Lawler Literature: Where is My Mind?

“Our life is the creation of our mind.” p, 35 The Dhammapada, trans. Juan Mascaro.

I’m re-reading Juan Mascaro’s translation of The Dhammapada, the sayings of Buddha, and right now I’m struck by the intersection between Buddhist philosophy and current psychological theories. I even went to the Psychology Today website and did a quick search for the phrase ‘mindfulness’. Let me tell you, it’s a hot topic. And no wonder: tons of research confirms that simply attempting to be mentally present reduces stress, combats depression, and allows us to be more considerate of our actions all day long.

Old as it is, mindfulness is a very contemporary notion. It asks us to pay attention to ourselves and our surroundings, closely and objectively. The new federal nutritional guidelines are in part based on mindfulness strategies. Be fully aware of what you eat and how much you eat. That’s the message. No daily recommendations, no numbers, no calorie counts. It’s a certain salve for our current mindless, cud-chewing eating habits.

But, as this article attests, obsessive self-judgment is not Zen either. It’s more about reasonable detachment, not fixation: “Many of our thoughts, urges, desires, and impulses simply bubble up from the brain in an unconscious way and no amount of mental effort, good intention, or wishing for things to be different will change that fact. You cannot control them and, for that very reason, you should not shame yourself for their mere emergence,” wrote the author, Rebecca Gladding, M.D. “Accept that they are,” she advises, “but do not act on them.”

Zen teaches us that in order to understand a mountain to be a mountain in the Zen way, the experience is to be negated first—a mountain is not a mountain—and it is only when this negation is understood that the affirmation ‘a mountain is a mountain’ becomes Reality. P 18

Labels are the enemy, if you can believe it. As humans, we like to make distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong, me and you. Capital R Reality, according to Zen tradition, mostly precludes such useless divisions. That a mountain is a mountain is largely a trick of perception, a trick of language. Its characteristics are arbitrary. The same goes for our ever unruly “thoughts, urges, desires, and impulses.”

It sucks to feel depressed, to feel lonely, to feel angry. But those feelings, on their own, aren’t good or bad. They just are. They exist. No qualifiers. You acknowledge the emotion, and then you separate it from yourself. Like the mountain isn’t a mountain, the emotions need not be emotions. They’re perceptions in disguise, masking truth.

I like this experiment wherein Dr. Stanley H. Block refutes the idea that positive thinking can lead individuals to a healthier mental state. “From a neuroscience viewpoint,” he says, “a thought is just a secretion, a droplet of a chemical where two brain cells connect (synapse).” Forced positive thinking traps us in what Block calls “the thinking box.”

For the record, positive thinking is basically the opposite of mindful acceptance. That first quote up there is not an example of the Buddha advocating the methods of The Secret. Rather, it makes a more innovative claim: with every thought, moment by moment, we determine who we are, what we are, what the world is. We can’t soley decide whether good things happen to us. Better yet, we can take good and bad out of the equation. Good and bad are insignificant. Maybe it is the finite and the infinite that we should consider.