Comfortably numb? A Buddhist perspective

(Photo: Nikita Kachanovsky on Unsplash)

The following contemplation is a patchwork quilt of metaphorical jewels that I hope you find as illuminating for prompting inner inquiry as I do.

Just the other day I was scanning through highlights of books I have read when I realised how many of the passages, in one way or another, address the same subject. Rather like going through notebooks from Dharma talks you may have kept over the years, it can be quite revealing – alarming! - how many times you find you have written down almost exactly the same thing, several years apart. What is going on here, you may ask yourself, that requires resolution?

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The first quote I’d like to share is from an author I am embarrassed to admit I discovered only recently. Rabindranath Tagore was a great Indian writer (1861-1941) known as the “Bard of Bengal,” who in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is one of his poems:

The tame bird was in a cage,

the free bird was in the forest,

They met when the time came,

it was a decree of fate.

The free bird cries, "O my love, let us fly to wood."

The cage bird whispers, "Come hither, let us both live in the cage."

Says the free bird, "Among bars, where is there room to spread one's wings?"

"Alas," cries the cage bird, "I should not know where to sit perched in the sky."

The idea of a caged bird having no interest in being free of its confines strikes me with a particular force. In this case it’s not fear that keeps the bird in its cage but rather a failure of imagination. It simply can’t conceive of a different way of being, even knowing that there are plenty of free birds, and even with the support of its lover.

I sometimes wonder how much like that caged bird I am, hopping and twittering from perch to perch of an extremely constrained reality. How open am I, really, to the prospect of incomprehensibly greater freedom? Would I be willing to embrace liberty if the door of my cage was unfastened and I could fly unrestricted? Am I ready to leave my familiar and cosy rut behind?

In particular, when death comes, will I be ready to embrace the oceanic bliss of the clear light of death, or will I not know where to sit perched in the sky? Will force of habit propel me to seek a separate, stand-alone ‘me,’ thereby forcing me into another lifetime’s confinement?

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Andrew Harvey, whose A journey in Ladakh I previously reviewed here, offers a different image:

A man is starving in one dark room, while in another just across the corridor from him there is enough food for many lives, for eternity.  But he has to walk to that room, and before he can walk to it he has to believe that it is there. No one else can believe for him. No one can even bring the food from that room to him.  …. We are free to become bodhisattvas or consign ourselves to life after life in pain.  Often when men say they are helpless, trapped, imperfect, they are really saying “I do not want to endure my own perfection.  I do not want to bear my own reality. Imperfect is more comforting, more human than perfection.”

Here, the imprisonment is more subtle. In this case, no bars are keeping the man from what he needs to thrive, rather constraints of the mental variety. He experiences existential deprivation quite needlessly – but he needs to believe that he can flourish before he can. I love the line: “No one else can believe for him.” This points to the anguish our more enlightened guides must feel when they see us making poor choices, just as we despair when we see others doing things that we know will bring them pain. But they don’t believe what we tell them - and we can’t believe for them.

The freedom Andrew Harvey refers to here is the metaphysical kind explained in traditional Buddhist teachings – freedom from an endless cycle of birth and rebirth in samsara. But even without such a world view, there is something arresting about the idea that many of us don’t feel free to believe that we are capable of perfection, however we may conceive of that.

Perhaps as children it was drilled into us that we are inherently sinful, and early conditioning can be hard to throw off. Maybe we feel it’s the height of arrogance to believe ourselves as capable of enlightenment. Imperfect is more comforting, more human.

Only last week, an insightful teacher was explaining to an online class I attended that, far from being an act of humility to feel we are incapable of perfection, this attitude is one of enormous arrogance.

For we are choosing to believe our own ego, who tells us that we have a self-nature that can never be enlightened, and rejecting what the Buddha and other enlightened beings reveal, which is that we have no inherent nature. What we are, instead, is boundless consciousness whose primordial quality is one of pristine radiance - whatever clouds may currently be obscuring this perception.

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Perhaps there may have been a time, long ago, when we intuited the truth. But perhaps, as Pink Floyd describe in their poignant lyrics, we have long-since grown out of that sublime vision:

When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb

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Recently a psychologist friend of mine, who has researched the use of meditation in therapy, told me that people’s motivation to meditate is at its highest when we suffer. We are hard-wired to avoid pain. Once we move from distressed to neutral, however, our motivation falls off. Even when we have direct experience of how powerfully a meditation practice can change our experience of reality, our enthusiasm to stick with the practice dwindles when we get to comfortably numb.

I sometimes feel that comfortably numb is the greatest threat to the spiritual development of quite a few of us. If we have the good fortune to enjoy a life free from major struggles and pain, if we practice contentment and have some reliable and regular sources of dopamine hits, then what incentive is there to transcend this way of being? And how should we if we want to?

The famous American psychologist, Martin Seligman, has spent his career showing us how to abandon ‘learned helplessness’ and take up the principles of positive psychology.

From a Buddhist perspective, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo’s latest book, The Heroic Heart, offers some helpful suggestions. A commentary on The Thirty-Seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva by Thogmo Sangpo, based on original teachings by the famous Atisha Dipankara, one particular verse opens the door:

In my native land waves of attachment to friends and kin surge;

Hatred for enemies rages like fire,

The darkness of stupidity, not caring what to adopt or avoid, thickens –

To abandon my native land is the practice of a bodhisattva.

‘My native land,’ in this case, could be a synonym for comfortably numb. Thogmo Sangpo isn’t suggesting that spiritually purposeful people should migrate to a new country. If only it were that simple! As the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami puts it, ‘No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.’

The native land in this case is our habitual patterns of behaviour.  Jetsunma explained during a teaching, “So it is helpful sometimes to just step back and look at people who are very familiar to us as though we had never seen them before. To just drop all our preconceptions, all our ideas, all our opinions and just see them, without any kind of judgement at all. Listen to them. Hear them as if for the first time. See them as if for the first time, afresh. We get locked into our habitual reactions and judgements, with usually too much attachment or with antipathy. Even people who love each other are often locked into a hostile way of reacting that they don’t examine. They spar with each other all the time, and they don’t hear each other. It is like one of those soap operas that are endlessly being rerun. Why not change the channel?”

Stepping back and tuning into ourselves speak, especially our tone of voice, is another suggestion. In our native land we are on auto-pilot. Do we really know how we sound to others? As for our mind, do our habitual responses serve us well, or might there be more skilful ones. “To change physical habits is a challenge, but to change mental and emotional habits is even more of a challenge,” says Jetsunma. But just as neuroplasticity reveals our capacity to create new neural pathways, so too our subjective experience of reality is one we can transform.

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“Then gradually the grass and flowers start pushing up through the old pathway that seemed so permanent, and after some time, we don’t see a pathway anymore. The new way has become the pathway. But this only comes from repeated effort. It doesn’t happen overnight. It just doesn’t. Anyone who promises that it is all effortless is just deceiving you, because these habits are deep inside our psyche, like thick, deep roots.  It takes a lot of conscious awareness and effort and determination to transform. But the good news is we can all change.”

We don’t have to remain as caged birds who can’t conceive of a better way. As spiritually hungry people who can’t bring themselves to believe in the delicious feast right across the corridor. Or as jaded grown-ups who have long-since lost the capacity for wonder. Remaining comfortably numb is a choice. A different choice is to abandon our native land and explore reality afresh.

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