Altruism and Meditation

If meditation is supposed to be a training, a few questions arise. What are we training, what is the objective, and how do we go about training?

Meditation is a training of the mind. The reason for training the mind is because here is where the roots of our experience, our behaviour, our communication and the way we see ourselves are cultivated. The objective is to understand the openness and flexibility within the mind, and train it to become more useful, less problematic, freer and especially more beneficial. And the method is one of patience, small steps that accumulate over time bringing surprising results, felt clearly in our internal and external environment.

The training is quick to point out that our nature is very much centred on the self. This translates into our constant preoccupation in dealing with our own problems. We worry about creating the very best conditions to fulfil our needs. We try and make sure not to be lonely. We try and keep healthy. We entertain ourselves. We try to create reasons to appreciate ourselves through our work, through our opinions and through our lifestyle.

A selfish attitude is not necessarily one of greed, but a more common, all pervasive obsession in our minds with the self, the “I”. Most of everyone’s mind’s energy is focused on the needs of the self. When we look closely and honestly, it is difficult to find a truly selfless concern. It is difficult to find a single thought that has the same level of concern for someone else as we would have for ourselves.

Occasionally, we care about our loved ones, people close to us, friends and family in the same way we would care for ourselves. But we do not get the same level of satisfaction, and perhaps there is some doubt about how far we should go to be helpful. And if we think about people that aren’t so present in our lives, it seems impossible to have any sort of true concern for them. It is difficult to truly put yourself in someone else’s shoes.  It is hard to use our minds for others.

We have been trained this way for a long time – to focus solely and completely on ourselves, what we can gain, what we can develop, who we will be, what others will think of us, what we are capable of, what we can show the world. We would like everyone to know our very own most original view, our most brand new opinion, our uniquely individual personality. We also want to make sure we are safe, secure, smart and cheerful all the time. We want to completely understand ourselves, make sure our lives are totally meaningful and make sure there is no space for regret in anything we do. We want to find a way to be totally free. This, we have been taught, is our mission in life.

Buddhist teachers have suggested for many centuries that this is probably not a healthy way to function in the world, and have gone to great lengths to create and develop methods of counteracting our obsession with the self, by gradually exchanging it for a deep concern for others.

The simple beginning for this training is to realize how much we have been focused on ourselves, how much we have used our intelligence, energy, wisdom, how much we have used our minds almost exclusively to work for ourselves.

Altruism begins with an awareness that our minds are capable of being trained in a more selfless way. This does not have to be a radical change, but starts with a simple thought about how you could be useful to someone else without asking for anything in exchange.

Sensitivity

One of the main practices of meditation is to investigate experience. We calm the body and mind so that we can become aware of how they interact with each other. Then we can observe the interactions between the inner environment and the outer environment. With each question, a new space for understanding opens up.

When developing sensitivity, we can go further than asking questions in the form of words, sentences and thoughts. We learn to open up to experience and its many qualities without the need for constant descriptive feedback. We look at how things are more directly, in a questioning that is deeper than our expectations about how things are. Rather than starting with a hypothesis, sensitivity aims at just expanding the awareness of what is really happening, of how we really function, of what is available and what are our limits.

In Buddhist psychology, there is great emphasis on the role of kleshas, which are normally translated as emotions. Kleshas are the mental reactions to experience which cloud our sensitivity. The main starting point for the emotions is the constant push and pull of craving and aversion. Craving and aversion develop into different forms. A more refined list of kleshas include attachment, anger, jealousy, pride, and ignorance.

These mental events create a veil over our awareness of how things are. Experience takes the colour of each emotion. The senses become dull and our judgment becomes biased. Confusion takes hold of our actions, creating further conditions where this cycle can continue developing.

Being sensitive to these emotions, we can gradually include them in our understanding of experience. Understanding how emotions work gradually helps in being able to observe experience as it is. We are not stuck with the superficial layer of emotionality and can go deeper into the workings of being.

Sensitivity can start through the senses. They are the gates to experience. You can try to notice when your senses are dulled down because you have too much in your head, or because you have a certain emotion taking hold. Your eyes go fuzzy, sounds don’t really have importance, food doesn’t taste of anything, smells don’t tell much and muscles go tense for no reason.

Then calming the mind and body down, you can open up the senses widely. All the different textures, colours, distant and close sounds, all the subtle smells, the different sensations of the skin and muscles, all the taste buds can be opened up. When you take a walk with open senses, any place becomes much more interesting, more exciting. You discover the richness of experience through the senses.