We generally want to become less stressed, calmer, happier, more emotionally intelligent, more in the “zone” – we may experience all these states of mind from time to time or even frequently, but we’re not completely satisfied and want to change our mind, so to speak, or understand more about how our minds work. That’s generally the motivation to start meditating – one gets fed up with one’s state of mind and our seeming inability to control it.

So we see that someone, the buddha or another role model (we’ll get to that), seems to have some wisdom, information, learning that maybe could help us. The instruction then is to imitate the role model – if we’re talking about the buddha, imitation is meditation practice. You pretend to be like him, sitting upright and still, but our minds aren’t like his – even though we’re sitting still, our minds aren’t. But we imitate him, and sit through the chaos, and eventually our minds start to calm a tiny bit. But we wouldn’t get anywhere without the imitation part.

It’s like playing an instrument – first we imitate the teacher, and eventually we become better at it. But we don’t expect to be perfect when we’re just beginning.

When we’re not meditating, we can still imitate the buddha – we could be angry, hostile, jealous, and instead of acting out we could make a choice to simply feel the way we feel and not necessarily try to change it, and still do the right thing, whatever that may be. We’re pretending, in a way, but it’s real pretending. Next time you feel angry, notice how you feel, inhabit your body – and pretend that the anger isn’t running the show, and that you can act in spite of the anger as opposed to because of it. You may be surprised at the result.

I’m always impressed with how actors inhabit the bodies of others – I recently saw Invictus (a great movie, but I’m a sucker for inspirational sports movies), and Morgan Freeman seemed to inhabit the body of Nelson Mandela. I would think that it’s hard to imitate the dignity of Mr. Mandela without having it rub off on you. So we could do the same – imitate dignity, imitate peace, imitate relaxation even, and then the imitation starts to become real.

Putting Mindfulness to Work, Pt. 2 from Center for Contemplative Mind on Vimeo.

I’ll next post a rough draft of the 10 minute or so presentation I gave on the panel, on working with stress.

My friend Peter Arcese came and spoke at the City Bar Contemplative Lawyers Group last week, and offered a poem by Wallace Stevens called Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The first stanza was highly evocative:

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Actually, that’s a trick question – you can’t manage time. You can of course work on things like procrastination, organization, discipline, but you’re not managing time, you’re changing how you live your life with a goal of making you less anxious and relatively happier. You may quibble with this, but bear with me — there’s a deeper point here.

We all have assumptions about the nature of our world which we never question, but are in fact neither useful nor true. One such assumption is about the nature of time. We believe that there’s a past, present, future – but if we look at this belief carefully, we can see that actually the past is gone, the future is a dream, and it’s only ever now. We can know that intellectually of course, but we don’t live as if we do. We tend to look at our lives and think, well, I did this, and I have this much more to go, and I want to accomplish this in that time frame, and then later I’ll be – happy, relaxed, I’ll feel better. We’re planning now how to make ourselves feel better later. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t plan, and strive, and try to reach our goals – but we tend to expect that we’ll be happier then, once the goal is reached. So time manages us, in a sense – we tend to push off our expectations of happiness until later.

What do we mean by happiness anyway? We could mistake happiness for pleasure, or even relief from pain, but that’s not it — it’s not just about feeling better, or putting a temporary fix on a situation (which gets into why people become addicted to substances or sensations). Those kinds of feelings of pleasure or relief come and go, and are conditioned on external circumstances. There’s no single word in English, but the meditative traditions talk about a quality of wellbeing, in all emotional states, including grief, sadness, anger, even jealousy – we could still have an unconditional sense of wellbeing.

How to achieve this kind of happiness, wellbeing, is through the path of meditation, of becoming intimate with our minds and the ways in which we tend to act which cause suffering to ourselves and others instead of happiness. With this kind of insight we can start to change our habitual kinds of behavior, and to make choices, to act differently.

So back to time management: if our goal is to be happy (well, it is – nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “I hope I’m miserable today!”) then a necessary corollary to that goal is to realize, deeply, that it’s always now – this is an insight that we can develop and refine through meditation. Then we can further realize that we have the choice, as Chögyam Trungpa was fond of saying, to just cheer up on the spot, for no reason at all. True happiness (and time management) isn’t a function of external circumstance – it’s unconditional, and up to each of us. Try it – you’ll like it.

PS: I’m co-teaching a class at The Interdependence Project called The Buddhist Path, starting next Wednesday, September 15, at 7pm, 302 Bowery at Houston, NYC. Pre-registration is required; a study at home option is also available if you’re not in New York or the timing isn’t convenient.

Languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like “John broke the vase” even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say “the vase broke itself.” Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.
In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when one wouldn’t normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japanese, they didn’t encode or remember the agent as well.
In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” (a wonderful nonagentive coinage introduced into the English language by Justin Timberlake), accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the last sentence where one used the agentive phrase “ripped the costume” while the other said “the costume ripped.” Even though everyone watched the same video and witnessed the ripping with their own eyes, language mattered. Not only did people who read “ripped the costume” blame Justin Timberlake more, they also levied a whopping 53% more in fines.
. . .
Patterns in language offer a window on a culture’s dispositions and priorities. For example, English sentence structures focus on agents, and in our criminal-justice system, justice has been done when we’ve found the transgressor and punished him or her accordingly (rather than finding the victims and restituting appropriately, an alternative approach to justice).

This could make you think twice (or more) about this country’s self-righteous approach to blame and punishment.