Want to be cool, calm, and collected?

Interesting or alarming factoid someone just sent me: “The average American spends nearly two and a half hours a day “dreamscrolling” – looking at dream purchases or things they’d like to own one day. In a year, that amounts to about 873 hours or nearly 36 days spent scrolling on the phone or computer. Gen Zers spend the most time dreamscrolling at just over three hours per day, while Boomers spend the least, clocking in around an hour. Half of respondents say they dreamscroll while on the job, and of those, 1 in 5 admit to spending between three and four hours a day multitasking while at work.”

All this seems to me like turbocharged looking for happiness in “wrong objects”, as Geshe-la described it in Portugal in 2013. That is, in objects that never can and never will cause real happiness. How can we tell? Because the more we have of them, the unhappier we become. Real happiness comes only from real causes of happiness, and these all involve some sort of inner peace. How can we tell? Because the more we have of that, the happier we become.

We can easily waste inordinate amounts of time these days on basically meaningless pursuits. I wasn’t feeling it on this plane, so instead of doing something constructive like meditating or writing an article or even chatting to my Irish neighbor, I just distracted myself with movies and a nap. I think I’m going to co-opt the term “dreamscrolling” for all the times I mindlessly buy into these dreamlike hallucinations rather than contemplate my escape from them via wisdom and compassion.

I could blame my lack of creativity on the stomach flu I’m getting over, but the truth is that it is just too easy these days to waste cosmically precious time scrolling and swiping and watching. And I know from my own experience that dreamscrolling doesn’t even feel good while it’s happening (especially in large quantities), let alone afterwards; that the passivity and inanity just leaves you feeling increasingly sprangled and dissatisfied. It is samsara through and through. As Shantideva asks:

Why do I forsake the joy of holy Dharma,
Which is a boundless source of happiness,
Just to seek pleasure in distractions and meaningless pursuits
That are only causes of suffering?

Fair question.

London dreaming

To break out of this temporary inertia, I’ve just been thinking about the unselfish, energetic people around my parents, where I’ve just been. David the handyman came around to paint their entire kitchen this morning (not that my mom will ever see the kitchen again). As he’s been doing jobs for my dad around the flat for 12 or 15 years, and inevitably undercharges for all of them, I thought I better suggest, “This is a big job! Please don’t undercharge this time!” And he demurred, “Well, the thing is, I’m not really a handyman. (Me: “You’re not?!”) I don’t do this for the money. I do it as service. My real paid job is as an electrician tester. Your dad called me years ago when I just happened to be doing some handyman work, and, well, it has just continued.”

Whaaattttt??!!

Last night I tried to give 26-year-old Frederica from Ghana a parting gift of some money because she looks after not just my mom, which is her NHS care job, but my dad, too – regularly pulling double duty to make sure he has everything he needs. Both Fred and Saint Patricia seem to come from another, far purer planet. (My mother has been like this so long that Patricia herself had to retire and now needs her own carers. But she still visits.)  

Fred is smart as a whip but has refreshingly never heard of anything or anyone, including any politician or celebrity in any country – yesterday it was Paddington Bear. She laughs a lot and just wants to make people happy “for my whole life”. Anyway she point blank refused to take my gift, and not for the first time – I always have to put it in her pocket. “No, no! I do it because Michael is like my grandfather, not for any reward, I just want to help him.”

Again, whaaaatttt????

Venerable Geshe-la reiterated not long before he died:

Compassion and wisdom, these two bring great benefit to our world.

In the parade of kindness and service that I’ve witnessed in London these past few years, there’s plenty to feel happy about. And this rejoicing is energizing – enough so to get me back to finishing off these articles …

Time out

 To stop chasing “wrong objects”, we need to be able to access our own happiness from within so that we are not even bothered about such pointless pursuits. This takes a bit of time and effort at first, but is very do-able. And we want to get to the point where that happiness is on tap!

There are different methods for taking a time out from the distractions to access a peaceful, sane, and healing reality, but I find the absorption of cessation (aka turning the mind to wood or stone) particularly effective because you just shut it down. You just stop those thoughts. You don’t engage in in negotiation with them, you just basically shut up. In a gentle way, of course, relaxed – just “Nope, thoughts, sorry”. They keep ringing the doorbell but we don’t answer. Instead we allow our mind to settle into an experience of peace, that naturally blissful cessation of our chunky thinking.

It is so important to give our mind the time and space to simply settle, as opposed to forcing it to become peaceful. Have you tried that, repressing an unpeaceful state of mind, pushing it down?! If so you’ll know it doesn’t work, it just creates more tension. However, if we simply disengage, the mind will naturally settle – in other words, peace is always there. We let go and allow the mind to calm down, and there it is! – a peaceful heart, our pure essential nature, our limitless potential, always available to us.

When Venerable Geshe-la taught this meditation at the Fall Festival 2006 in New York, he said that when we get good at it, eventually we can bring about a complete temporary cessation of all of our delusions, including our self-grasping. Temporary cessations are not enough, but they do indicate that the permanent cessation of all delusions is possible.

With this in mind we want to allow ourselves to enjoy even a bit of peace, to begin with, even a slight cessation of our ordinary blah blah mind. We can then recognize this as our potential for more cessations, for a greater pacification, and eventually for the permanent cessation of all delusions. In this way we are tuning into our Buddha nature, our truth.

Now we can allow ourselves to identify with that and think, “This is me. This is the person who is meeting the Dharma of wisdom and compassion, who has everything they need – not the person who is a bad meditator, too distracted for words, and wasting their precious human life.” This way we’ll actually make progress. Geshe-la says these things very clearly in this following passage from The New Eight Steps to Happiness:

Although we need to be acutely aware of our faults, we must never allow ourself to become overwhelmed or discouraged by them. We may have a lot of anger in our mind, but this does not mean that we are an inherently angry person. No matter how many delusions we may have or how strong they are, they are not an essential part of our mind. They are defilements that temporarily pollute our mind but do not sully its pure, essential nature. They are like mud that dirties water but never becomes an intrinsic part of it. Just as mud can always be removed to reveal pure, clear water, so delusions can be removed to reveal the natural purity and clarity of our mind.

This is what we’re connecting with. Therefore, when you experience even just a little bit of a cessation, please don’t be perfectionist and think, “My cessation isn’t good enough.” Instead, think, “What is interesting is that I am experiencing a bit less delusion, yaaayyy!, and this indicates the natural purity and clarity of my mind.” As Geshe-la then says:

While acknowledging that we have delusions, we should not identify with them, thinking, “I am a selfish, worthless person” or “I am an angry person”. Instead, we should identify with our pure potential, and develop the wisdom and courage to overcome our delusions.

As explained here, if we identify with the gold nugget of our potential we can get rid of the dirt around it – whereas if we identify with the dirt, we’re stuck.

The importance of community

I was asked in a Podcast the other day, how does an individual get out from under all of this distraction such that they actually get around to meditating in any consistent way? I have been increasingly of the opinion that nobody can do it on their own, especially not to begin with. We need the examples and encouragement of others. To bring this full circle to the first article about our attention being fracked, and the educators’ valiant attempts to solve this problem:

The curriculum we have developed takes on a challenge that so many of us face: how to create, beyond the confines of our personalized digital universes, something resembling a shared world.

I was speaking to a mother about anxiety and loneliness in high school kids and how it can be caused by having less and less in common to talk about. This is not just because people are spending less time in each other’s physical company, but also because everyone’s attention is directed to totally different entertainment – no two people are watching the same things anymore. Based on some exercises those teachers have been doing:

In no time it becomes clear that attention — giving it and getting it — constitutes social life.

This will sound quaint, but I remember when the number of TV channels in Britain went up from 3 to 4, and people lamented that families would no longer watch TV together. (And/or that it would lead to endless arguments about what to watch.) There may be a middle way between collective and personal entertainment, but this almost endless fracturing of entertainment by everyone having multiple devices and channels all of their ownsome has gone beyond anything I think any of us could have imagined back then. As the article says:

We need a new kind of resistance, equal to the little satanic mills that live in our pockets.

As I read this next bit, I was thinking about how our 1300 meditation centers around the world provide these dedicated spaces for helping people increase their attention spans enormously, and to provide community by paying attention to each other rather than our devices.

What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.

And it is not just democracy that needs this, but our communities. In our Centers we create a common world where everyone is interested in the same things. Extra bonus: it just so happens that those things are love, wisdom, inner peace, helping people, and so on.

I will give the final words to those educators:

This is going to require attention to attention, and dedicated spaces to learn (or relearn) the powers of this precious faculty. Spaces where we can give our focus to objects and language and other people, and thereby fashion ourselves in relation to a common world.

For your closest meditation center, click here. 

Comments welcome!