Making sense of things - Meditations on the practical benefits of Buddhism

So those of you who know me well know I’m very much in the atheist camp. Last year while travelling around the world this view was hardened by what I saw and many of the drunken conversations I got involved with. This would ostensibly seem to suggest somehow a negative experience in some way – when in truth the experience was the complete opposite. Every negative thing I witnessed was outweighed by many more positives. Whilst its fair to say that the majority of negatives I saw were, in my mind at least, the off shoots of overzealous religion, the most life affirming things found many forms: most striking was the humanity and generosity of spirit I encountered, along with a sense of wonder at what we can collectively create when we put our minds to it. Whether that be the immense cityscape of Hong Kong, the beautiful and simple architecture of historic rural China, the incredible tranquillity of Kyoto and so on.

So where am I going with this? Well yesterday I finished up reading a book I originally bought perhaps 8 or so years ago. It’s called Buddhism Pure and Simple. For some reason when I originally bought it I only got about half way through but recently I’ve been trying to finish off a number of half read books from my bookshelf (Again the reason as with many things at the moment is my departure to Oz in June – and not wanting to acquire more stuff before I depart). It was a strangely opportune time for me to dip back into Buddhism. The last time I’d read it to any great extent (other than when I purchased the book) was at Uni. The writing of the Beats and in particular Jack Kerouac led me to it. Loving Kerouac’s writing as I did (and continue to do) you can’t help but negotiate Buddhism if you truly are drawn into his work. At the time it resonated for me but not in a traditionally religious sense. It gave me some enhanced self awareness and a basic understanding of some of the precepts of Buddhism. Although I didn’t wade in any further than this cursory reading and understanding I think it had made enough of an impression on me to hold it warmly in my affections, respect it for its virtuousness, and mark it as something that I would come back and revisit at a future time.

My next encounter with Buddhism was via the Landmark Forum event I attended around 5 years ago. Whilst the Forum proclaimed itself as being non-religious a number of its self awareness teachings were clearly derived from Buddhism. It was here that my cursory knowledge of Buddhism came to life a little bit. The main thing I’ll take from that event (which is no inconsiderable gift in itself) is the whole concept of catching yourself in the state of thinking. This probably sounds like airy fairy new age nonsense to those not familiar with it, but it’s probably one of the most important things I’ve ever learnt. So what is it? It’s all about recognising that the thoughts that run through your head are just that, thoughts that run through your head. Too often we view them as world defining, as reality defining. When the truth is that reality is not these things, it exists outside regardless of what we think. Again I realise I’m struggling to sound concrete here so I’ll use an example. The easiest and best example I can think of is when your sitting in traffic. How many of us allow ourselves to get wound up and distracted, sometimes even to the point of rage, by just being stuck in traffic? And if we ask ourselves what good will such a negative reaction achieve? Any sane, logical individual will know the answer is none. Yet we continue to do it! I’m not going to try and psychoanalyse why we do this, as this is complex in itself. But what we can go into a little bit is the alternative – and the benefits of it. The alternative way to reacting to this is to try and catch your thoughts as they occur and view them, as far as you can, as an objective observer. Be mindful of the fact that you are feeling frustration and perhaps anger but the fact that you are observing them means you give yourself the option of how you wish to respond to this. And if you are given the choice of working yourself up into a state for no possible benefit or just observing and deciding to let those feelings go, then surely the latter is the better option?

This is a simple practical benefit of one aspect of Buddhism that I have chosen to adopt as often as I can. I’m far from being the finished article but I do practice this quite often. Emotions and knee jerk reactions still get the better of me sometimes but at least once a day I catch myself in the process of thinking and rather than just reacting I now chose how I wish to respond to the situation. What this allows me to do is make the right decision as I objectively access it. And strangely making the right decision does, in some weird way I can’t quite explain, make you feel good. Even if it doesn’t make you feel good its better than crashing and banging around completely unaware of the fact that you’re just knee jerk reacting to everything and anything that happens around you. You are not choosing who you want to be, or what you want to do, you are just reacting what happens around you. In a single day if you want to get a view of the benefits of this self awareness just walk down the street. When you come across any small negative thing that might cross your path, be that someone dropping litter, a mother scolding her child, teenagers verbally abusing each other etc. ask yourself are they aware of what they are doing? Are they making a conscious decision to do that? Would they benefit from just being able to step back from reacting to everything and instead objectively appraising their situation and choosing what they’d like to do next. I’m sure 99% people would agree the objective option is preferable, and 99% of people would be happier if they adopted this “philosophy”, useful tip, or whatever you’d like to call it? Yet strangely there was no mention of this stuff at school?!!!!!

So as I said this was a lesson of Buddhism I learnt some time ago, so not really what’s prompted me to write here. What prompted me to get blogging was finishing the Buddhism book that I’d started several years ago. The book moves on from talking about self awareness to expand upon the implications of this idea to tackle two of lifes biggest and most scary concepts: life and death!

Certainly in the past I’ve held the view that fear of death is probably one of the main reasons people continue to cling to religion in the 21st century. When we consider the fact that we are here on this earth for a finite amount of years and then after that we are no more, our reaction is quite often understandably fearful. The thought that everything we’ve ever known, everything we’ve ever thought, our whole construct of the world around us will cease to be once our heart beats its final beat – scares people so much they often choose to ignore it. Or look for solace in fanciful stories that offer the promise of salvation in return for the adoption of certain rules and behaviours.

Buddhism’s teaching in this area provide a different view of the problem that I find strangely comforting, and I guess its sharing that that prompts me to write here. Before I get into explaining my understanding of it I shall make two big disclaimers, firstly I am summing up my understanding of this Buddhist concept on the basis of this one book I have read (so far from an authoritative view), and secondly this seems to conflict with some other tenets of Buddhism I’m aware of that seem to believe is some concept of reincarnation. So as I’ve said before Buddhism views this “problem” differently. The whole self awareness idea is actually founded in the fact that reality is something that happens outside us. Our mind in order to try and understand things races away trying to build understandings of things by constructing concepts and thoughts that allow us to reduce and simplify reality into categorisations. Its important to understand there is nothing inherently wrong with making these categorisations in and of themselves, however we need to be aware that they are not reality. As previously stated they are constructs of reality that we use for practical means and advancement. Where problems occur is when we forget that reality is something quite different from this view we impose on the world. And Buddhists believe it is this misperception of reality that causes suffering. But how does that help us with our life and death question you may ask? Well if we expand upon that idea, almost everything we know, think and talk about relates to constructs of the world. More often than not these constructs are a) very rigid and b) binary. Something is either hot or cold, right or wrong, good or bad. Whilst these concepts have their uses (its useful to understand that something hot will burn you etc.) it’s important to understand they are concepts we overlay on reality, and not reality itself. But these concepts are so basic and familiar to us all what could possibly be wrong with using them? What would we gain from separating them from our perception of reality? Well this is big discussion so I’m not going to give an all encompassing answer here. What I will do however is give a couple of points that warrant food for thought and suggest there may be benefits in taking trying to detach our view of reality from these concepts. So first what’s wrong with these concepts? Well, by their very nature they are reductionist. Conceptually they tend to boil things down to binary positions. Something is either good or bad. As humans we don’t deal with ambiguity that well. We look to apply certainty where there is none and as a result our model of the world, or our perception of the world doesn’t quite fit with the reality we see before us. This leads to problems or in the Buddhist vernacular “suffering”. How? Well politics is a great example. A politician is either left wing or right wing. It’s a reductionist view that makes politics a lot easier to understand (politicians by and large take positions that are pre-dictated by the association of what constitutes left wing or right wing thinking, and where they position themselves) but fails to take a sensible view of the problem. Surely the correct way to judge policy is to review it on the basis of the evidence available and make the best possible decision. Not on some moral leap that you may have taken 20 years ago to herald a set of pre defined fixed values – each of which is unlikely to be the perfect response to each challenge that arises. Likewise the same problem exists with concepts of good and bad. Depending which country you are born in your view of whether a terrorist is good or bad may change (if you think he’s good he’s more likely to wear the moniker freedom fighter). The key point here is that when we use these terms we think in absolutes yet what they represent is not definitive or fixed. Therefore surely it makes sense to be mindful of the gap between they constructs and reality itself? Ask yourself, if we could do this and get everyone to be aware of the gap between perception and reality, to view things more objectively, to be less certain and fanatical about what is supposedly incontestably true – wouldn’t we have removed the motivation for every major conflict of modern times?

So that leads us on to the big one! Life and Death! What does Buddhism have to say about life and death that may help us? Well as you may be starting to realise Buddhism rejects the question itself for it rejects the concepts of both life and death as we view/construct them. This sounds super whacky I know but this isn’t any great claim for eternal life. Strangely Buddhism bases itself in what it can prove. What it says is that reality exists. It has existed in the past and it will continue to do in the future. The problem and the suffering that people fear around the subject of death is largely due to the construct we have of a “self” and the sense that that self had a beginning and will have an end. If we recognise that what we refer to as a self is a construct then all we can prove is that reality exists. We are part of it. It is part of us. Any distinction between what we are and what exists around us is itself a construct. Therefore if we take the view that things have always existed and will continue to do so then the trauma associated with death is reduced. But this might warrant some more explanation.

If we ask the philosophical question what is a self how should we answer? What do we refer to when we use “I”? It’s an interesting question! And if your initial thoughts are anything like mine you’re thinking it’s an easy one to answer. However the more you think about it the more difficult and complex it gets! For the “I” I refer to now is different to the "I" I referred to 10 years ago who is in turn different from the I of 20 years ago and so on. This is incontestable. But whilst there is difference there is also, obviously similarity. But if we try to definite what that similarity is its different. If we say its our physical body then with the benefit of modern science we know too that that is not clear cut. I seem to remember reading somewhere recently that the oldest cells in our body at any time are something like 14 months old! So in essence we are continually regenerating ourselves. Clearly there is some continuity but its hard to definite as is the difference. The point is the “I” we use to refer to ourselves is fixed and in reality we are not. We, like the world around us, are constantly changing in ways that we still don’t really understand.

So I guess the take away from all this long rant is that if we remove ourselves a little from the obsession with I, and view it for what it is (a useful construct), then we are free to view ourselves in a different light. One that is as much a part of everything as it is separate from it. And viewed in the light the concept of this physical collection of molecules. emotions, thoughts, and mind bending complexity etc. taking its last step really isn’t half as scary as that of the self obsessed place most people find themselves in at this moment in the 21st Century.