Feelings, meetings with predators, parents and children, a lucky death

‘Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear’. (Marcus Aurelius: Meditations)

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening. (Montaigne)

‘The glorious thing about mountains is that they will endure no lies.’ (Heinrich Harrer)

The food retailer Lidl has been accused of pandering to its more illiberal customers by airbrushing out a cross on the top of a Greek monastery that features on the packaging of a range of Greek products that it sells. The outcry has been interesting. Here is a representative response: ‘As a Christian I feel really hurt, discriminated against, upset and disappointed’. What is interesting are the grounds for complaint: how it makes someone feel. And what I am not allowed to do here is question that person’s feelings of hurt and being discriminated against. If you can lay claim to these feelings this gives you automatically a position of authority that no mere argument can match.

There are any number of examples of this kind of thing. In Australia we have one of those hoo-hahs we get from time to time over statues of imperial bastards. The unfortunate inscription on the statue of the founder of Melbourne makes the fascinatingly insouciant claim that the land was ‘previously unoccupied’. So a second inscription was affixed in the nineties saying, ‘It is now clear that Melbourne’s site was inhabited long before by Aboriginal people.’ Fair enough – though it would be more honest to say ‘It is now clear that the aborigines displaced by British settlers were in fact fully human beings’. Anyway, more recently a third plaque has been added, apologizing to Aborigines for ‘the wrong beliefs of the past, and the personal upset caused.’ In place of telling the painful truth about what those ‘wrong beliefs’ were, we have the contemporary requirement of an apology for hurt feelings. I hope there’s room for another plaque in another twenty years.

Then there is ‘hate speech’. In this country expressing hatred is a criminal offence. Not only this, but the police determine whether or not what you say or write is motivated by hatred through the testimony not of the speaker, but of their audience. So there is huge pressure on all of us to avoid causing offence; to say nothing that might be interpreted by someone as offensive. There is however no pressure on anyone to tolerate views or the emotional outbursts of others that they don’t like. That is, there is no pressure on anyone to grow up. Quite the opposite: being offended or ‘outraged’ or hurt, shows that you are on the side of right against wrong.

I’m sure I don’t need to go into the contemporary student world of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘no-platforming’ and ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘triggers’. It represents the same primacy of feeling, the same apotheosis of the victim - of weakness in the sense of an inability to tolerate emotional discomfort - as the source of moral authority in any given situation (rather than this source being a clear sense of shared values). What confuses the issue is that this all appears to be part of an overall cultural trajectory towards honesty and tolerance that is very positive, when in fact it is the dark shadow of that movement.

Without going into the whys and implications of this extraordinary situation, all I would say is that the Buddhists of Myanmar appear to be engaged in violently ethnic-cleansing a small Muslim minority, the Rohingyas: I would propose that how the Buddhist majority feel about what they are doing is irrelevant; how the Rohingyas feel about being persecuted is also neither here nor there; and how I feel about the situation is likewise beside the point. The question is what is actually going on, and what are our values, whether as Buddhists or Britons (by the way, unlike the Buddhists, the Rohingyas fought for us against the Japanese in the war) and what are we prepared to do to uphold them?

The Buddhist mindful perspective is quite different from the alarming modern cultural cul de sac of taking direction from feelings. The work is to shift our attention or perspective from concern for my feelings - that is, my experience of this moment, this situation, whether difficult and painful, or comfortable and pleasant – to concern for how I respond to the presence of this feeling, this experience, this situation. We shift from being concerned with getting what we want, to being concerned with the mental state we bring to getting or not getting what we want. We pay attention to sensation and feeling in order to separate it out from the mind’s active aspect, that is, the attention itself and the quality of that attention. Full awareness of our experience includes an interrogation of the mental state we are bringing to it. What we don’t tend to realize is the degree to which this mental state is the most decisive factor in determining the quality of our experience. So we imagine our experience is a given; but in fact we are creating it in the way we take it in.

This central practice is no faddish hair-splitting exercise. It can save your life. A well-known example of life or death mindfulness is the way Thai forest monks would test their practice by walking along tiger trails; if they did meet a tiger the pressure of the situation would hopefully push them into a meditative state, particularly one generated by the practice of metta or kindness. If not, well, too bad - an extremely steep but rather short learning curve would follow.

A wildlife film-maker told me a story that illustrates vividly what is involved in this kind of encounter. She was in Namibia, and just returning to her vehicle when she felt something behind her. She turned and saw a large male leopard a few metres away, looking at her. This film-maker specialised in filming predators, so she knew enough not to react instinctively to feelings of terror, not to behave like prey. She did the opposite. She slowed down her heartbeat. That is, she consciously relaxed. And she looked straight at the leopard, not staring, but making a ‘soft connection’. By this time she had her back to her vehicle. The leopard came right up to her, leaned his weight against her for a moment, and went away. So this is mindfulness. It can be a matter of life or death.

My own existential threat does not have the same compelling immediacy. My coming death won’t be the result of a failure of mindfulness. But the threat to my well-being in terms of pain and discomfort and despair is visceral and testing enough. So can I drop my guard, my defensiveness in the face of the killing machine stalking me, and fully take it in with a ‘soft connection’? Well, not really, no. (Except for a while in meditation.) There are times I must confess when I weep with the seemingly endless, day after day pain and frustration. The physical ease that I enjoyed all my life along with almost everyone else, with the people I see every day eating and drinking in the restaurants and strolling the parks, is gone, probably for good. To be honest I’m not always very good at welcoming this small visceral connection I now have with the other side of ordinary human life, with the darkness all around us, with those who have been pulled into the darkness themselves, in all the myriad horrible ways it happens. I really don’t want this connection to the reality of things. But this experience I’ve been dished out is the ground of my work now. It’s my practice whether I like it or not.

You see, much as I may rail against people offering up their feelings as if they were some higher truth, the fact is that I can become so locked into my own feelings that I cannot attend to the truth of what my actual experience is. As long as we are so emotionally identified with our wanting, our craving – in my case for simple well-being – we miss what is really going on. Mindfulness is the practice of learning to attend to feeling with interest in the truth of our experience, including the craving for what we might want out of that experience.

I have emphasized how difficult this is in the rough turns and distractions of ordinary life, because I’m afraid a lot of cheap mindfulness instruction makes the practice - all that walking with open attentiveness through autumn leaves and breathing in the present moment - seem so lovely and easy. It is in meditation that the mind is honed in mindfulness.  

Paying attention to bodily sensations and feeling in this way actually changes how we experience ourselves and the world. One is not necessarily consciously aware of this, but we start to see things differently, more truly. We are more aligned with how things really are. This is inevitably relaxing, because it takes a great unconscious effort to resist what is really going on. This change of our view of things tends to be unconscious, basically because it goes deeper than the conceptualising mind.

When you pay attention to sensations and feeling as sensation and feeling – i.e. separately from your interpretative, judgmental functions - you cease to be able to pin them down. I mean, what is a sensation like? Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay entitled ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Well, obviously, it isn’t like anything. This is the point. You are getting an experience of yourself that is ungraspable, essentially unknowable. It cannot be an object of attention at all. The more this becomes your experience of yourself, the more you should become aware of others as similarly inhabiting an essentially incommunicable and therefore private experience.

The really appalling truth of my experience is that my situation is not that bad. I’ve just been looking at a video of an eight year old girl who’s had terminal cancer since she was four (Claudia has been doing some psychotherapeutic work with her sisters). It shows the girl in her school with her sisters dancing to ‘Thank you for the music…’ She seems happy, and it ends with her kissing the camera. She died the following day. That lightness, that cheerfulness, that self-forgetfulness… is not easy for me at my age, but it gives me something to aim for.

My son Antoine has been visiting regularly, every day when he’s in London, and at present he’s flying over from Amsterdam every week. Very filial. One thing he said is that he feels lucky to have had two parents who both loved him. I think though it is more that he had parents who always had affection and respect for one another. Or to be absolutely honest I think he has been lucky to have a mother – Dominique - of such generosity, in every sense of the word. It reminds me of when my mother was dying, and she wanted to apologise to me for something in my own upbringing. Parenting was not the big deal that it is nowadays, more, shall we say, relaxed (and there were five of us) and they missed something – the fact I was deaf in one ear and so did not catch a lot of what was going on. I was taken to see a neurologist, and I remember my mother saying to him, ‘You see doctor, he’s so vague… I rather wonder in fact if my religious bent comes from that sense I had as a child of the world around me as being an unfathomable mystery. Anyway, I said to my mother, ‘I always felt loved’, which was true. And by far the most important thing.

I have been trying to reassure Antoine that as you get older, the very gradual decay of your powers makes death a much less alien prospect. Much less of a complete denial of your experience of life. When you’re young it’s as if it doesn’t compute. As you get older it is not so much of an enemy. I have to say that it seems sometimes now almost like a friend or lover who’s going to whisk me away from the abject daily grind of dying. Well, I say this now, but who knows how it’ll be when the time actually comes?

Another thing Antoine said is that we can have no idea how lucky we are (Sophocles says the same thing – ‘Call no man happy till he has crossed the bourn of death’). It may be that by dying a tad early I am dodging some much more painful event. Maybe. I think the point is that our life is always utterly uncertain. For all our savings and insurance policies and health check-ups we can never know what comes next, for good or ill. I think this is quite a good corrective to the usual lament of someone dying ‘early’, that they are going to ‘miss’ the future – grandchildren, Brexit, the later series of their favourite box set, Wimbledon… Nobody anticipates a nasty accident, a vicious divorce, a terminal illness of someone close to us, a suicide, some major nuclear disaster close to home… My mother, for example, was fortunate in dying a year or so before one of her daughters, Janet, lost her husband in a road accident. 

Antoine and I have been watching the new season’s football, even though I may well not be there for the end of the season. In some ways I’m surprised I remain interested in all this – and indeed in the absurd Brexit negotiations and all the other nonsense one allows to drift in and out of the mind. Ridiculous really to continue to be entranced by the whole gaudy show. In all sorts of ways I shall be leaving the field of play well before the final whistle. I would like to be able to say that I have lost interest in meaningless rubbish. Sadly, habits are not dropped so easily. Well, maybe they get a bit loosened.