I’m Dumbfounded: Are We Too Afraid and Too Ready to Accept a Simple or Convenient Lie Instead of Searching for The More Complex Truth?

I’m dumbfounded. Perplexed. Confused. And frightened. Worried. I feel a hole in my stomach. My hands feel like they’re vibrating, but it’s on the inside only. My mouth, cheeks, and eyes feel heavy, like they’re filled with concrete.

 

Dumbfounded is a good word, because I feel dumb. Have I been so wrong about humanity? Are our fellow Americans just so misogynistic they couldn’t allow a woman to be president? Or too racist? But somewhere upwards of 40% of Latinos voted for DT and helped swing the election. I’m missing something here. Or are we too vengeful? Too afraid? Too ready to accept a simple or convenient lie instead of searching for the more complex or inconvenient truth? Are our memories so short we don’t remember the chaos, fear, and malignant incompetence of DT’s response to COVID? Or his assaults on healthcare? The favoritism shown the rich?

 

Or have too many of us been so consumed by fake news we can’t see what seems so obvious to many of us? Or so deluded by disinformation we’ve voted in the King of fake news? The wanna-be Dictator of lies, hate, and fear?

 

I’m so confused.

 

Or maybe the election results are off? Or just feel impossible? Certainly, if the results prove accurate, the polling was off.

 

I was recently at a large dinner party seated with two obviously intelligent women I didn’t know. They were talking about their distrust in government. Their level of distrust and bitter anger startled me. One, who was a Kamala Harris supporter, even said, “Do we really know if we should have fought in World War II? Did we defeat Fascism?” I jumped in with two not-very mindful feet and said, “Yes. We did. Remember six million Jews had been killed, exterminated.” We shut off the ovens. We released starving millions from concentration camps. She said she agreed with me. The other woman became silent. But what about the distrust? Was I witnessing the result of disinformation aimed at undermining our trust in democracy?

 

Maybe she had a point neither of us recognized right then. Maybe the fascism continued underground. Maybe we saw its ugly face last night?

 

I don’t know.

 

But maybe the not-knowing can be a good thing….

 

**To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

The Magical Realism of Worry: When We Worry, We Might Feel We’re Keeping the Unbearable at Bay

Worry magical?  How can I call it magical? Disastrous, yes. Devastating? Painful? Certainly unpleasant. But magical? It can seem so devoid of redeeming qualities, but the emotion evolved to serve a purpose.

 

Worry is such a part of our lives. We can worry about so many things, of so many degrees of importance, from the outcome of a sporting event to whether climate change will the make the weather unsustainable for human life. We can worry about ourselves, our friends, family, students, or humanity as a whole.

 

I remember waiting for the results of a medical test. It was torturous, imagining different results. Luckily, I was soon able to put the worries away and not ruminate over the possible outcome. But ruminating is so easy to do. Not-knowing can be so difficult. When we worry, we can feel like we can’t let the emotion go.

 

And I noticed in myself that if we’re worrying, the unthinkable we worry about isn’t happening. When we worry, then for the length of a thought, we feel we’re keeping the unbearable at bay. We’re locking the future into the realm of the bearable, into the realm of imagination. We delay and delay. The emotion becomes a magical incantation. If we repeat the worry over and over, we stop the imagined awful from becoming awfully real.

 

But, to delay is to delay living or really to live delaying. To worry is to live in some form what we worry about. We keep it close to us. But the future is just another possibility, just another thought. What’s real is what we’re doing, feeling, thinking now.

 

There’s also a double quality to many emotions. We can fear fear (as well as enjoy it, as in watching horror movies). The fact we feel fear is itself fearful. We can get angry at anger, or at ourselves for being angry. We can also enjoy joy and love loving. With worry, we can, for example, worry about ourselves for “having” the emotion as well as worry about the object of worry.

 

We also might imagine rumination opens us up to those we worry about. And that can be true. The imaginative component of worry can help us understand what other people might be thinking or feeling. But it can also do the opposite. It can keep us in what’s called the default mode network (DFN) of the brain, the network we’re in when not involved in a task or focused activity.

 

As medical journalist James Kingsland describes in his book Siddhartha’s Brain: Unlocking the Ancient Science of Enlightenment, the default mode network allows us to bring up events we’ve lived through and to imagine what we haven’t experienced. It allows us to construct an image of who we are but looks at others more in relation to ourselves and less in terms of who they are in themselves.

 

The DFN allows “mind-wandering” to imagined possibilities. This ability to imagine is quite an amazing achievement of the human brain. It allows us to build ships to fly to the moon and write novels. And we might think we wander mentally to avoid psychological suffering as well as examine possibility after possibility. But according to research by Harvard psychologists Mathew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, the “mind-wandering” itself can be the cause, not the consequence, of negative emotions. Worrying can cause more worrying.

 

Yet the emotion serves a purpose….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on the link here to The Good Men Project.

How I Relate to Another Being is How I’m Living Life Now: The House of My Hearing Has Many Doors

Relationships are, clearly, at the heart of our lives; or maybe I should say that for most of us, they are our heart. Especially a marriage and those longstanding partnerships. They can be so miraculous, exciting, engaging, frightening, painful, and confounding that we lose perspective on the central role they play in our lives. Something comes up, a disagreement or hurt, and we focus exclusively on that. To the degree we feel engaged, we want to disengage. We can lose sight of how the relationship influences not only how we think of ourselves but all other relationships.

 

Despite the many relationships we have, we often think of ourselves as me-alone. Me separate from others, separate even from our world. But we’re never as fully separate as we might imagine. And core relationships have enormous power to reveal that. By recognizing this as a possibility, the relationship itself comes alive. The character of our lives improves.

 

Recently, I noticed that any marriage, or any core relationship, models for us what relationship itself means. It can become a school for learning how to deepen other, important emotional connections. For example, each friendship, in its own, unique way contains the possibility of developing a degree of the openness and emotional intimacy that a core relationship might develop⎼ a similar caring and being cared for, mutual discovery, trust, and exploration. Or if the core is dominated by resistance, pain, dishonesty, and projections, so might other relationships.

 

Such discovery and caring makes us vulnerable. When we’re open, loving, we’re vulnerable. That’s just what caring means. When we care we don’t wear bulletproof vests or build concrete walls around us. When we’re “open” our senses and feelings reach out. When we reach out, others can reach in. And this dynamic helps us grow in character.

 

This, of course, can also be frightening. It can scare us into shutting down. But being frightened can itself be a sign that something we’re feeling is meaningful and worthwhile. That we’re in a state where what we don’t know about the future of the relationship, or anything, might exceed what we do know. And we’re willing to risk that.

 

And this not-knowing is always with us. We might assume that when we’re open or vulnerable we’re less safe. But maybe we’re safer. If we’re more able to perceive what’s there, what’s real⎼ if we’re more cognizant of just how much of the future we don’t know, and more aware of what we’re doing and saying, then we can make better decisions. A relationship can help us recognize what’s real.

 

We can better recognize that right here, in this moment, this person⎼ is my life. I breathe; they breathe. I feel; they feel. Zen teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh called this inter-being⎼ we inter-are with others. Likewise, Australian Zen teacher Susan Murphy borrows an Aboriginal term, us-two, to describe relationships. Our relationship with another person, being, or place is not between separate, disconnected things. Instead, me-and-you and everything are dynamically creating this moment together.

 

As I sit with them, whoever they are, I sit with myself….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

An Open Mind

 

I was recently meditating, at home, in the early afternoon. Outside, intense snow squalls alternated with a few minutes of sunshine. Schools started two hours late that morning because of the weather, and before meditating I had wondered if the after-school class that I was supposed to teach would be cancelled. I concentrated on my breath and soon became calm and focused and lost all sense of school and snow. Then the phone rang. My wife picked it up somewhere in the house. I couldn’t hear the conversation but knew it was the school calling about the class and I began to wonder, again, if it would be cancelled. I tried to return my focus to the breath, but couldn’t do it by increasing my concentration. So, I tried another strategy. I made my response and interest in the call the object of awareness. I simply noticed what was there, in me, without judging it. That did it. My mind calmed.

 

By shifting attention to what was there in my own mind and body, and being open to it, my mind became the state of openness. The result was both calm and insight.

 

Why do I have this drive to have an answer? To know is to hold information in mind and be able to use that information, to comprehend and own in myself. Even more, it is a drive for a concept to fit reality into, or this is one way to understand it. In the past, I thought that the drive for answers was a common and primal human drive. It was part of learning and growing up; humans were naturally driven to better understand the world and themselves—unless it was educated out of them. And putting what you knew into words to form a worldview was part of developing an identity.

 

You create explanations and stories to order your life. Having an explanation of any sort is often more important than its accuracy. Thus, you feel uncomfortable when you don’t-know. You take it as something missing, a lack, a hole in your universe. You then hate not-knowing, as it leads you to worry or feel anxious. Part of the joy of solving puzzles or watching a mystery movie is that, for a moment, you feel the anxiety of not-knowing, but in a controlled way. You prove to yourself that this situation can be faced and overcome. It is like an inoculation against fear. The puzzle creates just enough anxiety that by solving the puzzle you demonstrate your control over not-knowing.

 

But this day, I realized this explanation was not enough. I dislike not-knowing only to the degree that I am wedded to an outcome or idea, only to the degree that I cling to one answer, fear another, or think I am only capable of handling certain types of situations.

 

It is easy to cling to ideas, and think knowing is only about putting experiences into words. You value the memory over the “thing” or experience itself, the story about your trip to Africa in the past over the experience of a moment of your life right now. And by focusing so much on the words and explanations, you easily lose perspective on the important role not-knowing plays in your life.

 

There is a second type of not-knowing, an experience of your world being fully there, alive, not lacking. Every moment begins with this not-knowing. If the present moment were known and put into words, it would already be past. Daniel Siegel and other neuroscientists describe stages in the formation of emotion. The first is an “orienting response.” Brain and body systems become alerted and energized. You begin to feel. Only later is memory activated, energy directed, liking and disliking begun, emotion and meaning created. In this sense, not-knowing is a step you need to go through to learn and understand anything. It is your original contact with the world. It is a non-verbal or incommunicable sort of knowing, the taste, the touch, the joy and agony of a body twisting in space, the rush of concentrated attention. 

 

In Buddhism, not-knowing is to perceive without preconceived ideas. It is to hold what you know lightly, and to put observation and experience before concept. It is a silence of concept mind so you can hear the world more clearly.

 

In the first sense of knowing, where you emphasize knowing as conceptualizing, you can miss, not fully engage in, the only moment you ever live in, the present. Your life becomes a memory, a story or explanation, and is lived almost secondhand. It is something you read about in your own mind or listen for in the words of others, not what you live each moment.

 

When you understand yourself in this almost secondhand manner, you cling to ideas and it is easier to get into energetic disagreements about points of view. When you think you know and have the explanation of an event, you feel in control. When you threaten a person’s explanation, you threaten their world. And when people in power and in the headlines manipulate information, say one thing and mean something entirely different, and lie repeatedly, even obviously, they are attempting to take away your power by undermining your sense that there is a clear reality out there. They can create psychological and social chaos. The lie is not just a lie. It is an attempt to undermine your sense of control over your life. It is an attempt to get you to live as if your life were a memory. With a truth, you can have a two-way conversation; a lie is an attempt to make it one-way.

 

To not-know in the second way, you can’t be manipulated so easily because you welcome and are fully present in your immediate experience. Thus, to be open to whatever arises in your mind, body and the world around you, and to be able to utilize both forms of knowing and not-knowing, is a revolutionary act. To face your fear and anxiety is a form of resistance to the powerful. It is to return to where all action begins and all thought is born. And that is a very powerful state.

 

*Two Resources Relevant to This Post:

Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha’s Liberating Teaching of No-Self, by Rodney Smith

 

The Gap Between What You Can Know and What You Can’t

How much can we know? And how do we deal with that limitation, if there is one?

 

Such old questions. Yet, occasionally, when I’m quiet inside and the world seems to slow down, I hear the remnants of these questions stirring in me. For example, just last night, I was thinking about the book I just completed. I worked on it for three years and it is scheduled to be published on September 30th. But, I still don’t really believe it. It is the third book I have written, and the first to be published. Yet, how it happened is mysterious to me. Mysterious not in the sense that I have no idea how I wrote the book or no idea of all the work, inspiration, joy and heartache that went into it. But, in the sense that despite all that intimate knowledge of what I did, I still feel “Wow, I did that!” I still wonder if it is really going to happen.

 

And so much of what it took surprised me. I thought a book was one person’s creation. Yet when you add all the people who edited, gave feedback, who were my students, colleagues, teachers, inspirations, and then add the publisher, etc.—how many people is that?

 

And how is it that I know how to write a clear, grammatical sentence (usually) and yet the book required several people over several months to sharpen the writing and eliminate mistakes?

 

Trying to understand is one of the biggest drives a human being has, so we are always trying to figure things out. And I don’t just mean things like about how my book will be received, but everyday things like how to set up a rain barrel system in my house or learn the best route to my brother’s new home in Virginia. And in the Presidential election, we watch polls to see what the future will bring. We research and try to understand who the candidates are so we can make good decisions about who to vote for and who will help us secure the future we think will serve us best. We do the same with doctors, places to vacation, bikes to ride, shirts to wear. We try to predict the weather and understand our friends and pets.

 

We often think knowing and understanding means to be able to predict, control, dominate and make safe, that it is linked to our drive to survive, possess and secure. We think it means to encapsulate in words. And that once we have created such a capsule of understanding or knowledge, it is the correct one. We seem to think that our mental models of reality are the one and only truth. And this truth will set us free. The internal pressure to replace the unknown and mysterious with the known and explained has led to both great technical and scientific advances and also violence and oppression.

 

Due to a limited perspective on what understanding means, many people try to fill the gap between what we can know and what we can’t with undigested or untested beliefs, often mistaking such beliefs for truth. We might be tempted to try to replace what we can’t know with a willful ignorance that masks wish fulfillment or shoddy thinking. We can do this with religion, politics, intellectual systems or relationships.

 

We need to recognize the limits of our knowing and control. We can’t know everything, but it is fun, important, and sometimes a responsibility, to learn and understand or think things through as deeply as we can. We can’t predict the future, although we can, to an extent, prepare for it. We can’t predict or control what our friends or loved ones or pets will do; yet we can be helpful, kind and caring. We can’t know when or how we will die, but we can live as fully, healthfully, and meaningfully as we can. We can’t pave over the unknown with the known, but we can be aware of when the attempts to do so lead to suffering.

 

We need to be able to live with and be mindfully aware of not-knowing. We need a little more humility, and a little less clinging to our mental formulations. We need to know how to tolerate, learn from, and let go of discomfort and other ways we hurt ourselves. We need to tolerate and even value some mystery, not mystification. The sense of mystery is a sense of the aliveness of life. When a person feels mysterious to us, we could be realizing they have an inner world of their own. That who they are exceeds our expectations, exceeds what we know, exceeds what we want of them. Any person or living being is so much more than what we want for or from them or words about them. And this mystery, this life, is what’s ultimately most important. It involves a very different sort of knowing, living, loving.