I recently attended a five-week practice group with
CIMC’s teacher Michael
Liebenson Grady entitled “Wisdom: From Reactivity to
Discernment”. One of our homework exercises was to spend a week
noting whenever we had a pleasant experience, and to explore the nature
of our reaction to it.
So on the way home from that session, I started taking mental notes.
I didn’t discern any particular clinging to pleasant experiences,
but I did notice the quantity of them, so I started counting: one, two,
three… By the end of the week I had noted over two thousand three
hundred pleasant experiences, which translates to one every minute or
two of waking time.
Now, granted, this was one of the first weeks in May, when everything
was just coming into bloom. The week also included cherished time spent
with my dharma friends and our expedition to see the Dalai Lama. But
interestingly, the rate of pleasant experiences was highest when I was
out on the bike, riding through the countryside, seeing a lot of
sights.
Most striking, though, was the sheer number of positive experiences,
especially in contrast with our homework the week before, which was to
note negative experiences, which had numbered no more than a couple
dozen.
That discrepancy really made me stop and reflect, and I’ve got
a few thoughts about it that I’d like to share.
When you’re young, you spend an awful lot of time and energy
focusing on improving the material quality of your life: getting a good
job, a good family, and a good home full of material wealth. I did that
once, and had some success at it. Below a certain point, there is a very
real enhancement to quality of life by improving one’s material
standing.
But there’s a limit. Contrary to the totemic human belief that
more is better, beyond a certain level, wealth and stuff gradually lose
their effectiveness in enhancing one’s happiness. At that point,
how one relates to the world becomes more important than material
desires.
I’ve long held the belief that, irrespective of circumstances,
people make their own happiness and sorrow. Some people’s minds
are just wired to see the good things in life, and they can see beauty
in even the most unlikely places; conversely, there are people whose
natural inclination is to overlook the good and see only the flaws and
problems in life.
I was fortunate: I started transitioning from the latter to the
former around the time I entered college, and I think I’ve made
pretty good progress. These days, no matter where I go, I find myself
surrounded with cool, interesting, and beautiful stuff: stuff worth not
just noting, but thoroughly enjoying and celebrating. In the process, my
perceived quality of life has increased dramatically, way out of
proportion with the material reality.
But I was still surprised at the overwhelming number of positive
experiences I was noting. Sure, I thought my life was good and I know I
treasure parts of it that others fail to appreciate, but I never dreamed
the balance was so radically lopsided. Sure, there are occasional,
inevitable problems, but on balance I really, really love my life and
the elements that comprise it, from the smallest to the largest.
I think the next step for me is to fully experience that imbalance
and somehow integrate it into my overall sense of well-being and
satisfaction. I still have a lot of behaviors, such as judgmentalism,
that are lingering residue from a time when I thought life was less
satisfying, less enjoyable. But if I am really that happy with my life,
I need to put more effort into internalizing it, because someone with
that strong a sense of satisfaction should project a very different
presence than the one I’ve retained from my youth due to
unexamined habit.
Granted, this wasn’t what the practice group was designed to
bring out, but I find that the growth of wisdom is seldom so linear a
process. It’s kind of like striking a vein of silver in the middle
of a gold mine: unexpected, but equally precious.
I noted one other implication when I examined my reaction to all
those pleasant experiences. According to Buddhist psychology, one would
expect there to be some sense of clinging to a pleasant experience, a
desire to preserve it or keep it from changing or fading away. While I
looked, I noticed very little of that clinging in myself. I attribute
that to the
sheer number of positive experiences, and the confidence it gives me to
let go of Experience X in full knowledge that there’ll be another
pleasant Experience Y coming along very soon.
It remains to be seen whether this constitutes a more advanced form
of clinging to pleasant experiences in general, as a class, rather than
as singular individual experiences. Clearly, more sitting is
required.
I’ll have another set of serendipitous revelations coming from
that group, as well, but I haven’t gotten them down into phosphor
yet.