Behaving Skinner-style
When I took a psychology course at Beloit College in 1965, the prevailing psychological dogma was Behaviorism, the brainchild of B.F. Skinner. About the only thing I can recall about this psychological theory was that it postulated that thoughts and feelings are not caused by the Unconscious but by external stimuli. Everything psychological was to be explained as a response to an external stimulus. That is no doubt an oversimplification of the theory, but oversimplifications are the only things that at my age I can recall.
I recall reading an article in which Skinner was quoted as saying something along the lines of his being puzzled by a mood he had fallen into. He said he was in his favorite room of his comfortable house, listening to his favorite music on an excellent sound system, digesting a meal of his favorite food. All the stimuli were present for a responsive feeling of contentment. And yet Skinner felt unhappy. His unhappiness was intensified by the uncomfortable realization that the theory that had made him famous would predict that he was happy. I read that article around fifty years ago, so I may have some of the details wrong, but the gist was that he was feeling unhappy despite being surrounded by stimuli that should have triggered happiness.
I thought of that article one morning a while back as I sat with my dogs at an outside table at my favorite coffee shop. It was a beautiful cloudless day, pleasantly warm but not yet hot. The dogs were wagging their tails. I had a delicious gluten-free doughnut and a hot chocolate on the table before me. All the conditions were present for me to feel full of joy, just as I almost always have felt in just those conditions. And yet I was in a state of mental turmoil, seemingly incapable of feeling any pleasure at all. But why?
I never thought much of Skinner’s theories. It amazed me that smart people from such bastions of intellectual excellence as University of Chicago took him seriously and that psychology departments across the entire country taught Behaviorism as the gospel truth about the human mind, and for that matter, the minds of dogs, rhinoceroses, chipmunks, and earthworms.
When my mother was going through a bad decade, she retained the services of a cognitive therapist. His course of treatment was based on the notion that happiness and unhappiness are the consequences of the propositions we accede to. Rehearsing negative thoughts makes one unhappy, while cultivating positive thoughts makes one happy. The treatment plan consisted of identifying one’s negative thoughts and replacing them with more positive translations. So, for example, instead of thinking “Trump is an incorrigible troglodyte who irritates the hell out of me,” one trains oneself to think “Trump has a different vision than mine of what is best for people, and I welcome the difference in our opinions, because variety is the spice of life.”
Many Buddhist meditation practices are based on a set of presuppositions very similar to those of cognitive therapy. So many a Buddhist is taught by her meditation teachers that her experiences of the world are a product of what she habitually thinks is true. Unhappy? Change your thoughts. What could be simpler than that?
As I see it, the seductive theories of both cognitive therapy and much of Buddhism is based on two obviously flawed presuppositions. The first is that it is possible to know which of the many propositions we believe generate contentment and which generate discontent. The second is that it is easy, or at least possible, to discard our habitual thought patterns. Suppose, for example, that one has somehow identified that the thought that one disapproves of someone who is unavoidable is the cause of one’s having the blues. Says the cognitive therapist, or the Buddhist meditation teacher: “Now just stop thinking that you are in annoyed by someone who is unavoidable. Think instead that everything is perfect just as it is and that there is a very good reason that circumstances are such that you and the other person have been thrown together on the same planet at the same time. Welcome the annoying other as a valuable life coach. And presto, after discarding the negative and endorsing the positive, you’ll feel better right away.”
One does not have to be diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder to have experienced thoughts that enter the stream of consciousness uninvited and that remain long after it has been made clear that they are unwelcome. Unwelcome thoughts just show up. And thoughts that one would welcome refuse to show up at all. One finds that one feels antipathy towards someone, because antipathy just shows up. No matter how much one wishes one could easily tolerate an annoying person, tolerance does not appear on demand. Even efforts to cultivate it often fail. The mind is forever mysterious, wild, and intractable, no matter how much Behaviorists, Cognitive Therapists, and Buddhists imagine it to be otherwise.
The long reach of roots
“More than any other group in America, Yankees conceive of government as being run by and for themselves. Everyone is supposed to participate, and there is no greater outrage than to manipulate the political process for private gain. Yankee idealism never died.”1
The most prototypically American of the nations was one of the last to be founded. From its inception in the 1680s, the Midlands was a tolerant, multicultural, multilingual civilization populated by families of modest means—many of them religious—who desired mostly that their government and leaders leave them in peace. Over the past three centuries, Midland culture has pushed westward from its hearth in and around Philadelphia, jumped over the Appalachians, and spread across a vast swath of the American heartland, but it has retained these essential qualities.2
When I was still a small child, far too young to understand the significance of what I was hearing, my father told me that he, and therefore I, was descended from three passengers on The Mayflower and one passenger from another shipload of Pilgrims called The Anne. My paternal grandfather was a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, who were therefore my 9th great grandparents, and my paternal grandmother was a descendant of William Bradford and Alice Carpenter, my 10th great grandparents.
When I was an adolescent and young adult, I did not see much significance in having ancestors who had landed in North America on November 21, 1620. After all, as many as 2048 people were my 9th great grandparents, and 4096 my 10th great grandparents,3 so why focus attention on those four people? Mathematically speaking, no more than 0.048828125% of my genetic makeup comes from John and Priscilla, and only 0.0244140625% from William and Alice. From a biological perspective, I figured that I have inherited almost nothing from any one ancestor from the 17th century. Despite all that, I must confess that when I stood in Pieterskerk in Leiden, Zuid-Holland and remembered that William Bradford had worshiped in that very church four hundred years earlier, I was surprised by a feeling of connection to and gratitude for Bradford unlike any I had ever felt before. I realized I would not have been standing in that church had he not be standing there four centuries earlier. It brought tears to my eyes and rendered me speechless.
Feelings like those that arose in Pieterskerk (and in several other places in Leiden where the English Puritan refugees had lived and worked) are fleeting. Once they wore off, I was once again for the most part indifferent to my personal ancestry. Indifference, however, like every other mental attitude, is liable to disappear when conditions change. A condition that changed in my case came about through reading American Nations,the first book in Colin Woodard’s trilogy about American history and how characteristics in the American society of today were shaped by cultural tendencies found in the various peoples who have made North America their home.
When my father retired, he devoted much time and energy during the following decades to doing genealogical research, and not long before he died, he gave me all the notes he had made and photographs he had collected. When I read American Nations, I studied those genealogical notes with renewed interest. It turns out that the majority of the ancestors of my paternal grandfather lived their entire lives New England and were Congregationalists or Universalists. I know from reading books written about my great grandfather and great-great grandfather that their core values and outlook on life was remarkably similar to the cultural values that Woodard describes as characteristic of Yankeedom. I began to realize that although I have never lived in New England, many of my own core values—and also many of my regrettable snobbish prejudices (against, for example, Appalachians, Deep Southerners, evangelical Christians, and Nashville musicians)—are not much different from my Yankee ancestors.
My father’s genealogical research revealed to me that alongside the ancestors from what Woodard calls Yankeedom, many of my paternal grandmother’s ancestors, and nearly all of my maternal grandmother’s ancestors, were Germans who settled in Ohio, Indiana, and eastern Kansas, all part of what Woodard calls the Midlands. On reading what Woodard says of that “nation” within North America, I recognize that no small part of my temperament (a “live and let live” attitude, and a celebration of multiculturalism and multilingualism) reflects Midland cultural stereotypes.
I am probably not alone in having assumed when I was young that most people in North America had the same values I grew up having. I knew that most of my father’s ancestors were New Englanders (Yankees) and that most of my mother’s ancestors were Midwesterners (Midlanders) who had settled in Kansas. I was aware that my own mentality was shaped by both of my parents and their extended families, but when I was a child I assumed that everyone in North America, and indeed everyone in the world, thought and felt about things pretty much as they did, and therefore pretty much as I did. It gradually became apparent that that assumption was unwarranted, and that a significant percentage of the people on this continent, perhaps the majority, have convictions that are diametrically opposed to my own, and that they feel as uncomfortable having me in their homeland as I am having them in mine.
Reflecting on how Woodard’s book has influenced my current thinking, I see that the indifference I used to have about my ancestry was due to an overemphasis on biology and genetics and an underemphasis on the lasting influence of that nebulosity we call culture. I have come to see, for example, that although I may have become a Buddhist by choice in my adult life, my Buddhism has an unmistakable Yankee/Midlander flavor to it and is undoubtedly much more a Boston Unitarian Buddhism than it is a South Asian Brahmanical Buddhism, or an East Asian Confucian-Daoist Buddhism. Even when I sit in meditation, I suspect that there are traces of Bradford’s Puritanism and the low-church anabaptist Protestantism of those Midlander ancestors manifesting themselves in what I fancy is a wordless and thoughtless silence.
Pinched back
Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?—William Saroyan (31 August 1908 – 18 May 1981) in a statement to the Associated Press, five days before his death.
My uncle Alden Hayes, when he was about the age I am now, once commented to me that every time he gets the news that one of his friends or relatives has died, his life feels a little bit pinched back. Whether it’s a smile or a chuckle that used to brighten one’s day, or a source of insight or advice that used to provide guideposts, or a sympathetic ear that used to listen without judgment, its lingering absence diminishes the quality of the lives of those who survive the deceased. Unlike Saroyan’s tongue-in-cheek proclamation, I have never believed, or even hoped, that an exception to mortality would be made in my case, but many times I have been saddened that an exception was not made in the case of a loved one. My preference would be that all my friends and relatives procrastinate about dying at least until I am no longer here to mourn their demise.
As is usually the case, and tragic when it is not, I outlived my parents. As it happened, both of my parents outlived their siblings, so by the time they had both passed away, I had no more elders in the family whose wisdom and memories of their elders I could rely on. As years have gone by, the last of the close friends of my parents have all died. Not a day goes by that I do not have a question I would like to ask one or more of the people who were adults when I was a child. It vexes me these questions will never be answered. Not even google can help me out. Not having any living elders to talk to and look up to has taken a big pinch out of my life.
This past year I have learned of the deaths of several friends whom I knew when we were all young and either confident or anxious about the lives we had ahead of us. I kept in touch with a couple of these friends from the time I met them until they left me behind. We shared information, opinions, laughter, and the whole gamut of feelings that attend early adulthood, middle age, and senescence. Losing them has also pinched back a big piece.
When no one else is around, I find myself saying things out loud to my parents, and my deceased friends and cousins. It’s not that I think they can hear me—I don’t have that kind of belief about what happens after death—but it’s that I occasionally have something to say and can find no one else to say it to. For as long as I can remember I have had thoughts and feelings that I felt comfortable sharing only with a specific audience, and when that audience has left the arena, the only option left is to deliver an unheard soliloquy. Or write a blog post.
It is not only the deaths of human beings that pinch back one’s life. During the past few years my wife and I have experienced the end of life of a dog who was with us for seventeen years, and two cats who were with us only a few years less than that. Losing a family pet is a heartbreak unlike any other, for their love is, or at least seems to us to be, unconditional. I have never suspected, for example, that my dog would withhold her affection if for some reason I neglected to give her a treat. Therefore, I rarely neglect to give her a treat, and if I don’t predecease her, I will sorely miss that little ritual and all the other happy moments we have had together.
For decades I have practiced what the religious traditions of India call mindfulness of death (maraṇānusmṛti). This practice, as I have learned it, focuses primarily on coming to terms with the inevitability of one’s own death, and with the uncertainty of when and how that event will take place. What the practice does not entail, at least as I have done it, is coming to terms with the inevitability of staying alive longer than some of the people and animals that I have held most dear.
Equanimity
Equanimity is characterized as promoting the aspect of neutrality towards beings. Its function is to see equality in beings. It is manifested as the quieting of resentment and approval.[1]
1968, Winter, Canada
In March of 1967 I left the United States and became a resident of Canada. My reason for making the move was to avoid military service during the war in Vietnam, a war that I saw as pointlessly destructive. During my first year in Canada I was cultivating anger and resentment toward the country of my birth. The winter months of early 1968 were especially difficult. I was living alone in a small apartment in the basement of a modest house in Lethbridge, Alberta, a town in which I had few acquaintances and even fewer friends—one friend to be exact. I did a lot of writing that winter on a green Hermes typewriter. I wrote a novel, a one-act play, a few short stories, and some poetry. Writing was an emotional outlet, and it gave me something to do while I was smoking unfiltered Player cigarettes, but what I wrote was unreadable. Even I didn’t like reading what I had written. It was too angry, too didactic, too preachy, too dogmatic even for my unrefined tastes. Who wants to read the bellicose raving of a bitter and inexperienced twenty-two-year-old draft-dodger?
Fortunately for me, there was a decent bookstore in Lethbridge, and when I wasn’t banging out substandard literature on my Hermes, I went to the bookstore to purchase novels by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. On one of those visits to the bookstore, I happened to see a thin volume called Buddhist Meditation, published in 1956. Reading Conze’s Buddhism: Its Essence and Development in the previous year had piqued my interest in Buddhism. So I bought Buddhist Meditation, read it, and even began to try some of the contemplative exercises described in it. One set of exercises in particular that caught my attention was the four brahma-vihāras, often known in English as abiding with the divine or the divine abidings. That set of exercises consists in cultivating loving kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā), which are antidotes to respectively hatred, cruelty, envy, and resentment. This post is about the fourth of those abidings: equanimity.
I was amazed to learn that there were actually tools available for reducing the painful mental states of anger and resentment, that loving kindness and equanimity are skills that one can develop by putting those tools to regular use.
Brahma-vihāra: abiding with the divine
In traditional accounts it is said that the Buddha once came upon a mendicant whose religious practice was done for the purpose of seeing the god Brahmā face to face. The Buddha asked the mendicant how his devotional practice was working for him. Had he seen Brahmā face to face? The mendicant said he had not yet succeeded. On being questioned further, the mendicant admitted that he had never known anyone who had succeeded in seeing Brahmā face to face. The Buddha then asked what qualities a devotee expected to find in Brahmā. The mendicant replied that he expected Brahmā to have unconditional love toward all beings, to be actively responsive to those experiencing hardships, to be full of joy when beings have good fortune, and to pass no negative judgment on beings. The Buddha then said that he could not help the mendicant see Brahmā face to face, but he could teach him how to have unconditional love (mettā), compassionate responsiveness (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā). Having those qualities would be tantamount to abiding with or even in Brahmā (brahmavihāra).
Many centuries after the Buddha lived and taught, the Theravādin monk Buddhaghose wrote a comprehensive manual of Buddhist practice called Visuddhimaggo, which has been translated into English under the titles The Path of Purification and the Path of Purity. The first section of that manual is dedicated to the development of good habits (sīla), the second section to mental concentration (samādhi), and the third to cultivating wisdom (paññā). In the second section a wide range of contemplative exercises are outlined in detail, one of them being the set of four exercises known collectively as abiding with the divine (brahma-vihāra). Buddhaghosa’s instructions on contemplative exercises were in fact the basis of much of Conze’s Buddhist Meditation.
What is equanimity, and how does it relate to the other divine abidings?
The quotation at the beginning of this blog post is Buddhaghosa’s concise description of uppekkhā.
Equanimity (upekkhā) has the defining characteristic (lakkhaṇa) of generating (pavatti) the mode (ākāra) of impartiality (majjhatta) toward sentient beings (sattesu); it has the essential property (rasa) of seeing (dassana) the similarity (samabhāva) in sentient beings; its manifestation (paccupaṭṭhānā) is the quelling (vūpasama) of aversion (paṭigha) and favoritism (anumaya).
The flagship of the divine abidings is the cultivation of friendship or loving kindness (mettā-bhāvanā). That exercise consists in learning to regard all beings as one regards oneself by acknowledging that all beings desire for themselves happiness and well-being. The other three divine abidings are particular expressions of friendship. Compassion is acting in response to a friend’s misfortune, that is, doing whatever one can to help reverse the misfortune. Sympathetic joy is the delight one feels when a friend experiences good fortune. Equanimity consists in accepting all one’s friends as they are rather than resisting them or being annoyed by them. It also consists in not playing favorites among one’s friends but rather loving them all equally. Buddhaghosa says that equanimity (or even-mindedness as Pe Maung Tin translated upekkhā) is the most refined expression of friendship
What are the obvious opposites of and the subtle obstacles to equanimity?
Buddhaghosa uses the expression “far enemy” to characterize a mentality that is obviously the opposite of the mode of friendship under consideration. For example, hatred, envy, and cruelty are the respective far enemies of loving kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy. He uses the term “near enemy” to characterize a mentality close enough that an unwise person might mistake it for the mode of friendship that one is aiming for. Lust is the near enemy of loving kindness, since both lust and loving kindness are based on seeing the desirable qualities in another. Grief at not having one’s own personal aims fulfilled is the near enemy of compassion, since both such grief and compassion are occasioned by recognizing a misfortune. Worldly joy based on attachment to one’s own good fortune is the near enemy of sympathetic joy, since it shares with sympathetic joy an appreciation of prosperity.
As for equanimity, its near enemy is indifference, or simply being oblivious of another person’s conditions and thus not caring at all for another sentient being. What indifference and equanimity have in common is an absence of condemnation of another’s shortcomings. Equanimity involves ignoring another’s faults, while indifference involves being ignorant of them.
Equanimity’s far enemy is resentment or disapproval of others due to their perceived shortcomings. True equanimity consists in being aware of another’s qualities without passing negative judgment of the person but rather seeing that personal qualities are conditioned, often by conditions beyond a person’s control.
Why equanimity?
It seems to me that blaming others has been on the ascendency in the past decade, as have shaming others for their real or imagined flaws, passing negative moral judgment on others for their perceived imperfections, and assuming the worst of those whose words and deeds are deemed unacceptable. The sort of equanimity described by Buddhaghosa may not entirely eradicate those trends—I would be the first to admit that those tendencies have not been eradicated it myself—but the cultivation of equanimity is likely to have the effect of reducing those tendencies in oneself.
I have a feeling that in some quarters equanimity may be perceived as a weakness or as a kind of permissiveness that accelerates moral degeneracy. I would ask those who feel that way to ask themselves what problems, real or imagined, have ever been solved by resenting, blaming, shaming, and accusing others. Those who are struggling in various ways are more likely to ocercome their obstacles by being shown kindness and a helping hand than by being condemned or shunned or villified.
There is much more to say on this topic, but rather than saying more I have more important work to do. I have a mentality that could use more cultivation of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
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Sattesu majjhattākārappavatti-lakkhaṇā upekkhā, sattesu
samabhāvadassanarasā; paṭighānumayavūpasamapaccupaṭṭhānā… Visuddhimaggo, Pali Text Society editon, p. 318. The translation is that of Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, The Path of Purification, p.344. An alternative translation is offered by Pe Maung Tin (The Path of Purity, p. 366): “Even-mindedness has the characteristic of evolving the mode of centrality as regards beings; its function is seeing the equality of beings; its manifestation is suppressing aversion and sycophancy.” I provide yet another translation in what follows. ↩
A call for secular spirituality
What does it mean to be secular?
The word “secular” derives from the calsssical Latin saeculum, which means the period of one human generation. The adjectival form of the word, saecularis, means pertaining to a generation, especially to the current generation. In medieval Latin the word saecularis came to refer to those concerns of the current era, which meant those concerns of life in this world, as opposed to the heavenly realm or the afterlife in general. During the time of the European Enlightenment, there was in some circles a celebration of political secularism, that is, government not dominated by the religious establishment. When the United States of America was being formed, several of the most influential founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and others strongly influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, favored a form of government that was free of the influence of religious dogmas of all kinds. Government was to be guided by moral principles, so long as that morality was secular and humanistic in nature. Their thinking was reflected in The First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Congress is prohibited by that amendment from making any religion the established religion of the United States, and it is also prohibited from outlawing any religion or prohibiting people from practicing the religion of their choice. The United States, in other words, was meant to be a secular nation. There is, however, more to secularism than that. It is to those further dimensions of secularism that we now turn.
The generations now living and those to come
The need for secularism in the original sense of a focus on concerns facing our times has never been more urgent. The human race is collectively undermining the ability of its planet to sustain not only human life but the life of countless other species that live on the land and in rivers, ponds, lakes, lagoons, and oceans. This is a time in which human beings, the species doing the most to degrade biological habitats, must take stock of the consequences of habits they have cultivated during the past few centuries. Many, if not most, of those habits must be changed dramatically, and many must be abandoned altogether. Knowing which of those habits must be changed or abandoned requires the guidance of unbiased evidence-based thinking. Many of the traditional religions around the world are of little use in coming to terms with what must be done; some traditonal religions are actually obstacles to the kind of thinking that is required to solve the problems the human race has created for itself and for other species of plant and animal life. In recent human history there has never been a time in which there was a greater urgency to be secular. Being secular in that sense may be aided by having a poetic spirit.
What does it mean to be spiritual?
As with the word “secular,” it may be instructive to look at how the word was used in classical languages. The Latin word spiritus is derived from the verb spirare (to breathe, to blow). Spiritus, therefore, means breath. Spiritus was the word the Latin-speaking world used to translate the Greek πνευμα, which also means breath, or the vital principle that dwells within the soul (ψυχή, anima) and therefore distinguishes animate from inanimate beings. In the works of some of the Stoics, πνευμα (pneuma) was seen as the organizing principle of both the human ψυχή (psyché) and of the entire cosmos. It is in the latter sense that I like to use the word “spirit”; it is that which indwells and organizes everything in the universe and therefore that which unites the human being with all other beings, both animate and inanimate. It is that which Quakers call that of God in everyone (and I would add in everything), or what Hindus call ātman, or what Buddhists call Buddha-nature.[1]
Secular spirituality
The call to be secular in the sense of tending to the most urgent concerns of the present and future generations can of course be answered without any reference to being spiritual. One can study physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering and apply that knowledge to living sustainably on our planet. There are plenty of people who do that, and we all benefit from their commitment. What is gained by thinking in terms of spiritual secularism or secular spirituality is, for those who need it, a sense of personal engagement based on the realization that what is good for other living beings (and also for such inanimate beings as marshlands, rivers, prairies, and other ecosystems) is also ultimately good for oneself.[2] Caring for the well-being of the planet is a way of caring for one’s one physical health, one’s psychological health, and one’s character. Conversely, caring for one’s one physical health, one’s psychological health, and one’s character—in other words, living spiritually—entails caring for other human beings, for all animals, for all plants, and for the soil, the landbound waterways, and the oceans.
No one can tell another exactly how to be spiritually secular, but the more people learn for themselves how to be spiritually secular, the better off we, and those who have yet to come into this world after us, will be.
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I am not sure that there actually exists any single thing that indwells and organizes everything in the universe, but I do find it helpful to think and act as if there is such a thing. In other words, I think of the words “spirit” and “spiritual” not as metaphysical terms but as invitations to put one’s poetic imagination to good use. ↩
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There is a saying in Buddhism that everything that is parārtha (good for others) is also svārtha (good for oneself), and everything that is svārtha is also parārtha. The good news is that one never has to make a choice between serving otrhers and serving oneself, since the two services amount to the same thing. This idea is by no means unique to Buddhism. ↩
Out of a living silence 