Anyone who has ever sat down to meditate knows how easily the mind gets caught up in telling stories and entertaining thoughts. As Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku puts it, “If we take time to focus on the stream of mental events, we soon observe that we are almost always thinking.” In one way, that seems almost self-evident, but we might still wonder why, since most of our thoughts are routine and, frankly, pretty boring. 

The same is true for the stories we tell. Whatever function they may serve in keeping our lives on an even keel, they seldom offer much in the way of new insights, greater clarity, or a sense of wellbeing. They bubble up when we’re feeling agitated or when we’re acting out of habit, and they distract us from paying attention to what is going on in our lives. 

That’s why meditation teachers generally suggest not getting involved in the stories that flicker across the screen of consciousness. When we get lost in the content of our stories, we stop being present to our own experience. We “space out,” a term we can take fairly literally, since stories lift us out of our immediate experience and deposit us somewhere else.

Things look different, however, when we start to look closely at the stories we live. And we do indeed live within stories. First and foremost, there’s the story of being a self: the story “Here I am.” It’s not a story we have to put into words, because the self-story is built into our lives at the deepest level. It’s a given, and—as the Buddha tirelessly pointed out—it has powerful consequences for how we live our lives.

Traditionally, the commitment to the existence of the self is considered a wrong view, but there is more to it than that. We don’t just see the self as being real; we inhabit a world in which the existence of the self, situated at the center of what we experience, is a given. 

To get a sense of what this means, consider this passage in a book by the naturalist Barry Lopez, describing a journey with Indigenous people of the far north:

If my companions and I, for example, hiking the taiga encountered a grizzly bear feeding on a caribou carcass, I would tend to focus almost entirely on the bear. My companions would focus on the part of the world of which, at that moment, the bear was only a fragment. . . . My approach . . . was mostly to take note of objects in the scene—the bear, the caribou, the tundra vegetation. A series of dots that I would try to make sense of by connecting them all with a single rigid line. My friends, in contrast, had situated themselves within a dynamic event. . . . Their approach was to let it continue to unfold. To notice everything and to let whatever significance was there emerge in its own time.

Lopez is contrasting two different ways of inhabiting the world. His way is to put the self at the center. Events happen and objects appear, but the self, the one who experiences this, is positioned outside what is happening, “taking note” of what happens and “making sense” of it. His companions, in contrast, inhabit a world that is fluid and dynamic. For them, a story is unfolding, and their experience in this moment fits within that story. They are embedded in the world shaped by that story, much as a character in a novel is embedded in the story that the novel unfolds. 

A practice that starts from the stories we live makes this ongoing dynamic available. We need not focus solely on this immediate moment (helpful though that can be), because stories are temporal in a different way. The stories we inhabit engage past, present, and future simultaneously. Once we realize that we are always inhabiting stories, we realize that the immediate moment is not where we live our lives. We live across time, in a present that encompasses the past and future—what we might call “story time.” Any experience has its framing story, and every story, provided we let ourselves live it, offers an occasion for deeper appreciation and knowledge.

Understanding the Buddha’s teachings in this way gives them an added dimension we might otherwise miss. Consider the teaching on the five skandhas—form, feeling, perception, conditioning, and consciousness—a teaching specifically introduced to counter the commitment to a self. It’s not just about seeing experience through the lens of the five skandhas, though that’s the place to start. Instead, it’s about living a story—inhabiting a world—that unfolds through the skandhas’ dynamic interaction. When we do, the self-story still operates, but now it’s just another dimension of the understanding we have been conditioned (the fourth skandha) to accept. 

Another way to get clear on lived stories is to contrast them to told stories. Consider explanations, stories we tell to make sense of things. Why was I late for work? “Well, the bus broke down, and all the passengers had to transfer to a different bus. So I couldn’t get there on time.”

That’s an example of an explanation as a told story. Look a little deeper, however, and you’ll find a lived story: we inhabit a world where the principle of cause and effect applies, so in the story we live, offering explanations makes sense. If something happens, it’s because something else happened, and we can trace that sequence back. We don’t have to tell ourselves stories about how the principle of cause and effect operates; we just know that it does. Just like the story “here I am,” the story “everything has a cause” is something we take for granted. To be clear, calling the principle of causality a story doesn’t mean it’s false. “Cause and effect” is a true story, at least in the pragmatic sense that it applies to how we go about our day-to-day lives. 

Many of the stories we live are equivalent to what we think of as common sense: what everyone knows is true. Of course, we live other stories that are unique to us: stories about who we are and how other people figure into our lives, stories that make sense of what’s happening around us and to us. Again, it’s like being the characters who inhabit a novel. The lived stories make up the background of what’s happening. The told stories advance the plot.

If we accept that we are always living stories, we can see that a lot of Buddhist practice is about changing the stories we live, about getting us to inhabit a new story. I’ve already given one example: the Buddha asks us to question the story that puts the self at the center of experience, offering in its place the story that our lives consist of dynamic interactions among the five skandhas. The teaching on the four noble truths, and especially the reality of suffering in our lives, is another invitation to live a different story. The Buddhist scholar David McMahan speaks of the Buddha’s teachings as “laying out an entire way of being in the world.” That “entire way” is what I call a lived story.

Admittedly, the idea of lived stories can be difficult to get a handle on, largely because they are mostly implicit, abiding in the background of day-to-day life. To use one more analogy, we might think of lived stories as the architecture of our normal thinking. If, for example, you step into someone’s home, you might notice the furniture or what is hung on the walls or the flooring and so forth. But you don’t see the framing and foundation that are the structures upon which everything visible rests. Lived stories are something like that.

The dharma offers many ways to change your lived stories. For instance, you can engage your embodied experience differently, by focusing without judgment on sensations in the body. Or you can imagine the world you inhabit differently, and then let that imagined world come alive. Visualizing the Buddha works this way. It’s an invitation to let the Buddha, with all his extraordinary qualities, be present in the story you are living. The same holds at the level of doctrine: you hear the story that all conditioned things are impermanent, you reflect on it, and you integrate it into your life, which means that the impermanence of all things becomes a part of the story you live, the story that makes sense of the world. At a more fundamental level, living a story is itself an expression of the truth of impermanence. Instead of holding tightly to the fixed identity of self in a world of other fixed identities, you live (like Barry Lopez’s friends) within the flow of shifting events, where past, present, and future alike are in constant flux. 

Seeing our lives as stories we live opens up a different way to practice. For instance, suppose I find myself thinking back to the pleasant dinner I had last week with friends at one of my favorite restaurants. There are two parts to that act of remembering. There’s the content of the memory—catching up with my friends on what’s been happening in our lives, discussing plans, enjoying the food and the company. At the same time, there’s the experience of remembering—in other words, the experience of living in that activity of remembering. If the memory arises in passing, I’ll probably focus on the content. If it comes up while I’m meditating, though, I may be more sensitive to the remembering itself, letting the content of the memory slide on by. 

Something similar happens when I focus in my meditation on breathing. There is the experience of breathing—air in, air out, belly expanding, belly releasing, and so on. But there is also the lived story “I am breathing,” a story I take for granted. While it doesn’t pull me away from the experience of breathing, it conditions and limits it. My experience of breathing is shaped and confined in subtle ways by the story that the breathing is mine, that it belongs to me. 

That’s where learning to be aware of the stories we live can change things in important ways. When we excavate them from the subterranean realm of “what we take for granted,” we make available a different dimension of lived experience. At the same time, because we are focusing on the lived story as a story, we are less likely to be pulled into the story’s content, where we so often get lost. 

Consider again the story that my self is the owner of experience. The Buddha taught that the self-story, and the grasping and claims of ownership that come with it, are the source of tremendous suffering and frustration. He offered other stories in its place, as we’ve already seen—not only the story of the five skandhas but also the story that all things and all circumstances are impermanent and constantly changing, including our presumed identity as selves. If we replace the lived story of “me at the center”—the story we have been conditioned from childhood to accept—with the story of impermanence, life looks very different.

Holding the stories we take for granted up to the light of inquiry can be challenging, because we don’t see them as stories at all, but simply as how things are. Here again, the best example is the story of the self as owner. The philosopher Henri Bergson starts one of his books by saying that we are more certain of our own existence than anything else. It’s a basic fact of being human. So how can we question it? 

I’d say that the first step is to acknowledge how thoroughly our experience is shaped by the stories we live. And here we’re in luck, because that’s a practice eminently suited to these times. As a culture, we seem to be more committed to our stories, more involved in them, than any other culture in history. True, people have always told stories and always imaginatively lived in them, but today, inventing stories or adopting them has become a way of life: think of social media, conspiracy theories, and identity politics. Our forms of entertainment—movies, television, video games—feed us a steady diet of stories, and still we clamor for more. We curate our online identities on Instagram or TikTok and present them to others as stories ready to be consumed. At a deeper level, we live in a multicultural and tribalized world, one where different stories compete to define the way things are. Even if I insist that my version is the one that’s true, I have to accept that it’s a story, standing on the same footing as your incompatible story. We even are ready to consider the possibility that our waking life could be a simulation, a story crafted by someone else, in which we simply play our assigned roles (as in the Matrix movies). 

That’s not all bad. For one thing, we understand very well the danger in being so involved in stories, of living in what the writer Kurt Andersen calls “Fantasyland.” As the historian Daniel Boorstin foresaw more than sixty years ago, “we risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” For another, our openness to stories, our sophistication about how they work, prepares us to see clearly the constructed nature of the worlds we inhabit. In a sense, stories are our superpower.

If we want to take full advantage of our familiarity with stories, we need to be clear about what stories are and are not. Here, I want to borrow an important way of making sense of the mind from the Buddhist Abhidharma. A systematic presentation of key Buddhist teachings, the Abhidharma identifies six kinds of consciousness: the five sense faculties plus mind as a sixth faculty.

Each of the six has its own range of experience. For instance, when we hear a blackbird sing, hearing-consciousness hears the sound, but it does not identify the bird as the source of the sound. That identification is a story, an explanation, generated by the sixth, mental consciousness. That’s what mental consciousness does: make sense of what the other five forms of consciousness present by organizing them into a story. 

Seeing stories as the “output” of the sixth kind of consciousness helps us understand differently the role of lived stories. On the one hand, we see that the lived story informs the whole of experience. I don’t just hear the blackbird; instead, once hearing consciousness has made a sound available, a lived story emerges, along the lines of “Here I am, and what I hear is a blackbird, and here is how I feel about that, and here is what it reminds me of.”

A focus on lived stories helps us recognize that the world I inhabit and experience is much more mental—in that it is more story-driven—than we usually think. I don’t just sense a world and objects in the world; I make sense of it. 

At the same time, seeing how the lived story shapes my experience, I recognize that I don’t have to accept its content as the truth of the way things are. The story is only a story. It is one dimension of a field of experience that includes the output of the other five consciousnesses. 

All this leads to a way of exploring the mental operations quite different from what we usually think of as meditation. We don’t have to turn away from stories or drop them. We can bring lived stories into our practice. We can be mindful not just of the particulars that show up in our lives from moment to moment, but of the story we are living, the story that informs the whole. 

When we get lost in the content of our stories, we stop being present to our own experience.

To practice with stories, we need above all to understand them as stories. If we accept the stories we live as simply the truth of what is so, we are likely to get lost in their content, and thereby lose the opportunity they offer. Marshall McLuhan famously said that “the medium is the message.” That holds for the stories that inform our lives. Whatever the story’s content, what the story communicates is its own nature as story. When we see that, we are ready to engage differently the experiences that constitute our lives. 

Here are a couple of suggestions for practices that can lead in that direction. The first, which I’ve mentioned already, arises with respect to the lived story “I am breathing.” There are meditative practices that suggest labeling that act of breathing as “breathing, breathing,” and that is part of it. But that focus does not directly question the story, the “transitional construction” that says, “I am the one who is breathing; it is my breath.” That’s where we want to look. 

You can use the basic meditative practice of focusing on breathing to call the self-story into question. Just let breathing breathe. When we say, “It’s raining,” there is no need to look around for the “it” that is doing the raining. In the same way, there is no need to maintain the existence of the self that is doing the breathing. When you switch in your practice from the story “I am breathing” to the story “it’s breathing,” you can be more directly aware of the self-story arising.  

You can take this practice a step further. When you “pay attention” to breathing in meditation, you actually tend to reinforce the role of the self, because the self-story tells you that it’s the self who is paying attention. Again, it doesn’t have to be that way. Awareness of breathing simply goes along with the breathing. Just as there is no one breathing, there does not have to be anyone watching or paying attention. 

Another way of decentering the self has to do with the temporal dynamic of stories, which I spoke of above. The self operates in linear time, a time that unfolds in a sequence of moments from past to present and future. If you relax into the flow of experience, however, you will find that between any two linear moments, there is another moment that does not fit into the same linear sequence. For instance, between two moments of breathing, there might be a moment occupied by a stray thought, or an itch. Any one of those “between moments” could trigger a whole new and completely different linear sequence, with its own content. In fact, that’s what happens when we get distracted.

Here’s the alternative. Instead of getting pulled into a new sequence of linear time, keep looking for those “between moments.” Soon enough, you arrive at moments that are unnamed and thus not part of any potential linear sequence. The more you develop sensitivity to those unnamed moments, the more you free yourself from the content of the stories you inhabit—and the more you can appreciate stories themselves in their arising. And that means appreciating more fully your own life.

Many kinds of meditation involve focusing with increasing intensity on one specific object: the breath, a visualization, sound, or just about anything else. Learning to engage the stories we inhabit—the stories we live—is a very different kind of practice. Stories are complex, multidimensional. They invite us to engage our lives as a whole, and they make the whole of our lives—including the stories we tell—available to value and to explore.

One final point. The more familiar we grow with stories in operation, the more we turn away from their specified content to inhabit the field of experience to which they give form. As this happens, the hold they have on us loosens. That matters for our ability to be fully present in our lives, but it matters also for stories that take form as ideology, or as implicit bias, or in conspiracy theories or stories of tribal identity. Not tied to what such stories have to tell us, not insisting on the truth of their content, we draw closer to being free.

The post Stuck in Stories appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Humans have a lot of problems. Some problems, like our search for meaning and the need to come to terms with our mortality, appear to be timeless. But many of the urgent problems we face are unique to our time: the climate emergency, systemic injustice, weapons of mass destruction, and many more.

When it comes to existential problems, Buddhist teachings offer wisdom that directly supports us in our struggles, but how the dharma applies to the problems that mark our own time may seem less clear. Teachers often point out that practice can help us be more effective in our commitments by reducing stress, anxiety, and despair on the one hand and promoting resilience and clarity on the other. Yet this does not tell us how we can make our values and concerns an integral part of our practice or how we can find in millennia-old Buddhist ethical teachings guidance on dilemmas that have emerged only in recent decades.

A good place to start addressing these questions is to ask why we should treat the Buddha’s teachings as trustworthy at all. One good answer is to point to places in the scriptures where the Buddha said that it was up to those who heard him to discover for themselves whether or not the dharma is true.

A famous source for this statement is the Kalama Sutta, from the Pali canon (Anguttara Nikaya), a sutta that addresses the question of religious authority directly. The sutta relates that the Buddha had entered the town of Kesaputta, in the territory of the Kalamas. Having heard of the Buddha’s great knowledge and profound teachings, the Kalamas seek his guidance on a matter that has left them confused and in doubt. Many teachers, they say, pass through Kesaputta, and all claim that their own doctrines are right and all other doctrines are wrong. Since the Kalamas hear this from each teacher, they have no way to decide whose teaching they should follow.

The Buddha responds with these oft-quoted words:

Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, “This contemplative is our teacher.”
—trans. Thanisarro Bhikkhu

Champions of free and open inquiry love this advice: don’t trust authority; decide for yourselves. The passage has become Exhibit A for the claim that the Buddha taught a rational form of inquiry particularly well-suited to our times. As the Theravada monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu pointed out in a Tricycle essay (Fall 2012), however, this is misleading. If we carefully read the text as whole, we see that the Buddha is not just telling the Kalamas to reject tradition, custom, and authority. He also counsels skepticism toward rational thought or any kind of reasoning process. As Ven. Thanissaro writes, “The Buddha’s skepticism toward reliable authorities extends inside as well as out.” In other words, you need to evaluate your own knowledge and convictions. And when you do, you find that logic and inference—the tools of reason—are not the right foundation to build on.

If the Kalamas cannot rely on reason or thinking things through, they ask the Buddha, what can they rely on instead? The Buddha answers:

When you know for yourselves that, “These qualities are unskillful; these qualities . . . lead to harm and to suffering”—then you should abandon them. . . . When you know for yourselves that, “These qualities are skillful” . . . then you should enter and remain in them.

As we assess this advice, let us keep in mind what we already know about the Kalamas. First, they think it’s good to listen to teachers who have real knowledge, and they are eager for guidance. Second, they know when they’re confused. Third, they recognize that the source of their confusion lies in not having any basis for deciding between competing doctrines. All this makes them prime candidates for learning from the Buddha. They’re ready to hear, they respect those who are wise, and they are motivated to learn. Would the Buddha have responded as he did if they did not have these qualities? It seems unlikely.

The Buddha’s guidance is thus not universal; it is addressed to these people in their particular situation. And here it helps to point out: we are not the Kalamas. We do not know what they know, and we know some things that they do not. Whether the Buddha’s advice to them has relevance for us remains an open question. So let’s go on.

Having told the Kalamas to rely on what they know, the Buddha asks them a series of questions about whether greed, hatred, and delusion (a triad known in Buddhist teachings as the three poisons) lead to good or to harm. They are firm in their answer: “They lead to harm and to suffering. That is how it appears to us.” By asking for their views, the Buddha is helping the Kalamas discover that they already have real knowledge—knowledge they can rely on.

The Buddha’s guidance is not universal; it is addressed to a particular situation.

If the Buddha posed these questions to us, we might have the same response: that greed, hatred, and delusion always lead to harm and that their absence always brings benefit. But maybe not. There are good arguments to be made in favor of that view, but for most of us it’s a topic open to debate. After all, we do see counterexamples in the news every day: people driven by the three poisons, yet apparently thriving at almost every level.

Here we come to a major difference between the Kalamas and us: The Kalamas—as we learn later in the sutta—believe in rebirth. This belief makes the causal connection between actions and their consequences easier to accept, because it implies that actions may bear fruit only in future lives. If we lack that belief or don’t give it much weight in deciding how to act, the claim of karmic retribution that the Kalamas “know for themselves” becomes much more difficult to accept.

Even for those of us who do believe in rebirth, our belief is not quite the same as that of the Kalamas. The Kalamas lived in a culture where virtually everyone accepted rebirth as a given, an incontestable part of the fabric out of which the universe was woven. A good comparison is the belief in traditional Christian societies that after you die you will be reborn in heaven or in hell. This is not just useful information for Christians to store away. If you are steeped in a traditional Christian culture, this belief shapes at a deep level how you live your life. Your eternal destiny (in a Christian context) or your samsaric fate (in a Buddhist context) is shaped by your actions in this life. If that is the truth of your world, it works its way into your conduct from day to day, even hour to hour. It is not something you remember from time to time; it is an ever-present reality.

For many people today, the belief in a Christian heaven and hell is no more compelling than the Buddhist belief in rebirth. However, we can accept another belief in place of belief in karmic retribution, and it is one that the Buddha presents as bedrock truth: the law of cause and effect. Implicit in the Buddha’s questions to the Kalamas about the impact of the three poisons, it is known in Pali as idappaccayata (literally, “having its foundation in this”):

This existing, that exists;
this arising, that arises;
this not existing, that does not exist; this ceasing, that ceases.
Majjhima Nikaya 3.63

This is a succinct statement of the law of cause and effect, something we moderns can get behind. Despite some philosophical doubts or religious objections, it is the guiding principle of science, our most esteemed form of knowledge. It is an inescapable baseline assumption. A world in which this law does not operate is contrary to common sense, just as a world in which rebirth did not operate would have gone against common sense for the Kalamas. Quoting the Kalamas, we can say, “That is how it appears to us.”

The difference between the Kalamas and us, of course, is that for us causality—at least in its strong, lawlike form—operates only on the physical plane. We exclude from its workings the inner, subjective realm where the three poisons operate—questions about good and evil, right and wrong, and the whole domain of morality.

Judging on this basis alone, then, we are not good candidates to learn from the Buddha. Knowing that a seed properly tended will grow into a certain kind of plant—the law of causality operating in the realm of biology—tells us very little about how to conduct our lives so as to produce what is positive.

However, there are certain causal relationships—in the sense that science understands them—that do influence how we live our lives. Let’s take the example of the climate emergency. Science, with its remarkable ability to extrapolate from present conditions to future consequences, tells us that human actions are rapidly transforming our environment, leading us toward future catastrophe. It also tells us that if we change our conduct, we may have it in our power to prevent that.

Keeping in mind that this understanding of causality may play the same role for us as understanding the causal workings of the three poisons does for the Kalamas, let’s return to the sutta.

Having led the Kalamas to recognize what they already know to be true, the Buddha now moves the conversation to a different plane. Instead of giving them advice on how to practice or offering them other teachings, he tells them how his disciples, having used their knowledge of the three poisons to transform their lives, would practice:

Now, Kalamas, one who is a disciple of the noble ones [is] . . . devoid of greed, devoid of ill will, undeluded, alert, and resolute.

Although the Buddha has reminded the Kalamas that they know something fundamental about the three poisons, this does not mean they are ready to put that knowledge into effect. After all, they are not followers of the Buddha, trained in moral conduct, concentration, and wisdom. They may know how the three poisons work, but this does not mean they are free of their influence. So the Buddha invites the Kalamas to make a leap, to take their knowledge deeper. Be like my disciples, he suggests: having freed yourself of the three poisons, be “alert and resolute,” and you will find the real answer to the confusion that brought you here.

From here on out, the Buddha’s instruction enters familiar territory. His description of his disciples’ practice appears many times in the Pali canon, in more or less identical language. But we should not lose sight of the fundamental difference in the circumstances of this sutta. The Buddha is not telling the Kalamas to be alert and resolute, since they are not ready for that step. He is just pointing out that his disciples—those who accept his authority—would make this their practice.

Putting this core teaching at one remove reminds us that the Kalamas are a naive audience. They know nothing about the Buddha’s teachings. Specifically, when he tells them that his disciples dwell “alert and resolute,” these are most likely not technical terms pointing to a whole body of teachings (such as those found in texts like the Satipatthana Sutta, which details the four foundations of mindfulness). Instead, this description will refer back to what the Kalamas know to be true. Understanding for themselves the workings of moral cause and effect, they will be alert to their operations. Resolute, they will naturally turn away from the three poisons.

By describing to the Kalamas how his own followers practice, then, the Buddha is not telling them to practice in the same way. Instead, he is counseling them to take to heart (or keep in mind) what they already know for themselves to be true.

In our own circumstances, there are things we know to be true, things we can clearly and mindfully comprehend. We know that the climate emergency is real, we know how it arose, we know we can address it, and we see the possibility of a path toward doing so if we act soon. (We too could say, “That is how it appears to us.”) Cultivating mindfulness in this context means keeping this fourfold knowledge in mind.

Mindfulness is about more than body, feeling, mind, and mental formations (the “four foundations”). It is about being alert and resolute in light of the fundamental knowledge we already possess, knowledge that truly matters. Letting such knowledge permeate our hearts and minds may in the end make it impossible not to act on what we know.

Our knowledge of the climate emergency (or other truths we find to be fundamental) is not dharma knowledge as such, yet it can still play a fundamental role in our practice. We see this when we consider what the Buddha tells the Kalamas next. Still speaking of how his own disciples would practice, he presents another teaching repeated often in the suttas. Disciples who have abandoned the three poisons deepen their understanding through practice of the four divine abidings or boundless states: love (or good will), compassion, joy (or appreciation), and equanimity. As the Buddha puts it with respect to compassion:

[They dwell] . . . pervading . . . everywhere and in every respect the all-encompassing cosmos with an awareness imbued with compassion: abundant, expansive, immeasurable, free from hostility, free from ill will.

While the Buddha goes on to offer the Kalamas a second way of resolving their initial confusion, for us it is this teaching on the boundless states that completes the lessons the sutta offers. We can put it this way: Start with what you know to be true—a truth based on the law of cause and effect, which informs your view of your world on a fundamental level. Deepen that knowledge by keeping it in mind and taking it to heart, alert and resolute. Then let it permeate and transform the world you inhabit through cultivating love and joy, equanimity and compassion. Let the attitude with which you practice transform the knowledge that you know truly matters.

We are not the Buddha’s close disciples, devoid of the three poisons, and we are not the Kalamas, who know beyond doubt how the three poisons operate in karmic terms and who have now been given teachings that show how to work with this knowledge. But we too have been given a teaching that we can rely on. Like the Kalamas, we know something true and powerful; we know truths that range from the climate emergency to social injustice and beyond. That knowledge lets us connect with the great moral concerns of our time.

Alert to what we know to be true, resolute in acting on its significance, we can infuse our practice with what we care about deeply, and we can inspire our conduct in the world with the fruits of our practice. Learning to dwell in a world permeated with love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, we find the strength and clarity to act as the situation demands of us. We know what needs to be done, and we know how to cultivate our hearts and minds in ways that support the call to action. Whether our work succeeds or not, we will be acting on our values. The life we live will be its own reward.

The post What You Know to Be True appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the history of Buddhism, popular movements that present meditation as a relatively simple practice, accessible without extensive training, are nothing new. It happened in 8th-century China, and again in 19th-century Burma. And—growing directly out of the Burmese movement—it is happening again in today’s secularized mindfulness movement, represented most notably in the practice of MBSR, or Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction.

Wherever such movements flourish, a backlash quickly develops. No one denies the potential benefit from learning to calm or focus the mind, but many Buddhist teachers worry that an approach may be easy and give immediate benefits and yet risk discarding essential elements in the Buddha’s teachings. And so the battle is joined. Does the secularized mindfulness movement zero in on the most vital points, or is it just “McMindfulness,” a simplified, less nourishing version of dharma that turns meditation into a form of self-help?

The debate will no doubt continue, yet both sides fail to ask an essential question: if MBSR presents mindfulness as “purposeful, nonjudgmental attention in the present moment,” do we really know what we mean by the present moment? Can we assume in advance that we know how to maintain present-moment attention? Asking these questions will do a lot to clarify what the mindfulness movement does and does not do. If we understand what goes on in the present moment and how best to engage it, we may discover new resources for bridging the divide between traditional mindfulness practice and the current mindfulness boom.

Starting Way Back

Around the start of the Common Era, and for centuries afterward, several flourishing schools of Western philosophy, especially the Stoics and the Epicureans, presented their teachings much as Buddhism does: as a way of life and a path to deeper realization and profound peace. As far as we know, followers of these schools did not practice sitting meditation in the Buddhist sense, but they did offer a meditative approach to daily life, based on cultivating the insights of their founders. Both schools emphasized the importance of present-moment attention, and their teachings are helpful in reflecting on how we understand mindfulness today.

Can the Buddha’s teachings truly transform who we are when we don’t know in any deep sense who we have been?

Why look back to the past, instead of striking out on our own? For one thing, wisdom is scarce, and it’s always good to seek guidance from the great thinkers of the past. More fundamentally, however, the dialogue between Buddhism and the West in recent decades has been too narrow in its range. In our historically-challenged culture, we seldom look back at the sources that shape how we make sense of our lives. There are plenty of people ready to tell us about the links between Buddhism and psychology, and others who see interesting possibilities for a conversation between Buddhism and science. Some look to the 18th- and 19th-century Romantics, such as Schiller and Blake, or reach back to individual philosophers, such as Spinoza or Nietzsche. But if that’s as far as we go, we are leaving out of account more than 2,000 years of Western thought.

Because the Stoics and the Epicureans share with Buddhism a concern for how to live one’s life well, they are natural conversational partners for the meeting of dharma traditions with the West. In fact, their worldview may be closer to a Buddhist outlook than anything we are likely to find by sifting through the insights of the materialistic, nihilistic thinkers of our own time. You could put it this way: can the Buddha’s teachings truly transform who we are when we don’t know in any deep sense who we have been?

Three Ways to Be Present

When we bring the Stoic and Epicurean teachings into the picture, it makes sense to distinguish at least three different ways to practice being attentive in the present. All three figure in the current debates, but usually they are not clearly separated out. For clarity’s sake, we can call them therapeutic presence, joyful presence, and mindful presence.

Therapeutic Presence

One way to practice present-moment attention is to let go of the past and the future. The guiding principle is hardly subject to debate: we all spend a lot of our time obsessing about the past and the future—worry, regrets, replaying and anticipating, making plans, falling into fantasies and daydreams. If we can learn to drop such characteristic moves, our world becomes a simpler, kinder, friendlier place, and we can live without all those desires, judgments, and the like. Here’s how Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of MBSR, put it in an interview: “Quite simply, the future is not here. . . . The past is already over. We have to deal with things as they are in the moment. . . . Healing and transformation are possible the moment we accept the actuality of things as they are.”

A wide range of Buddhist texts and teachers make the same point, and it has become central in the modern mindfulness movement. As Thich Nhat Hanh writes in a book on mindfulness, “From now, I’ll use the term ‘mindfulness’ to refer to keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality.”

Here we can start to make some comparisons, because the Stoics gave the same advice. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “If you separate from . . . everything you have done in the past, everything that disturbs you about the future . . . and apply yourself to living the life that you are living—that is to say, the present—you can live all the time that remains to you until your death in calm, benevolence, and serenity.”

Joyful Presence

Another way to attend to the present moment is to cultivate full appreciation of the rich experience available in each moment. Think of the well-known MBSR practice of slowly, mindfully eating a raisin. It has been argued that this dimension of mindfulness meditation owes less to classical Buddhist teachings than to the unacknowledged elements of 19th-century Romanticism that color modern Western Buddhist understanding. Still, joyful appreciation (or the closely related practice of complete acceptance) is by now firmly embedded in modern Buddhist practice.

The best classical comparison here comes from the Epicureans, who insisted that only in the present moment is happiness possible. What is more, they said, happiness in this one moment is all the happiness one could ever want. In his influential reinterpretation of ancient philosophy as presenting a way of life rather than just abstract ideas, the late historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot summarized this Epicurean outlook: happiness comes “when we learn to accord infinite value to the slightest moment of existence.” It was the Epicurean poet Horace who coined the well-known phrase Carpe diem, “Seize the day,” and even if there is more of melancholy in this phrase than joy (act now, for death awaits), it can stand in for joyful presence, for that is how it is most often understood.

Mindful Presence

Buddhist scholars regularly point out that the word translated into English as “mindfulness” (sati in Pali, smriti in Sanskrit) has ‘remembering’ as its fundamental meaning. This is “mindful presence”—presence that remembers. And to be clear, “remembering” here does not just mean remembering to be mindful: it refers instead to remembering what has value, what matters most.

Secular mindfulness practice (including MBSR) has little to say about mindful presence, yet there’s no denying that it figures prominently in the tradition. Let’s take the example of present-moment attention to the body. In the Satipatthana Sutta, the single most important scriptural source for the mindfulness-movement teachings, mindfulness of the body certainly includes “therapeutic presence,” or nonjudgmental, present-moment attention to body sensations:

When walking, the monk discerns, ‘I am walking.’ When standing, he discerns, ‘I am standing.’ When sitting, he discerns, ‘I am sitting.’ When lying down, he discerns, ‘I am lying down.’ Or however his body is disposed, that is how he discerns it. . . . when going forward and returning, he makes himself fully alert; when looking toward and looking away . . . when bending and extending his limbs . . . when carrying his outer cloak, his upper robe and his bowl . . . when eating, drinking, chewing, and savoring . . . when urinating and defecating . . . when walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, waking up, talking, and remaining silent, he makes himself fully alert.

But the sutta goes on from there in a very different vein, instructing listeners to practice “mindful presence” with respect to the body. Specifically, it tells the assembled monks to remember certain fundamental insights meant to counteract attachment to the body. Here are three: view the various constituents of the body (blood, pus, snot, phlegm, urine, feces and the like) as unclean or repulsive; analyze the body as composed of the basic elements of matter; and remind yourself that the body is mortal and will one day turn into a decaying corpse.

With mindful presence, then, we move beyond immediate sensory experience and disregard for past and future, beyond joyful and therapeutic presence. In fact, mindful presence might seem to take us out of the realm of present-moment attention entirely. After all, being mindful that the body is constructed out of the basic building blocks of matter invites reflecting on the body’s past origins, while being mindful of the body’s decay after death invokes events that will take place in the future.

Happiness in this one moment is all the happiness one could ever want.

A better way to make sense of the practice of mindful presence, however, is to see it as inviting a broader sense of what it means to inhabit the present moment. We can see this clearly if we focus on the fact of mortality. True, your death is an event in the future, but the certainty that you will die is a present reality, true in each present moment. Dropping your concern with the future (therapeutic presence) does not mean losing sight of your mortality, which (as Buddhist and Western thinkers alike steadily remind us) colors every moment of our lives. As Marcus Aurelius writes: “Let your every deed and word and thought be those of one who might depart from this life this very moment.” For the very same thought, see the Bhaddekaratta Sutta: “Today, effort must be made; tomorrow death may come, who knows?”

Mindful presence, then, does not turn away from the present moment at all. However, it requires us to rethink what goes in that moment. As human beings, we do not live in a point-instant present, even if experience does change from one moment to the next. Instead, we live in a present that draws on the past and the future. We understand our own experience in terms of ongoing stories that we use to make sense of the way things are. Our sense of having or being a self, for instance, is such a story. My present experience only makes sense in terms of who I am, where I come from and where I am headed; my plans and projects, my history and circumstances. Therapeutic presence encourages us not to cling to these elements of experience, which means radically simplifying the story, and there is clearly value in this. Yet when we operate in the world, the story of our lives—unfolding from past to future, shaped by memory and anticipation—structures our experience at the deepest level.

Mindful presence acknowledges this wider temporal presence and asks us to frame it according to the insights of the Buddha. To go back to the example of giving mindful present attention to the body, you do not just experience feelings and sensations in the body; rather, right now, in the present, you see the body as repulsive, composite, and mortal.

When you practice this kind of mindful presence—presence that remembers or keeps in mind key Buddhist teachings—a certain attitude toward life takes hold. For instance (keeping the focus on the body), you no longer concern yourself as much with taking care of the body, beautifying the body, gratifying bodily impulses, and so on.

It may seem that the practice of mindful presence puts us squarely back within traditional mindfulness practice, but looking to the traditions of Western philosophy helps us see that what is at stake here is much broader. There is a striking parallel between Stoic and Buddhist practice here that helps make the point clear. Stoic writers regularly invite their followers to practice by memorizing (shades of sati/smriti!) short sayings or maxims that embody Stoic teachings, so that you always have them on hand to apply to each new situation. Here is the Stoic statesman and philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC) on such short sayings: “These are the precepts that [the practitioner] must never let go. Rather, he must cling fast to them and make them a part of himself, and by daily meditation reach the point where these salutary maxims occur to him of his own accord.”

Now, exactly the same instruction appears in the well-known root text of the mind training teachings (lojong) brought to Tibet in the 11th century by the Buddhist master Atisha. The text consists of 59 sayings. Saying 9 instructs the practitioner: “Use sayings to train in all forms of activity.” For our purposes, we can rephrase this slightly: “To train the mind, use sayings in each present moment of action.”

What emerges here is that Buddhists and Stoics both ask us to maintain present-moment attention, but they also both understand that this will involve a way of being present that takes us beyond the particulars of “this single moment.” The present moment is not defined solely by letting go of past and future (therapeutic presence), nor by accepting and appreciating what arises right now (joyful presence), but by choosing in this very moment how we make sense of the world (mindful presence).

There is, however, a fourth way of practicing attention in the present moment, which we might call “active presence.”

Active Presence

Mindful presence involves choosing to orient ourselves in the world in accord with a certain outlook or set of teachings, whether we have them available as sayings and instructions or have embedded them in our awareness in some other form. But it is not enough to accept this outlook. We also have to take responsibility for this outlook, to act on our convictions. This is “active presence.” Open and attentive to the multiple dimensions of experience, seeing the world as we understand it to be, we act accordingly. This is a point emphasized by the Stoics. We can only act in the present, not the past or the future. When we practice active presence, choosing how to act in this moment, we also choose who and what we will be.

Active presence—choosing how to act in this moment—takes mindfulness out of the range of sitting meditation and inserts it into daily life. Think here of practicing the eightfold path. We start with right view and right thoughts or intentions, and then live our lives accordingly. As the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk and author Henepola Gunaratana has emphasized, to live our lives in accord with the eightfold path means practicing mindfulness—“active mindfulness”—in each moment.

In this sense, active presence includes the other three forms of present-moment attention already identified here. In therapeutic presence, you actively choose where to focus your attention. In joyful presence, you actively choose how you react to your experience. In mindful presence, you actively choose how to make sense of your experience.

Active presence has the potential to go further, for it invites an open-ended engagement with experience. When I am actively present, I choose the whole: what values I will enact, what commitments I will make, what understanding I will bring to bear. Potentially, it makes available for questioning each and every ordinary, taken-for-granted structure of my experience. It puts everything into play. What is my relationship to the objects I encounter in the world, or to other beings? How do my moods and emotions affect the ways I engage the world? What happens when thought carries me away from direct experience? Can I be attentive within thought? Each and every dimension of experience is available; nothing is presupposed. Each position I take is more a provisional positioning than a fixed structure.

Taking the Present-Moment Plunge

Seneca wrote, “Toti se inserens mundo,” a phrase translated by Hadot as “plunging oneself into the totality of the world.” Taking this plunge could be understood as the heart of active presence, of “being here now.” The Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku writes in Love of Knowledge (1987) that the self lives in the world like an illegal alien, always afraid that its identity will be questioned. “Taking the plunge” is the exact opposite. It means fearless presence, total involvement, holding nothing back. If it is difficult for the self to do this, if it clings to and defends its own positions and wants, that only underscores the need to challenge the self and the conditions it imposes on experience.

Those who question the contemporary mindfulness movement ask whether it does justice to the Buddha’s revolutionary call to transform both self and world. But we do not have to conclude from this that the only alternative is to stay within the tradition, though for some that will clearly be the right response. Active presence does justice to the Buddha’s revolutionary impulse on a wholly different basis. Not holding back, fearlessly questioning, always going beyond what we know, active presence offers a way into the deeper existential and universal concerns that the Buddha raised through his teachings.

From the perspective of active presence, neither therapeutic nor joyful presence is sufficient to turn us toward the existential transformation that the Buddha asked of us. Mindful presence is the right place to start, provided we are ready to respond to what we call to mind. It is really a question of how we live in the world. When we engage the present, we engage the whole of our lives. When we plunge into the world, we accept the whole of what is.

The present moment is more than we imagine it to be. Active in the present, we act on our intentions and our values as well as our perceptions and our attitudes. Ready to question our ordinary concerns, commitments, and understanding, we come close to the teaching of the Buddha, even if we choose not to think and see and frame reality in accord with the models for understanding that the Buddha put in place. Present in the moment, we are present to ourselves, and perhaps also to the universal truths that the Buddha made available.

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