When the telephone was invented, The New York World condemned it in an editorial. “Of what use is such an invention?” they asked. Why would someone want to speak to someone who isn’t there? Of course, history proved that people would find many uses for it, perhaps not what Bell or The World ever could have imagined. So when I learn about new technology, I kind of want to be on the right side of history. Perhaps what it takes is to make sure the question is a question instead of a dismissal. If The World had asked, “What uses will people find for a telephone?” they may have started to see the banal and wonderful things we do with a phone.
It’s with this in mind that I approached the practice of tweeting. Instead of dismissing it with the question, “Why would anyone want Twitter?” I decided to explore with honest curiosity… “Why do people use Twitter?” Instead of a dismissive “Who cares about my tweets?” I decided to ask, “If there is someone who cares about my tweets, who is that?”
I can’t say I’ve pinned down an answer. But I’ve had some fun trying. It seems that Twitter is a game of attention. As I spend my meditation practice on a quest to understand what attention is, what it does and how to use it, I think that mindfully exploring the question of Twitter has had deep implications.
The Diamond Sutra says, “Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world: a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.” A bubble or a cloud is not, in essence, a complete and separate thing. But I think it would be a misreading of the sutra to say that Buddha meant we should not pay attention to these phenomena as they come up.
People who use Twitter sometimes complain about other people’s tweets, particularly when there are a lot of them at once. This only is a problem if we think of the tweets as having weight, having an essence, being a thing. But like all phenomena in this world, they’re bubbles.
We can think of communications in two ways: an inbox or a stream. Twitter’s overwhelming if we think of it as an inbox, of a demanding pile of messages that are gathered into a backlog until we can catch up with them. But Twitter isn’t designed to be that, and it doesn’t work like that. It works like a stream; rather than trying to track down what passed in the stream yesterday, to pay attention you see what’s in the stream right now. The stream is useful not because every message gets attention from every reader, but because there are always messages and always readers.
I was about to say that new technology is moving toward more streams and fewer inboxes, but then I thought of television. My view of television has changed from a stream to an inbox. Rather than watching what’s on right now, when I go to watch I look for what’s in my lineup of things to watch–and that allows me to pay a different kind of attention to it. So maybe the answer is that we learn there are many more kinds of attention, and the more we know about them the more we know how to use them.
We were about three hours into the Buddha’s Enlightenment sitting–a retreat that starts at 8 PM and ends at 4 AM, commemorating Buddha’s awakening under the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya–when I experienced my ironic reversal.
Beginning meditators sometimes think they’ll stop feeling resistance after a few months, maybe a few years. But it really never goes completely away. In the middle of a retreat, doing sitting periods of about 30 minutes with periodic breaks to stretch, I find myself getting expectedly sore and uncomfortable. Observing my thoughts arise and letting them go, I still find that one recurring thought is, “How soon until that bell rings? How soon until I get a break? Come on, like, now!”
But then every once in a while I have a sitting where I get into the zone, and when the bell rings, my mind goes “NO! Not yet! I was in the zone! I could totally do ten more minutes!” That’s what happened around 11 PM on Friday.
It led me to an insight, and I’m worried it will sound too pithy here. I examined my own relationship with preferences, and noticed: I assume that my preferences have some influence on reality. I assume that if reality doesn’t bend to my preferences, something must be wrong. And the insight is that reality has never bent to my preferences, will never bend to my preferences, really can’t be bothered with my preferences. In reality, 30 minutes is 30 minutes, regardless of whether I’d prefer it to be longer or shorter.
Our preferences might be the most immediate mental force we have, and so it stands to reason that we assume they have some power. Some people even sell trashy self-help books that suggest if you stick really hard to your preferences, if you really picture reality becoming exactly the reality you’d prefer, then it’s all going to line up.
There are big problems with this if you stop and look at it. Problem #1 is that despite being immediate and demanding, our preferences are also unstable. At 8 PM, I decided that I’d prefer being at a Buddhist retreat to being at a movie theater or a bar or at home. By 11 PM, I was thinking maybe I’d prefer something else. This problem is compounded when we meddle with our own hindsight. If in June you decide you’d prefer to be married then by October think you’d prefer to be single, you might talk yourself into believing that you never really wanted to be married in the first place. So we’re bound to be unsatisfied if we expect reality to bend on cue for us, especially when we keep changing the cues.
Problem #2 is that we think that preferring alone is enough to do the job, when sometimes preferring isn’t even enough to break through our own junk. If I strongly want to be a professional singer/artist/athlete/whatever, but that doesn’t motivate me to practice… how can my preference bend reality when it can’t even bend my own habits? If I’d prefer for a publisher to love my book enough to sell it in every Barnes & Noble in the country, then I have to believe in my book to get it to every publisher who might consider it. The strength of my preferences makes me think that preferring is enough–that my wishes will come true if I wish them hard enough.
Problem #3 is that we’re actually–at this time and place in history–more likely to have our preferences humored than any time before. If you have air conditioning and heating, you have something that bends to your preferences in the way that most humans throughout history could only dream of. But does that give us the illusion that our own ideal reality is attainable–that if it’s not here today, it will surely be here tomorrow?
We have preferences, and they exist, and we acknowledge them. We just know, through meditation, that we’re searching for reality. We can’t let preferences get in the way of that.
It’s strange how often I hear variations of the question, “If attachment causes suffering, does that mean we’re not supposed to have goals?” I often tell people that there is no Buddhist commandment, “Thou shalt never have any attachments whatsoever.” That’s not why the Buddha taught about attachment’s role in suffering.
Maybe it would help to change the terms we use: rather than saying “end attachment,” say “relax attachment.” It’s your karma to be alive here and now, so maybe your role in this lifetime is not to become a forest monk with no attachments; maybe it’s to be a 21st-century person who is able to relax those attachments.
Of course we still have the same resistance to relaxing attachment. Many of us often don’t like to relax. We think that if we relax for just a moment, we’ll lose everything we worked for. But the truth is that we can’t get everything we desire, and getting desires fulfilled often just leads to more desires. You succeed at getting As in middle school, so you think you’re entitled to As in high school, and then As in a university. There’s no point where you can say, “I’ve succeeded,” and relax. So we live in continual panic, because we never relax our attachments.
We relax our attachments by playing them like a game. It’s fun to win, but it’s not the end of the world if I don’t. I’d like to have success, and I’ll take the logical steps that I predict will lead to success, but if I don’t succeed, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the world or wrong with me. And because so much of our success is compared with others–I want good grades so that I can get into a better school than you–when we relax, we can be happy for people who are more successful than we are. I didn’t get that job, but someone else did, and I’m happy, because there’s no way we could both get it.
And maybe it helps to think of the opposing attachment. If you want to lose weight, contemplate the idea of relaxing your attachment to high-calorie foods. If you want to learn well at school, contemplate relaxing your attachment to leisure activities that cut into your study time.
In the Dharma talk I heard this weekend when visiting the Jewel Heart Buddhist Learning Center with the Buddhists meetup, the teacher mentioned that we tend to use anger to avoid taking responsibility for our own role in conflicts. It was an interesting thought, and I hoped she would explore it more. How is anger avoiding responsibility?
When we talk about emotional transactions, we have a number of ways to do it. I remember when I took French classes in high school, the verb manquer puzzled me. It’s used to talk about missing someone, but the way to say “I miss her” is “Elle me manque.” “She” is the subject, “me” the object.
But then I realized that sometimes we do that in English too. Some concepts can go both ways–”I like sushi” and “Sushi pleases me” mean more or less the same thing. But more often, our words for negative emotions but the object as the subject. “That music annoys me.” “He pissed me off.” “You make me sick.” Even the way we can state those positively is a little bit passive: “I am upset with him” is the passive of “He upsets me.”
This way of thinking holds us back from acknowledging our own role in our interactions. Buddha taught that our worlds are made by our minds. Many Zen masters have advised us to meditate on that which causes resentment. I realized after a meditation a few weeks ago that I spend much of my mental energy trying to justify my reactions. When I am annoyed with someone, I dwell on those thoughts that run through my head explaining exactly why obviously my way of thinking about it is right and the other is wrong. When I’m annoyed with the weather, I find myself saying that the weather isn’t supposed to do what it’s doing right now, that I’m justified in feeling annoyed because the weather is wrong. If I rewrite the language to a more mindful way of thinking about it, I’d probably say something like, “I am resenting the weather.”
This doesn’t mean that we should stop reacting emotionally to things; we do and we will. But when we do, that’s an opportunity to learn about ourselves, not necessarily about anyone else. When I look at another person and experience disappointment or irritation or aversion, I examine my own role in that reaction. Meditate on the resentment in learning about myself, not necessarily fixing someone else.
And it doesn’t mean that we can’t discern, that we can’t choose pleasant situations over unpleasant ones. One thing we may learn about our emotional states is that they’re normal and healthy. If I smell a rotten egg and I experience aversion, I am resenting the rotten egg, and what does that say about me? It says that I have the normal human capacity to tell fresh food from decaying food. That’s not a bad thing to learn about myself.
Reposted from an email conversation with a Christian friend.
There’s a analogy for thinking about the goal of meditation: imagine that you have a pool of water, and you’re always throwing pebbles in it, or splashing in it, or stirring it, so that the surface is choppy and you can’t see your reflection. The water represents your mind, and the splashing and stirring and pebble-throwing represents all your worrying, wanting, planning, comparing, thinking. To get the pool clear, you need to let it sit for a while, then your reflection becomes clear. I like this analogy because it’s not like stilling the mind is some secret special way to stir it or an exotic type of pebble; and it’s not that your mind isn’t already made of pure, clear water. It’s just that it takes some stillness and silence to get it to settle down. (And, if you’re wondering, sleep doesn’t do the trick. The mind isn’t still in sleep–REM sleep is the time for the mind to try out all kinds of thoughts that hadn’t come up in waking life.)
Another way to think of meditation is as objectless prayer. Katagiri Roshi, one of the first Zen teachers to come to the US, said that zazen is prayer without the expectations that some people might put on the subject and object of prayer. It takes away the parts of prayer that people get hung up on. Now, I know that not all Christians pray for stuff, or pray for specific outcomes, but you can see how it’s a possibility that someone would get hung up on it. The concept of “answers to prayers” suggests a subject and an object, a separation from the divine, a speaker and a listener, I’ll give you this if you give me that. So in that sense, meditation is a kind of unconditional prayer. Praying to listen, not to talk.
The other thing that interests me in this definition is the idea of a consistent meditation practice. The changes in the way I deal with my thoughts didn’t happen overnight. Through setting time aside on a daily basis for silent meditation/prayer, I let the changes happen at their own pace. I know some religious people who pray or meditate only when they feel like they need it, only when they’re troubled–no atheists in foxholes, etc. And in terms of meditation, I say that it doesn’t work well as emergency medicine. If you only meditate when you’re dangerously overwhelmed with emotion, it’s not going to give you instant serenity. Like all good habits, it works on you over time.
