What is the unconscious? For the Buddhist monk, the most profound aspect of consciousness is alert presence. For him, what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious only represents the random mists of mental fabrications. For the neuroscientist, precise criteria distinguish between conscious and unconscious processes, and it is important to identify everything that happens in the mind as it prepares for conscious cognitive processes. Then comes the question of emotions. How to neutralize conflicting situations? How does altruistic love differ from passionate love? Is love the highest emotion? Points of view coincide concerning the effectiveness of cognitive therapy.
Matthieu:
Let’s explore for a bit the notion of the unconscious, from neuroscientific and contemplative perspectives. Usually when people speak about the unconscious, they refer to something deep in our psyche that we cannot access with our ordinary consciousness. We certainly have the concept, in Buddhism, of habitual tendencies that are opaque to our awareness. These tendencies initiate various thought patterns that can either occur spontaneously or be triggered by some kind of external circumstance. Sometimes you are just sitting there, thinking of nothing in particular, and suddenly the thought of someone or a particular event or situation pops up in the mind, seemingly out of nowhere. From there, a whole chain of thoughts begins to unfold, and if you are not mindful, you can easily get lost in it.
The general public, psychologists, and neuroscientists surely have varying views about what the unconscious is. As for psychoanalysis, what it calls the depths of the unconscious are, from a contemplative perspective, the outer layers of clouds formed by mental confusion that temporarily prevent one from experiencing the most fundamental nature of mind. How can there be something unconscious in a state of pure awareness, devoid of mental construct? No darkness exists in the middle of the sun. For Buddhism, the deepest, most fundamental aspect of consciousness is this sun-like awareness, not the murky unconscious. Of course, this is all expressed from the first-person perspective, and I am sure that a neuroscientist approaching this issue from the third-person perspective will have a different view of the unconscious.
Wolf:
Yes, I see it a bit differently. As mentioned earlier, an enormous amount of knowledge is stored in the specific architectures of the brain, but we are not aware of most of these “given” heuristics, assumptions, concepts, and so on. These routines determine the outcomes of cognitive processes, which we are aware of, but the routines remain hidden in the unconscious. Usually we are not aware of the rules that govern the interpretation of sensory signals, the construction of our percepts, or the logic according to which we learn, decide, associate, and act.
We cannot move these implicit hypotheses and rules to the workspace of consciousness by focusing our attention on them, as is possible with contents stored, for example, in declarative memory, the memory in which we store what has been consciously experienced. Abundant evidence indicates that attentional mechanisms play a crucial role in controlling access to consciousness. When attended to, most signals from our senses can reach the level of conscious awareness. Exceptions are certain odors, such as pheromones, that are processed by special subsystems and cannot be perceived consciously. Then there are the many signals from within the body that are excluded from conscious processing, such as messages about blood pressure, sugar level, and so on. It cannot be emphasized enough, however, that signals permanently excluded from conscious processing as well as transitorily excluded signals such as nonattended sensory stimuli still have a massive impact on behavior. In addition, these unconscious signals can control attentional mechanisms and thereby determine which of the stored memories or sensory signals will be attended and transferred to the level of conscious processing.
Another constraint is the limited capacity of the workspace of consciousness. At any one moment in time, only a limited number of contents can be processed consciously. Whether these limitations are due to the inability to attend to large numbers of items simultaneously or whether they result from the restricted capacity of working memory or both is still a matter of scientific investigation. The capacity of the workspace is limited to four to seven different items. This finding corresponds to the number of contents that can be kept simultaneously in working memory. The phenomenon of change blindness, the inability to detect local changes in two images presented in quick succession, demonstrates impressively our inability to attend to and consciously process all features of an image simultaneously.
Perception is actually not as holistic as it appears to be. We scan complex scenes serially, and actually much of what we seem to perceive we are in fact reconstructing from memory. Which of the many signals actually reach the level of conscious awareness is determined by a host of factors, both conscious and unconscious. It depends on what we attend to, and this is controlled by either external cues, such as the saliency of a stimulus, or internal motifs, many of which we may not actually be aware of. Then it may occur that even an attentive, conscious search for content stored in declarative memory fails to raise it to the level of awareness. We are all familiar with the temporary inability to remember an episode or a name and then how a persisting subconscious search process may suddenly lift the content into the workspace of consciousness. It appears that we are not always capable of controlling which contents enter consciousness.
I consider the workspace of consciousness as the highest and most integrated level of brain function. Access to this workspace is privileged and controlled by attention. Moreover, the rules governing conscious deliberations such as consciously made decisions most likely differ from those of subconscious processes. The former are based mainly on rational, logical, or syntactic rules, and the search for solutions is essentially a serial process. Arguments and facts are scrutinized one by one and possible outcomes investigated. Hence, conscious processing takes time. Subconscious mechanisms seem to rely more on parallel processing, whereby a large number of neuronal assemblies, each of which represents a particular solution, enter into competition with one another. Then a “winner-takes-all” algorithm leads to the stabilization of the assembly that best fits the actual context of distributed activity patterns. Thus, the conscious mechanism is suited best to circumstances in which no time pressure exists, when not too many variables have to be considered, and when the variables are defined with sufficient precision to be subjected to rational analysis. The domains of subconscious processing are situations requiring fast responses or conditions where large numbers of underdetermined variables have to be considered simultaneously and weighed against variables that have no or only limited access to conscious processing, such as the wealth of implicit knowledge and heuristics, vague feelings, and hidden motives or drives.
The outcome of such subconscious processes manifests itself in either immediate behavioral responses or what are called “gut feelings.” It is often not possible to indicate with a rational argument why exactly one has responded in that way and why one feels that something is wrong or right. In experimental settings, one can even demonstrate that the rational arguments given for or against a particular response do not always correspond to the “real” causes. For complex problems with numerous entangled variables, it often turns out that subconscious processes lead to better solutions than conscious deliberations because of the wealth of heuristics exploitable by subconscious processing. Given the large amount of information and implicit knowledge to which consciousness has no or only sporadic access and the crucial importance of subconscious heuristics for decision making and the guidance of behavior, training oneself to ignore the voices of the subconscious would not be a helpful, well-adapted strategy.
Matthieu:
What you said corresponds with what Daniel Kahneman explains in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.1 Although we are generally convinced that we are rational, our decisions, economic or otherwise, are often irrational and strongly influenced by our immediate gut feelings, emotions, and situations to which we have been exposed immediately before taking a decision. Intuition is a highly adaptable faculty that allows us to make fast decisions in complex situations, but it also lures us into thinking that we have made a rational choice, which actually takes more time and deliberation.
I understand that a lot is going on in the brain to allow us to function and have coherent perceptions, memories, and so on. But I was thinking more of the pragmatic aspect of dealing with the particular tendencies that give rise to the afflictive mental states and emotions associated with suffering. My point was that if you know how to relate to pure awareness and rest within that space of awareness, when disturbing emotions arise, they dissolve as they appear and do not create suffering. If one is an expert in this, then there is no need to bother about what is going on down in the subconscious. It is more a question of method. Psychoanalysis, for instance, contends that you need to find a way to dig into those hidden impulses and identify them, whereas Buddhist meditation teaches you to free the thoughts as they arise.
By dwelling in the clarity of the present moment, you are free from all ruminations, upsetting emotions, frustrations, and other inner conflicts. If you learn to deal, moment after moment, with the arising of thoughts, then you can preserve your inner freedom, which is the desired goal of such training.
Wolf:
Here we seem to face rather divergent concepts of the virtues of subconscious processing and the way we should deal with the unconscious dimension of our mind. This brings me to a critical issue: the side effects of meditation. One could argue that a strategy consisting of closing one’s eyes when facing conflicts, in escaping from problems rather than solving them, is perhaps a suboptimal strategy. Let us assume that conflicts exist in the subconscious and that the rumination motivated by these conflicts serves to identify and settle them. Such conflicts could arise from ambiguous bonding between the child and her caretaker in early infancy or from conflicting imperatives imprinted by early education. The causes of such problems cannot easily surface in consciousness because they are part of implicit memories that have been formed prior to the maturation of declarative memory. Such conflicts jeopardize mental and physical health.
Humankind throughout its history has sought relief from such problems, with drugs, cultural activities, and, more recently, a host of specially designed therapies. Most of the latter require one to face the problem to cope with it. Another strategy, which is applied in cognitive and behavioral therapy, attempts to alleviate the problem by unlearning the habit using conditioning paradigms. If one suffers from a particular phobia, then one gets exposed to the threatening events and learns that they don’t cause harm, and after a while, one habituates to the threat and the problem may be solved.
Matthieu:
We surely need to get at the heart of the issue. But in the end, what we need is to be free from inner conflicts, one way or another, right? So, there might be ways that involve digging into the past as much as one can, with or without the help of a therapist, and then trying to solve the problem or trauma that has thus been identified, thereby freeing oneself from the afflictive effect. But there are also ways, including those used by Buddhism, that do not attempt to elude the problem but to free any conflicting thoughts that arise in the mind at the moment they arise. If you become expert in those methods, the so-called afflictive thoughts no longer have the power to afflict you because they undo themselves the moment they arise. But that is not all: Experience shows that by repeatedly doing so, you not only deal successfully with each individual arising of afflictive thoughts but you also slowly erode the tendencies for such thoughts to arise. So in the end, you are free of them entirely. Among contemporary Western therapies, cognitive and behavioral therapy also offer methods to attend precisely to a particular emotion that upsets you in the moment and deal with it in a reasonable and constructive way and has therefore some interesting similarities with the Buddhist approach.
Wolf:
Let us see what meditation could contribute to the resolution of conflicts that arise at levels inaccessible to conscious processing. I shall take a critical stance and use a real-world problem as an example. Imagine a conflict evolves between two partners that evokes uneasy feelings and causes lasting mental rumination in both parties. Their two ego bubbles fight against each other, as in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Love and passion exist between them, which are both difficult to control because they are anchored in subconscious spheres. The partners go into retreat and meditate, stop ruminating, and feel fine while they meditate alone in a protected environment. But will this solve the problem? Will they not resume fighting once they are back home, together, and confronted again with their problems?
Matthieu:
To openly confront our differences can be a way to pacify a conflict, but it is not the only one. To begin with, a conflict requires two protagonists confronting each other in antagonistic ways. One cannot clap with one hand only. In fact, if one of the persons involved disarms his or her own antagonistic mind, then it will contribute greatly to reducing the conflict with the other person.
We did an experiment at Berkeley with Paul Ekman and Robert Levenson, who, among other things, have been studying conflict resolution. In this case, they wanted me to have two conversations with two different people. The idea was to discuss a controversial topic—in this case, why a former biologist like me, who did research in a prestigious lab at Pasteur Institute, would ever choose not only to become a Buddhist monk but to believe in crazy things such as reincarnation. We were all fitted with all kinds of sensors detecting our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, skin conductivity and sweating, and body movements, and our facial expressions were recorded on a video camera, to be later analyzed in details for fleeting microexpressions. My first interlocutor was Professor Donald Glaser, a Nobel laureate in physics, who then moved to research in neurobiology. He was an extremely kind and open-minded person. Our discussion went well, and at the end of the 10 minutes, we both regretted not having more time to dialogue. Our physiological parameters indicated a calm, nonconflictual attitude. Then came in someone who had to be chosen because he was reputed to be a rather difficult person—he was not told about that of course! He knew that we were supposed to get into a heated debate and went straight into it. His physiology became immediately highly aroused. From my side, I tried my best to remain calm—I actually enjoyed it—and did my best to provide reasonable answers delivered in a friendly way. Soon enough, his physiology became calmer and calmer, and at the end of the 10 minutes, he told the researchers, “I can’t fight with this guy. He says reasonable things and smiles all the time.” So, as the Tibetan saying goes, “One cannot clap with one hand.”
As far as your own inner conflicts are concerned, if you use meditation simply as a quick fix to superficially appease your emotions, you temporarily enjoy a pleasant deferral of these inner conflicts. But as you rightly say, these cosmetic changes have not reached the root of the problem.
Merely putting problems to sleep for a while or trying to forcibly suppress strong emotions will not help either. You are just keeping a time bomb ticking somewhere in a corner of your mind.
True meditation, however, is not just taking a break. It is not simply closing one’s eyes to the problem for a while. Meditation goes to the root of the problem. You need to become aware of the destructive aspect of compulsive attachment and all of the conflictive mental states that you mentioned. They are destructive in the sense of undermining your happiness and that of others, and to counteract them you need more than just a calming pill. Meditation practice offers many kinds of antidotes.
A direct antidote is a state of mind that is diametrically opposed to the afflictive emotion you want to overcome, such as heat and cold. Benevolence, for instance, is the direct opposite of malevolence because you cannot wish simultaneously to benefit and harm the same person. Using this kind of antidote neutralizes the negative emotions that afflict us.
Let’s take the example of desire. Everyone would agree that desire is natural and plays an essential role in helping us to realize our aspirations. But desire in itself is neither helpful nor harmful. Everything depends on what kind of influence it has over us. It is capable of both providing inspiration in our life and poisoning it. It can encourage us to act in a way that is constructive for ourselves and others, but it can also bring about intense pain. The latter occurs when desire is associated with grasping and craving. It then causes us to become addicted to the causes of suffering. In that case, it is a source of unhappiness, and there is no advantage in continuing to be ruled by it. Here you may apply the antidote of inner freedom to the desire that causes suffering. You bring to your mind the comforting and soothing quality of inner freedom and spend a few moments allowing a feeling of freedom to be born and grow in you.
Because desire also tends to distort reality and project its object as something that you cannot live without, to regain a more accurate view of things, you may take the time to examine all aspects of the object of your desire and see how your mind has superimposed its own projections onto it. Finally, you let your mind relax into the state of awareness, free from hope and fear, and appreciate the freshness of the present moment, which acts like a balm to soothe the burning of desire. If you do that repeatedly and perseveringly—and this point is really the most important—this will gradually lead to a real change in the way you experience things all the time.
The second, even more powerful way to deal with afflictive emotions is to stop identifying with them: You are not the desire, you are not the conflict, and you are not the anger. Usually we identify with our emotions completely. When we become overwhelmed by desire, anxiety, or a fit of anger, we become one with it. It is omnipresent in our mind, leaving no room for other mental states such as inner peace, patience, or reasoning, which might calm our torments.
The antidote is to be aware of desire or anger, instead of identifying with it. Then the part of our mind that is aware of anger is not angry, it is simply aware. In other words, awareness is not affected by the emotion it is observing. Understanding that makes it possible to step back and realize that the emotion is actually devoid of solidity. We just need to provide an open space of inner freedom, and the internal affliction will dissolve by itself.
By doing so, we avoid two extremes, each as inefficient as the other: repressing our emotion, which would then remain as powerful as before, or letting the emotion flare up, at the expense of those around us and of our own inner peace. Not to identify with emotions is a fundamental antidote that is applicable to all kinds of emotions in any circumstance.
This method might seem difficult at the beginning, especially in the heat of the moment, but with practice, it will become easier to retain mastery of your mind and deal with the conflicting emotions of day-to-day life.
Wolf:
And love, that almighty power that is at the origin of so much suffering and joy, would this wonderful force also fade and turn us into lukewarm beings without passion?
Matthieu:
Not at all. The constructive aspect of love, at least altruistic love and what psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls the “positive resonance” between persons, has no reason to disappear. In fact, when you are free from mental distortions, it becomes even stronger, vaster, and more fulfilling.
As for romantic love, there is usually a strong component of grasping and self-centeredness that will most often turn into a cause of torment. In this kind of love, one is often loving oneself through the guise of loving someone else. To be a source of mutual happiness, genuine love has to be altruistic. This does not mean at all that one will not flourish oneself. Altruistic love is win-win, whereas selfish love soon turns into a lose-lose situation.
Wolf:
Can you selectively remove the grasping component?
Matthieu:
Yes, because the grasping component is most often experienced as conflict and torment and the letting go of it as a relief. Joy is felt in letting go. Grasping means, “I love you if you love me the way I want.” This situation is uncomfortable. How can you demand that someone should be the way you want her or him to be? That is unreasonable and unfair. Altruistic love and compassion can apply to any one person and can also be extended to all.
Wolf:
How object centered is this?
Matthieu:
The universal nature of extended altruism does not mean that it becomes a vague, abstract feeling, disconnected from reality. It should be applied spontaneously and pragmatically to every being who presents him or herself in the field of our attention. It can also focus more intensely on particular persons who are naturally close to us. The sun shines over all people equally, with the same brightness and warmth in every direction. Yet people in our lives—our family, our friends—who happened to be closer to the sun of our care, love, and compassion naturally receive more light and heat. This does not mean that this sun of compassion focuses its rays only on them in a discriminatory way, at the risk of actually shine less well on all.
Wolf:
How does this differ from the dreams of the flower power movement—dreams that did not pass the test of reality? They were based on similar assumptions: just share love and compassion, and everybody will be happy. It didn’t work out. Adolescents went from their natal family directly into the next family, the commune, without having been alone in between, without the chance to detach and mature. But it was seen as a way to get rid of the self-centered ego by sharing love, affection, responsibilities, and material goods. Is this an idea Buddhist societies would subscribe to?
Matthieu:
I can’t say what the flower power people really had in mind. When I mention extending love to more and more people, I did not mean being more and more promiscuous, of course. I meant extending altruistic love and compassion, which is quite different, isn’t it? As far as Buddhism is concerned, extending altruistic love to all certainly does not come at the cost of neglecting one’s own children. The example of the sun is apt: You give your full, undiminished love to those who are close to you, those for whom you are responsible, but you also preserve a complete openness and readiness to extend that altruism to whoever crosses your path in life. This does not have much to do with a collapse of personal relationships and with favoring sexual promiscuity, which is more likely to engender confusion and grasping. Unconditional altruism is a state of benevolence for all sentient beings, a state of mind in which hatred has no place.
Wolf:
It is a characteristic feature of love that it hurts when the beloved other is not around. Seeking one’s own pleasure may become sad if one cannot share that experience with one’s beloved.
Matthieu:
It should not only be when we see some beautiful natural scenery that we wish others could be there too; it should also be when we experience deep inner joy and serenity that we wish others may experience the same. This brings us back to the aspiration of the bodhisattva: “May I transform myself and achieve enlightenment so that I become able to free all beings from suffering.” This is a much vaster and deeper aspiration than simply wishing that a loved one might be there to see a beautiful sunset with you.
Wolf:
This sounds reasonable, generous, and mature, of course. But is it within the reach of human capacity? Human beings are uniquely able to bond with others, but when these bonds are stretched, they suffer. It seems to be a deep-rooted trait. When I listen to you, it seems to me as if you advocate a practice that promotes some kind of detachment. This can certainly reduce suffering and negative emotions such as hatred, revenge, envy, greed, jealousy, and aggression, but doesn’t it also damage the amplitude of the other strong, precious, and utterly joyful feelings associated with highs and lows at the same time? Do you really believe that we can extend our compassion far beyond our personal relations? After all, our cognitive abilities and emotional capacities have been selected by evolution to cope with social interactions within small groups of individuals who know each other. Are you not taking equanimity in the place of intensity?
Matthieu:
I don’t think so. Having inner peace and equanimity does not mean that you cease to experience things with depth and brilliance, nor does it necessitate a reduction in the quality of your love, affection, vivid openness to others, or joy. In fact, you can be all the more present to others and to the world because you are remaining in the freshness of the present moment instead of being carried away by wandering thoughts. What you call the “highs and lows” are like the surface of the ocean: sometimes stormy, sometimes calm. The effects of these highs and lows are heightened if you are near the shore, where there is little depth: sometimes you surf with euphoria on top of the wave, and the next moment you hit the sand or rocks and are in pain. But at high sea, when you have several thousand meters of depth below the surface, whether there are enormous waves or the surface of the ocean is like a mirror, the depth of the ocean below always exists. You will still experience joys and sorrows, but they will occur in the context of a much deeper, vaster mind. You may also remember that research in psychology and neuroscience indicates that states such as unconditional compassion and altruistic love seem to be the most positive among all positive emotions. Among various meditative states, the meditation on compassion is the one that produces the strongest activation of all. Researchers in positive psychology, such as Barbara Fredrickson, have concluded that love is the “supreme emotion” because, more than any other mental state, it opens our minds and allows us to view situations with a vaster perspective, be more receptive to others, and adopt flexible and creative attitudes and behavior.2 It causes an upward spiral of constructive mental states. It also makes us more resilient, allowing us to manage adversity better. These states are anything but dull or indifferent.
Harmonious relationships can provide the most wonderful opportunity to enhance the reciprocal feeling of lovingkindness. But you have to build up the inner depth so that this love is vaster than the state of being enraptured by someone and by your own attachment to the feeling this love gives you. Evolution gave us this capacity to feel love for a person who is special to us. This is the case in parental love, particularly maternal love. But we can use this capacity as the foundation for extending the circle of love further and further.
Earlier you asked about difficulty in a personal relationship. Obviously that can bring intense pain. Yet if you overflow with love toward all living beings, the distress caused by the sudden loss of a dear one will be less disruptive because a vast amount of love still resides in your heart ready to be expressed toward many others.
If such distress occurs, then you should examine its nature. Is it provoked by the fact that your self-centered love has been upset? Does it prevent you from giving love to and receiving love from others? In truth, the more inner peace and contentment you experience, the more you can stand on your own two feet in a loving rather than an egotistical way.
Wolf:
This reduced vulnerability to suffering is then not restricted to monastic life?
Matthieu:
That would be a pretty limited application of inner strength! We all have the potential for it because it results from a genuine understanding of the ways the mind works and the cultivation of compassion and inner contentment.
Wolf:
Perhaps we should impose two years of meditation practice before people get married, rather than military service.
Matthieu:
Great idea! People should do that before engaging in any path in life, in fact. In the humanitarian world where I work, you can see that what often derail great humanitarian projects are human shortcomings: corruption, clashes of egos, and so on. The best training for nongovernmental organizations might be to ask all humanitarian workers to do a three-month retreat on altruistic love and compassion. Paul Ekman once told me that we should have a “compassion gymnasium” in every city. Truly, many ways exist to actualize the potential we have to enhance our own basic human qualities through mind training.
One of my teachers told me that to be able to feel unconditional compassion, one needs to develop fearlessness. If you are excessively self-centered, then you naturally feel insecure and threatened by everything around you. But if you are primarily concerned with others and not obsessed with yourself, why should you be so fearful? These qualities could be taught at school in a secular way as part of a program for cultivating emotional balance and fortitude. But for this we would need teachers who are familiar with the way emotions work.
Wolf:
Many of us obviously suffer from exactly this problem. We feel uneasy because of some inner conflict, and then we go to work and divert our attention by concentrating on other immediate problems, repress our emotions, and get along until the problems inevitably find a way in again through the backdoor and then require even more effort to be masked and refuted. Obviously, this vicious circle could be interrupted if we invested time and effort from the outset to identify the nature of the shadows.
Matthieu:
I think the cognitive therapy technique comes quite close to that. When I met him, Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive and behavioral therapy, told me he was struck by its convergences with the approach of Buddhism.3
Figuring among the similarities Aaron Beck noticed was eliminating the “six main mental afflictions”: attachment, anger and hostility, arrogance and mental confusion, which are to be slowly replaced by serenity, compassion and inner freedom. He also noted similarities in the application of procedures and meditation techniques aiming to reduce the mental fabrications leading to these afflictions: in particular, being absorbed in intransigent egocentricity.
One of the aims of cognitive therapies is in fact to gain awareness of the mental fabrications and exaggerations that individuals superimpose on certain events and situations. Cognitive therapies and Buddhism also aim to successfully reduce people’s tendency to assign the highest priority, and sometimes exclusive priority, to their own objectives and desires, to the detriment of other people and often their own well-being and mental health. Beck notes that people suffering from psychotic problems experience intensified self-focalization: They relate everything to themselves and are exclusively concerned with the fulfillment of their own wants and needs. It must also be said that “normal” people often display the same type of egocentricity but to a lesser extent and in a more subtle way. Buddhism tries to diminish these characteristics.
What we really need is to identify the mental events that arise in our mind and skillfully resolve them. Many of the things that continue upsetting us are superimpositions on reality, mental fabrications that we can easily deconstruct. We need to be more skillful in paying attention to all the nuances of what is actually happening in our mind and in successfully freeing ourselves from being enslaved by our own thoughts. This is how one can gain inner freedom.
We invest a lot of effort in improving the external conditions of our lives, but in the end, it is always the mind that experiences the world and translates these outer conditions into either well-being or suffering. If we are able to transform the way we perceive things, then we will transform at the same time the quality of our lives. The normal mind is often confused, agitated, rebellious, and subject to innumerable automatic patterns. The goal is not to shut down the mind and make it like a vegetable, but rather to make it free, lucid, and balanced.
Wolf:
I fully agree but wish to maintain that there may be many different ways to get there. Different cultures propose different strategies, extending from Socratic dialogues about the essence of things and the human condition to a host of spiritual practices, most of them embedded in religious systems, to humanistic stances based on the ideals of enlightenment, to distinct educational programs, and finally to therapeutic interventions. Would it not be desirable to devote some effort to the identification of the most efficient and practical strategies?
Matthieu:
Of course there are many ways to get there. In Buddhism alone, one speaks of 84,000 gates to the path of liberation. What matters is which method actually works for you, according to your own mental dispositions, life circumstances, and capacities. If you want to open a door, then you need the right key. There is no point in choosing a golden key if it is the old rusted iron key that actually opens the door.
Wolf:
As far as I can tell, the most efficient strategy so far has been the codification of human rights in modern, democratic constitutions and the installation of sanctions for violating social norms—hand in hand with the development of political and economic systems that protect the freedom of individuals and optimize equality. Surely these measures have to go together with transformations of the individuals embedded in these systems to have the greatest impact. If external causes for suffering are reduced and if social and governmental structures are such that compassion, altruism, justice, and responsibility are recognized and rewarded, then human beings are more likely to exhibit such traits and vice versa.
Matthieu:
Society and its institutions influence and condition individuals, but individuals can in turn make society and institutions evolve as well. As this interaction continues over the course of generations, culture and individuals keep on shaping each other. Cultural evolution can be applied to both moral values—certain values are more apt to be transmitted from one individual to another—and beliefs in general, insofar as certain beliefs give people greater chances of surviving.
If we want to encourage a more caring and humane society to develop, it is important to evaluate the respective capacities for change of both individuals and society. If humans had no ability to evolve by themselves, it would be better to concentrate all our efforts on transforming institutions and society and not waste time encouraging individual transformation. But the experience of contemplatives, on the one hand, and the research on neuroplasticity and epigenetics, on the other, has shown that individuals can change.
Wolf:
Of course. Otherwise we would not invest much hope in the possibility for education to nurture character traits that reduce individual suffering and contribute to the stabilization of peaceful societies. But the effectiveness of education is undisputed, and so is the value of attitudes that you claim result from contemplative training. It should be investigated whether current scientific evidence shows that meditation has the transformative power you advocate or that societies in which contemplative practices are widespread live in greater peace and inflict less suffering on their members than societies in which such practices are uncommon.