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Observing without Evaluating
One thing I'm currently trying to practice is observing without evaluating; that is, going through experiences without necessarily "labeling" or "defining" them.
This is a vast field for practice, because the process of judging and evaluation is constantly going on in my mind. It happens at every level: thought, speech, writing, human interaction, cyberspace, whatever. I see or experience something, and immediately (almost automatically) I form some judgment about it.
These snap-judgments, it seems to me, are instances of conditioned thinking: mental habits and thought-patterns which keep repeating themselves, over and over, on "automatic pilot," flying below the radar of consciousness.
I therefore need to raise my consciousness, raise my awareness until these automatic reactions appear in my field of vision. Once I see them happening, then I can consciously choose how to deal with them (rather than ignorantly letting them run my life).
So my question is: how to do it? What is the procedure for training oneself to stop making automatic judgments? How do you teach yourself to pause between the moment when you have an experience, and the moment when you judge it?
I believe that within that little gap of time, a valuable treasure may lay hidden; and if we can "pry" open the gap a bit wider, we can obtain it.
This is a vast field for practice, because the process of judging and evaluation is constantly going on in my mind. It happens at every level: thought, speech, writing, human interaction, cyberspace, whatever. I see or experience something, and immediately (almost automatically) I form some judgment about it.
These snap-judgments, it seems to me, are instances of conditioned thinking: mental habits and thought-patterns which keep repeating themselves, over and over, on "automatic pilot," flying below the radar of consciousness.
I therefore need to raise my consciousness, raise my awareness until these automatic reactions appear in my field of vision. Once I see them happening, then I can consciously choose how to deal with them (rather than ignorantly letting them run my life).
So my question is: how to do it? What is the procedure for training oneself to stop making automatic judgments? How do you teach yourself to pause between the moment when you have an experience, and the moment when you judge it?
I believe that within that little gap of time, a valuable treasure may lay hidden; and if we can "pry" open the gap a bit wider, we can obtain it.
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Pausing in the middle of a judgment requires another judgment. To stop something as fast as an automatic judgment requires an automatic judgment, because you don't have time to think about it. You have to do it without thinking, automatically.
If a specific mental action is undesirable, you can train yourself to stop by becoming aware of the things that trigger the action and learning to change your response.
For instance: someone makes a comment about you, and you interpret the comment as an attack. You begin defending yourself, and in the ensuing interaction, harsh words are spoken, maybe even worse. I've experienced this phenomenon many times, on both the giving and receiving end of the error.
Or maybe you see someone at work, or on the street or subway, and you automatically form an impression about that person in your mind, which may bear no relation to who they really are;
Or you read a post in a forum, and you create this story in your mind about another person, without having any idea what's actually going on in their life;
Or you're thinking about something someone said yesterday, and you decide "that must mean she doesn't like me," and then all your ensuing thoughts proceed along that assumption, though it may not be true;
Or you hear a rumor about some guy cheating on his wife, and you instantly form a judgment about the guy, though there's no proof he actually did it yet;
Or you see some online photo of a highly erotic nature, and impulsively, you gravitate toward it;
Or any number of other examples. They pop up all day, every day, everywhere. Snap-judgments, knee-jerk reactions. Mental habits, thought-patterns, neural grooves. "Automatic pilot" thinking.
Like the man on the bus with the kids jumping around and screaming, and you're thinking how inconsiderate it is, and you ask him to please rein his kids in; and he apologizes and explains that their mother died that day, and they don't know how to handle their loss; and you feel awful.
In the moment after the phenomenon occurs, we have an opportunity, before our automatic judgment or evaluation kicks in: we can pause a moment, deliberately choose to exercise right thinking, and ask ourselves: is this really true, or is it just some story I instantly created? Is my idea of this person reality, or is it just a fabrication of my mind?
Most people don't usually take control of that moment: too often we react instantly, automatically, impulsively. This is a huge reason wrong thinking occurs. Going through life on "automatic pilot." To awaken (as I understand it) is to train ourselves to see these errors of thought, speech, and action before they happen.
Then, once we're seeing our thoughts clearly, we gain the power to guide them in an enlightened way; a power we don't have when we're stumbling through life on automatic pilot, half-asleep, semi-conscious, not really in control of our mental processes.
That's what I'm talking about: taking control of our thoughts.
This is samadhi (concentration) training.
The procedure is to watch the mind itself.
Watch the place where those judgements arise from.
These two things, watching & judging, are antagonistic.
Generally, on a gross level, there cannot be one & the other together.
"This town is not big enough for both of us."
So the procedure is to develop watching, cultivate watching.
There is the phrase: "Perfect the watcher, until the watcher disappears and there is only watching".
Kind regards
DD
Madhupindika Sutta: The Ball of Honey http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.018.than.html
This discourse plays a central role in the early Buddhist analysis of conflict. As might be expected, the blame for conflict lies within, in the unskillful habits of the mind, rather than without. The culprit in this case is a habit called papañca
How can this process be ended? Through a shift in perception, caused by the way one attends to feelings, using the categories of appropriate attention [see MN 2]. As the Buddha states in DN 21, rather than viewing a feeling as an appealing or unappealing thing, one should look at it as part of a causal process: when a particular feeling is pursued, do skillful or unskillful qualities increase in the mind? If skillful qualities increase, the feeling may be pursued. If unskillful qualities increase, it shouldn't. When comparing feelings that lead to skillful qualities, notice which are more refined: those accompanied with thinking (directed thought) and evaluation, or those free of thinking and evaluation, as in the higher stages of mental absorption, or jhana. When seeing this, there is a tendency to opt for the more refined feelings, and this cuts through the act of thinking that, according to MN 18, provides the basis for papañca.
In following this program, the notion of agent and victim is avoided, as is self-reflexive thinking in general. There is simply the analysis of cause-effect processes. One is still making use of dualities — distinguishing between unskillful and skillful (and affliction/lack of affliction, the results of unskillful and skillful qualities) — but the distinction is between processes, not things. Thus one's analysis avoids the type of thinking that, according to DN 21, depends on the perceptions and categories of papañca, and in this way the vicious cycle by which thinking and papañca keep feeding each other is cut.
It may come as cold comfort to realize that conflict can be totally overcome only with the realization of arahantship, but it's important to note that by following the path recommended in DN 21 — learning to avoid references to any notion of "self" and learning to view feelings not as things but as parts of a causal process affecting the qualities in the mind — the basis for papañca is gradually undercut, and there are fewer and fewer occasions for conflict. In following this path, one reaps its increasing benefits all along the way.