Have you ever looked at a dog and really seen it in its total “dogness”? A dog is quite miraculous when you really see it. What is it? Where did it come from? Where is it going? What is it doing here? Why is it shaped the way it is? What is its “view” of things, of the neighborhood? What are its feelings?
Children tend to think about things this way. Their vision is fresh. They see things as if for the first time every time. Sometimes our seeing gets tired. We just see a dog: “If you’ve seen one dog, you’ve seen them all.” So we barely see it at all. We tend to see more through our thoughts and opinions than through our eyes. Our thoughts act as a kind of veil, preventing us from seeing things with fresh eyes. What comes into view is identified by the thinking, categorizing mind and quickly framed: a dog. This frame of mind actually prevents us from seeing the dog in its fullness. It processes and categorizes the “dog” signal and all its various associations very quickly in our brain and then moves on to do the same with the next perception or thought.
When our son was two years old, he wanted to know if there was a person inside our dog. It warmed my heart to see through his eyes in that moment. I knew why he was asking. Sage was a real family member. He had his rightful place. His presence was felt. He was a complete being. He participated along with everyone else in the psychic space of the home, as much a “personality” as any of the people in the family. What could I say to him?
Never mind dogs. What about a bird, or a cat, or a tree, or a flower, or a rhinoceros? They are all quite miraculous really. When you really look at one, when you truly apprehend it, you can hardly believe it exists; here it is, this perfect thing, alive, just being what it is, complete in itself. Any imaginative child could have dreamed up a rhinoceros, or an elephant, or a giraffe. But they didn’t get here as the product of a child’s imagination. The universe is spinning these dreams. They come out of the universe, as do we.
It doesn’t hurt to keep this in mind on a daily basis. It would help us to be more mindful. All life is fascinating and beautiful when the veil of our routinized thinking lifts, even for a moment.
There are many different ways of looking at any thing or event or process. In one way, a dog is just a dog, and there is nothing special about it; at the same time, it is extraordinary, even miraculous. It all depends on how you are looking at it. We might say that it is both ordinary and extraordinary. The dog doesn’t change when you change the way you look—and therefore what you see. It is always just what it is. That is why dogs and flowers and mountains and the sea are such great teachers. They reflect your own mind. It is your mind that changes.
When your mind changes, new possibilities tend to arise. In fact, everything changes when you can see things on different levels simultaneously, when you can see fullness and connectedness as well as individuality and separateness. Your thinking expands in scope. This can be a profoundly liberating experience. It can take you beyond your limited preoccupations with yourself. It can put things in a larger perspective. It will certainly change the way you relate to the dog.
When you observe things through the lens of mindfulness, whether it be during formal meditation practice or in daily living, you invariably begin to appreciate things in a new way because your very perceptions change. Ordinary experiences may suddenly be seen as extraordinary. This does not mean that they stop being ordinary. Each is still just what it is. It’s just that now you are appreciating them more in their fullness, and that, it turns out, changes everything.
Let’s take eating as an example once again. Eating is an ordinary activity. We do it all the time, usually without much awareness and without thinking much about it. We have seen this already in the eating meditation exercise with the raisins. But the fact that your body can digest food and derive energy from it is extraordinary. The process by which this is accomplished is exquisitely organized and regulated at every level, from the ability of your tongue and cheeks to keep the food between your teeth so that it can be chewed, to the stepwise biochemical processes by which it is broken down and absorbed and used to fuel your body and rebuild its cells, to the effective elimination of the waste products of this process so that toxins do not accumulate and the body remains in metabolic and biochemical balance.
In fact, everything your body normally does is quite wonderful and extraordinary, though you may hardly ever think of it this way. Walking is another good example. If you have ever been unable to walk, you will know how precious and miraculous walking is. It is an extraordinary capability. So are seeing and talking, thinking and breathing, being able to turn over in bed, and anything else your body does that you choose to focus on.
A little reflecting on your body will easily lead you to conclude that it does wondrous things, all of which you probably take completely for granted. When was the last time you gave some thought to the remarkable job your liver is doing, for instance? It is the largest internal organ in your body, performing more than thirty thousand enzymatic reactions per second to ensure metabolic harmony. Dr. Lewis Thomas, a great immunologist and former chancellor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, wrote in his classic book The Lives of a Cell that he would rather be given the controls of a 747, knowing nothing about how to fly, than be responsible for the functioning of his liver.
And what about your heart, or your brain and the rest of your nervous system? Do you ever think about them when they are doing their job well? If you do, do you see them as ordinary or extraordinary? What about your eyes’ ability to see, your ears’ ability to hear, the ability of your arms and legs to move just where you want them to, the ability of your feet to keep your whole body balanced when standing and to carry your weight and transport you without losing your balance and stumbling while walking? These capacities of the body are quite extraordinary. Our well-being depends intimately and entirely on the integrated functioning of all our senses—of which we have well more than five—along with our muscles and nerves, our cells, our organs, and organ systems at all times. Yet we tend not to see and think in this way, and so we forget or are ignorant of the fact that our body is truly wondrous. It is a universe in itself, consisting of more than 10 trillion cells that all ultimately derive from one single cell, organized into tissues and organs and systems and structures, and with a built-in ability to regulate itself as a whole to maintain internal balance and order down to the nano level of interacting molecular structures. In a word, our bodies are undeniably self-organizing and self-healing at every level you care to look at. This is one reason why we see the participants in MBSR classes as “miraculous beings”—it turns out we all are.
The body accomplishes and maintains this inner balance through finely tuned feedback loops that interconnect and integrate all aspects of the organism. For instance, when you exert yourself, as in running or climbing stairs, your heart will automatically pump more blood to provide more oxygen to your muscles so that they can perform the task. When the exertion is over, the output of the heart returns to a resting level and the muscles that got you up the stairs, including, of course, your heart, recuperate. The exertion may also have generated a lot of heat if it lasted awhile. This might have caused you to sweat. This is your body’s way of cooling off. If you did sweat a lot, you will feel thirsty and drink something, your body’s way of ensuring that the lost fluid will be replaced. All these are highly integrated, interconnected regulatory processes operating through elaborate feedback loops.
Such interconnections are built into living systems. When the skin is cut, biochemical signals are sent out and cellular blood-clotting processes set in motion that stop the bleeding and heal the wound. When the body is infected by microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses, the immune system goes into action to identify, isolate, and neutralize them. If any of our own cells lose the feedback loops that control cell growth and become cancerous, a healthy immune system will mobilize specific types of lymphocytes, called natural killer cells, that can recognize structural changes on the surface of the cancerous cells and destroy them before they can cause damage.
On every level of organization, from the molecular biology of the interior of our cells right down to the level of our genome and to the functioning of entire organs and organ systems, our biology is regulated by information flow, which connects each part of the system to the other parts that are important for its functioning. The incredible network of interconnections by which the nervous system monitors, regulates, and integrates all of our organ functions, the countless hormones and neurotransmitters released by specialized glands, by the brain itself, and by the entire nervous system, which in concert transmit chemical messages to targets throughout the body via the bloodstream and nerve fibers, as well as the panoply of different specialized cells in the immune system—all play varied but crucial roles in organizing and regulating this flow of information in the body so that you can function as an integrated, coherent, whole being.
If interconnectedness is crucial for physical integration and health, it is equally important psychologically and socially. Our senses allow us to connect with external reality as well as with our internal states. They give us essential information about the environment and about other people that allows us to organize a coherent impression of the world, to function in “psychological space,” to learn, to remember things, to reason, to respond or react with emotion—everything that we mean when we use the word mind. Without these coherent impressions, we would be unable to function in even the most basic ways in the world. So the organization of the body allows for a psychological order that arises out of the physical order and also contains it. How amazing! At each level of our being there is a wholeness that is itself embedded in a larger wholeness. And that wholeness is always embodied. It cannot be separated from the body and from an exquisite and intimate belonging to the larger expression of life unfolding. This can be seen in the discovery of what are called “mirror neurons,” networks of cells in the brain that fire in us when we see someone else engaged in a particular intentional action. These mirror neurons may underlie our biological capacity for empathy, for “feeling with” another individual.
This web of interconnectedness extends well beyond our individual psychological self. While we are whole ourselves as individual beings, we are also part of a larger whole, interconnected through our family and our friends and acquaintances to the larger society and, ultimately, to the whole of humanity and life on the planet. Beyond the ways in which we can perceive through our senses and through our emotions that we are connected with the world, there are also the countless ways in which our being is intimately woven into the larger patterns and cycles of nature that we only know about through science and through thinking (although even here, indigenous peoples always knew and respected these aspects of interconnectedness in their own ways as natural laws). To mention just a few, we depend on the ozone layer in the atmosphere to protect us from lethal ultraviolet radiation; we depend on the rain forests and oceans to recycle the oxygen we breathe; we depend on a relatively stable carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere to buffer global temperature changes. In fact, one scientific view, known as the Gaia hypothesis, is that the earth as a whole behaves as one single self-regulating living organism, given the name Gaia after the Greek goddess of the earth. This hypothesis affirms a view based on strong scientific evidence and reasoning that was, in essence, also held by all traditional cultures and peoples, a world in which all life, including human life, is interconnected and interdependent—and that interconnectedness and interdependence extends to the very earth itself.
The ability to perceive interconnectedness and wholeness in addition to separateness and fragmentation can be cultivated through mindfulness practice. Partly it comes from recognizing how quick our mind is to jump to a particular way of seeing things out of habit or out of unawareness, how easily our views of events and of ourselves are shaped by prejudices, beliefs, likes, and dislikes that we acquired at earlier times. If we hope to see things more clearly, as they actually are, and thereby perceive their intrinsic wholeness and interconnectedness, we have to be mindful of the ruts our thinking gets us into and the tacit assumptions we make all the time about things and people. We have to learn to see and approach things somewhat differently.
To illustrate the automatic nature of our patterns of seeing and thinking, as well as the power inherent in keeping wholeness in mind, we give the following exercise to the people in the Stress Reduction Clinic as a homework “problem” in the very first class. It usually generates a good deal of stress during the week, because some people invariably think that they are going to be judged by their answers—a holdover, no doubt, from our days in school. By design we don’t say anything until the next class about how this puzzle might relate to what they are doing in the program. We leave that for them to come to on their own. We call it the problem of the nine dots. You may know it from your own childhood. It is a vivid and easily grasped example of how the way we perceive a problem tends to limit our ability to see solutions to it.
The problem is as follows: Below is an arrangement of nine dots. Your assignment is to connect up all the dots by making four straight lines without lifting your pencil and without retracing along any line. Before you turn the page, spend five or ten minutes trying to solve this puzzle yourself if you don’t already know the answer.
What invariably happens with most people is that they start out in one corner and draw three lines around the square. Then the light dawns! One of the dots will be left out this way.
FIGURE 8
At this point the mind can experience a modicum of distress. The more solutions you try that don’t work, the more frustrated you can become.
When we go over it in class the following week, we ask all those people who do not know the answer to watch carefully what their reaction is when all of a sudden they “see” the solution when a volunteer draws it on the blackboard.
When you see or discover for yourself the solution to this problem, especially after you have been struggling with it for a while, there is usually an “aha!” experience at the moment of discovery. This is associated with the realization that the solution lies in extending the lines you draw beyond the imaginary square that the dots make. The problem as stated does not prevent you from going outside the dots, but the “normal” tendency is to see the nine-dot square pattern as the field of the problem, rather than seeing the dots in the context of the paper and recognizing that the field of the problem is the whole surface that contains the dots.
If you isolate the nine dots by themselves as the domain of the problem because of the automatic way in which you perceive things and think about them, you will never find a satisfactory solution to this problem. As a consequence, you may wind up blaming yourself for being stupid, or getting angry at the problem and proclaiming it impossible or foolish, and certainly irrelevant to your health concerns. All the while, you are putting your energy in the wrong place. You are not seeing the full domain of the problem. You are missing the larger context and therefore, possibly, the potential relevance of the problem to your own situation.
The problem of the nine dots suggests that we may need to take a broader view of certain problems if we hope to solve them. This approach involves asking ourselves what the extent of the problem actually is and discerning the relationship between the various isolated parts of the problem and the problem as a whole. This is called adopting a systems perspective. If we do not identify the system correctly in its entirety, we will never be able to come to a satisfactory solution of the problem because a key domain will always be missing: the domain of the whole.
The problem of the nine dots teaches us that we may have to expand beyond our habitual, highly conditioned ways of seeing, thinking, and acting in order to solve, resolve, or even dissolve certain kinds of problems. If we don’t, our attempts to identify and solve our problems will usually be thwarted by our own prejudices and preconceptions. Our lack of awareness of the system as a whole will often prevent us from seeing new options and new ways of approaching problems. We will have a tendency to get stuck in our problems and our crises and to make faulty decisions and choices by misapprehending the actuality of things and circumstances. Rather than penetrating through problems to the point where solutions are reached, when we get stuck there is a tendency to make more problems, and to make them worse, and also to give up trying to solve them. Such experiences can lead to feelings of frustration, inadequacy, and insecurity. When self-confidence becomes eroded, it just makes it harder to solve any other problems that come along. Our doubts about our own abilities become self-fulfilling prophecies. They can come to dominate our lives. In this way, we effectively impose limits on ourselves via our own thought processes. Then, too often, we forget that we have created these boundaries all on our own. Consequently, we get stuck and feel we can’t get beyond them.
You can get a closer look at this process on a day-to-day level by being mindful of your own inner dialogue and beliefs and how they affect what you wind up doing in certain situations. Unless we are practicing mindfulness, we rarely observe our inner dialogue with any clarity and ponder its validity, especially when it concerns our thoughts and beliefs about ourselves. For instance, if you have the habit of saying to yourself “I could never do that” when you encounter some kind of problem or dilemma, such as learning to use a tool, or fixing a mechanical device, or speaking up for yourself in front of a group of people, one thing is pretty certain—you won’t be able to do it. At that moment, your thought fulfills or makes real its own content. Saying “I can’t …” or “I could never …” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you are in the habit of thinking about yourself in this way, by the time you have a chance to act or to do something to solve a challenging problem you may be facing, you may have already put yourself in a box of your own creation and limited your possibilities. The fact is, in many situations you really do not know what you are capable of doing at any particular moment. You might surprise yourself if you took on a problem, just for fun, and tried something new, even if you didn’t know what you were doing and even if you inwardly doubted your ability to do it. I have fixed many a clock and car door that way, sometimes learning about clocks and doors in the process but sometimes managing to fix it just by fiddling with it without having the foggiest idea about how it got fixed.
The point is that we don’t always know what our true limits are. However, if your beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings are always producing reasons for not taking on new challenges, for not taking risks, for not exploring what might be possible for you at the limits of your understanding and your beliefs, for not looking at what the entire scope of a problem might be and at your relationship to it, then you may be severely and unnecessarily limiting your own learning, your own growth, and your ability to make positive changes in your life. Whether it is losing weight, giving up cigarettes once and for all, not yelling at your kids all the time, going back to school, starting your own business, or finding out what there is to live for when you have experienced a deep personal loss or are in the middle of a momentous change in your life that threatens your well-being and everything you hold dear, what you can do will very strongly depend on how you see things, on your beliefs about your own limits and resources, and on your views concerning life itself. As we will see in Chapter 15, our beliefs and attitudes, our thoughts and emotions, can actually have a major influence on our health. In the Stress Reduction Clinic, most people rise to the challenge and take on the risks of turning toward and facing the full catastrophe of their situations with greater mindfulness and heartfulness. In the process, they often surprise themselves and their families with their newfound courage and clarity; they discover their limits receding; and they find themselves capable of doing things they never thought they could do, buoyed up by a new sense of wholeness and connectedness within themselves.
Wholeness and connectedness are what are most fundamental in our nature as living beings. No matter how many scars we carry from what we have gone through and suffered in the past, our intrinsic wholeness is still here: what else contains the scars? None of us has to be a helpless victim of what was done to us or what was not done for us in the past, nor do we have to be helpless in the face of what we may be suffering now. We are also what was present before the scarring—our original wholeness, what was born whole. And we can reconnect with that intrinsic wholeness at any time, because its very nature is that it is always present. It is who we truly are. So when we make contact with the domain of being in the meditation practice, we are already, in a profound sense, beyond the scarring, beyond the isolation and fragmentation and suffering we may be experiencing. This means that as long as we are breathing, it is always possible to make meaningful inroads into the harmful effects of past trauma to at least some degree, and that degree is always unknown when we begin. It means that it is always possible for us to recognize, work with, and possibly transcend fragmentation, fear, vulnerability, insecurity, even despair, if we can manage to come to see differently, to see with eyes of wholeness.
Perhaps more than anything else, the work of MBSR involves helping people to see and feel and believe in their wholeness, helping them to tend, befriend, and mend the wounds of disconnectedness and the pain of feeling isolated, fragmented, and separate, and helping them to discover an underlying fabric of wholeness and connectedness within themselves. Obviously this is the work of a lifetime. For our patients, the Stress Reduction Clinic is often the first conscious, intentional step as an adult in this lifelong process.
Clearly the body is an ideal place to begin. In the first place, as we have seen, it is convenient. It is also a door to the larger world, in that what we see in the workings of our body teaches us many lessons that apply in other domains of our lives. What’s more, our bodies usually require some healing. We all carry around at least some physical and psychological tension and armor. At the very least, it is likely that most of us have encountered some degree of personal harm or injury, some stress to the system that was traumatic, either physically, emotionally, or both. Some psychologists speak of this as “little-t trauma,” to distinguish it from the catastrophe of “big-T trauma,” such as that experienced by Mary, as described in Chapter 5. Whatever we have experienced and have survived, whether it took the form of big-T trauma or little-t trauma, our body, our mind, and our heart, which only seem separate, constitute a profound resource for healing. If we listen carefully to the body, it can teach us a great deal about what is most difficult for us to recognize and come to terms with from the past, and how we might approach our hurt with kindness and wisdom. It has a great deal to teach us about stress and pain, illness and health, and about suffering and the possibility of freeing ourselves from suffering. Mindfulness is a key ingredient in approaching and nurturing what is deepest and best and forever unharmed within ourselves.
Given the centrality of the body in the healing process, and how much pain and hurt it may be carrying (the root meaning in Latin of the verb “to suffer”), it is not surprising that we devote a good deal of attention to the breath, which you could think of as a bridge between the body and our emotional life. It also explains why MBSR starts out with two weeks of practicing the body scan every day, why we tune in so systematically to sensations in different regions of our body, why we cultivate a sense of our body as a whole, why we pay attention to such basics as eating, walking, moving, and stretching. All these facets of our body’s experience are doors through which, from the beginning, we can catch glimpses of our own wholeness. In time and through daily practice, we can walk through those doors more and more frequently and inhabit that wholeness in full awareness. This process of befriending awareness itself and learning how to inhabit it is always much more important than the particular objects of attention we choose to focus on, important as they are. Through ongoing practice, we can come to live in a more integrated way from day to day and from moment to moment, in touch with our own wholeness and connectedness and aware of our interconnectedness with others, with the larger world in which we find ourselves, and with life itself. Feeling whole, even for brief moments, nourishes us on a deep level. It is a source of healing and wisdom when we are faced with stress and pain in all the various forms that stress and pain can take.
You probably won’t be too surprised to learn that the very word health itself means “whole.” Whole implies integration, an interconnectedness of all parts of a system or organism, a completeness. The nature of wholeness is that it is always present. Someone who has had an arm amputated or has lost some other part of the body, or who faces death from an incurable disease, is still fundamentally whole. Yet he or she will have to come to terms with the physical loss or the meaning of the prognosis to experience that wholeness. This will certainly entail profound changes in one’s view of oneself and of the world and of time, even of life itself. It is this process of coming to terms with things as they are that embodies the process of healing.
While every living organism is whole in itself, it is also embedded in a larger wholeness. We are whole in our bodies, but as we have already seen, our bodies are constantly exchanging matter and energy with the environment. So although our bodies are complete, they are also constantly changing. Our bodies are literally immersed in a larger whole, namely, the environment, the planet, the universe. Looked at in this way, health is a dynamical process. It is not a fixed state that you “get” and then hold on to.
The notion of wholeness is found not only in the meaning of the words health and healing (and, of course, in the word holy); we also find it embedded in the deep meaning of the words meditation and medicine, words that are obviously related to each other in some way. According to renowned polymath David Bohm, a theoretical physicist whose work involved exploring wholeness as a fundamental property of nature, the words medicine and meditation come from the Latin mederi, which means “to cure.” Mederi itself derives from an earlier Indo-European root meaning “to measure.”
Now what might the concept of measure have to do with either meditation or medicine? Nothing, if we are thinking of measure in the usual way, as the process of comparing the dimensions of an object to an external standard. But the concept of “measure” has another ancient, more Platonic meaning. This is the notion that all things have, in Bohm’s words, their own “right inward measure” that makes them what they are, that gives them their properties. Medicine, seen in this light, is basically the means by which right inward measure is restored when it is disturbed by disease, illness, or injury. Meditation, by the same token, is the process of perceiving directly the right inward measure of one’s own being through careful, non-judgmental self-observation. Right inward measure, in this context, is another way of saying wholeness. So it may not be as farfetched as it may first appear to have a clinic based on training in meditation in a medical center.
The choice of meditation training, and in particular mindfulness meditation training, as the central and unifying element of MBSR and the program of the Stress Reduction Clinic was not arbitrary. Mindfulness meditation training as it is taught in MBSR has unique characteristics that distinguish it from the many relaxation techniques and stress reduction approaches in common use. The most important is that it is a door into direct experiences of wholeness, experiences not so easily tapped and deepened by methods that perpetually focus on doing and on getting somewhere rather than on non-doing and being. According to Dr. Roger Walsh, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the School of Medicine of the University of California at Irvine, meditation is best described as a consciousness discipline. Dr. Walsh, a longtime mindfulness practitioner himself and student of the interface between Eastern and Western psychologies, emphasizes that the consciousness disciplines are based on a profoundly different paradigm from that of mainstream Western psychology. From the perspective of the consciousness disciplines, our ordinary state of waking consciousness is severely suboptimal. Rather than contradicting the Western paradigm, this perspective simply extends it beyond psychology’s dominant concern, at least until very recently, with pathology and with therapies aimed at restoring people to “normal” functioning in the usual waking state of consciousness. At the heart of this “orthogonal,” paradigm-breaking perspective lies the conviction that it is essential for a person to engage in a personal, intensive, and systematic training of the mind through the discipline of meditation practice to free himself or herself from the incessant and highly conditioned distortions characteristic of our everyday emotional and thought processes, distortions that, as we have seen, can continually undermine the experiencing of our intrinsic wholeness.
Many great minds have been preoccupied with the notion of wholeness and how to realize it in one’s own life. Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, held the meditative traditions of Asia in very high regard in this connection. He wrote, “This question [of coming to wholeness] has occupied the most adventurous minds of the East for more than two thousand years, and in this respect, methods and philosophical doctrines have been developed that simply put all Western attempts along these lines into the shade.” Jung well understood the relationship between meditation practice and the realization of wholeness.
Albert Einstein also clearly articulated the importance of seeing with eyes of wholeness. In the last class of the eight-week MBSR program, we give our patients a booklet that closes with the following quotation from a letter of Einstein’s that appeared in the New York Times on March 29, 1972. I cut it out of the newspaper on that day and still have it tucked away, now yellowed with age and brittle to the touch. This statement is particularly meaningful to me, in part because it captures so well the essence of the meditation practice, and also because it comes from the scientist who, more than any other, revolutionized our understanding of physical reality and demonstrated the unity of space and time and of matter and energy.
When Einstein was living in Princeton, working at the Institute for Advanced Study, he used to receive letters from people from all over the world asking for his advice about their personal problems. He had a unique reputation for wisdom among laypeople throughout the world because of his scientific achievements, which few understood but most people knew were revolutionary. But he also had a profound reputation for compassion because of his kindly face and his outspoken involvement in humanitarian causes. He was thought of by many people as “the smartest man in the world,” although he himself could never understand the big fuss people made over him. The following passage comes from a letter he wrote in response to a rabbi who had written explaining that he had sought in vain to comfort his nineteen-year-old daughter over the death of her sister, a “sinless, beautiful, sixteen-year-old child.” The letter to Einstein was clearly a cry for help, coming out of one of the most painful of human experiences, the death of a child. Einstein replied:
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
In his reply, Einstein is suggesting that we can easily become imprisoned in and blinded by our own thoughts and feelings because they are so endemically self-centered, concerned solely with the particulars of our own lives and our own desires. He is not belittling the suffering we experience at such a loss. Not at all. But he is saying that our overwhelming preoccupation with our own separate lives imprisons us by ignoring and obscuring another, more fundamental level of reality. In his view, we all come into and go out of this world as quickly passing gatherings of highly structured energy. Einstein is reminding us to see wholeness as more fundamental than separateness. He is reminding us that our experience of ourselves as separate and enduring is a delusion, and ultimately, imprisoning.
Of course we are separate in the sense that our lives are localized in time (a lifetime) and space (a body). We do have particular thoughts and feelings and unique, wonderful, love-filled relationships, and we suffer greatly and understandably when those bonds and connections are ruptured, especially when death comes to the young. But at the same time, is it not equally true that we are all here and gone in an instant, little eddies or whirlpools in a flowing current, waves briefly rising on an ocean of wholeness? As eddies and waves, our lives do have a certain uniqueness, but they are also the stuff of a larger wholeness expressing itself in ways that ultimately surpass our comprehension.
Einstein is reminding us that when we neglect the perspective of wholeness and connectedness, we see only one side of being alive. This view inflates the sense of my life, my problems, my loss, my pain as what is supremely important and prevents us from seeing another, very real dimension of our own being that is not so separate or unique. When we identify ourselves with a permanent, solid “self,” it is a delusion of consciousness, a form of self-imprisonment, according to Einstein. Elsewhere he wrote that “the true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.”
Einstein’s remedy for this dilemma of the delusion and tyranny of what we might call the small self, which he exemplified in large measure in his own life, is for us to break out of this “optical delusion” of consciousness by intentionally cultivating compassion for all life, and an appreciation of ourselves and of “all living creatures” as part of the infinitely interconnected natural world in all its beauty. In suggesting this as a way to freedom and inner security, Einstein was not merely speaking romantically or philosophically. He understood that it takes a certain kind of work to achieve liberation from the prison of our own thought habits and delusions. He also knew that such work is intrinsically healing.
Coming back to the problem of the nine dots, we have seen that how we perceive a problem, and by extension how we perceive the world and also ourselves, can have a profound influence over what we are capable of doing and how much we are capable of loving. Seeing with eyes of wholeness means recognizing that nothing occurs in isolation, that problems need to be seen within the context of whole systems. Seeing in this way, we can perceive the intrinsic web of interconnectedness underlying our experience and merge with it. Seeing in this way is healing. It helps us to acknowledge the ways in which we are extraordinary and miraculous, without losing sight of the ways in which we are simultaneously nothing special, just part of a larger whole unfolding, waves on the sea, rising up and falling back in brief moments we call life spans.