The Choice of Awakening
Many people around the world are making the choice to awaken, beginning an inner journey which, though less easy to measure than a road or rail trip, and with a destination more difficult to define, is nevertheless just as real. For most of us it begins with a heartfelt yearning for greater purpose and contentment, the recognition that ‘there has to be more to life than this’.
Whether our recognition builds up over time, or is thrust upon us by the crisis of a job loss, relationship break-up, serious illness or other personal drama, the important thing is what we do next. Do we attribute our unhappiness to our heartless former employer, our deceitful ex-partner, the fickleness of fate? Or do we recognise that we have some say in the way we feel? Do we believe that external circumstances force us to experience certain emotions we’d much rather avoid? Or are we not the inevitable victims of circumstance?
In short, can we choose the way we feel?
As a society our answer to this question is ambivalent. So much of our behaviour is based on the assumption that happiness is to be found in things which are external to ourselves—in particular, material comforts and relationships with other people. We spend a lot of our lives working to achieve or sustain a certain standard of living, a set of relationships, and sometimes the acquisition of influence or status—all the things which society seems to promote as the basis of a happy and fulfilled life. When these don’t deliver the required levels of happiness, we see no paradox in turning to mood enhancers, be they alcoholic, prescription or some other variety, which we know will do nothing for our external circumstances, but which we hope will make us feel a whole lot better about them.
Like most people, until I got quite some way into adulthood I never gave a moment’s thought to whether or not I could choose the way I felt. Looking back on the major psychological landmarks of my early years—the anxieties I experienced at the start of my career in public relations, the frustrations of my work as a writer, the indignation that landlords and roommates and innumerable others could be less than scrupulous—I realise that all these feelings seemed normal, even inevitable in the circumstances. As for the biggest landmark of them all, when my first serious girlfriend dumped me, the dark abyss of depression into which I fell seemed to me all too unavoidable. When someone pointed out the irksome truth that not all dumped ex-boyfriends reacted with quite the same dramatic intensity, I understood the point being made but—at least initially—came up with all kinds of reasons to explain why I wasn’t like other dumped boyfriends.
Like a bird whose cage door is opened yet who does not fly to liberty, sometimes we find all kinds of excuses to remain in painful, familiar confinement even when the possibility of freedom is offered. It was only later that I was ready to explore the idea that I didn’t actually have to live in despair.
Changing our inner reality
If the starting point of our journey to awakening is dis-satisfaction with the status quo of our lives, our first step only becomes possible when we choose to do something about it. The Buddhist term for this is ‘renunciation’, which approximately translates as ‘turning away from the causes of our suffering’.
In the West, such is our preoccupation with external reality that the word ‘renunciation’ instantly evokes images of monastic austerities like sackcloth and ashes—in secular twenty-first-century terms perhaps, giving up our favourite high-cholesterol foods for a grim, low-calorie regime in an effort to lose weight.
Fortunately the Tibetan Buddhist view of renunciation is somewhat different. It is not the external reality which we are renouncing, but our inner reality. The whole point is that the causes of our suffering are to be found not ‘out there’ but ‘in here’. If we want to turn away from them, the focus of our efforts has to be on our mind.
Which brings us to the first stop of our highlights tour of Shantideva. And, perhaps appropriately, to one of the most quoted verses of the entire Guide. It is a verse you may have already encountered: the power of its message and economy of expression make it a perennial favourite with lamas, psychologists and self-development teachers alike.
Where would I possibly find enough leather
With which to cover the surface of the earth?
Yet wearing leather just on the soles of my shoes
Is equivalent to covering the earth with it.
With the simplicity of genius, Shantideva explains the whole point of renunciation. In just four lines he illustrates the impossibility of trying to control everything in the world around us, contrasting it to the more manageable alternative of controlling the way we experience the world.
This explanation is based on the understanding that on our journey through life we will inevitably experience the psychological equivalent of stubbing our toes, stepping on thorns, cutting our ankles and worse as we encounter harsh emotional terrain. Without protection we suffer pain. Just as shoes provide a defensive layer for soft feet, we should safeguard our emotions with a layer of protection—a shielding barrier of interpretations, values and beliefs.
Long before psychologists began to tell us that every emotion is preceded by the thought that determines it, Shantideva was saying the very same thing. To understand why we experience any feelings, be they pleasant or unpleasant, we first need to identify our thoughts about and interpretations of any given situation.
Which is all very well, you may be thinking, but I already have my own set of interpretations, values and beliefs. If that’s the pair of shoes Shantideva is talking about, why do I experience dissatisfaction and pain?
Could it be, perhaps, that the shoes you’re presently wearing simply aren’t up to the job?
What kind of shoes?
My Dharma teacher, Les Sheehy, often teases the class that there’s one subject on which most of us are expert. With decades of practice under our belt, we’re all so good at it that we mostly do it without even trying. The area of expertise he’s talking about is our ability to make ourselves unhappy.
The Sanskrit word dukkha, central in Buddhism, doesn’t have a direct English translation, but it encompasses all forms of dissatisfaction, from everyday disgruntlement to the most profound suffering. Many of us are specialists in our own particular field of dissatisfaction. Some people are experts at experiencing frustration that their goals and dreams are never fully realised. Even when they do conquer a particular mountain, another, higher range looms up to meet them. Other people are grudge gurus, expert at feeling bitter resentment against political leaders who don’t share their world view, a wide range of industries—oil, financial, pharmaceutical and the media are the usual suspects—and sometimes entire nations or races. Then there are victims, people whose lives are a woeful litany of one abusive experience after another—if ever there’s a harrowing situation on offer, it seems to happen to them. And so the list goes on: the worried, the angry, the cheated, the depressed.
Of course, not everyone is like this. We all know people who manage to remain robustly upbeat and positive despite the most daunting personal circumstances. They come to mind very easily because there are so few of them around!
Given that we all share the same world and many of the same experiences, what accounts for such a variety of reactions? The answer, of course, is the layer of assump-tions, beliefs and habitual thoughts through which we mediate our experience of the world. To extend Shantideva’s metaphor, some people wear sandals that constantly catch up sharp stones. Others wade through swamps wearing only canvas shoes, bitterly complaining when their feet get wet. Only a small proportion wear robust footwear.
It’s significant that Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), a mainstream practice used by psychotherapists today, takes the very same approach in treating individual clients. Developed more than two millennia after Buddha lived and taught, CBT concurs that what happens to us is actually less important than how we interpret it. The purpose of CBT is frequently defined as follows: ‘One of the objectives of CBT typically is to identify and monitor thoughts, assumptions, beliefs and behaviors that are related and accompanied by debilitating negative emotions and to identify those which are dysfunctional, inaccurate, or simply unhelpful. This is done in an effort to replace or transcend them with more realistic and useful ones.’
In Shantideva’s terms, CBT helps people find better shoes.
Our ingrained mental habits
One of the main challenges of this process isn’t so much identifying our negative mental habits as replacing them. Like the bird which has lived in its self-imposed cage for too long to fly out the open door, we may very well be remaining in captivity for no better reason than sheer force of habit. We may share our world, perhaps even our homes, with people who have a quite different and more positive way of dealing with external reality, but still remain trapped in our routine negative patterns.
I recently heard a story which illustrates this very point. Young Brett was usually dropped off at school every day by his mother, but on this particular day, for the first time, she was unable to go. It was Dad’s turn to help out. He put Brett in the passenger seat beside him, clicking the safety belt shut, and the two of them set out for school in the early morning traffic.
After they’d made their way smoothly through the first intersection, Brett seemed pretty interested by what was going on around them. By the time they’d gone through the second, he was sitting up in his seat, craning his neck as he peered up and down the street.
‘What’s up, son?’ asked Dad.
Brett just shook his head.
By the time they were halfway to school, there could be no disguising the fact that something was amiss. Brett looked bewildered, although he still wouldn’t tell his father why.
Eventually, his father said firmly, ‘I know something’s going on, so you’d better just tell me.’
Looking across at him, Brett finally explained what was troubling him. ‘Dad,’ he said, all wide-eyed innocence, ‘where are all the dumb morons today?’
It’s unlikely that Brett’s mother set out on the school run every morning intending to find fault with her fellow drivers. But after years of practice it becomes second nature. Our assumptions and reactions become so automatic that without even realising it we create the negative thoughts which in turn produce negative feelings. Meanwhile other drivers sharing exactly the same roads are having visibly different experiences, looking relaxed, humming along to the radio, even laughing as they talk to their passengers.
Shantideva recognised the truth of our self-sabotage when he said:
Although wishing to be rid of misery,
They run towards misery itself.
Although wishing to have happiness,
Like an enemy they ignorantly destroy it.
Yes, we all agree, we do want to be happy. It’s just that our ingrained mental habits—often referred to as ‘delusions’ in Buddhism—can sometimes make this difficult to achieve.
The circuit breaker
Buddhist teachings offer a way of breaking this cycle in the form of radical methods of interpreting reality. These methods might be likened to pieces of leather with which to improve the quality of our shoes. Layers to protect us against the inevitable challenges of life.
Importantly, Buddha also recognised that we need a means by which to start applying these different methods of interpretation, a way of interrupting the old cycle of negative habitual reactions with more positive ones. The next few chapters focus on each of these radical interpre-tations in turn. Then, in Part II we will explore exactly how to apply them to everyday life—the reframing devices, the techniques and the practices we can use to break out of the pattern of negativity.
I first discovered the value of these for myself as a Dharma student in Perth, Western Australia. Having met and married my Australian wife while living in London, I arrived in Perth in my mid thirties at what felt like the start of an exciting new chapter in my life. I had recently signed a two-book deal with a major UK publisher and was looking forward to embarking on a life as a novelist. This development hadn’t come without effort—it had been my driving passion since the age of eighteen. Through my university years, twenties and early thirties I had written ten whole novels and numberless proposals for novels, submitting them to agents and publishers with a resounding lack of success.
Finally, hundreds of thousands of words later, I felt I was getting somewhere. All those difficult years as an apprentice seemed to have been vindicated: all those long hours and late nights spent hammering away at a variety of keyboards—from the manual typewriter of my student years to the ponderous, humming Amstrad computer that occupied most of the small pine writing desk in the bedroom of my twenties. Throughout this time, I had held fast to my dream, believing that somehow, somewhere my hour would come. There were, of course, periods of dark depression and self-doubt after the failure of each book into which I’d invested so much time and emotional energy. I’d use all kinds of mental devices to keep me going despite the endless slew of rejection letters. Reading the biographies of famous writers, I was well aware that many of them had also had to cope with exactly the same level of disappointment. I’d visualise a clock with the hands at five to midnight—if I could just keep going that extra metaphorical five minutes, I told myself, it could mean all the difference. I only needed one idea, one publisher, and my ‘real life’ would begin.
Such was the strength of my determination that I once assembled some of the most memorable rejection letters from publishers into a montage which I had mounted behind glass in handsome mahogany and brass frames and hung on my wall. I’d show them, I thought every time I looked at the collection (‘No, no, no, this simply will not do!’ began my favourite): in a few years’ time they’d be kicking themselves that they had missed out on the chance to publish me!
And now, here I was, represented by a high-powered London agent and with a significant advance on what would be my first two published novels. At last I felt that I had the world at my feet.
In moving to Perth it also seemed as though a whole new vista was opening up—as indeed it was, though in ways that turned out to be very different from what I had imagined. Having been born and brought up in Zimbabwe, and begun my working life in South Africa, I had been living in London for ten years when my wife and I decided that another British winter was more than either of us wanted to endure, and since one can write a book anywhere, why not sunny Western Australia?
So instead of the grinding commute to work through grey mornings in over-crowded train carriages, I suddenly found myself having breakfast al fresco, with only the screech of rainbow lorikeets in the palm tree to contend with. No longer was the phone jangling with imperative demands from clients and journalists as it had when I worked as a public relations consultant in London. Nor did I have to cram writing into whatever spare pockets of time I could find. Instead I had the luxury of whole working days to devote to my work.
Basking in Perth’s life-enhancing Mediterranean climate, expansive white beaches and vast blue skies, I felt that I was following in the footsteps of some of the great writers of the past. Somerset Maugham had escaped from England to the South of France, Ian Fleming to Jamaica, Gore Vidal had abandoned America for Italy. This seemed to be the pattern in the natural order of things.
This supremely self-indulgent reverie was, however, abruptly cut short. No sooner had my first thriller been published in paperback than my publishers wrote to say they were dropping me from their catalogue. In the space of just a couple of years I’d gone from the next big up-and-comer on their thriller list to a discarded also-ran. The encouraging letters I received from readers, the rave reviews on Amazon—so what? Who cared? They counted for nothing as I found myself swiftly consigned to bookstore remainder bins.
In the circumstances, it was hard to think of my novel-writing ‘career’ as anything but a colossal failure. It was hard to avoid feelings of defeat and futility as everything I’d struggled so hard to achieve, everything by which I’d sought to define myself, slipped through my fingers. I could no longer tell myself that publication would lead to instant success. As I walked the pristine sands of Cottesloe Beach, I was no longer following in the footsteps of Ian Fleming or Somerset Maugham. Instead, I was washed up, on the wrong side of the world, far away from anywhere that mattered.
I’d show them, indeed!
It was my very good fortune, however, to be a Dharma class regular at this time, and to be aware that a different perspective of my situation was possible. Specifically, I did have some choice in the way that I felt. I could blame my publishers, agent or others for the chain of events which had reduced me to the status of failed novelist, or I could recognise that this interpretation of events was entirely my own. I could allow negativity and bitterness to dominate my thoughts and feelings, or I could reach for a more robust pair of shoes, a set of more accurate interpretations which would help me feel altogether more positive about my place in the world.
I had no difficulty identifying the negative interpreta-tions that made me feel unhappy. As Shantideva said, although wishing to be rid of misery, I ran towards misery itself with negative thoughts like: ‘I’ve failed because I’m a useless writer’; ‘Being dumped means no other publisher will ever take me on’; ‘My career as a novelist is over almost before it began.’
Such thoughts were far too pervasive and recurring for me to be unaware of them! No, the real challenge was to break the cycle. To interrupt my mental patterns before they got caught up in habitual negativity and self-recrimination.
It was here that Buddhist classes proved invaluable in providing a powerful counterbalance. First, because I was introduced to the technique of analytical meditation along with the benefits already described; and second, because in my teacher, Les Sheehy, I found the perfect coach to challenge my usual ‘default mode’ world view. It didn’t matter that my own particular brand of negative self-talk was different from the negativity of the Dharma student sitting next to me: the content of my depressing feedback loop wasn’t really that important. In reality, all negative thinking, from which arise unhappy feelings, is based on only a handful of common assumptions, beliefs and interpretations.
Several misconceptions in particular shape our thoughts, and Shantideva challenges each of these with masterful insight. One is our tendency to focus almost exclusively on the short-term here and now of our daily lives while habitually ignoring the bigger picture. A second is our routine overvaluing of external, material circumstances while undervaluing our internal, cognitive circumstances, which though less tangible, are much more important in their ability to make us happy. And a third is our preoccupation with narrow self-interest at the expense of a broader, other-facing world view.
Each of these, in turn, forms the subject of the next three chapters.
Our first step, however, is the liberating recognition that the emotions which trouble us are by no means inevitable and unavoidable. Not only can we help the way we feel—the truth is that we are the ultimate creators of the world we choose to experience.
Mindfulness exercise
This first exercise is not an analytical meditation so much as a warm-up. There’s no need to go too hard, too soon! But nor should you underestimate its value. Your task is quite simple. At different times during the day, simply stop and ask yourself: what am I thinking?
Stop yourself at intervals and consider the content of your thoughts and the way that you feel, and how one thing—the thought—leads to the other—the feeling. If it helps, put discreet reminder notes where you will see them at different times of the day.
Approach the exercise as though you were a researcher, trying to reach an objective assessment of your thoughts and feelings. Identify the predominant themes. Are they positive, negative or a balance of the two? Pay particular attention to the habitual thoughts that give rise to any negative feelings.
Observe how you talk to yourself during the day. What is the overall tone of your self-talk, and what messages do you send yourself?
Through this exercise, try to become more aware of the assumptions, interpretations and beliefs you have about yourself and the world around you—especially any recurring patterns and the feelings that they create.