Links for Monday
Worldviews and challenging meditative experiences, the importance of boundaries, and the negativity bias in Western culture
I was keen to read this paper from Willoughby Britton’s research group on the interrelationship between a practitioners underlying worldview and challenges they might face in their practice. What aspects of people’s underlying ontology are predictive of adverse events? Two things stood out: the impact of bypassing, and relatedly, the impact of an excess of idealization about the practice (and its fruits). Juicy quotes:
Many practitioners described how a privileging of the absolute over the relative, or a singular focus on meditation and enlightenment as the “only thing that was valuable,” was “really limiting.” One teacher reflected, “We think we can hopscotch over all of these worldly, relative, psychological issues and take refuge in the absolute, and it just doesn’t really work for most of us.”
A Theravāda teacher also observed that “there’s a lot of spiritual ideals that are actually hurting people. Spiritual ideals about what a ‘good Buddhist’ should do and should be able to do.” In particular, she noted how in Theravāda monastic traditions, “you’re trying to get off the wheel and not be incarnated anymore,” which sets forth “spiritual ideals that may not be realistic if we’re gonna actually be embodied.” For some practitioners, idealizations projected onto their teachers were associated with challenges. One woman on a long-term retreat in a Tibetan Buddhist lineage explained that “I think I had that mistaken concept or notion that, if I just followed everything that my [teachers] were saying, that everything would be okay.”
This essay by Phillip Moffitt about healthy boundaries is very wise. We might think that when we realize some version of “no-self” that we can and should fully dissolve the boundaries between self and other in our relationships, but the reality is that avoiding enmeshment and co-dependence remains important. Moffitt writes:
Through my own practice, I now see boundaries as being about stewardship, which means I have a responsibility for caring for this body and these mental and emotional states. If I’m a good steward, opportune conditions for both psychological development and spiritual freedom will arise, and I’ll cause less suffering for myself and others. Good boundaries are not about “me” or my ego. Nor is there a feeling of “me” or “mine.” Rather, there is harmony and possibility, or there is not. Likewise, being a good steward means showing the same respect for the boundaries of others. I may not always be able to experience boundaries this way, but that’s how I organize and work with my view. Only gradually has it become a natural state, through repetition and habit.
Is there a negativity bias in contemporary Western culture that is causing mental illness throughout the English speaking world? Is it linked to the spread of Western ideas of mental illness that are leading to both more diagnoses and more people reifying their identities around these diagnoses? That is the claim of this Atlantic piece. I’m not sure how related the negativity bias of the news is to mental illness diagnoses, but the overall picture seems more convincing than the simple social media explanation that Haidt and others have offered:
My answer is that although mental illness is global, the experience of mental illness cannot be separated from culture. If there is a surge of Anglospheric gloom among teenagers, we have to study the culture that young people are consuming with their technology. In the past generation, the English-speaking world, led by the U.S., has experimented with a novel approach to mental health that has expanded the ranks of the “worried well,” while social media has surrounded young people with reminders to obsess over their anxieties and traumas, just as U.S. news media have inundated audiences with negativity to capture their fleeting attention.
It’s my belief that Buddhist perspectives on identity and the cultivation of positive mental qualities can be a helpful corrective to these tendencies. And the growing interest in these practices throughout the Western world gives me some hope.