Pixels of Thoughts

It has been a happy weekend for me because Liverpool FC won the EUFA Champions League Cup again--for the sixth time. That made up for the heartache of just missing out on the Premier League title by 1 point to Manchester City. Also the pain of last year's Champion League's final has finally been healed by this great victory against Tottenham Hotspurs.

I've been supporting Liverpool for ages--since the days when Bob Paisley was the manager. There have been many managers and new players since then; so many ups and downs. By sticking with the team you support through thick and thin, you earn your right to enjoy their victories simply by partaking in the pain of the defeats. Being a football supporter is great training in karma (the subject of my previous week's post).

Every blog post starts with a single thought. Students of the Buddhist text, the Abhidhamma will know that thoughts, at their most fundamental level, are discrete. One thought sparks off another thought and another thought--a Markov Chain of events, propelled by its karmic force.

In our everyday life, we experience physical activities such as walking, sitting and sleeping and also go through a whole gamut of human emotions such as joy, anger, fear, jealousy, love and hate. This is where we operate in our normal mode of existence. Our moral conscience, ethics and education guide us on how we should react, respond and act on these experiences. Religion, at a superficial level provides principles and guidelines on how we should or should not behave at this level of existence.

However these are but experiences at a macroscopic level. The everyday drama that runs in our mental screens, on closer inspection are made up of small pixels, like your TV or computer screen.

A sensory input, say the sight of an expensive watch on the display window of a mall, can trigger an impulse to possess it, which result in you perhaps parting with a huge chunk of your salary to purchase it, which in turn results in pride of its possession, an inflation of your ego, an awareness of your rising social status, a need to possess even more material accessories that fall in line with that status and perhaps leading you to suffer financial difficulties, which trigger you to consider better-paying jobs elsewhere and so on.

Each one of these experiences are actually made up of even smaller pixels. Just think, why should the sensory input of the image of a watch itself would trigger a need to possess it?

This is due to the condition of your mind. The watch is not simply an image of an object. The impingement of its light on your retina, triggers a series of mental stimuli and responses that are automatic, apparently beyond your control. Our consciousness works at a very coarse-grained level. We don't see these individual pixels that make up the total mental picture. That is the main cause of our downfall.

As Victor E. Frankl famously wrote:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

The ability to see the space between stimulus and response, like seeing images as consisting of pixels on the LCD screen requires a higher resolution in our consciousness. How easily do you get angry? That is a good test of your mind's resolution. Are you able to see the arising of anger within you before you respond?

Increasing the resolution of the mind requires training. That training is called mindfulness. Mindfulness is a skill that can be cultivated. Just as the piano player can through practice increase the flexibility and precision of his fingers to produce the subtle tonal variations, so can we cultivate the ability to see our experiences clearer, at better resolution, so that every pixel of experience is seen as it is. By seeing out thoughts at the pixel level, we choose more wisely. And of course, wise action leads to better outcomes in our lives.