Misunderstanding

I have been reading Douglas Adams' The Salmon of Doubt, which is a posthumous publication of essays and such. There are many worthwhile musings in this book, but one of the most fascinating to me is the idea that we have almost entirely mistaken what human life is about. Though no Buddhist practitioner, Adams' philosophy nestles neatly into the Dharma as taught by the Buddha. As we will see, this correspondence is not all that surprising, as both derive from what Pema Chodron called "a misunderstanding so old that we can no longer see it."

The misunderstanding, it seems to me (and to them) is this: we believe that since this is a very complicated universe and we are at the pinnacle of it, we, too, must be highly complex creatures. Some people in recovery refer to AA as "a simple program for complicated people," reinforcing the same misunderstanding. Adams is very clever in debunking the myth of our complexity, pointing out the flaw in the logic: since we are creative beings and manipulate our world, and have what the bible calls dominion over it, we must be very complex beings to correspond to that world and our place in it. We have fallen for a fallacy that is entirely of our own making, that is, in fact, tautological.

One way of looking at the formation of the human ego is in response to a basic fact of prehistoric need: we are, in comparison to our predators, slow and weak. The only two things we really have going for us is that we have a more highly developed brain and opposable thumbs. This combination made it possible for us to develop tools to defend ourselves, among other things. Our complex brains combined with the constant threat of being such relative wimps in a hostile world led to a state of constant alert. The only way we could defend ourselves and those we considered of value (family or tribe) was to put our safety at the center of our existence. This self-referential adaptation is the source of our egos (more or less). Those who did not develop this defense mechanism were, quite simply, eaten by the saber-tooth and did not survive to pass their genes along to the next generation. Thus did neurosis and egocentrism become an inherent trait in us. 

As the world grew more complex due to our tinkering and inventing ever more safety (shelter, weapons, tools, agriculture, animal husbandry, etc.), our sense of dominion expanded accordingly. We also needed to project our thoughts into the future, as most animals cannot, to plan for the next event that might threaten us (food shortages and cold weather, for instance) and recall our past in order to use the lessons learned from that to model our future response to threat. Another characteristic this threat-based thinking bred in us is the constant desire to have more of everything; there is never enough, because we never know when the resources will run out and we will die as a consequence.

The Buddha identified desire, aversion, and ignorance as the sources of our suffering. It should be clear that the first two, desire and aversion, arise directly from our primitive need to always be on top of things, that we must constantly desire what is good and be averse to that which is bad as a survival technique. Ignorance arises from the need for absolute tunnel vision; the prehistoric human who lets his mind drift dies. What should be obvious in all this, though, is how none of this functions in our lives today. From an evolutionary standpoint, these are residual characteristics that have never (or at least not yet) evolved out of our species. This makes sense, of course, as there is no particular evolutionary pressure to have them removed. Their usefulness is at an end, it is true, and has been for millennia, but lack of usefulness is not a predictor for a trait being selected against in evolution; only traits that are deleterious to survival are under any pressure to disappear. Of course, there are some pressures from the negative outcomes of these traits--global warming and other environmental degradation, economic disparity, constant warring, starvation, and disease arise directly from desire, aversion, and ignorance--but the consequent pressure is not on individuals, but on the entire species. So far, there is unfortunately no adaptive advantage to being openhearted or openminded.

What all of this leads to is a constant state of alert, a never-ending feeling of need to move in some way, even if there is no need and our energies would be better preserved by staying still. When we look at human economic systems, to take one example, we see that they are predicated on the principle of growth, of constantly moving upward to bigger and better. This is a fine philosophy as far as it goes, but it ignores completely that, in an environment of scarce resources, it is unsustainable. Our most basic instincts panic, though, when we perceive that perhaps we must simply stand still or even retreat from the level of resource depletion we currently enjoy. The most obvious current example is that, even in the face of irrefutable evidence of environmental damage from global warming and the human source of most of it, there is very little movement toward retrenchment. There is also a salient political argument here, but all I wish to point out in this essay is the fact that this is all driven by a set of behaviors and responses that are based in survival techniques that we have not needed for thousands of years.

What, then, is the solution? Where do we find peace in the midst of all this? The poet Mary Oliver has famously written that "you do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert repenting./You only have to let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves." T.S. Eliot wrote (quoting Julian of Norwich, apparently) "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." The point being that we have made too complex an issue of this very simple thing called a human life. It's just not that complicated. There is very little we require, and it is not all that hard to acquire. All the rest is just neurosis, just desire, aversion, and ignorance. When we sit in silent meditation, this becomes crystal clear (from time to time it does, at least). When we are living in the midst of desire, aversion, and ignorance, we suffer. When we are not, we do not, and Nirvana (if only for a moment) is the result. This is the misunderstanding that Pema Chodron referred to, and that has taken over most of our lives and has molded our world into the place it has become: that life is anything other than this. When we step back, take a deep breath, and see what is, rather than our projection of it, peace ensues, simplicity reigns, and we can finally, finally relax with just what is right here, right now. It doesn't seem like much, but is, in fact, everything.