Vicariousness 2

What are they thinking?

Vicarious appreciation of mental ideas
Visualization of other’s situations for self empowerment

It is clear to anyone who has studied habitual thought that it takes constant repetition, spaced and otherwise, to make lasting change. We are habituated to living within our skins, and simply letting go of a lot that is going on here and now. This is a pleasant thing in one sense, because it means we really don’t have to deal with all of it. From the perspective of simply sitting with our own present moment experience, this is ideal. The issue though is that we let go of a lot of it, but not all of it. If we were to just drop all conceptions and ideas of the world and sit still, this is your garden variety sitting meditation, and it is invaluable for so many different reasons which we won’t get into just now. But we are not habituated to dropping all of it. Instead, we are habituated to dropping all that is not available to us through perceptual or conceptual experience.

Now this is neither here nor there. It leaves you with the common experience of malaise that so many of us experience. One of its many results is the feeling of feeble progress or regress or of treading water that is almost the rule in modern life. As an alternative to what we usually do, and as an alternative to meditation, I am going to suggest something dynamic that will almost seem like a roller coaster ride that threatens to end up in insanity. Not to worry though, our minds and our imaginations are capable of so much more than we give them credit for. The odds are that a person will sooner become insane through a cyclical association with frustrating and dis empowering thoughts than with indulging in a radical exercise of the imagination.

Now, what is this dynamic something? Let me ask you a question. What happens if we do the exact opposite of what is done in sitting meditation? Instead of simply paying attention to the breath or a picture on the wall or something, and dropping all else, how about we pick up everything else. That’s right. I mean pick up not just the thoughts that you hold as personal and intimate, but all else.

This very moment, in a cafe in Rio, the music being played is something you will perhaps never hear in your life. This very moment, in the Siberian tundra, a man is undergoing an experience that you will probably never go through. A bushman in the Kalahari is right now thinking thoughts that none of us are privy to. But we’ve already done this game of taking random and far fetched individual contexts and splaying them out to stretch our sense of what else is out there. Let us go one step further.

Imagine that right now, all of the thoughts of one oneupmanship in corporations around the world are indeed being thought. In other words, in Beijing, someone is thinking of staging a coup at his office to show superior performance to his rival co-worker, in order to be the person who seizes that promotion. In Vancouver, this minute, someone is preparing a plan to make a presentation that one ups her colleagues and demonstrates that she is the queen bee in the hive. In Mumbai, someone is clearly hashing a plan with his colleagues that will surely lead to their little clique being viewed as golden boys, and their rival co-workers as candidates for pink slips. The central thought that is running through all these minds is ‘I’ll show them who’s the best’ or simply ‘I’ll show them’. There is a clear strand of anger here, and an equally clear strand of politics, but also a clear strand of a desire for significance. To feel worthy through one’s accomplishments.

Now, let us change the emotional tone that we search for in different contexts. Imagine this minute, that we know that several people, all over the world, in different studios, in their living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, are earnestly practicing for talent show auditions. The sensation of ‘I want to blow them away with my brilliance’ is at the forefront of their minds. One person in London is thinking about how Simon Cowell is going to react to her singing. One person in New York City is thinking about how he’d like to show Howard Stern his comedy act. One troupe in Warsaw is thinking about how they are going to wow all of Europe, and going through their fifth rehearsal of the evening. Effort is being expended, massive effort, with a fairly grand array of dreams fueling it. Again, the clear strand of a desire for significance screams out at us. I want to feel worthy because of what I can do. I want you to notice me and to acclaim me and to praise me to the skies.

One thing comes through to us when we go through such exercises in the imagination. A poverty of the imagination is one of the key ingredients in why we make the same choices over and over again. I mean, let us say you’re sitting in a home in the USA, and you’re unemployed, and at home, and your habit is to turn on the TV and to watch Jerry Springer in the daytime. Putting judgment aside, we all agree that this activity is habitual in the context portrayed. Now, picture this in your mind’s eye. It is clear enough that at the same time that you’re making the seemingly conscious decision to watch Jerry Springer, someone is moving in a coffee shop, with their hand extended, with the idea of making a new professional contact, because they’ve trained themselves to spot and avail opportunities that come their way. In the same moment, someone else with your very life conditions is getting up, and deciding the opposite of what you’ve almost decided. That is, someone else, this moment, who is also unemployed, at home, who had an impulse to watch daytime TV, just for this once overrode that, and decided to drive to a library nearby so that she could read books on empowering herself in her job hunt. Someone else, with the same situation to the two of you, started feeling intensely sorry for himself, and he started reaching for a beer can, barely keeping it together while doing so. Someone else, this moment, in a similar situation to the three of you, actually decided to pick up the phone and call a recruiter. Someone else, in a similar situation to the four of you, by virtue of the life he lived, had an impulse to call his friends to pitch a small business idea.

Now it was the same situation in these five cases. An unemployed person at home is terribly tempted to watch daytime TV in order to procrastinate an activity that is really important and even urgent to their overall well being. But in each of these cases, something very different was done. In the cases with the downward trajectory, either alcohol or entertainment were used to distract the person from the very real, urgent situation that life has stagnated and there is no means to put some food on the table. In the cases with the upward trajectory the call to action was heeded, and inner feeling of guilt at not doing something about, or simply a feeling of inspiration, or some complex mix of emotions, made action possible.

The thing though is that those that chose the downward trajectories were not exercising their imagination in that moment. If they had access, in their mind’s eye, to at least one person in their own situation, who was choosing to act in a much more inspiring fashion, the odds are that they would have acted differently as well.

I think this is where the rubber of this chapter hits its road. How would your life be, if you developed the imagination to see different possible options for the next step in any given life situation. For instance, in the shoes the above example, the unemployed person at home, who has a strong impulse to watch daytime TV and perhaps to mindlessly shovel food into the mouth while doing so, how would different choices appear. The same habitual weight that is backing the option of daytime TV accompanied by a ‘snack’ is perhaps a lot more than the weight that is associated with the option of calling a recruiter. Perhaps there is some large amount of trepidation and annoyance at having to go through the process of finding a job. Perhaps there is a lack of confidence that has developed through being out of touch with the tools of one’s trade. Perhaps it is a mix of all of the above. Whatever the case, that same weight and the impulse to move in the direction of the other option is not there.

In such cases, it is clear enough that even working on remedial work requires the impulse to step out of the comfort zone. The thing though is that the impulse to step out of the comfort zone doesn’t really feel comfortable. The key, then, is that if one really works on one’s imagination, then the shift from the comfort zone to some place outside it doesn’t have to be sudden or even unpleasant. It can be done one step at a time, in the gentlest manner possible, and we can use our imaginations to give it a twist.

One of the well established rules in neuroscience that has been mentioned countless times is: neurons that fire together, wire together. Now this is the secret behind the inculcation of any habit. Do it long enough for the wiring to happen, and then each time you just start the habit, whoosh, you’re in the habit neural circuit. If it was something that was picked up deliberately to improve some facet of your life, that’s great. That’s just what you’ve been looking for. If instead this is a neural circuit of addiction to something harmful, such as sugar or cocaine, then it doesn’t serve you so well.

What will it take to drive or inspire each one of us to enlarge our imaginations as though our lives depended on it. Because, guess what, they really do. An active and healthy exercise of the imagination is essential to progress in life, and living is really consciously choosing those activities that really offer us opportunities to imagine grander and higher.

The thing that really feels good in life is the feeling of progress. The process of arriving at a goal in life gives us lot more pleasure than the state of having arrived there and simply being there. This is the oldest adage in the reams of self help and philosophical literature that have been published. It is the journey, not the destination. But this does not stop us from continuously obsessing over the destination, and continuously forgetting about the journey. I would like to suggest here that very often it is a failure of the imagination that keeps people obsessing over the destination, when in fact a healthy exercise of the imagination could go a long way in allowing them to imagine ways to return to their practical, living, waking experience. In fact, it would be a very useful exercise to visualize the state of being stuck in a seemingly insurmountable rut, and to then to visualize the creation of progress in that rut, until one has achieved significant mental momentum to move out of that rut.