A
AntiTheist
Guest
Part 1 of 2
As you can tell from my screen name, my posts on this site are generally anti-religious, but today I want to post about a spiritual practice – and I’ll call it a “spiritual practice” for lack of a better term – that has proven very useful to me. It’s the Zen practice of meditation, what is sometimes called “Zazen” in that tradition. It is, as you will see, a practice that any person, of any religion (or no religion), can benefit from.
First, a little theory behind the practice. Most people – myself included – spend the vast majority of their time in their heads. Now, when I say that, I don’t just mean that a lot of people tend to be idealistic and have their heads in the clouds and come up with impractical ideas. I mean that we spend most of our time engaging with our thoughts about reality rather than reality itself. In a very literal way, we spend most of our time in our heads.
For example, have you ever driven somewhere while you were thinking about a problem you have, and when you arrived at the destination, you realized that you can hardly remember any details about the ride? Or have you ever had a family member make a decorating change to a room that you frequent, and the change escaped your notice for an embarassingly long time?
It’s a well-known fact that our senses take in more information than our brains can process. What our minds do is to form a mental map of the environment, and it’s this map that we’re usually caught up in evaluating, rather than the world that’s in front of our noses. As a result, we’re liable to miss details in the real world, and, in our rush to filter the world through our mental map, we’re very likely to misperceive.
There are, incidentally, very good evolutionary reasons that our brains developed this way. Having brains that can quickly size up an area and filter out all of the extraneous details is, obviously, very conducive to survival. It also aids survival to have a brain that can use its mental map to do basic tasks – like navigate a path – on “autopilot” so that the rest of the bra(name removed by moderator)ower can be used to reflect on problems not currently present in the environment. It’s those same tendencies, passed down to us, that today let us direct a lot of our attention to our mental patterns instead of reality.
So here we are in the modern world with these brains that are always caught up in spinning stories about reality and constructing relatively accurate but still somewhat faulty mental models. We spend most of our lives daydreaming. We go through our day thinking about pleasant memories of the past, worrying about stuff that just happened to us, hoping that we’re going to get that raise, dreaming of a peaceful, relaxing end to the day, wondering whether so-and-so got our letter, assuming that so-and-so doesn’t like us, criticizing the way so-and-so dresses, thinking that so-and-so is annoying, thinking that the guy who just cut us off is the worst person ever who did something horrible and needs to be taught a lesson and and and (don’t laugh – there are many cases on record of altercations and even deaths that have resulted due to “road rage,” which is a fancy name for the phenomenon of macho dummies mistaking this particularly aggressive mental pattern for reality)…etc.
Whew! It’s exhausting how much mental work we do during the day instead of looking the present moment squarely in the face. And before you know it, the day is over…and we’ve missed a lot of it.
Now, there’s nothing “bad” about any of this (in fact, as I indicated above, it’s the way that nature has made our brains to work), but the drawback is that we end up living in the imaginary worlds we construct. It might be a perfectly beautiful day, but your worry about something that’s going to happen at the end of the week might ruin it for you. There might be song birds building a nest in your backyard, but your wondering about whether so-and-so likes you is going to keep you anxious and prevent you from noticing and enjoying it. There’s a whole world of interesting activity going on around you all the time, but if you’re preoccupied with the world that your mind has constructed, you’re going to dream your entire life away.
Now, obviously, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t worry about things or get angry about things or plan for things or whatever – but there’s a big difference between experiencing an emotion in the moment and spinning a story about it in your head for the next twenty minutes (or more!).
Worse still, the mental worlds we construct can end up vastly different from the real world. Back in the wild, our ancient ancestors developed brains that jumped to conclusions – they heard a twig snap and they perceived DANGER (whether or not there really was danger)…that’s what made them run away and live to pass on those conclusion-jumping tendencies (the ones who didn’t run away would tend to get eaten and not pass on those genes). Nowadays, we see an innocent gesture from someone or hear an innocent remark from someone, and we jump to assumptions as well: “He doesn’t like me!” or “He’s mad at me!” or “I knew I shouldn’t have done X, Y, or Z! Now I’ll never get him to sponser my membership to the National Association of Hat-Wearers,” or whatever.
Pretty soon, we’ll start worrying about what to do about this guy being mad at us, and then we’ll start imagining what he must think of us, and…before you know it, we’re having a daydream about something totally unconnected to reality – we’re not just spending our time worrying pointlessly about something, we’re worrying pointlessly over one of our own fantasies!
As you can tell from my screen name, my posts on this site are generally anti-religious, but today I want to post about a spiritual practice – and I’ll call it a “spiritual practice” for lack of a better term – that has proven very useful to me. It’s the Zen practice of meditation, what is sometimes called “Zazen” in that tradition. It is, as you will see, a practice that any person, of any religion (or no religion), can benefit from.
First, a little theory behind the practice. Most people – myself included – spend the vast majority of their time in their heads. Now, when I say that, I don’t just mean that a lot of people tend to be idealistic and have their heads in the clouds and come up with impractical ideas. I mean that we spend most of our time engaging with our thoughts about reality rather than reality itself. In a very literal way, we spend most of our time in our heads.
For example, have you ever driven somewhere while you were thinking about a problem you have, and when you arrived at the destination, you realized that you can hardly remember any details about the ride? Or have you ever had a family member make a decorating change to a room that you frequent, and the change escaped your notice for an embarassingly long time?
It’s a well-known fact that our senses take in more information than our brains can process. What our minds do is to form a mental map of the environment, and it’s this map that we’re usually caught up in evaluating, rather than the world that’s in front of our noses. As a result, we’re liable to miss details in the real world, and, in our rush to filter the world through our mental map, we’re very likely to misperceive.
There are, incidentally, very good evolutionary reasons that our brains developed this way. Having brains that can quickly size up an area and filter out all of the extraneous details is, obviously, very conducive to survival. It also aids survival to have a brain that can use its mental map to do basic tasks – like navigate a path – on “autopilot” so that the rest of the bra(name removed by moderator)ower can be used to reflect on problems not currently present in the environment. It’s those same tendencies, passed down to us, that today let us direct a lot of our attention to our mental patterns instead of reality.
So here we are in the modern world with these brains that are always caught up in spinning stories about reality and constructing relatively accurate but still somewhat faulty mental models. We spend most of our lives daydreaming. We go through our day thinking about pleasant memories of the past, worrying about stuff that just happened to us, hoping that we’re going to get that raise, dreaming of a peaceful, relaxing end to the day, wondering whether so-and-so got our letter, assuming that so-and-so doesn’t like us, criticizing the way so-and-so dresses, thinking that so-and-so is annoying, thinking that the guy who just cut us off is the worst person ever who did something horrible and needs to be taught a lesson and and and (don’t laugh – there are many cases on record of altercations and even deaths that have resulted due to “road rage,” which is a fancy name for the phenomenon of macho dummies mistaking this particularly aggressive mental pattern for reality)…etc.
Whew! It’s exhausting how much mental work we do during the day instead of looking the present moment squarely in the face. And before you know it, the day is over…and we’ve missed a lot of it.
Now, there’s nothing “bad” about any of this (in fact, as I indicated above, it’s the way that nature has made our brains to work), but the drawback is that we end up living in the imaginary worlds we construct. It might be a perfectly beautiful day, but your worry about something that’s going to happen at the end of the week might ruin it for you. There might be song birds building a nest in your backyard, but your wondering about whether so-and-so likes you is going to keep you anxious and prevent you from noticing and enjoying it. There’s a whole world of interesting activity going on around you all the time, but if you’re preoccupied with the world that your mind has constructed, you’re going to dream your entire life away.
Now, obviously, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t worry about things or get angry about things or plan for things or whatever – but there’s a big difference between experiencing an emotion in the moment and spinning a story about it in your head for the next twenty minutes (or more!).
Worse still, the mental worlds we construct can end up vastly different from the real world. Back in the wild, our ancient ancestors developed brains that jumped to conclusions – they heard a twig snap and they perceived DANGER (whether or not there really was danger)…that’s what made them run away and live to pass on those conclusion-jumping tendencies (the ones who didn’t run away would tend to get eaten and not pass on those genes). Nowadays, we see an innocent gesture from someone or hear an innocent remark from someone, and we jump to assumptions as well: “He doesn’t like me!” or “He’s mad at me!” or “I knew I shouldn’t have done X, Y, or Z! Now I’ll never get him to sponser my membership to the National Association of Hat-Wearers,” or whatever.
Pretty soon, we’ll start worrying about what to do about this guy being mad at us, and then we’ll start imagining what he must think of us, and…before you know it, we’re having a daydream about something totally unconnected to reality – we’re not just spending our time worrying pointlessly about something, we’re worrying pointlessly over one of our own fantasies!
of mu. So I might more correctly have stated “… happening to “you” as another body” as we have “nothing” in common. Knowing that, you still drink beer, change the kid’s diapers, and smooch the wife. And maybe work at a soup kitchen for nothing.