Buddhism and Awareness
Our topical discussion of Wake Up to Your Life over at Mudita Forum is going remarkably well.
I’m especially impressed by Andrew Schwartz’s kickoff essay on Chapter 3 (”Cultivating Attention”), which elegantly lays out a number of ideas to which any Rand admirer worth his weight in dog-eared paperbacks should pay attention.
Here’s an excerpt:
Finally, Buddhism includes a sophisticated psychological understanding of barriers to attention, and, viewing attention as a skill, includes sophisticated tools and methods for dismantling these barriers and achieving greater attention over time. The tradition has a sophisticated conceptualization of how experience leads to complex conditioned habit patterns that cannot simply be squashed, but must be gently attended to in order to be understood and dissolved.
Objectivism’s cognitive theory of psychology on the other hand — encapsulized by the notion that one’s ideas determine one’s emotional responses — is somewhat simplistic, and provides little understanding or technology for improving focus over time. Rand generally advocates in her fiction a rather authoritarian means of dealing with one’s perceived irrational emotional reactions (Roark wants to blast through his painful emotions like he does the rock in the quarry).
This authoritarian means of dealing with emotions was once expressed in more extreme form by a very prominent orthodox objectivist, who said in my presence that the proper way to deal with irrational emotional reactions is (and I’m quoting almost word for word), “to get angry at them and to yell at them. You say, ‘No! You’re wrong!’ And you have to keep doing that over and over again, until you actually kill the response.”
Given all these considerations — Buddhism’s conception of attention as an already present capacity to be uncovered and stabilized, its recognition of the possibility of attention that becomes self-sustaining, its treatment of attention as a skill to be acquired and improved over time, and its conceptualization of the barriers to attention in emotional reactivity and its useful methods for dismantling these barriers and cultivating attention — I would say we Objectivists can learn much from the Buddhists on the issue of Attention/Focus.
Go Andrew!
