Transforming Internal Formations pt. 8
How long would you like for it to take Jim Bootman to completely transform his workplace anxiety? Should he transform it as quickly as possible? What does, “as quickly as possible,” mean? This is not a choose your own adventure question, for us or for Jim. That is why the next period we will enter into is going to be one of non-transformation. For the sake of dramatic effect, I will give it a name that is not appealing.
Stagnation
Would Jim be letting himself down if he stopped working on transforming his anxiety? We have a concrete case before us in which to explore this question, the case of the conflict with his wife. Let’s ignore for the moment that this formation was partially conditioned by his anxiety and treat it as an entirely isolated issue. When Jim was lying in bed late at night staring wide-eyed at his ceiling and doing his very best to bring compassionate awareness to the avalanche of thoughts and feelings that this conflict let loose, should we have snuck into his room, lifted him into the air by the collar of his flannel pajamas and chastised him for straying so far from his solemn vow to transform his anxiety? I won’t dignify that with an answer!
When I was a monk, people were always telling me how much they too would love to follow the monastic path, to cast away the tarnished vestments of the material world and adorn the robes of stainless virtue, to join the ranks of the spiritually elevated, the luminous, the radiant, the compassionate. You know… to be as awesome as me. People were always telling me how much they wanted to be as awesome as me. And then invariably came the words, “but I could never live without sex.”
Now, I’m not the horniest guy in the world. I’m probably not even in the top 10. But it never made sense to me to respond to that objection in terms of ease or difficulty, permission or restraint. I always thought the same thing: “Well, you’re not having sex now, are you?” In a moment of not having sex, what consolation is it to tell yourself that you’re going to have sex later? This is a question that has always puzzled me. Are the non-celibate people of the world walking around zestfully repeating to themselves, “I’m going to have sex later!”???
My conclusion is that whether or not you’re going to have sex later, the best practice is not to worry about it too much, because at a given moment there may be more important things to attend to. That goes for transformation as well. This stretch of Jim’s practice is called stagnation because our story is framed only with reference to his problem with shoes, but the conflict with his wife blew open his idea of what he is practicing for. He learned from experience that the problem that needs to be dealt with is this one. The one that’s coming up now. The natural result is that his practice is no longer as strictly framed around his anxiety.
Paradoxically, it is exactly because he has become more adept at practicing with his anxiety that it no longer makes sense for him to concentrate on transforming it. He can now stand tall with the great many of us who are presented each day with of shoes every variety and fail to recoil in terror. In fact, his way of responding to his anxiety is becoming automatic. It takes up much less mental bandwidth, but it also draws less of his attention. It is becoming a source of a certain feeling of competence not entirely dissimilar from the one that he gains from working hard at cobblery. This has important implications for its ultimate transformation.
In the meantime, although he has reached a stable equilibrium with respect to his anxiety, other domains of his life are blossoming. The increased time he is spending with his wife and sons has completely released an inner pressure that he was only half-aware of. For years he heedlessly concentrated on the unfinished work at hand and quietly suffered about the time he was missing with his family. Now, having experienced something like a perfect inversion, he realizes that paying heed to his role as a husband and father while quietly suffering about the unfinished work at hand is much, much more satisfying. He is also finding an unexpected depth in his relationships with his clients, who he has always treated with a mild delicacy and suspicion. He had taken their comments of appreciation as a kind of mild accusation or an admission of incompetence. It was as though, just before leaving the shop, they would inadvertently provoke an argument by proposing that his work was good enough. Now he can see that, whatever their knowledge of cobblery may be, their gratitude is genuine. This, in the face of his enduring conviction that his work could be better, is humbling.
The Two Accumulations
Let’s return to Jim Bootman’s store consciousness, and have a look at what’s happening there. Every new practice experience he has is converted into a microscopic speck of karmic goodness, picked up by tiny cosmic helpers called “merit goblins” and carefully stored away in stockpiles sorted by size, color, and shape. Kidding! Kidding!
In Mahayana Buddhism, the culmination of the practice is conceived of as the completion of the two accumulations of merit and wisdom. Some practices accumulate conditions that are supportive of wellbeing. From the perspective of a separate self desiring happiness, that’s “merit.” These are the practices that look like deliberate interventions. When you practice loving kindness until you have the heart of a whale, you’re accumulating merit because it feels good to love, and you are going to inherit more moments full of love. But even a well-cultivated field does not bear fruit on command. That’s why without understanding, present happiness can still contain seeds of suffering.
The second accumulation is wisdom, although I think that the word accumulation is a little misleading, because wisdom is eliminative. What accumulates here is a pile of things that don’t happen anymore, and actually cannot happen after a certain point. They no longer have supportive conditions to arise. This is different from the practice of restraint, which counts as merit, because you could still do things that you refrain from doing. Wisdom makes certain things impossible. Jim Bootman can still stay late after work, but he cannot really blame any resulting conflict on his wife. He can’t even choose to. It just doesn’t stick anymore.
In the traditional presentation of the practice, you have to accumulate a certain amount of merit for wisdom to arise. You’ve got to be at least a little even-keeled. So you practice precepts, generosity, devotional rituals, community engagement, and gradually build your capacity to rest in a concentrated state in the present moment. If the present moment is a living hell, that’s just not that easy. So you undertake practices that kind of smooth out the mind. The neat distinction about Buddhist meditation is the way that it leverages that smoothness to give rise to lasting, structural changes to the way the mind works.
Incidentally this division speaks directly to the question of, “What should I do?” There are two conflicting admonitions: to change the mind and to leave the mind exactly how it is. The former makes the mind more habitable, the latter has the potential to lead to penetrating insight into the whole frame of habitability. But thinking about this question in isolation, as an abstraction, makes the situation seem much more complicated than it is. There isn’t a hard line here. The paradigm examples of the cultivation of merit are ritual practices and service. Because both of those are bounded activities, they also provide wonderful conditions for insight. When you are worried about what you should do, just do something that is so concrete and self-explanatory that it leaves very little space for worry. Do something that bounds the possibilities: a fixed routine or something where interpersonal conditions provide the structure. Or you can be forest hermit like me, but have a careful look and decide for yourself how that’s working out.
The accumulation of merit is not secondary to wisdom. It is meaningful in its own right because we like to be happy. When wisdom challenges self-centered formulations of happiness, the accumulation of merit just loses its personal character. In fact, it can’t really be called accumulation anymore, because the view of an accumulator has ceased to arise. It’s just called “functioning.” The happiness no longer belongs to anyone. What a relief!
During this period of equilibrium, Jim Bootman is doing exactly what he needs to do, and although it doesn’t show up anywhere in the functioning of his anxiety, he is continuing along on his path of fulfilling the two accumulations. He is having many tiny insights that we don’t need to recount, and making many tiny changes that put him in alignment with his values, with his humanity. These create the ground that he will eventually stand upon to look deeper into his anxiety. For now he is just taking life as it comes, with an occasional murmur to himself upon the recognition of his anxiety, “I should really get around to transforming this.”
