Author name: Bryan Hubbard

What have our feelings got to do with what we believe?  Short answer: everything.  In fact, when you think you’re having a rational debate, you’re probably not engaging with the other person’s brain, but their emotions.  And the stronger the beliefs are held, the greater is the underlying emotion.

Our emotions are the residues from any experience we had that may have caused upset, pain or even trauma.  More exactly, they are experiences that we only partially understood in the first place because they were witnessed entirely from our own personal viewpoint.

These emotions colour our world, and they form the lens through which we see everything.  Anything that reinforces that view is immediately acknowledged; the thousands of things that happen every week that challenge our world view are discarded, or not even seen in the first place.

I upset a Zen monk the other day.

I didn’t mean to, of course.  In fact, I used to love the Zen koans – What’s the sound of one hand clapping?  What was your face before you were born?  Great stuff and a wonderful way to by-pass the conceptual mind.  And I used to love the Zen books by the likes of Suzuki, Bodhidharma, Philip Kapleau and Alan Watts.

The koans and the books are the essence of the teaching.  Behind that, and something we don’t often see, are the traditions and the rituals.  My Zen monk had clearly invested years of practice and dedication to achieve his current status.  Perhaps he had a different coloured robe to designate his more lofty position, I don’t know.

And we all like to do that, whatever path we follow, whether it’s religion, academic, some social activity or the work we do.  We study, we work hard and we achieve, and that achievement is recognised in the status or position we are then granted.  We know where we are and where others are around us, and there’s great comfort and security in that.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has figured out that we can think through a problem one of two ways: fast or slow.  Most of us choose the first way.  It’s the knee-jerk, immediate thought, often the result of previous experience, and even prejudice, that we employ.  Sometimes it’s the right approach, but often it’s not, as his book Thinking, Fast and Slow makes clear.

The same applies to seeing: we can see fast or slow.  The other day I looked up from the kitchen table and noticed a dead fly, lying prone on the window frame.  Fast-seeing would have been: dead fly, unsightly, dispose of.  It’s a superficial response, and it has its place, especially if danger threatens or we have to act quickly.

I caught a Sunday morning television programme this week that walked the ancient, and well-trod, path of Religion vs Science.  The religious fraternity said science doesn’t have all the answers while the scientists said belief stood in the way of scientific truths, and wanted us back in the ‘dark ages’.

Nothing was resolved, of course – but it hasn’t in the hundreds of years the debate has raged, so the odds were against a breakthrough last Sunday.  And when religion comes up against science, nothing will ever be resolved.  They are two belief sets, or dogmas, that will inevitably clash.  Religious fundamentalists believe, for instance, that the world began in 4400 BC, while science says that is clearly nonsense.

I’ve been reading a book that, part way through, touches on the most radical and transformative element of Time-Light.  The book is Robert M Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, ostensibly the story of a man’s motorcycle ride across America with his son, but actually an exploration of meaning, value and philosophy.

At one point, the narrator says something that almost made me drop the book: “Objects create the subject’s awareness of himself”. Now, that’s pretty close to my idea that, soon after our birth, the sense of an individual ‘I’ emerges from an upsetting experience, and that in turn creates the impression of a world separate from ourselves.  As I arise, the world arises also.

Then, a few pages on, the narrator states: “Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place.”  Now, it starts to get very interesting, although I say ‘pure experience’ rather than ‘reality’.  And I’d substitute the semi-academic term ‘intellectualization’ for ‘you’.  Now it reads: “Pure experience is always the moment of vision before you take place (or arise)”.