Each of us is the hero or villain in a story of our own making. That's admittedly a simplistic summary of a psychological principle, but it isn't far from the truth.
I'm certainly aware of this in regard to myself. I have a way of looking upon my 75 years of living that, by and large, puts me in a positive light.
Which isn't surprising, since I prefer praise to blame, so why would I choose to view the events of my life in a fashion that draws attention to my weaknesses instead of my strengths? Of course, some people do this for their own psychological reasons.
Philosopher Thomas Metzinger addresses this subject in one of the longer chapters in his book, The Elephant and the Blind. It's titled "Emptiness and Fullness."
Emptiness, by the way, is defined by Metzinger in its usual sense of voidness, not in the Buddhist sense of things lacking inherent existence. He makes this clear early on in the chapter. So emptiness can mean an openness to knowing in the context of pure awareness, the subject of his book.
Many of the meditators who completed Metzinger's survey about their meditative experiences claimed that they were able to overcome past patterns of knowing and thinking, arriving at a state of "epistemic openness" or emptiness.
In this chapter, Metzinger talks at length about an obstacle to this, narrative self-deception. He notes that our search for meaning is a foundation for that sort of self-deception. For we imbue events with a flavor that doesn't exist in them as they are in themselves.
As we have seen, the first of these deep needs is to develop a successful and sustainable strategy of meaning-making -- to find a more permanent solution to the constant struggle to make sense of life events. This need is shared not only by meditators, but by all those who are not existentially indifferent.
...One simple conceptual point to make at the outset is that words and sentences have meaning, but events don't. Events just happen. Events as such, as well as whole chains of events connecting birth and death, are intrinsically meaningless -- but not in the emotionally negative sense that we may attribute to the idea of life as a whole being meaningless.
So we humans have to supply the meaning to events in our life. The basic way we do this is through telling stories to ourselves.
Human beings are storytellers, and they stabilize the fabric of their long-term self-model by creating a permanent inner monologue. They identify themselves with Harding's "little one" (chapter 8), the entity constantly chattering on about all its extremely interesting and important perceptions and thoughts and emotions to keep the long-term self alive. There is no better way to understand this fact, to observe its continuous fight for survival under the microscope of mindfulness, than to participate in a silent meditation retreat.
For many people, their spiritual or religious path becomes an important part of their life story.
A story encourages us to hallucinate cause-and-effect relationships between events in our narrative ("Nothing ever happens by chance!") and detect patterns in the way they affected us ("I have always been interested in this!").
Most of all, a life story offers a chance to insert a single, overarching theme that holds everything together, a normative metacontent that allows us to morally evaluate ourselves and others with the goal of enhancing and sustaining our sense of self-worth.
The romanticism of "being on a path" is a good example of this. Now we can judge, negotiate, plan for the future, and thereby continuously stabilize the long-term self model. There is a way of life, a general theme. The story has a beginning and a possible end; it has characters, episodes, a setting -- and like a dream that has become fully lucid, it even has a plot that can apparently be controlled.
Metzinger says that for spiritual seekers, all this gives rise to a sense of having found something.
Many of us try to find something: something that allows us to live in an insane world without going insane ourselves. Something that creates coherence.
...My first point is that, for many committed practitioners, the core motivation allowing them to sustain a regular practice over many years may consist to a considerable degree in the fact that they have found something, that they have adopted a certain belief system (or joined a group or spiritual movement, identified with a certain lineage or teacher, etc.), and not solely in the intrinsic force of the pure-awareness experience itself. This belief system, the sense of community, the acceptance of an authority, and the ongoing project of making-meaning may be among the major sources of motivation.
All that is fine. It helps us to feel grounded in a world that often seems to lack any firm foundation. But there are some downsides, including narrative self-deception.
In meditation, as elsewhere in life, what we experience isn't some mythical "things as they actually are," but things as we conceive them to be in the context of the story that our mind fashions about the life we've lived, are living, and will live in the future.
The autobiographical self-model is not a thing, but rather a process. It is also not a little man in the head. This process is mostly subpersonal: to a large extent, it is not something that you do, but an automatic process taking place under the hood, in your unconscious brain. The process constantly tries to minimize surprise and to keep a certain layer in your self-model as coherent as possible (namely, the layer that portrays your life as a whole).
...The model expands into time, creating a past and a future. Whenever this layer is conscious, it can function as what we have termed the "unit of identification." You may think that you simply are your life story, which springs from the ongoing search for thematic stability. But you may also begin to hallucinate an observer, an active narrator, or a stable protagonist within the story itself -- an entity that reflects on and monitors the whole process.
...The good news is that there is probably no better tool than the practice of meditation itself to help us really understand the mechanisms of self-deception that continuously express themselves as the subtle workings of one's own mind.
...Classical insight meditation, for example, consists in nothing other than observing the actual process of narrative self-deception at work: Every single thought arising is an attempt to generate a new self-model, to become "temporally thick," to escape the wholeness of the present moment.
...Life just happens -- and meditation practice is a perfect way to become aware of that fact.
Metzinger says in the previous essay: "A logical error consisting in falsely concluding that just because something feels like the very essence of consciousness, it is also a reliable indicator of actually being in touch with consciousness per see. As such, verbal reports referring to having experienced an "essence" or "pure consciousness in and of itself" do not imply or license any claims as to the actual existence of such an essence because all such claims need an independent epistemic justification."
And in this essay, Metzinger argues that it's possible to arrive at "epistemic emptiness," i.e., a mental state where, ultimately, one knows the true perceptions from the false.
What is the epistemic justification for believing that one is living utterly free of self-will, in emptiness, where "life just happens" uncolored by the machinations of egoic thinking?
OK, I agree most definitely that insight meditation reveals that our mental processes are influenced by an infinite stream of stories and assumptions. Moreover, this insight can be comprehensively useful for not only our mental health but also our relationship with the world. A stellar example would be the story of Dipa Ma, who reversed the tragedy of her early life through Buddhist meditation. "Everything is a story" is one of her foremost realizations.
But the idea that life has no intrinsic meaning, in my view, is not absolutely compatible with Buddhist teachings. That's because along with anatta (no independent self), Interconnectedness is also a key concept in Buddhism. Pratītyasamutpāda, which emphasizes the interdependent nature of all things, suggests that the meaning or purpose of life is not isolated but interconnected with the broader web of existence.
It would then follow that each of us is not merely a little independent unit who should get busy deconstructing his psyche. The broader Buddhist perspective is that we're not alone; our life is the life of all sentient beings in the universe, and our way should be addressed to that reality.
That's an intuition shared by the religionists who have their gods, their gurus, their sangats and sevas. The intuition that life does have at least one story that's not an illusion: that no man is an island. That's a story that no amount of 10-day retreats will ever reveal to be false.
Posted by: sant64 | July 14, 2024 at 03:46 PM