In the previous two posts, I put forth the idea
that, relative to our own self, we can change the world simply by changing how
we think about it. This is an important
idea in many spiritual traditions, and it might be worth exploring
further. I suggest that there are four
levels on which this principle applies: surface culture, deep
culture, surface biology, and deep biology.
At each level, our ability to make this kind of change becomes more
difficult.
The poem is an example of surface culture. It is
not terribly difficult to mentally make this kind of change, but as I suggested
we can encounter significant resistance from our fellow humans if we do. Also in that post I
suggested that there is an analogy between the notion of weed and the notion of
sin in Christianity. Here, I’ll suggest
that in our culture the notion of sin is more deeply established than the
notion of weeds and that our ability to reinterpret that notion will similarly
be more difficult.
Moving from the re-interpretation of ideas
grounded in culture to ideas that are grounded in biology is a significant
increase in difficulty, but I will argue that the principle still holds. We may think that pain and pleasure are
simple biological givens, but this is not so.
As an example, I used to teach outdoor education, and sometimes we would do an exercise with kids were we would blindfold them and have them smell various
aspects of the world. Often, along the
way, we would take them to a “stinky” garbage can. In the blindfolded conditions, the kids did
not recoil from the smell the way that most of them would have had they known
it was a garbage can. Instead they
would explore the smell. We may think
that our response to such odors is purely biological, but there is actually a
combination of learned and natural response at play. After witnessing this, I played around with
this idea and found that I could re-interpret many things that I found mildly
painful as simply interesting sensations.
Just how deep people can take this principle is an
interesting question. In the various
ascetic traditions, there are many examples of people doing things that we
would find intensely painful. In
some cases this is due to people developing a very high pain tolerance, but in
the yogic traditions the explanation is usually given that the yogi has learned
to become totally detached from the idea of pain, and so is able to
re-interpret what would naturally be thought of as a painful sensation as
merely a strong, but neutral sensation.
The upshot of this principle is that we have more
control over our world than we normally think. This control can provide us a significant degree of
freedom from the negative conditions of life.
The Western alliance of science, technology and market economics has
fixated on external solutions to problems.
It has highlighted the so-called “objective” world and de-valued the subjective. In the
process it has ignored the degree to which the world for each person is that
person’s subjective interpretation of the world. That
degree is limited -- there is a range of laws and principles operating beyond
subjective interpretations. But the
degree that those laws and principles determine the quality of our life is also
limited. Too often we think that our quality
of life is a state to be achieved by changing our external conditions, and fail to recognize the degree that the quality of our life depends on how we choose to interpret those conditions.
(The above doesn't really says anything different from the old adage: "when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.")
(The above doesn't really says anything different from the old adage: "when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.")
