Things Aren't as They Seem

Perhaps the most intellectually intriguing aspect of mindfulness training is what happens when we investigate reality very closely. Gradually, this investigation leads to the realization that reality may be a little different than how we perceive it in our daily lives. In a way, reality is much like a two-sided coin.

On one side of the coin, there is the idea, created by our brain, that we are somehow separate from the world around us. This is actually a natural and important part of our cognitive development. We need to see the world in this way to communicate and even survive as a species. If we couldn't distinguish the separation between ourselves and the world around us—an ability even an amoeba apparently has—we wouldn't survive very long.

However, the idea of separation is only a conventional truth. As modern science has made very clear, there is another side of the coin that most people can grasp intellectually but very few ever directly realize. This is the side of interconnection, or interdependence, the truth that ultimately no thing is fundamentally separate from the world around it.

Imagine for a moment that you could see everything from the perspective of the nucleus of an atom. All you would see is vast empty space with tiny little bits of energy moving at incredible speeds, continuously flashing into and out of existence. You wouldn't be able to tell where a human body ends and the floor begins. You wouldn't be able to find objective separation between anything other than the little particles that make up atoms.

Quantum physics, the most successful physical theory created to date, suggests in many ways that even the tiny particles that we perceive as the discrete building blocks of matter are actually not separate either. An electron, for instance, is at once both a particle and a wave, and is not generally thought of as a discrete thing until it as actually measured. In a way, we create the electron as a separate particle via our effort to measure it.

As the well-known theoretical physicists David Bohm and Basil Hiley wrote, “Parts are seen to be in immediate connection, in which their dynamic relationships depend, in an irreducible way, on the state of the whole system.…Thus, one is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical idea of analyzability of the world into separate and independently existent parts.”¹ Much of quantum physics points to the truth that, ultimately, separateness is indeed an illusion.

Although it's a very complicated process, neuroscientists are starting to develop a good idea of how the illusion of a separate self is created in the brain.² If you'd like to learn more about how the sense of self is created, you might enjoy the book The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, written by a neuroscientist named Dr. Bruce Hood, who is the director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol and a former research fellow at Cambridge University and University College London and professor at Harvard University.

Here's the problem. Most of us only ever see one side of the coin, the illusion of separateness. This is not to say that we are hallucinating, which means that we are seeing something that nobody else sees. No, we are seeing the same illusion that fools nearly every human on this planet. Below is an example of such an illusory perception.

Nearly every person in the world perceives the top line in this example to be longer than the bottom line. However, when we measure the two lines, we see that in fact they are exactly the same length. Because of the way our brain works, though, we still perceive the top line to be longer than the bottom one even after we have confirmed that the two lines are equal in length. The difference is that after measuring, we know better. We are no longer fooled by our illusory perception.

In the same way that we incorrectly see the top line in the example as being longer than the bottom one, the way that we perceive the world in general is also incorrect. We perceive everything we see as separate and distinct entities. Most important for our discussion here on the root cause of our tendency to operate from the perspective of being the thinking mind and the ego it creates is our perception that the mind and body are separate from the rest of the world.

This is another perceptual illusion created by the brain. Unfortunately, because of a slight misunderstanding about how reality actually exists, that illusory perception fools us. We feel very strongly that the mind and body are ultimately me or mine and fundamentally separate from the rest of the world.

Just as without a ruler we'll swear up and down that the top line in the diagram is longer than the bottom one, without closely examining reality we'll swear that the mind and body constitute a permanent, separate self. As a result, for most of our lives, we have been clinging to every part of that self—the body, sensations, thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories, collectively known as the ego—as being what we ultimately are.

This has resulted in a very strong habitual tendency to cling to and become all aspects of the body and mind. This habitual tendency compels us to cling to the thinking mind as our default mode of being, even when we're putting forth great effort to become and remain mindfully self-aware. The root of this whole process is our slight misunderstanding about how reality actually exists.

What would happen if we corrected this misunderstanding? What if we could see both sides of the coin of reality? What if we could see the world of separateness and operate in that world just like any other normal person in our daily lives but were no longer fooled by that illusion? What if we could see very clearly that ultimately, the mind and body are not a permanent, separate self?

When we realize this truth deeply enough, we remove the root cause of our habitual tendency to cling to and become the thinking mind and its ego: the mistaken identification with the body and mind as ultimately being what we are. This wisdom is what can allow us to eventually have the ability to remain mindfully self-aware as long as we wish.

An Incredible Discovery

Each one of us has a deep sense that there is some type of permanent, separate self that persists throughout our lives on Earth and perhaps even after the body dies. For instance, if we look at a picture of ourselves when we were five years old, we would surely identify the person in the photo as being me. We would say, “Yep, that's me. I was five then.”

But that picture is of a little five-year-old. The mind, the body, and the personality have all changed dramatically since the age of five. Obviously, the physical body changes over the span of a human life. After leaving the womb, there is infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and then a slow process of decline, when the body wrinkles, hair turns gray or falls out, and so on. Not so obvious, though, is the fact that the body is changing every second. Each second millions of cells die and are replaced by new ones.

It is true that some cells don't die very quickly and may actually live for many years. In fact, some neurons are believed to live for the entire life span of the body. However, every one of the cells in our bodies is undergoing a constant process of change as the cell continuously replenishes and rebuilds itself with new food, water, and air. Each cell, and thereby our entire body, is like a portion of a continuously flowing river that appears to have a fixed shape but actually never consists of the same material for two consecutive seconds.

Although the body is continuously dying and being reborn in every moment (and perhaps, according to many quantum physicists, many, many times per second at the subatomic level), let's consider the generalization that the body is completely new every seven years, which is based on the average life span of the cells that make up the body. In other words, the body dies and is replaced by a completely new one every seven years. Thus, if we are 57 years old, we have already died eight times, and we are on our ninth new body.

We can reach two rather amazing conclusions from this simple understanding. First, the death of the body is nothing to fear. We've already experienced it numerous times. Second, the body is obviously not ultimately me or mine.

Returning to the thought of us identifying with the five-year-old in the picture, we can likely recall at least one vivid memory from that time. If we can bring this memory somewhat clearly into the mind, we can almost feel ourselves living that moment. It feels as though we really were that five-year-old, whose mind and body produced all sorts of thoughts and feelings that we could watch arise and pass away just as we do now.

Yet not one single piece of cellular matter—and thereby not one single cell—that makes up the body we call me today was there experiencing that moment we remember from when we were five.³ Thus, neither our current brain, eyes, ears, nor anything else was there.

At this point we face a very interesting question. If not one single piece of cellular matter that makes up the body we call me today was there experiencing that moment when we were five, what was? In other words, what is it that observed the physical body and its thoughts and feelings undergo constant change when we were five, that is observing a completely new body and its thoughts and feelings arise and pass away now, and will be observing a completely new body that will feel like me when we are 20 years older?

You're Not What You Think

Most people seem to have at least a modicum of wisdom regarding the truth that the physical body as it exists here on planet Earth is not ultimately what we are. We identify with the body to some degree, but not entirely. We refer to the body as “my body,” as though there is a self inside the body that is the owner of the body. In fact, many of us spend so much time in our heads that we've become quite disassociated with our bodies. As Sir Ken Robinson noted in his excellent first Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Talk, we often think of our bodies simply as the vehicles needed for “getting [our] heads to meetings.”⁴

Most of us are fooled much more by our thinking than by our bodies. We tend to identify very strongly with our thinking, especially the voice inside our heads (or, for some of us, the various voices) and the sense of self, or ego, that the thinking mind creates. Intellectually, most of us know that we are not the thinking mind and the ego it creates. We know that thoughts are created by the brain, and that if there is no brain, there is no thinking. Nevertheless, we still live as though we are that voice in our heads that is constantly talking, analyzing, judging, criticizing, and so on. With mindfulness training, we can transform the intellectual understanding that we're not the thinking mind into wisdom.

For example, imagine that you are operating from the perspective of mindful self-awareness and you are observing the mind. Imagine that it is completely empty of thought (I know that sounds impossible, but it's actually quite common with extensive practice, especially when that is not made to be a goal). Now imagine that you observe a single thought arise in the mind. Perhaps it's an image of the cover of the best book you've ever read, The Mindfulness Edge. You see this image quite clearly. Then you see the image gradually dissolve, leaving you to observe a mind that is completely empty again.

Assuming you could do this, what does the observation tell you about your relationship to that thought?

The experience above shows us quite clearly that we are not our thinking. We were there observing an empty mind, we were there as we watched a thought arise and pass away, and we were still there after the thought had disappeared. The thought, then, is a fleeting phenomenon. It is not a permanent part of us.

It is also possible to notice this truth with the form of thinking that occurs as the voice in the mind. With training, that voice can go silent at times. We can rest in mindful self-awareness listening to a completely quiet mind, we can hear a thought arise, and we can hear it cease, leaving us once again listening to a completely silent mind.

Taking this a step further, it is quite clear that we are not the mind, the backdrop for thinking, either. We can observe the mind quite objectively, as though we're watching a television. We can know when the mind is empty and when it contains thought. The perception of this objective observation of the mind can seem like “The mind is over there, and I'm observing it from over here.”⁵

These experiments, much like the thought experiment above involving the body, often raise some deep questions, such as “What was there observing things happen when I was five?” “What's observing the body and mind constantly change now?” “What is a permanent part of me?” and “Who am I?” I apologize, but these questions are not possible to answer with words and concepts. The aspect of ourselves that is aware of the body and mind transcends the mind and the words and concepts the brain creates. What we are ultimately is something we can truly know only through our own direct experience.

Because I am not a fan of disappointing people, I will share some really good news. By simply being mindful and self-aware, and seeing clearly what you are not, what you are gradually becomes increasingly clear. At some point, it becomes so clear that you will just know. You will not be able to describe it either, but you will certainly know how to be it. You will realize that you have been being it quite often.⁶

The most important aspect of this wisdom we are exploring, in terms of developing leadership excellence, including unconditional happiness, is to discover through our own direct experience that we are clearly not the thinking mind. This simple little insight—I am not the thinking mind—is actually incredibly powerful. The deeper this insight becomes, the less power the thinking mind and the ego have to suck us in. We continue to develop the sense that the thinking mind and whatever passes through it are over there, so to speak, like a heads-up display we can see out of the corner of the eye, and we're over here, observing the heads-up display we call the mind, much like the image in Figure 10.1 that was first introduced in Chapter 1.

We see whatever arises in the mind from a completely objective, third-person vantage point. As a result, we don't habitually cling to and become the thinking mind. If our wisdom were to become deep enough, we could reach a point where we are never pulled out of mindfulness by the thinking mind. We would be able to remain objectively self-aware as long we like, under even the most challenging situations.

This insight is also the key to developing greater freedom from our conditioning and habits. As this wisdom that we are not our thinking becomes deeper, we recognize our conditioning and habits more quickly. We can eventually learn to objectively see our conditioned, habitual reactions to stimuli as they are arising, in the moment. It's as though there is more space around the thinking mind, ego, and conditioned reactions, somewhat like what we see in the image above. This is the highly revered “space between stimulus and response” that gives us the freedom to choose our response, which Dr. Stephen R. Covey has called “the greatest power” we can develop.

This space creates an effect that is somewhat like the difference between being in the same room with really loud, annoying music and hearing that same music from two miles away. When we're in the same room, the music has a lot of power to affect our emotions and actions. When the music is two miles away, it is barely audible and has no power over us. It doesn't bother us at all. With enough space around our conditioned thinking mind and ego, they have no power over us either.

Wisdom versus Knowledge

It's very important that we move beyond the intellectual understanding that we're not the thinking mind and develop insight into that truth, which is wisdom. Intellectual understanding alone has very little effect on behavior and real-world, applicable skills. The difference between intellectual understanding and insight is simply a matter of experience.

For instance, let's imagine that you have two friends who have offered to give you a ride in their sports cars on curvy mountain roads. One friend, Joe, has read 125 books on the subject of driving a car and written his own book on how to drive a car. By Western standards, he would likely be called an expert on driving. However, Joe has never actually driven a car.

Samantha, on the other hand, has received only a brief explanation of driving from an experienced driver and has never read a book on how to drive a car. However, she has been driving every day for 15 years, including time as an amateur racecar driver, and she's never had an accident.

Whom would you rather ride with?

Clearly, riding with Samantha is the better choice. Although, intellectually, Joe understands quite well how to drive a car, he does not know how to drive a car. The actual experience of driving a car is different than the theory he has read. You may want to learn about the theory of driving from Joe, but if you're in a car on a curvy road, you would definitely prefer Samantha be behind the wheel.

The moment Samantha actually began driving a car, her intellectual understanding transformed into wisdom. There was an insight that arose within her: “Ah.…So this is what driving a car is like. I get it now.”

Of course, the insight that arose from the first experience of driving a car was not yet very mature. There were still many aspects of driving a car that she had not yet directly experienced. But, as she continued to drive, her wisdom gradually became deeper. This wisdom is what gives us confidence in her car-driving skills.

In the same way, the more often and the more deeply we see through our own awareness that we are not the thinking mind and its ego, the more wisdom we develop and the greater the impacts we will see on our personal and professional performance.

The Interplay between Stable Awareness and Wisdom

What we find with continued mindfulness training, both in our daily lives and while sitting still, is that there is a deep interconnection between wisdom and our ability to remain mindfully self-aware without being distracted by and pulled into the thinking mind. The more stable awareness is, the deeper the insight we have into the truth that we are not the thinking mind. With training, awareness becomes like a much brighter light with which to see our inner world.

This is somewhat similar to observing an object at night with a very bright, focused spotlight versus relying only on the light of the stars and moon. We see the object much more clearly with the spotlight, just as we see our inner world with greater clarity when we've trained awareness to be more stable in the present moment. This increased clarity in turn results in deeper insight.

The deeper the insight into the fact that we are not the thinking mind and its ego, the easier it is to remain mindfully self-aware without being distracted by and pulled into the thinking mind. The more easily we can remain mindfully self-aware, the more rapidly wisdom develops.

Wisdom and stable awareness continue to feed each other in this way, which results in the personal and professional benefits discussed in this book. Gradually, we are better able to realize mindful self-awareness on demand, anytime we like, with less effort. Eventually, mindful self-awareness can become our default mode of being.