If I let go, does that mean I do nothing?
Actually, you might do even more.
The New Mindscape #5–5
Meditation can’t remove the objective external conditions that cause stress, worry, and problems in our lives. If you have a major exam tomorrow, this will raise your stress level. That objective condition will not change no matter how much you meditate. Meditation will not change the objective condition of being unable to afford a home in Hong Kong. All that meditation can do is to help shape your mindset. Beyond the fact that the regular practice of deep breathing literally lowers your overall stress level, meditation also helps you to become more detached from your desires and to put things into perspective. Over time, by changing your perspective on things, you start doing things differently, and you may find it easier to change the objective conditions — or, even better, in tune with your better mental state, the objective conditions around you seem to naturally improve.
But, you might ask, if we just say ‘let go’ — let these thoughts come and go, and detach ourselves from our desires — are we going to lose our motivation to strive for anything in life? Might we become lazy and slothful because we learned that we should let go of our desires and believe that everything is impermanent? Why even bother striving for anything? Should we just follow the new trend in China called foxi, referring to lazy people who have very passive attitudes to life, dropping out of society and not trying hard for anything?
Perhaps attachments and desires are good for us, because they motivate us. When we are greedy, we’ll fight to get more money. We want something because of our desires, and that leads us to struggle and make an effort, and then we will do great things. So much of our world has been built thanks to all this greed. We build things, we strive, and we try to become better. And the same goes for anger: we become angry when we see injustice around us. This leads us to act, to do something to change the situation. If we let go of that anger, then we might see injustice in society and do nothing, losing our empathy for others. When people see somebody suffering, it might make them sad, but without anger people would just tend to let it happen.
All of these questions are all very good results of mindfulness practice. It causes us to ask ourselves questions that we don’t usually ask. What is the source of my motivation? Should I have any desire? What is it that I desire? Is that desire good for me? Where does this desire come from? Do I want this desire to control me? What kind of desire do I want to have?
If you want to say, “No, I don’t want to be foxi. I don’t want to be just a passive, lazy person. I have a passion for life. I think it’s important to want something, strive for something, and to have goals in life” — you become more aware of your deep motivation, and it becomes stronger. People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jack Ma all meditate. But they aren’t passive people who do nothing in their life. These are people who do great things in their life! Meditation does not make them passive.
Through the mindfulness practice described in the essay Observe your Mindscape, you become aware as you sit, stand back, and look at all your thoughts. You start to become aware of all these thoughts at the surface of your mind.
And then you might realise, “If I blow away all those thoughts, what is will be left? What should I do?” That might be scary, because you might find yourself completely empty, and not knowing what to do.
We are always pursuing some kind of desire, and we grasp onto that. We let that desire control us because it keeps us busy and alive, and the object of our desire — that object of consciousness — pushes you to strive for the thing that you want.
As I said in the essay Become a thought magician, it gives you power and keeps you alive when you are running after your goal. So it might be frightening to think about dropping it. But the thought of dropping it makes you aware of it.
You are now looking at your own life objectively: you step back and look at all these things. And then you might ask yourself: maybe that thing that I am desiring and striving after is not the best thing for me. And you might discover an even stronger motivation, a more pure motivation and passion welling up inside you, that was covered up by your previous desire.
We have a power that is leading us to do something all the time. We have this life-force in us that leads us to always strive for something. Some people are very energetic, and they will always do a lot of things, while some people are less energetic and will do fewer things. Still, no matter how energetic you are, everybody has this power in them. It’s like having a channel of power flowing through us, that motivates us to do so many different things. When you look at your whole lifetime, through the years, you have so much power to do so many things. The power is flowing through you. Where are you going to direct this power? How are you going to use this power?
Buddhists tell us to let go of and completely extinguish all desires. But the monk Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu, in the videos I suggested you watch in the essay Observe your mindscape, is obviously very motivated to make all these videos. He has a desire for a higher level of spiritual transcendence and to spread these teachings. So, he has that life that is flowing through him, and he decided to direct that power to spread the Buddhist teachings, to help other people to become happy in life.
So the question is, where do you direct your power? How are you going to use your power? How are you going to use your life? Even Camus said, even if life is meaningless, we should live our life to the fullest.
Training the mind for an active life
The mindfulness technique shared by Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu is only one of the many different forms of meditation. All of them have different purposes. A very basic technique is training the breath. Breath training helps to make the connection between your mind and body, giving you greater relaxation and serenity. Another type of meditation is visualization, which is an active training of your imagination, in which you visualize something as an object of consciousness and focus on it. Visualization is an active process of “gardening” your mindscape. While mindfulness is about observation, visualization is about creating something in your mindscape, placing an object of consciousness in your mind, imagining it, and focusing on that imagination. Other meditation techniques are about training your concentration, learning how to focus very carefully, thus enhancing your mental powers.
Another technique is gratitude, learning how to appreciate everything that you have and expressing that appreciation.
If you want to accomplish anything, you have to train your mind. First, you need basic discipline — breathing helps maintain a good state of your mind and body. Then you need to know yourself objectively, using mindfulness. Then you need to be able to imagine, to visualize, to concentrate on your objective. And you need to have a positive attitude of gratitude, that connects you with others, to the Universe, or to God. All of this will help you to focus and achieve your objective. Thus, different forms of training the mind do not make you passive — they train different abilities of the mind, that help you to become more active. The objective could be a worldly objective, like that of Steve Jobs. Or, it can be a spiritual, religious, or transcendental objective, where your motivation is to serve others, to serve humanity, to serve all living beings or to serve God.
Warning:
Meditation sounds harmless. What could go wrong with a relaxation exercise? But when some people try it, they find that it brings out negative emotions — when meditating, a lot of negative thoughts and emotions keep rising up in their mindscape. Or, they might enter mental states that they have difficulty getting out of, experience hallucinations, or great fears. In that case, meditation is not a good idea, without guidance from a highly experienced practitioner or qualified psychotherapist. If it reinforces negativity or enhances sensitivity to negativity, it is not a suitable practice. For people who have psychological or mental issues, including depressive or suicidal thoughts, sustained meditation practice is not recommended. In such cases, practicing these kinds of meditation and looking into your mind intensely for a very long time could be dangerous without expert guidance.
See the next essay, on Materialist dualism: Things exist, and you have thoughts about them.
See the previous essay, on Let go. You are nothing, and you are so much more.
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This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
