultural factors underlying individual success.  In this excerpt from his opening chapter, Gladwell states the book’s thesis with his customary eloquence and clarity:

In examining the lives of the remarkable among  us – the skilled, the talented, and the driven – I will argue that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.

What is the question we always ask about the successful? We want to know what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what special talents they might have been born with.  And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how the individual reached the top.

I want to convince you that these kind of personal explanations don’t work.  People don’t rise from nothing.  We do owe something to parentage and patronage.  The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves.  But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up.  The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like.  It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who successds and who doesn’t.

Among the most compelling case studies Gladwell reports on in the chapters that follow are accounts of the surprising impacts that month of birth plays in the selection of Canadian high school hockey all-stars, that year of birth and geographic area of upbringing played in the career paths of technology entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, and that cultural conditioning plays in the core competencies of airline pilots.

In every case, the bottom-line learning is that these achievers didn’t build their successes in a vaccum.  Their parents, their teachers, their culture, and even such purely random circumstances such as the time and place of their birth – all played a part in the successful outcomes these individuals achieved.

Obama was attempting to assert no less – and unintentionally ignited a political conflagration.  And in fact, there was something of a critical backlash against Gladwell’s book as well.  A number of reviewers seized upon a few of the less compelling case studies, and exploited the modest weaknesses in those arguments to fault the book’s thesis in its entirety.

What is it about this simple assertion that provokes such resistance, bordering on hostility?

I suspect that those who are offended feel as if they are being personally attacked.  Perhaps they have constructed their sense of self-worth almost entirely on being perceived as strong individuals who need little if any help in achieving their success.  And then along comes an author like Gladwell or a national leader like Obama, pointing out that success is so much more complicated than the old Horatio Alger myth would have us believe.   What an affront to their self-image!  They didn’t “build it” all by themselves!  No wonder they get hostile!

What’s needed here, I think, is a more sophisticated understanding of the interconnectedness of everything.  None of us exists in isolation.  We are each and everyone of us deeply connected to countless others in a thick mesh of familial and societal groupings.   We continuously influence others and in turn are influenced by them.  From the most trivial of events occuring on the small stages of our individual lives, to the most titanic of events sweeping across the huge stage of history, absolutely everything that happens emerges from the complex web of human interactions that has been weaving itself together since the first humans walked the planet.  We each get to shape this web in some fashion or other by what we choose to do with ourselves while we are alive, and simultaneously what we choose to do with ourselves while we are alive is shaped by the specific time and place in which we happen to find ourselves in this very same web.

Buddhism has been pointing humanity towards this understanding of interconnectedness for three thousand years, but as President Obama discovered when he gave that speech a year ago, there’s a lot of resistance out there – most especially in today’s politically polarized America, where an extreme sense of personal liberty has taken root among a significant portion of the polulace.

But if it’s true in the personal sense that what we resist is what persists, then perhaps it’s also true in the collective sense.  The idea of interconnectedness that as a society we continue to resist is an idea that will persist until as a society we finally embrace it.

I’d like to think that here is a fitting mission for contempory Buddhism – to keep pushing us in this direction, to keep pointing out the undeniable truth of interconnectedness, until we cross some unknown tipping point where our irrational resistance crumbles, and we get down to the serious business of building a more compassionate society and a more sustainable world.

That would indeed be something to celebrate and chant about – “We built that!”

Remembering Richie Havens

What’s the use of singing this song?
Some of you are not even listening.

Nearly every announcement and obituary notice reporting the sad news of folksinger Richie Havens’ death last month began with a reference to his iconic status as the opening performer at the legendary 1968 Woodstock music festival. Most of them included either a photo or a video of him – face dripping with, and shirt drenched in, sweat – chanting the words “Freedom! Freedom!” at the top of his lungs, as he feverishly paced the stage strumming his guitar through his intensely improvised version of “Motherless Child”.

All of these tributes were pointing back to his singular, career-launching moment – a moment that occurred some 45 years ago. A few of them also referenced Richie’s most well-known album, “Mixed Bag” – his first recording, released in 1967, one year before Woodstock, and some 46 years ago.

The lyrics quoted at the top of this post come from one of the most enduring songs on that album, the anti-war ballad “Handsome Johnny”. Spanning centuries of human warfare, each verse of the song describes a new “handsome Johnny” – some anonymous young soldier enthusiastically marching off to his generation’s war, shouldering the latest version of military gadgetry, and almost certainly fated to returning home from the battlefield anything but young and handsome.

It is only in the song’s closing verse that Richie abandons the history lesson he’s been conducting, and adopts instead the resigned stance of a singer/songwriter painfully aware of the limited impact his impassioned words will have. The wars would continue, and the handsome Johnny’s would continue dutifully marching off to them – too many of us indeed “were not even listening” to what Richie was trying to tell us.

But that didn’t stop him. Richie kept on writing songs, recording albums, giving concerts around the world, and inspiring his listeners for the next 42 years, until health issues forced him to retire in 2009. The songs he gave us on his last two albums – “Grace of the Sun” from 2004 and “Nobody Left to Crown” from 2008 – are among his most moving and heartfelt compositions.

Here are selected lyrics from a few of my favorite songs from these two albums:

“Grace of the Sun”

Got no time to play
Giving time away
We don’t see the gift
We all share as one
Only by the grace of the sun

“Way Down Deep”

Somewhere in the darkness as I scramble to the light
Somewhere I am falling down
Somewhere in the twilight when I finally get my sight
Somehow I can see the common ground

“The Key”

Somewhere there is a place
Where the heart meets face to face
With the whole human race
Before the last shadows fall

“Nobody Left to Crown”

To those of you seeking perfection
Oh Lord, it’s not a long way to go
All you need is a bit of reflection

“Standing on the Water”

Why do we surround ourselves with houses and big cars
Trying to make out we got it made
When nothing really belongs to us
We’re only passing through
We’re part of a masquerade
When you’re standing on the water
Talking to the walls
Making so much matter
Out of no matter at all

“If I”

If I could change the ending
No one would ever lose
And I’d keep this road from bending
No one should have to choose
And we’d walk this line together
And share what we could share
And we’d all do this forever
And that should get us there

What a gift it was to “walk this line together” with this sensitive, compassionate artist – even if it couldn’t last forever, and even though there seems such a long way further to go down that line.

Some of us were not listening, Richie. You were right about that.

But a lot of us were listening, all along. And we still hear you.

Engaging with Evil: Reflections on the Boston Marathon Bombings

What is there to say in the aftermath of yesterday’s devastating attack on the innocent runners and spectators at the Boston Marathon?  I suppose the answer is, paradoxically, nothing and everything.

Nothing, in the sense that words ultimately fail in the face of such a catastrophic event – one that inflicted horrendous physical harm on a hundred or so random individuals who had the utterly bad fortune to be in a particular place at a particular time, and unimaginable emotional distress on all who know and love them.

Everthing, in the sense that words are all we have available to try to make some kind of sense from a tragedy of such magnitude.

And words there will be – many many words, spoken and written, some skillful, some not so skillful, on cable and network television, in newspapers and magazines, on twitter feeds, in the blogosphere.  Everyone trying to somehow express the inexpressible feelings rushing over us, and to somehow explain the inexplicable events happening around us.

Here is one particularly skillful example of written words being put to extraordinarily good use in this endeavor.  It’s an essay in today’s Huffington Post, written by the political columnist Richard Eskow, entitled “The 27th Mile”.  You can read it by following this link …. http://huff.to/15cQtK2.

I want to quote Eskow’s closing paragraphs.  The context, in case you chose not to read the article linked to above, is the enormous outpouring of offers to help by the residents of Boston and its surrounding neighborhoods in the immediate hours after the bombings took place.   Countless people offered to drive into the city, pick up stranded runners who were unable to get through the cordoned-off security area at the finish line to reclaim their personal belongings (street clothes, wallets, car keys, etc.), and provide them with food and a place to stay overnight.

Yesterday the bombs exploded at Mile 26. That was the work of one person, or several people, or many people, who were in the grip of an evil darkness.

But the killing ended there. The people of Boston walked the next mile, the 27th Mile. And after the smoke cleared they chose to walk it together, not alone. They looked into that handful of dust and saw hope, not fear.

When we remember April 15, 2013, let’s remember the 27th mile.

Remembering that 27th mile as we each go about our own daily routine today, tomorrow, and each day after that, just might be the most meningful way that we can engage with – and prevail over – the evil that was done in Boston yesterday.

Robert Thurman’s “Politics of Enlightenment”

I recently came across an extraordinary essay by renowned Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, in which he examines the potential contribution that Buddhism can make to the American political process.  It is such an inspiring explicitation of the principles that infuse this blog on Engaged Mindfulness that I have chosen to quote it in its entirety.  Here it is ….

THE POINT OF DISCUSSING a Buddhist platform is not to generate something altogether new and exotic, but to reinforce enlightenment-oriented tendencies and to mobilize active Buddhist participation in American politics.

It is a misunderstanding to think that enlightenment is some sort of final escape from life and that the doctrine of the unsatisfactory nature of samsara obviates any need for involvement with other beings or social responsibility. Because nirvana is selfless, there is no self that enjoys a state of being beyond the world. Selfish habits that dominate unenlightened living may be dissolved, but that leaves the aggregates of body and mind just as present in the world as they ever were. Buddha himself remained deeply engaged throughout his life after his enlightenment. Wisdom and compassion are ultimately inseparable, wisdom being the complete knowledge of ultimate selflessness and compassion being the selfless commitment to the happiness of others.

The Buddha was trained to be a prince in his early life, he was trained in the arts of management in times of peace and war, and was attuned to the responsibilities of a king for his subjects. He renounced being an unenlightened king. But once he attained his own enlightenment, he emerged in world history as a kingly leader with far more impact than any ordinary king. The Buddha did not teach escape from responsibility or society. He taught escape from ignorance and evil thoughts and actions. He founded not merely a religion or a therapy, he founded a quiet revolution, a total reorientation of the habits of individuals and societies that has continued to this day.

The main engine of Buddha’s revolution was the society-within-society he founded, the sangha or community, with its fourfold membership of nuns, monks, laywomen, and laymen. Within his alternative society, he was able to implement his enlightened principles of individualism, nonviolence, personal evolutionism, altruism, and pragmatism.

The Buddhist community was centered on the sacredness of the individual’s liberty, on nonviolence, on equal access to enlightenment, on simplicity and sharing of property, and on pragmatic, reasonable, consensual flexibility in all things. This community exercised a powerful and sustained influence on the larger societies within which it existed. And it spread throughout the world without any violent invasions. In America, due to our democratic ideals, Buddhism has one of its first opportunities to fully participate in society and to implement its principles for the benefit of everyone.

Thus there is a politics of enlightenment, a set of strategies based on enlightened principles that maximize beings’ progress toward enlightenment. From its principles emerge sets of policies and practices that are an indispensable part of our progress toward enlightenment. “Practice” is not merely some form of meditation, some recitation of mantra, some belief system, or set of rituals. Practice includes the committed engagement in the politics of enlightenment, social actions aimed at perfecting and beautifying the “Buddhaverse,” which must be integrated with the internal actions of meditational transmutation. The noble Eightfold Path includes authentic speech, action, and livelihood along with the five other branches of intellectual and meditational development. People should be persuaded that things are workable, and enlightened leadership can make a difference. Peoples’ optimism and determination must be mobilized by a clear and holistic assessment of the situation. Defeatism, apathy, cynicism, despair—these are invoked by the few who do better when the world is managed badly to prevent the many from demanding and implementing enlightened management. In this historical moment when American democratic ideals of freedom, civility, pluralism, altruism, and individualism make America the most comfortable home on earth for the individual pursuit of enlightenment, it is an essential form of Buddhist practice to participate in politics, to vote, to speak out, to encourage those who agree, to reason with those who disagree. It is wisdom. It is meditation. It is compassion. It is ethics.

Professor Thurman is purportedly working on a book in which he will expand upon these ideas at greater length.  I await its publication with a keen sense of anticipation, and look forward to exploring this vital topic further in future posts.

One Cast, Many Connections

“What unites us is far greater than what divides us.”

John F. Kennedy spoke the words above in a 1961 address to the Canadian Parliament, in the context of affirming the historically positive nature of the relationship between the United States of which he was the president and its northern neighbor of which he was a guest.

Bill Clinton frequently cited these words in his speeches during the 2012 presidential campaign, in the context of countering the increasingly histrionic negative nature of the discourse between the opposing sides in our national elections.

On a far more personal and local level during the past few weeks, I have come to appreciate the truth of these words in an entirely different context.

It began with an accident.  Out for my usual early-morning run on a clear, sunny morning in late January, I slipped on a patch of black ice left behind by a freezing rain the night before, and fell very fast and very hard.  I landed full-force on my left elbow, and shattered the radial head bone at the joint.

{Note to self, and other early-AM runners:  Do not be lulled into complacency by blue skies and warming temperatures in the morning.  Remember the weather conditions from the night before!}

After getting up and getting back home, I spent the better part of the next few days making trips to the emergency room, to the orthopedist, to the radiology clinic, and to the ambulatory surgery center.  And I’ve spent the entire part of the last four weeks going about my usual activities with my left arm in a cast.

Which is where the story of this post really begins.

Not a single day has gone by since I donned my cast that I have not had at least one conversation with someone – usually a random passerby in a store or on the street, someone I don’t know at all  – who not only wants to express sympathy for my injury, but also very much wants to tell me about a similar injury they or one of their loved ones has endured.

And although my biggest frustration with my injury was the way doing everything with only one good hand was slowing me down, causing me to “lose time” and fall behind schedule on my various projects, I never once minded the time these constant pauses to chat with people was taking.

Their stories were uniformly compelling, and after the first week or so, each time I set forth on some errand or outing, I found myself anticipating the next random encounter.  After the second week or so, every time I started feeling frustrated with the limitations imposed by my cast, I found myself remembering the most recent stories I had been told, and forgetting about my own trifling woes.  And now – three weeks after my surgery and a few days out of my cast – I’ve become aware of an unexpected sense of ease about my accident and its subsequent inconveniences, especially all that “lost time”.

I would love to attribute this newfound sense of acceptance to my Buddhist-inspired aspiration to be with life as it is rather than how I wish it would be – but I know much better than to try to get away with that!  No, this sense of peace that I’m feeling on the inside has come from all those random connections I made on the outside, walking around with that cast on my arm.

As I reflect on all the people I’ve spoken with this past month, it occurs to me how little we each knew about the other as we shared our intimate tales of injury and pain.  In most cases, I knew nothing at all about my conversational partner’s political preferences, religious convictions, or ethical values – nor did they know anything of mine.  None of those things – which usually separate us into opposing sides – mattered.  In the moment, even if only for that moment, we were connected in a truly authentic way.

How did that happen?  I suspect it was the result of what my cast evoked in us – a shared sense of how frail we all are, how prone to injury, how susceptible to pain.  Something we all know, something we all have in common.  Something that calls out to us for connection.

What unites us is far greater than what divides us.

A Mighty Purpose (continued)

“This is the true joy in life – that being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.  That being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.  I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.  I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.  For the harder I work the more I live.  I rejoice in life for its own sake.  Life is no brief candle to me.  It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

~ George Bernard Shaw

A few months ago, I wrote a post (https://engagedmindfulness.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/a-mighty-purpose/) inspired by the words above.  And since then, I’ve been reflecting on what personal steps I might take in order to live more in keeping with Shaw’s lofty ideal.   Here are the resolutions I’ve come up with so far ….

1. Work on being more open to – by which I mean being less irritated by – the unexpected things that arise in the course of each day.  Try seeing them from the Buddhist perspective of “being with what is” rather than from my default perspective of “I don’t have time for this”.

2. Become more conscientious about building and sustaining relationships outside the small circle of my immediate family and close friends.  In particular, actively seek out meaningful ways of contributing to my local community and to the world at large.

3. Sharpen the focus of the essays I write for this blog.  Look for links between engaging mindfully with the world and the Buddhist concept of  “wise action” as a way of easing suffering in the world.

For now, I will keep the first two of these resolutions outside the scope of this blog, except when something occurs in my pursuit of either one of them that seems relevant to the intention set in the third resolution – promoting wise action and easing suffering.

By way of getting started with the third resolution, I’ve gone back and read through my posts since the very first one in October 2011.  What I notice is that, while the topics vary from month to month,  the themes revolve almost exclusively around various aspects of becoming more self-aware.  A worthy enough concern – and yet not enough in and of itself.  This blog bears the title  “Engaged Mindfulness” – and yet it appears that I’ve been concentrating excessively on the mindfulness part, to the detriment of the engaged part.

From now on, I intend to restore the balance implicit in Engaged Mindfulness’ description phrase, “Reflections on balancing committed action in the world with mindful awareness of the self”.

Since I wrote the original “A Mighty Purpose” essay in September of 2012, the United States has concluded the most divisive and most expensive presidential election in its history, the northeastern region of the country was wracked and wrecked by the most devastating hurricane ever to strike this area, and a quiet community in the state of Connecticut was traumatized by the horrific mass shooting at its elementary school that left twenty kindergarten-age children and seven of their teachers dead.  So much suffering on the national stage.

Since that same time, not even four months ago, the world has been witnessing – often on a daily basis – the ever-escalating carnage in Syria, the dismal descent into chaos of the once-promising democracy movement in Egypt, the eruption of civil war in Mali, the continued sectarian violence in Iraq, the threatening missile launches in North Korea, the secretive nuclear activities in Iran, the economic turmoil in Greece, the toxic air pollution in China – not by any means a complete catalog of our global woes, but a bleak enough accounting nonetheless.  So much suffering on the international stage.

So much suffering in the world.

I do not propose – in fact, I would not presume – to offer solutions.  Instead, I propose to offer ways of looking at and engaging with these complex events from a mindful perspective that focuses on the interconnectedness of all people and on the interrelatedness of all situations.  Only from such a perspective can wise action arise and the easing of suffering take place.

My topics will continue to change from one post to the next, but the underlying theme I intend to bring to each new post will, I hope, consistently reflect the urgency implicit in Thich Nhat Hahn’s powerful declaration – “Mindfulness must be engaged.  Once there is seeing, there must be acting.  Otherwise, what is the use of seeing?”

I believe that this new intention will make writing these posts more compelling for me.  I hope that it will make reading them more compelling for you.  Otherwise, what is the use, for us both?