changing habits

How do we change habits for the better? Everyone says the ban on public smoking has worked, and the fagaholics who huddle in office doorways and outside hospital buildings look like losers, definitely. But climate change? The personal response is pathetic, small gestures that seem demeaning. Except that they are evidence of an intention – learning to have respect for the resources on which we depend totally for life – the four ancient elements of earth, fire, air and water. Don’t leave the tap running. Turn down the thermostat. Cut back on the airmiles. Dig the allotment. The change of consciousness that we need is to be reflective about our consumerism, the way we come to need what we want. After my car coughed and died on the motorway, I never got around to replacing it. Urban living does not need cars, generally speaking. (If I had small children would I be saying that? Small children living in buggies that transform into car seats are like little emperors looking out passively from their private thrones, while the adults text and tweet. What price attachment in the digital age?) An advantage of ageing is the slow erosion of what we need. Survival is in the end more important than status. With age we recover the peasant mentality of our ancestors - ‘There are other things in life’: I overheard two men saying this in the pub, facing their own retirement.

when the powerful are deaf

There has been panic buying, encouraged by government ministers, of petrol – ahead of a strike that did not happen. The police closed petrol stations as motorists backed up on to the highway. What are we to make of this?
At the same time I heard a radio interview (‘Material World’) with a scientist, saying that there was no dialogue between scientists and politicians, and appealing to social scientists to get involved and to help. Now there’s a challenge.
Ann Glover, the European’s Chief Scientific Adviser, was saying that Europe needs three planets to supply the resources we are using. The US needs five planets. As she says, this is unsustainable. We know what to do but we are not doing it. We need people to react and that’s not happening. No sense of urgency at the moment, despite the evidence.
She was taking about geo-engineering, which is the last gasp hope that science will come up with an answer, throwing particles in the upper atmosphere and vacuuming out the excess CO2 to prevent global warming. Prevention is better than cure -what about ego-engineering?
Meanwhile a government minister has been encouraging us to fill our gerry cans and the prime minister said to top up our fuel tanks as the sensible thing to do. And yesterday we bought more than twice as much petrol than we could possibly need, causing an acute shortage- and giving a short-term gain to government revenues.
How come that no-one thought to speak to an alternative – that we might use less fuel, reduce our demand at this time, so that if there is a need to conserve stocks, we are able to do that.
Now that would be intelligent leadership. How might social scientists help us to think differently, and provide the conditions where politics would listen to science?

Virtual reality is not the same as a computer game. We are expected to get up in the morning and go to work to make money for shareholders, anonymous hungry ghosts,and ourselves in later life worrying about our pensions.
The future lives of the present, like a man begging in the street. We give to the beggar, not knowing why we are doing it. Not knowing is sufficient reason.
None of this is for real: we live to make money, we make money to make more money. The richer we are the more we are in debt, our fortune measured in pixels on the screen.
Those richer than us do not know how to spend their money. We do, of course. Those worse off are by definition dumb, not clever at all, victims and spongers.
The rich provide enough evidence that they do not know how to spend their money. Race horses, yachts and ugly houses; for the mega rich, Premier League football clubs and media empires …They caricature the villain in a James Bond movie, confident that there is no James Bond.
The poor are villains, you can see it in their faces.
I suggest that these are underlying assumptions in our personal and collective thinking about austerity, government policies and financial systems.
Rich or poor, we have a tendency to be profligate in our desires. The single most important rule about money is to use it well.

What is an appropriate state of mind at this time? I try to be a reflective citizen. I would like to have the negative capability that Keats wrote of, but he was writing about Shakespeare. Harold Bloom sees Shakespeare as god-like in his humanity. Nothing wrong with aiming high. As they say, don’t be a Buddhist, be a Buddha. Do Christians have the aspiration to sainthood? I think Thomas Merton suggested that they should.
We could use more prosaic language and talk of a paradigm shift. I was in the bank yesterday, paying in cheques. It was a Friday and I was expecting delays as local small businesses sorted out their cash returns. In fact it was not so bad, a wait of five minutes or so, but a woman ahead of me was saying that it was disgusting, the delay, and she would be writing to head office. I thought: if waiting at the counter is the only difficulty we’ll be facing at this time of potential financial meltdown, then I’ll settle for that.
What other states of mind might be useful? An apocalyptic vision is helpful when everything is collapsing around you. There is a great exhibition at Tate Britain at the moment.
And you need to be paranoid when the others are out to get you. The human skeleton is designing for running, not walking.
We find it hard to think of prosperity without growth. We are not used to facing years of austerity – that is, when we are not going to be reassured all the time that we are getting to be better off than before.
We are hearing all that time that this is the biggest, smallest, hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, fastest, slowest, whatever since ten years ago or twenty, or a hundred years, and increasingly, since records began.
We need mindfulness, to keep in touch with the interconnectivity of all things, but not as a quick fix for depression. There is something about the human condition that we have great ideas, great religions, and we reduce them to a concern about inessentials, what we wear on holy days and rubbish collections and 2p on the price of petrol.

mindfulness at work

Buddhist psychology – which has brought the concept of mindfulness to our attention in thinking how people may have more control over their lives, in the context of stress, addiction, depression – starts from the premise that we do not understand ourselves or the world we are a part of. We start from a position of ignorance. We just don’t know. We don’t get it. What we have are a whole lot of habitual ways of seeing things and doing things. These inform our consciousness of what we experience – whether this is a door or love affair. At any moment we are in contact with the world of which we are a part, through our senses, sight, hearing, smell, touch, the work of our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and our thoughts, the work of our mind. Buddhist theory says that this contact is at first pleasurable or not, or it is neither pleasurable nor not pleasurable. And then we give it a name, a description, we build a story around it. We create a meaning for the contact, which becomes our way of understanding the world. So a pain becomes something that has been done to us, and it makes us angry. We look with hostility for the perpetrator. The pain is not the problem, according to this analysis: it is our reaction that is the problem. This is how we react and overreact to each and every stimulus that arises.
This is a psychology that is asking the question how. This is how we feel, think, and behave. It is not interested so much in the question why, which is a more familiar question in psycho-analysis. The Buddha ridiculed those who want to know why all the time. When you are shot with an arrow you just want it taken out, not wait to get a detailed description. But if you are always getting shot at when you are out and about, it seems sensible to ask who is shooting the arrows and a description is then very helpful in identifying the enemy. This is after all the way of diagnosis in medicine, and the Buddha is said to have been diagnostic in his description of the four truths of the existence of suffering, of craving as the cause of suffering, that suffering can cease, and there is a way of making that happen – the eight-fold path, involving a profound understanding of how things really are, an ethical framework for living, and a training in how to be fully aware of how things really are. It is called an eight-fold path but they are none of them independent of the others. Buddhists make lists but this is deceptive, as their approach is always integrative and holistic.
The theory of dependent origination is itself a theory of causality; that everything that we might call a fact has in fact been constructed; it could not be as it is but for other stuff that came before, necessary but not sufficient for its present existence. This door could not be as it is without a thousand acts that contributed to its existence, and each of these acts were themselves consequent on previous acts, and so back into the mists of time. But the final act – say, of cutting the wood – in that moment the craftsman was paying greater or lesser attention, the line is more or less true … With each act there is renewal of intention. So much for a door – so much more complex for a love affair … how you met, that first contact, pleasurable, not pleasurable, neither pleasurable nor unpleasurable.
It is not the thing in itself but the idea of the thing that is important. The thing in itself does not exist as such. An organisation, for example: in what sense does it exist in itself? We talk instead of an organisation-in-the-mind. The organisation is made of all kinds of stuff – there is plant, there are people, there is trade, there are raw materials, products and services, there is intellectual property, there is legal identity. But what is Accenture or Marks & Spencer , or, to take a particular example, the NHS? How we think about them makes them what they are.

I have never been one for value statements and mission statements and the like. I have a cautionary approach to broad statements of intent. Get on with it, I say. Do what you can, inch by inch, take a breather, get round the next corner …
But, in the space between Christmas and a new year, I have been thinking about intention,
I do not call myself a Buddhist. I do not call myself a Christian. Or a Freudian or a Kleinian. I live in a context, I am English, born in 1943 and brought up in post-War Britain. I am influenced by the thinking and example of Christ, of Western philosophers and psychologists, and by the philosophy and psychology of the Buddha among Eastern thinkers I am thinking what does it mean to follow the path that the Buddha taught, in the context of our society now? It seems clear to me that Western capitalism and its accomodation with the monotheistic religious traditions is fatally inadaequate to the task of achieving a good society and we need to look for other ways of experiencing the world. The Buddhist reality of impermanence, of the interdependence of our own being with others, of our pervasive dissatisfaction with experience, offers a different way, certainly. The practice of mindfulness and compassion, living with an ethical principle of non-harm to ourselves and others, and an understanding of the world that does not put ourselves at the centre of all things that matter, offer a different kind of freedom of action. I have come to think that it is both necessary and possible to change our ways of seeing the world. In the end we do have to understand the world better in order to live in it.

living in the present?

How we make sense is open to wildly discrepant possibilities – at any moment. A distant murmur may sound like the sea – or motorway traffic. How we name it and build a story will influence our response, pleasant or unpleasant. The experience may be just a murmer in our ears, but the perception, our understanding is what we think we experience.
So perception is always retrospective. We are always reviewing the past, moment by moment.
The neuro scientists have found that there is activity in the brain before we think to act. We are not in control then, always reacting and justifying our actions after the event. Even when we scratch our nose. How we react is influenced by our lives up to that point. A musician will hear a sound and know it is a B minor chord. Another person may find the sound pleasurable, but will not remark on it or be able to recall it in the same way. Recall is always a reworking of the story. I do not have a photographic memory; I have to recreate each memory that I have, and each time I will recreate it a little differently. I remember you differently today than I did yesterday. The recollection I have of an event is a remake of a movie, where the original is lost.
We translate this experience into language. We not only feel and think, analysing our experience in a rational way, as a pigeon does in a Skinner box when it wants food, but we interpret that experience: having the use of language we do not have to tell the truth about our experience – we can make it up. And that is all that we can do. You can be in my dream if I can be in yours.