Because I keep forgetting...

I’ve written about this before, using some of these, taken from Sam Harris’s talk “The Logic of Practice” from the “The Waking Up Course.” I’m just going to slow it down and unpack what he says. Because it’s vital that I remember it. If it helps you, too, great. But I’m writing this to remind me. Because once in a while, I do read what I write.

Why meditate?

The basic logic is quite simple. The quality of your mind determines the quality of your life.

The quality of your mind doesn’t “influence the quality of your life.” It doesn’t “affect it.” It determines it. Really? That’s a pretty strong statement.

What if you’re living in horrible circumstances. Wouldn’t that determine the quality of your life?

No.

Some people are content in the midst of real deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world.

If you live in a concentration camp, or you’re dying a painful no one’s going to blame you for being miserable. But that doesn’t mean you have to be miserable. Some people manage not to be.

Likewise, if you live in safety and abundance, you’re likely to have a pleasant life. Yet some people are miserable. Some are so miserable that they kill themselves.

Consciousness is a prerequisite

But everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad situations because changing how you respond to the world is often as good as changing the world.

Really? Changing your response is as good?

No. Not always.

I assure you that you’re about to be crushed, then changing how you would respond to being crushed is not as good as avoiding being crushed.

But if someone says something that annoys you, then changing how you respond is just as good as changing what they say. Maybe even better.

To change or not to change

There’s nothing wrong with changing the world (for the better.)

There’s nothing virtuous about changing your mind so that you can be exploited without complaining.

But changing the world and changing your mind are not exclusive options.

If you choose to change the world, you can do it with a mind that’s full of anger and bitterness and resentment, or you can do the same things with a mind that’s got equanimity.

If you choose to accept unpleasant circumstances, you can do it with a mind that’s full of frustration, sadness, and impotence—or you can accept them with equanimity.

Avoiding suffering

Rather than trying to change the world in each moment, there is another move open to you. You can look more closely at what you’re doing with your own mind, and actually cease to respond to life in ways that produce needless suffering for yourself and those around you.

The insight gained through meditation is that all your suffering is needless. Pain may be unavoidable, but suffering, you learn, is optional.

When we’re lost in thought, there are certain things we tend not to notice about the nature of our mind. For instance, every thought or feeling you’ve ever had, good or bad, has arisen and then passed away. The anger you felt yesterday, or a year ago, isn’t here anymore. And if it arises in the next moment, based on your thinking about the past, it will once again pass away when you are no longer thinking about it.

So whatever is troubling you now will pass away.

This is a profoundly important truth about the mind. And it can be absolutely liberating to understand it deeply.

I’m good at this, right?

No.

I don’t understand it deeply.

I forget from day to day—as yesterday’s post and the one from the day before make clear.

I don’t expect this blog post to bring anyone to understand it deeply—including me.

But here’s the thing: I do understand it.

I need to keep reminding myself of the fact that everything in consciousness that I have experienced so far has arisen and that everything—except the present moment—has passed away.

Yesterday I was whining about the difficulty of—stuff being difficult. It had arisen, and I engaged with it and kept manufacturing the discontent. Until I stopped.

Today, with a clearer mind, I see that what was in my mind was yesterday was—just something in my mind. It had arisen, and if I had let it pass away, I’m confident that it would have.

Anger needs to be manufactured

Sam says this about anger:

…if you’re able to pay clear attention to the arising of an emotion like anger, rather than merely thinking about why you have every right to be angry, it actually becomes impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments at a time.

It’s the same for any mental state.

If you think you can stay angry for a day, or even an hour, without continually manufacturing this emotion, by thinking without knowing that you’re thinking, you are mistaken.

You mean it’s that easy?

No. It’s not. Once an emotion takes root, it’s hard to stop manufacturing it. That’s because you can’t control your attention.

Really? How does that work?

If an emotion arises—say anger, or fear, it’s for a reason. And the reason, like the emotion itself, is just something that’s appeared in consciousness.

Maybe someone said something that you found offensive. It appeared in consciousness because they said it and you heard it. Say you’re afraid because you heard a strange sound at night. What you heard has arisen in consciousness because you heard it.

Now that person is no longer saying that offensive thing to you. And you no longer hear that strange sound. But to stay angry or fearful, your mind has to remain stuck on something. Maybe it was what prompted the feeling in the first place. Perhaps it’s the feeling itself. If you could—without effort— transfer your attention elsewhere, perhaps to some pleasant interaction, or something neutral, like the sensations of breathing, then the fear or anger would go away.

My experience (which I keep forgetting.) It does.

It’s testable

As Sam says:

This is an objective claim about the mechanics of your own subjectivity. And I invite you to test it. And meditation is the tool you would use to test it.

The theory is: you learn to control your attention and your awareness; you learn to observe what’s going on in your mind, and things change.

The practice is: you practice.

This practice has been shown to produce long-lasting changes and attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception. And these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.

So here’s a reminder for me the next time I’m stuck in some undesirable mental state: it’s just a mental state. It arose, and if I don’t keep manufacturing it, it will pass away.

The quality of my mind determines the quality of my life

Got that, Mike?

Having a low-quality life-experience?

I know what to do.

Just remember: the most valuable quality of my mind is my knowledge that its quality determines the quality of my life.

Recover that, and all will go well.

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