(previous installment here)
Wright: I gather that Buddhists, as a metaphysical matter, believe in free will, at least in the sense that they believe that people are capable of true freedom. But in One Dharma you were saying that, still, what most people think of as freedom is kind of backwards. Most people think that if they go around doing whatever they want that’s a sign of freedom: to do what ever you want is to be free. You’re saying that if you go around doing whatever you want, in some sense that is addiction and the opposite of freedom.
Joseph Goldstein: Yes.
Wright: What are everyday examples of things that —
Joseph Goldstein: Simple. There are a million simple examples. One we talked about before in terms of right speech. In other words, some some kind of judgmental thought about somebody comes up in the mind. A natural tendency would be, “Boy, that person’s doing, you know, this or that“; expressing some kind of judgment. One definition of freedom would be: Well, the thought came to my mind, and I’m free to do it. I’m free to say it. But that’s really just the playing out of a habit pattern that causes suffering. Through mindfulness, if we could see that thought arising in mind before we express it, we could say “No, I don’t have to do that,” and just let it be. The non-doing actually creates more inner peace.
We see it with food. How many times in the course of a day do we find our hand in the refrigerator before we even know how it got there? Just on an impulse, you know, to want to eat something. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not that there’s something bad about it; it’s just that we’re playing out habituated patterns and there’s no freedom in that. That’s really mechanical.
Wright: And also, there’s less truth in the perceptions, it seems to me, in at least the following sense. I’ve been interested in evolutionary psychology, and according to evolutionary psychology some kinds of things people do naturally include the following: if you have a rival, if you’re competing with someone for something, whether a job or a mate, you will naturally tend to derogate that person in your mind. Your judgments of the person will be automatically negative, and may have no correspondence to that person at all.
Similarly, if you’re waiting in line, and you’re just dying to get a hamburger at McDonald’s or something, and there’s somebody kind of fiddling with their change, you’re not just annoyed, you actually come to believe that that’s a bad person. You briefly want harm to befall that person. These are clearly kind of departures from an objective perspective: Because you fiddle with your change, you’re bad.
That’s a big part of the idea, right? Not just that it feels better to go around not wanting so chronically and not competing so fiercely, but that it’s actually conducive to something closer to the truth.
continued here
meditation
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