Meditation: by the Unitarian Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (Singing the Living Tradition #660)
Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?
We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.
I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.
I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.
I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear…
I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,
I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world;
Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.
Reading: by Nicholas Carr from The Shallows - What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (p. 5, 7)
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly, disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it too. Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going - so far as I can tell - but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle…
Maybe I’m an aberration, an outlier. But it doesn’t seem that way. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends, many say they’re suffering from similar afflictions. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some worry they’re becoming chronic scatterbrains.
Reading: by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron from Taming the Mind (p. 104)
Taming the mind takes time. Through good and bad moods, through periods of peacefulness and [anxiety] attacks, we train in being present. Day by day, month by month, year by year, we become better able to keep a rule of life, better able to lead the life of a bodhisattva who can hear the cries of the world and extend a hand…
In Buddhist literature there are many animal analogies for the wildness of mind: monkey mind, for example, or the out-of-control nature of an untamed horse. [Some teachers magnify] the image by choosing the most powerful of all tamable beasts: an elephant. If a wild horse or monkey can wreak havoc, imagine the destruction that could result from a crazed elephant!
Reading: by the Christian Trappist monk Thomas Merton from New Seeds of Contemplation (p. 1)
Contemplation is the highest expression of [our] intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source…
Taming the Monkey Mind
A Sermon Delivered on November 13, 2011
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Henry David Thoreau is one of my Unitarian heroes. His story of a simple life in a small cottage near Walden Pond has long been an inspiration for me. I long for such simplicity, that I too might learn to live deliberately.
So it is with come embarrassment that I must tell you what I was doing last month, on Friday, October 14, in the RadioShack store at the corner of Vine and Main Streets in Urbana. You see, I was one of the hundreds of thousands of consumers around the country who acquired the brand new iPhone on the first day it was on sale. Unlike several other customers who dropped by the store that afternoon, and left empty-handed - my phone was pre-ordered and waiting for me.
I am embarrassed, because I have reason to believe Henry David Thoreau didn’t own an iPhone. And if he did, I imagine he wouldn’t have taken it along to Walden Pond.
In the way of mitigating explanation, let me say, this was not entirely my own initiative. The phone was pre-ordered by my loving wife, Elaine. It was a birthday present.
But it is a fact - I do really like my iPhone. Some of you may have heard a sermon I delivered almost two years ago, when I mentioned purchasing my first iPhone… and talked about the religious implications.
Since then, I have grown increasingly attached to the device, and its seductive distractions, perhaps even addicted to the temptations of technology. Some scientists say smartphone use can tap into the same neural pathways that drive compulsive behavior, like gambling. Or that they trigger the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is associated with addiction to cigarettes or drugs.
One researcher recently determined that among committed users, the iPhone can elicit almost religious devotion. MRI tests showed that images of Apple products touched into the same brain regions of research subjects, as images of rosary beads or the pope.
In a test earlier this year, the researcher set out to determine whether iPhones are indeed as addictive as alcohol, shopping or video games. What he discovered was that for devoted users the iPhone triggered a flurry of activity in the “insular cortex of the brain,” which is the area associated with feelings of love and compassion. It is the same area that is active when we are in the presence of a close friend, family member, or lover.
The researcher concludes: “In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.” (NYT, 9/30/11, “You Love Your iPhone. Literally.” By Martin Lindstrom)
Which makes me think, it’s a good thing my iPhone is a gift from my beloved wife, and is thus re-enforcing my love for her, rather than competing with it.
* * *
Nevertheless, the continual internet access which has been made possible by smartphones can have troubling consequences for our lives. There are potential benefits, in terms of useful information and communication, but also potential dangers.
Nicholas Carr believes extensive internet use has a troubling impact on our mental and emotional health. Its endless distractions and interruptions undermine our ability to concentrate and think deeply. It makes us scattered, fidgety, and restless.
The trouble with the internet, Carr writes, is it “seizes our attention only to scatter it. We focus intensely on the medium itself, on the flickering screen, but we’re distracted by the medium’s rapid-fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli.” (p. 118)
Studies of office workers who use computers show that they constantly stop what they are doing in order to read and respond to incoming email. Many glance at their inbox thirty or forty times an hour. Each glance is an interruption of thought. Over time, these “interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious.” (p. 132)
“Every time we shift our attention,” Carr writes, “our brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources,” leaving us restless and bewildered. (p. 133)
* * *
The seductive distractions of our lives in the twenty-first century are unprecedented. But the challenge of coping with a mind that is distracted and bewildered, has been a source of religious concern for millennia.
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham - who was trained in the contemplative arts of archery, calligraphy and horsemanship - writes, “The bewildered mind is like a wild horse. It runs away when we try to find it, shies when we try to approach it, it takes off with the bit in its teeth and finally throws us right into the mud. We think that the only way to steady it is to give it what it wants We spend so much of our energy trying to satisfy and entertain this wild horse of a mind.” (Turning the Mind Into an Ally, p. 19)
A bewildered mind is weak because it is continually distracted. When difficulties arise, we are unable to cope. When we feel threatened, we strike out in anger. If we see something we like, we immediately want to have it. We live our lives at the mercy of our moods, and our actions are guided by thoughtless impulse, desires for immediate gratification, and short-term satisfaction.
A restless mind is unable to focus long enough to see the long-term consequences of what we do and leave undone. And so we make bad decisions.
We make the kind of bad decisions I talked about last Sunday. Bad decisions like those surrounding business on Wall Street, and a financial industry that was devoid of safe-guards, allowing dreams of short term gain to lead us into a global economic crisis with long-term consequences.
And this week, the news has been offering more examples. The president of Penn State university, and the football team’s head coach, made some bad decisions, when they chose not to appropriately address instances of sexual abuse and child molestation committed by an assistant coach, which took place for over a decade. This is a scandal, which got the president and head coach fired this week.
And on a local level - we have learned that an associate dean at the U of I law school, has been falsifying test scores of hundreds of law students over several years, in order to improve the law school’s position in national college rankings. Since the dean’s efforts helped the law school regain entry to the top-twenty law schools of country, his salary had been more than doubled. The dean - now no longer employed at the U of I - made some bad decisions.
Sometimes people make bad decisions. And when hear about them, after the fact, when we watch the consequences of bad choices unfold over time, and see the final outcome - we may wonder: what were they thinking?
When I hear stories of intelligent and conscientious individuals whose actions seem anything but intelligent and conscientious, it seems obvious these people were not thinking very clearly.
Poor choices are evidence of a bewildered mind, scattered and rushed, a mind unable to think deeply. A bewildered and distracted mind does a fine job attending to the immediate demands of living. Forever darting around, from one interest to the next, it can respond to immediate threats and dangers, it can guide impulsive action, and point us toward short-term gain.
The research of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio supports this. But his research also shows there are other kinds of mental functioning at are “inherently slow.” The mental processes associated with higher brain functions, such as empathy. They cannot be rushed. For a brain to understand and feel the “psychological and moral dimensions of a situation” takes time. (Carr, p. 220)
The more distracted we are, the more difficult it is to experience the subtle and distinctly human forms of empathy and compassion and morality.
* * *
Pema Chodron reminds us that it takes time to tame the monkey mind. And only if we take the time will we gain the clarity of mind needed to lead the life of a bodhisattva, a life of service, a life that allows us to hear the cries of the world, and which allows us to extend a helping hand.
Chodron draws on the insights of the eighth century Indian teacher Shatideva. Shatideva envisions the bewildered mind as neither a monkey, nor a horse. He envisions an elephant. Shatideva writes:
Wandering where it will, the elephant of mind,
Will bring us down to pains of deepest hell.
No worldly beast, however wild,
Could bring upon us such calamities.
Hell, he understands, is not some place the unfortunate may discover after death, nor punishment for disobedience to the divine. Hell is a state of mind - a bewildered mind.
This insight is not unique to Eastern philosophy. John Milton knew as much, when he wrote, “The mind is its own place, and itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
In the Western tradition the practice of contemplation can provide relief from such hellish suffering. Contemplation opens our eyes to the blessings of life itself. It can teach us to be fully awake, fully active, fully aware. It can teach us gratitude.
In the Eastern tradition the practice of meditation and mindfulness can help us. Shatideva envisions the practice of mindfulness as a rope that can restrain our restlessness, tying our attention calmly to the present moment. He writes,
If, with mindfulness’ rope,
The elephant of the mind is tethered all around,
Our fears will come to nothing,
Every virtue will drop into our hands.
Sakyong Mipham says meditation is not some esoteric skill, but rather a natural process of the mind. Meditation is simply a matter of watching our thoughts, watching as they jump from one idea or impulse to the next, from one distraction to another. He says, “Even though the bewildered mind is untrained, it is already meditating, whether we know it or not.” (p. 24)
Simply by watching our restlessness in action, we are already slowing down. We are already stabilizing the mind. If we continue to practice mindfulness, first by paying attention to our restless thoughts, then our breathing, then our actions this very moment - then, over time, every virtue will drop into our hands.
* * *
Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life? Thoreau asks us. He says we should slow down, and learn to live deliberately.
We have good reason to live more deliberately, not only for the sake of our own personal health and happiness, not only so we can learn to transform our lives from a personal hell to heaven - though that’s part of it.
We must live deliberately, because only if we do so, will we be able to transform the world around us from hell to heaven.
We must slow down, in order to think deeply, and see clearly. That is simply the way our brains are built. We need to slow down in order to understand the moral dimensions of our actions, in order feel compassion, in order to experience love - real love, not just a blip in the brain when we get a new iPhone or other gadget.
We must slow down, so that when we look back on our lives, we don’t see a long series of bad decisions; so we don’t scratch our heads and wonder: What were we thinking? And when we come to die, discover we have not lived.
We must slow down, in order to hear the cries of the world, so we can extend a helping hand.
Our lives are, and always will be, filled with distractions
May we learn to pay attention to them.
May our every distraction remind us to slow down.
So we might understand the deeper purpose of our lives,
So we might feel compassion and commitment and love
And find that peace of mind that can guide our efforts to
Build a better world.
Amen.
