Fixed views and doctors.

‘I am seeking the truth, not laying it down’. (Montaigne: On Prayer)

Views. There’s a lot of them about. A lot of them not very nice views, rather iffy views in fact. However, my guess is that in the case of Trump, his views are offensive rather than policy positions. They seem so far to be held provisionally.

This makes him, picturesquely, a bit more of a Buddhist than those who hold more agreeable views than his with a sense of righteous certainty. For us in the west, perhaps as a legacy of the priority of doctrinal orthodoxy in Christianity, your ideological position is who you are. However, as a Buddhist it’s not like that.

Buddhist views are less important than the way you hold ‘em. The important thing is not to get stuck in a view, attached to it, or identify with it, not to build a fixed self out of it, or use your view as a weapon. Not to take it absolutely literally. The Buddha’s teaching sets you off; it’s not meant to wrap things up for you.

Over the past few months I have lost the use of half my face. The reason for this is that my GP took a certain view of my symptoms and did not want to have second thoughts. My GP is old school, an elderly, reassuring guy, authoritative, good bloke. He said the lump I showed him in my face was bone. I also presented numbness on the same side of the face. As the weeks went by and half my face became more paralysed and numb, he said, ‘Bell’s Palsy; a slightly unusual Bell’s Palsy, but it’ll be fine.’

He eventually referred me to a neurologist, whom he advised to reassure me about the ‘lump’ on my cheek. When Claudia asked the neurologist - this was in July - if the symptoms could signal cancer of the parotid, the neurologist said that yes, they could. But he just carried on with his own specialism, using little hammers and pins to check how my nerves were doing, and asking ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ And then he ordered a brain scan. Nothing wrong there.

If you have a fixed viewpoint, you don’t see what you aren’t looking for. In September, I was telling my GP my lump felt a bit tender; he said it was a distraction. Bell’s Palsy. Finally, at the start of October it got a bit painful and Claudia dragged me to A&E at UCH on a Saturday night.

There, reception said to me, ‘Can it wait till you can see your GP on Monday?’ I said to her, ‘NHS treatment is world class, and free, and I am extremely grateful for this. But it is not actually ‘free’ if the diagnosis is too late. It can cost you everything you have.’ She waved me through. A head and neck surgeon is always there on a Saturday night to deal with people who have been punched in the face, and so I finally got the attention I needed. Thank you the flying fists of British pub culture. And the very newly qualified specialist. For a diagnosis give me the uncertainty of the beginner’s mind any time. A month later the tumours were removed.

The narrowly locked focus that is our modern iphone-induced mental (as well as physical) posture loses touch with the open shared space in which conflicting views are tolerated. Even music is now experienced not as filling a physical space that includes you in it, but as occupying a mental space, your own ‘headspace’, between your earphones. In the public sphere too we no longer want to debate. We find it difficult to acknowledge that there might be something bigger and more important than our own position, our own experience.

Again, though, you pay a price. At the Democratic convention of 2009 they had an Evangelical pastor speaker (God is big in the US) and as you might expect the guy had views on LBGT issues that not everyone liked. At the 2013 Democratic convention a similar pastor with similar views was forced to withdraw. So between 2009 and 2013 the capacity of these people at the Democratic convention to value debate over one particular set of views disappeared.

Parliamentary democracy is based on the principle that the debating chamber is more important for arriving at the most useful conclusion than any one view or judgment that may be expressed within it. Similarly, mindfulness is a valuing of awareness or attention itself, over any one view or thought or feeling that arises and passes away within it. It is not really about inviting unhelpful or ‘judgmental’ thoughts to leave. It is about holding them in a larger, open space of awareness.

This is sometimes, I’ve found, difficult, for people to ‘get their head around’ - because you can’t think your way into that open space. We tend to identify with our thoughts, emotions and feelings. That is, they emerge as being all about what is going on in the world around us, rather than what is going on in us. We polarize with our experience: ‘I like this, I don’t like that’. But as soon as you have been able to identify a thought as a thought, a view as a view, an emotion as an emotion, or a feeling as just that, a feeling, you have, if only momentarily, opened up that space. You are no longer possessed by those thoughts or feelings. You have begun to open up a path to some kind of freedom.

Me? Well, it now looks like cancer. There are feelings of relief, mixed with intimations of mortality. Hopes and fears banging about. I try to notice, to make conscious, to make room for in my awareness, my sense of other things going on, especially breathing, but also the sky, the whole world of particular things, not the sky in general, but this cloud, its unrepeatable shape and colour; and likewise, this person here, the unrepeatable character and tone of their world in its brief collision with mine. Not everyone really wants to follow me into this grimly significant place where I suddenly find myself, and I likewise can find myself sometimes uninterested in really taking in their world. But there is room in awareness for all these things, including the sense of not wanting to take an interest in things. Awareness is spacious by its nature.