Spacious Mind
Disturbed Landscape, watercolour on paper, © Rami Schandall 2021.
This weekend I attended a celebration of Tibetan Losar, with a theme of joyful, spacious mind. Tulku Jigme Wangdrak of the Abhaya Fellowship taught that joy naturally arises when we release our minds from the grip of bias and attachment. We do not need to go digging for that joy — it is simply there in a spacious mind. Perhaps you recognize this feeling, from an experience of restful, calm awareness.
Mind tends to believe it is an autonomous self, and it is perfectly designed to perceive and categorize the world through preferences. We can practice noticing this phenomenon in meditation. A simple practice observes sound. How quickly there is a response — “I like it” or “I don't like it,” “that's a good sound” or “get me out of here!”
We can practice this with any sensation, feeling, or thought that shows up in practice. Attraction and aversion are so quick, it's hard even to notice the space between perception of the stimuli and our judgement of it, which can occur at the physiological level before it is thought. And then we build stories out of those preferences, elaborating, rationalizing, complicating — “I need it, I deserve it, it is mine;” or, “it might be bad for me, it's unfamiliar, I had a bad experience with something like that once, remember when,” and so on.
To expect the world to be as we prefer, and not how it is, is futile. To grip tight to the need to be right, to be gripped by our preferences, is no fun. Delusion, longing, anxiety, greed, rage, get stuck here.
When we practice noticing how our biases and attachments show up in body and mind, we are more likely to be able to perceive them in the context of daily life. As we become more adept at noticing and unpacking our stories around them, we are more able to discern, with awareness, what to do with those signals. Sometimes aversion really is about danger, and you need to get out of there. Or attraction might point you toward something benevolent that supports your well-being. Regardless, there is real benefit to bringing unconscious bias into consciousness, to notice what we are holding onto despite our better intentions. It gives us the ability to self-correct and act in the world with more clarity. This sounds like a good moral reason to practise, to do our best to hold an open, spacious mind. Anti-racism demands this, as a pertinent example.* And the bonus, the gift the lamas taught this weekend, is that with spaciousness of mind, there is naturally joy, and it can resonate into our world in a beautiful feedback loop.
*Project Implicit is a non-profit organization running ongoing research on implicit bias since 1998. Learn moreabout the project, and learn more about your own bias in a variety of contexts by taking a test. Tests are hosted at Harvard University, and are themselves an interesting way to experience the speed of impulse and preference. If you choose to participate, you will see your own results and a contextual report on the broader data.
