Lisa Feldman-Barrett says our brain’s job is to predict what is going to happen next in the world so we can appropriately allocate resources. Run and hide, stay still, or relax quietly with friends: our ability to successfully decide which is essential for our survival. Kahneman says our brain accomplishes this in two ways: making up stories (System 1) and solving problems (System 2). The problem is we make up stories about the world in front of us for best fit, or most plausible, rather than scrutinize for accuracy. We don’t want to solve problems, cause that takes effort, so we make up stories and proofread them with Sys2 for egregious errors. Part of what fits or seems plausible to us, however, is based on the stories we have constructed in the past. And those stories, since they are not entirely accurate, but only had to be close enough, are filled with inaccuracies that become biases. Worse, biases are formed simply by sloppy story telling to begin with … and there you have the recursive loop of suffering Dogen calls “picking and choosing”.

This is not a bad thing. It just is the thing our brains do – make up stories about the world for our survival. The problem isn’t the suffering it causes – the problem is how good it is. We are FANTASTIC story tellers. It seems to me that most creativity derives simply from the ability of the conscious mind (Kahneman’s System 2) to spur the fabricating mind (System 1) on and on. This explains why so many creative artists gravitate toward substances, or lifestyles that are somewhat out of the norm. They are stoking System 2 to spur System 1 (the Storyteller). “Go farther, and farther, make up more!” Sys2 says, and only later edits in ways that can catalyze even more from Sys1. Creativity is the great byproduct of how our minds work, and the fundamental beauty of that is we have used stories for all of humanity to bind us together as families, tribes, societies and civilizations. We are the great storytellers of the Universe, through music, art, physics, and every other realm.

But that is just the story that makes sense to me. I don’t really know.

You see, that is how it works. And Shakyamuni’s revelation was that our delight in the stories we tell, when anything more than fleeting, causes suffering one way or another. Dogen, to me, is like a great acting teacher. Stop reading the story, stop writing the story, and be the story, he says, over and over again. Just be the story of the meal, the cleaning up, the holding of hands, the music (actually Dogen didn’t appear to be much for music) … whatever it is, just be the story and let someone else witness it. This is a deceptively difficult proposition, precisely because our poor brains will keep making up stories as they cannot help but do.

Zazen is the exercise of stepping into your own story, not picking or choosing the one you want, but just stepping into the story you are.

References:

Feldman Barrett, Lisa: How emotions are made. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2017.

Kahneman, Daniel: Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011.