Between Stimulus and Response
We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves. — Buddha
These last few years has been pretty out there for me. My personal life, my vocational life, and my spiritual life have radically be flipped around. My ex-gf, in a direct yet oblique way, enabled me to see, acknowledge, and stand by my own emotions. Then she left. My forays into business have shown me a completely different side of a favorite past-time, philosophy. I began to see communication, language, and symbolism as ways that humans justify how to organize. My core beliefs were not thrown out the window —but they just turned out to be not nearly as “core” as I thought. I also began to lose a sense of who I am. I began to resign myself to the present, even while I look towards the future. I began to give up trying to be in control.
Also, despite not being a Christian, I joined a church, at least I attended it fairly regularly until as of late. This church came into my life strangely, as my ex-gf was interested in them. She finds all the coolest things.
The tagline for this place is
“Radius is a church for people convinced church is irrelevant.”
I have heard this place described as a hipster church. They run service a few blocks from where I live, just outside Hollywood. This Sunday they are moving to a new location.
Not having grown up going to church, this was a unique experience for me.
I wonder about the production talent that goes into their podcast and media — if it is above average quality for being so close to the movie industry.
I wonder if, in the next few years, they really will change Los Angeles as they claim to set out to.
I wondered how social media affects any group with any kind of message.
Also, despite not being a Christian, I joined their men’s group, Unravel. This group focused not on the bible, but on “achieving excellence”. We fasted, read books on self-development with a Christian bent and talked about what we found in these books.
Another novel experience for me.
These books on their own were not really that remarkable. But together the theme that ran through them spoke to me. That theme rang as clear as day.
When I was in my early 20s, my interest in philosophy as a lived experience led me into business instead of academia. Yet I continued my own practice of philosophy.
In early 2016, I realized that my interest in philosophy was really,
- interest in self-improvement (to follow in the footsteps of Chinese sage-Teachers whom my mother seemed to idolized)
- a desire to master sensemaking (to be able to justify anything I like to others), and thus, to have control over reality (to have anything I liked).
Of course, when I realized this, I began to see that the search for Truth has always been to justify certain social organizations over alternate social forms. Philosophy is just another way to support authority via claims about who has access to reality.
What was really surprising about these books from Unravel was that they approached meaning-making from a different angle. I found in them a mixture of psychology, faith, and science. I ended up back in the philosopher’s armchair.
I am no longer in that program. What follows are 7 principles related to how to make sense in the world as it relates to self-improvement. I can’t say I got all these ideas from the books I read, but I can say that without Unravel, it’s doubtful I would be writing this list at all.
Note: The books mentioned below may or may not have been on the reading list. I quote from whoever is most useful at the moment.
1. The space for all self-development is between stimulus and response
This has been a lesson from as many religions and self-development programs (such as Scientology, Landmark forum, Buddhism, Productive Learning, yoga and so on).
This space is where boxers learn to box. This space is also where pianists train for their scales. Martial artists train to fight. This space can be used for anything. In Emotional Agility, Susan David argues that this space to be used to develop emotional agility. She writes
And yet emotional agility is not about controlling your thoughts, or forcing yourself into thinking more positively. Because research also shows that trying to get people to change thoughts from, say, the negative — “I’m going to screw up this presentation” — to the positive — “You’ll see. I’ll ace it!” — usually doesn’t work, and can actually be counterproductive.
Emotional agility is about loosening up, calming down and living with more intention. It’s about choosing how you’ll respond to your emotional warning system. It supports the approach described by Victor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived a Nazi death camp and went on to write Man’s Search for Meaning, on leading a more meaningful life, a life in which our human potential can be fulfilled: “Between stimulus and response there is a space,” he wrote. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Developing emotional agility in the space between stimulus and response unlinks our emotional reactions. According to Buddhism, when we develop access to that gap, we can gradually gain clarity and insight. This is one of the traditional goals of meditation, prayer, or yoga.
Most animals don’t have access to this gap. Freedom is the result of having access to this gap.
Paradoxically, this gap not only allows us to express our free-will (realize choices) but it also allows us to have greater clarity. In the chart below, the gap appears before action, allowing us to consider other courses of action rather than simply reacting to our feelings.
Thoughts and feelings can also be reactions, so appropriately there is a gap between each of these, of which Buddhism intensely focuses on.
Awareness of this gap allows us to have more choice, increasing our expression of free-will. We can use these gaps as opportunities to be more effective.
2. Effectiveness requires working in reverse
Considering the results we want means determining which actions get us results. To do those actions, we sometimes have to mine our feelings, thoughts, and beliefs to see why we do what we do; why we resist certain behaviors; and why we prefer some actions over others.
The initial steps in considering results and actions are as follows:
- Consider what you want
- Discover what factors affect what you want (finding out what is real)
- Do things that move towards what you want
- Don’t do things that move you away from what you want.
From here, the difficulty lies in examining and aligning our internal states.
There are many schools of thought on this.
Business motivation speakers like Zig Ziglar, whom I saw speak at the behest of one of my business partners back in 2009, Tony Robbins or more derivative events that mix social media, affiliate network marketing and public speaking (like JVology or the Marketer’s Cruise) come to mind. All share the message that in order to put your energy forward in a way that manifests what you want, you have to be clear and in alignment with your message.
Much of these talks are about examining and aligning our feelings, thoughts, and beliefs and then conveying these to receptive people. Methods like Gloria P. Flores’ LEAN come to mind.
Today there are countless methodologies and teachers all meant to help us develop and clear the space between stimulus and response, including methods like neurolinguistic programming, reiki, prayer, ayurvedic medicine, and so on.
YouTube has many spiritual leaders unique to its medium.
The sum of these practices, at its greatest, we might call spiritual teachings. At the most mundane, self-help. A given method might have a specific promise but the totality of all these methods is alignment to desires, be it to give online courses, increase business or sales, better relationships or anything else one may want.
The motivational video below is one such expression regarding the alignment of external results and inner purpose.
It’s obvious that effectiveness requires facing reality. But what does motivation have to do with reality?
As motivation is part of reality, so what other people want and how they see themselves is also part of reality.
Of course, this means that what the self wants is also part of reality. Matching our inner purpose to an external reality includes matching our actions, thoughts, and feelings with reality.
3. We (people and self) are all part of Reality
How people see themselves in the world is also part of how the world sees itself as other people are part of the context that we exist in. Perception, our own and other’s is part of the reality.
Thus learning about others allows you to discover something about yourself and vis versa.
Nature or nurture, we grow, which means that we will change how we are in the world.
How we choose to be is exactly what developing the space between stimulus and response is all about. We can either direct our growth with intention, or we can allow ourselves to be fragmented by all the other meanings out there, be it from consumerism, ideology, culture, philosophy, self-image, emotional trauma, lack of self-worth or any other situation that can tell us who we are instead of us having that worth emanate from us.
Besides incoherency, one expression of fragmentation is having contrary feelings that lead to contrary behavior, such as saying “no” when we mean “yes”.
Feelings are a reflection of how we perceive ourselves in the world.
For example, if we feel afraid, then we believe ourselves to be helpless. The common way to fight helplessness is to seek control.
Worry is itself an illness, since worry is an accusation against Divine Wisdom, a criticism of Divine Mercy. — Said Nursi
People who want control are afraid of not having something.
Yet due to our limitations as people, while we can’t really guarantee anything, we still have influence.
Exerting influence interferes with context, potentially disrupting any clarity one might be trying to gain about a context. Attempting to exert influence on what we do not understand will have unintended consequences (which we can’t control either).
The opposite of control is to let it go.
4. The World is as it is, not what we Mean
Only by letting the world be can we begin to learn what it is. Learning is best facilitated by being open-minded. Being receptive to what is happening around us lets us pick up more distinctions about the world and about ourselves.
Learning is the only way to discover what is because when we try to extrapolate and create symbolic consistencies around our experiences, we risk becoming closed-minded. We become close-minded when we care more about some symbolic creation than about what is happening in the world.
Close-mindedness is the state of ignoring what is happening in favor of promoting our favorite symbolisms, which could be a self-concept or a favorite ideology.
Not unironically, the gap between stimulus and response is also the gap between meaning-making/language and reality.
This gap lets us configure our understanding of phenomena. This re-configuration ability is the freedom to choose how to respond to any situation. Since we can re-configure our understanding of anything, we can justify whatever conclusions we want.
I explore this phenomenal space in this article Informational Realism.
Thus, absurdity isn’t a feature of the world.
Absurdity is a feature of how free we are to make meaning from anything we want.
This freedom of meaning-making can also interfere with our understanding. Having an inaccurate idea of what the world is can hamper our ability to be effective.
Discovering the world requires that we resist imposing meaning on what happens. This is not the same as not taking in-action, although it could involve wu wei. The best way to learn is to be in a state of acceptance so that we can observe what emerges from the world.
Love, not to be confused with possessiveness, is the maximal state of acceptance.
The opposite of love is fear. Fear commonly expresses itself as the desire to seek control, which often requires denying what happens in the world.
5. Control and evil are both self-defeating as both seek stasis in a world that continually changes
Control can be self-defeating as
- controlling people will alienate them from you (once they acknowledge that you don’t care about them)
- your target is always moving, as the world changes around you or as you change
- we are too limited to control the world, hence, in Christianity that is the domain of God and Jesus.
On a more conceptual note, Evil is self-defeating as
- Evil will interfere with itself since all activity causes ripples, which always reflects back as the world sorts out excess energy.
As it turns out, Evil and control are both about maintaining some kind of state (in the self or world) that is not natural.
Good can be characterized as the undisturbed harmony that the world is supposed to be. It is in this view that artificial constructs of Good, such as with The Handmaiden’s Tale and other dystopias, can be understood as Evil.
What makes something evil is that some sin is practiced. Essentially sins are addictions to a state. Sinning is trying to maintain that state no matter what. This state isolates us by focusing our attention on something that is fractured from the world. This state could be one’s self-image or one’s emotional pleasure. Sins often lead to addictions. Addictions are conditions where one must control circumstances to maintain a particular state.
For example, the classical “7 Sins” are states that are maintained in excess, disrupting the self’s energy from more “natural” activities (activities that are “Good” because they are presumed to be harmonious with the ideal condition of the world). For example, focusing on masturbation instead of developing relations with a partner can be a sin if you believe that sex is for having particular kinds of relations (such as with a partner). Murdering someone is a sin because murder is the ultimate expression of exerting control.
Ultimately the artificial nature of maintaining a state is also its lack of sustainability. It is in this vein that the environmentalists will understand sustainability as a moral mission.
This brings us back to self-development. Self-development ultimately asks us a real choice, between states and continual change.
As we uncover tools to unlink a stimulus from its response, in the same vein we can relink that stimulus to a different response.
Now we reach a choice, in the guise of a paradox.
To reiterate, I posed self-development in terms of achieving goals.
As maintaining a state can be a goal, this means that the tools of self-development, which are spiritual in nature, can be used not only to force dissonance in our ideas so that we grow and learn, but it can also be used to reinforce our personal illusions.
5.1 Lack of Emotional Awareness can Lead Towards Evil
In On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, Robert A Burton, a neurologist, examines how our feelings of certainty is a function of our unconscious identifications. This feeling can seduce us away from having a true choice, as certainty is independent of reality. The takeaway is that certainty can much contribute to personal illusions. Burton writes:
Certainty is not biologically possible. We must learn (and teach our children) to tolerate the unpleasantness of uncertainty. Science has given us the language and tools of probabilities. We have methods for analyzing and ranking opinion according to their likelihood of correctness. That is enough. We do not need and cannot afford the catastrophes born out of a belief in certainty. As David Gross, PhD., and the 2004 recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics, said, “The most important product of knowledge is ignorance.”
This belief in the veracity of our emotions can lead the unwary towards behaving in ways to deal solely with unpleasant emotion. Being unaware of how one’s behavior can be motivated by self-serving feelings, can lead many people to behaving, at minimum, unpleasantly and at maximum, self-destructively. Many people who seek spiritual guidance do so because they are in pain. The combination of being unaware of one’s motivation and being in pain can lead people who are spiritually inclined to twisting spiritual truth in service of personal illusion to escape pain.
The methods taught in spiritual practice can change people’s internal states. Ideally, this practice is used to unlink stimulus and response so that people can discover what they truly are. However, since these methods can influence the gap, these same spiritual tools can be used to maintain internal states. People can use them to support their self-concept (ego), and generate emotional comfort in a kind of Emotional Realism. Emotional realism is the condition where people believe their emotions gives them direct access to reality. (By extension, echo chambers, ideology, and other forms of social/personal fantasy can be forms of emotional realism.)
6. Growth is Never Complete; Change is Endless
In order to be grounded in something greater than ourselves, we must communicate with other people. Reality includes other points of view. Authentic communication and openness is a necessary part of being kept in check.
As we expand our awareness so we also expand the awareness of those around us through greater interaction, leading to dissonance in ourselves and others.
Many different philosophers have expressed how our interaction with the world is an act of creation. The expression can be as mystical as Taoism, or as conceptual and political as Judith Butler’s performativity or as philosophical as Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy.
The point is that performance and interaction are how the world and our identity emerges. This interaction is how we participate in creating the world and ourselves, as the two are inexorably entangled.
Our downfall comes about when we care more about performance than anything else. When we focus on maintaining a state (for ourselves or for impressing others), ironically, we risk losing our place in the world by trying to hang onto a specific place in the world.
We risk losing our self by obsessively trying to hang onto our ideas of who we need to be.
Martin Heidegger has noted that our being is fundamentally relational. Care is the being of what we are in the world, the nature of the relationship between us and the world. Only when we recognize our limitations in death can we see the totality of our being: future, past, and present. With this totality, we can gain clarity about what we uniquely are, so that we can take a stand (create meaning) and own our own life. This aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy is the cornerstone of existentialism.
While Heidegger describes meaning in terms of isolated individuals, I would consider Heidegger’s thoughts overly reductive to the self. Heidegger rightly considers the “they-self” as inauthentic, but he misses considering that the best check for creating authenticity is to get sincere feedback from others, as people create reality together. As many self-development practitioners note, finding others who align with a given purpose is perhaps the best way to achieve that purpose, as people who see your authenticity and care about you will serve as a check on any illusions you may harbor.
Checking illusion requires learning what is. But for the self to be, the self must be in the world because that is what the self ultimately is.
The irony is, we cannot have ourselves without simultaneously accepting that we cannot hang onto our ideas of ourselves.
7. We are our participation
We are what we do. What we do is what we are. How we put forth our energies is our experience of the world and an experience of us for the world.
What we love is what we care for. How we choose to care is how we participate. How we participate is how we are in and of the world.
If we live by fear then we will cultivate fear. If we live by love then we will cultivate love. If we live by selfish desires, such as to maintain a state then we cultivate isolation by dwelling in a space separate from what is happening around us.
We have a choice in how we make the world, and what emotions we manifest.
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth — learning and loving. Nothing else — not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake — can possibly have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say “I have learned” and “I have loved,” you will also be able to say “I have been happy. “— Arthur C. Clarke, Rama II
Now we come to the essential conundrum of having free-will and the necessity of love.
7.1 Wisdom and Humility are Two-Sides of the same Coin
To talk about how wisdom is a consequence of free-will, we can borrow two concepts from the Tarot.
The first two cards of the Tarot deck express two kinds of beginnings, one which is activated with wisdom, the Magician; and the other without wisdom, the Fool.
“Wisdom is when you understand what, previously, at best you only knew.” ― Idries Shah, Observations
The Magician is an alchemist, one who transforms energy and matter, conducting miracles of great intent. He has awareness so he is effective.
The Fool is one who lacks awareness. His effectiveness is not dependent on his awareness, as it may be due to circumstances beyond his influence.
This is ultimately why fools must also be unaware of themselves. A fool can’t just be unaware of reality without also being unaware of how he stands in reality.
In 9 Things You Simply Must Do, Dr. Henry Cloud includes humility as one of these things that we must do. Cloud writes
Humility is not having a need to be more than you are.
This humility is the opposite of how the Fool is. Having wisdom means knowing what you are capable of, which means being humble (not a false humility either, which means obscuring what you are actually capable of).
To learn about what you are capable of is the ultimate journey, a mix of quietude and action, of observation and exertion.
Before we are wise, it will be between these two positions that we vacillate, unsure if our commitments are wise or foolish. Ultimately we cannot make any guarantee regarding our schemes. Applications of influence always apply unilaterally on both the known and the unknown of a given situation.
As knowing what one does not know is impossible, so at the end of Proverbs 1, Wisdom personified speaks directly to us, telling us to put forth our effort in faith and trust in a greater power:
“How long will you who are simple love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge? Repent at my rebuke! Then I will pour out my thoughts to you, I will make known to you my teachings. But since you refuse to listen when I call and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand, since you disregard all my advice and do not accept my rebuke, I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you; I will mock when calamity overtakes you — when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you. Then they will call to me but I will not answer; they will look for me but will not find me, since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the LORD. They will eat the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruit of their schemes. For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them; but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm.”
Faith in a greater power is not incompatible with the Buddhist renunciation of attachment. Relying on a greater power (perhaps by claiming control to be in God’s hands) is really just a way of maintaining an illusion of control even if we actually do give up personal control.
As Ernest Becker states in his amazing book The Denial of Death, This is how Kierkegaard was post-Freudian despite being chronicalogically before Freud. When we give up the trappings of self-image, the only left to sustain us is faith.
Faith can be a form of participation if it pushes us out into the world. If it locks us into ourselves, then it is a form of spiritual bypassing.
With Buddhism we are simply to let go. By letting go, we let the consequences emerge so that we may get feedback on our actions and feedback about the nature of the world. This incorporation of feedback is the essence of learning; it requires emerging consequences to be without interference so that we may see.
But Buddhist wisdom isn’t simply about letting go. We must also participate.
From the Bhagavad Gita, the most famous chapter of the Indian epic Mahabharata, Krishna, the full avatar of the God Vishnu explains duty and karma to Arjuna. This explanation comes in the middle of a war in which Arjuna must kill his own kin: cousins, teachers, siblings, childhood friends whom he loves.
You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.
Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered in success and failure: for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.
Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahma. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.
In Hinduism, karma is unselfish action. With some interpretations, this means doing what one needs to do as part of Dharma, the order of the universe. Good karma isn’t simply to help others, it is to promote the order of the universe without the intentions of maintaining an artificial self-concept or avoiding the authenticity of who and where one is. Karma goes with the universe, not against it.
Our choice of participation is how we grow. Obviously, we will continue to age regardless of the choices we make, so we might as well go for finding the deepest answers. If we pursue our desires without self-knowledge we may come to find that the fruits of our desires are not really true. Then we will “eat the fruit of our ways and be filled with the fruit of our schemes.”
Given that it is impossible to know what we do not know, and given that we cannot control others or guarantee outcomes, our choice in participation is either to
- be a slave to a state of mind/construct of our emotions
or
- be an active part of the world and let the future emerge so that we may continually find alignment with it and thus, with ourselves and others.
In other words, if we want an illusion then we must exert control.
If we live only to live in certainty, living to attain an emotional state (such as that of security or happiness), then we will be a slave to that state.
If we want to live in what is, then we must embrace, discover, and develop the gap.
There are two ways to walk into a gas chamber — free or not free — Pema Chödrön
Since we cannot get rid of uncertainty, and we will one day die, why not learn to live with its offering of freedom?
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