Capote's Law

“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck,” says the Dalai Lama.

Of course it doesn’t feel that way when it happens. I can’t count the number of times in life that I’ve cried and wailed with disappointment when something I wanted failed to materialize, or slipped out of my grasp.

But with time and perspective, I see that in many cases it would have been disastrous for me if things had gone “my way.”

I’m thinking of the college lover whose dream was for us to move to Lagos, Nigeria to teach English. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable life plan when I was a sophomore. I even spent time in the university library teaching myself basic phrases from an Igbo language primer, preparing for life in Nigeria. But it wasn’t meant to be. That relationship soon dissolved, and with it went the dream of moving to Lagos.

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones,” wrote Truman Capote. It isn’t difficult to imagine how Capote’s law could apply here. Just look at the kidnapping and murder rates in Lagos, and Nigeria’s attitudes towards gay men, and you start to get a sense of the myriad ways our plans might have gone wrong.

This perspective only came later. At the time, I mourned the loss of that relationship, put away the Igbo language primer, and scrambled to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Not having things work out the way I wanted was a slap in the face, and it stung. But in hindsight, I’m grateful for it. That wasn’t the right relationship for me to be in, and moving to Nigeria to teach English was not in my star chart. Sometimes we need life to give us a compassionate slap in the face to wake us up.

There’s a famous story about an old man who lived on a small farm with his son and a horse. One day the horse ran away and the neighbors came to express their sympathy, telling the farmer, “Oh, that’s so terrible.” The farmer replied, “Maybe.” A couple of days later the horse came back, bringing another wild horse with it. This time the neighbors exclaimed the farmer’s great good luck at getting a new horse. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next day, the farmer’s son fell and broke his leg while trying to tame the new horse. The neighbors came again to express their sympathy, but the farmer brushed it off with another “Maybe.” A couple of weeks later, the army came through the village, looking to conscript any able-bodied young men for a new war. The farmer’s son was passed over because of his broken leg, which prompted the neighbors to exclaim the farmer’s great good fortune. “Maybe.”

You get the point. We never really know. What looks at first like good fortune may be setting us up for a disaster, and what looks like bad fortune may be saving us from something even worse. Life brings us to a fork in the road and then forces us down a path we didn’t choose. We shed tears over the road not taken, but later come to see that the path we wanted to take would have led us off a cliff. We can appreciate this lesson because hindsight is 20/20, and time heals old wounds — but in the moment, when we don’t get what we want, we are blinded by disappointment.

Every now and then, it’s good to look back at our disappointments, our misplaced hopes, the dreams that didn’t pan out, and consider the possibility that life was actually trying to bring us something better than what we wanted. “Maybe we even find redemptive value in our apparent lapses,” says philosopher Rob Brezsny. “We come to see that they saved us from some painful experience or helped us avoid getting a supposed treasure that would have turned out to be a booby prize.”

Here’s to booby prizes, to disappointments, to the dashing of misplaced hopes, to the roads not taken, and to the eventual triumphs that come to us only through failure.

On Meditation and the Future of Humanity

Do you find it unpleasant to be alone in a room with your thoughts for just 10 minutes, with no smartphone or other distractions to keep your mind occupied?

Apparently, most people do.

A recent article by Kate Murphy in The New York Times examined how excruciating it is for the average person to simply be alone with their own thoughts. Citing a study published in the journal Science, involving 11 experiments and more than 700 people, Murphy writes that "the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes."

Even more alarmingly, in one of the experiments, "64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think."

I ask you to pause for a moment and consider the implications of that: A vast swath of human beings find it so incredibly unpleasant to be alone with their own thoughts that they will resort instead to shocking themselves with painful electric currents simply to have something — anything, even something unpleasant — to redirect their attention.

Most of the time, we don't have to go to such extreme lengths to avoid introspection. That's because we never bother to go there in the first place.

As a society, we've become masters of staying busy all the time, always distracted and plugged in and entertained. We never have a moment to think, and when we do, we are programmed to reach for a familiar device or an activity or an experience to fill up the empty space.

"Our habitual tendency is to always be busy, doing something, changing something, or cultivating something," says the 17th Karmapa. "Therefore when somebody asks us to just relax, to just be natural, it is very difficult for us to actually understand how to do that."

Watch your mind closely the next time you step into an elevator and the door closes. During those 20 seconds of in-between space, in which nothing much happens, how strong is the impulse to reach into your pocket and check your mobile phone? Or is it already in your hand?

Murphy speculates that the reason we find it so unpleasant to be alone with our thoughts is because, given the opportunity, our minds tend to veer towards darkness: we begin to ruminate on our worries, our frustrations, our fears, our doubts and existential questions. Left to our own devices, we begin to make contact with our shadow, and our shadow is naturally something we experience as unpleasant because it is (by definition) composed of all the things we don't want to think about.

No Self

In 2007 I was fortunate to attend several days of profound Dharma teachings given in New York by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. These thoughts are inspired by those teachings.

Whether we realize it or not, most humans tend to think that collecting wealth, companions and power will make us happy. While these things may provide temporary pleasure and comfort, they are not a genuine path to lasting happiness because no matter how much of them we acquire, our wealth, companions and power are always, themselves, temporary and unreliable, subject to loss and change. Even when we have these things in abundance, we worry about losing them. The fortunes of rich men can vanish overnight, or be stolen by other rich men like Bernie Madoff. Friends can turn into enemies, and lovers into exes. Power can become corrupted or be taken away (as the slogan artist Jenny Holzer slyly puts it, "Abuse of power comes as no surprise"). We create tremendous suffering for ourselves by clinging to these things, based on the mistaken idea that genuine, lasting happiness can be had in them.

As His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, transformation of our emotions is one of the keys to genuine happiness. But our methods for transforming emotions must be realistic, based on an accurate understanding of the way things really are. If our approach to training the mind is based on a distorted understanding of how we exist in the world, then we are out of touch with reality and our efforts to attain happiness will also be unrealistic. If we practice in that way, we're just spinning our wheels. So it is essential to inquire into the true nature of what we call the "self."

Buddha taught that you are your own master, yet he also taught that the thought of "I am" (the sense of self) is like the mind of a demon, the wellspring of suffering upon suffering. On the basis of this thought of "I am," which we take for granted, we give rise to "I have," "I want," "I like," "I dislike," "I hate," and all the other self-centered thoughts that lead us to push away the things we think will make us unhappy and pull at the things we think will make us happy. This basic sense of self is based on the notion of some kind of master agency that sits at the center and controls the entire mind-body experience.

But if this "self" inherently exists in the way we habitually think it does, then it shouldn't be very difficult at all for us to pinpoint exactly what it is and where it exists. We have all sorts of largely unexamined ideas about what the self is and where it can be found, but when we examine these ideas more closely and search for this so-called "self" through analytical meditation, we find it is a very slippery fish that always seems to escape our grasp. In Buddhism this kind of analysis is called meditation on emptiness -- because we seem to find, upon further inspection, that our actual experience is "empty" of the self that we've always assumed was there at the core of it all.

In Buddhism, studying and meditating on emptiness is essential because without an understanding of the "emptiness of self" (or "selflessness"), there is no possiblity of genuine liberation from suffering. Until we penetrate that fundamental misperception of reality, we will always be operating on the basis of a deluded sense of self and clinging to the objects that we think will make the self happy. The purpose of studying emptiness is not to negate the existence of things or to deny the validity of our experience, but to expose and ultimately eradicate the clinging that arises in response to our experience.

As the great Tibetan master Tilopa said to his disciple Naropa, "You are not bound by appearances, you are bound by clinging. Cut through clinging, Naropa." In other words, objects such as wealth and companions and power do not, in and of themselves, bind us and make us suffer -- rather, we gum up the works with our habit of clinging to these things and our efforts to manipulate the world to get more of them. Ultimately, our clinging is rooted in a false idea of self, which is why rooting out this mistaken sense of self through emptiness meditation is necessary to find enlightenment and genuine, lasting happiness.

It is also important to cultivate a calm, stable and peaceful mind, and to generate lovingkindness and compassion for all sentient beings. These, too, are aspects of awakened mind and keys to genuine happiness. But lovingkindness and compassion do not, in themselves, directly oppose and uproot ignorance -- even heightened states of concentration cannot dispel the innate clinging to a mistaken sense of self. For this, only direct inquiry into the self and the realization of emptiness in one's own experience can unlock the door to lasting happiness.