How Thích Nhất Hạnh Nudged Me to Learn More about the Unconscious Mind

Image: Thich Naht Hanh (Wikimedia Commons)

Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Buddhist Monk who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King in 1967, passed away yesterday in his native Vietnam. Thay, as he was known to followers worldwide, was key in introducing Mindfulness to the western world. The mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programs offered by medical centers and hospitals across America are the work of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of the Center for Mindfulness at the U Mass Medical School and student of Thay’s.

I discovered Thay back to 1992, when I was living in the picturesque town of Oakhurst in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. While browsing the shelves at the Barnes and Noble in nearby Fresno, a book titled “Peace is Every Step” jumped out at me. In the Foreward, no less than the Dalai Lama himself promised that the book would show how “mindfulness and concentration can heal difficult psychological states” and “bring about inner and outer peace”.

I drove back home with book and placed it face up on my bookshelf, promising to flip through it in the morning. I woke up the next morning to a mystery. The Contents page had been ripped out of the book and sat neatly on top of it, an angry tear running along its length. I stared at it some, and then some more. Two equally disturbing possibilities presented themselves: either a Djinn or spirit straight out of Alladin’s magic lamp had perpetrated this deed, or I had done so in my sleep without any recollection of doing so. I decided to invoke Occam’s Razor and go with the simpler explanation.

What unseen force had guided my hand in tearing out a page from a book on peace without my being aware of my actions? Some program deep inside my mind, for reasons unknown to me, chose to “wake up” in the middle of the night and rip a page out of a book, then go back to sleep. (Just so that you know, this was a one-time anomaly — I don’t have a habit of walking around at night ripping out pages or people’s throats.) At the time, I tucked away the incident in my catalog of the inexplicable, of things that go bump in the night.

Today, I see that this is where the teachings of Thay, and Buddhism in general, come in to the picture. In Buddhism, deeply entrenched sankharas or mental and emotional patterns of attraction, aversion and unconfirmed biases — are held to be responsible for most of our actions. We perform these actions unaware, as if on autopilot — until we develop sufficient mindfulness and awareness of the hidden patterns that guide them.

The concept of sankharas had been an academic footnote as far as I was concerned, until the multi-day long mindfulness retreats I undertook this fall. These hidden patterns in my subconscious came alive to me in a way that no book can do justice to, as documented in my post What a 10-day Mindfulness Retreat Taught Me about My Anxiety Problem.

Ever the skeptic and rational thinker, I looked to see what western science has to say on the subject. I discovered the work of cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, whose split-brain studies show that our decisions and actions are largely driven by unconscious processes and justified post-facto by the conscious mind. I finally dusted off my copy of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, a laborious tome that I’d dreaded reading until now. The book’s thesis is that we almost exclusively think “fast” and on autopilot, moved by motivations and biases we are unaware of. It’s only about 2% of the time that we think “slowly” (mindfully!) and make well-thought out decisions.

In other words, unless we cultivate mindfulness, our daytime actions spring from the same well of the unconscious as my act of nocturnal book mutilation. And as Michael Gazzaniga has shown, regardless of whether our actions and choices are good, bad or just plain ugly, we are usually good at rationalizing it. I had uncomfortable recollections about flipping off someone in a fit of road rage; of conversations with managers or direct reports I wish I hadn’t had, of emails I wish I hadn’t sent, of social media battles I wish I hadn’t fought.

My assumptions were truly challenged when I came across this line in physicist Michio Kaku’s book The Future of the Mind: “our choice of politicians, marriage partners, friends and occupations are all influenced by things we are not conscious of….people named Denise or Dennis are more likely to become dentists, Laura or Larry are more likely to become lawyers, George and Georgina are more likely to become geologists”.

I found this a tough pill to swallow. After all, didn’t I vote for my presidential candidate consciously and out of enlightened common sense while the other side was stuck in unconscious group think? That’s when I encountered Turing Award winner Herbert Simon’s model of “bounded rationality”, which says that “our minds only let in signals that confirm our biases.” The ultimate bias that we all hold, it would appear, is the illusion of our own rationality and agency. We need to look no further than the unraveling of American society in the echo chambers of social media for evidence of this.

So, the question for each of us is this: are we all really sleep-walking, while imagining that we are rational actors and decision makers? What pages are we ripping out of the books of our daily lives (and justifying it after the fact) as we go about each day? Are our intellectual accomplishments and inventions really our own to claim? Is our world view — conservative, liberal, Darwinistic, atheistic, new age, or otherwise — anything more than a reflection of our innermost programming? Do we have no free will, as many scientists claim, or do Buddhist Mindfulness practices and Kahneman’s “Slow Thinking” offer us a way out?

In my observation, these questions cannot be answered intellectually, from the same place of “bounded rationality” that simply plays our hidden sankharas back to us. From the glimpses I’ve had in the course of my own meditation practice, the answer lies in cultivating deep awareness of our inner mindscape, which in turn enables us to act from a place free of fear or conditioning.

As I look at Thay’s book sitting on my desk, I’d like to think there’s a third explanation for that mysterious event from 30 years ago — that perhaps Thay himself reached out from half-way across the world to rip out that page, as if to point me not-so-gently towards the tear in my own mind, between the conscious and unconscious.

“This body is not me; I am not caught in this body, I am life without boundaries, I have never been born and I have never died…Birth and death are only a game of hide-and-seek. So smile to me and take my hand and wave good-bye….We shall always be meeting again at the true source, Always meeting again on the myriad paths of life.” - Thích Nhất Hạnh; No Death, No Fear