A few weeks ago, I began attending Tuesday night teacher-led sits at New York Insight Meditation Center. A recent one was led by a charismatic older guy who bore a passing resemblance to Tommy Lee Jones -- which would have kept me entertained no matter what he said -- and his dharma talk for the evening was about patience, the noblest or highest of four or six something-or-others. (Buddhism has a number of lists, apparently, and I'm not really familiar with any of them yet.)
Anyway, patience seems to amount to a sort of skillful inaction, where we are presented with an offending stimulus and the usual reaction might be one of anger, indignation or perhaps even violence. Exercising patience doesn't entail just remaining silent while fuming underneath or desperately trying to keep the lid on a boiling cauldron -- it is tantamount to giving a gift of love, forgiveness or what-have-you. I am all for this. The temptation is to react (a la scratching an itch), and the skillful response is one of non-reaction.
However, when talking about this stuff I think it's easy to lose sight that judgments are often difficult to make in the heat of the moment, and that non-action (or a delayed action) isn't necessarily the best decision even in a Buddhist context.
For example, one will witness an injustice being done, and the temptation might be to lash out at the offending party, to crush them and make them feel small. Teach them a lesson. Tit for tat. Equally misguided, however, might be to stand there and do nothing, which I think is the more tempting option when one's own well-being isn't directly threatened.
It doesn't even have to be a question of intervention; often we'll be presented with opportunities to get closer to our goals somehow -- business/networking opportunities, or a potential connection with a great girl, for example -- and the temptation for introverts like myself is to do nothing. Perhaps we could justify non-action after the fact by claiming patience; after all, we don't want to react with greed or lust. If it's gonna happen, it'll happen. In due time. This is called inertia -- in physics, the tendency for an object at rest to resist motion.
I hope I'm starting to make clear what my dilemma is. It is all too easy to say, this was an example of patience, that was an example of inertia, and how do we tell? Well, patience is skillful inaction while inertia is unskillful inaction. Okay, then what is skillful? Well, skillful decisions yield better results than unskillful ones. Now we are talking about results, which is dangerous because using results to evaluate process retrospectively merely begs the question and sheds no light on how we can be skillful in the uncertainty of here and now.
To be sure, Buddhist meditation can help us liberate ourselves from the regrets caused by inertia -- but I am more interested in constructing a guide for action, not just a better way of interpreting the past.
Life tends to present to us certain gifts and opportunities when we least expect them and are least prepared to accept them -- for they are often shrouded in apparent risk. However, it is perhaps only with the cultivation of mindfulness and self-love that we can learn to see through the apparent threats to self and recognize: these are gifts (for a limited time only) and for freak's sake, we deserve them.
So, how can we know if we are being skillful without relying upon the lens of results? That is really what it comes down to. To be continued....
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5 comments:
good topic and discussion.
maybe it's more about one's own internal process and assessment than outward, tangible standards or results.
say some people experience similar injustices like you described, and they each respond differently based on their experiences, values and their skillfulness at engaging the moment (in that meditation sense). one guy might get the "best" results, but maybe he was groggy, drunk, or overcome with anger and just got lucky. or maybe he had seen this sort of thing a hundred times before so it didn't take much mental engagement for him to make the "best" decision.
likewise, maybe the guy who got the "worst" results was also the most tuned in to what was happening. it could be that he was just limited in other ways such as experience, knowledge, mental or physical capacity.
being results-oriented instead of process-oriented can also be problematic since results are beyond anyone's complete control. a lot more than one's skillfulness accounts for results, like being at the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people.
also, who gets to decide what the best and worst results are? experts? the majority? seems more constructive to me to let go of that emphasis and instead let the individual speak for his own experience. who could possibly know other than the individual how skillful he was at the moment? If you watched an injustice, wouldn't you know on some level if you were standing idly by instead of patiently waiting for the right moment to intervene, no matter how much you tried to convince yourself otherwise? then again, i'm probably underestimating our capacity for denial. i certainly underestimate my own often enough!
just thoughts. take 'em or leave 'em.
Yes, I think our capacity for denial is near infinite, especially when we're under pressure of some kind. (The threat can be to the body, to the wallet, or even to a particular sense of self.) All sorts of decision-making heuristics kick in, and, more often that not, we make an emotional decision that we later come to regret. It would be really useful to take a proper conception of skillfulness and produce a set of rules that works for each of us, something that we can refer to in the wild uncertainty of the heated moment.
i like the idea of having rules like that, but the problem with an external system is that my state of denial will affect how i apply it. it still comes back to a sincere effort to make the best decisions i can, based on the self-awareness i have today. maybe someday i'll look back and see that i was making much more emotional decisions than i currently realize, but that's how i think the process works. i just keep peeling back the layers of denial through repeated attempts at self-awareness.
hopefully, what's skillful for me today will be meager compared to the skillfulness i have in the future when my self-awareness has grown and my standards have changed from experience.
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