Month: June 2018

The Four Divine Abidings

The Brahmaviharas, or Four Divine Abidings, circumscribe the four attitudes of mind that are the highest level response to one’s experience and to other beings, human or animal. They are metta, translated as loving kindness; karuna, compassion; mudita, sympathetic joy (sometimes translated as appreciative joy); and upekkha, equanimity. These qualities of mind can be cultivated through practice in meditation, until they become the framework for one’s interior life.

The most familiar to western Buddhists is metta, an attitude of unconditional love toward every living thing. There are phrases we can repeat to ourselves in meditation for individuals or all beings: may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be healthy, may you be safe and protected, may you live with ease and with joy. The exercise is most effective when concentration is deep, but we need not be perfectionists about it; repeating the phrases throughout the day, whenever we happen to think of them, is also well worthwhile.

The far enemy of metta is hatred, while the near enemy is attachment. When we first attempt to do metta, we unfortunately realize that we can’t say with sincerity that we wish good things for every living being. An immediate example is certain kinds of harmful creatures, like wasps, mosquitoes, or poisonous snakes. There are even harmless insects and reptiles that bear enough of a resemblance to harmful ones that we feel an immediate response of disgust when thinking of them. How are we supposed to wish good things to a bug?

More troubling are people towards whom we have complicated feelings, or even uncomplicated hatred. That is why it is recommended that we undertake metta practice in stages. There are four specific types of recipients: ourselves, benefactors or friends, neutral persons, and adversaries. Many Westerners have even more trouble expressing love for themselves than for adversaries, feeling they don’t deserve it, or that in loving themselves they are in danger of becoming narcissistic. A good beginning might be a benefactor, or even a neutral person, someone one sees from time to time but with whom one doesn’t have a close relationship.

As we begin working with metta, we encounter attachment as well as ill-will, which is why saying metta for intimate partners or family members is as complicated as for adversaries. We want our partners or children to be happy, successful, healthy, and strong because when the people we love are thriving, we are thriving, whereas when we have a depressed spouse or a sick child, we ourselves are naturally wounded as well. While such responses are understandable, they ultimately do not lead to peace of mind, and can even get in the way of our ability to care for the very persons whose lives are most important us. Ask any adolescent what they most want from a parent and the answer is likely to be, “space.”

Karuna, or compassion, is the response to the suffering of others that opens us to intimacy without the burnout we are likely to feel when we become identified with it. The far enemy of karuna is cruelty, while its near enemy is pity. Pity, feeling sorry for or commiserating with someone, turns the other’s story into our own, making it all about how awful we feel for them, or conversely it can set us apart from the other, causing us to see ourselves as immune to the other’s affliction. Cruelty is rejoicing in another’s suffering: “Good! I’m glad he got what’s coming to him!” While we like to feel that there is justice in the world and that “bad” people get punished, indulging in the desire to judge and punish other people can only be a source of unhappiness.

Compassion is characterized by spaciousness, which can occur only by our emptying ourselves of ulterior motives. Just as metta is wishing good things to everyone unconditionally, karuna is openness to the suffering of all regardless of what anyone deserves. There can be feeling for others, a movement of emotion through ourselves that brings us into intimacy with them, including tenderness and sadness, but without resistance, rumination, or the urgent need to fix whatever is hurting.

The third brahmavihara, mudita, is a joyful response to something beautiful and good. Sympathetic joy is the rejoicing in something good that happens to another, which may possibly be the hardest of all the divine abidings. When we think of someone we dislike for any reason, the last thing we want is to see that person thrive and prosper, especially if that person benefits through actions of injustice. We certainly don’t want someone who is arrogant, unprincipled, phony, or undeserving to get a promotion, admiration, or love from someone we admire.

The near enemy of mudita is identification, while the far enemy is envy. In the case of identification, we want those whom we favor to thrive because their success enhances our sense of self. Professionally, we want people we’ve mentored to do well as a testimonial to our influence and good advice. Still, we may not want them to do too well, which would put us in danger of being surpassed by the beneficiaries of our patronage, and tip our good feelings over into the territory of envy and resentment. We feel envy when we see people who are richer, better looking, healthier, or more influential than ourselves. Why should they have that big house, that beautiful family, that loving spouse while we are stuck in a small apartment, divorced, childless, and sick with worry over our bills?

Practicing any of these brahmaviharas is fiendishly difficult because they bring us up against our own sense of lack. Envy, ill-will, or identification all speak to a depletion within ourselves, a feeling of not being enough. When we think of another person having what we lack, we want to latch onto that person’s success in the hopes of owning some of it, or else see that person’s happiness diminished. We don’t even have to experience misfortune in our own lives to feel this way; we can want to see someone fail even when we are ostensibly doing well. The driving force is the deficiency we feel within.

The last brahmavihara is equanimity, upekkha. This is the ability to be with whatever comes up, to disattach oneself from outcomes. At first glance it may seem to negate the other three, which call for all-embracing good wishes, compassion in the face of suffering, and joy in the face of good fortune. Underlying all of these attitudes of mind, however, is the recognition that we do not control outcomes, and that good and bad things come to everyone.

The near enemy of upekkha is indifference, while the far enemy is panic and despair on the one hand and manic joy on the other. It is easy to confuse equanimity with a lack of caring. How can anyone be reconciled to the death of a child, or the tragedies that affect entire populations displaced by war or famine? How can a good person say “let it be” to monstrous cruelty? No matter how deep our practice, there will be circumstances that plunge us into overwhelming grief and pain. The point is not to no longer feel these things, but to be willing to feel them on behalf of ourselves and others. Having felt them, though, we go on; we do what is necessary, comfort ourselves and others, and above all not add any more than necessary to the weight of suffering in the world.

The Divine Abidings are a recognition that all beings desire happiness, regardless of their relation to us in life, and that our goal is to promote the sum of happiness in the world, and to diminish suffering. When we repeat phrases to ourselves—in the case of karuna, “may your suffering diminish, may it end,” and in the case of mudita, “May your good fortune continue, may it increase”—we are training the mind to turn to these thoughts automatically. We can think of them throughout the day as we encounter others, while express compassion for ourselves when we find we are feeling a sense of lack or depletion. The overriding recognition that things are as they are is what returns us again and again to inner peace.

 

 

My Brilliant Career

Most of my adult life was dedicated to the business of building a career. I had always known that I would have one, and was driven by the belief, or even the commandment, that it should be brilliant. As I’ve remarked earlier, quitting was shameful. With the arrival of the women’s movement, I got the message that settling was just as much a deadly sin. I had failed in my initial plan to become a violinist, and so I found an alternative: an academic career pursuing my interests, which were entirely within the framework of the humanities. I majored in history in college, but almost completed a philosophy major as well; in fact, my senior honors thesis was so philosophical that at the very end of my four years I changed my major to Intellectual History.

“As opposed to what,” people would ask, “dumb history?” I laughed, but it was hard to explain, especially as the definition shifted during the time I was a student. History of ideas? Or the history of texts in context? The history of how people express meaning? And then, there was the question of what was included. Literature? Philosophy? The fine arts? Any and all of the above, I would say, elaborating that I had had so much trouble choosing that I finally landed in a field that allowed me to have everything.

The only trouble was, at the time of my graduation from college in 1976, there were no academic jobs to be had. The demographics of my generation were to blame: when the baby boom generation first began reaching college age in the 60s, graduate schools responded by accepting more students to increase the number of newly-minted professors. Unfortunately, there was the lag between bringing these people into the pipeline and sending them out, because of the length of time it takes to train a college professor (anywhere from 4 to 12 years, roughly). Thus for awhile there was a limit in supply, until the inevitable crunch occurred as the baby boomers cycled out of college and into their adult lives.

Graduate departments did not notice this fact immediately, and so as applications for admission to colleges and universities began to slacken, the supply of PhDs continued undiminished. Not only did the number of people still in training remain high, but new ones were being admitted year after year. Academic departments are like any other unit within a hierarchical organization, in that they operate to increase their share of the whole through expanding in size wherever possible, and thus during the heyday of the 60s these organizations had enjoyed their expansion. They did not easily arrive at a decision to contract, even if they found themselves almost overnight unable to place their graduates with the same success as earlier.

This bit of history is of little interest to most people, but to the academic world it had devastating consequences. I had been celebrated in college as an excellent student with wonderful prospects, but suddenly I found myself in a position where the sky was no longer the limit in terms of what I could accomplish. Still, my narcissism was such that I was convinced I could not fail. I took some time out between undergraduate and graduate school, ended my first marriage, and then went ahead with my plans.

Throughout the years that followed I was obsessed with landing a job. I got a series of temporary positions after five years in school, completing my dissertation at the end of my first year out. I sent out applications each fall to every school offering a job even remotely in line with my experience, attended the annual meeting of the American Historical Association each winter to interview with those that had indicated an interest in my application, and returned home in an agony of expectation waiting to hear further. I eventually landed a job at a fine liberal arts college in the Midwest, far from family and friends, and remained there until retirement two years ago.

I recognize that I am one of the fortunate ones, and have no complaints about the lot I drew in my vocational life. I also recognize that I made sacrifices to get and keep that job, and that throughout my career I often wished I had chosen differently (I even find myself revisiting the question in retirement). When I was applying for jobs 30+ years ago, I was under the powerful illusion that I would be blissfully happy if I attained my goal. I also regarded the difficulties of my job search and early career as a miserable burden, resenting those who seemed to have an easier life—mostly older, established professors, which I myself would eventually become—and wallowed in self-pity at the unfairness of it all. It’s not that I didn’t know about the multitudes of people in the world struggling to survive in war zones or in extreme poverty, but I simply did not relate their lives to my own. And so I spent my young adulthood mired in self-centeredness and delusion.

The job search and subsequent career also threw me into relentless competition with countless others, equally or better qualified, who I feared would rob me of my prize. The real prize, I found, wasn’t just a job doing meaningful work or an income, but self-esteem. I invested my entire self in winning this competition, regarding my competitors with a sense of grievance. Most frightening of all was seeing how easily I could be surpassed or replaced. The fear was like a choking sensation in my throat, as if I couldn’t breathe, as if these doubles of myself would suffocate me. For if someone else could do everything I could do, only potentially do it better, or be more attractive or more praised in doing it, then what was I? The answer was that I was nothing, nothing at all.