Out of a living silence

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.