Category: psychology

What is the meaning of life?

(Originally published on Quora on March 16th, 2012)
I used to think that “What is the meaning of life?” is a misguided question, because it assumed the existence of a creator with an intention or a plan, which I never thought was warranted.
But I’ve come to realize that there’s a different way to think of meaning. I think when we ask “what is the meaning of life?” most of us really mean “How should I interpret life in the grand scheme of things? And what value should I assign it?” I think those are very good questions.As a confirmed Atheist, I nevertheless spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about life, its meaning, and how this meaning should guide us in our everyday lives. It’s almost a personal obsession of mine.

What follows is my best attempt at a universal “meaning”:

You are an intelligent being, and intelligent life is the latest, most awe inspiring stage in universal evolution. Its birth was the moment in which the universe has evolved the sufficient complexity  to be able to perceive, direct, and re-imagine itself, and this process is only beginning – through you.

From the first micro-second of its existence, the universe has been a vast though inanimate battleground between two universal mathematical trends: order and chaos, creation and destruction, syntropy and entropy.

Your life, and human life in general, represent the universe’s single best hope in the battle against randomness, entropy, and chaos; the single best reason to believe that creative forces, order, and harmony will prevail.

The way to fulfill this promise is to think and act like an intelligent being. To find a use for that marvelous brain of yours in the service of progress. To create things that are good and useful. To empower others to do the same. And to be happy, truly happy, because that’s the only way to make sure that you are not a force of entropy after all.

What are some big ideas western societies should learn from Buddhism?

(Originally published on Quora on June 28th, 2012)
I’m very new to Buddhist ideas, and have only read a couple of books, so take this as a layman’s description of what I found valuable in certain Buddhist texts.
I can’t tell yet if those are universal to all Buddhist traditions or if they only represent some traditions or teachers, or maybe just the books I’ve been reading. All I can say is that I found these ideas extremely beneficial:

  1. Dependent Origination – 
    Everything we see and experience around us, including ourselves, is not a singularity but an aggregation of elements, causes and conditions.
  2. Impermanence – 
    Everything that is subject to birth, is subject to death. Or in other words: the very fundamental causes and conditions that brought something into existence are the ones that will enable it in time to go out of existence.
  3. All Suffering Comes from Clinging – 
    All suffering comes from an attempt to battle the basic impermanence of experience and force it into a rigid permanence, which is impossible. We must not cling to specific outcomes, but do our best and allow change to unfold as it will.
  4. Three Personality Types – 
    Three broad personality types encapsulate our relationship to this impermanent world. The Grasping Personality is always reaching for something better than is possible at the moment. The Aversive Personality tends to see flaws and reject present experience. The Deluded Personality tends to be confused and indecisive.
  5. Small Self vs. Big Self – 
    Self can be identified as the “Small Self” which includes your particular personality traits, knowledge, desires, and everyday interests, or the “Big Self” which is that pure consciousness that can observe the particular emotions, interests, and experiences of the small self without identifying with them or repressing them.
  6. Everything is Empty of Self – 
    When looking at any particular object, precept, or experience, we find that it is not our self. Therefore, we should not identify too strongly with any particular object, precept, or experience. Just like everything around us, we are an aggregate, not a singularity.
  7. Self as a Process, Not a Thing – 
    Self is a process, not a thing. It changes and evolves. It includes elements at one time that it may not include at another time. It is not finished, and not static.
  8. Everyone Has a “Buddha Nature” – 
    The road to being a better, enlightened person is open to everyone. Everyone has the tools to become enlightened. One just need the right intention, focus, and effort.
  9. Compassion as Selfish, Not Selfless – 
    Unlike the West, that sees compassion as an altruistic, self-sacrificing act, Buddhists seem to think compassion starts with compassion for the self. If one has no compassion for themselves, they will not have compassion for others. If one approaches it from the right perspective, concern for the happiness of others promotes rather than prevents ones own happiness.
  10. The Power of Empathy – 
    Empathy for others as a great tool for self-fulfillment, and as a great way to overcome fear and resentment. Being able to see events from another person’s perspective is a liberating experience that allows you to deal with others better, and also to liberate yourself from your own, often narrow perspective on events.
  11. The Importance of Generosity – 
    Giving without expecting a return is seen basically an exercise in non-clinging. Unlike in the West, where the act of giving often gains value in direct relation to how painful it is, the stress in Buddhism seems to be on the giving being genuine, based on true friendliness, and never more than one can happily give. As such it’s seen as a tool for happiness, a way to train your mind to be generous, rather than as a form of self-sacrifice.
  12. Countering Emotions with Their Opposite – 
    Emotions tend not to co-exist with their utter opposite. In Buddhism this fact is often used as a tool for growth, because it means you can counter anger with gratitude, counter fear with love, etc.
  13. The Power of Concentration – 
    The act of calming and concentrating your mind helps provide greater insight when one observes complex internal states, such as complex emotions. Training your mind in concentration can have cascading effects throughout one’s life, can increase your power to notice and react to things appropriately in real time.
  14. Mind Cultivation and Training – 
    The idea that you can cultivate good personal qualities through simple practice, in the exact same way that you train your body to increase its fitness. This idea in itself seems rather obvious these days, but Buddhists through the centuries have actually developed these cognitive and behavioral training techniques, and many of them are quite brilliant!
  15. Change from the Inside-Out – 
    Buddhists seem to believe that changing behavior is not enough. That right intention and right understanding precedes right speech and action. Mindfulness training seems to put the stress of fully understanding your own thought patterns and habits without trying to force better behavior. Better behavior follows insight organically.

These are the main points I can see right now. Would love to hear about major points I have surely missed!

Stress and Coping: How do I get over the feeling of stress?

(Originally published on Quora on August 15th, 2013)
The essential antidote for stress is to be able to concentrate fully on what you are doing at any given moment, instead of worrying about what comes next. I will simply list the elements I believe are critical for this:

  • Don’t Hold It All In Your Head – get todos/projects off your head and onto some trusted system (read up on Getting Things Done or other productivity methodologies.)
  • Make Decisions – If there are decisions you’ve been avoiding making, make them now, or at least set a deadline for when you must make them.
  • Accept Your Limitations – Things that are beyond your power to change should not cause you stress. Making a clear distinction between what’s within your power to change and what’s beyond it can work wonders on stress.
  • Learn to Concentrate – Vipassana meditation as well as many other meditation techniques train you to focus your mind on the activity in front of you, rather than jumping around, worrying about the future or remembering the past.
  • Broaden Your Perspective – If a stressful situation becomes unbearable, I find it always helps to look at it from a broader perspective. Is it going to matter much in a year, five years, a decade? Is it possible for you to be happy even if the worst case scenario happens? What are the chances of the worst case scenario playing out? Are there things to be grateful for, to appreciate about this situation?

Hope this helps!

What can people do to cope during times of uncertainty?

(Originally published on Quora on May 9th, 2013)
This is a timely question for me, and a topic I’ve wrestled with quite a bit in the last couple of years. I think that dealing with uncertainty is primarily an issue of attitude. In Western society we are generally well equipped to rationally evaluate various courses of action with multiple risk factors. We can think about these things on a very high level and come up with a pretty good understanding of most situations.
Still, for many (and certainly for me) uncertainty is accompanied by a deep sense of suffering and frustration. A sense of struggle. Changing my attitude about uncertainty itself, and being more mindful of my feelings at any given moment had done wonders to my ability to deal with and tolerate uncertainty.Many of my ideas about the subject come from my experience with Insight or Vipassana Meditation, and Buddhist psychology in general. However, they do not require training in meditation or interest in Buddhism to apply.

Specifically, here are some attitudes/ideas that helped me tremendously in dealing with times of uncertainty:

  • Remembering that Life is Uncertain – 
    Times of uncertainty make us feel especially vulnerable, but it helps to remember that these times are not really different in kind from the rest of our lives. We all live with limited knowledge of the myriad causes and conditions that shape our futures. Accepting that the future is always, on a fundamantal level, invisible to us will help us feel less sorry for ourselves in the present predicament.
  • Accepting the Limits of Your Power – 
    Look at your particular situation very deeply. Analyze and understand the different causes and conditions, the different risk factors and odds involved. Then, ask yourself these simple questions: What’s within my power to change? What’s within my power to influence? What’s outside of my power to either change or influence? Focusing on the factors you can actually affect, and fully accepting that other elements are completely out of your hands, including often the ultimate outcomes of the situation – will help you stop fighting reality and begin to work with it.
  • Relaxing Control – 
    Even as you intellectually grasp that certain elements are outside of your control, your emotions may still cling to certain outcomes. If you look deeply inside, you’ll find it: almost like a clenched muscle holding on to a desired outcome, a painful, throbbing knot in your mind where peace could be. Through meditation or simple mindfulness it is possible to directly relax that tension. If you find that place of clenching and unclench it, the suffering could stop almost instantly.
  • Finding “You the Observer” – 
    A crucial piece of dealing with uncertainty is having the type of self-image that does not require certainty. It’s possible to become a bit less invested, especially in times of crisis, in the limited self (the one that’s concerned with job offers, relationships, your reputation, your financials), and to identify more strongly with the experiencing self: the “pure consciousness” self that is always experiencing, always curious and open. The “Observer” self will have plenty to observe, plenty to learn, plenty to experience in either scenario. Letting go of your limited self-image will leave you free to grow and change without artificial restrictions.
  • Being Grateful – 
    It’s very easy to be bogged down by self-pity, and focus on the negative. In almost all cases, though, a wider perspective will remind you that there’s much to be grateful for. Think of the great resources you do have, the people who are there for you, and all the knowledge and skills you do posses. This is not some hippy-dippy “positive thinking” exercise. By all means be as realistic as you can about the depth of the problem and the difficulty of the challenge. But then be equally realistic about the advantages you’ve had that others might not have.
  • Enjoying the Present Moment – 
    Once you’ved decided on a course of action, accepted what’s outside of your control, and found the positive in the situation, you can appreciate the present moment. Remember that the future scenarios you’re worried about or wishing for don’t exist yet. What is real is the present moment, which is often peaceful, beautiful, and most importantly: passing. If you don’t let yourself experience and enjoy what you have right now, it really doesn’t matter what happens in the future because you’re likely to not enjoy that either when it comes.

The principles described above are part of many spiritual and religious traditions. As an Atheist, it’s been a long struggle to find and accept them through the veil of myth and mysticism that usually surrounds them. I hope I managed to write clearly and cleanly enough so that the above come through as practicable principles as opposed to more spiritual nonsense!

How effective are yoga and meditation at healing old traumas?

(Originally published on Quora on October 21st, 2012)
I can only speak from personal experience with my own meditation practice, as I’m not involved in any type of research and have not looked at any statistics on the subject.
So here goes: After reading about Vipassana, or Insight Meditation in a post on Sam Harris’s blog (see here – http://www.samharris.org/blog/it…), I became curious and took an 8 week class at a local center.

The technique, though very challenging in practice, is very simple in principle. You stabilize and concentrate your mind by focusing only on your breath. Whenever your attention wanders, you proceed to look at the new object of attention – be it a sensation, an emotion, or a thought – with your full attention. You then name it, and  gently and without judgment return to focusing on the breath, where you try to remain most of the time. I was instructed to sit for 20, then 30, and eventually 45 minutes a day doing just this, though some further guidance was of course provided, and my questions answered.

Within a week, I was noticing patterns in my own thinking that had been there all along but which I had never noticed before. Within a couple of weeks, I could see some of the reasons for these patterns. By the third week I had vivid memories of past traumas, and could see very clearly the connections between those traumas and some of my unproductive behaviors.

I’ve had moments of personal revelation or “sudden clarity” throughout my adult life, long before meditation, and those had always helped me grow. But nothing had prepared me for the consistency and sheer breadth of the insights I’ve gotten from practicing Vipassana meditation. For a couple of months, it was like a reliable assembly line was producing insights day in and day out. As if those insights were waiting just under the surface and came gushing out as soon as I had payed stable, nonjudgmental attention to them.

Those insights, moreover, were of a different kind than any I’ve experience before. The trigger for most of my past insights was intellectual: I would be thinking about an idea and suddenly realize that I had been wrong. Or I would realize intellectually that I was acting irrationally in some instance, and would force myself to think it through. In meditation though, much of my insights felt more like undirected observations: I would observe my own thinking and noticed it was tinged with a certain emotion. I would look at that emotion and see it was actually three different emotions, all mashed up together, but in actuality arising because of different causes and conditions. I would look at each one in turn and see how it arose, and often time remember, for the first time in years, a traumatic event that gave rise to it. And by seeing the connection so clearly, I could start laying down new foundations and weakening the old ones.

As weeks went by I was aware that I was beginning to let go of many of these patterns, little by little, and that the unproductive behaviors were significantly reduced or stopped completely. I continue to practice and reap the benefits of meditation daily. I have not tried other forms of meditation, and cannot vouch for their effectiveness. I can’t even guarantee that Vipassana meditation would work for you. But I do believe that paying calm and nonjudgmental attention to the content of your mind once a day is a great first step in coming to terms with trauma.

 

Why do many people believe things based on faith rather than due to the Scientific Method?

(Originally published on Quora on December 29th, 2011)

I believe that the following reasons play a major role:

  1. Human beings have a psychological need for meaning. That meaning must be more than the simple injunction to “make the most of it.” People are looking for some way to look at life and feel that it matters in more than just a personal sense. They want to know what is a life well-lived, and what is the standard.
  2. Human beings have a need for everyday psychological guidance and practice. This goes beyond “curing mental disease”, which is the focus of most of today’s psychotherapy. People are looking for guidance in dealing with the normal difficulties of life. Especially the universal limitations that all human beings must deal with: limited control, limited time, uncertainty, etc. People are looking for tools for increasing happiness, satisfaction, perspective, and meaning in the face of the inherent difficulties of everyday life.
  3. Human beings need a systematic way of dealing with and accepting death.Even Atheists (such as myself) find it helpful to remember and “digest” the fact of their own mortality, and place it in a positive framework. Virtually every religion in the world revolved around a core concept that either denies death or explains it away in a way that help people accept it, at least as long as they believe in the model.
  4. Human beings have a psychological need for meaningful social ritual. By this I mean a way to share and celebrate life and its meaning with others. A structured way to share the journey with your loved ones and your community. A structured way for the community to provide emotional and moral support in times of crisis.

As an Atheist, I believe it is possible for a completely scientific, rational, and proven system to provide us with all of the above. However, it’s also important to note thatno such system exists today.

Until one is developed, people will always flock to systems that seem designed to answer those fundamental needs. They would rather ignore the light of reason when it means, to them, a meaningless and cold existence with no support network or the comfort of social rituals.