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.

Minding the Mind

Meditation and mindfulness practices, popular among Eastern religions, are increasingly being adopted by moden pscyhotherapy as a legitimate technique for treating a wide variety of mental disorders. Noted therapist Dr Dan Siegel writes about it eloquently in his books, Mindsight and The Mindful Therapist.

While meditation is a general term to refer to a wide variety of mental cultivation practices from many cultures and religions, mindfulness, as it is normally used in Buddhist literature refers to to the practice of being aware of one's thoughts, feelings and sensations and this need not necessarily be done in a sitting position. The ability to intentionally pay attention to the thoughts and processes in our minds is a valuable skill that allows us to observe and modify our behaviour and even physiology to prevent 'dis-ease'.

Restlessness, reactivity and agitation are natural tendencies of our minds. Pyschologists also tell us that, 80 percent of the time we operate using our unconscious minds (example, when we are driving our car), so our reactions to sense stimulus are usually automatic. The unconscious brain is a more powerful computer compared to the conscious one. Nature designed it in such a way because of a very good reason: if we are to process every sensory input conscously, we'll be completely overwhelmed--we will not be able to do the things that come to us naturally such as walking and talking.

If our unconscious mind runs the show most of the time, are we simply not replaying back responses we've consciously or unconsciously programmed into our minds? We have been programmed since we were young by our experiences of pain and pleasure. Efficient though the unconscious mind is, sometimes it traps us into habitual patterns of behaviour that could be harmful to us. The world around us changes rapidly, but we are mentally not capable of dealing with rapid change. Our minds continue to run old programs. And when old programs are not able to process new inputs, then stress and anxiety sets in.

A person suffering from anxiety disorder is often trapped in a downward spiral of negative thoughts and emotions. The person is not able to snap out of this state because he or she does not have the ability to disassociate the mind from its processes. Mindfulness practices help us to strengthen our mental muscles; we are not trashed about by the stormy seas of thoughts and emotions. In most miindfulness practices, we learn to observe the arisal of thoughts and gently label them; worry, hesitant, anxious, longing...

These random thoughts are the background noise that comes to the forefront whenever we sit down quietly to meditate. The meditator takes note of them, labels them if necessary, and allow them to come and go. No force is necessary. We do not fight nor resist them. They will come and go like waves lapping on the shore. When this is done often enough, we carry this mindful habit into our daily lives, and it helps us keep an inner island of calm amidst the chaos of everyday activity.

I would say, mindfulness is the most important skill that any healthy individual would need in today's world, where we are constantly assaulted by an overload of sensory input and information. Dr Siegel calls it 'brain hygiene'--a necessary skill to ensure the healthy functioning or the brain, as one of the most important organs in our body. The mind does not have total control of its output, because out of biological necessity we do most of our things unconsciously. But using the practice of mindfulness, we deliberately observe our mental output, and this very act itself generates a modifying input that is fed back into the brain. Only in this way, mental stability and control can be achieved.

So be mindful, lest your own thoughts might lead you astray!