Knowing but Not Acting

 

I want to begin with a short excerpt from a writing assignment submitted by a student I’ll call Thad in a Contemporary Moral Issues class I taught a few years ago. 

“[When we discussed the ethics of day-to-day personal food choices] It made me realize that I want to avoid this issue because I eat meat, and it could be inconvenient for me to change.  It’s really easy to know and not act.  With stuff like this I usually acknowledge that it is a valid and very serious issue, and then I put off doing anything about it because I know subconsciously that I’ll stop feeling convicted about it after a few days and return to my comfortable state of self-righteous complacency.  I fit in wonderfully in a country of people who witness atrocities and injustices and then go right on living their lives.  The worst part of it is that part of me doesn’t even want to change.”

            Thad’s writing is startling in that he has very honestly and unflinchingly looked at and understood his behavior and the workings of his mind.  In addition, he had the courage to speak the truth about himself.  This pleased me very much, and his doing this is a crucial first step toward integrity and living in truth.  But… from what he has written it is clear that it is not enough.  Why isn’t it?  This is a question I have pondered for many years because Thad is only unique in that he is better in touch with what he is doing than most people.  Such self-deception is rampant and very destructive both at the personal and global levels.  How would the Buddha, whose whole philosophy was one of teaching personal transformation, have dealt with this issue?

            A story I have used in the past is useful here.  Imagine that you are walking down a street near where you live, and a man comes up to you in a very agitated condition.  He says to you “Please, please help me!  I have this terrible, searing pain in my right hand.  I don’t know how I can endure this for another moment.  Please help me! Tell me what to do.”  You look down, and you notice that the man is gripping a red-hot coal very tightly in his right hand.  What do you say to him?

I think anyone would tell the man to simply release the coal from his hand.  The only reason the man has not already released the coal is that he has not yet seen the connection between what he is doing and his own suffering.  Once he sees clearly that his own behavior—gripping the hot coal—is the cause of his suffering, he no longer wants to grip the hot coal.  Releasing the coal does not require thirty years of prior meditation practice, or some special technique, or a superhuman amount of will power.  When the connection between the behavior and the suffering is seen clearly, the desire to continue with the behavior evaporates, the behavior changes, and the pain caused by his own behavior stops.  As a friend who was making real progress with his anger issues once said “I finally saw what I was doing and I just didn’t want to do it anymore.” 

Thad is still gripping the hot coal and doesn’t even realize how much pain he is in.  He knows the truth about animal suffering, climate change, resource depletion and a host of other issues that he acknowledges are important but still grips the coal of cultivated ignorance and nonaction.  What he has not yet seen here is the connection between what he is doing and his unacknowledged suffering.

Here is what Thad needs to start seeing clearly. 

This pattern, if it remains unchanged, will prevent him from making many needed and beneficial changes in his life (food choices is only one example of potentially dozens).  If we are willing to learn how to change when change is necessary, it will be an important life-long skill for us.  If Thad doesn’t do this, the “inconvenience” of change will stop him every time and he will simply stay stuck in unhelpful patterns for a lifetime.  The more Thad does this the stronger the habit of cultivated ignorance becomes—eventually becoming the default setting for him. 

Thad’s behavior is distancing him from his emotions, and doing this cannot help but occur as a more general things with all his emotions.  The underlying feeling will be that “I can’t afford to be in touch with my feelings” and that “My mind and emotions are a minefield; I don’t want to go there because I’m afraid of what I will find.”  Sacrificing his self-awareness is a huge loss.  It’s why people end up in marriages that are wrong for them, working at jobs they hate, and having friends who are not caring and supportive. 

The habit of suppressing knowledge in one area of life will carry over to other areas.  Any time anything unpleasant comes up, he simply won’t deal with it and willwait for it to go away.  And so inner conflicts, past wounds, and unresolved questions never get dealt with—resulting in an alienated and numbed out life.    

There is a second kind of suffering that Thad is not seeing. There is a constant inner struggle to push down what he is doing and what it says about him—that he is a person who does not care about the suffering of others, whether humans or other species.  On some level he feels convicted of being a shallow and insensitive person, but is hiding from this.  He suffers because of the inner conflict and struggle to keep down conscious knowledge of what he is doing.  This creates inner turmoil and distress and is a constant energy drain.

In contrast with this, living with integrity—being part of the solution instead of part of the problem—actually feels good.

And what if Thad is behaving the way he is in order to “fit in” with other people?  These people he is trying to fit in with are people who are insensitive and lacking in integrity and are unlikely to be there for him in times of trouble when he might not be pleasant company.  Are those the kind of friends he wants in his life?  This is a recipe for feeling isolated and disconnected.         

Thad says, “part of me doesn’t even want to change.”  It would be very useful for him to get in touch with that part of himself and see what it is all about:  fear of being different and being judged, fear that it will lead to other changes, fear that he won’t succeed in his attempt...?  Each time we feel the fear and do it anyway we strengthen our ability to make good changes in the future. And each time we give in to fear we strengthen the opposite and dysfunctional tendency. But it does get easier the more we do it and find out how good it feels.

And then there is the external component of all this.  Acting on what we know helps nudge the world in a better direction.  If at least a few people were not willing to act on what they believed, we would still have slavery, there would still be religious persecution, women wouldn’t be able to vote, and so on.  An individual’s behavior really does affect the world and the example one sets in their own life really does influence other people’s choices.  Growing up, I never saw anyone give to charity or donate their time for a good cause.  Early in my life the thought of giving to causes or volunteering my time to help in some way never crossed my mind.  Later, meeting people who gave of themselves helped me to change and become more giving myself.

Often we learn how to act by observing how others are acting.  But we also learn to act by acting.  When I actually tried volunteering my time to help others I found that it was actually very fulfilling and meaningful.  At some point, it started to come naturally to me as a result of my actually having tried it.  I found in my philosophy classes if I actually asked students to do something as an assignment it moved them in a way that verbal explanations did not.  I assigned them to write their essays for class on the back of used sheets of paper that they recruited from recycle bins and student computer labs on campus.  I asked them to design an environmentally conscious breakfast for themselves satisfying five criteria they were given, eat that way every morning for a week, and then write a report on what they did, how it went, and how they felt.  Sometimes actions such as these are all that are needed to get someone “over the hump” about trying new things and being willing to put their values into action.

Learning to act on the truth (as you see it) actually feels good and not doing so creates suffering.  As an experiment, you might pick something that you believe is a “valid and serious issue,” and consciously choose to act on it for a week.  When doing this, pay attention to the feelings that come up for you.  There may be some fear at first (fear of the unknown, fear of what others will think), but on the whole I think you will find it energizing, enlivening, and joyful. In my own experience, it always feels much better to act with integrity.  My concern for Thad is that he might wake up when he is 40, 50, or 60 years old and find himself asking “What I have done with my life?” 

 

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