Hi Everybody,
Well when I look out of the window here in Kew this morning it's superbly autumnal. Grey gloomy clouds as far as I can see. A grey mist in the tress and damp and dripping everywhere. Which kind of fits in neatly with where we start today. The sub heading of this passage in the book is...
Feeling a bit low seems to be a common experience.
Many people talk about their negativity getting up with them in the morning, because that's when it can so often occur. People often say for example that early mornings are a kind of low point for them, when they have to struggle to lift themselves out of a hole. Hence perhaps the global addiction to the regular morning pick-me-up fix of caffeine. But it's not just in the mornings is it? There are many times when it can stick around all day. Indded it seems that to feel generally ' a bit low,' is quite a common experience for many of us these days. Psychologists talk for example about a general, low-level, background anxiety as being one of the features of our time. The psychologist Daniel Goleman for example has dubbed our time, the age of melancholy, because there seems to be more sepression about than in previous generations.
Even Martin Seligman, the boundlessly optimistic, bouyantly smiling founding father of the positive psychology movement in the US, comments strongly on this particular aspect of modern society in the West;
' Why do anxiety, anger and sadness pervade so much of our lives...concurrent with so much success, wealth and the absence of biological need in the lives of privileged Americans?'
For Americans in that passage you can of course include all of us who happen to live in the ultra-privileged western-way-of-life parts of the world. He goes on to explain,
' People by and large are astonishingly attracted to the catastrophic ( that is to say the negative ) interpretation of things. Not just neurotics, not just depressives...but most of us much of the time.'
Those are indeed broadly inclusive phrases he chooses to use, ' People by and large, ' and ' most of us much of the time.' But if we take them at face value, it would seem that lots of people share in this generalised low-level anxiety we've been talking about. It is I believe a very significant perception that is being passed on to us, almost you might say, as a wake-up call.
And if we dig a bit deeper, and ask ourselves why this might be the case, why we are so inclined to interpret event sin a negative way, at least part of the explanation might lie in the fact that this negative voice knows us infinitely well. We have no hiding place. It knows all our weaknesses and our vulnerabilities...because of course it is us. So it can frame the arguments it whispers into, our ear, to match precisely those weaknesses and vulnerabilities. And if we let it, it can go on sniping and whittling away at our self-confidecne and our courage for much of the day, constantly taking advantage of those half-formed inner stirrings of doubt and fear and uncertainty that we scarcely admit to ourselves. So it knows precisely for example why we won't succeed in this or that endeavour, why we won't get the job, or the praise, or the promotion, or those exam grades we desperately want, or whatever it is that happens to be uppermost in our thoughts.
When we are strong and with a high life state, or when we've just had a victory we can often just brush this web of insidious sniping aside. and laught at it, or ignore it into silence. But when we are down, with a low life state, or we've just had a rejection, and particularly when we know full well that what we are reaching for this time is a real stretch, then it can often be all tha tis needed to tip us into a negative or defeatist frame of mind.
And that can be truly life-changing in a negative way. Life can become, ' there's no point in even trying,' rather than, ' I really think I can make a go of this. '
So it is crucial that we learn how to combat this kind of negativity. And that's where we go in the next episode. See you then. I'm on my way out into the woods with Gatsby!!
Best wishes, William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available as a neat, good looking paperback from Amazon or as a Kindle download onto your
No comments:
Post a Comment