Street Roots • September 1-7, 2017
MINDFULNESS, from page 5
time, smartphones have proliferated society. Do
you think they add another hurdle to liberation
from delusion, considering what they’re doing
to our attention spans - always being on with
notifications?
R.W.: I think one reason meditation
retreats are becoming more popular is
because they allow you to get off the grid.
At most retreats, you’re encouraged to leave
your smartphone at the desk. When I go on
retreat, I’m totally out of touch with the
world. But even daily
meditation, if you focus on
"W h e n y o t f r e d o in g w oric
the problem, can make you
a n d s u d d e n ly y o u h a w
less enslaved to your
electronic devices.
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meditation can do in
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general is make you more
ye® meditate#- y e a a re m e re aware of how little subtle
lik e ly to r e c o g a iie th e
feelings tug at you and
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govern your behavior and
ROBERT WRIGHT your thoughts. So like when
you’re doing work and
suddenly you have this urge
to check in with Twitter or Facebook, or do
some online shopping, if you meditate, you
are more likely to recognize the feelings
that are at work.
First of all, there’s a feeling of aversion to
the work itself. Maybe you’ve gotten to a
difficult part in some writing you’re doing so
it doesn’t feel good to keep writing, and
then there’s the craving, the attraction of
Twitter or Facebook, and if you become
aware of those feelings before following
their guidance, you have the option of just
sitting there and experiencing and
observing them until their power lessens.
And this is true of self-discipline in
general. In fact, there are studies that show
this approach to something like quitting
cigarette smoking can be very effective.
Once you feel the urge, observe the urge in
a meditative way, until its power weakens,
which isn’t the same as pushing the urge
away. Ironically, it starts with accepting the
urge, at least enough to get close to it,
without following its guidance.
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issues in a very left-leaning city, being in
Portland, and there’s been a sort of collective
anxiety here since the election. How can
someone use mindfulness to kind of calm that
anxiety when stressors are external, and in
some ways very real?
R.W.: I think daily meditation allows you
to endure the Trump era with somewhat
more equanimity - now there may be such a
thing as too much equanimity - in other
words, if you quit fighting the things that
you think are worth fighting.
In my own case, that is just not a danger.
I think, if anything, a more common
problem is overreacting to Trump’s
provocations, often in ways that play into his
hands and confirm his narrative that
everyone hates him and holds his followers
in contempt and so on.
In fact, I just started a site called
MindfulResistance.net. We’re putting out a
weekly newsletter. It’s not for meditators
only, but it is premised on the idea that the
kind of mindset meditation cultivates, a
mindset of very clear vision and awareness
without overreacting emotionally to things,
can be helpful in combatting Trumpism.
I also think being aware of how the world
is perceived by Trump supporters can be
very helpful. That’s called cognitive
empathy, as distinguished from the kind of
feel-your-pain emotional empathy. It’s just a
matter of perspective taking. I think the
more we understand the various reasons,
and I think there are a lot of reasons that
people voted for Trump, the better we will
be able to make it less likely that someone
like him will be president again.
I think meditation is good for cognitive
empathy because it can weaken the
emotional obstacles to seeing things from
the point of view of somebody who is in the
other tribe, so to speak. And I think one
thing we shouldn’t lose sight of is the
people who voted for Trump have
grievances, and some of them are not
imagined.
Globalization, technological change -
these things have complicated a lot of
people’s lives, and we need to think of ways
to address the problems they create. I think
the more time we can spend doing that
thinking, the better, and if we spend too
much time overreacting to Trump’s daily
provocations, we won’t have time to do that.
E.G.: It almost seems like he kind of plays
into some of those hunter-gatherer brain
tendencies, especially with tribalism, as you
mentioned.
R.W.: Totally, I think this is a big problem
with the world, whether it’s like sectarian
conflict, Sunni-Shia, or national conflict,
U.S.-North Korea - or ideological conflict in
America. It’s what you could call the
psychology of tribalism and the cognitive
biases that entails, and I think it inflicts
both sides.
I think anyone on either side who thinks
the other side is the entire problem is
deluded. I think almost all of us have spread
fake news. I know I have sometimes
retweeted things without really carefully
examining the information I was spreading,
and the reason I did it is because it felt good
to do it. It was information that reflected
badly on the other tribe, or on Trump, and
again, I think mindfulness meditation can
make you a little more aware of when you
are being pulled into something like that by
your feelings, and it can help you step back
and ask yourself, wait a second, do I really
want to retweet this? And if everybody on
both sides did this, America would be a
massively better place.
E.G.: Anything else you’d like to add for
anyone who might be interested in reading
your book?
R.W.: W hat you hear m o st about
mindfulness meditation, that it’s good
therapy and can help you deal with anxiety
and stress and so on, is true in my view. But
I think it’s also true that this therapeutic
view of meditation can be the first step
toward a deeper kind of exploration that is
philosophical and even spiritual in nature. In
the book, I tried to provide enough
information about the Buddhist philosophy
that is the context of Buddhist meditation to
help people who are so inclined explore that
path.
________ _
emily@streetroots. org
Twitter @greenwrites
Portland, Oregon
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