Attitude

I was reading about some thing called ‘Lojong’ in Tibetan Buddhism (which involves refining and purifying one’s intent and way of thinking through a set of proverbs) when I came across this short story about a teacher called Atisha, the originator of this concept. This happened when Atisha was planning to move to Tibet to teach there; the story is reproduced below from Wikipedia:

 A story is told of Atisha that when he heard that the inhabitants of Tibet were very pleasant and easy to get along with, instead of being delighted, he was concerned that he would not have enough negative emotion to work with in his Lojong practice. So he brought along his ill-tempered Bengali servant-boy, who would criticize him incessantly and was awful to spend time with. Tibetan teachers then like to joke that when Atisha arrived in Tibet, he realized that there was no need after all.

 Though the story brought out an instant smile, the depth was touching. How many people really think of the possibility of negativity around for his/own self development?

 This reminded me of an article I read long ago. This was written by a person called Siddique (a film director from our state) about a person called Father Abel, the founder of an institution called Cochin Kalabhavan  (this is group of performing artists with lots of emphasis on humor). Siddique recalled this incident about Father Abel, when the latter passed away .

 When Siddique was a small boy, he along with his friends used to play football in a ground adjacent to the church. Father Abel used to walk  to the church from his residence and back, along the road next to the ground. The children used to make fun of him, call him names and tease him, whenever he walked past. But he would never respond and would walk away walk away calmly as if nothing happened. Many years later, Siddique joined Cochin  Kalabhavan as  an artist and during a conversation asked Father Abel why he refused to react when the children made fun of him. Father replied with a smile: “ When we were in Rome for the priesthood training, people are employed to stand on roadside to insult us. This was done to increase patience and tolerance. When you boys were giving me that training free of cost, why should I get angry at all?”

In the corporate world, I have heard the ‘whether the glass is half empty or  half full’ stuff more than a dozen times, and whenever people use that to talk of attitude, you could tell how empty the statements were. But to practice it to the  extend where everything is simply a means to help you on the path, needs something more profound.

May be that’s why god need to exist…

Which brain listens? Right or left?

Some of the literature on right and left brain suggest that while the left brain processes things serially, the right processes things as a whole.

Looked interesting and also convincing, but for quiet sometime I could not really figure out what it really meant.

But then I had this interesting experience that simply but in a profound way showed me this. As is my usual practice, I was listening to a talk as I was driving home yesterday. Though it was the second time I was listening to it, I was listening intendly. Suddenly there came a moment of laughter, where the speaker explained a point with a joke. As I burst out laughing, suddenly I became aware of the surroundings; and where I was at that point. But what was also interesting was that I remembered exactly the location where I listened to the same joke earlier. I rather remembered it like a picture.

I was amused and when I shared this incident with a friend, he too agreed to have had similar experiences. I think this is what happened: When I was listening to the talk, it was my left brain who was ‘listening’ (predominantly) making sense of what is heard in an incremental way. But when the moment the joke came, suddenly the right brain kicked in and the whole thing including the surroundings is perceived as one shot.

I think the reason why the shift to right brain was so visible, is that a joke is not serially processed, mostly you laugh at a whole joke. So you wait till a joke is complete without logically processing it and when it is done, the whole thing is just processed in one shot as a whole.

And I think this is the essence of mindfulness…

Past and the future…

Sometime back I wrote about our anticipated future being actually our negated past. Here is something interesting that I came across which in a way supports this point.

I was watching a UKtv video series on brain and mind. One of them had this interesting experiment. There was gymnast attempting to perform what is called Gienger saltos; which involves leaving the high bar, performing a back summersault and a half twist before re-caching the bar again.

It begins by the coach slowly taking her through the steps to get her mind accumsted to the sequence of movements. Then she goes on to attempt it. But she fails repeatedly. She couldn’t re-catch the bar at the end of the sequence.

She had to take a different approach now and she does something interesting. She sits down with eyes closed and visualises the the whole saltos in her mind (that she is performing it successfully), slowly, as detailed as possible. She does it over and over again. After this she goes on to perform the saltos and gets it right in the very first attempt.

What happened here? As she was visualizing the whole sequence in her mind, she was creating a pattern in the brain as if the event had already happened. So when she did this at last, she actually was doing something that she was already accustomed to –at least that’s what her brain thought.

I think this is the crux behind visioning, where in you convert a future event to a past event in the mind, so that brain can perform it automatically.

I came across another very interesting study that clinically proves that it is the same part of your brain that is activated both while you remember something from the past and while thinking about the future. (See this blog)

So I guess the future does not really exist, except in the mind; that too as past. But if we can master the art of converting the future to the ‘past’ (before it happens in reality) may be it is a great tool for changing our lives.

Of course the next question will be: does past exist except in the mind?

The beauty of contradictions

Last week, I was in a session discussing about TRIZ (For those who do not know, TRIZ is an inventiveproblem solving methodology which has 40 principles. This is an easy way to solve a problem using these principles : phrase your problem in to a contradiction (there is a parameter that’s improving and there is another one that is suffering) and then using a matrix, you can identify the correct principles to be applied)

That left me thinking a bit about contradictions. Have you wondered what happens in the mind when there is a contradiction? Why is contradiction an important aspect in problem solving?

I think this is because holding two contradictory thoughts in the mind simultaneously, makes the mind bit confused, and there is a moment of uncertainly and stillness. This stillness is where mind is receptive to new ideas, looking beyond the patterns.

Now when I think of it, all the religions used this brilliantly to convey their teachings. The “Bhagawat Geetha“, one of the most popular books in Hinduism begins with illustrating a contradiction. It starts with Krishna telling Arjuna : You are mourning for those not worthy of sorrow; yet speaking like one knowledgeable. The learnt neither laments for the dead or the living. (Chapter 2, verse 11 – This is where the great Shankara starts his interpretation of Geetha). Geetha is conveyed in to the stillness created by this contradiction.

Incidentally Geetha also ends with a contradiction. Towards the end, after the message is conveyed, Krishna contradicts whatever he said in the verse : Relinquishing all the ideas of righteousness, surrender un to Me exclusively, I will deliver you from all sinful reactions, do not despair.(Chapter 18, Verse 66)

Many sayings of Jesus has this contradiction in them. This is a good example: “Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.”

This is what happens here: there is an immediate compulsive tendency for the mind to respond and this is based on patterns or conditioning. But when there is a contradiction, mind waits for a moment, not sure which pattern to execute. And this is a moment of awareness where you are open to newer possibilities.

I think for the contradictions to really become effective and bring about a new dimension to problems, it needs to be felt by the heart and not the head.

How the mind associates thoughts….

Post my experience described in the previous post (A thought formed..), I successfully did ‘catch’ some of my thought trains and traced them back to the origin. I was basically curious to find out how a thought originates and  forms the first association (or connection) with the next one; which is the beginning of the thought train.

This wasn’t easy. I could do this only on handful of occasions. I wasn’t aware most of the other time and even when I was, it was not possible to trace the thought back to the origin.

But I found something interesting from the experience, on analyzing the first association. When an association is made between a new thought with one already in the memory (a past incident), the comparison is done rather ‘textually’ (like a string matching, sentence matching etc..) and not “visually”. But when the connection is done with something in the future (an imagination that is stored in the memory) it is ‘visual’.

                Another way to state this is to say that most of our past experiences are stored in the memory in ‘text’ form (when I say, text, don’t get carried away by text as we use in day to day world. I couldn’t find another appropriate word for it) and our imagination (anything that has not yet happened) is stored ‘visually’ (pictures static or moving).

                 You must have seen people who can associate two or more seemingly non-related things. (Btw, you must have also have done this yourself some times). Typically people who are found of story telling, have this ability. Given any incident, they will tell you a story, that is connected to the incident in a strange but uniquely strong way. I have been trying to find out how some people are able to do this, while others not. I think the answer lies here in what I described above. These are the people who can do a ‘visual’ association.               

                I think this is what is happening. When you have an experience (visual, auditory, emotion, conversation ….), the mind (the logical mind) has a compulsive need to interpret it and store in the form of language. This actually connects the ‘experience’ with you (the self or the ego or the identity whatever you call it). As you go along, you forget (or lose) the real experience and retain just the ‘interpretation’. Next time a similar experience occurs, it is first ‘interpreted’ and the interpretation is then compared with already stored interpretations in the memory to form the connection.

                Here is an example to understand this: You see a beautiful flower. The experience is “the beauty”, but say the interpretation is “Oh! I don’t have this in my garden”. Some days later, you see a good painting. The experience actually is the same: “the beauty”, but you are probably not able to relate this experience to seeing the flower because the connection is not happening at the level of experience. Now assume you see another beautiful flower, and the interpretation immediately is “Another one I want to have in my garden” and may be you connect the experience to the previous one.

                Since most of the events in life (perhaps with the exception of the time we were children) are interpreted and stored in the memory and this makes the associations to the past events slow and memory dependent. On the other hand, the future events (our imagination) has not yet been interpreted and they are stored in visual form.

                So if we need to form the right associations (with the past events of our life, what we have seen, heard, read, did…) we need to rather store the experience and not the interpretation. Then I think we will be able to do visual associations.When a new experience comes, immediately the association is made and this is effortless and fast.

                 This I believe is the crux of Mindfulness or awareness. When we are aware , what gets stored to memory first is the experience; then the mind kicks in, to do the interpretating job and also stores the interpretation to the memory. When a new experience comes and you are aware, the experience is compared to prior experiences first and only if there is no association found, the interpretations are compared.

                You can experience this yourself, when you are intensely aware in a situation, you form many associations to your child hood events (probably the only time, we didn’t much interpret things, but rather experienced them).

                The two problems that cause this are the ‘language’ and ‘thinking’. We have a compulsive need to interpret, analyze, judge, categorize and label everything around us and connect them to ‘us’ to form our sense of identity.