Shambhala Publications, Inc.

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Boulder, Colorado 80302

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© 2024 by Dza Kilung Rinpoche

Illustrations © 2024 by Janice Baragwanath

Cover art: Numbetta/Shutterstock and Lenka_X/Shutterstock

Cover design: Daniel Urban-Brown

Interior design: Greta D. Sibley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rinpoche, Kilung, author.

Title: The free mind: finding clarity in a digitally distracted world / Dza Kilung Rinpoche.

Description: Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2024. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023038755 | ISBN 9781645473251 (trade paperback)

eISBN 9780834845633

Subjects: LCSH: Happiness—Religious aspects—Buddhism. | Buddhism—Essence, genius, nature. | Rnying-ma-pa (Sect)—Doctrines.

Classification: LCC BF575.H27 R56 2024 | DDC 158—dc23/eng/20231219

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023038755

a_prh_7.0_147902106_c0_r0

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Although the author, Kilung Rinpoche, is a Tibetan Buddhist lama and teacher, The Free Mind is not a book on Buddhism. It was written for any one of us seeking peace, harmony, and especially clarity in today’s fast-paced, digitally driven world. Rinpoche is a full participant in that world, and, from his own experience, he has discovered that certain ideas and practices from Buddhism can effectively resolve many of the distracting problems of modern life. These ancient Buddhist practices were originally designed to help us humans live fulfilling lives of genuine happiness. Adapted to today’s world, they are a powerful antidote to confusion arising at the interface between our digital and personal lives.

I received these teachings through meetings with Kilung Rinpoche and from audio files Rinpoche recorded for the book.

These were transcribed and then used as the basis for the manuscript. Although I made occasional suggestions, my role was limited to arranging these teachings in book form. Each chapter was then reviewed by Rinpoche, who was intimately involved with the whole process of compiling and editing. I hope that I introduced no distortions into the author’s writing, and I take full responsibility for any that might have occurred.

Regarding the language style of the book, I used the following guideline: Since Rinpoche normally teaches in English and has developed his own expressive style in that language, I thought it best to retain his own words whenever possible. Having heard Rinpoche translated many times from Tibetan, it is clear that he is a brilliant and insightful thinker. Therefore I thought it best to parallel that sophistication in the general style of English used throughout the book.

—Brian Hodel

Introduction

Joy is much bigger than happiness. While happiness is often seen as being dependent on external circumstances, joy is not.

—Archbishop Desmond Tutu

I am from Tibet—“the roof of the world.” I grew up in green highland valleys at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. I helped tend my family’s animals—yaks and sheep mostly—as we moved from pasture to pasture, living in a large yak-hair tent. When our family needed to communicate with other nomads or go to town, it was done on horseback. Today I communicate like you do: I use a smartphone, a tablet, and a laptop. I still spend a large part of the year in Tibet, but I also have a residence in the US, and I travel worldwide to teach. I need my devices in all those places, including Tibet.

As you can guess, despite my unusual background, I am thoroughly engaged with the modern world, a world tied together by digital technology. Over time, as I became more and more connected to the digital world, and more dependent upon it, I found that this technological way of life has two sides: On the one hand, the range and speed of the internet and other digital connections allow me to do much more than I could previously and with greater ease. But—as many of us have discovered—this technology brings with it many headaches and distractions that can seriously undermine its benefits.

Therefore, as I integrated this digital world into my life, I used the same Buddhist practices I had been taught since childhood to meet the challenges life presents. Doing so, I have been able to maintain a tranquil and orderly lifestyle that is conducive to my peace of mind as well as my productivity. Although I do not work for a company or have a boss or manager I must report to, mine is an active life; I am engaged in many projects and must keep in contact with many individuals and organizations. So, I know that many of you—like my students, friends, and acquaintances—feel a lot of pressure and stress that is tied to how we interact with our digital devices. As we all know, such digital anxiety is becoming more and more common in today’s world. I think there are two main reasons for this—an outer reason and an inner one.

The outer influence of this technology on our minds and hearts is the rhythm of the devices themselves. I don’t mean just the phone you hold in your hand or the laptop facing you across your desk. Those are closely interconnected with a pulsing electronic web of millions of similar devices—not to mention satellites, mainframe computers, cell towers, and so on. We are connected in so many ways to this dazzling electronic grid and the billions of people who use it that even when we turn off our phones and computers, we know it is out there calling, vibrating—leaving us messages and notifications. And since many of the programs that command our devices are also businesses, these apps are designed to engage our attention as much as possible. The more apps we use, the more opportunities for engagement as we browse, buy, chat, and download. And if we do business with our devices—as many of us must—we may feel we have to be available nearly all the time. That can create pressure, anxiety, and fatigue.

The inner connection to digital technology is personal. Our inner life, our personal psychology, comes from the whole of our experience. We have all passed through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, guided by parents, relatives, teachers, mentors, friends, and so on. We’ve all been influenced by our cultural backgrounds, schools, employers, religion, governments, economies, media, and politics. They’ve made us what we are and how we are. And in today’s world, our inner life is fully integrated with the universe of digital media. Social media and smartphone apps connect us to friends, dating, business, transportation, entertainment, take-out meals, research—well, everything. It’s a two-way street: we reach out for those apps and programs we need and are attracted to, then digital media tracks our habits—our data—and uses it to reach out to us. We are so involved with this give-and-take that for many people, being even briefly out of touch with their digital devices can create loneliness and the fear of missing out on things. If our upbringing included conditioned habit patterns that make our engagement with certain people or situations troubling or painful, the digital connection can amplify that.

To bring harmony to these inner and outer aspects of our lives, we need to carefully examine both sides of the equation and see if we can make some positive changes. As we do this, we soon discover that the inner world of thought and emotion drives our digital needs just as much as the nature of digital communications can sometimes drive us to distraction. As we explore strategies we can use to gain some control over our devices, we will be getting to know some of our hidden inner urges that keep us glued to the screens, track pads, and buttons.

From this exploration we may also discover that our engagement with the digital world in both its inner and outer aspects is limiting us. What we all seek, naturally, is happiness. Isn’t that true? But is our modern lifestyle making us happy? To ask that question in more detail: Is our current way of life bringing us the rewards that we seek? And if it is, do those rewards—our accomplishments, income level, recognition, and social connections and relationships—make us deeply happy? When I say, “deeply happy,” I am talking about a kind of joy, contentment, and happiness that comes from inside and is not only the result of outer satisfaction. Getting a raise and a promotion may make you skip down the street singing a tune. That’s great! But we have also felt that way at times for no outer reason. We just feel great to be alive. We need more of that!

This kind of genuine, authentic happiness is like a flower that needs a spacious, well-tended garden to thrive. In terms of the outer and inner aspects of our digital environment, we need some mental and emotional space that gives us room to breathe and grow and that allows us to develop the wisdom that can see the true inner causes of happiness. Only then can we move in that direction and blossom. The practices and suggestions presented in this book can clear away the distractive clutter that prevents us from advancing in our careers and relationships. We need space to become good at what we do and to more effectively navigate all the complexities of human life. But it would be a pity to leave it there, to merely become “successful.” So, just as these practices have been used by Tibetan Buddhists for millennia to achieve truly happy and fulfilling lives, my hope is that you will apply them with this greater goal in mind.

Travel Plans

This book unfolds a little like an airplane flight. Part one, our takeoff—taxiing down the runway and lifting off—is a brief exploration of the human-to-digital interface that is so much a part of life today. How is it organized and how is our behavior conditioned by these technologies? Of course it’s different for every individual, but there are some aspects, like the use of smartphones, that affect most of us in similar ways. How much do our phones bring us together and make life easier? And how much do they separate us and intrude with distractions? Where do they add to our freedom and happiness, and where do they limit us?

Part two will take us into the clouds. The kind of digital overdose many of us experience daily is like a thick cloud cover. With their speed and density, the calls, messages, and notifications we receive can tie us up and blur our mental clarity. Whereas in part one we get a basic picture—a review of the personal and electronic sides of modern life—in part two I introduce some practices taken from Buddhism that will help us loosen up a bit. For most readers, these will comprise a new set of tools based on the practices that I have found to be extremely effective in my own life. Using them we can gain more freedom to choose how we will engage with life and then move in the direction of greater peace of mind and less unnecessary distraction. We can make insightful discoveries about our habit patterns, notice their effects on us, and engage in practices that will bring us greater harmony and freedom.

We rise above those clouds in part three, where we can enjoy some clear blue sky. We examine the nature of happiness and suffering and observe the deeper implications of our virtual reality—the interdependence that connects everything in life. These insights serve as a bridge to part four, where we soar into space. Here I invite you to explore deeper issues that you may already be curious about. These include the nature of wisdom, the question of karma, and the importance of loving-kindness and compassion. Finally, in the last chapter, “Ecology—Inner and Outer,” we come literally back to Earth, focusing on our planet, our home. How is today’s environmental dilemma connected to our inner world, and how can we use that knowledge to heal the Earth?

The worlds of our inner lives and digital communication can meet harmoniously or they can clash, bringing us stress, anxiety, distraction, and suffering. This book is about developing a clear understanding of these two worlds so we can lessen our suffering and deepen our happiness.

Part One

◼

Under the Spell of Distraction

1

Our Digital Lifestyle

I think everyone would agree that we all want to have happiness in life and avoid suffering. I don’t know if our quest for happiness is more difficult today than it was in the past, but on top of the normal problems all humans face in life, I am sure that today’s world of digital communications has added new twists and turns to a dance that we are only beginning to understand and learn to move with. And it’s always adding more.

To fully appreciate our present situation, we need some perspective. It’s important to know how we got here in order to see where we can go. We’ve become so accustomed to our speedy, connected, modern lifestyle that we tend to ignore context. Not so long ago, modern countries like the United States, Germany, and China were mainly agricultural. Most people lived in the countryside. Then new technologies changed agriculture and farmers moved to the cities, where life was faster and more complicated. One day we had unhurried farmers on a family farm. The next day the same family was struggling to adapt to city life.

Something similar has happened with digital technology, which became a powerful influence only thirty years ago. Gradually everything became speedier and more complex. And because the digital industry is driven by innovation, speed and complexity are always increasing. But just because the hardware and software are electronic doesn’t mean that we are really separate from digital technology—humans simply using machines, like a writer pounding a typewriter. Today’s devices and software are creations and expressions of the human mind—of its creativity and ingenuity. Tech researchers, businesspeople, and the military introduced them to human society. They have become like a new extension of our bodies and minds. We create new hardware and software, and as these influence more and more aspects of human life, we are obliged to adapt to them—to play their game, dance their dance.

Here’s a more familiar example of what I mean: Let’s take a popular competitive sport. It could be any, but we’ll use soccer, since it is easy to describe, even if you are not a player or fan. Each side has eleven players, there are goals with a net at each end of the field, and one ball is used. A point is scored by kicking (or heading) the ball into the net. There’s plenty of complicated maneuvering and strategy involved, but basically the game is that simple. Now suppose the players entered the field and were told there would be two balls used at the same time. Then after halftime, a third ball is added. Next game—with little or no warning—there are more balls, players, and goals added and the field is reduced in size. And the players have no choice—they have to adapt to these changes. That pretty well describes where we are today living in a digital world. We and our devices are partners in a vast, shifting feedback loop: we tweak them and they tweak us. But what is our problem exactly?

I think the best word to describe our difficulties with “digital living” is distraction. Look at the difference between an ordinary landline telephone—an old-fashioned technology—and a smartphone. The old “dumb phone” stayed put, and it had only one function: telephone calls. When you missed a call by being away from home or out of the office, if the call was important, the caller would call back or leave a message on an answering machine. We had some distance from our phones, and there was a relaxed quality to that. The phone didn’t fit in our pocket or purse, following us everywhere. We weren’t interrupted when driving or taking the bus, walking, or enjoying a meal with friends or family in a restaurant. Likewise, most of us didn’t have personal computers in our homes until about 1990. Laptops, tablets, and the Apple Watch were yet to come. Sure, life in modern countries was fast-paced—sometimes described as a “rat race.” But compared to today, there was a lot more breathing room.

Now those days are hard to imagine, and many younger people have never experienced that old analog world. Today, for many of us, it seems natural to be constantly communicating one way or another over our phones. If it’s not an actual call, there are texts coming in, notifications, ads, news feeds. Or we are taking photos or videos and uploading them to Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or Pinterest, then adding text. We’re googling for answers to our questions, checking our bank balances and investments. Then, if we look around us, we see that nearly everyone else is doing the same thing—faces glued to screens. If it’s not a smartphone, then it’s one of those many other digital devices. They fill up our time—a continuous stream of distraction—but we think that’s normal because everyone is doing it. We are obliged to do it just to keep up with life.

How do these digital distractions affect our personal lives, especially our pursuit of happiness? If such distractions threaten that pursuit, have we at least begun integrating them harmoniously into our daily lives? Are we coping with them? Or have we simply become used to them, leaving us no choice but to put up with them and carry on as best we can? If that is the case, haven’t we hobbled ourselves in our quest for happiness?

The Digital Fast Lane

To find answers to those questions and to get a sharper picture of how and how much digital technology shapes our world and our lives, let’s step back and view the digital universe and our own participation in it in greater detail. There’s a lot of information available about what devices people are using most today, how they use them, and how they feel about their participation in this digital world. It’s a common topic, often spoken of in the news media. You may be familiar with some of these data and opinions. But beyond the general trends there is a lot of variety in people’s digital behavior. To get us into the mood of this exploration and to arrive at a useful picture, answer the following questions:

• Among the devices you use regularly, which one do you use the most, and why? What differences do you see among your devices, and to what ends do you use each of them?

• How does your use of each of your devices relate to your goals in life; to requirements such as those coming from work, family, relationships and friendships, personal hobbies and projects; leisure-time activities?

• Are you comfortable with the amount of time you spend with digital communications—would you like to spend more time connected or would you prefer to spend less? Why, exactly?

• Do you ever feel manipulated by the devices, apps, and programs you use regularly? (For instance, does the design of an app cause you to spend too much time with it? Do advertisements and notifications intrude and annoy you too much? Do you feel compelled to check email, answer calls, or respond to social media when you would prefer not to or simply don’t have the time for it?)

• How do your person-to-person digital communications (email, texting, video calls, and so forth) compare to live encounters?

Write down and arrange your answers to these questions to get a picture of your digital engagement. Do any patterns emerge? This list will prove useful later when we begin to apply antidotes to those aspects of our digital usage that we consider problematic.

In preparation for writing this book, I asked friends, acquaintances, and some of my students what they think about the pros and cons of our digital lives. I also reviewed my own use of digital devices. Here are some of the trends that appeared from this research—results that are not surprising:

ADVANTAGES

• The speed, ease, and convenience of digital communications, especially with friends, family, and business contacts who live at a distance from you or who are traveling.

• The great variety of information and activities available via our digital devices, ranging from research materials to entertainment.

• How buying online has revolutionized shopping.

• Useful suggestions for purchases—targeted advertising—delivered to your devices based on your tracked preferences. (This is not always a positive. Some see it as a privacy issue and/or overly time consuming.)

DISADVANTAGES

• Overuse: spending too much time on our devices.

• Digital clutter: the sheer quantity of apps and programs can cause overwhelming distraction.

• Time pressure: social and business-related pressure to respond to calls, texts, and notifications producing the sensation of being “on call” 24/7, and the reduction of leisure time.

• Emotional vulnerability when using social media.

• Feeling susceptible to emotionally manipulative sales tactics.

• The superficiality and lack of nuance of interpersonal digital communications as compared to face-to-face meetings. Email is another example of this. Relying on written communications can introduce misunderstandings that are more easily avoided with in-person contact. (Improved technologies allowing video calls, such as Zoom and Skype, may have lessened this drawback.)

Books, the news media, and online research point out other negatives. One important topic is “deep work” versus “shallow work.” Here we are warned that our value in the marketplace and our career trajectories are threatened by distraction-dominated activities that make us less competitive. Human output generated by shallow work could be replaced by machines. Another negative is the planned obsolescence of both digital devices and software—a spending treadmill required to keep people up to date. Then there are the news feeds tailored to people’s personal and political biases. These have contributed their share to social and political divisions in recent years. Yet another negative is the time and money wasted due to technological glitches, not to mention hacking. When these occur, the “speed and convenience” of digital technology grinds to a halt.

So many of our devices and software programs are attractive and useful. And a wide variety of devices are available for different occasions and types of communication. The technology itself is truly amazing! But at the same time, many of us have noticed serious drawbacks in the use of these technologies and how our lives are affected by them. If you are like me, there is some tension between the advantages and disadvantages of digital communications. The advantages—such as those listed above—tend to seduce me toward the disadvantages, especially when it comes to wasting time and the intrusion of unwanted advertisements. My devices become the adult version of the chocolates or ice cream that children would love to eat all day long, and I can find myself wasting precious time that could be used in more meaningful ways. As another example, when traveling, I use an app that provides the soft, ringing sound of Tibetan bowls. This creates a nice atmosphere for meditation. But at some point an advertisement suddenly appears and the meditative mood is broken.

The tension between the pros and cons of this technology is reflected in the rarer or extreme ways some people engage with it. There are some who strictly limit their use of digital technology. Either they don’t need it or don’t like it, and they have concluded they will simply avoid using it or they discipline themselves so as not to be carried away by it. At the other extreme are those who are addicted to the technology—throwing away their time and money with online gambling, excessive shopping, and compulsive attention to their devices. This group includes the people who are extremely stressed out by all this distraction. The “nervous breakdown” of past years has been replaced by today’s panic attacks.

Distraction, Inc.

Is there a harmonious middle zone between the frenetic overuse of digital technology and barely using it at all (and missing out on its advantages)? I think this may be rare, and there are specific reasons for this—reasons that point to the role of distraction in the digital industry. After all, distracting us is what makes technology firms profitable. It is the key to their success, their bottom line. They know—and they have spent lots of money to find out—that if they don’t keep distracting us, capturing our attention, and luring us onward, we are not likely to stay logged on. We’ll get bored and go somewhere else. (We might even turn off our device and read a book!) As one tech-informed friend told me, “They [apps] are designed to lead you on in small increments, craving more stimulation.” So—number one—distraction is good business in the digital universe. Therefore, there is always some pressure pushing us toward at least mild addiction—overuse, time pressure, and navigating the emotional snares laid by social media.

But these pressures didn’t start with digital technology. When the CEOs of Silicon Valley (and their forerunners in the established advertising industry) saw how vital it was to keep customers wildly interested in their products (and distracted from any competing interests), they turned to the science of psychology. Today they have gone far beyond previous efforts that used surveys, interviews, focus groups, and so on. Now even medical technology, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), is used to see in real time how consumers’ brains react to specific advertisements and apps. And what did they discover? They discovered our hot buttons—many of them so subtle as to be beneath our radar—and they have used this knowledge to design their programs. Example: What impulse causes people to frequently check email? Is it information that we are after? The content of communications? No. The initial urge is a desire for social recognition, for love—“Someone cares about me.” The same kinds of subtle impulses make us crave a thumbs-up or heart emoji from our Facebook friends or YouTube followers.

There’s nothing new here. Good salespersons have always done the same things—often intuitively—to encourage potential customers. They could read people’s emotional needs and responses and appeal to those. But now the clutter produced by intense and generalized digital selling—so many of us eight billion humans are now part of this digital universe—has shaped distraction and all its side effects into a general atmosphere. As is often said, the world is getting smaller and smaller. That’s because we are so intimately and frequently connected. We may be moving in a direction where digital clutter, digital overuse, and digital time pressure are pushing us into uncomfortable mental and emotional environments and distracting us away from more satisfying thoughts and feelings. This is being seen more and more in children who are essentially addicted to digital activities. Dependence on their devices can narrow their focus exclusively to their own needs and desires. They can become so narcissistic as to be socially handicapped and vulnerable to depression. Adults are not immune to this.[*1]

Notice that distraction in the digital world is coming from two sources. First is the enormous quantity of information being aimed at us from many directions, through many media, and into the many devices we keep at hand. These comprise the platform from which the atmosphere of distraction is generated. As long as our devices are on, the messages keep coming. Second is the content—distracting in the sense that it can be emotionally disturbing. We are exposed to more and more violence in the news (and vividly, since anyone “on the scene” with a smartphone can film the latest outrage and post it online or sell it to a commercial news outlet).

Social media platforms such as Twitter (now X) allow loud pundits and politicians to set us thinking and sometimes angrily emoting. The best of them know exactly how to hook our attention. Social media has taken the place of the rumor mills of decades past. The old-style tabloids, with their exaggerated, questionable, and often bizarre stories, have been replaced by blogs, websites, slanted news channels, and social media.

Many of these facts are now well known to the public. I remind you of them because for each of us, at the personal level, there is a positive side to all this. We have a golden opportunity to see ourselves as the app developers and advertisers see us—with their subtle insight into some of our most intimate and hidden motivations. With such insights as a basis, we can refine our self-knowledge, giving us the power to head in the direction of genuine happiness rather than just accumulating more digital pats on the back and more “stuff” from Amazon, Walmart, and other major online retailers.

Conditioning 1.0

We all become aware from time to time of sensations arising from impatience, stress, and the need for emotional support. These are some of the common fallouts from our use of digital technology. For example, when our activities are fast-moving, any attempt to slow the pace will usually produce impatience. We are accustomed to a certain speed and intensity—just look how fast you type and text on your devices; how quickly you move from screen to screen, app to app. We have become conditioned to do so. So right now, to see what conditioning really feels like, let’s try an experiment.

Take out your phone or other portable device. Place it on a table in front of you, turn it off, and just look at it. Carefully notice its general shape and its component physical features—keyboard, screen area, holes and slots for input and output connections, buttons, and so forth. Move it around, turn it over, look at it from different angles. Lift it and feel the weight of it. Close your eyes and very slowly move your hands over the device. Is it warm or cool? Put your nose close and smell it.

How did it feel to do that? Did it seem silly or stupid? Did you sense any impatience? Did the device “call you” to be turned on and used? What came up for you? Most of the time we don’t think of a digital device as an object to just look at or weigh in our hand. Rather, it’s something to look into or through. For us, it’s a doorway to virtual reality, maybe even a part of ourselves.

Now, very slowly and carefully turn on the device. If it signals an alert, calmly ignore it. Choose a simple task: taking your own sweet time, look at an email or texts or check for calls. Type or text something very slowly and deliberately. If you sense you are beginning to rush, resist the impulse. Now once again run your hands over the device, feel its weight, look at it from different angles, then turn it off.

How did that feel? Did it make you anxious? Did you feel drawn by the device to engage with it at your normal speed? Did you notice any physical effects such as hunched shoulders, neck or facial tension, tapping feet, or the like? Or did it feel all right just to leave it be? Try this now once more to see if you can be simply relaxed and aware of the device rather than thinking of the past or future—what you did with it in the recent past or what you need to do with it in the near future. Be present with the device and with yourself. See how that feels. It’s likely you didn’t feel comfortable or even neutral while trying this experiment. If so, that’s because you were going against the habits you’ve acquired from years of using digital technology. (If you are relatively young, you may have started when you were a toddler.) As digital devices and software have become more and more powerful, they’ve become quicker, as have we when using them. Slowing down feels like swimming against a strong current.

We feel that way because we have become conditioned to our devices. Conditioning occurs when an activity is repeated over and over until it becomes automatic. More generally, we were conditioned in many areas by our families, our schools, and later as we entered work and professional life.[*2] Conditioning can include physical tension that accompanies our efforts and activities—tension that may not be necessary for the task at hand.

Of course, we couldn’t have learned useful things like our ABCs or addition and subtraction if we had to review them every time we needed them. They had to come instantly. That’s fine, and that’s necessary. But what about when we make a habit of negative emotions like anger, hatred, craving, laziness, jealousy, and pride? Sooner or later those emotions can lead to unhappiness, for ourselves and others. They poison the inner and outer atmosphere, don’t they?

I believe we all have a natural source of inner happiness that we can learn to access and allow to permeate our lives. I think the biggest impediment to that happiness is distraction. Distraction and conditioning are closely linked. Beginning with chapter 2, we are going to look at how we can work with distractions coming from our modern, digitally driven lifestyle. Then, since I believe that those distractions are based on deeper layers of human conditioning, we will see how we can loosen up and free ourselves from the distractions posed by this deeper conditioning.

Skip Notes

*1 According to a public advisory by the US Surgeon General, “[F]requent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain…and could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments.” “Surgeon General Warns That Social Media May Harm Children and Adolescents,” Matt Richtel, Catherine Pearson, and Michael Levenson, New York Times, May 23, 2023.

*2 Artists and inventors—people who depend on creating something fresh and new—seek to avoid habitual patterns. Their success requires “deep work” that can flourish in the absence of distraction.

2

The Tale of the Monkey

The notifications we so often receive on our devices are designed to distract. They are meant to get our attention. The mobile app, computer program, or website that sends them considers it important for you to pay attention to their notifications. It might be your bank asking for confirmation that you transferred some money. It could be YouTube telling you someone new has subscribed to your channel. Or is your smartphone sending you an ad or robocall? We may get many of these every day.

In spiritual traditions like my own, where meditation is practiced, avoiding distraction is really important. If a meditator cannot focus, he or she cannot even begin the practice of meditation. There are lots of stories and metaphors in these traditions that speak about this. One of the best known is the tale of the monkey. The monkey—representing our minds and the way our thoughts normally proliferate—swings through the trees and vines, attracted to everything it sees. A banana catches its eye and it drops whatever it was doing and swoops down to grab the fruit. In the middle of eating the banana it might hear the call of a bird or another monkey, and it drops the fruit and goes off to satisfy its curiosity. And so the monkey goes—day in and day out—distracted by one thing after another. Today we might say that the monkey is neurotic or has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—or is attached to its smartphone.

This experience is pretty familiar, isn’t it? We know that our minds often work this way. We may have discovered this the first time we were forced to concentrate continuously on some task. It might have been learning to read or memorizing the multiplication table. We saw (and our teachers warned us) that if we didn’t concentrate, we wouldn’t learn. In that and similar situations, concentration meant we had to avoid inner and outer distractions—put them aside temporarily. We had to stop thinking about our hunger and our favorite dessert in our lunch box. We had to put aside our resentment for not being chosen for the school volleyball team. Or we had to stop daydreaming or staring out the window and wishing we were out playing or on the way home. To do that, we had to restrain our monkey mind and find or create another mind that was more focused. One meditation tradition puts it this way: “We must bind the monkey with the rope of mindfulness.” Mindfulness is attention focused, in this case, on the mind itself. Over and over it asks the simple question, “What am I thinking?”

If our habits are in reality our conditioning—our deep-seated patterns of behavior—how much are we in the habit of focusing our minds and how often do we think and act like the monkey in our parable? No, we don’t need to be focused constantly like some robot. That would probably drive us mad. But I think many of us, if asked, would say that we could do with more focus than we normally have. Whether it’s work or play—and especially when it comes to games and sports—the more concentrated we are, the happier we will be with our performance. Focus may be one of the keys to happiness—to living a fulfilling lifestyle.

Of course, being unfocused, being distracted, was already a big problem before the digital age. If the knight with his lance or sword lost concentration as his enemy approached, he was done for! Likewise, if we didn’t prepare and concentrate well while taking a college entrance examination, our educational aspirations would be thwarted. Focus has always been a vital factor in many, many aspects of human life. But now we have added digital distractions to our basic problem. There’s a lot more easily accessible activity out there now, and these distractions stimulate the monkey mind as never before. Practicing mindfulness is an excellent way to lessen distractions in general, and especially those coming from our consumption of digital technology. We’ll explore mindfulness practice later in this chapter. But first we need to get an idea of how our thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and so forth are being tweaked by long-established human influences and digital technology.

The Power in Habits

Distraction and conditioning often go hand in hand. Our most deeply ingrained habits prime us to act and react. Both the trigger and the reaction it causes are basically distractive. In some cases—like a simple notification or software update pop-up—the distraction is straightforward. It’s not much different from being distracted by a dog barking outside our window. We may or may not lose focus. But what about the emotional disruptions mentioned earlier that distract us into dangerous territory—things like anger and hatred, desire and craving, dullness and laziness, jealousy and pride? Often these well up quickly from inside when the right trigger appears. They can be upsetting—sometimes dramatically so. You see a friend walking hand in hand with someone to whom you feel romantically attached or attracted. How easily that can trigger jealousy, as we all know from experience. For those who have been conditioned to racial intolerance, the common sight of “foreigners” or “strangers” (to avoid using nastier labels) in today’s multiethnic world triggers hatred. We can also be conditioned to be dull or lazy. When a load of work comes our way, we may say, “I’ll put it off until tomorrow.” If we get into that kind of habit, we may find ourselves always falling behind in school, on the job, or even when we promise to do a friend a favor.

We can also develop the habit of pride. We do things well, get lots of compliments, and having been convinced we are superior to others, we treat others as second class. At a minimum, that is not a good way to make and keep friendships and harmonious relationships. Such habitual patterns, repeated until we are fully conditioned to them, are a very big deal when it comes to both personal happiness and happiness in the world at large. Think of how different history might have been if many Germans and other Europeans in the early twentieth century had not been anti-Semitic. Or if Christians and Muslims at the time of the Crusades had been able to bridge their differences. Or if there were not the discrimination against People of Color—Black, Indigenous, and so forth—that is still too common in the United States. If you look at a world map, you will find it difficult to locate places where habitual negative patterns of behavior have not caused terrible tragedies.

But aside from these larger societal tragedies, there are subtler kinds whose triggers come into play beneath our radar. For example, if we were pushed hard to excel from the time we were children, we might have become perfectionists. Sometimes perfectionism causes subtle anxiety that triggers exaggerated responses, like depression when we feel we’ve been less than perfect or the obsessive need to cross every t. Likewise, childhood traumas such as abandonment can trigger obsessive needs for social connection—vulnerabilities that may swim just below the surface. Many of our social and cultural prejudices may slip in by this door as well.

Our world is plagued with such distractions, whether big or small—acting both as the triggers for conditioned responses and coming as the results of such reactions. You might call these “chains of distraction.” Many humans are engaged in or are the targets of ethnic, class, and economic discrimination and violence. This is a dense cloud, like the haze from a forest fire that darkens the general atmosphere of human life on Earth. And on a more personal scale, many of us are troubled by habitual thoughts and emotions that threaten our inner poise and inner peace and leave us unable to focus. What specifically has digital technology contributed to this world of distraction?

Habit Formation—There’s an App for That!

We already touched on the ways social media, blogs, biased news outlets, and other digital sources can amplify social unrest and political turmoil. These sources work in much the same way that gossip did in the pre-digital world. They rely on content (slogans, conspiracy theories, fake news) and are easy to spot. And the rapid spread of real-time news and events (enabled by digital technology) can also contribute to this confusing atmosphere. However, the design of many programs and apps injects a subtler kind of distraction into our lives. The intention is not to agitate us—not to contribute to our anxiety and stress. To succeed in the marketplace, digital corporations—most of which earn money by selling advertising or selling our data to advertisers—must lure us to their apps and sites and keep us there as long as possible. Because there is lots of money to be made in this branch of the advertising business, and therefore the competition is intense, the corporations spare no expense in finding ways to divert our attention to their apps and sites. Using the results of extensive behavioral research on consumers’ motivations, app designers have come up with ingenious ways to attract us and keep us coming back. Essentially they’ve learned to read our minds better than we can. And as I mentioned above, what they’ve learned about our subtle and often subconscious motivations can be turned around and used to give us greater self-knowledge and help us deal with life’s challenges more effectively. If, through mind training, we develop enough focus to catch ourselves becoming hooked on negative habitual tendencies or digital temptations, we can free ourselves from them and make informed choices. We become more independent.

A very subtle stream flows like an undercurrent beneath our intentional thoughts and emotions. From time to time we may notice this current, but to see it clearly we need to quiet our minds a bit and practice mindfulness. Using behavioral psychology, the modern advertising industry and, especially, digital software product designers have carefully explored this undercurrent of thoughts and emotions. As mentioned previously, to do so, not only have they used the traditional methods of focus groups, surveys, interviews, and so on but also analysis of modern neurochemistry and brain-scanning technology. What have they been looking for? They want to know what motivates people to visit apps and websites, stay there, return there—and make their app a habit. What have they discovered? For starters, they have found that many of our motivations do not match our stated opinions or intentions—we are frequently unaware of the reasons we click on a particular app or are attracted to a particular product.[*1]

Think about the smell of fresh-baked bread. You are walking down the street by a bakery one morning and that attractive smell—you may not even be conscious of its effect on you—draws you into the store. Chances are strong that you will emerge with a bag of baked goods. You had no intention of going for bread today, but you did. For this reason, bakeries, cafes, and restaurants often have a fan over their front door projecting food odors toward passersby. It’s good for business.

As another example, take the success of Coca-Cola. When the brand began, it competed with many other cola drinks. How did it distinguish itself? One of Coke’s earliest and most famous advertising tactics was to design their bottle in the attractive shape of a young woman. Today, most Coca-Cola ads show people gathered together having fun. Once again, the message isn’t what you would expect—the “fabulous taste” of Coca-Cola or that it’s “refreshing.” The essential message is social connection. It works because a subtle sense of loneliness and a need to socialize are common to the human condition. Our attraction to pleasant food smells, our need for companionship, and so many other habitual and automatic motivations are part of the subtle undercurrent of thoughts and emotions that app designers home in on and link to their digital products.

The discoveries in consumer behaviors and motivation made in advertising were once called “hidden persuaders,” and their application has been called “subliminal advertising.”[*2] The emotional undercurrents that digital software designers rely on today include loneliness, boredom, anxiety, stress, depression, indecision, confusion, frustration, fears—including FOMO (fear of missing out)[†3]—the desire to feel competent, the wish to be in control, to be soothed, and many others. They have discovered that we experience these as short, barely perceptible moments of discomfort—micro-pains. Since they are often very subtle, we may sense them only as a vague dissatisfaction—an “itch,” as app designers call it. Again, these are not emotions strong enough to cause you to join a street protest, sign a petition, or write a letter to the editor. But they can trigger a simple click on an app that relieves the discomfort, that scratches the itch. So what app designers are especially focused on is the moment before you click—on the impulse that triggers that action.

If you feel a twinge of boredom, wouldn’t some kind of excitement be the natural relief? That could mean a video game, a newsfeed, or even checking email. For loneliness or if you’re feeling a little down in terms of your relationships, Facebook is frequently the first choice for social connection and support. Feeling anxious and stressed out? You might turn to a meditation app like Headspace or soothing sounds on YouTube or Spotify. Whatever the uncomfortable thought or emotion poking you at the moment, digital apps, programs, and websites aim to provide relief in the form of a seemingly more pleasant distraction. Your attention is directed away from what’s bothering you. Of course, that doesn’t solve problems at their core. If it did, people would not need to return again and again, and the app would go out of business. So here’s the deal: in return for a few minutes (or hours) of agreeable distraction, the visitor is shown advertising and their data is logged. The visitor feels relief, perhaps followed by satisfaction. The app’s success—so many log-ons per day, so many regular users—attracts advertisers (who target visitors and make sales).

Beyond the initial lure to try an app, there are a number of clever strategies used to keep us returning and staying longer and longer. We won’t make a survey of these. But one good example is the principle of “variable reward.” Software design research has shown that we are more likely to stay with a program if its rewards vary over time—we’re not quite sure what will happen next. We are attracted to novelty, and if there isn’t enough of it in an activity, things become too predictable and we get bored and go away. The most obvious example of this is the slot machine. Slot machines are designed to pay out at random. This keeps the player interested. (And, of course, the payout is calculated to be much less than the value of the coins spent playing.) Video games, too, are designed in this way. Even the motivation for frequent email checking shares a connection with this common psychological habit. (“I’d better check again. There might be some nice surprise!”) Studies of dopamine flows in the brain (a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure) have shown that it’s not the actual reward from these apps and games that excites us—the shower of coins, thumbs-ups, or heart emojis—but the relief from the tension of craving the reward. It is the craving that is painful.[*4]

More Monkey Business

Let’s return to our monkey. The monkey is distracted from thing to thing on impulse. Monkeys love bananas, so when they see one, they go there impulsively—without a thought. The monkey craves the flavor—the reward. And the monkey isn’t satisfied until the anxiety of that craving—that micro-pain—is relieved by the actual banana. But very soon another craving distracts the monkey and the pattern repeats. As long as the monkey fails to notice the pattern of distractions and investigate its causes, the pattern remains in control. That’s one of the dangers of habits. Of course they also have an upside. We couldn’t survive or thrive without our wholesome habits.

Many of our daily digital routines are arranged intentionally. They are habits we decided upon in order to meet our everyday needs. We check email, watch newsfeeds at breakfast, respond to texts and voice messages on the way to work, work at a desk in front of a laptop or fixed computer. This is similar to the old analogic world where we checked the mail, read the morning paper, made telephone calls (and even sent and received telegrams), and maybe used a typewriter at work. Now our daily routines are enhanced by digital technology. But the real monkey business happens when we are at leisure. Whether this is a few minutes or hours, here is where the persuasive power of app designs becomes clear. The “banana” you crave may be relief from a subtle feeling of boredom, loneliness, anxiety, or any such emotional vulnerability that forms part of your conditioning. You turn to your device, see the logo of an app that provides the best and quickest relief, and click on it impulsively. You go to Facebook to check quickly on what friends are doing (and saying about you), and two hours later the app’s psychological bells and whistles are still attracting your interest. “Gosh, where did the time go?”

Where do all these subtle cravings, these micro-discomforts, this agitated undercurrent of thoughts and emotions, come from? They come from our personal experience—our upbringing as children, our formal education, our informal education (what we picked up from our friends and neighbors), our relationships, and our work life. This conditioning is our culture. Whether you were born and raised in the West or elsewhere, it is Western culture that now dominates much of the world. (And digital technology has played a big part in this dominance.)

The research that empowers digital commerce, probing consumer psychology and especially consumers’ motivations, is focused mostly on modern Westerners. And today, “modern Westerners” include many people living outside the US, Australia, and Europe.[*5] It should come as no surprise that our strongest mental and emotional habits are developed in childhood (and adolescence) and that in Western societies—with their energetic striving for individual expression and career success—emotional vulnerability acquired in youth is common. These vulnerabilities provide a fruitful area of research into consumer behavior and motivation. For example, today it is not uncommon for both parents to work full-time. Therefore, many children in this situation may feel somewhat lonely and abandoned. This can bring up issues regarding social connection and social validation (“Am I loved?” “Am I valued?”). The child may also develop FOMO, which has been described as one of the motivations behind Instagram, Snapchat, SHAREit, and social media platforms, where the incentive to open the app is to chronicle one’s daily life experiences with photographs, captions, messages, and short videos. The user is saying, “This is my life and here are the meaningful things I am doing. What do you think?” Facebook is another popular outlet for this kind of message.

Based on a fear of missing out on the passing events of their lives and recording their importance, fans of Instagram often spend hours each day engaged with the program. This involvement provides Instagram with statistics to entice potential advertisers, demonstrating that many people spend substantial time on the app and therefore it would be worthwhile to place advertisements there. FOMO can also stimulate excessive use of email, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and so forth, where users are led on with the hope of receiving a thumbs-up, a heart emoji, and other forms of social validation.

Driven to Excel

A wide range of emotional vulnerabilities is common in Western culture and many parts of the world heavily influenced by the West. This doesn’t mean Westerners are typically traumatized and panic-stricken. However, growing up today in a Western society involves common aspirations and activities that require intense striving, complex thought, and emotional stamina. That’s because life in the West revolves around the expression of personal independence.[*6] An example is the importance of having a successful career—of material and psychological success in a competitive world. One of the first questions you hear when meeting someone new is, “What do you do?” It’s a loaded question that may also ask, “Is what you do important (compared to most others)?” “Are you successful?” and even, “Have you made it on your own?” Since this is so important, there is pressure on parents (who also faced these questions) to make sure their children are successful.

This can create tensions and traumas, especially if the young person has ideas about their aspirations that differ from their parents’ advice and expectations. Such conflicts are common, especially today. A typical example: The parents wish for their child’s success and happiness based on career X, while the child wants to pursue Y. Doubt and indecision would be a natural outcome if the situation became an inner conflict that the child was unable to resolve. And there are plenty of apps and games that are designed to briefly alleviate twinges of doubt and indecision.

The drive to be outstanding, unique, different, and better—the ideal of the individual in Western society—can become an obstacle if taken to extremes. If competing with others is uppermost in one’s mind, there is constant pushing to be better and do more. One outcome could be perfectionism, which we touched on previously. Here the mind is obsessively monitoring one’s progress, which can contribute to neurotic thinking. This competitive individualism could also lead to excessive pride.

The situation I’m describing in this chapter is not theoretical. It can be easily verified by anyone who is able to pause, step back, and shine a focused light on their own mind, the activities of their fellow humans, and the ways societies interact in today’s world. The human world is, after all, no more than the interactions of human minds. But this pause to observe and reflect rarely happens because we, like the fabled monkey, are too distracted. We are carried along by the rushing river of our habits and are left wondering why we lack happiness and peace of mind. Therefore, if we are serious about developing those qualities, we need to train our monkey with the rope of mindfulness.

Incidentally, Tibetan medicine provides a metaphor and form of healing applied to the human nervous system that can shed additional light on conditioning and stress illnesses. Called lung (pronounced “loong”), it shows in some detail how the mind, physical body, and nervous system work together to form habit patterns that can restrict our freedom of choice. For a short description of this process from the Tibetan medical point of view, see appendix 1.

Doing Something about It:
An Introduction to Mindfulness

Certainly, mindfulness practice can bring us peace, at least temporarily. But in spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, it has a greater purpose—one that fits in nicely with our wish to live harmoniously with the digital universe. Mindfulness can empower us to attain clarity—a mind free of the whirling clouds of distraction. Clarity is the basis for creating the space and openness that can lead to genuine happiness, the fulfillment that is deeper than the happiness available in the ups and downs of modern life. Clarity is the stage upon which we can enact a meaningful life. As we practice mindfulness to attain some clarity, we will be able to examine our engagement with digital media and see specifically which digital activities are helpful and which are harmful to the harmony we seek. Mindfulness will provide an opening to the self-knowledge we need to begin this endeavor.

The undercurrent of thoughts and emotions described earlier is what brings our conditioning into the here and now. Something triggers one of our habitual patterns and we act, often automatically. Again, much of that conditioning is necessary and positive. But other aspects make us slaves of distractions that destroy peace of mind and prevent focused, consciously directed activity. Clearly these habitual patterns are powerful. But if you understand their nature and begin working with them, you discover that they are made of the flimsiest and most fleeting of materials—thoughts and emotions. It is only their repetition that gives them such power. A thought of anger, jealousy, craving—any thought—is still just a thought. As a wise man once said, “Although enemies such as hatred and craving have neither any arms nor legs, and are neither courageous nor wise, how have I been used like a slave by them?”[*7] The automatic nature of conditioning can be softened with patience, presence, and mindfulness. As we gradually deconstruct these patterns, we will be able to direct our lives consciously and deliberately. We will become more focused and balanced. And we will begin to create causes for deep, authentic happiness.

Mindfulness practice provides us with an initial opening to let light shine on our inner lives and processes. Eventually it will enable us to pause and reflect before reacting automatically to inner and outer stimuli. The mindfulness practices presented throughout this book have been tested by Buddhists for over 2,500 years. They are more than just a way to slow down and relieve tension. They attend to the roots of tension and distraction and can bring lasting positive changes to our lives.

Here is an introduction that we will expand upon later. It is the first of a number of practices and exercises I will be introducing to open our minds and emotions and give us space to breathe, act, and make changes.

1. Sit comfortably on a chair or cushion, keeping your spine relatively straight (you can also do this lying down). If you are seated on a chair, let your feet rest on the floor.

2. Your eyes may be open or closed.

3. Feel the weight of your body where it touches your chair, cushion, floor, or mattress.

4. Take several long breaths through your nose. Then focus on your belly and feel its movement as you breathe.

5. When your attention strays from that sensation of breathing, gently bring it back.

6. If you are distracted by sights, sounds, or feelings, just let them be; let them fade naturally and come back to the breath.

7. See if you can maintain this meditation comfortably for five or ten minutes, then take a few deep, slow breaths and end the session.

Your aim is to focus on a single object in order to become calm and concentrated. It is important to know that this is not a kind of concentration that is tense and forced. Rather than pushing to achieve concentration, then becoming irritated when you are distracted and concentrating harder in order to achieve a result, here focus emerges from relaxation and the repeated gentle return to the object—in this case, your breathing. So let go of any judgments about how you are doing. Those kinds of tensions are part of the world of the tight, agitated habitual patterns we are now relaxing.

Obviously this practice requires patience. If you are unused to meditation—to taking a break from normal, “purposeful” activity—just deciding to sit for five or ten minutes may generate impatience. (“Am I wasting my time here?”) Once you have entered the practice, patience is required to remain calm when your attention strays and to keep gently bringing it back. However, there are rewards. At some point, perhaps in your initial session, you will feel pleasantly relaxed. You will also begin to feel present, a quality the monkey mind doesn’t know. Over time, mindfulness meditation can begin to bring down your stress level—that nervous pushing. For now, though, think of this as an experiment. See how it goes and let go of expectations. Later we will develop a more extended, deeper practice of mindfulness.

A Pause for Reflection

Now look at the list you made from the last chapter detailing your digital usage. Maybe the survey of habit formation and conditioning introduced above rings some bells for you. You might want to take a moment to recall any uncomfortable, distracting, or negative patterns of thought and emotion that you have noticed in your life.

• Do any of these patterns seem to make you vulnerable to the enticements of digital apps and programs?

• Are you more easily distracted than you would like to be? Does your mind tend to wander like the mind of the monkey in our story? This could be in regard to important tasks that require your attention but also with the ordinary flow of your mental and emotional life.

• What inner and outer distractions are most likely to grab your attention? Why are you more sensitive to these attention-getters than to other things?

• When you are using your digital devices, do you notice any tension in your body? Do your shoulders tense up, your jaw, the area around your upper cheeks and eyes, anywhere else? Do such tensions occur regularly for you in other situations? If so, remember these regular physical reactions.

• What things irritate you most—and why? What things make you smile? Can you remember or imagine where these habits came from?

Skip Notes

*1 This discovery was actually made much earlier in the history of modern advertising, although its application was less subtle than in today’s world.

*2 The journalist Vance Packard was, in the 1950s, one of the first to make modern advertising research and strategies public. The Hidden Persuaders was the title of his most famous book.

†3 This is a term coined by academics in the field of app development.

*4 According to Anna Lembke, the medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University, engaging with social media releases dopamine, lighting up the same part of the brain’s reward pathway as drugs and alcohol. But we have 24/7 access for this particular drug. See Luis Velarde, “How Addictive, Endless Scrolling Is Bad for Your Mental Health,” Washington Post, July 14, 2023, www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/07/14/social-media-mental-crisis-youths/.

*5 Of course, local variations must be taken into account. An advertising company in a Muslim country is not likely to show young women in skimpy clothing plugging their products.

*6 In contrast, traditional Asian cultures have stressed one’s established role in society, exemplified by India’s caste system and the stratified societies of Japan, ancient China, and elsewhere.

*7 Shantideva, A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, trans. Stephen Batchelor (Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1981), 33. Shantideva was an eighth-century Indian Buddhist monk and philosopher.

Part Two

◼

Learning to Breathe Easily

There is a common suggestion when you’ve gotten so wound up that you’re almost panting: “Take a breath.” If you literally take a deep breath, you will momentarily ground yourself, calm yourself, and be in a much better position to deal effectively with the situation at hand. You will feel better.

Today a growing number of people are becoming aware of the problems caused by our participation with digital media. A variety of strategies have been developed to deal with tech overconsumption. They include “time boxing”—where we strictly determine our activities throughout the day to limit our time using digital media. It has been argued that if you wish to excel professionally, near abstinence from digital media may be necessary.[*1] Another approach is provided through residential camps where people—children especially—are exposed to “analog” activities that are considered more wholesome—activities that encourage face-to-face human interactions. And for anxiety and stress in general, popularized mindfulness techniques have become fashionable to lower the pressure level and help us “chill out.”

All these techniques can be helpful in the short term and in specific areas. But I don’t concentrate on them in this book because they do not tackle the overall problem of conditioning and habitual patterns that we examined in the previous chapters. They miss the crux of the matter. If we are going to handle distractions in a way that brings us peace of mind, balance, and authentic happiness, we need to detect negative patterns and develop and fully absorb new and wholesome ones. We need new habits that will act organically to open us up rather than tie us down. We cannot simply throw quick fixes and minor modifications at something as strong and automatic as lifelong habitual patterns, not if we are looking for significant change in the direction of true and deep happiness.

Skip Notes

*1 This approach is recommended by writers such as Cal Newport in his well-known book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central, 2016).

3

The Exploration of Inner Space: Developing Patience and Openness

These days we are very familiar with impatience. With patience—not so much. If you are someone who uses digital devices like a smartphone regularly, the exercise we did in chapter 1—simply touching and observing the phone—probably brought out some impatience. After all, our familiar electronic tools are part of the fast schedules and routines that dominate the lives of many of us. They are designed for quickness that is equated to efficiency. And each new generation of devices, software, and connection speed raises our expectations of how fast “fast” should be. The fast lane was always there in the pre-digital world, but it is these devices that have upped the speed limit. We rarely use them in an easygoing, laid-back manner.

But we could! And if we did, we would be rewarded with a reduction in tension, anxiety, and stress. We would be at the doorway of serenity. This is a lifestyle change that we find difficult even to imagine today. And that same space created by patience will also improve the quality of everything we do—including our work.

In places where hurricanes or tornadoes are common, when they appear—tearing through and destroying everything in their path in seconds—people must find a place to take refuge. That may mean a storm cellar, or it might mean getting as far away as possible from the scene of the whirlwind. Most of us would not describe our daily routines as hurricanes. But the kind of speed and intensity we consider normal today was the extreme in the old analog world. In 1900 or even 1950, people as speedy as most of us are today would have been described as “headed for a nervous breakdown.” Confirmation of this general trend toward speed, anxiety, and stress in everyday life are the many antidotes for it coming from medical science, psychology, and alternative medicine, along with the popularity of Asian traditions of medicine and spiritual development (primarily meditation). There are even numerous apps for meditation and relaxation, along with boutique yoga and meditation studios, all catering to stressed-out workers, homemakers, single parents, academics—well, everybody.

When we start to feel the effects of our modern lifestyle—whether when we are still young and energetic or later when we begin to be worn down by it—finding refuge from these storms begins to make sense. We need to create some space to breathe within our lives and expand and explore that space. We’ve already been introduced to one kind of refuge: mindfulness meditation.

Yes, mindfulness meditation will cool us down when we encounter peaks of stress. But practiced consistently and thereby deepened, mindfulness will change the whole tone of our lives. One way it will do that is by training us to be patient.

To create from mindfulness meditation a useful tool or refuge, it needs to become a habit. See if you can find one or two brief intervals in your day when you can regularly practice the sequence I presented at the end of chapter 2. As you progress—becoming more and more used to meditation practice—the sessions will naturally and comfortably extend in length. There is no need to force it. In this way, gradually extend your sessions to twenty to thirty minutes each. And try to find a time and place where the atmosphere is calm and the setting is pleasant in order to provide positive reinforcement for your meditation period. You might find or buy a comfortable cushion or use a favorite chair that allows you to maintain a comfortably erect posture. Lighting a candle or a stick of incense is unnecessary, but if this is attractive to you, why not? You could even use a bell or singing bowl to start and end your sessions if you find that appealing. However you arrange it, remember that you are creating a refuge space for yourself—a positive home base from which you can fashion a more comfortable inner life. Oh, and remember to turn off your phone when you meditate!

Once again, remember not to push your meditation with the kinds of demands and expectations to which you may be accustomed. Let the rewards of mindfulness emerge from the practice itself—your attention on your breath. Over time, as you become more experienced with meditation and as you extend your sessions a little longer, you may find yourself entering very peaceful states where thinking slows down or even seems to stop. When this happens, shift your focus from your breathing to the feeling of serenity and calm itself. This object of attention is subtler. When you lose focus on calmness, return to the breath.

An Introduction to Post-Meditation

Once you have developed some enjoyment and stability doing regular on-the-cushion sessions, it is time to introduce mindfulness meditation to selected moments in your active, daily routine. This is called “post-meditation”—moments of mindfulness integrated into daily life. These moments are supported by your formal meditation sessions. Eventually they can be expanded to embrace your entire waking life, but this is something that for most of us occurs very gradually over years.

Post-meditation can be a bit like stopping race car drivers in the middle of a race for a short coffee break before continuing the competition. Since in our case the “race” is the rush of our ingrained habits, in the beginning we will have to introduce these moments of calm very deliberately and for short periods. You can practice mindfulness as post-meditation anywhere and at any time, but there are natural breaks in most of our routines that are more convenient. Waiting in line is one good opportunity. You are in line at the post office (or bank, grocery checkout lane, coffee shop, gas station—you name it). Normally at these times our mind wanders restlessly. How much are we going to pay? Will we pay cash, use a credit card, or use a payment app on our phone? Do we have the right forms? Do we have time for another errand? And so forth. When you find yourself in one of these situations, check to see if your mind is rushed or anxious and if parts of your body have tensed up. That alone will introduce a mini pause. Then follow your breath for a little while. Finally, give yourself a pat on the back and smile, because you have done something extraordinary.

If you are on your morning jog, can you interrupt your thoughts and fantasies to just feel the bottoms of your pounding feet or the air against your cheek? If you work at a desk, can you take a coffee break where you will be alone for a few minutes? If so, you could count several rounds of ten breaths and take note of how this makes you feel. Since each of us has a different routine, the first thing we can do is list opportunities to pause such as those suggested above. Start by finding one or two short gaps in your schedule that you can use each day. Don’t make them long pauses or try to meditate at times when you need to be engaging in other activities.

Here are a few more suggestions:

• From time to time, slow down the pace of your typing on your laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

• When you are about to make a call, pause and take a breath before dialing.

• Notice if you wash and dry your dishes quickly. If so, slow your pace.

• Do the same with preparing food, like cutting carrots or onions.

• When you clean your house, take your time.

• When you are shopping, do so in a leisurely manner.

Come up with some of your own ideas for this exercise.

It takes a moment of self-awareness to remember and initiate these exercises. And they work much better if you concentrate on what you are doing as much as possible rather than being carried away with thoughts. When you lose touch with the present and get carried away, you are likely to return to your old, faster pace.

Since the conditioning you are working with is often tight and resists changes, it will have the nature of impatience. Your mini meditations will therefore be acts of patience. At first it will take a lot of discipline just to initiate your pause. But keep at it. Each post-meditation session will bring you a moment of self-awareness that will begin to open up your life—awaken you to life. It will bring a breath of fresh air both to your lungs and to your lifestyle. Doing this exercise, you will gradually create a base from which you can take greater control of your time and pace. At times these sessions may not work or take you very far, but be patient with that also; don’t set yourself up for disappointment or negativity by creating rigid expectations of success. Relax that one too.

Patience is an important quality to cultivate; it will gradually iron out and soften the general tone of your life through post-meditation. When you suddenly encounter one of those difficult life situations that evoke strong emotions like annoyance, anger, or hatred or an extreme expression of craving—things that knock you off-balance—say to yourself, “Let’s be patient!” Pausing to do that will create a physical, mental, and emotional reaction that will ground you. You will experience a moment of presence of mind and objectivity that may prevent you from creating a difficult situation for yourself or others. As they say, “Look before you leap.” The more you think about and practice patience, the smoother life will become and the greater independence you will have from the distractions of the mental and emotional side of the fast lane. You may have noticed how patient, relaxed people attract others and those who are impatient and nervous repel them. Practicing patience will make you one of the former.

Natural Patience

The mind training for developing patience that I just described is done case by case, starting with one or two simple situations and slowly expanding to many of your activities. Gradually you will loosen up your tighter habitual patterns and a relaxed, spacious quality will emerge. However, there is a quality of natural, effortless, innate patience in the heart-mind of every one of us.[*1] Consciously conditioning ourselves to patience and familiarizing ourselves with it will lead us to the discovery of this natural quality. It may even come to us out of the blue. In either case, we will begin connecting to the wise side of our nature. This is a side of us that is always available but one we fail to notice because we are so speedy and distracted. Our conditioning—whether it’s from our upbringing or the digital world—acts like a fogbank concealing this beautiful and open awareness. As that fog gradually clears, we will begin to act from the wisdom quality of patience.

The wisdom I speak of—whether it’s the wisdom of patience or of some other wholesome trait—has a spontaneous quality. There is an experience of unity, that things are not so separate or dualistic. In a way it appears as a gift—effortlessly. And words, such as these I am using now, don’t really do it justice. We will ease into this wisdom side of training very gradually. But don’t be surprised if you experience this open freedom occasionally without any warning. The more you are open to it, discovering and putting aside your opinions, biases, and points of view, the more often this will happen. It will put a smile on your face.

Openness

It takes patience to untie a complicated knot, to loosen the tight spaces between the strands of rope. Likewise, openness gives us the space needed for us to live with greater calm, focus, and serenity.

I like to view openness on three levels. The first one we are all quite familiar with. When we were young, we were trained to be polite—to be a “nice” person rather than a rude and abrasive one. This is a common social norm—part of the self-control parents try to teach their children. I doubt there is any society where negative interactions among its members are generally encouraged. If someone visits your home, they are your guests and you try to treat them politely. If you are a shop owner or engaged in some other form of business, you try to maintain a friendly attitude toward your customers, knowing that it is good business to do so. Every office or factory manager or employee knows that maintaining smooth, friendly relations is more pleasant and in most cases more productive than working in tense, combative environments. I imagine this is true everywhere.

Maintaining this kind of openness is not always pleasant, and it requires discipline. A salesperson may not enjoy catering day in and day out to customers whose inquiries and demands can be tiring or exasperating. In the office environment there are often personality conflicts that have to be inhibited. But because we depend on customers and coworkers for our livelihoods and on our friends, families, and other acquaintances for a comfortable emotional life, we have to be open to them. We have to open up enough to pay attention, whether it is to provide the goods and services customers want to buy or to keep our conversations friendly. Of course, this is an ideal, but societies function because it is generally met. So, for the most part, this kind of openness is a conditioning we learned as we grew up, and it is somewhat mechanical in its application in daily life. But it is still good and forms a potential basis for opening up even more.

This first, basic level of openness is not voluntary, and you are mostly doing it for self-interest. You are following a norm. But at the second level of openness, your personal willingness to open up creates a different atmosphere. Here we engage with others for their benefit as well as our own. We practice empathy. There’s a greater acknowledgment of other people and their interests and of our need to include them in our activities. This can be challenging because, here, opening up means we are not so protective of ourselves—we are willing to be vulnerable. You decide to make yourself part of a situation that includes others. To use a metaphor: The first level of openness is like driving through a neighborhood. You may catch a few details—a house, a beautiful tree, a person walking—but for the most part, your eyes are on the road, intent on getting you to your destination. The neighborhood is just something on your way. The second level of openness is like walking through that same neighborhood. Because you are moving more slowly and not enclosed in an automobile, you see more detail and can take more interest in your surroundings. You are making yourself more available to whatever appears.

Activities on this second level can be as simple as visiting friends because you really want to know how they are. You watch and listen attentively. You are open to whatever interplay occurs. They might thank you and offer tea; ask how you are doing. On the other hand, they might close the door on you, saying, “Not now, I’m busy.” Or they might ask you for a loan or to look after one of their children for a couple of hours. It could be unpleasant, but your open attitude itself makes negativities easier to handle: “I can’t loan you a hundred dollars now, but how about fifty?” If for instance you are involved with some kind of group working to benefit others or simply involved in an interesting group project, the openness of the individuals involved creates a positive experience even if the aims of the project are not met. There isn’t the same kind of tension here as with a business enterprise where openness is more limited and the attainment of goals paramount.

In this state of openness where you wish to benefit others, you too are always benefited. Your openness and the inspiration it imparts will increase, bringing more and more joy to your life. Basically that’s because everything we experience in life is determined or flavored by our mentality. Narrow expectations create tension, whereas open expectations—focused more on the process and companionship rather than on the outcome—create space and comfort. To open at this second level requires an active, conscious willingness to let down our guard, to eliminate some of the boundaries between ourselves and others—conditioning we may have acquired as youngsters or later on. You can tell yourself, “I think I can open up more, and I believe this will mean a happier and more serene life. Yes, I can do it!”

Practicing Openness

Here are some effective ways to open yourself more at this second level: If you regularly drive or take public transportation to work or another regular activity, find a way to break up the trip so that for a short while you are walking. Park your car farther from your destination, take a short walk before entering your car, or get off the bus or train a stop early. Give yourself extra time to be able to do this. Then walk leisurely and look around. Take notice of your surroundings and see if something interests you. You might write down anything interesting you see (or hear or smell or feel). Until this exercise becomes a habit, you could keep a journal for it. The important thing is not to be in a rush and to be open to new experiences.

Go somewhere new: If you are used to going to a specific place from time to time—a restaurant, coffeehouse, neighborhood, theater, library, sporting event, park, and so on, break that routine once in a while and go somewhere completely new to you. Open up to that new environment and take note of what you are seeing and experiencing. Again, do so calmly and serenely. Notice how you are breathing and walking. Just be open.

Try doing something you’ve never done before. If you have never been to a theatrical performance, go to one and be open to the experience. Go to a restaurant serving something new to you—perhaps you’ve never eaten Arabic food, or Japanese, Ethiopian, Scandinavian, and so on—and be open to the new and unusual flavors. Listen to live music in styles you are unfamiliar with. If you don’t like to dance, go dancing! You get the picture. Do something out of character and see how it goes. You may find it refreshing.

For many of us, the most challenging ways of opening are with people. Try doing someone a spontaneous favor, such as offering someone something you value. At a café or coffeehouse, buy a beverage for a stranger. You could offer a neighbor or coworker a ride. You could invite a new acquaintance to a party. You could drop by and cheer up someone who is ill or feeling down. (See if you can do this for their enjoyment and not because you want a “thank you.”[*2])

Other possibilities include activities such as joining a folk dance group or language club, taking tai chi lessons, or learning to play a musical instrument. You could teach something that you are good at. The idea is to try something you would never normally think of doing—something that goes against your style and is outside your comfort zone. Be sure that what you choose involves live, person-to-person interaction.

These are just a few possibilities to stimulate your imagination. If you see the value of occasionally engaging in these kinds of fresh, even unexpected activities, you will become more spontaneous. And spontaneity is the essence of openness.

Natural Openness:
Spaciousness

Living at the second level may eventually lead you to a place where you begin to see that everything in the universe—yourself, other people, other beings, all phenomena—is interconnected. Rather than being open to things piece by piece, one at a time, here there is an underlying feeling, a spacious view where with each breath there is a sense of life, inspiration, and vitality. This is the third level. It may come to you gradually or it may hit you suddenly—perhaps by being in a naturally beautiful setting or hearing inspiring words or music.

A spacious view of life can become part of us when we make the intention to open the heart-mind as much as possible. The spaciousness I speak of is the energy generated by such openness. It is a reflection, an attribute, of great openness—a spiritual quality. It has the nature of love and compassion. And this level is a great refuge and protection from the ups and downs of life and the anxiety and stress these normally cause. Here we are able to accept life in an entirely relaxed manner. Whether we face suffering or joy, it doesn’t matter what the experience is. This openness brings a relaxation and spaciousness that sustains a healthier mentality, bringing strength and balance to our mind and body.

This third level, then, is unconditioned openness. We become available to it at all times and in all situations. It pervades our life and always brings immediate benefit. Once we’ve arrived at this level, we don’t really have to practice openness in a mechanical way because it’s just there—and it has always been there as a natural attribute of the human heart-mind, “soul,” or “spirit.” We haven’t really created it. The second level can bring us in contact with unconditioned openness and then, by being available to it, we discover it.

Practically speaking, opening beyond the first, highly conditioned level is very simple. One doesn’t need to be a “spiritual” person or train extensively in practices such as meditation. The practice is just to be open to the experiences of daily life. You try your best and see how far you can open up as you go through the three levels. As mentioned above, one very good way to familiarize yourself with openness and nurture it is to spend as much time as possible outside in nature. The natural world is spacious and free of the entangling thoughts that often bind us. It can relax and inspire us. If we are attentive and willing, we can drop our troubles at the gate when we enter a park, climb a mountain or hillside, or walk barefoot on the beach.

When you begin to incorporate these more open attitudes and new practices into your daily life, it is again important to do so gradually and with a relaxed attitude. Taking that approach is itself a powerful practice that counters and softens the tightness and pushiness that creates anxiety, stress, and a lack of balance. So don’t make this one of those “big projects” that can attract a lot of overseriousness and tension. This is a key piece of advice that I will be repeating again and again throughout this book.

Skip Notes

*1 “Heart-mind” refers to the mind of wisdom that knows directly, intuitively.

*2 Recent studies have shown that even small random acts of kindness create a much bigger positive impact on the recipient than most of us imagine. See Catherine Pearson, “The Unexpected Power of Random Acts of Kindness,” New York Times, September 2, 2022.

4

Applying Mindfulness in Daily Life

We have already begun to explore mindfulness as a formal, seated meditation where we concentrate on the breath. I have also made suggestions for bringing presence of mind to our daily activities. In this chapter we will combine these two approaches in a more organized and powerful way. Here we will apply mindfulness to our bodies, our feelings, phenomena, and our minds. This is derived from a traditional Buddhist practice called “the Four Applications (or Foundations) of Mindfulness.” By doing so, we will develop some flexibility and independence from the automatic drives of our habitual patterns—our conditioning and distractions. When we become more aware of the sensations and activities of our bodies, the nature of our feelings, how we view and interact with the things we perceive, and how our minds work, we can identify and free ourselves from patterns that can lead to anxiety and stress and that cloud our understanding of reality. As our mindfulness strengthens, we will more easily be able to notice and counteract distractions, and our ability to relax will improve. We will also begin to enjoy greater command over our activities.

Again, I would suggest you avoid treating these practices as ordinary projects where you set goals, have expectations, and work rigorously and methodically to succeed. Yes, we want to progress and improve. But the single-minded, success-driven attitude is at the heart of many of our activities that cause tension, speediness, and anxiety. By being relaxed, open, and exploratory—yet gently persistent—we will allow these practices to penetrate and soften us like a soothing massage applied to tight muscles.

Because the exercises below may be new to you and are to be done in daily life, the first step is simply to remember to do them. They don’t require much time within your normal schedule, but at first it may be easy to forget them and just go with your usual flow. Whether you set up specific times during the day for them, are more spontaneous, or both, doing a morning session of mindfulness daily is a good time to remind yourself of this new intention. Visualize the times and places when later in the day you will practice these forms of mindfulness. Then, the next time you do seated meditation, or perhaps when you are preparing for bed, check to see how often you remembered to do them. This process of checking up on yourself will help you become more self-aware.

Being Mindful of the Body

One of my students decided to finish his last two years of college in a single year. He was also working part-time. He found he could accomplish all of this by sleeping exactly four hours per night and assigning the remaining twenty hours to a rigorous schedule. He completed his courses and graduated, but after the school year finished, he collapsed. The mere smell of coffee—which he drank to keep himself awake—caused him to shake and tremble from stress. Fortunately he was young and healthy and managed to get back to a more relaxed norm.

Because our minds are so quick and easily distracted, we frequently abandon the body. We lose our awareness of it and leave it on automatic while our attention follows the busy mind. It is easy for that to happen because the body has a naturally slower rhythm than the mind. But even so, speedy thinking and exaggerated effort accelerate our nervous system, pushing the body beyond its comfort zone, and this is a major component of stress. My student found this out the hard way. And when the body begins to feel anxious and icky, the mind picks up on this and begins worrying. Then the two reinforce each other, creating a feedback loop that throws us further and further out of balance. When this goes too far—to a “nervous breakdown”—most people see a doctor and are prescribed tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and other medications.

When we work in the opposite direction—being mindfully aware of our body—the body’s naturally slower speed will help calm and anchor the mind. So, ideally, in every physical action we take—big or small—we can maintain awareness. We connect the mind with the body. And this connection will benefit the body enormously. This will bring relaxation to the body, which is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your health. Experienced athletes know how to move from a basis of relaxation. This mind-to-body connection can also help you deal with physical pain. Rather than being automatically drawn to a part of the body that is hurting, extend mindfulness to the body as a whole. The pain will diminish. Your redirected attention can become a very powerful form of healing.

When practicing mindfulness of the body while seated, we can begin with the breath and then expand to all other physical sensations. We can sense the weight of our body concentrated in our buttocks, sit bones, and lower thighs. We can feel the weight of our hands on our knees or in our lap. In fact, we can feel the attraction of gravity in any part of our body if we are attentive. We can feel the pulse of our heartbeat. We can feel the temperature of the air on our skin and the tactile sensations of our clothing against our skin. Attention will develop our sensitivity.

Then we can extend this practice to our postures and to our body in motion. Our main postures are standing, walking, sitting, and lying down. When you go to bed at night, take a moment to relax and feel the posture and tell yourself, “I am lying down.” It’s a moment of presence. Then let it go. When you are walking, do the same: feel your body in movement; focus on your feet, legs, swinging arms, torso, head, or the body as a whole, and say to yourself, “I am walking.” See how long you can continue that awareness. Do the same with standing and sitting. At some point you may want to be present to the transitions from one posture to another. If you persevere with this, your body will begin to function as a reminder to be present.

The goal here is not to be continually aware of your posture and movement but to take notice from time to time each day. When you decide to go for a walk or are working at your desk, you might bring the intention to stay with your body as long as you can. Or you may begin noticing your posture spontaneously at some point during your day. Be nonjudgmental when you discover you’ve forgotten. Bring yourself back gently and positively to the practice. You are taking important steps to loosen up and bring peace, joy, and focus to your life. Always stay with that positive motivation. Improvement will come naturally, at its own pace.

The other physical sensations can also become part of this dynamic meditation: tastes, smells, sights, sounds, and a whole variety of tactile sensations. Here we are extending mindfulness of the body to areas we often take for granted. Fleetingly we notice that we taste a flavor or feel a breeze against our cheek or the sensation of heat from the sun on our skin. But we don’t really go very deeply into these sensations. With greater attention they can become sources of great pleasure, like the refreshing feeling of a cool shower on a hot day.

Suggestions for Practice

If you are doing the practice of mindfulness of the breath daily, this exercise will provide a foundation from which you can branch out into other areas of the body. At the end of your session, you might try a body scan, starting with the top of your head and working down to your feet. Simply relax and notice the “raw” sensations—without any mental commentary.

Here are some common situations where you can explore extending mindfulness of the body:

In nature: walking, hiking, biking, swimming in parks, lakes, rivers, at the ocean, sitting quietly in a forest. Try leaving the speed of daily life behind. Walk leisurely. Roll down a grassy hillside with your eyes closed and sense the ground, grass, and leaves as you spin.

In the water: When you are taking a bath or shower or swimming, open completely to the sensations of the water on your skin.

Make no barriers between yourself and the sensations of wetness, coldness, or warmth. Float, dive under the water, body surf. Relax completely and let go of your thoughts as you experience an ocean of sensations.[*1]

Watching fireworks: A creative and well-presented fireworks display is meant to be totally captivating. Allow yourself to be carried away by the forms and colors, the sounds of the fireworks bursting, the smell of the powder. You could experience a bonfire or even the fire in a fireplace in a similar way.

Listening to random sounds and music: Try spending time with music that has no words in order to avoid engaging your thinking mind. Stay in the present and listen intently—completely absorbed. Be nonjudgmental and simply be aware of the sounds as they follow one upon the other. You can also listen to sounds such as a waterfall, the wind, faraway traffic, birds, crickets, locusts—anything. Just hear it as pure sound, in a nonjudgmental way.

Walking around a park or neighborhood: Do this in an unfamiliar place. Swing your head gently from side to side and catch the sights and quickly let them go. Experience pure visual sensations. This can be very refreshing.

Taking in smells: Go to a bakery, close your eyes, and take in the odor of bread and pastries. Do the same by a polluted river. Note how the temperature of the air and the change of the seasons affect odors outside.

Sampling tastes: Buy a variety of fruits, place one of each in a basket, then take a bite out of each one with your eyes closed. Bite and chew slowly. Savor everything without making any judgments of liking or disliking.

You get the idea. You can come up with many more such opportunities to be mindful of your bodily sensations. The important thing to remember is the object of attention is the sensations themselves, not your reactions to them. Over time, the practices of mindfulness of the body will not only enable you to overcome distraction and habitual patterns but also greatly enrich your life.

Mindfulness of Feelings

We can extend our experience of physical sensations to better understand our positive and negative feelings. These feelings are more than just physical sensations. Along with sensations and coming from our habitual patterns—our conditioning—we bring a long list of preferences: likes and dislikes; things wanted and unwanted, loved and hated, and so on. By superimposing judgments on things, we change our experience of them. We can observe how we apply these preferences to three basic aspects of our functioning: body, speech, and mind.

Once we have brought greater mindfulness to our body through its sensations, we begin to observe that the mind judges what the body feels. If the mind is expecting something that it believes is positive (from conditioning), then you “feel good” and you are content. But if the mind has a different expectation from what appears, the mind makes a negative judgment (“feels bad”) and the body loses its calm, peace, and satisfaction and often becomes distracted, jittery, and unmindful. You have a “negative experience.”

You can easily observe that this happens with all the physical sensations—touch, smell, taste, sound, and sight. Take taste, for example. You prepare a new variety of tea and take a sip. The mind judges “good” or “bad” according to your conditioning as to what flavors you prefer. It may be that you like a tea that is acidic. Otherwise you don’t like it. Meanwhile, your friend across the table tasting the new tea may have a whole different view. You may like the new tea. Your friend may hate it.

But in the tasting of the new tea, both of you are being distracted by your preferences and experience the tea at a relatively shallow level. If you can apply some mindfulness and the openness that comes with that, you can experience the flavor in a pure, unbiased way that will introduce a new and deeper experience and not distract you into unmindfulness. You can have a much more spacious and liberating experience than you would by being biased by habitual expectations. Perhaps professional tea, coffee, and wine tasters experience flavors in this way.

The same goes for something like the weather. High or low temperatures or wet or dry conditions do not necessarily determine how you feel about these experiences. If you have the habit of avoiding cold weather, try relaxing when it becomes cold rather than shivering and tensing your body. Be mindful of the sensations without judgment and you may have a new and surprising experience that is beyond “good or bad.” This can be very liberating. In fact, it is a form of meditation called “one taste.”

Likewise, things do not smell good or bad in themselves. Everything has its own distinctive odor. It’s a world of sensation worth exploring. The same goes for the things you see and hear. The arts of music, film, and painting have shown that when new approaches appear, they may provoke resistance and negativity. Then at some point a change comes about as audiences begin to open up to—to “get”—the new art form. But the painting or musical composition itself has not changed at all. A good example is Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring that debuted in Paris in 1913. It was nicknamed “The Riot of Spring” because it initially caused a scandal. Now this once-startling music is played without controversy by orchestras the world over.

Our experience of speech includes what we say—along with the chatter of our minds—and what we hear spoken. What we read can also be included here. It’s not hard to notice how opinionated we are to experiences of speech. We frequently judge what we say, hear, and read. But the experiences themselves are just sounds (including the internalized sounds of what we read). Again, when we make negative and positive judgments, we distract ourselves from the comfortable balance of mindfulness and shut ourselves off from the more open and spacious experience we can have of speech in its many forms. Why not simply listen to the sounds of speech purely? Freed from judgment, we can discover a direct and refreshing phenomenon.

Exploring sensations in this way, we begin to notice that the key factor is the mind. It’s not just the sensations that determine a negative or positive experience. It depends on the view from your mind—your habitual mindset. If you are mindful and at peace, you are more open to whatever sensations appear and less likely to be hemmed in by judgments of like and dislike. Such judgments become hindrances or obstacles to the more satisfying experiences of openness and mindfulness. The pure experiences of sensation become the energy of a mindful, meditative state, rather than triggering judgments.

Mindfulness of Phenomena

When considering mindfulness of phenomena, we are concerned with how we engage with objects of the mind, especially those we perceive around us in our daily lives. We have already seen the way feelings of like and dislike condition us. Now let’s look at this process more deeply. We are constantly bombarded by the phenomena we perceive. Often this great variety of phenomena distracts us—sounds, movement, smells, energy, light, and so on. Our perceptions can be chaotic and superficial. As I have suggested above, usually our minds do not connect deeply with phenomena. We may not have the concentration or curiosity to stick with one object and understand it at a deeper level—to concentrate on it, open up to it, and really know it.

Mindfulness of phenomena means to check our mind and see just how we are engaging with phenomena. Then we can develop greater alertness, presence, and relaxed concentration in the way we connect with things. To do this means we must fully open our mind, fully relax our mind, so that the nature of the phenomenon itself can be perceived in an unbiased manner. When we go beyond merely grasping the surface of phenomena or imposing our habitual perspectives and labels on them, we can experience a true sense of joy and presence. We see phenomena and their connection to our mind in a new way, recognizing a quality of coherence and oneness between them. We see that mind and phenomena are not separate, isolated entities.

We don’t often notice because the experience is brief, but there are times when we do make such connections with objects in our environment. This can happen when you view a common object from an odd perspective. You may bend down to look for something you’ve dropped on the floor and notice some other object that you cannot recognize. It may draw your curiosity, and you look at it with concentration. You cannot figure out what it is, so you see it without any preconceptions. It’s just a “strange-looking object.” Then suddenly you see that it is some common object—a toy toppled on its side or a broken cup. But for a moment you were viewing it in a very pure way in which you could not label it—could not re-cognize it. You were seeing the object “as it is” in the present moment. In regard to cultivating such unbiased perceptions, the historical Buddha Shakyamuni made this observation over 2,500 years ago:

In the seen there is only the seen;

In the heard there is only the heard;

In the sensed there is only the sensed;

In the cognized there is only the cognized.[*2]

To engage with phenomena in this more open and pure way, you can practice loosening up the way you perceive things. When you look at cloud patterns, stones or rock formations, abstract paintings—anything that doesn’t have an obvious and precise visual content—you will probably project some form onto it. A cloud may spontaneously appear to you as a flower or a human body. The surface of a stone may look like a grinning face. Shift your head slightly and it may look like something else. Of course, the actual objects you are viewing have no faces or flowers in them. Your mind is projecting things that you perceive as similar in shape. People with different ages or experiences or from different cultures may project different images. The point is that the phenomena you engage with do not contain any of these projections. A cloud in a windy sky is changing all the time. A rock is just a rock. Can you see these objects—engage with these phenomena—as they simply and nakedly appear?

One easy way to do this is to listen to someone speaking a foreign language you are completely unfamiliar with. Whereas the speakers of that language are engaged with the meaning of the thoughts and images the words convey and relatively unaware of the pure sounds they are speaking, you will hear only the sounds, just as they are.

The ability to do this may come in short glimpses. Our habit of grasping at phenomena superficially causes them to zip by quickly without our experiencing them fully. Rarely are we even aware of the richness available from our inner and outer environments. Like driving quickly through a neighborhood, we are always concerned with some destination and miss the surroundings. But being mindful of phenomena gives us a chance to see our world as it really is—without rushing by it; without masking it with habitual labels, projections, and interpretations. As we start to get glimpses of this world, we will see just how fascinating it is, how interconnected it is, and how we are a part of it. We will find ourselves beyond words, beyond limits.

Suggestions for Practice—Opportunities to Engage Freely with Phenomena

• Gaze into a clear night sky: Take in the whole without identifying parts of the sky as “stars,” “planets,” “the moon,” “shooting stars,” and so forth. Open up to the phenomena of the night sky as purely as possible, dropping all influences coming from your experience or intellectual knowledge.

• Look at clouds in the same way: Notice when you project some self-derived form onto their essentially formless nature. Then drop that.

• Observe a waterfall or rushing river: Watch it, listen to it—openly.

• Watch a large body of water, either when it is choppy and chaotic or when it is so placid that it reflects the sky or other surroundings.

• Observe the sunlight reflecting from the leaves of trees in a park or forest: Turn your head slowly and scan the panorama of light.

As you open up to connecting with phenomena more directly, you will discover many other situations and opportunities to practice with. Don’t do this practice so much as a goal or project but as a new way to connect with and enjoy the world.

Mindfulness of the Mind

The mind is something much vaster than we usually imagine it to be. This is because in our daily life we have been mostly concerned with the contents of our mind—our thoughts, emotions, images, and so forth. We may think of our mind as a kind of bag filled with all the things we think. We also confuse our mind with our brain—often thought of as a sophisticated electrochemical calculating machine or computer. Our mind is made up of all these objects, but we can only know that because we are aware of them.

And that awareness is another feature of our mind—maybe the most important.

When we become mindful of the contents of our mind either while practicing seated meditation or during daily life, we can notice that some of our mind’s contents cause us difficulties and unhappiness, and others lead to peace and happiness. In my tradition there are five mental phenomena, called “the Five Poisons,” that cause most of our problems: aversion (hatred, anger), attraction (craving), ignorance (dullness), jealousy, and pride. We’ve all seen how these can cause suffering for ourselves and others, especially when we overindulge in them. But they seem so much a part of human life, of our conditioning, that often we are swept away by them. Their power—the power of habit—is hard to oppose.

But it is by no means impossible! There are two ways we can work with these: we can consciously replace them with positive qualities; and we can concentrate on our awareness of all objects of mind—positive, negative, and neutral.

Positive qualities like openness, compassion, and loving-kindness are natural to the mind. They are part of our genuine human nature. The negative qualities mentioned above, as well as doubt, busyness, grasping, and distraction—qualities that modern life stimulates—are not. We’ve been conditioned to them. So, as you maintain mindfulness of your mind, notice which of your thoughts and emotions are positive and which are negative. Notice how, sooner or later, the positive ones lead to positive outcomes for yourself and in your engagement with others. And see how the negative ones lead to suffering.

Positive role models can be helpful for encouraging yourself in the direction of having a positive mind. You might read the biographies of Nobel Peace Prize winners. You can also find such models right around you—in your community, in your family. Notice how they have behaved to bring happiness to their environments and to themselves—often in difficult circumstances. Let them inspire you to do the same. Make this part of your meditation practice.

Of course, we couldn’t be aware of the mind’s contents if we weren’t aware, awake, taking notice of what’s going on. So where does that awareness fit in? When you explore the mindfulness exercises given earlier, you will become more keenly aware of awareness itself. If you perceive your body, feelings, and phenomena purely and directly, without projecting habitual thoughts—no matter how briefly—you will be in a state of pure awareness. That awareness can be found in the gaps between thoughts. And if you notice yourself projecting a habitual tendency onto an object—like a face imagined in a cloud formation—that noticing of your projection is also awareness. Without awareness you are essentially unconscious, asleep. Even when your mind is extremely tense and busy, awareness is what makes you conscious of what you are thinking. In fact, awareness partakes in all our activities in an all-encompassing manner—something we will examine closely later in the book.

Awareness is like a mirror. To practice mindfulness of the mind is to see the mind reflected in your immediate awareness in an unbiased way, just as a mirror reveals whatever is placed before it without distortion. As previously you may have observed your body as it breathes, experiences of the five senses, and phenomena directly, now with mindfulness of the mind you observe whatever appears in the mind clearly and simply.

Suggestions for Practicing Mindfulness of Mind

Sit or lie comfortably, as you have done when practicing mindfulness of the body. Follow your breathing for a short while until your mind is relatively calm and clear. Then observe your thoughts (the mind’s “contents”) or awareness itself (“the mind itself”) without comment. As a motivation, activate your curiosity. Rather than following and becoming entangled in thinking, wouldn’t it be interesting to know what is going on—just what the mind is, how it operates? When you find yourself becoming involved with thinking—generating thoughts and becoming involved with them, identifying with what’s going on—return to your breathing for a short while, then return to observation. As always, be relaxed and nonjudgmental.

We can adapt the Five Poisons mentioned above to this practice. We engage frequently in these five emotions or mentalities—attraction, aversion, ignorance, jealousy, and pride. We know that they can cause problems—for ourselves and for others. And we know they are often unpleasant to experience. When one of these emotions appears in our mind, we have two choices: We can follow it—identify with it, engage with it, act out, comment, analyze, and so on. Or we can simply notice its appearance directly and let it be. We don’t block it. We just let it dissolve. When we do so, not feeding such emotions, they will simply disappear. This latter approach is something we are unused to. It goes against our conditioning. (This is not to forget there are many times when engaging with these emotions is necessary. Expressing anger can be positive in some cases—as when your toddler decides to walk across a busy street.)

But there are many times when engaging with these thoughts and emotions is unnecessary and destructive. And our fantasies are filled with them. So, when you are thinking, daydreaming, or even when engaged with other people, see if you can notice negative thoughts and emotions simply arising, like the appearance of a bird or a breeze. See if you can sense the emotion beginning to form—it may be very quick—and then just let it be without acting on it. That is direct observation of the contents of the mind. If you can also catch a taste of the act of noticing itself, that is awareness of awareness, the other aspect of mind. You can sense that awareness both before a thought arises and in the moment it dissolves.

Mindfulness of mind requires quiet, subtle attention. Keep your sessions short. Don’t push yourself, especially if your mind is very busy. And although these practices can be explored very deeply and taken very far, here we are engaging with them mainly to strengthen our mindfulness so that this quality permeates our lives. By doing so, eventually we will develop a powerful tool to help guide us in life with relaxed focus.

To enhance this practice so that it begins to really transform our lives, we have to “take it on the road”—make it part of daily life. Since our mind commands everything we do and experience, we can have mindfulness of the mind in all our activities. This can be done both formally and spontaneously. The best way is to let both approaches work hand in hand. You can begin by planning specific times and situations during your day when you will take a moment to observe the contents of your mind: “When I do X—sit down at my desk, begin fixing a meal, prepare to start my car, and so forth—I will listen to what I am thinking for a few moments.” The other approach is to look for the awareness that is observing, that is shedding light on the contents of your mind.

If you do this enough each day, the process will gradually become spontaneous. And if you are planning to be mindful of the mind at specific times, you will build the habit such that you are more frequently reminded to enter into this kind of awareness. Negative habits, such as impatience when the internet connection is slow or aimless and time-consuming digital surfing, will lose their attraction. You will begin to sense how they control you, and you will make more reasonable choices as to what you do with your valuable time and how you will conduct your life. This is an extremely important step for bringing balance to your digital activities.

More than that, you will begin to see and experience life in a new way. As the distractions emanating from the ordinary, conditioned mind fade away, you will enter directly into a new dimension of experience. You will find yourself more and more deeply connected to wisdom that arises spontaneously from a liberated mind.

Summary of Mindfulness Practices

Mindfulness of the Body

In seated meditation, begin with mindfulness of the breath and then extend this focused attention to other bodily sensations. For example, you can do a systematic body scan—head to toes or toes to head.

Other positions for mindfulness are standing, sitting, or lying down. We can also extend this attention to your body in motion. Say to yourself from time to time, “I am walking,” and feel the motion. Also notice transitions from one posture or movement to another.

Be mindful of the other senses—taste, smell, vision, hearing, and tactile sensations.

Mindfulness of Feelings

Notice judgments you may apply to physical sensations: “This feels good” and “That feels bad.” Did the physical sensation you perceived meet some expectations you had or fail to meet them? Expectations are closely linked to judgments. Notice this in regard to all the physical senses.

Do these judgments (as well as those you apply to speech—your own and that of others) derail your mindfulness?

See if you can go beyond expectations, relaxing into a raw or “pure” sensation beyond subjective feelings of positive or negative.

Mindfulness of Phenomena

Notice how you project your own habitual labels, forms, and preferences onto phenomena that have no such specific content, such as cloud or rock formations. Then, beginning with short glimpses, view such phenomena in a more open and unbiased manner. As you are able to relax more and more, you will find yourself connecting more deeply with phenomena. At some point the barrier between “you” and the “observed object” may fade and even disappear. You will experience oneness with phenomena.

Mindfulness of the Mind

In seated meditation, observe your thoughts as they arise. Pay special attention to thoughts of aversion (hatred/anger), attraction (craving), ignorance (dullness), jealousy, and pride. Notice the power they have to distract you from mindfulness.

Spend time in meditation thinking about positive qualities such as openness, compassion, and loving-kindness. Notice how these lead to happier states of mind than the more negative qualities observed previously. Take note of people you know or have heard of who exemplify a positive approach to life.

Shift your attention to the awareness that enables you to practice mindfulness. When you become distracted by the content of thoughts, concentrate briefly on your breathing to ground yourself and then return to resting in the awareness that shines its light on experience. When you become used to this practice, by leaving passing thoughts alone, they will dissolve effortlessly as moments of pure awareness. With training and effort these moments can be extended. (I will talk more about this in part 4.)

When you feel you’ve attained some stability in this style of mindfulness, try doing it at different times and in different situations in daily life. Plan ahead and then try it out. Later you will find the practice sometimes happens spontaneously.

Skip Notes

*1 Dedicated surfers are very familiar with this experience of being one with the waves. Other athletes also seek out such “sweet spots.”

*2 Udana 1.10, a Buddhist scripture from the Pali Canon.

5

The Perfect App

Mindfulness makes us present. If we are not mindful, we are not fully here. Presence is a platform from which we can operate in a grounded, clear-headed way. That goes for working or playing with our digital devices, engaging with friends and family or with our work associates. We typically use a variety of apps on our devices for a task: we use email, phone voice calling, texting apps, and social media to communicate with people; when seeking information, we use internet browsers, map programs, and specialized search engines. We may hop from one app to another to get the complete pictures we need.

I want to present to you here a marvelous “app” derived from a Buddhist practice called “the Six Transcendent Perfections”—or we could call it “the Six Valuable Qualities.” If you use it regularly, I believe it will bring great balance to your life. Each quality has its own special advantage and focus, but, like the digital apps you use regularly for research, these six qualities work best when they are used in combination. The qualities are generosity, patience, diligence, discipline, concentration, and wisdom. You won’t find them on your smartphone, but you do have them inside you, developed to one degree or another from your upbringing, education, and experience.[*1] They are a great potential resource for us but often go missing from our behavior and activities. When developed and used skillfully, these six qualities give us tremendous power to free ourselves from negative conditioning and bring positivity and harmony to our lives.

Take the first: generosity. We usually think of that as simply giving. Perhaps we give something material to someone in need. We also may be generous with our time, lending a hand. But whatever form our generosity takes, how generous can we be without the second quality of patience? In many cases, generosity is a form of patience. Instead of rushing about in our normal patterns of thought and action, we slow down a bit to notice the needs of others. But here diligence also comes into the picture. It takes diligence to be patient—a certain quality of energy and attention that guides action. Diligence is sometimes called “joyful exertion”—the juice needed to complete our tasks. How can we accomplish anything significant if we aren’t diligent about it?

Discipline implies self-awareness—being mindful that we are focused on our intentions and not being distracted and sidetracked. What good is joyful enthusiasm if we are not going in the right direction? This quality is also important for preventing us from acting unkindly and unethically toward others. Then concentration activates, focuses, and empowers the mind to see the details of our tasks and interactions. If our intention is an act of generosity, concentration will allow us to discover how we will go about it. But the most important quality is wisdom. Here we discover whether our generous act can really be of benefit and how we should go about it to maximize that benefit. We are wise to be less self-cherishing so that we can see beyond our own biases—get a clearer picture of reality. For instance, our wisdom may determine that in certain situations, generosity might be misunderstood by the receiver and cause more harm than good. (“I don’t need your charity!”) This kind of wisdom comes from experience and intuition, and especially self-knowledge.

In many situations, if you are thinking of acting with generosity or patience—say, assisting someone with a need or task (by being generous) or giving someone emotional space (by being patient)—wisdom needs to be part of that initial decision. Then concentration will sharpen our focus, followed by diligence and discipline to make sure we get the job done.

Here is a short example of how the six qualities are united. Suppose you feel called upon to be generous. Let’s say someone asks you for money. This could be a friend or relative in need. A person representing some charitable organization might contact you by email, phone, or in person to request a donation. Or it could be someone begging at a street corner or coming up to you while you are eating in an outdoor café.

There are times when we might be annoyed by these requests for generosity. This is a common reaction that can activate a stingy attitude within us. And there are times when it seems we don’t have time to pause and consider the request. But this can be a self-cherishing attitude that narrows our focus and cuts us off from the needs and situations of others. Generosity is the opposite of this—an open empathy that keeps us available to others. If we are naturally generous or have intentionally trained that quality, a voice from within will tell us that here is an opportunity to practice generosity. We will pause and allow ourselves to open up to the request.

That pause to reflect is patience. Continuing that, we may ask the person making the request to elaborate a bit. That could reveal anything from “We’re seeking donations to provide food for starving people in Africa” to “I need it for my college tuition” to “I’m out of work and my family is hungry.” We listen patiently, with our body language open and attentive (with presence and mindfulness—concentration).

At some point you may ask yourself, “Is it wise for me to make this donation?” At one extreme, there are places where public service announcements discourage giving money to beggars, suggesting that they might use it in harmful ways such as for drugs or alcohol. It’s up to your personal wisdom to decide what to do in these situations. You need to get a “take” on the person making the request, which requires the wisdom of openness. If an organization is making a request, you might do research to determine the direction and effectiveness of the charity. This kind of information is widely available on the internet. Or you may decide to simply be generous—to take a chance. Perhaps your intuition—another aspect of wisdom—says, “This feels right. Go ahead.”

With discipline and diligence, once you have decided to act with generosity, you will make sure that you actually go ahead and do what’s necessary so that the money gets to the person or charity making the request. This could mean making a bank transfer or using your credit card with all the details involved there. If the donation is urgently needed, your diligence will assure you get it there in time. Or it could be a matter of taking time to pull your car over at an intersection to grab your wallet to give money to someone requesting from the side of the road. You can see that patience comes in here too.

You can discover the interconnectedness of these six qualities by contemplating other situations, such as patiently giving advice to a relative, coworker, student, and so on. You can be patient toward yourself by not rushing into an important decision. Or start from the concentration needed to learn a new skill. You can use just about any common situation in daily life. See how the six qualities all play a part. You will discover that in most cases, each one of the six qualities will naturally connect with the other five.

Familiarization

To make these six valuable qualities your allies and helpers, first you need to familiarize yourself with them singly and then contemplate how they work as a team. This can be accomplished in sessions of thought-based, analytical meditation. Thus begins a process of assimilation that comes to fruition as we bring these six qualities to all our activities.

To begin our contemplation, let’s look at these qualities in a very general way. As suggested above, generosity and patience are forms of openness. When we are inspired to be generous, our open empathy allows us to step beyond our own concerns and connect with the needs of others. As we’ve seen, patience plays a part here. Furthermore, patience is particularly helpful for avoiding anger. After all, impatience can be viewed as a first step leading to anger.

Let’s begin our analytical meditation. Sit comfortably, concentrate for a couple of minutes on the breath, then: Imagine situations where you have practiced generosity and patience. Then contemplate times when you could have used these two qualities but didn’t. Why didn’t you? Now think about common situations in your daily life where generosity and patience would be appropriate.

Concentration and wisdom work hand in hand and give us access to knowledge and understanding. Concentration, which is closely allied with mindfulness, is obviously essential for many of our tasks. For example, if we are doing research on the internet, concentration allows us to filter out superfluous information from the kernels of knowledge we are seeking. Wisdom goes beyond concentration and knowledge, widening to embrace the subtle understanding that guides effective action.

Then consider: Do you believe that you have good concentration and focus in many areas of your life? Are there certain situations where you lose focus easily? Why do you think that is? How might you use the practices of mindfulness to improve your concentration? Can you think of situations where wisdom—either your innate wisdom or wisdom gained from experience—made an important difference in some life situation?

Discipline and diligence are guiding principles that keep us on track. They provide the energy and adherence to our intended direction that ensure we will accomplish whatever we set out to do. This is the case whether we are working on a project or engaged in a personal relationship. Are your activities ever undercut by laziness? If so, does your laziness appear only at a certain time—perhaps in situations or with projects you find boring? Or is it more general? Where do you think this habit came from? What about lack of energy or enthusiasm in some of your activities? If this happens frequently for you, what is its source?

These handy descriptions, however, are only a starting point, a blueprint. To understand the six qualities at a deep and really useful level, you need to discover the many subtleties that emerge when you explore them in contemplation and especially as you engage with daily life situations. To this end, you could begin to make them habits—positive conditioning—by considering them in the following way.

1. What Are Some of the Forms My Generosity May Take?

Generosity can be expressed by our bodies, by way of our speech, and in our minds. By body, I mean all our physical expressions. That includes our body language—our gestures, the gaze of our eyes, and facial expressions. Generosity can be expressed through a smile, a pat on the shoulder, a warm handshake. We let others know that we are open and generous—that our thoughts and feelings embrace them and not just ourselves.

The same is demonstrated when we speak with honesty, openheartedness, kindness, and genuineness in direct and ethical communication. Of course these outer displays originate in our minds. There, generosity originates from awareness, openhearted thinking, love, compassion, and insight into others’ thoughts, feelings, and needs.

Meanwhile we should keep our motivation pure: generosity without expectations. We are not expecting feedback. Our generosity is not the least bit motivated by a wish for compliments or applause, some favor in return, a big “Thank you!” We may get that, but our wish is that our generosity will contribute to the happiness of others. This is a case of “Virtue is its own reward.” Avoiding the trap of expectations, which is a common habitual pattern, may require mental discipline. Here we can even go beyond the notion of the “giver,” “receiver,” and the generous “action.” We will look at this highly liberating approach later on.

Think of the many situations you encounter where you can be generous. I’ve noticed how people waiting in line at an airport will generously make way for a passenger whose flight will be leaving soon. We can all empathize with their situation, and based on that, we generously step aside. Then there are “acts of random kindness” we can practice, such as anonymously paying for someone’s beverage at a coffeehouse or paying for the cinema ticket of the person in line behind us. I’m sure you can imagine many similar situations. Doing so will prime you to act generously when the opportunity appears. Also remember occasions when practicing generosity would have been appropriate, but you didn’t do it. What prevented you?

2. What Is the Value of Patience?

We are all very familiar with its opposite—impatience—from the speedy, digitalized world we confront daily. There we often find a confining lack of spaciousness. Patience, on the other hand—as we’ve examined it previously—opens up space, giving us room to breathe, room to consider things wisely, and better balanced, relaxed energy. Patience is the best antidote to the pressure and speed of today’s world. Just think of the many mishaps that occur when people lose patience and fall into anger and hatred. Think of the tragedies we read about often in the news where a little patience injected before things began to snowball would have saved the situation.

From another angle, you may have noticed how people who are patient attract others to them whereas impatience deters people. There is a warmth in patience that brings comfort to self and others. Patience can also support courage in difficult situations. It provides time and space to consider options—solutions that might not appear when we are rushed but that may help us penetrate a baffling problem and lead to a good outcome. And patience, being an aspect of concentration, helps us to focus better in whatever situation we find ourselves. So let your mind explore patience in its many facets. Then think of times when you practiced patience and those times when being patient would have helped matters but you weren’t patient. Why weren’t you? Were you unaware at the time that patience was called for? Or did you know that but something held you back?

3. Where Does Diligence Come Into Play?

Think of the story of the tortoise and the hare. The two were racing to the finish line. The hare was quick and agile. Feeling superior—the easy victor over an animal as slow and sluggish as a tortoise—the hare was constantly getting sidetracked. It wasted valuable time in trivial pursuits. Meanwhile, the tortoise, intent upon the goal of winning the race and being careful to put all its energy toward that aim, just moved on steadily and won.

Once we have developed an intention—a project or goal—we should include diligence in our plans. The energy and enthusiasm necessary to succeed at a task must be incorporated with the other factors: inspiration, motivation, planning, pacing, and so on. Diligence will help us notice and screen out unhelpful attitudes such as pride, a sense of superiority, arrogance, and egotism. These may inhibit people who might otherwise help us. And if we become distracted, like the hare, not only can we be sidetracked but we can miss opportunities to advance our plans. Distractions prevent the openness and presence necessary to see important factors as they arise. We miss out on vital information. Diligence focuses our energy leading to accomplishment. Think about times when diligence has fortified your efforts and other times when the lack of diligence has undercut them.

4. Discipline

Whereas diligence has the nature of energy and enthusiasm, discipline has a moral character.[*2] If we are not careful, we can be seduced by negative attitudes that detract from the proper behavior necessary to complete projects, have harmonious personal relationships, and conduct our life in general. Frequently we see in the news the cases of high-profile individuals who have spoiled things for themselves due to a surprising lack of discipline. Something potentially dangerous tempted them and they didn’t have the discipline to avoid falling into the trap. Discipline does not need to be rigid and confining. Rather, it should be a mode of awareness and care. As such, it is closely allied with mindfulness and concentration. Is lack of discipline a problem for you? Are you unable to follow through and complete your intentions? If so, how strong is this tendency in your life and what is its origin?

5. Concentration

We often think of concentration as being very tightly and narrowly focused. But effective concentration needs to be relaxed and open. Concentration is essentially the same as mindfulness. When we lose concentration or mindfulness, diligence and discipline help us notice that, and we simply bring our attention back to its object.

Think of the degrees of concentration you experience throughout the day as you go from one activity to another. Notice factors that enhance concentration and those that dull it. You may lose concentration from pushing too hard and for too long. Something as simple as a refreshing break could help. Sometimes we only need to remind ourselves to be present. Do you believe that you have good concentration and focus in many areas of your life? Are there certain situations where you lose focus easily? Why do you think that is? How might you use the practices of mindfulness to improve your concentration?

6. Wisdom

The wisdom I am speaking about in this chapter is mundane wisdom. It comes mainly from education, the advice of mentors, and experience. But wisdom can also arise from intuition, a more transcendental wisdom that I will speak about in part 4.

What does the word wisdom mean to you? When you believe you have acted wisely, what does that signify? Perhaps something “wise” you did led to a positive outcome. Can you think of situations where wisdom—either your innate wisdom or wisdom gained from experience—made an important difference? Was the source of that action formal knowledge, experience, intuition—a hunch?

The Six Valuable Qualities really emanate from the depths of the human heart-mind. They are a natural part of us. But since human life is full of distractions, we can become separated from them. They become like a vague memory. Therefore, we need to reacquaint ourselves with them in a deliberate way. You can use the blueprint I have provided in this chapter to begin the process of reconnecting to them. Having done so, they will serve you well in every corner of your life.

Skip Notes

*1 In reality, they are innate to your very being. And they are not really separate from one another but are aspects of a single quality. We will explore this in a later chapter.

*2 In Buddhism, discipline is also called “morality,” “proper conduct,” and “virtue.”

6

Happiness Has Its Causes

If we practice mindfulness consistently and attune ourselves to the Six Valuable Qualities, we establish a basis for positivity to flourish. Bringing greater happiness to all our daily activities now becomes workable. Formal, on-the-cushion sitting practice—at whatever length and frequency you are able—supports the informal, in-life mindfulness practices presented previously: mindfulness of body and postures, feelings, phenomena, and mind. If you stay with these practices, they will strengthen and begin to penetrate your attitude toward life and the feeling tone of your life. This mindful attitude is a gateway to greater contentment, including a genuine happiness that is not conditioned by our desires and expectations.

In this chapter we will see how loosening up and opening to others will give us greater happiness and freedom as we engage with everything from digital devices to our personal relationships and work. Gradually we can replace tight, self-cherishing attitudes that do not lead to real happiness. And we will see how paying greater attention to others and their needs and desires connects with and awakens positive qualities to be found naturally within us—in our own heart-minds.

A Positive Beginning

When you rise in the morning on a typical day, what are your first thoughts? They may be coming from habitual feelings and attitudes. Or they could be reactions to recent experiences or thoughts about the future. Something as simple as “I feel hungry. What’s for breakfast?” or “How am I going to deal with that big problem at work?” These ideas may set the tone for your whole day. But are they positive or negative?

We’ve seen just how powerful our habitual patterns—our conditioning—are in determining our attitudes and behavior. What if, at the beginning of each day, you deliberately set your mind in a positive frame? Doing so will create causes for happiness. Happiness and unhappiness do not appear in our lives out of nowhere. If we have negative thoughts and act in negative ways, sooner or later there will be negative feedback—from people and from the universe. On the other hand, a positive act will lead us to happiness and make others happy, reverberating confidently in our mind and beyond. And these patterns of cause and effect—which are the real causes of happiness and suffering—can extend over long periods of time.

Let me suggest that you try repeating the following four phrases when you awaken in the morning:

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.

May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.

May all beings never be separate from the supreme happiness that is without suffering.

May all beings abide in boundless equanimity, without attachment and without aversion.

If that seems like a lot, start with the first line or two each morning and then gradually add the third and fourth lines. Or you could just do one each day. Try it!

Starting your day thinking or saying these lines out loud will have a magical effect. It’s like sounding a beautiful note on a musical instrument, bell, or singing bowl as you awaken. Examining the words, you can see that they are directed outward. (But never forget that you too are included in “all beings.”) And they are directed toward finding happiness and eliminating negative experiences—suffering. These “four immeasurable thoughts” are a form of mind training popular in Tibetan Buddhism. Most of us need such training since we have already been trained to act in ways that ultimately cause us suffering. We have been taught that to survive and prosper in the modern world we must first cherish ourselves above others and then compete—often ferociously—with other people. Natural positive qualities that we were born with—such as altruism, compassion, and the simple delight in just being alive—are forced into the background.

Now you may ask, “How is my wishing happiness and well-being for all beings going to make me happier?” Or, “If creating a positive attitude at the beginning of each day is helpful, why not just say, ‘Today I’m going to have a great day?’ ” The answer, once again, is openness. When you open your heart beyond your own concerns, you begin to break down tight, conditioned habits that are at the root of unhappiness. You loosen up compulsive, agitated, speedy, uptight patterns that are among the main causes of suffering.

Furthermore, the words themselves impart a great deal of practical wisdom. First, they remind us that suffering and happiness have causes; and if we attend to these causes, we can generate happiness for ourselves and others and diminish suffering. That is important information that in our everyday attitudes we may overlook. Again, much of our normal thinking is like driving through some beautiful neighborhood quickly, intent only on the road ahead and our destination. We miss the details—opportunities to make ourselves and others happy. Our tight, grasping, end-gaining attitude narrows our focus and, ironically, makes us more vulnerable to distractions. We are so busy attending to our own interests that things that wouldn’t bother an easygoing mind become gnarly obstacles we must avoid at all costs. This is not an efficient way to live when compared to a more balanced and relaxed focus.

Recall the levels of openness I presented in chapter 3. The words of the first two stanzas above—May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness / May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering—invite us to step beyond the self-centered level of openness to the second level—an openhearted position of acceptance and cooperation with the people and situations around us. When you wish that all beings have happiness and avoid suffering, you are planting seeds of happiness for yourself and others. These seeds will sprout in your open and positive attitude and the natural warmth that inspires these qualities in others.

Imagine a team of workers in a factory, an office, a scientific laboratory, a commercial kitchen—any situation requiring some degree of teamwork. No matter what level of technical skill the workers bring to the job, a team dominated by either impersonal or negative interactions will be less productive and less happy than a team whose members are open to one another and positive.[*1] In the same way, a negative and abusive boss will find that workers are less productive and likelier to quit and go elsewhere than those with a supervisor with an open and positive attitude.

The Causes of Happiness

We all want happiness. And we all dream, imagine, plan, and work in what we believe is a direction that will bring us happiness. But sometimes it does not. Somehow things go wrong. All our longing for happiness will not help us unless we focus on its causes. If we dream of growing some fresh, tasty vegetables for our table, sooner or later we will have to plant a garden. We will have to find some fertile soil for that, obtain and plant seeds, and be sure there is enough water and sunlight for the seedlings to grow. We must create the causes for those nice veggies. Likewise, since our happiness often depends on our relationships with other people, we need openness and attention to them to see their needs and desires. We need to understand their backgrounds. We need to get a notion of what makes them tick so that we can have harmonious relationships with them. If we do this in a manipulative way, eventually it will backfire. Rather, we use empathy—we put ourselves in their place—as a basis for positive relationships. If we are only concentrated on ourselves, this won’t happen easily.

That’s because the happiness we might get in the short term by concentrating exclusively on our own desires will probably not last long or be satisfactory. However, if you begin by seeking happiness for yourself and others, your chances of success are much higher. We are all in this thing—life—together. When we forget that, our unintended effects on others may come back to haunt us. Suppose you work as a food preparer in a commercial kitchen, and one day, because you are angry at someone, you lose focus and badly cut a finger. You will have to be taken to a hospital for stitches. Someone else on the kitchen staff will have to fill in for you, perhaps slowing down the whole kitchen crew. Meals will be served late, possibly overburdening and irritating servers. Customers will have a longer wait, perhaps upsetting some of them—who will tip their server less—and perhaps even damage the restaurant’s reputation. A similar scenario would apply to almost any work environment when a boss or employees are narrowly focused, forgetting they are part of a community.

When I was a young boy growing up in Tibet, something happened to my mother that greatly affected my outlook on life. We were a Buddhist family, like all the people in our community. But this was the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution when all religious practice was prohibited. We were not even allowed to light butter-lamp offerings—a simple, traditional practice. We had to hide them under pots when we lit them.

One day some Chinese soldiers were walking through our village, shooting indiscriminately at ravens. My mother was accidentally shot in her side. She nearly died. The community was very supportive, giving us milk, butter, and other necessities. I was the youngest in the family and I really needed my mother then. She became very weak; we had lost nearly everything when the Chinese invaded our area, and my mother—a trained midwife—could no longer work. She lost strength, and I missed my mother’s nurturing. Things were really difficult, and I blamed the soldiers and the Chinese for causing so much suffering. I hated them.

But my mother and father had a different attitude. They could see that if the family maintained such hostile feelings, this would be a disaster for all of us. So they tried to repair the emotional damage from the shooting. My mother became a friend to the soldiers stationed in our village. She practiced patience and maintained an open heart toward them. I remember my mother talking positively about the person who shot her, saying that he was really a very good person and that he liked us. When I heard this, all my trauma and anger healed smoothly and magically.

I came to realize that this person did not intend to shoot my mother but had been caught up in ignorance—going around town shooting at random and intimidating people. The cause was a lack of mindfulness and wisdom. I opened up to this deeper understanding and was able to forgive. I no longer feel anger toward this Chinese soldier. Rather, I feel sad for the trauma and remorse he felt afterward and all he had to go through. And I feel great love and admiration toward my mother for how she handled herself in that very difficult situation, with all she had to do to raise the family and help others in the community. A positive attitude can transform even a very difficult situation.

The same is true for all our interactions and activities. Like ripples on water, the consequences of how we relate to others expand widely in patterns of cause and effect. Our own positive attitude toward others can create harmony and happiness overall. This may not always be easy going. There may be hardships, but it is worth it. We can cultivate a quality of joyful exertion. When difficulties appear—such as someone blocking our causes of happiness—we need to be patient and diligent. In this way, the problem or obstruction can become a catalyst to positivity—a cause of happiness. For example, we can remain calm and positive in a difficult situation with others, and that attitude may influence them in a soothing, positive way.

Causes of Suffering

We see a great deal of suffering in our world, and we experience suffering ourselves from time to time. All this suffering has causes—causes that can often be avoided if we become aware of them. A good example of this is the Earth’s natural environment. We can see that the environment is degrading rapidly, and we are suffering from an increase in giant storms and hurricanes, flooding, droughts and heat waves, changes in seasonal weather, rising sea levels, and so on. These are the results of human actions ranging from overpopulation to pollution.

These actions were not intended to cause suffering. Rather, the intention was to create happiness. The owners of a polluting factory or power plant resist pollution controls because they are expensive and time consuming and therefore lower profits—profits that make the managers, owners, and shareholders wealthier and, supposedly, happier.[*2] They are so convinced that their happiness depends on a financially successful business that they may even ignore the fact that they and their families and friends could be breathing polluted air and the long-term results of pollution lower the quality of life for everyone. The wealthy factory owner may plan a Caribbean vacation only to discover that his or her favorite island has been decimated by a powerful hurricane fed by global warming.

This example also shows how the causes of suffering can work slowly. The pollution and warming of Earth’s atmosphere began centuries ago at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The effects have been gradual and cumulative. The same can happen on the smaller scale of personal relationships. We may treat others around us in ways that are convenient according to our own ideas of how we can achieve happiness. A boss may avoid the valid needs of employees merely because it seems inconvenient to attend to them. A spouse may dominate a relationship in a way that slowly builds resentment. A child may be ignored by parents and deprived of love and nurturing, leading to dysfunctional relationships years later when the child becomes an adult.

We also suffer a lot from habitual patterns that set up unrealistic expectations. You become an avid supporter of your town’s football team. You watch all the games with other fans; you buy a shirt with the team’s logo. You cheer your team and jeer at your team’s biggest rivals, pointing out all their weaknesses—what makes them “so pathetic.” Before long, you have an ingrained belief fixated upon your team’s “goodness,” why their opponents are “bad” and therefore your team should always win. This has become reality for you. Taken to the extreme, violence breaks out between rival fans at and after games; in some cases, people have been seriously injured and killed by these rivalries. You could die or go to prison because of these beliefs. But the whole phenomenon is in the mind of the fanatic fan. The supporters of the “enemy team” have the same beliefs. Meanwhile, the players are just kicking a ball around, making lots of money, and often changing teams. It’s all an illusion! But it can cause a lot of suffering.

Once again, the attitudes that create these patterns of suffering were intended to bring happiness to the person who practices them. It may seem smoother and more convenient to ignore employees, a spouse, or a child. But that small “happiness” of convenience or some short-term gain cannot compare with the suffering it eventually causes. And sometimes we do things mindlessly out of habit, such as placing great expectations that our favorite team must always win. We rarely imagine that these actions and attitudes are causes of suffering.

Habitual, fixed thinking and beliefs can also lead us into trouble because our daily reality is not so fixed. If we observe it mindfully, we see that life is extremely fluid and complex. For the most part, the situations and people we meet simply cannot fit our expectations. Everything is varied and changing and must be engaged with one by one. That requires a mind that is awake, focused, and, most importantly, flexible. Being mindful, we observe carefully and engage with greater openness—with greater wisdom and compassion. It may be difficult or impossible to avoid some expectations, but we must be ready to drop them when we see that they do not apply to a given person or situation. Happiness will emerge from dealing with things as they come and as you come to understand them. Suffering will arise from expecting everything to conform to your expectations and then being disappointed and frustrated when they don’t.

We must discover through awareness and openness that such narrow attitudes are causes of suffering for others and ultimately for ourselves. A wise man once said, “Although seeking to avoid pain, beings run headlong into suffering. They long for happiness, but foolishly destroy it, as if it were their enemy.”[*3] If we carefully contemplate the times when we suffer, often we can find its source in some misguided action we performed in the past, thinking we were creating happiness for ourselves. Engaging in this training of observing the causes of suffering awakens and creates awareness in us so that we will engage less with such causes—negative actions and emotions, and so on.

Supreme Happiness and Boundless Equanimity

Once we have begun to recognize and cultivate the causes of happiness and remove causes of suffering, we can begin to experience positive qualities that are a step beyond our normal experiences in life. We will encounter profound, innermost happiness. This is not ordinary happiness conditioned from the outside, dependent on circumstances. This happiness has dignity and depth, inner balance and peace, and is unshakable. It emanates from the profound nature of our very humanity. We discover that once we are able to open the heart-mind in depth, it naturally becomes sorrowless—free from suffering. You must keep connecting with that in order to nurture it so it becomes inseparable from you.

Opening up more and more establishes in us an altruistic attitude of equality and boundless equanimity in our minds and hearts. You are simply more openhearted, open to all beings; and you will experience pure compassion. Moving beyond partiality—which brings us suffering—we are “without attachment or aversion,” freed from the compulsions of self-benefit and conflicts with others.

PRACTICE: THE GIVE-AND-TAKE

Here is a short practice you might try. Its purpose is to open us up to others and to our possibilities for engaging with everyone with loving-kindness and compassion. Loving-kindness means wishing for and giving happiness to others. Compassion means to relieve their suffering.

Sit quietly and breathe mindfully for a short while. Feel your body’s weight where it touches solid objects like the floor, the cushion, the seat of the chair, and so forth. This will allow you to feel more grounded.

Imagine before you someone who is suffering. This could be an actual person (or an animal or other being), a group of beings, or even the inhabitants of the whole planet or the universe. Visualizing in this way, imagine that when you breathe in, you take into your heart a dark cloud that represents the suffering of the beings you are visualizing. Imagine that as you do so, these beings are relieved of their sufferings. Ahh! How wonderful!

Then when you breathe out, imagine rays of light from your heart going out and suffusing all those you are visualizing. This is a light of happiness and well-being. Imagine it fills them with joy, replacing all their suffering and its causes. Do this repeatedly and put as much imagination and feeling into it as you can. From time to time it is important to visualize yourself along with the others who are being relieved of suffering and filled with joy. You deserve that as much as anyone. We deserve our own loving-kindness and compassion.

This giving-and-taking practice, called tonglen in Tibetan, will enhance generosity and open you more and more to those around you. When you finish practicing, just rest your body and mind openly for a minute or two. When you become used to this practice, you can do it almost anywhere and at any time.

If you become uneasy with the notion of taking in the suffering of others, it is better to start with this practice very gently or not at all. Its purpose is not to make you feel uncomfortable.

Summary of Practices

Practice the Four Immeasurable Thoughts when you awaken. From time to time, contemplate the meaning of each of these four ideas. Let them penetrate your mind and heart and let them guide your activities whenever possible.

Practice the give-and-take meditation on loving-kindness and compassion as a formal sitting meditation and in any life situation where it seems appropriate and comfortable.

Skip Notes

*1 This was proven by the style, production methods, and success of Japanese automobile manufacturers over decades.

*2 This is not to forget that power plant owners and managers may derive happiness from supplying something needed by the human community—electric power.

*3 From Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra: An Introduction to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, ch. 1, v. 28, trans. Adam Pearcy, Lotsawa House, 2007, www.lotsawahouse.org/indian-masters/shantideva/bodhicharyavatara-1.

Part Three

◼

Going Deeper

I believe that the ideas and practices presented in part 2, if absorbed and engaged with consistently in our lives, will bring us greater happiness. Not only will we be able to better handle the speed and complexity of modern life but we will also create the causes of a balanced, positive, rewarding lifestyle. Becoming aware of the causes of happiness and suffering, we will be able to move in the direction of happiness and away from suffering. What more could we ask? Surely, accomplishing that is no small achievement.

However, if we can cultivate an even deeper understanding of how happiness and suffering appear in our lives and their true nature, our concerns about them will give way to a deep relaxation and ease—a serenity that is largely unaffected by life’s inevitable ups and downs. We will come into direct contact with “the happiness that is without suffering” and “boundless equanimity.”

7

The Essence of Happiness and Suffering

Sit down comfortably as you do when practicing seated mindfulness meditation. Take a few deep breaths and relax your body, scanning from head to toe. When you find physical tension, just let it go. Relax your entire body. Then focus on your breathing and count the in- and out-breaths from one to ten over and over until your thoughts begin to diminish and mental distraction lessens. Let your attention become more concentrated, if possible extending it to encompass the full length of each in- and out-breath.

Once you’ve become comfortably centered and calm, observe any mental tension that might be present. Even if you have been able to drop distractions coming from outside or from thinking, notice that some tension may be generated simply from your intention to meditate—to relax your body and focus your mind.

There’s a subtle expectation there. And where there is expectation there is judgment: “Am I getting what I want? Does this make me happy?” It may be just a whisper.

When we act intentionally, we have a goal; therefore, we generate expectations. We want something to happen, we anticipate positive results—in this case, a “good meditation.” But we know from experience that “good” is not guaranteed. We hope for one thing and fear its opposite. If you have a “very good meditation” or a “very bad meditation,” such judgments may set you up for your next meditation session: “Can I do as well as I did last time?” or “I hope I do better than that last ‘bad’ session.” As you continue to sit quietly, notice if such subtle tension from expectations slips into your meditation from time to time. Then just let the tensions go.

Viewing Mind on a Deeper Level

Our quest for happiness and avoidance of suffering has been the main theme of this book. In the beginning we considered the difficulties created by our modern, digitally driven world and the many kinds of human conditioning that feed into that. Then I offered viewpoints and practices to help us balance ourselves in life and bring us greater happiness and reduce suffering—especially suffering experienced as anxiety and stress. But we never asked, “Do happiness and suffering really exist?”

Of course happiness and suffering exist. We all experience something we call happiness and suffering. But in what way do they exist? On the gross level, there are great, ecstatic highs ranging from winning the lottery to sexual pleasure. And there are all the intense physical sufferings, as well as the pain from the loss of loved ones to the loss of one’s home or fortune.

On the modern, day-to-day level we have the common happiness and suffering discussed in part 1. If we examine them and discover their causes, we have a reasonable chance of making our lives happier and more positive. That alone can be a great improvement. But there is a subtler and more pervasive level of our behavior that conditions us—something whispering in the background. Our wishes, desires, intentions automatically generate expectations. And as we act in seeking these desirable outcomes, our expectations create the belief that they are both real and capable of making us happy or satisfied.

Our current desire might be as innocent as peeling the skin from an apple. “Can I take it all off in one continuous spiral?” As you apply the knife and rotate the apple, you may be confident (“It’s a piece of cake. I’ve done this a thousand times!”), or you may be nervous and unsure. You’ve set yourself up with an expectation of success. If the peel breaks, there’s disappointment—a little suffering. If you make it all the way, there’s a twinkle of happiness. All for an apple peel. Sound familiar?

In modern life we often think our happiness should be automatic—something that comes from clicking on our digital devices. As we have seen, digital developers set up their apps so that we receive rewards designed to keep us engaged with their products. But eventually our clicks lead to nagging distractions, like advertisements, notifications, and robocalls. And sometimes our clicks don’t work—as when the internet is slow or our cell phone is too far from an antenna. Our positive expectations—many of them operating under our radar—result in disappointment.

This persistent quest for happiness creates an overriding concern, a tension, about the results. There is hope for happiness and fear of suffering. They are really two sides of the same coin. If you hope for something, this usually includes the fear that your hope may not be realized. And if you fear something, the hope it may not occur is implied. Hope and fear are a common and very deeply ingrained form of conditioning for most of us. We can see them at work—sometimes very subtly and sometimes quite blatantly—in many of our activities, especially when we are looking toward the future: “Will I have a good interview and get the job?” “What will the test results show?” “Will my date find me attractive?” Hope and fear help glue our conditioned habits into place.

When we examine happiness and suffering through the lens of hope and fear, it puts our quest for happiness in a different light. Although seeking happiness and avoiding fear is quite natural, our upbringing, culture, and life experience can easily lead us to unrealistic expectations. We may internalize our hope for happiness and fear of suffering with the expectation that we always will be happy and never suffer. When that impossible dream is dashed again and again, we suffer.

Looking at happiness and suffering in this way makes it clear that they have more to do with our mind—our mindset—than anything else. They begin to take on the illusory quality of the soccer game described in the previous chapter. If we believe that the team in the blue jerseys is “our team,” “the best,” and “must win,” then by believing that, we’ve made it reality. Our fixation on a set of beliefs makes things real to us. But many of our beliefs—upon which we base our expectations—are not only unreal in themselves but also ignore the fact that conditions in life are always changing. Seeking happiness in this way is like trying to use crooked arrows to hit a moving target.

What’s Real?

Consider this: If different people, groups, nationalities, or even animal species see some common object differently, how real is that object, how “common”? Are different minds seeing the same object differently? Or are they seeing different objects? For example, if different people have different opinions about it, is there such a thing as “good weather”? Or “a comfortable bed”? Or “good food”? I have been served Mexican food and warned that it was “very hot and spicy,” only to find it rather tame compared to what’s “hot and spicy” for most Tibetans like myself who grew up eating very spicy foods.

You might point to a physical object—a stone, an iron rail—and say, “That’s solid. That’s real!” But even for modern physics, which closely examines the nature of physical objects, reality has taken on a very ambiguous meaning. The atoms that supposedly compose a stone, some iron, or anything else are not “solid.” And the subatomic particles that represent the fundamental reality of these elements do not have fixed, consistent qualities. Such basic traits as location, velocity, wave-versus-particle duality, spin, measurement, and other aspects of “reality” cannot be established as expected. Rather, the way the scientist designs the experiment has a decisive influence on the result—on the “reality.” Even physics is very unsure about what is physically certain and recognizes how much physical reality is dependent on the human mind.[*1]

Considering these examples, is there a single thing that we can consistently point to and say, “Yes, that is happiness and that is suffering”? We cannot do that, can we? Not everyone suffers from the same causes, and not everyone sees suffering in the same way. If suffering had an absolute, concrete, inherent, and irrefutable existence, it would have to cause suffering consistently in all cases. But we know that it does not. The causes of happiness and suffering vary greatly. At one end of the spectrum we have the masochist who derives happiness from what we would normally call pain and suffering. At the other, there are chronically depressed people who rarely gain pleasure from anything. But exploring the nature of the reality of happiness and suffering is not an abstract, philosophical question. Rather, it goes to the heart of how we view and experience reality.

What’s implied here is that happiness and suffering may be real on a relative level—on what human cultures and historical periods have accepted as the reality of happiness and suffering. But when examined carefully, they are simply ideas that don’t have to conform to an individual’s experience. Take physical pain, for example. It might appear that the pain of an injury or illness is determined by the trauma to tissues and the messages sent by your nerves—just that. But we know that we can distract ourselves from physical pain. And by concentrating and worrying over physical pain, we can make the experience much more painful—both physically and mentally. However, by accepting the pain, we can release the mental tension that causes this. Then, if instead of homing in on a physical sensation—such as a pain in your foot—you were to extend your attention to the body as a whole, you can have a new and less “painful” experience. This openness releases pain and encourages healing. This is something I have experienced myself.

In terms of mental and emotional pains, all of us have developed strategies to handle them, to lessen their impact. One way is to focus away from the object of suffering to something else. Say your car has been stolen and you’re really worried about it: “Will I get it back? How can I do all the things I must do each day without a car? Will the insurance pay for a new one?” But you are at work now, and you force yourself to concentrate on the task at hand. If you do that successfully, reality for you is your work at present and not your stolen car worries. Unattended to, they temporarily disappear.

Aside from deflecting our attention from unpleasant thoughts, we can use acceptance. When we resist something unpleasant, we create more tension and suffering. By accepting things, we release that tension and reduce our suffering. How can we develop acceptance? One way is to take a wider, more open and spacious view of life. We can arrive at this view by contemplating the ups and downs of life, the changeability and impermanence of life, and how the reality of phenomena—including happiness and suffering—is largely dependent on our mindsets. Our conditioning, our habits, cause us to fixate narrowly rather than opening to this more accepting, flexible, spacious view.

Since happiness and suffering depend so much on our minds and how we look at things, we don’t have to see life’s ups and downs as so desirable or so threatening. We can back off that tension and accept it. Think of a multicolored rope. We may not like each of the individual colors, but the rope as a whole can be quite beautiful. Conditioning ourselves to this very reasonable viewpoint can transform our whole attitude toward life.

This is especially important in human relations. Suppose you decided to do a favor for a friend. You expected your act of kindness to be effective and elicit appreciation from your friend. But that didn’t happen and you became a little upset. What’s a good way to handle that? First of all, if your intention was centered on your friend’s happiness, you shouldn’t blame yourself. But why blame your friend either? Any number of things could have caused their cool reaction. You might have misjudged that person’s mood at the particular moment. You might not have understood what kinds of things please your friend. Rather than feeling hurt and closing up, you can be open and simply explain your motives and ask about your friend’s reaction. We are all different, and the best thing to do is to embrace and accept that.

This open attitude is especially important between ethnic, racial, and national groups. The human suffering caused by prejudice and intolerance is incalculable. Wars and other armed conflicts such as vendettas and even bar fights show just how slippery “happiness” can become. Enthused by the hope of defeating an enemy and experiencing the pleasure of being victorious, the conflict we engage in may bring us great harm and suffering. Even if we win, our enemy may return some day to harm us. So much destruction results in wars that large parts of the planet suffer, not to mention the victims and their families—all for “happiness.”

With wars, pogroms, genocide, political extremism, and other atrocities, a more open and communicative attitude could prevent these tragedies from ever happening. They are the product of closed minds, nothing more. And they are now a part of our digital environment. I refer specifically to social media motivated by hatred. We have seen just how much confusion and suffering they can cause. The variety of human cultures and individual differences enrich human life on Earth. Negating such diversity has obviously caused great suffering.

Self-Knowledge

If happiness and suffering as we normally view them are not fixed, not real, how can we find “happiness without suffering” and “boundless equanimity”? How can we gain so deep an understanding of this that we achieve deep contentment and serenity? We can do this through formal meditation and by applying mindfulness to daily life. “Happiness without suffering” is an experience beyond the dualities of happiness versus suffering and hope and fear. And “boundless equanimity” is an open and even quality, free of the biases of attraction and aversion. Actually, our quest is not for happiness but for self-knowledge. Placing our emphasis on self-knowledge—on understanding the heart-mind—gives us a reliable place to work from. It’s like climbing to the top of the highest mountain so that we can see the lay of the land—how everything fits. Since the mind is such a powerful actor in determining the reality of things for us humans, knowing it well will lead to a deeper, more fundamental and embracing happiness.

We have already begun this process by examining our personal conditioning and how that relates to our use of digital media. Now, through developing a subtler understanding of the very nature of happiness and suffering, we can see more clearly how our thoughts and feelings arise and how they color and even create “reality.”

PRACTICE: A MEDITATION ON HOPE AND FEAR

Sit comfortably and center yourself by whatever method you have found effective in your practice of mindfulness. Give yourself the time you need to attain a state of relative calm.

Now engage for a while in conceptual meditation. Think of hope and fear in terms of the previous discussion. How are hope and fear similar—linked together like two sides of the same coin? How do they arise from expectations? How are they related to your quests for happiness and avoidance of suffering? Find a few examples from your own experience.

After exploring the role of hope and fear in your life and mind, center yourself in calmness once again, perhaps by concentrating on your breathing, and remain there for a few minutes. Now simply observe your thoughts as they arise, not engaging with them but just noticing them. If some thought in any way related to hope and fear arises—it might be something like your hope that this meditation session be “successful”—when you recognize it arising, just let it go. You might even say, “Ah,” and return to your breathing and remain lightly watchful for the next thought to arise. Don’t block your thoughts. Don’t have any expectation about them. To the best of your ability, don’t engage with thoughts by producing sequences of related ideas. Just let thoughts arise spontaneously as if they were clouds appearing from over the horizon. When you become aware of a thought connected to the topic of hope and fear, simply recognize it. Then let it go and continue watching.

Bring your session to a close whenever you choose.

When you have become accustomed to this style of meditation, allow yourself to engage in it spontaneously during ordinary daily activities. Notice hope and fear in whatever situations and activities they arise. Does this happen rarely for you? Or are such thoughts common or even pervasive?

Deconditioning

This meditation exercise introduces a new way to loosen up conditioning that may be limiting us. Previously we employed more logical and directed methods of deconditioning. We used exercises such as patience and openness, the Four Applications of Mindfulness, the Six Valuable Qualities, and the Four Immeasurable Thoughts to give us greater flexibility and command over our behavior. Although they can become quite subtle, those exercises, as presented above, are not as subtle as the meditation on hope and fear. This meditation releases habitual patterns at their source, spontaneously in the moment they arise in the mind. It does this not by applying instructions but through simple, direct recognition. This subtle approach requires sensitivity and perseverance, but it has the double advantage of increasing our self-knowledge while slowly weakening and eventually eliminating our automatic engagement with hope and fear.

I have met people whose happiness appears to be deep and stable. You may know such people yourself. They are content with life and radiate serenity. That could be because they do not fixate on either happiness or suffering. They accept that happiness and suffering are part of life, and they know that excessive hope and fear will make them anxious about the future, regretful about the past, and absent from the present. This perceptive attitude makes it easier to roll with the punches. And it doesn’t mean that life will be merely bland, the emotions dampened to prevent pain. Great joys and pains will be experienced in the moment they occur, but they will not be dwelled upon to an exaggerated degree. They will not interfere with the open, relaxed flow of life. Rather, they are recognized as part of it.

This is one reason why in mindfulness meditation we are advised to simply return to the object of focus when we are distracted and not make a big deal of it. We trust that the process of regaining focus again and again will naturally improve our meditation over time. And it does. Likewise, when we make too big a deal of the ups and downs of life, we fixate on them and they become background worries—nagging distractions liable to pop up at any moment. We introduce tension and maintain it as an undercurrent rather than dropping it and staying open and in the present.

Recall once more how the last two statements of the Four Immeasurable Thoughts speak of “the happiness that is without suffering” and “boundless equanimity.” It is through the subtler meditations similar to the meditation on hope and fear that we can arrive at the deep contentment I speak of. We will begin to engage in this more intimately through the explanations and practices given in part 4, “The Value of a Spiritual Path.”

Skip Notes

*1 This ambiguity has been demonstrated in the double-split interference experiment, the uncertainty principle, complementarity, and other established research. See George Greenstein and Arthur G. Zajonc, The Quantum Challenge: Modern Research on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 1997).

8

The Mystery of Interdependence

As you read this book—absorbing the narrative and trying the meditations and exercises—deeper questions may arise for you. Some of what you’ve read may relate to your own natural curiosity about who and what you are: Beneath or beyond your personality, is there something else? My words may echo your own observations of your inner life and how that relates to the outer world of people and things. In this chapter we will look at a view of life that may help answer some of these questions—the view of interdependence.

The internet, since its development in the 1980s, is a splendid example of interdependence. Remember that the internet is also called the World Wide Web (as in the “www” that precedes the URL—the universal resource locator or internet address). As we know, the web that interconnects the virtual reality of our digital world is vast beyond description. It consists not only of its various and numerous digital devices but of the many humans who engage with them. That’s billions of people with even more pieces of digital hardware. Of course the software is a part of it too. And these are always changing: new hardware and software update the old, and often very quickly too. New users are born and old ones die, so the human population of participants is always shifting. Here we see that impermanence, too, is an aspect of this virtual reality.

In this World Wide Web, everything depends for its functioning on other parts of it. Major applications like email and web browsers depend on high-capacity mainframe computers. These depend on hardware systems that depend on the generation of electricity and the other activities that produce the devices—the mining of minerals and the processing of silicon to make chips, the refining of petroleum to provide plastic cases, and so forth. This circle of material interdependence could be expanded much further. For instance, we could also include the people who perform all activities related to it and everything that supports them—even the food they eat.

But even more interesting and revealing is the dance of virtual reality that pervades all human interactions with the web. We engage with this virtual reality daily, accessing it visually on our screens. Here we are using our eyesight and visual imaginations. We initially were trained to do this through analog media like movies and television. Even the old landline telephones encouraged us to imagine the physical appearance of people we were speaking with. Now when we do research, rather than entering a library building and accessing a card catalog, we type our query in a web browser and get answers that can include videos.

Where does all this take place? What has replaced the library with its books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, and so on? What has replaced face-to-face communications where we could reach out and touch the person we were speaking with? Actually, we don’t really…exactly…know. The term virtual reality was very well chosen. One dictionary definition of virtual is “in effect, though not in fact.”[*1] Synonyms include potentially, possible, latent, between the lines, approximate, and unmanifested. A virtual reality is not quite there, not quite real.

All these “parts” of the internet are interdependent. If you look at each part or nexus of the web, you can see that they arise interdependently. That goes for things that arise visually on screens and for the responses of our minds—our imaginations. It also goes for material parts of the web. Bringing all those parts together required the human minds that developed physics and chemistry over centuries and the modern designers who applied that scientific knowledge. The minds of businesspeople who saw the economic potential of the internet also participated.

Of course, you can imagine many more pieces that contribute to the World Wide Web. But the important point is that the internet depends on each of these parts for its existence. The web is not independent—some solid thing, self-contained and in isolation. As a virtual reality, it is not quite real in the terms we usually apply to reality—terms that refer to independent “things.”

So what kind of reality is the internet? Can it really be grasped the way we seem to grasp other realities? Apparently not.

But this question extends even further. It applies to “solid” objects like your smartphone too. A year or two ago, it existed as a bunch of raw materials, perhaps sitting in warehouses in China. Then these were processed, then combined in a factory and shipped to the store where you bought it. But even your new phone is not stable. You drop it and the screen might crack. An internal part might shake loose. You might spill coffee into it. Your battery gradually degrades. The software is always shifting through updates as is the content you interact with. Your phone goes through changes—it’s not always the same. And when you recycle it to buy a new one, it is taken apart once again. Its components separate—perhaps placed in different bins in a recycling facility marked “plastic,” “wiring,” “chips,” “aluminum,” and so forth. The software disappears into thin air. Your phone is its own virtual reality. All along the line it is only seemingly the smartphone we imagine it to be, as are all its components also seemingly what we name them. The reality of your phone itself is virtual.

You can extend this exploration into interdependence to everything. This might be an interesting topic for you to contemplate: “Can you find anything that exists independently?” Try it. I believe you will come to the conclusion that everything exists interdependently. The consequence of this discovery—which corresponds to what we found in the previous chapter using a different approach—is once again that things do not exist in the way we normally and habitually assume. We have been taught to believe that things are independent—that they are things-in-themselves, unified, self-contained. And, of course, for the world to function and for us to communicate we have to use this inaccurate, conventional belief—this “shorthand.” But this standard view of things is illusory.[*2]

This view of interdependence is nicely summarized in the following quotation by Buddha Shakyamuni circa 500 B.C.E.:

When this is, that is.

From the arising of this comes the arising of that.

When this isn’t, that isn’t.

From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.[†3]

We, Who Experience Happiness and Suffering

Why is it important to know this? Why do we need to seek a more fundamental and valid truth if the human world normally functions by our believing everything is independent and “real”? It’s because this view of interdependence also applies to us as individuals. We humans, too, are a virtual reality. Everything that applies to a smartphone applies to our bodies. And our minds—where we define “Who am I?”—are also an interdependent collection of thoughts, emotions, and perceptions. It can come as no surprise that the internet, which humans invented, is modeled on the human mind. Everything everywhere—including the internet and our minds—depends on something else. “When this is, that is.” Everything lacks self-entity, is empty of the self-contained identity we assume it has, and that includes “us.” At the very least, ignoring this leads us to take ourselves too seriously. At worst, a fixed belief in independent, really-real things often results in disastrous human interactions and activities. For instance, when it comes to happiness and suffering, what is the root cause of hatred and violence between humans? To fall into a violent reaction requires that your sense of self feels threatened, insulted, or in some way irritated or injured. Here are some common examples.

You are walking in an open market, brooding over a problem in your life, and someone accidentally jostles you. You react by pushing back, or even striking—defending your “self.”

Someone of the “wrong” ethnicity walks through your neighborhood and you think or even shout racial epithets, perhaps even threatening that person physically.

From a sense of patriotism (identifying with your nation), you join the armed forces and go enthusiastically to war against the “enemy” that believes in a political system or religious culture you dislike or is of an ethnicity considered an enemy. (Of course, the “enemy” feels the same way about you.)

A friend, relative, spouse, or neighbor makes a remark that injures your pride or hits a sore point in your life. In response, you shout and spill abuse.

We could easily add to this list and create others exemplifying negative emotions like jealousy, pride, attachment, and dullness/ignorance. These are common sources of suffering.

If we didn’t believe we existed independently—both in terms of how we identify ourselves internally with our thoughts, emotions, and perceptions and in how we ignore our interdependent identity with other beings—we would have no basis for personal suffering. Who would there be to suffer and cause suffering for others? By seeing through the myth of our independent identity and taking ourselves much more lightly, a life of great, pervasive happiness becomes possible.

Then Who or What Am I?

As we all know, there is a lot of attention these days on the natural environment. The word itself, environment, simply refers to what is around something or someone. More deeply, that something or someone is part of what “surrounds” it. An environment is an interconnection, a massive feedback loop. Everything is part of and depends on everything else. We can easily see this in the natural world. This is especially tragic since it is our forgetting our interconnection with and dependence upon the Earth’s environment that has caused us to act so carelessly, as if human activities have nothing to do with the balance and health of our planet.

The mind, too, can be viewed as a virtual environment. There, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions appear and disappear, flitting through. Flitting through what? We would normally answer that by saying they flit through the mind or awareness. But can we find some thing that corresponds to the mind or awareness any more than we can say, “This is the internet”? Once more we arrive at the “in effect, though not in fact” nature of virtual reality.[*4]

If our happiness depends to a great degree on our minds—if it is our minds that direct our actions (which can bring about the causes of happiness and suffering)—it would be a good idea to know our minds very well indeed. To do that, we must investigate to see if they are the way I’ve suggested or not. Here, meditation—conceptual meditation and deeper, more direct approaches—can help a lot. Again, we see that our happiness and suffering depend on self-knowledge. We saw from the beginning of this book that self-knowledge—related to the things app designers know about us—is a key to balancing our engagement with the digital world.

We can begin this quest by dividing our understanding of the mind into two aspects—the conventional or conditioned, and the definitive or unconditioned. Can this paradigm help us understand just who and what we are? This model suggests that our conventional views and activities, where we see things as relatively real, is the way human society has conditioned itself to function. It also suggests that we often make the big mistake of falsely assuming that conventional reality is fundamentally true and “real.” Doing so, we often say to ourselves, “I am this,” “I believe in that,” even though we are frequently changing—shifting, becoming something else. We can observe that the elements that make up our identity are different when, for example, we are in a comfortable situation versus when we are uncomfortable. In fact, we can observe this changeability in every situation we engage with. You’ve heard the comment, “She’s just not herself today.” Are we really ever some unchanging, independent self? Observe yourself mindfully in many situations and you will know.

A FORMAL PRACTICE ON INTERDEPENDENCE

During a time and in a place where you can sit quietly for a while, begin by relaxing your body and focusing on your breath. Once you have centered yourself, practice mindfulness in the following way: Begin observing your thoughts and allow them to flow without blocking or interrupting them. Just notice them without reacting. Notice if any thoughts about your identity—about “Who is meditating?”—appear in your mind. If they don’t, at some point notice how you identify yourself, the watcher. Are “you” associated with a particular part of your body or possibly with your body as a whole? Are you identifying yourself with some thought—“me” or “I”—that may be only the sound of that word, or perhaps a visual, emotional, or other sensation? Do memories associated with your identity come to mind—for example, “me” in different situations? Perhaps some of these might have to do with important and defining moments in your life. Your sense of self may at times be a combination of some of those appearances—one that may change. If you discover such “me” identities in your meditation, are they always the same? After doing this practice for a while, finally ask yourself if you have observed some permanent, inherent, independent “me.” (And if you have, who saw it?)

If—especially after you have meditated on it over time—the notion of interdependence makes sense to you, you can use the view of conventional-versus-definitive reality as a basis for greater self-knowledge. In a certain sense, the two are not separate or opposed to each other. Conventional reality arises from our deeper, original nature—our innate intelligence and intuition. When we learn anything or do anything, there is an awareness—a spark of knowing or a “light”—that is conscious of phenomena the moment they appear. This unconditioned part of us may appear so quickly that we don’t notice it. It does not interpret nor evaluate nor pigeonhole phenomena. It just “knows” in the most direct and basic sense. It is like when you burn your finger on a hot surface. You experience it directly—ouch! Recognizing it as “hot” comes in the next instance. The experience of “hot” is unconditioned. Knowing “what it is” and “what caused it” comes a moment later from conditioning—experience and learning. To understand this knowing awareness in direct experience requires practice and subtle guidance. We will explore this in part 4.

Developing the View of Interdependence

Great benefit in many areas of our lives, including our relations with others, comes from understanding interdependence. This also goes for human society and our entire planet—the home that supports us. Because we see that everything is connected, this understanding encourages us to think and act positively. In Tibet, where we have traditionally been taught to respect the natural environment, we try to avoid air and water pollution and engage with the natural world in the most positive way possible. We have often depended on lakes and rivers for drinking water. Therefore we do not throw dirty things into them. And not just because of that—we respect the other beings in the waters for which our filth is toxic. Other animals also rely on clean water. Polluting the atmosphere through burning noxious materials such as trash has also been avoided for the same reasons. Often, doing less is doing more. That’s wise and therefore positive.

Knowing interconnectedness, we know that when we fail to pay attention to the consequences of pollution, land mismanagement, careless and inappropriate construction, and so on, negative feedback happens. It can come sooner or later, but it comes. By avoiding such mistakes, the natural world automatically supports us, providing us with food and water, materials for shelter, and much more. That includes beauty and inspiration. It cannot be denied that our planet Earth, when in natural balance, is a thing of awe-inspiring beauty, complexity, and abundance. We humans share all of this with all other beings everywhere. But we tend to separate things because of the borders we imagine existing between them—this is Africa, that is Asia, North and South America, Australia, Europe, not to mention countries and other geographical divisions. “This is my land!” But these borders exist only in human minds. In reality, everything is an interconnected, interdependent whole.

The view of interdependence will also greatly improve the human social realm. Understanding and adopting this view motivates us to engage at the second level of openness mentioned earlier—positive engagement with others. If you receive a beautiful plant as a gift and you want to nurture it so that its beauty will continue to brighten your home, you have to be aware of the causes and conditions involved in that. Without giving the plant the right amount of water, sunlight, proper soil, and so on, you will deprive that plant of the causes for the condition “beautiful, healthy plant.” Providing these causes requires some knowledge, planning, work—and especially positive, enthusiastic motivation. Some love is needed.

For the many interactions that occur among human beings, the view of interdependence is not just helpful but truly necessary. When this is ignored, people tend to simply listen to whatever comes up in their minds, in social media, or on television. This is a careless, uninformed attitude. It ignores context and is essentially selfish. When we close up like this, we are disconnected from the interdependent nature of things. The chances of positive, harmonious engagement with others are narrowed.

In contrast, when we are guided by empathy—by taking into account other people’s needs, wishes, and feelings—we are part of others and they are part of us. That is how things really are. We are grounded to reality. If you occasionally ask yourself, “How would I feel if someone said this or did that to me?” you are likely to know how the other person would feel and how they would react. That goes for positive, neutral, and negative relations between people or groups of people. This applies not only for engaging with others such that happiness arises but also when it comes to accomplishing our work, projects, and so on. To accomplish things, we nearly always need the cooperation of others. The conditions—happiness and accomplishment—depend on such causes.

We also benefit from the practice of interdependence by feeling connected to others. This is especially important in modern life. Loneliness and isolation are big problems throughout the world today. Many factors have contributed to this over time, but the digital revolution has made things worse. Yes, we can “communicate” through our devices, but how wholesome and satisfying is that communication? We become used to it and accept it—in many cases we have no choice—but aren’t we missing out on something very important for human beings when we are deprived of in-person contact?

Developing the view of interdependence is a matter of opening your mind to the idea and observing your inner and outer environment. See how things interconnect inside, outside, and in between. See if “this” and “that” are separate or interdependent.

Skip Notes

*1 Webster’s New World College Dictionary, third ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

*2 The same thing happened with physics. The conventional physics of Isaac Newton, which was considered valid until about 1900, contained all that was necessary to build a railroad or send a rocket into space. But the laws of conventional physics could not produce technology like computer chips or quantum computers, which rely on a more “virtual” (and precise) understanding of physical reality.

†3 From his paticcasamuppada, a teaching on dependent arising.

*4 Neuroscience tends to identify the mind with the brain. But although they are obviously related, there is no hard scientific evidence that they are the same.

Part Four

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The Value of a Spiritual Path

A spiritual path is usually concerned with exploring the nonmaterial side of life. The idea has always been that there is something beyond, underlying, or pervading material existence—something subtler and more powerful. When we engage with a spiritual path, we begin to get glimpses—views of this “something.”

When I speak of spiritual path, of course I am here referring to Buddhism. I am from the Buddhist culture of Tibet, and I am a teacher in that spiritual tradition. Throughout this book I have adapted Buddhist views and practices to the practical problems of modern, digitally attuned living. I think they are a good fit because they go to the heart of these problems, offering penetrating insight and therefore solutions that can be extremely effective.

That’s because Buddhism is greatly concerned with the elimination of suffering and the creation of the conditions for happiness. The first Buddhist teaching, given 2,500 years ago, was not about cosmology or religious philosophy but rather the causes of suffering and their elimination. You might say that Buddhism specializes in this quest. Therefore I think it is an ideal pathway to solving many of the common problems of modern life. Furthermore, in Buddhism, daily life and the spiritual path are seen as interconnected.

To create the conditions for happiness requires wisdom. Wisdom exists on different levels, ranging from the relative or conventional, which is coarser and more unrefined, to the definitive or absolute level, which is refined and subtle. Buddhism operates on the assumption that the subtler the wisdom, the more effective it is in our achieving the outcomes we desire. That is, if you understand the underlying reasons for the existence of a problem, you are in a better position to solve it.

The same goes for our understanding of life, or “reality” as we sometimes say. The Buddhist path can lead to a more perceptive and refined view compared to our normal way of seeing things. It can lead us to developing and opening up the heart-mind to an awareness of the nondual connection between inner (spiritual) and outer (material) reality. Discovering this unity is one of the most important aims of this path. It is greatly transformative, and when we open to this awareness, the pros and cons of our digital activities become clear to us.

I invite you to read part 4 with an open mind, not with the aim of becoming a Buddhist or actively following any spiritual path but in order to explore some of the deeper questions of life—questions you may have been asking yourself all along.

9

Wisdom

Wisdom has a special meaning in spiritual traditions and especially in Buddhism. Whereas we often say that someone who is knowledgeable—who knows lots of facts—is “wise,” in Buddhist practice wisdom points to direct understanding and experience of inner and outer life, of ourselves and phenomena in general. This wisdom is not data or the conceptual understanding of phenomena. It is beyond ordinary knowledge that recognizes objects in the material world and concepts such as good and bad. We have already touched on this topic in chapters 7 and 8, where we explored the nature of happiness and suffering and of interdependence.

The portal through which wisdom is found is the mind—not the brain or the conceptual mind but the heart-mind, the mind that knows directly. We have all had moments when intuition has revealed things to us directly, and intuition is one example or facet of this mind. But where is this mind, this knower, to be found?

We can begin to find and know it through meditative investigation. By doing this, we begin to know ourselves at a very deep level. Sooner or later you will make some surprising discoveries, so you must start by encouraging yourself to be open and compassionate with yourself: “Let’s go deeper and know the nature of one’s own mind,” which we sometimes call “myself” or “I.”

Realizing “No-Self” and “No-Phenomena”:A Conceptual Meditation

Find some time when you can be undisturbed and sit comfortably. Allow your mind to be relaxed and unhurried. Spend some time on each of the ideas presented below. Here they are rather condensed, so they need to be unpacked and allowed to sink in.

It is extremely important before we begin this meditation to understand that “no-self” and “no-phenomena” do not mean that our personal selves and the outer world are nonexistent. Rather, they mean that the inner and outer worlds do exist but not in the way we ordinarily assume.

As for ourselves, even though we can easily observe that we are always changing—our moods, our thoughts, our emotions, and so forth—we still believe that behind all of this is some permanent, independent “I”—some me who runs the show or at least tries to.

We also normally believe that the outer world we observe and engage with is solidly established and consists of independent objects—“things.” For example, we assume that physical objects like wooden tables and chairs have independent existence even though we can easily see that they are no more than moments in the history of some trees—all part of a dynamic continuum of minerals, soil, water, sunlight, and so on. Things are always changing. Recall that even the science of physics, which has always sought to find the smallest and most essential building blocks of matter—which they once called “atoms”—has been unable to find anything solid, fixed, and existing independently.[*1] This goes for not only tables and chairs but the materials that make up our bodies as well.

To begin to get a notion of how the mind normally engages with objects, look at your hand. What are you seeing? Do you see anything that makes it a hand? Well, it is shaped like something we have been taught to call a hand. But that shape doesn’t really stay still, does it? We move our hands in ordinary activities such as typing, clicking, lifting a fork, and so forth. So the shape is always changing.

Ah, but a hand is composed of five fingers, right? But if that is so, the hand we are so familiar with is dependent on those five fingers for its identity. It also depends on the palm. You could also say it’s a combination of those elements, but a combination is a pretty abstract concept. We don’t think of our hands as “combinations” very often. We can apply the same idea of interdependence to the fingers or the palm separately. They too are made up of parts upon which they depend for their identity. We can say that each finger depends on its joints and so on down to the cellular level—skin cells, bone cells, nail cells, and so forth. The cells are made up of other substances composed of molecules, which are composed of—atoms? But, as we’ve seen, an atom is an old concept that modern science has been unable to truly establish. According to modern physics, atoms have subatomic parts whose properties do not conform to “matter” as we normally think of it. So the rug of a solid, material foundation has been pulled out from under things.

But we still call it a “hand.” Observing this process of identification carefully, we begin to see that the hand depends on our mind—on how we conceive it (based on a lot of conditioning in childhood: “Get your hand away from that hot stove!”) Returning to our fingers, when our finger is pricked by a thorn, the finger hurts, but we say, “My finger hurts.” But where is the “I” that makes the finger “mine”? Which part of the body can really be called “me” or “I”? After all, people lose larger body parts, such as an arm or leg, but are still healthy and okay. They still have the sense of “I,” an ego. The self-identity is still believed in, even if the body upon which it depends has changed due to injury.

But if there is an “I,” as we always assume—if it is some entity or “thing,” something real—it must have some characteristics, right? To begin with, it must be located somewhere. What real thing has no location? Now observe your body carefully and see if you can find “I” in any part of it. Where is “I”? If it is in your head, say, which part of your head? If it is in the center of your chest, is it in the upper or lower center? How big is it? What is its color, its shape? Take some time with this and look very carefully. You may conclude, “Yes, there is some kind of ‘I,’ but I don’t know exactly where it is.”

Then we can turn our investigation to our mind. Who thinks of “I”? Who thinks this is me and my body? Where is that thinking consciousness located? Where does it come from? Where does it reside? And where does it go (like when you are not thinking or in dreamless sleep)? Am I my mind when it is in a relaxed, neutral state or when it is excited and active? Am I my mind? What is my mind? Take some time to let these questions and their implications sink in.

You would think that these questions—about things we have always accepted as true—would have easy and obvious answers. If something is true or real, the more often and more carefully we look for it, the more evident it should become—no? But through our investigation we may not discover easy or obvious answers. Could it be that out of habit we are simply applying labels and then believing the labels are something real?

The Point of the Exercise

At some stage you may find that your mind or “I” is beyond explanation, beyond words, beyond searching and finding. It is somehow open and pervasive. Yet all this pervasive energy is also focused, dynamic, intelligent, and insightful. Maybe it doesn’t really matter where it is or when it begins, where it ends or what it is. When we allow ourselves to be fully present with this experience of the mind and its richness, that brings a different perspective—a vastness. In the teachings of the historical Buddha and the great masters of meditation who succeeded him, it is said that the nature of the mind is “empty and clear,” that “the mind is devoid of mind” and that “not even the Buddhas have ever seen the mind or ‘I.’ ”

Such an experience of mind is sometimes called the “Middle Way” in Buddhism. The middle is a place between the extremes of reification (called “eternalism”) and nonexistence (called “nihilism”). When we reify, we project the belief in absolute existence onto a self or phenomena. With nonexistence we project the belief in nothingness onto a self or phenomena. The Middle Way between these two extremes is where reality is to be found. Things do not have absolute existence nor are they nothing. In the direct experience of this middle ground, you find yourself in a place that is not a place. And in a time that is timeless. That is to say, you are free.

We practice this meditation to realize “no-self” and “no-phenomena.” When we begin to recognize these qualities through direct experience, the mind is liberated and we realize, “Okay, now I can be loose and at ease. There’s no need to be always clinging on ‘I’ or to cherish this ‘I.’ ” The “I” and everything else exists in a zone that cannot be described in terms of the extremes of eternalism and nihilism—the terms we commonly use in relative existence, in our normal, everyday lives.[*2]

Naturally this practice helps us overcome ego-clinging, which refers to the way we develop attachment for our own ego or self or mind, and to our body. Ego-clinging conditions our thinking into believing that everything is true and existent. We cling to the true existence of suffering, happiness, anger, attachment, and so on. These are the habits that bring us the relative suffering we experience in life.

The mind of wisdom that we experience in this kind of meditation has the potential to see the true nature of all things and all beings in the universe. Wisdom and mind are united in a nondual realization. The separation we normally make between the inner world (our subjective sense of self, of “I”) and the outer world of objects is seen to be an illusion. Rather, they are intimately interconnected. We can also discover that this wide-open mind—naturally relaxed and loose—is naturally compassionate. Sometimes this is called our “awakened, innate nature.” Buddha-nature, primordial purity, and mind essence are other synonyms for this used in the Buddhist tradition. The compassion and loving-kindness that is united with this experience emerges effortlessly. It doesn’t require any thinking on our own part, such as “I should be generous and help others as much as I can.” When we are in nondual realization, we benefit beings naturally—just by resting there.

Keep in mind that this kind of wisdom practice is beyond concepts, so the words I am using here don’t and cannot really describe it. By engaging in conceptual practices—such as the mindfulness of staying focused and undistracted—we won’t necessarily find the ease, peace, or vastness that can be discovered when we open to our own innate wisdom mind.

The Moon in Water

Here is another way to look at wisdom: We have all seen the moon reflected in water—at night on the surface of a placid lake or in a puddle as we walk down a pathway after a rainy evening. If the water is still, the reflected moon looks no different from the moon in the sky. It looks “real.” We know there is no moon in the puddle but we can still project some sense of reality onto the image, as we often do when we look at our face in a mirror—another simple reflection. “The moon in water” is used in Buddhism as an analogy for the nature of our personal “self” and all outer phenomena. These can appear with perfect clarity and yet, with some analysis, they are seen to be empty of inherent existence—of the eternalism mentioned above. They don’t exist “from their own side.” There is no entity within or behind the image or belief. They arise interdependently.

Another good example of such interdependence is the rainbow. To view a rainbow requires (1) moisture in the air, (2) sunlight, and (3) a human observer who is in the right position so that the sunlight refracts off the moisture into the eye. So where exactly is the rainbow? Does the rainbow itself exist? No, the rainbow depends on these three factors. If one is missing, no rainbow is observed. This is another example of the middle between the extremes: seeing a rainbow, we are led to believe the rainbow exists from its own side. But it doesn’t. Nor is it nonexistent. All other phenomena—including our personal identity, our “I”—exist in a similar manner. They depend on other phenomena. Everything is interdependent—even our realization of interdependence (which depends upon either analysis or direct perception—wisdom).

It is important to train in this understanding to acquire or stimulate wisdom within ourselves and to maintain the causes of happiness. To recognize the interdependent connections between things makes us aware of the causes and conditions of happiness and suffering. We can then act wisely, and the feedback we receive from our actions will be positive. It’s a matter of cause and effect. If we know how to treat others well and do so, they are likely to reciprocate in kind. And just maintaining that attitude will also bring a different energy into our mind and body—our whole sense of being. An environment strongly influenced by wisdom will be an extremely positive place to be. It’s also a place where the temptations of addictive apps and social media on our mind become obvious. Therefore, it is very important to understand what wisdom means and to practice it. (This is one aspect of karma, which we will explore in the next chapter.) Because everything is interconnected and interdependent, whatever we do or say matters beyond our own personal corner in life, beyond our ego. So ask yourself, “How can I keep my mind in wakefulness and my heart in compassion and loving-kindness so that I can bring benefit to self and others as much as possible in this interconnected universe?”

The Six Valuable Qualities Revisited

Recall from chapter 5 the Six Valuable Qualities of generosity, patience, diligence, discipline, concentration, and wisdom. There I suggested you practice them as one of the ways to loosen up some of the conditioning that can keep us speedy, stressed, and unbalanced in daily life—especially when we are heavily influenced by and engaged with today’s digital world. That presentation is derived from a Buddhist teaching called “the Six Transcendent Perfections” (Sanskrit: paramitas). These qualities are called “transcendent” when they are practiced without reference to the agent, the action or activity, and the recipient. These three—subject (agent), action, and object—are called in Buddhism “the Three Spheres.”

An example would be to practice generosity in such a pure and spontaneous way that you don’t think of yourself as the subject—the agent, the “giver” or “generous person.” Nor do you think of the action as an “act of giving”—where something is transferred from one person to another. You also do not conceive of the recipient as the object of generosity. Here one is generous in a way that transcends any attachment to self, other, or activity. This may seem hard to imagine, but all of us have done something like this in our lives. You may have come upon someone who is hungry or destitute and simply opened your purse or wallet and given to that person without any thought or hesitancy. We’ve all helped people with mobility difficulties to cross the street. Maybe we’ve turned over a beetle that was struggling to get to its feet. We become instantly aware of such situations of immediate need and help out spontaneously. This comes from the compassion that is innate to us, though our conditioning can keep it covered up much of the time.

The same lack of subject, object, and action makes the other five perfections transcendent. This is why they are called “perfections” in the first place. I demonstrated earlier how these six qualities are really a unified whole. This is true here as well. But the central perfection is wisdom. If the other five are like the branches of a tree, wisdom is the trunk that holds everything together. However, if all six perfections—transcendent generosity, patience, diligence, discipline, concentration, and wisdom—are not well maintained, the fruit will not appear. All six are natural qualities of the fully opened mind mentioned above—the mind that is free of ego-fixation and so on. Therefore, rather than having to consciously maintain the full participation of the six qualities in our activities, they are automatically unified—a single package. They arise together effortlessly.

But how do we access such pure and exceptional qualities? How can we practice so that the nondual wisdom described in this chapter can blossom in our minds? Reading descriptions may inspire us, but how do we move in the right direction? What can we do? Because we each have a different mind, different background, and differing potential, the quest for wisdom is highly individual. Buddhism provides many practice vehicles that can bring this about. One approach may speak to one person, while another may work for someone else. However, I believe that a form of nonconceptual meditation called dzogchen (Tibetan for “great perfection,” or ati yoga in Sanskrit) is especially appropriate for the modern world. This practice works well for the quick minds we have today and is able to cut through the mass of complicated habits and concepts that pervade modern life. I will introduce you to this practice in a later chapter.

Summary of the Conceptual Practice on No-Self

Remember that no-self and no-phenomena do not mean that self and phenomena are nonexistent.

If “I” am always changing, why do I believe in a single, unified, stand-alone “I”?

If physical objects are always changing, why do I believe that these are independent entities—real “things”?

Upon what does a common object—such as my hand—depend for its identity? If it depends upon its parts, and those parts depend on other parts, where is the real underlying basis for identifying any object?

How does the identity of an object depend upon my mind—what I think about the object?

If I believe some object is mine—a body part or some possession—where in the object is the proof that it is mine?

Where am “I” located? What is its shape, color, size, and so forth? Where does it come from? Where does it stay? Where does it go?

Where is the mind that thinks of “I” located? What is its shape, color, size, and so forth? Where does it come from? Where does it stay? Where does it go?

What is the mind? Am “I” my mind?

If you cannot find satisfactory answers to these very basic and fundamental questions about yourself and existence, what does that mean? And how does it make you feel?

Skip Notes

*1 This has been true for modern physics—science’s cutting edge—since the turn of the twentieth century, when Max Planck and Albert Einstein introduced quantum physics and relativity.

*2 Of course, we don’t use these exact terms, but they do reflect our attitudes and beliefs.

10

Habitual Patterns and Karma

We’ve all heard of karma. The term probably entered the modern popular vocabulary in the 1960s, when there was a surge of interest in Eastern philosophy and religion in the West. Today, karma is usually used as a synonym for fate, destiny, justice, or luck. It may also refer to positive and negative actions, as in “Doing this is good karma” and “Doing that is bad karma.” But in popular culture, the word doesn’t have a deep significance.

In Buddhism, however, karma is an important and active force in our understanding and dealing with life. Karma, in Sanskrit, means “deed” or “action.” The actions referred to here are the causes in cause and effect. Because it is so easy to notice, cause and effect is a concept understood by everyone. We see it in action always and everywhere. It is a guiding principle of life. When we want something to happen, we work on the causes we believe will make it happen.

In Buddhism, truly karmic influences begin from the creation or accumulation of habits. If I decide that the effect I want to create is my occasional enjoyment of a game on my laptop, the most obvious cause of that effect is my acquiring and clicking on the app. If I begin playing the game and like it, and therefore return to it from time to time, I have come to an important fork in the road: Will my playing of this digital game become merely a habitual pattern or will it solidify into a karmic propensity?

We talked a lot about habitual patterns in the first part of this book, where they are seen to be an important element in conditioning. Since conditioned attitudes and actions are often strongly and deeply ingrained in our minds, they are a good example of karma in the Buddhist sense. Returning to our example of the digital game, in the beginning we may think, “Oh, my desires are under my own control. I can regulate the degree to which I am distracted by this game and limit my time with it.” We like to think we are in control of our lives.

However, as we know, all these enticing digital apps are cleverly designed to undermine such control—to distract us for as much time as possible and keep us coming back again and again. Unless your self-control is really good, you may discover that you have spent a lot more time on the app than you expected. We are all aware of worst-case scenarios like people who become addicted to digital pornography and gambling. These are the digital parallels of alcoholism and drug abuse.

The Creation of Karma

Bagchag, a Tibetan concept, means something you engage with over and over again. That’s because at some point you begin to develop a relationship with it that entices you to come back to it again and again. Something about that distraction is desirable to you. Over time, this habitual pattern becomes so strong that it becomes a part of you—a part of your self-identity or personality.

Take the example of marinating some fruit or vegetables. We whip up a flavorful sauce or marinade and drown our vegetable in it. If we take it out an hour later, maybe the original flavor of the vegetable hasn’t changed much. A day later, it has changed more. After a week’s immersion, the flavor has changed completely. Compare the flavor of a fresh cucumber to that of a pickle. The original cucumber has changed into something else, and we call it by a different name. In the same way, our minds can become marinated with distractions from the digital world. The distraction begins innocently, telling you, “Anytime you want me, I am available.” Then by returning again and again, the attraction becomes stronger until you have difficulty resisting it. The digital app has taken over some part of your mind.[*1]

Arriving at this point does not mean it is impossible to redirect yourself and change such habitual patterns. We’ve all heard stories of people who overcame strong addictions to alcohol, drugs, gambling, abusive behavior, and so on. This is where the pervasiveness of impermanence is really helpful. Nothing—not even karma—is permanent. But to change these patterns once they have become established takes patience and discipline—it takes effort. And we need mindfulness to redirect, to reflavor our own mind to change its perspective to where it will be natural and free once more. So one must recognize that staying with the habit forever is not good and use that understanding to create motivation, conviction—confidence in liberation from the pattern.

If we are unable to do this—either because we don’t recognize the problem or because we don’t have the motivation to change it—it becomes a karmic propensity. The habitual pattern has now developed subpatterns and many connections to personal mental phenomena, often engaging with our afflictive emotions. These are harmful emotions such as hatred, desire, ignorance, jealousy, and pride, which we examined earlier. It is by becoming conditioned to such afflictive emotions that we enter the world of karma as understood in Buddhism. They have become our personal traits, our characteristic imprints. We become these emotions as exemplified in descriptions such as “Susan is an angry person,” “John easily becomes jealous,” and “The boss is always very proud and arrogant!”

These karmic propensities can distort our views of people and phenomena drastically. A habitually angry person easily directs their anger toward a national, political, or ethnic group. That is to say, a person’s anger can target folks the person isn’t even acquainted with! “I hate people from country X, therefore all of them are terrible people!” There is a lot of that kind of thinking going on today—often amplified by social media—and throughout human history. At this point, the heart-mind becomes distorted, narrow, and closed.

Karma over the Long Term

Here is one example of how karma has been understood traditionally in Tibet. In 1959, Tibet was invaded by the Chinese Communist army. China claimed Tibet had always been a part of China and therefore had the right and duty to reassert full control. For Tibetans and their government, this was a calamity. Afterward, to understand how this tragedy could have happened, many Tibetans naturally reflected on karma. After doing so, many concluded that the invasion was a karmic consequence of Tibet having deliberately isolated itself from the rest of the world. In doing so, it was reasoned that Tibet had deprived greater human society from the benefits of Tibetan Buddhism. (Another “karmic conclusion” was that the invasion was the result of long-term corruption within the religious and civil leadership of Tibet.)

From this example we see that karma can apply not just to individuals but to larger groups such as nations. One could also view the present environmental crisis as a consequence of negative karma. This is not hard for us to understand—another extension of ordinary cause and effect. For centuries, humans have been polluting and pillaging the natural environment. As the population has grown, naturally this process has increased dramatically to serve the apparent needs of so many humans. We humans, out of ignorance—even ignoring the warnings of our own scientists—have engaged afflictively with our planet. Whether we view Earth as a “being” or simply a collection of natural processes, we may now be receiving a kind of karmic justice or payback in the form of environmental damage that affects our quality of life and perhaps even our survival as a species.

On a more individual level—beyond the results we experience in this lifetime from our negative and positive actions—karma is seen in Buddhism as extending over many lifetimes. A karmic propensity from a previous life is triggered by some circumstance in a new life and thereby comes to fruition. Karma from actions in past lives—especially habitual karmic actions—can come to fruition in future lives and not necessarily in any strict order. It can be very subtle and complex. It is not that in the last life some person kicked someone in the head and in this life the reincarnation of that person who did the kicking suffers from migraines. However, it is commonly believed, for example, that if someone lives a thoroughly stingy and self-cherishing life, that person will experience poverty and deprivation in a future life. Some level of belief in reincarnation is helpful here.[*2]

I have been concentrating on negative karma in my examples here. Conversely, habitually repeated positive attitudes and actions create positive karma and positive outcomes in this and future lives. It is said in Tibetan Buddhist teachings that one should not avoid engaging in even the tiniest and seemingly insignificant positive actions. Even these have subtle karmic effects. Apparently karmic influences are something like multiple threads or filaments that weave among lifetimes, perhaps like a series of delicate and refined tapestries all joined as a single continuum. It is believed that a deep understanding of this—one that allows one to see intimate karmic influences and even predict karmic outcomes—is available only to those of the greatest wisdom. That is, only buddhas, bodhisattvas,[*3] and highly realized masters—those who might be considered “enlightened”—have access to this knowledge.

Purifying Karma

How can we avoid developing karmic propensities? If we have them, how can we discover what they are? And when we do find them, how can they be purified? If we view karmic habits as distractions—distractions that take us out of the freshness and mindfulness of the present—we need to understand the nature of the distractions and the reason for our being distracted. To see that, instead of following our distractions into habitually narrow ways of thinking and feeling, we need to refresh our minds every day in the same way we would care for a garden. To nurture plants, we must frequently add fresh water, make sure they get adequate sunlight and fertilizer, and watch out for and remove harmful insects and weeds that might choke the plants. We have to be mindful and take the necessary actions.

If our minds are fresh—mindful and present—it will be difficult to develop karmic propensities and easier to spot the ones we have already developed. But well-developed karmic patterns are not easy to change even if we see them for what they are. Perhaps you have had the experience of living in one place for a very long time and becoming thoroughly used to it. Then, on a very rare occasion, you traveled and spent a night in a motel or hotel. You got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, but for a moment you were completely disoriented—the door should be on the left, but it’s not there; it’s on the right. Finally you remembered you were not at home. That is the power of the familiar. In the same way, our personalities have become invested in karmic habits, and we justify them, thinking, “This is what I am used to, this is my view, this is what I believe, this is now an aspect of my life,” and even “this is who I am.”

Even so, we can still change karma. Like all things, it is empty of inherent existence and therefore impermanent. Its true nature is like the moon reflected in water. It appears but is insubstantial. The problem is that we have been staring at that vision and believing the moon is real over and over for a long while. One way to liberate these patterns—to see their true empty nature—is through meditation. Another approach applied by Buddhists is the recitation of purification mantras—words believed to have power to affect change. Prayer is another method (see appendix 2).

Above all, once you have discovered your predicament, you need to confront yourself and make a strong aspiration to change, something like the following: “I want to clear my karma, clear my patterns. I don’t want to be trapped in these distractions and afflictive emotions and create and be engaged with karma that is bad for myself and others. Therefore I am ready to wake up and work on that, to try various methods, but especially to keep my mind alert, awake, and mindful so that I do not engage further with this habitual pattern.” Then vigorously apply any antidotes available to you, such as those mentioned above. Speaking to a qualified spiritual guide or teacher can also be helpful.

Skip Notes

*1 For a Tibetan medical understanding of how physical and neurological processes can support this kind of conditioning, see appendix 1, “Lung.”

*2 Reincarnation may not be such a far-fetched idea as many people believe. There are recent scientific studies that provide credible proof of reincarnation. See appendix 2.

*3 A bodhisattva is a highly realized being completely dedicated to benefiting all sentient beings.

11

Loving-Kindness and Compassion

The term bodhichitta[*1] refers to the view and activities of loving-kindness and compassion. Ultimately it is the expression of the awakened, enlightened mind for which these two qualities are innate. Loving-kindness is the aspiration that beings have happiness. Compassion is the wish that the suffering of beings be reduced and eliminated. All beings—human and nonhuman—desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering. Everyone is striving to have a life that is comfortable and happy. No one seeks unhappiness and suffering. The Four Immeasurable Thoughts, which we looked at earlier, are one of the purest expressions of bodhichitta.

Remember that the first two stanzas of the Four Immeasurable Thoughts speak of wishing that beings have happiness and its causes and that they be free from suffering and its causes. In each phrase there is first the aspiration and then the actions that must be applied to create the causes of each aspiration. Having a happy life depends on our actions—how we engage with other beings and our environment and how we behave. That brings results and feedback. A good positive action brings a positive outcome. When we look for happiness, first we have to make sure the right causes are planted there. This interdependence between happiness and its causes and suffering and its causes is clear and easy to understand.

When it comes to reducing suffering in our own lives, we may seek an antidote, such as making adjustments to the outer world. It is understandable that we try to set things up for ourselves as perfectly as possible so that all goes smoothly. If we can control things carefully, we believe we can avoid problems and therefore live happily. However, that may work temporarily, but often it doesn’t last for long. Once more, that’s because change is everywhere. If phenomena were stable and unchanging, it would make sense to try to arrange outer phenomena to our advantage. But phenomena change. Nothing is not changing. If something is stable now, sooner or later things will shift. That’s just how things are—impermanent.

There is a Buddhist story about leather sandals (mentioned by Shantideva in his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life). Since it is impossible to cover the outer world with soft leather, it is better to wear that protection on the feet. That is to say, look inwardly to the mind that experiences happiness and suffering. We can protect our inner world—our heart-mind—with the soft sandals of bodhichitta. Looking inwardly toward our mind and training the mind is most important, most powerful, and most beneficial. When our mind is stable and less confused, then when outer phenomena change, there is inner stability and spaciousness in which we can remain calm. This is like insurance, protection. Ultimately this refuge is the awakened mind itself.

Training the Mind

Stage 1: The Good Heart

Although the term is not so common, there is nothing unusual about mind training. Alternatively, you might say, “I’m going to change my attitude.” Mind training is a beautiful practice—very effective and powerful. It is not a matter of faith or religion. It is straightforward, and the results come quickly, giving one confidence. How do we train?

Begin with a good heart. Train the mind to develop a good-hearted attitude toward yourself and others. That doesn’t mean training yourself to open your heart only toward those you are already close to, comfortable with, or for whom you have an impartial attitude. These days there is a great deal of conflict and animosity between people. We see this expressed in differences and even hatred between nations, political groups, and ethnic groups, and in people’s opinions on important topics such as the natural environment. This has created an atmosphere of negativity that has enveloped the hearts of many people around the world.

Why is this? Why are there so many conflicts? What is the source of all this suffering? The obvious general answer is that we are the source—we humans! We cannot blame history or tradition or competition. Those may seem like causes, but how did they originate? Such problems arise from human attitudes and actions coming from human hearts. So, I would say that the real source of our suffering is that our hearts are not fully opened. People are not observing and relating to one another in a good-hearted manner. If people could open up, coming closer to having a good heart, then many of these contradictions and conflicts would be reduced.

Therefore, we need to change our heart-minds, and that requires training ourselves to be kind, good, respectful, inclusive, sharing, and open to understanding others. If in our daily lives we could frequently remind ourselves of these things—as much as is needed throughout the day—then I am sure there would be significant changes in our hearts and the outward benefit would be seen clearly. There’s no mistake about it.

The benefit accrues not only for others and the outside world. When you make the aspiration “I’m training my mind for a good heart,” you need to keep in mind the kind of heart that is “not good.” We want to avoid falling into such narrow and negative feelings and activities. When your mind remains in a state of goodness, this is a very strong and powerful healing for your own suffering. We are not only doing this for others. This is a healing for our own heart, which suffers so much emotional pain when we are closed-minded and closed-hearted. Training in this way brings us what everyone wishes for—a heart of happiness and harmony. For us and for others this training is a win-win practice.

Stage 2: Training in Loving-Kindness

We have created the aspiration for a good heart. Now we can take that a step further using loving-kindness to help generate that good-heartedness. We begin by applying loving-kindness—the wish for happiness—toward those who are close to us. We meditate and apply this loving attitude toward ourselves, our family, our friends, our pets—toward everyone we feel close to. We think of them positively and treat them well, using empathy to understand how we can work for their welfare and happiness. This is fairly easy because we are already biased in their favor. You could call this loving-kindness with partiality. It is better than no loving-kindness, but it is still limited.

So we cannot stop there. True loving-kindness—true bodhichitta—is an unlimited, unconditioned openness of the heart-mind. This is an inherent quality of the enlightened, fully awakened mind—a form of ultimate happiness. We all have such a mind, although it is often covered up by biases to which we have become habituated. We wish for good things to come to those we are close to, those we agree with, and so on. And we often hope that negative things occur for those we dislike and disagree with. Not only does this narrow-hearted attitude limit our possibilities for happiness but these biased expectations often lead to disappointment: some group we dislike gains wealth, power, and influence; a politician we hate wins the election; and so on.

To train in loving-kindness, we begin by generating these positive feelings toward ourselves and those we feel close to, but then we extend these positive feelings. First, we extend them to those for whom we have neutral feelings. Then we extend this positivity and warmth to those we dislike and even hate. For those with a truly good heart, this is not difficult. But for most of us, extending genuine positivity in this way is a challenge—we must apply ourselves slowly and gradually.

Meditation for Extending Loving-Kindness

Here is a traditional training in Tibetan Buddhism for extending loving-kindness to all beings. It is very simple and has two aspects. The first aspect is to use your imagination to generate feelings of loving-kindness. Based on this change of heart, the second aspect is to engage with “neutral” and “disliked” people and groups in a positive, harmonious way. In so doing, the Four Immeasurable Thoughts are merged with our heart-mind. In this engagement we already have an ally we’ve looked at before. The activities of the Four Immeasurable Thoughts are practiced through the Six Valuable Qualities (Six Paramitas) of generosity, patience, discipline, diligence, concentration (mindfulness), and wisdom. Now we deliberately apply these to those people and groups for whom we have neutral feelings and those we dislike.

Begin this meditation by sitting comfortably and calming yourself through following the breath or by any other method you find effective. Imagine three persons or three groups of people seated in front of you. To one side is someone you feel genuine affection for, someone who generates positivity within you just by thinking of them. Let that positivity and loving-kindness fill your heart. Feel that warmth of loving-kindness.

The second person, seated before you, is someone you know or don’t know for whom you have no negative or positive feelings. How can you generate loving-kindness for such a “neutral” person? For Tibetans, who believe in reincarnation occurring continuously over time without beginning, every other being in existence has at one time or another been their mother. Based on this, they extend their loving-kindness to this former mother (or father, daughter, son, etc.). But for people who do not believe in reincarnation, empathy can be very powerful.

Is this “neutral” person essentially different from you? Doesn’t this person seek happiness and wish to avoid suffering just as you do? Hasn’t this person suffered difficult situations and unhappiness as well as happiness and joy, just as you have? For some other people, aren’t you—with all your qualities and experiences—a “neutral” person? Asking such questions again and again will bring you to the conclusion that we are all essentially the same, all deserving of loving-kindness. And the loving-kindness you have for those close to you can then extend itself to neutral persons.

The third person before you is someone you intensely dislike. Here we extend the empathy we developed in the second stage. Like everyone else, this person deserves loving-kindness. If you believe this person has many negative qualities, imagine how much suffering these may generate for that person’s mind. Also contemplate how change could make this person different, perhaps someone you might find likable. (You may have friends in your life who were once your enemies, and vice versa.) Extending loving-kindness to this person may be very difficult in the beginning, but slowly try to open your heart a bit and imagine something positive about this person.

As mentioned in the story above about my mother and the Chinese soldier, the Tibetan people encountered many difficulties during the Cultural Revolution. But many Tibetans, particularly those who were dedicated Buddhist practitioners, went to extremes to avoid cultivating negative attitudes toward the Chinese. For these lamas, monks, nuns, and householders, their greatest fear was not their own personal suffering but the fear that they might lose their bodhichitta attitude toward the Chinese—that they would not maintain the loving-kindness and compassion they had developed for all beings.

Once you have become comfortable extending loving-kindness to all people and beings through this meditation, it will begin to change your actions in daily life. Allow yourself to encounter some of those people for whom you feel negative. Learn how to “break the ice” with them. Let empathy guide you.[*2]

Stage 3: Training in Compassion

As with loving-kindness, compassion has the two aspects of aspiration and action. Compassion is also based on empathy. Often we see in the news the plight of groups and individuals suffering from the destruction of their homes, natural disasters, torture, having their human rights trampled upon by more powerful forces. Witnessing these unfortunate events, we imagine their suffering as if it were our own. How would we feel to be a victim of abuse, homelessness, starvation, and other traumas?

Sometimes we might think, “My family and I are not suffering, my society is not suffering. As long as that is true, I am okay with that.” That may be true on the relative level for a while. But in reality, if there is as much suffering in the world as there is today and probably always has been, we all share in that suffering. One way or another, or at one time or another, we will be affected. We may be impassive to this, but in this ever-changing world, how long will our passive happiness last? We can think about that.

But we can also be moved to act based on our compassion. We can take a step forward to perform an action that makes a difference in the lives of those who are suffering. At that point we have to decide what action is right for us—what resonates with the compassion we feel in our hearts. That could be anything from making a monetary contribution to volunteering our service. In our daily lives we can apply the Six Valuable Qualities to all our engagements with others. Whatever actions we take, if we do so wisely and appropriately for the situation at hand, we will bring joy for the recipients of our actions and for ourselves by exercising our good heart.

Stage 4: Unconditioned Bodhichitta

At the ultimate level, we can practice bodhichitta—loving-kindness and compassion—in an unconditioned way. That means our activities are performed without any expectation of feedback. We touched on this previously, in part three. When we perform acts of service to others out of the goodness of our heart—with no concern for receiving recognition or thanks—that touches upon bodhichitta as the awakened mind. It is the awakened mind that opens and sees the need for loving-kindness and compassion. These are qualities of that mind. You might even say that this awakened mind is loving-kindness and compassion.

We can practice each—the good heart, loving-kindness, and compassion—in either the relative or the absolute way. On the relative level, we bring in positive ideas and attitudes—thoughts, really—that stimulate our views and actions. On the absolute level, we act out of the unconditioned, awakened mind. We are more direct and spontaneous. This is connected with the Three Spheres mentioned earlier: there is no separation between actor/agent, recipient, and the action. The awakened mind has no need for making these distinctions.

Unconditioned bodhichitta can evolve out of the practice of relative or conditioned bodhichitta. Beginning in a relative way, you may engage in training the good heart, loving-kindness, and compassion in small steps. Perhaps you decide to begin training for a few days, and then for a week, and then for two weeks or a month, concentrating on one of these practices. You will begin to feel the benefit of your good heart, loving-kindness, and compassion for others and for yourself. Then at some point there will be an inner shift to a quality that enjoys and rejoices in what you have been practicing. It becomes pure and genuine. There is a new flavor there. You know more and experience more. Now you are entering the ultimate level of bodhichitta.

Begin with the relative level because without beginning there, it is very hard to enter true wakefulness. You should not expect something to happen in a very short time, like magic. You have to be patient and actively train your mind to realize its absolute awakened qualities. To realize that, to fully achieve this state of wakefulness, takes time and persistence. Doing so, you will discover the heart-mind free of all limitations, beyond conditioning, beyond expectations.

An Introduction to Dzogchen Meditation

Another way to arrive at ultimate bodhichitta is through the nonconceptual meditations of dzogchen. Nonconceptual awareness and bodhichitta are in essence the same. There is no way really to describe this. It must be experienced. At this level, loving-kindness and compassion have a new dimension that is beyond the conceptual longing for the well-being of sentient beings that exemplifies relative bodhichitta.

Nonconceptual meditation is synonymous with dzogchen. In Tibetan, dzog means “all-pervasive” or “complete.” Chen means “great.” So dzogchen means the “great completion” and is also translated as the “great perfection.”

Nonconceptual meditation takes place in the present. Rather than thinking about the past and future—watching the homemade documentaries that constantly flit through our minds—we rest in the present moment. We do not block our thoughts and feelings. We let all our mental phenomena be. We just let it be. That means we simply witness its coming and going. When we do that, these phenomena will—sooner or later—come to rest in the clear and peaceful present. We have the experience of the nature of our minds, an experience that is beyond description.

Resting in nonconceptual meditation does not mean that there are never any thoughts occurring. When thoughts and other mental phenomena are allowed to be, without our modifying them, they are pure manifestations of the energy of nonconceptual presence. We rest in equanimity without attachment and without aversion to thoughts of good or bad, positive or negative. We are present to our thoughts and feelings but undistracted.

Nonconceptual meditation is the best way to overcome hope and fear—the tension we feel from desiring happiness and wishing to avoid suffering.

THE PRACTICE

Begin by establishing the view. The view is like a road map. What is your motivation to practice and what are you going to do? Your motivation may be to bring true peace and happiness to your life. It may be to benefit yourself and others by clearing your mind and experiencing wisdom. Whatever it is, establish your motivation. The meditation itself will be to rest, to let be, in the present moment.

Begin with your body. It is very important to feel meditation through the physical body. Does the body feel open? Is there good energy and relaxation?

Breathe in…to feel loving-kindness in your body.

Breathe out…to feel phenomena with compassion.

Breathe in…to feel your heart-mind filled with joy.

Breathe out…to feel equanimity free of partiality.

Continue in this way until your body and mind feel right with ease and presence.

Now rest in the nature of mind. The “nature of mind” is the nonconceptual state. This state is so profound it’s beyond words and explanation. It includes peace, subtlety, ease, warmheartedness, loving-kindness, and compassion—all are present with this nonconceptual state. You don’t have to construct them; they will come naturally.

Begin by being present to all the mental phenomena—thoughts and feelings—arising to your awareness. What is going on in this moment? Just be aware of mental phenomena and let them be as they are without any modification. The more you let go in the present moment, the more your mind experiences clarity. This is not a closed, hollow, inactive state. Rather, you are totally alert in present awareness.

Sometimes this state is called “self-knowing awareness.” You know what is happening in the present moment—in the nonconceptual state; you know the state of your own mind. Mind knows itself. That is self-knowing awareness. Self-knowing awareness opens the door to the development of awareness in everyday life.

Once you have found some equipoise, sometimes you may find yourself making effort to remain in the present moment, to not be distracted. As long as that effort is gentle and subtle, it will not imprint the habit on your mind, so that is okay.

It takes some courage to practice in this way—courage in not letting your mind be carried away by habitual tendencies, habitual thoughts, the “old friends,” familiar conversations, gossip—all kinds of voices you may be hearing. If you are brave and patient, there is the potential for experiencing meditation that is like space—relaxed, spacious, peaceful, and comfortable. There is no guarantee that you will remain in such a state till the end of your meditation period, and it is best not to maintain an expectation of a good outcome. That’s not a problem as long as you have inspiration, wakefulness, and awareness with an open mind. Continuously be present in that way. When you become distracted, just let the distractions be. Sooner or later the nonconceptual state will reemerge.

After you have finished your formal session, you may get up and maybe drink a glass of water. While you are drinking the water you can remain present. Continue to experience the presence of the flavor of the water and the connection between water, glass, and yourself. While your mind is present and undistracted in a common, daily situation, everything can be experienced differently—freshly. This practice can be applied in any situation, making it a form of post-meditation. Perhaps after a formal dzogchen meditation you might gently engage with one of your digital devices. See if—at least initially—the experience is more open than it would normally be.

At times you may think that being in the present is very challenging. But as long as you have inspiration and deep motivation for this practice, you can see that being in the present moment is more natural than being distracted. It’s not something new that we never had before. The nature of mind—the natural way of our mind—is to let go and be present and self-knowing. All we need—once we gain some experience with this practice—is to activate it and make it part of our experience of daily life.

Note that dzogchen meditation is very subtle for most people and works best in context with an understanding of Tibetan Buddhism and the assistance of a qualified teacher. Fortunately for Westerners, many Tibetan meditation masters have taken up residence across the world.

Skip Notes

*1 Bodhichitta is Sanskrit for “awakened mind.”

*2 The biographies of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela provide excellent examples of how these great leaders were able to put aside resentment and negativity and engage positively with former enemies.

12

Ecology—Inner and Outer

At last, we return to Earth. We’ve surfed the digital universe, peered into our souls, and investigated how the heart-mind is at the center of everything. Now we’ll look at our home, our planet. It’s easy to see that the Earth is in trouble. And it’s no mystery who is responsible. As we know, global warming—the scientifically demonstrated fact that air pollution leads to severe disturbances of weather patterns that in turn lead to droughts, rising sea levels, and a host of other calamities—along with pollution, species extinction, human overpopulation, and other degradations of our planet cannot be blamed on insects, animals, storms, or volcanoes. It’s us! But why? Birds don’t foul their nests. Why do we?

This negative human treatment of our home has been going on for a long time—you could say since the Industrial Revolution began in the second half of the eighteenth century. Similar things were happening locally and on a smaller scale all along. In some places, people living near streams have simply thrown all their refuse—even old cars and appliances—right into the water. Forests are burned indiscriminately. Mining scars the land and leaves toxic wastes in the soil and water. But there have been important exceptions. Indigenous populations around the globe have had greater respect for the environment. That includes traditional Tibet. One of the reasons for this in Tibet derives from Buddhist attitudes.

There is a famous story that illustrates this point, written about in Heinrich Harrer’s well-known book—later made into a popular film—Seven Years in Tibet. While a resident of Lhasa, Tibet’s capitol, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Harrer’s companion Peter Aufschnaiter was hired by the Tibetan government to design and direct some public works projects. This required a lot of digging in the earth to put up walls, bridges, and so on. The work was painfully slow for the Austrian engineer because every time his Tibetan crew dug into the earth, they had to make sure they didn’t kill any worms or insects. That required meticulous sifting of the soil to save the tiny beings endangered by the digging. Taking such care was not a matter of any official policy. It was the heartfelt belief by Tibetans that they had no right to wantonly take the lives of other beings.

This respect for life and the environment is part of Tibetan culture. As I mentioned before, we don’t pollute streams because, if we do, not only are we fouling our sources of water but we are also harming other beings who rely on those streams and lakes. For similar reasons we don’t throw trash on the ground, clear-cut forests, or burn large quantities of refuse, fouling the air. It is not my intention here to glorify Tibetans and their culture. Indeed, despite the bodhichitta attitude toward sentient beings, most Tibetans are meat eaters. (It would be difficult to get enough protein to survive in Tibet’s harsh climate otherwise.) But the Buddhist roots of Tibetan culture clearly illustrate the origin—the essential cause—of our caring for the environment rather than disregarding it. Unfortunately these positive attitudes are gradually being discarded due to the distractions brought about by digital technology and other aspects of modern life filtering into Tibet.

We Have Two Bodies

In simple terms, you could say that the Tibetan attitude toward the environment is based on empathy. It is an expression of bodhichitta. When one puts oneself in the place of other beings, it becomes clear that their physical environment has to be included. Just as we humans require clean, unpolluted air, water, and so on to live healthy lives, all other beings require similar environmental qualities to sustain themselves.

But as you can guess by remembering the importance in Buddhism of karma and reincarnation, this empathy extends back to the distant past and far into the future. Essentially each of us and all other beings have been living together and exchanging places since time without beginning. We are all “family.” At some time or another, each of us has been a worm, insect, or any other creature. We have been each other’s fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers. When you believe this or are open to its possibility, compassion for all beings comes more easily.

I have spoken at length about the inner aspect of a human being—the heart-mind—and our relationships with other human beings. That analogy holds also for the relationship between humanity and the outer environment of nonhuman beings and the physical world. You could say that we have two bodies and that the outer, phenomenal world is our outer body. We depend for our happiness and survival on that outer body, and now that we are affecting the outer world so dramatically, it depends on us to treat it with intelligence and, yes, kindness and empathy. Polluting the environment is like poisoning our own bodies with bad food and water. We would never voluntarily do that, but by destroying the environment we are doing exactly that. Therefore, we need to develop and practice an ecology of inner and outer environments.

We pollute the natural environment because we have polluted our minds with ignorance. This inner pollution has led to the outer pollution. In Buddhism, ignorance is one of the main afflictive emotions. We ignore the interdependent relationships between ourselves and the environment and the interconnections among all living beings and between physical aspects of the environment. And despite dramatic commonsense evidence, we continue to ignore global warming.

As our growing human population has encroached on the habitats of animal species from which we were once isolated, the interaction has created many of the worst diseases affecting us. There is a likelihood that AIDS and Ebola spread to humans due to human encroachment on monkey populations in Africa. Bird flu (avian influenza) is transmitted from human contact with sick birds. SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), first found in China in 2002, is attributed to human contact with civets and cave bats. Now COVID-19 is believed to have been transmitted from bats used as human food in China. Many more examples could be listed.[*1]

When humans move into more and more areas that were once the exclusive territory of larger animals—bears, tigers, wolves, wildcats, and so on—there are more and more dangerous encounters. These sometimes result in the deaths of humans and the wild animals. Suburban homeowners in the western US discover wildcats and bears in their backyards—places that were recently wild habitat.

This encroachment also leads to the extinction of animal species. All of this is due to a lack of empathy and respect—an attitude of mind. And not only is this a degradation of the natural environment but also the dying off of so many animal species is a warning that the ecosystem that supports all life on Earth is fraying dangerously. They are “the canary in the coal mine”—once used to warn miners of poison gas leaks. We need to establish proper boundaries between ourselves and wild animals in order to live with them harmoniously. Doing them no harm would be enough.

We can view the natural environment through the categories of mountains, water, air, and living beings. We should be respectful that where there is water, there are fish. Where there are mountains, there is wildlife. In the air there are birds. Where there is jungle, there is a great variety of forest beings. Such living beings are especially adapted to these environments. If we leave these environments alone, there is no need to make special efforts to preserve wildlife, such as feeding them or quarantining them in special areas. We need to look at things from their point of view, always keeping in mind that by doing so we too will benefit.

Purifying the Human Environment

It might be beneficial to view problems with the Earth’s environment from a human spiritual perspective. Purifying our inner environment is the key to treating the outer environment with love and respect. With this change of attitude we can begin to truly heal the Earth and human society. After all, the two go hand in hand. Once more, let’s use the perspective of body, speech, and mind.

Body, speech, and mind are three facets of our inner environment. How do we nurture these three to produce harmony and happiness? For our body, this is very simple and practical. We get up after sleeping well, drink a glass of water, eat healthy food—not forgetting fruits and vegetables—and maybe take some vitamins. During the day we get some exercise. We shouldn’t forget how important physical movement is for our body. Perhaps we practice meditation, which is also good for our body. We are mindful to avoid things that are harmful to us.

We nourish our body as we would care for a garden. By nourishing our inner garden through respecting and helping ourselves, we are helping others—our family, friends, all people with whom we have a connection. They are made happy knowing that we are well. Here again we find the positive connections provided by the fact of interdependence.

Our speech—the way we communicate with others—is also an environment. What we say and how we do so has a powerful influence on the human environment. When we gossip or criticize others, we can create unhappiness for them. We pollute the human environment and sooner or later we too receive some kind of negative feedback. Unhappiness creates distractions that can lead to negative attitudes and actions. To maintain a healthy speech environment requires mindfulness and empathy. We need to notice and consider the effect of our words on others. We don’t want to engage with the causes of suffering. If you are unsure of how something you say will affect people—whether for a few friends or a national audience—at that moment it might be more beneficial to remain silent. When we are inspired through such an inner training to engage with people more positively and with greater compassion and kindness, we enter a new ecology for the speech environment.

Our mind—the heart-mind—is the most important factor because it guides the actions of body and speech. Since humans are at the center of today’s environmental difficulties, if we remain as we are, we cannot expect much improvement. Notice that the sheer volume of digital communications, not to mention much of its contents, may act as a distraction from the fundamental problem of environmental degradation. But when the mind is truly motivated toward altruistic, beneficial, and positive attitudes—when we open our hearts to the wisdom that knows we live in an interdependent world—we become beings that naturally foster a healthy environment. If our minds attain the perfect view of pristine awareness with its attributes of great balance and openness—our hearts filled with loving-kindness and compassion—then our inner environment is so rich, pure, and vast as to be limitless. Such minds can heal the outer environment.

When our minds are not like that—when they are polluted with negativity, unfounded fears, anxiety, neuroses, and other unfortunate habitual tendencies—our inner lives will be limited and largely unpleasant. This is the origin of attitudes that deny the interdependence of all life on Earth. This is the source of inner pollution that results in outer pollution.

We must all ask ourselves: “Would I not like to live somewhere that is free from pollution, where the air is crisp and refreshing, where the sky is pure blue and the ocean and streams sparkling and clear? Or would I prefer smoggy air and smoke-filled skies, smelly streams and oil-covered beaches?” Of course you would choose the first option. Similarly, if we had the choice between wise and clear minds or minds polluted with negativity and ignorance, we would choose the former. We seek happiness and its causes and to avoid suffering and its causes.

Little by little, by working on ourselves and purifying our minds of negativity we can contribute both to our own happiness and to healing the environment. The inner and outer have never been separate. There are no real divisions between them. Practicing contemplation and meditation can give us wisdom, and that will naturally influence our engagements with the world of mountains, streams, oceans, forests, and the wildlife that makes its home there. We create a positive harmony between ourselves and that outer environment.

These words may seem simplistic, idealistic. But emergencies have a way of forcing us to see the essentials of a situation. When your house is on fire, you try to quickly snuff out the flames with whatever is at hand and you call the fire department. You don’t go on the internet or telephone an “expert” to find the best method of putting out a fire. You don’t worry about the temperature of the water or the color of the blanket you use to put it out. And you don’t question the firefighters as to their religion, political beliefs, or ethnic origins. If we allow our thinking to become clouded in similar ways as we try to deal with the present worldwide environmental situation, things will not improve.

By calming our minds we can clearly see the source of our inner and outer problems and begin to work on them for the benefit of ourselves and others—for the benefit of humanity and the Earth—the home we share with all beings.

Skip Notes

*1 According to the World Health Organization, the number of diseases spread from animals to humans in Africa has jumped more than 60% in the last decade. See WHO Africa, “In Africa, 63% Jump in Diseases…,” July 14, 2022, www.afro.who.int/news/africa-63-jump-diseases-spread-animals-people-seen-last-decade.

AN AFTERWORD

As I write this book, the digital revolution is only beginning. Many of those who first surfed the internet are now retirees. After them, several generations—their children and grandchildren—have grown up using progressively more rapid and complex digital platforms and devices. We know that this has sped up our minds, sped up human interactions, and even changed the way we communicate in person. What we don’t know in any detail are the psychological and physiological effects of this massive human retooling. These technological innovations are happening so rapidly that we haven’t had time to pause and ask ourselves, “What are the consequences?” Due to the rapid stream of digital innovation, professional researchers have also been pressed to find even tentative answers to this question. The US Surgeon General’s report on the risks of social media—quoted previously—provides an early warning we must heed. And now, with artificial intelligence entering the mainstream, we have no more certainty about our digital future than gamblers throwing dice.

Whatever the future may bring, we have one element that can be relied on: the mind. The mind extends and embraces everything. When it is freed from the fetters of narrow conditioning, it has a miraculous potential. All our experiences—good, bad, happy, painful—are perceived and influenced by our minds. The digital world is a creation of the human mind, and it is our minds that can come to understand it, evaluate it, and provide solutions to its problems on a personal and societal basis. We need to remember always that the mind is key; the mind is the basis of everything.

If we are to understand digital communications, our minds must be awake and alert to how they function and how they were designed. If we are to clarify our relationship to this digital world, we must understand our own inner workings—our habitual patterns, emotional tendencies, and so forth. Our minds must be lucid in order to see all of these clearly. For our minds to become lucid requires planning and effort, something that I hope this book has provided and encouraged.

The viewpoints and solutions I have provided are based on the power of the mind’s awareness. That is the source of wisdom. And it is wisdom that will bring all of us happiness and make our world the paradise it should be and, in a sense, already is. Therefore, cultivate wisdom in every way possible. Doing so we will make a genuine, harmonious connection to our planet’s environment and among all living beings.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the editors at Shambhala Publications for their excellent work and advice, in particular editor Tasha Kimmet and project editor Breanna Locke. Shambhala’s president, Nikko Odiseos, provided support and encouragement for which I am grateful. Several friends and Pema Kilaya sangha members read early drafts of the book and offered helpful comments: Diane Ridgzin Berger, Jeanne Lepisto, Karen Carbone, and Daniel Hodel. Jim Rosen provided important information on issues of digital commerce and social media. Brian Hodel compiled and edited the manuscript. Special appreciation goes to Janice Baragwanath for her beautiful artwork, and to the Kilung Foundation, which funded her participation. My thanks to them all for helping bring this project to fruition!

APPENDIX 1

Lung

Strangely, even for medical science—which has by now recorded a long list of mental and physical health effects from stress—relieving stress is rather hit or miss, relying mostly on pharmaceuticals, alternative medicine, counseling, and borrowings from meditation traditions. Because our knowledge of what stress is and the way stress functions is somewhat tentative, we don’t have a clear and precise understanding of how the outer treadmill—modern life—is connected to our minds and bodies.

On the bright side, we have begun to incorporate approaches coming mainly from traditional Asian societies—things like tai chi, meditation, and the theory and exercise of prana in hatha yoga. The Chinese theory of chi, which has an important role in traditional Chinese medicine, is promising; its application in the serene movements of tai chi is clearly helpful in alleviating stress, as are the movements and breathing practices of hatha yoga. Still, these systems give us only vague and incomplete insights into the mechanisms of stress and their relationship with modern daily life. But hidden away over millennia, in the mountains and high plains of Tibet, a form of medicine evolved that I believe contains the key to this much-needed understanding.

In Tibetan medicine there is a concept called lung (pronounced “loong”). Lung relates to energy, a type of person, to types of activities, and, in the extreme, to a disease. Lung is a metaphor that translates as “air” or “wind.” Lung is mainly concerned with what we call the nervous system, along with movement, breathing, and the senses. The general characteristics of unbalanced lung—considered an illness—include anxiety; quick mood changes; a sensation of lightness; insomnia; excessive mental, verbal, or physical exertion; stress and strain; irregular sleeping or eating patterns; anxiety and panic attacks; and desirous, grasping emotions (often resulting in frustration or fear of rejection and loss). These characteristics are described in books on Tibetan medicine (see bibliography).

The symptoms of lung may sound familiar. Excessive lung is the jitters we feel from drinking too much coffee. It’s the butterfly feeling of stage fright. It’s the elation you feel when something you really want to happen, happens: your team wins, your project proposal is approved, your new app goes viral, you make an important scientific discovery, your proposal of marriage is accepted—Yes! Viewed in this way, lung is a double-edged sword—propelling us to inspired activities when balanced but overwhelming when out of control. An example of balanced lung is the way in which seasoned actors and musicians use the energy of butterflies—of stage fright—to enhance and energize their performances.

But these are only examples applied to the individual. Today lung is much, much more than that. Lung—mostly unbalanced lung—pervades our whole modern way of life. It characterizes our work, political, and social environments. The concept is relevant and very useful today because lung—the energy coursing through our nervous systems—ties together everything we do and experience. Without it we couldn’t live. With too much or the wrong kinds of lung, we have the typical sufferings of modern life.

Lung and Distraction

From the Tibetan viewpoint, lung is a requirement for life. Without this energy you are dead. But to live a healthy and psychologically comfortable life—a happy life—lung must be balanced with other factors. It’s a bit like the difference between an occasional coffee to perk you up and excessive caffeine intake. If you have an overabundance of lung, as many of us in the modern world do, we are especially prone to distractions. This is because lung makes us oversensitive. For the most part, we are locked into a feedback loop between lung and distraction. We—our thoughts and our bodies—are always buzzing. There is even a common Tibetan saying that alludes to this: “Thoughts ride on the wind (lung).”

Lung is associated with a view of human anatomy called the “subtle body.” It underlies our sensations, feelings, and responses. The subtle body is made up of channels, winds, and essences. These cannot be detected (as yet) by medical science, but there is strong anecdotal evidence for their existence. If you have ever had Chinese acupuncture, you may have seen charts of all the channels to which acupuncturists apply their needles, massage, and other treatments. There is plenty of scientific evidence that, using these diagrams, acupuncture has physical effects. And yet the channels don’t show up through anatomical examination or imaging technology.

In many situations, because they are united with lung, distractions gain a foothold in our lives. It is difficult to ignore or let distractions go when they are physically grounded in our bodies. This is a fact of enormous importance for understanding everything from stress to the details of human psychology, habitual patterns, and motivation. Lung can reinforce our ingrained habits and addictions, which makes them very difficult to modify or eliminate. And where excessive lung adds power and energy to our beliefs, biases, and opinions, openhearted and open-minded attitudes needed to see things calmly and clearly are hard to develop and maintain. These require a flexibility of mind free from entrenched mental and emotional habits—habits supported by unbalanced lung.

Our vulnerability to lung is so much a part of us now that if we can just step back a bit and observe ourselves—our thoughts, emotions, activities—it’s plain to see. We can see it in our reactions to events, especially when we are surprised, irritated, fearful, or strongly attracted to something. We get “carried away”—a common expression that hints at the fact that on some level we know that a powerful wind of emotion is exerting some control over us. Of course, we could justify these reactions, saying things like, “That’s just how I am. I believe in or want or expect so-and-so, and when I don’t get that, I become upset or angry. It’s natural!” But is it so natural? These reactions may be entrenched habits created by lung’s energy united with mental patterns of distraction.

As for our use of digital technology, lung is an active ingredient in our becoming attracted to and habituated to our favorite programs and apps. As far as I know, the advertising and app mavens who design them have never heard of lung. They don’t need to know about it because they are already masters of its effects. Their research into how we form habits based on emotional needs didn’t require them to seek a deeper understanding. They are in the business of creating consumer habits, and whether they call it “emotional triggers” or “lung” doesn’t matter. Although knowing about how lung operates wouldn’t help them improve their theories and practices, it could be of help to people who want to free themselves from the burden of ingrained habitual tendencies in command of any part of their lives—including those connected to digital technology.

The main problems produced by digital media massification are health-related stress—both physical and psychological—and the emotional costs from social isolation. The result overall is the proliferation of what Tibetan doctors would call lung as a disease—unbalanced lung. As mentioned above, when balanced with other characteristics of the human body and psyche—such as the elemental characteristics earth, water, and fire—lung is a positive life force, the juice we need to be alive. But in our modern environment—less developed countries included—distractions have unbalanced the lung element to the extent that many of us—perhaps most of us—are suffering from a pervasive illness.

How can we heal this illness? I have tried to provide some exercises in this book that will ease us out of the habitual patterns that both support and are supported by overactive lung. One could also consult a Tibetan doctor. There are more and more of them practicing today in the West. They can offer herbal remedies, dietary suggestions, and breathing and other exercises that can calm and balance lung and thus lower stress. A book that may be informative and helpful is Dr. Lobsang Rapgay’s The Tibetan Book of Healing.

APPENDIX 2

Buddhism—A Brief Description

The Free Mind is not a guide to the beliefs and practices of Buddhism. However, many of the ideas in this book come from there. Since some readers may be interested in learning about the source of these ideas, here is a brief and general outline of Buddhism.

I’ll begin with a little history: Buddhism arose in India around 500 B.C.E., the result of the enlightenment and teachings of Buddha Shakyamuni (also known as Gautama), a prince of the Shakya clan of northeastern India. The Buddha taught for forty-five years, his numerous teachings being memorized by his leading disciples and written down after his death. Buddhism became an important religion in India for many centuries, soon spreading to Southeast Asia. The principal Buddhist tradition or school in those regions is Theravada (Sanskrit for “teaching of the elders”), which bases itself on these written accounts (sutras) and stresses the goal of enlightenment for the individual practitioner.

Buddhism came to Tibet from India beginning in the seventh century C.E., having already spread to China, Japan, and Korea some centuries earlier. I will not go into technicalities regarding the development of Tibetan Buddhism beyond saying that it is of the Mahayana tradition (Sanskrit for “Great Vehicle”), which lays emphasis on bodhichitta and aims for the enlightenment of all sentient beings. Tibetan Buddhism has also incorporated some elements of the indigenous Tibetan Bon religion.

Cosmology and Reincarnation

In Buddhism, enlightened beings—buddhas—are believed to be able to see the truth directly. These enlightened beings are the source of Buddhist cosmology. They have described the universe as cyclical—arising from emptiness and developing until it is destroyed in a conflagration. Then it arises and is destroyed again, and so on, over and over.[*1]

Time in the Mahayana Buddhist view has no beginning and no end. Sentient beings—beings with minds—have existed in one form or another since beginningless time. Our minds are in essence perfectly enlightened—just like that of a Buddha—but that pristine awareness is obscured by two kinds of ignorance: the ignorance of dullness and imputing ignorance. (That is, we don’t see clearly; and we see incorrectly, projecting false beliefs.) Our consciousness is part of a continuum that goes individually from life to life. The form into which we are reborn is determined by karma (see chapter 11). When we have perfected ourselves through practicing the Buddhist Dharma (teachings), we fully realize our undeluded, pristine awareness—our potential—and are enlightened.

Reincarnation is a natural attribute of Buddhist cosmology. This cosmology is not materialistic but sees even the material universe as a reflection of the mind. Therefore it is the mind, not matter, that is the determining factor of reality.[*2] Beings reincarnate until they see directly the reality of mind—enlightened mind.

If reincarnation sounds like a stretch of the imagination, take note that recently it has received convincing scientific affirmation. In 1997, Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist who was the director of personality studies at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center, published Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. This book, written for the lay public, summarized Stevenson’s study of over 2,600 reported cases of past-life memories. Through a thorough, systematic scientific examination of the details of these past-life memories, Stevenson concluded that for many of them, the only logical explanation was reincarnation. Stevenson’s work has been continued at the University of Virginia by Jim. B. Tucker, a professor of personality studies in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Studies and the author of Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives and Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives.

Rituals, Practices, and Blessings

Prayer is an important Buddhist practice. Through prayers we can help others and receive blessings. These blessings—perhaps they can be thought of as a form of energy—are active influences on Buddhist techniques such as meditation. The practices common to Tibetan Buddhism include mantras—repeated phrases often counted on a rosary (Tibetan: mala); devotional prayers; and sadhanas, ritual practices directed toward specific deities. Although these deities are sometimes translated as “gods,” they do not form a pantheon of powerful beings that control certain aspects of life and the universe. In Buddhism there is no God, nor gods in the Judeo-Christian sense. The deities are in essence enlightened beings, like buddhas, who are the source of wisdom and blessings.

Another source of blessings in Tibetan Buddhism are lineages. The major schools of Tibetan Buddhism revere their founding masters and pray to them for blessings, guidance, and wisdom. One example of this would be prayers to the lineage of Dalai Lamas in the Gelukpa school.

The fundamental supplication of Buddhism, which precedes both rituals and meditation practice, is refuge. The practitioner verbally requests refuge from the Buddha, the Dharma (the teachings), and Sangha (one’s fellow students and/or the masters). In Tibetan Buddhism, refuge is followed by bodhichitta—one arouses one’s intention to practice for the benefit of all beings. Refuge is followed by practice (meditation, sadhana, ritual, mantra recitation, etc.) and concluded by dedicating the merit of the practice. Merit is virtue or spiritual power and benefits those to whom it is dedicated as well as seals the practice.

Teachers and Teachings

The first teaching given by the historical Buddha was the Four Noble Truths. Briefly, these truths are (1) the truth of suffering, (2) the truth that suffering has causes, (3) the truth that suffering can be eliminated, and (4) the truth of the path (or method) that eliminates suffering. The “world of suffering” is called samsara, and it is this world that is to be eliminated via the path leading to the complete release of enlightenment (sometimes called nirvana).

In Buddhism, study with a knowledgeable teacher is considered necessary to make progress in the Dharma—in understanding and accomplishing Buddhist practice. The primary teachers in Tibetan Buddhism are lamas; many of these are tulkus—considered to be reincarnations of past lamas. Lamas are sources of blessings; it is believed that the greater the devotion of the student, the more powerful the blessings the student will receive. The lama is above all responsible for teaching the Dharma and answering students’ questions. In Tibetan Buddhism, the lama is considered the key factor in progressing along the spiritual path. Traditionally monasticism has been an important element of Buddhism. Monks and nuns are often cloistered in nunneries and monasteries, fulfilling various functions from teaching to running the institution to serving the needs of the lay community.

Traditional texts and new books on Buddhism are now widely available in Western languages, especially in English. Whether one gains knowledge of Buddhism from a teacher or from texts (it’s usually both), the steps in absorbing this knowledge are listening (or reading), reflecting, and meditating. In Tibet, although there are many monastics, most Buddhists are lay practitioners forming part of a household.

Buddhism in the Modern World

Prior to the mid-twentieth century, people in Western countries took little interest in Buddhism. However, there were always a few who explored and practiced Buddhism, and the style best known to them was, for the most part, the Theravada tradition. All the while, Tibetan Buddhism was practically unknown in the West, with the exception of some writer-adventurers (such as Alexandra David-Néel, who also practiced Buddhism) and scholar-practitioners (for example, W. Y. Evans-Wentz). The main reason for this is that Tibet allowed few Western visitors and generally kept itself and its Buddhist traditions closed to the rest of the world.

That all changed in 1959 when China invaded Tibet, forcing many Tibetans into exile. Well over a hundred thousand Tibetans settled for the most part in India, but also in Western countries. The most famous was the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who established a large exile community in northern India. The Dalai Lama was interested in the West and eventually began teaching Tibetan Buddhism around the world. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, which made him a high-profile figure, and this aided the spread of Tibetan Buddhism to the West.

Complementing that, in the 1960s in the West there were many young people dissatisfied with the materialism of Western societies, and some of these were attracted to Eastern spiritual traditions. Since that time, Tibetan Buddhism has been practiced by several million people in places ranging from Europe and North America to Australia and Latin America. Spiritual “communities” (sanghas) of all four principal Tibetan Buddhist traditions have been established in these countries, classic texts have been translated into Western languages, retreat and practice centers have been built, and teachers of Tibetan Buddhism—some of them Westerners—travel the world spreading the Tibetan Buddhist Dharma.

Skip Notes

*1 Here, generally speaking, Buddhist cosmology is similar to the big bang theory of modern physics.

*2 This is exactly the reverse of the view of modern neuroscience, which identifies the mind with the electrochemical brain and considers nonmaterial aspects to be mere by-products thereof—“mental representations.”

GLOSSARY

ADHD: Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

analytical meditation: Intellectual, thought-based contemplation. Also called conceptual meditation.

awareness: A quality of mind that notices or detects phenomena. In the larger sense, awareness is a boundless, unbiased, spacious quality of great spiritual importance.

bodhichitta: Sanskrit for “awakened mind.” The view and activities of loving-kindness and compassion.

body, speech, and mind: A Buddhist conception of three aspects or constituents of our personal environment.

Buddha: Can refer to any enlightened being, but generally when we speak of “the Buddha” it is in reference to Buddha Shakyamuni, also known as Gautama, who lived in what are now India and Nepal in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.E.; he is also called “the historical Buddha.”

compassion: The wish that the suffering of beings be reduced or eliminated.

conditioning: A result of repeated activity that is the basis of habitual tendencies, often likened to automatic responses.

Dalai Lama: The head of the Gelukpa school of Tibetan Buddhism. For many centuries the Dalai Lamas were the temporal and spiritual leaders of Tibet. The current Dalai Lama—Tenzin Gyatso—is the fourteenth in the lineage of the Dalai Lamas.

deep work: Work accomplished with a minimum of distractions from outside. Ideally this provides an environment where creativity can flourish.

dzogchen: Tibetan for “great perfection” or “great completion”; Sanskrit: ati yoga. A Tibetan Buddhist form of nonconceptual meditation.

ego-clinging: Our attachment and identification with our own ego or self or mind.

emptiness: Basically refers to how things—objects, both mental and physical—do not have concrete inherent existence. They exist in the sense that they do appear, but when their essence is sought, it cannot be found.

equanimity: Here defined as a spacious, boundless, wide-open experience free from attraction (craving) and aversion.

Five Poisons: Aggression (and hatred, anger), desire (attraction, craving), ignorance (dullness), jealousy, and pride. Buddhism considers these five the main disturbing emotions of sentient beings. These are also called “afflictive emotions” (Sanskrit: kleshas).

FOMO: Fear of missing out. A common term in the vocabulary of digital app academics and designers.

Four Applications (or Foundations) of Mindfulness: In Pali, its original language: Satipatthana Sutta. One of the original teachings of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni. It directs mindfulness toward the body, feelings, the mind, and phenomena.

Four Immeasurable Thoughts: A mind training practice of Tibetan Buddhism bearing the wish that all beings have happiness and its causes, be free from suffering and its causes, have supreme happiness, and abide in boundless equanimity.

heart-mind: The wisdom mind that knows directly, intuitively. Open awareness.

hope and fear: A common mental/emotional bias that creates distraction and tension; a central feature of social conditioning.

impermanence: A key Buddhist concept based on how things are constantly changing.

interdependence: A key term connected with emptiness. Because all things depend on other things, no thing is independent. Rather, all things are interconnected and therefore interdependent. Therefore all things are empty of inherent existence. A synonym for interdependence is dependent arising—that is, things arise in dependence on other things.

karma: Sanskrit for “deed” or “action.” The Buddhist view of cause and effect (found also in other Indian religions such as Hinduism).

lama: Tibetan for “heavy,” and applied to realized masters. These teachers are responsible for guiding practitioners—teaching the Dharma (Buddhist teachings) and answering students’ questions.

loving-kindness: The aspiration that beings have happiness.

lung: Tibetan for “wind” or “air.” Sanskrit: prana. Basically, energies that circulate in the body.

Mahayana: Sanskrit for “Great Vehicle.” A tradition of Buddhism that aims for the enlightenment of all beings.

Middle Way: A Buddhist view of things being neither really real (called “eternalism”) nor nonexistent (called “nihilism”).

mind: A collective term basically referring to the arising and experience of thoughts and emotions.

mindfulness: In the general sense, attention focused on the mind or other objects.

no-phenomena: There being no permanent, independent entity in phenomena.

no-self: There being no permanent, independent “I” or person in sentient beings.

phenomena: Objects of the mind. Those perceived by the senses are also recognized by the mind.

post-meditation: Meditation “off the cushion”—that is, in daily life situations.

rinpoche: Tibetan for “precious one”; usually applied to lamas.

Sangha: Buddhist spiritual communities. The “Noble Sangha” refers to the community of realized masters.

sentient beings: Beings with minds.

Six Transcendent Perfections: Sanskrit: Six Paramitas. They are: generosity, patience, diligence, discipline, concentration, and wisdom.

Theravada: “Teaching of the Elders.” The earliest of the Buddhist schools still in existence. Centered mainly in Southeast Asia. Lays emphasis on the individual practitioner’s liberation.

Three Spheres: Subject (agent), action, object.

tonglen: “Taking and giving.” A Tibetan Buddhist practice of taking upon oneself the suffering and causes of suffering of others and giving them your happiness and causes of happiness.

virtual reality: Things existing potentially, approximately, “in effect, though not in fact.” The reality of the effects of a computer screen, hologram, virtual reality goggles, and so forth.

wisdom: Mundane wisdom concerns information in the intellectual sense. Higher or transcendental wisdom involves knowing directly, perhaps intuitively.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Part One: Under the Spell of Distraction

Eyal, Nir. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. New York: Random House, 2014.

Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Reissue. New York: Ig Publishing, 2007. Originally published in 1957.

Part Two: Learning to Breathe Easily

Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Originally published in 1975.

Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment and Your Life. Louisville, CO: Sounds True, 2016.

Khyentse, Dilgo. The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-Seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2007.

Part Three: Going Deeper

Rahula, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught. Rev. ed. New York: Grove Press, 1974.

Ricard, Matthieu, and Trinh Xuan Thuan. The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.

Part Four: The Value of a Spiritual Path

Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row, 1944.

Nanamoli, Bhikkhu. The Life of the Buddha. Seattle: BPS Pariyatti Editions, 1992.

Schmidt, Marcia Binder. Dzogchen Primer: An Anthology of Writings by Masters of the Great Perfection. Boston: Shambhala, 2002.

Appendix 1: Lung

Dhonden, Yeshi. Healing from the Source: The Science and Lore of Tibetan Medicine. Translated by B. Alan Wallace. Boston: Snow Lion, 2000.

Rapgay, Lobsang. The Tibetan Book of Healing. Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press, 2005.

Appendix 2: Buddhism—A Brief Description

The Dalai Lama. The World of Tibetan Buddhism: An Overview of Its Philosophy and Practice. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

H. E. Dza Kilung Rinpoche, Jigme Tendzin Chodrak, is head of Kilung Monastery in the Dzachuka region of Kham, Tibet. Since 1999 he has divided his time between Tibet and his home base on Whidbey Island, Washington, from which he teaches throughout the United States and the world. He also directs the Kilung Foundation, which supports educational, cultural, and humanitarian projects in Tibet. Rinpoche is the author of The Relaxed Mind (Shambhala, 2015).

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