The interplay of habit, faith and reason
When writing about the Ten Unskillful Behaviors, I’m basing what I write on my understandings of human behavior. It’s important to understand how it happens that we behave the way we do, in order to change how we behave and how we experience our lives. The understanding that I have of human behavior comes from the disciplines of behaviorism and neuroscience. I’m an expert in neither. My own experience, aside from my professional life as a computer geek, comes from practice.
What’s interesting about the intersection of the models that I use to think about behavior, and what I experience in practice, is that they seem to match up. The predictions I make based on my understanding of behaviorism and neuroscience seem to be reflected in actually happens in my practice. When I talk about this, bear in mind that I am an expert neither in neuroscience nor behaviorism. I use the language of both because it helps me to think about how to practice, and helps me to decide how to practice.
Since the practice of virtue can be seen as a spiritual practice, it can be a bit challenging to speak of it in scientific terms. The scientifix method is a method for gathering information reasoning about what we experience, so that we can understand and grow. When we see science and reason as the enemy to spirituality, I think it’s because we are afraid that science will prove our beliefs wrong. I’ve definitely grappled with that more than once in my time as a Buddhist practitioner.
My experience in the long run, though, is that applying scientific reasoning to my spiritual practice has never steered me wrong. When I apply it, and doubt comes up, it means that I have discovered a place where what I believe conflicts with what I am observing. When I dig in and figure out what’s causing the feeling of doubt, then I have to do the work to reconstruct my spiritual practice in a new way. That’s real work. It isn’t always pleasant. But it’s work that’s worth doing. I’ve never come to regret such an event; at this point I look forward to them.
The reason I bring this up in the context of the practice of virtue is that we tend to believe we are rational creatures, and to believe that when we behave in ways that seem irrational, this is an exception. That’s actually a bad frame: a misunderstanding of why we are behaving in ways that seem irrational. This misunderstanding leads to a lot of self-doubt and even self-hatred.
The misunderstanding is in the notion that, whether we are rational or not, this rationality governs our behavior in the moment. It does not. It cannot. We just don’t reason that quickly. It would be exhausting to try to live a perfectly rational life by reasoning through every action we take, from picking up a cup of coffee to take a sip, through to deciding which stock to buy, which religion to follow, which profession to pursue, which relationship to engage in. Not only would it be exhausting, but it wouldn’t work.
So what is behind our behavior? The answer is our conditioning. Conditioning is the process of learning how to be in the world, how to react automatically in the moment in ways that produce good outcomes. It’s something that we begin learning no later, perhaps, than the moment we leave the womb. And, importantly, it is learned on the basis of what works. Not what makes sense. Not what is right. What works.
This can start to feel a bit worrisome. Where am I in all of this conditioned behavior? Am I just a machine, going through rote behavior, absent of meaning? If you actually do the exercise of trying to find “me” in all of this, you will probably come up empty. But do you feel like “me”? Probably so. So that’s a direct observation of “me” that you don’t really have to worry about. The observation about the system in which “me” exists does not make “me” go away. Exploring the nature of “me” can be fruitful, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole just yet. I mention this here because I don’t want you to have an existential crisis and wander off without getting to the good part.
The good part is this: conditioning is something that your mind does brilliantly, and your conditioning is not fixed. You aren’t stuck with it. Learned behaviors that you picked up when you were two years old are still with you, and probably aren’t serving you very well anymore. These can be changed. Some behavior patterns might be serving you quite well, but could be improved. Even behavior patterns as fundamental as the triggers and conditioning that lead you to your current emotional state can be changed for the better.
The practice of virtue is one of the ways that you can work on your conditioning. It’s not the only way, of course, but it’s a very powerful method, if you can learn to use it. It gives you way to collect data about what your triggers are, and what conditioning arises in response to them, and then to change this conditioning over time. It can be a difficult process, because as you do the practice, your conditioning reacts to you doing the practice, sometimes in unpleasant ways. For example, if you are prone to self-criticism or self-hatred, it’s quite easy for the data collection process to lead to more of that.
What do I mean by “data collection?” Simply this. Throughout the day, you are noticing things and responding to what you notice. There is a state of mind called mindfulness which you can cultivate. When mindfulness is present, you aren’t just noticing and reacting: you’re noticing how you’re noticing and reacting. You can develop mindfulness through meditation, through awakening practices, and also by journaling. When you have mindfulness, you can start to catalog your triggers and the ways you respond to them.
Some will be obvious. One of the triggers that my mindfulness noticed pretty quickly was the tendency to get upset at people in traffic who behaved other than the way I expected them to. Another, much less obvious trigger, was that when I sat down to write code for my job, I would quickly become frustrated when something went wrong, and would spend a lot of time being upset that it had gone wrong, blaming my tools, feeling bad about myself, and then after a while, when all of that stopped, the solution would become obvious.
Mindfulness at first allowed me to simply notice that this was happening. This was quite helpful, because even if the trigger went off, even if the conditioning (cycling through the denial, blaming, and self-hatred) happened, at some point mindfulness could kick in, and at that point I could stop and wait for the conditioning to stop doing its thing. Once it had stopped, the “solution becomes obvious” part of the cycle could happen. This was a definite improvement in terms of efficiency, although the conditioning was still very unpleasant.
So it became clear that mindfulness was very helpful. But it really wasn’t enough. I developed some degree of mindfulness over the course of my years as a Buddhist practitioner, but my dislike for my work continued to grow over time—my frustration for the state of the art in compilers and other tools, for example, was something I didn’t seem to get over.
This process of learning my conditioning and developing new conditioning to control my old conditioning was certainly an improvement, but it was not bringing happiness. What I needed was a way not to have a new trigger that could react to my old conditioning in a way that made it less bad. What I needed was to soften and perhaps eliminate some of that old conditioning.
What worked for me, that actually led to this being possible, was an awakening practice I did that changed my internal perspective enough that I was suddenly just a bit able to soften conditioning rather than just developing new conditioning to counteract it. This, surprisingly, brought immediate relief. Over time, I got better and better at softening and eliminating conditioning. This de-conditioning process has dramatically improved my experience of life. At this point, the conditioning I described earlier about work generally just doesn’t happen.
The reason I mention these two ways of benefiting from mindfulness is that I don’t hear this described explicitly very often when I hear teachings on the practice of virtue. I can remember one specific teaching I received from someone who’d been through an awakening process like the one I described just now, and he taught it as if everybody’s experience of mindfulness would be the same as his own. This was very frustrating for me, to the point where I started to lose faith in the process. So I really think it’s important to set expectations appropriately.
This is not to say that if you haven’t had some kind of awakening, you aren’t going to get any benefit from the practice of virtue. Far from it. Being able to notice your triggers and conditioning is useful even if all you get out of it are some useful tools for stopping yourself from spinning out of control when you are triggered. But that’s not all that you can get out of the practice.
If you decide to pursue awakening, you can develop quite powerful tools for de-conditioning. This is not a pipe dream. We are often told that awakening is rare, very difficult, only available to people with incredibly good karma, or whatever. Even if that’s true, how do you know that you aren’t a person with that good karma? If you’re not a Buddhist, this might sound a bit silly, but if you are, it can be a huge impediment to awakening: the belief that you can’t do it, that you don’t deserve it, that it’s only for special people, of whom you are not one. I know someone who, when that belief dropped, had an immediate and profound awakening. We don’t usually get that lucky, but whether we do or not, the belief that awakening is out of reach for us is worth questioning and challenging until at some point it drops.
Future work:
Talk about how the problems of straight de-conditioning
Talk about priming
Talk about the problem of awakened misbehavior and relate it to the practice of virtue—dispel the rumor that awakened persons are naturally virtuous.