One Time, One Meeting

                                       That day she put our heads together,

                                       Fate had her imagination about her,

                                       Your head so much concerned with outer,

                                       Mine with inner, weather.

                                                 — Robert Frost, “Tree at My Window”

If you pay attention to your inner life, you may have noticed how your experience of the world around you conditions your states of mind. Sitting with friends on a summer afternoon, you feel happy and relaxed. Watching the evening news, you feel tense and depressed. What may have escaped your notice, however, is the degree to which your mental states condition your experience of the world. “I feel different now,” my granddaughter remarked, having fallen and broken a front tooth, “and the world feels different, too.” In ways less dramatic and often less apparent, that is true for us grown-ups as well.

In Buddhist psychology, the part of our makeup that causes us to feel one way or another is known as a “mental formation.” According to traditional Buddhist teachings, the so-called self consists of five components, known as “form” (physical body), “feelings” (sensations), “thought” (perceptions), “mental formations,” and “consciousness.” Like the other components, mental formations are constantly in flux. They pass through our minds like changing weather. But while a particular mental formation is present, it mediates between our raw sensory impressions and our awareness of the world.  It influences and may determine how we think, speak, and act. If, for example, the mental formation craving is present, we are likely to grasp, or try to grasp, the manifold things we encounter. By contrast, if the formation mindfulness is present, we are likely to see those objects clearly and allow them to remain as they are.

Mental formations might be likened to filters, through which we screen the evidence of our senses. At any given moment, what we call the world is in reality an immediate sensory impression—the bark of a dog, the smell of gas, a roseate evening sky—perceived through the medium of whatever mental formation might be present. In a microsecond, what began as a pure impression becomes a complex of thought and feeling, as we superimpose on that impression our personal and cultural memories, our moral concepts, and our fixed opinions. Together this multilayered amalgam becomes what we call our experience.

As Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck notes in her essay “Experiencing and Behavior,” we cannot feel another person’s experience. However intuitive, empathic, or skillful we may be, and however many miles we may have walked in that person’s moccasins, we can only observe, judge, and have an opinion about his or her behavior. “If we think,” Beck remarks,” ‘she shouldn’t be so arrogant,’ we only see her behavior and judge it, because we have no awareness of what is true for her (her experiencing, her bodily sensation of fear). We slip into personal opinions about her arrogance.”

And as with others, so with ourselves. “Know thyself,” the ancient Greeks advised. But often enough, our fund of self-knowledge consists mainly of our ideas about ourselves (“I’m a morning person”; “I’m a hoarder”; “I’m a survivor”).  Sometimes those ideas correspond to empirical reality, but quite often they do not. However real they may seem or feel, they may be far from true. And even when they contain some modicum of truth, they are usually based on a notion of the self as a fixed entity, impervious to shifting causes and conditions. To the degree that we identify with such ideas or believe what they are telling us, we separate ourselves from our actual felt experience. We become self-observers, whose observations may be wise or foolish, accurate or wide of the mark.

If we wish to counter that common tendency, we can stop and become aware of whatever mental formation might be present. We can permit it to be what it is for as long as it lasts. At the same time, we can look more deeply into its origins—the personal, familial, and cultural causes and conditions that have brought it into being. We can discern whether, in the language of Zen, it is a “wholesome” mental formation, such as loving-kindness or compassion, or an “unwholesome” formation, such as greed, aversion, or delusion. If it is the former, we can resolve to cultivate it at a later time. If it is the latter, we can endeavor to let it go. Empowered with the understanding that, in large part, our mental formations create the world we live in, and that we can choose which formations to embrace, we need no longer be governed by the most destructive among them. And should we take a hard fall, we can learn to accept rather than resist our changing inner weather.

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