Ornoth

Since ancient times, mankind has been preoccupied by a quest for “freedom”. Even in today’s somewhat enlightened society, safeguarding our “freedom” is an almost daily topic of conversation.

But I wonder how many of us have ever made the effort to formulate in words exactly what that term means to us. And if you don’t know what freedom means, how can you possibly successfully attain it?

Freedom!

For me, freedom has three main components: choice, independence, and ethics.

First is the freedom to choose between alternatives. Where a man has no choice to make, there is no freedom.

And to be truly free, that choice must be largely independent of external influence or coercion. A man who is coerced or misinformed is not able to freely choose.

And finally, “freedom” has no meaning unless a person can make decisions based upon the values and beliefs that he holds as the product of his upbringing, education, life experiences, emotional makeup, and philosophy.

As a bonus aside, I’ll assert here that a person’s values are most often a uniquely individual balance between benefit to oneself and benefit to others, where the latter category might be further subdivided into one’s “in-group/family” and “outsiders/others”, however broadly or narrowly one chooses to make that distinction.

So that’s my operative definition of personal freedom; now let’s consider whether we do a good job attaining it…

We humans like to think of ourselves as complex, multifaceted, and diverse, as the pinnacle of evolution, and imbued unique capacities of intellect, free will, discretion, morality, and freedom of choice.

How ironic then that, across all cultures and times, the overwhelming majority of human behavior can be reduced to two very simple principles:

• Get more of the sensations that we perceive as pleasurable, and
• Get rid of the sensations that we perceive as unpleasant.

This two-line algorithm is not only sufficient to describe almost all human behavior, but that of nearly all animal life, down the simplest amoebae and paramecia. If it’s pleasant, move toward it; if it’s unpleasant, run away from it. It’s poignantly emblematic that the Declaration of Independence, one of mankind’s most cherished documents, proclaims “the pursuit of happiness” as a vital and basic “unalienable right” of all men.

What does it say about our vaunted sense of freedom and individuality if 99% of all human thought, feelings, and behavior can be boiled down to a ludicrously simple two-line program, the exact same one used by the most tiny, primitive unicellular organisms? Where is freedom to be found in slavishly obeying that biological imperative?

Here is where the Buddhist in the audience has something to contribute.

Without judging anyone’s individual spiritual practices, I would assert that Buddhism is not fundamentally about stress relief, quiescing our thinking, blissing out, self-improvement, earning merit for future lives, extraordinary experiences, psychic abilities, or deconstructing the self. Those things may or may not happen along the way, but I think that the core goal of the Buddhist path is breaking free of our instinctual programming by first understanding that we habitually live under a false illusion of freedom, then gradually learning how to find genuine freedom by ensuring that our thoughts, speech, and actions are driven by conscious, values-driven choices, rather than never-questioned blind reactivity and maladaptive habit patterns.

Realizing that pleasure and discomfort are the central drivers of our biological programming, the principal line of inquiry for Buddhists has been cultivating a more skillful and beneficial relationship to these influences. A key tenet is the principle of dependent arising, which describes the chain of cause and effect that explains how our relationship to desire creates our experience of dissatisfaction. My distillation of it goes:

• Because we are alive, we have senses.
• Because we have senses, we experience contact with sensory objects.
• Because we experience contact with sensory objects, we experience sensations. These sensations are immediately perceived as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral at a pre-verbal, instinctual level. Let’s call that the sensations’ “feeling tone”.
• Because our perceptions produce these low-level feeling tones, we instinctually relate to the pleasant ones with desire, the unpleasant ones with aversion, and are mostly disinterested in the neutral ones.
• When our desires and aversions arise, we react with craving and need, becoming entangled and increasingly attached to having things be a certain way in order for us to be happy.
• Because of our attachment to things being a particular way, in a world where we control very little and where change is inevitable, we suffer when our needs and desires are not met, and even when our desires are fulfilled, we become anxious knowing that it’s only temporarily.

This is the sequence of events that leads to our experience of dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, suffering, and unhappiness.

Of course, if dependent arising were an immutable progression, it wouldn’t be of any practical value in our quest for freedom. But there’s one key step where — with sufficient mindfulness, wise intentions, and skill built up through patient practice – we can pry open a tiny window in this sequence of events and grasp our one opportunity to consciously choose a different response.

And that window of opportunity presents itself in how we relate to our sensations. It’s telling that, looking back on what I’ve written above, aside from “pleasure”, the other word that appears in both my two-statement definition of human behavior and the Buddhist principle of dependent arising is “sensations”.

A Buddhist would say that the only place where we have the opportunity to influence our unrealistic expectations is found in how we relate to our sensations. If we can see our perceptions clearly and in real-time, as well as the pleasant/unpleasant/neutral feeling tones that they evoke, we can wake up from our unexamined habit of letting those feeling tones blossom into the reactive craving and aversion that drives most of our subsequent thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. In each moment, if we can bring mindfulness to our sensations and our reactions to them, we can consciously choose to respond in a way that is less compulsive, less harmful to ourselves and others, and better informed by our values.

When it doesn’t harm ourselves or others, pleasure is a vital part of living a fulfilling life. However, our dysfunctional habit of blindly following pleasure and running away from discomfort needs to be balanced by wise intentions like purpose, mission, and ethical values that are more complex but also more advanced in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In this sense, the traditional Buddhist monastic way of life may go a bit too far in its inclination toward banishing or vilifying pleasure, rather than seeking a middle way that allows one to wisely examine, engage, practice with, and potentially master one’s relationship to pleasure and aversion.

Note that this isn’t the same as saying that “life is just suffering” or that one has to avoid pleasure and resign oneself to pain. What I’m saying is that we can learn how to relate to our desires and aversions more skillfully, rather than being mindlessly led around by them. And that is the only path to true freedom and living a fulfilling life of integrity, wisdom, and joy, and a life that is in alignment with our innermost and highest values.

Rhonda, one of my meditation teachers back in Pittsburgh, used to liken it to commuting on a familiar route. Taking the main highway might require the least mental effort, but it might not be the best, fastest, safest, or most pleasant route. The only way to know is to cultivate the ability to choose something different: something other than what comes to mind automatically.

Then she would describe her commute home on Ohio River Boulevard. She could stay on the highway, but the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation had thoughtfully placed a big traffic sign indicating (the town of) “Freedom” with an arrow indicating the off-ramp (that’s it, above). True freedom is exactly that kind of off-ramp, giving us an opportunity to get off the limited access highway of compulsive reactivity and mindless habit.

If you want to be truly free – not satisfied with the mere illusion of freedom and the suffering that it entails — you need to be able to see beyond desire and aversion, beyond reactivity and habit. Freedom means being fully awake in every single moment, willing and able to make real, meaningful choices that are informed by one’s ethical values.

The key to success is developing the skill to be awake enough in each moment to avail ourselves of that little window in the chain of dependent arising, where our perceptions of pleasure and discomfort, if unexamined, can blossom into untempered desire and aversion. If you will excuse me hyper-extending an apocryphal truth: in terms of manifesting wisdom and living an ethical life, the price of freedom is eternal mindfulness.

Or so it seems to me.

One the many lessons of meditation practice is impulse control. I don’t like that itch or that knee pain, but I’m trying to stay still right now. Can I relinquish the need to scratch or to adjust my position? What happens if I try?

In meditation, the underlying motives behind such movements—even these trivial ones—are brought into conscious awareness and examined.

And for me, these examinations have led me toward an interesting idea: that the root cause of almost all our movement is dissatisfaction with life as it is, and desire for things to be otherwise.

Humans—perhaps even all living organisms—are programmed to seek out pleasure and avoid the unpleasant.

From infancy, every movement we make is either to move toward and grab something we want, or to move away from or throw away something we don’t want. All because we have been programmed to believe that we’ll have the best life experience if we get what we want and avoid what we don’t.

And to a large degree, that works pretty well for us. We gravitate toward the people, the foods, and the music we like, and do our best to avoid those we dislike. And whether we’re infants or adolescents or adults, we usually do our damnedest to get what we want, or avoid enduring what we don’t want.

This drive is so basic and unexamined that the vast majority of what we do in life is in the service of this particular concept of “making things better”. We go through life wedded to the idea that perhaps someday we will reach some magical place where we are “happy”, needing nothing more to be fulfilled.

Few people actually think about what true happiness would look like. If we were truly happy, all that infantile want-based grabbing and throwing away behavior would be unnecessary. What would it be like to be truly happy? Wouldn’t all that motion which is impelled by desire and aversion simply cease?

And that’s what I’d like to talk about now: the idea that every volitional movement we make is an expression (or a manifestation) of our dissatisfaction with the way things are.

That in itself is an interesting insight that few people ever investigate. But if one were to take that idea seriously and allow it to actually inform our decisions, it would result in a life that is structured very differently than most of us experience and pursue in modern America.

I suppose it’s becoming a familiar trope that we cannot find happiness in the never-ending quest to change our world to better suit us, and that peace can only come through internal growth, so that our happiness isn’t dependent on forcing external circumstances to be “just right”.

But what that might look like is not so obvious at first.

So that’s one hypothesis: that if we were truly happy and at peace with life as it is, all that extraneous movement would simply stop. But that’s a very linear, American way of looking at it. What if we turned the underlying cause and effect relationship on its head?

One of the more useful techniques in modern psychology is cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is often summarized as “fake it till you make it”. Patients are asked to model attributes and practice behaviors they wish to manifest—such as confidence, strength, or independence—even if they don’t necessarily feel that way internally. The idea is that maintaining the appearance of a desired effect can be part of the cause that eventually makes the effect feel “real”.

If we approached the question of happiness and movement in the same manner, we flip the idea that “happiness causes motionlessness” idea on its head, and come up with a new hypothesis: “motionlessness creates happiness”.

Preposterous, right? Sure, the idea that sitting still might make us happier sounds ludicrous to most of us at first, but it’s actually the basis of many meditation practices. The benefits of silence and physical and mental stillness underlie the Buddhist samatha practice of calming the mind, as well as most yogic and Western derivatives.

Just ask the average Joe off the street to describe what meditation is and he’ll say ”sitting still and being quiet“. Ask him what it’s supposed to accomplish, and he’ll use words like: relaxation, stillness, calmness, tranquility, and peacefulness. The idea that stillness can somehow contribute to happiness is not as alien as our instincts tell us. In fact, it’s been around for centuries.

Practicing and strengthening our ability to be motionless can lead us toward a deeper understanding that all our grabbing what we want and throwing away what we don’t cannot make us happy. And that perhaps our best route to happiness is to practice quelling the impulses that underlie all that grabbing and throwing: learning how to relate mindfully to our desires and aversions, rather than be mindlessly ruled by them.

The hard-bitten Americans in the audience will have an instinctive reaction to this. What, do we just stop moving, then? That won’t make me any happier! Do you expect us to just give up all hope of making this a better world for ourselves and our children?

No, progress inevitably march on. But it’s vital to see that the things American culture has told us lead to happiness simply have not and will never work. We don’t have to give up on progress and development, but we do have to accept that despite how much the conditions of our lives have improved, we aren’t significantly happier people, nor will our children be.

There’s a very real limit to what scientific progress has done (or can do) for us and our species in our quest for happiness. It’s about time we tried something else! Your happiness is what’s at stake.

I challenge you to put serious effort into exploring these kinds of alternatives, rather than blindly believing the illusion that getting what we want will someday make us “happy”. If more people did so, not only would we be significantly happier with our lives, but it would constitute meaningful progress, too: arguably the greatest advancement in human social and ethical development in two thousand years!

I always feel some degree of trepidation relating my philosophical revelations. Either they sound like trite, self-evident aphorisms, or they take so much abstract language to relate that they come across completely flat on paper.

Last night I had another interesting revelation. Like the others, it’s going to take some background.

Many Buddhist sects express some form of belief in reincarnation. Throughout his multiple lives, a man must attempt to perform meritorious acts in order to accumulate positive karma and promote one’s future wisdom.

In addition, nearly all schools of Buddhism promote a belief in the unity of all life, some dialect of the concept that we are all truly one in essence.

The point of these tenets is to help adherents overcome the problem of ego. Buddhism stresses compassion above all other values, and modeling compassion requires a certain suppression of the ego’s belief that it is more important than anyone else. It is difficult to express true loving compassion while we’re busy defending our ego’s self-conception of us as somehow special, better, and more important than everyone else.

However, I’ve always had an innate aversion to both of these concepts. I couldn’t explain why, other than indicating a stubborn belief that we are nothing more than bio-mechanical organisms that live briefly and die, and our consciousness, in whatever high esteem we hold it, dies with the meat that houses it. And although we have self-evident dependencies, we are not “one”.

Okay, that’s the background. Now let’s set the scene for the revelation.

I am presently reading “The History of Surrealism”, a horribly dry but authoritative account of the movement, originally written in French by Maurice Nadeau back in 1940. Here is a particular passage where Nadeau speaks about the movement’s primary leader, André Breton.

Life and the dream, he had shown, were two communicating vessels, in which events were homologous, it being impossible for the individual to assert that the latter was more real than the former. This time he went further: he abolished any frontier between the objective and the subjective. There exists, according to Breton, between man and the world, a perpetual and continuous correspondence. There exists, above all, a continuity of events which can be antecedently perceived and whose correspondences remain invisible. Yet self-analysis permits their observation.

Upon reading this, a couple things struck me.

First, the last two lines are a fairly concise statement of a Buddhist approach to life: there is something to life that is beyond its appearance to our mundane senses, and contemplative meditation allows us to access that. Now, the surrealists had a general familiarity with Buddhism, so this isn’t necessarily an independent observation, but it did put me in the mindset of interpreting this passage from a Buddhist perspective. Which led to the following.

It seems to me that Breton, as depicted in this passage, is a bit strident in his insistence upon some existence beyond objective reality. I felt this was an expression of a powerful fear of death, of the very impermanence that Buddhism teaches us to accept.

Or does it?

Breton’s unchecked ego brought him to this conceptual argument in order to bolster the idea that he would somehow live beyond his meat. But in reincarnation and the mystical oneness of all life, Buddhism also seems to provide psychological crutches that allow the overpowering ego to avoid facing death!

In a word, Buddhism’s concepts of karma, reincarnation, and the oneness of all life, while helpful in allowing the individual to suppress ego in order to cultivate a healthy sense of compassion, can also be viewed as the sheerest vanity, providing the ego with ample ways of rationalizing away the blunt, absolutely immutable fact of our impermanence and death.

I find this particularly ironic, because Buddhism is all about mastering one’s ego and accepting the fact that we die. To realize that such an obvious, ego-driven aversion to death can be found within Buddhism’s core tenets was a real revelation.