The Las Vegas of the Mind
In what might be my only original contribution to these ideas, I’ve been know to say:
“The word ‘Why’ is the Las Vegas of the mind”.
What do I mean by that?
When we are fully with the present, what we notice is largely an answer to ‘what?’: What is here? The feeling in my knee, the thought racing through my mind, the tightness in my chest, the sense of fear.
Often we don’t want to see the ‘what’ – it doesn’t fit with what we expect or prefer, or it might be too painful to take in. So we distract ourselves with ‘why?’ which leads to constant thinking and analysis, often repetitive and circular. I sometimes liken the why- thoughts to seductive dancing showgirls, flashy and taking up all the attention – trying to distract from the discomfort of the present, of what is actually so now.
It doesn’t mean that it isn’t helpful to see connections and to have some idea why things happen the way they do. But when we analyze things obsessively and repetitively, it blocks out our intuition and clear seeing. I’ve discovered that I’m more likely to see the ‘why’ accurately by not spending too much time thinking. When there is space, the ‘why’ often just pops up unbidden into my mind, without any thinking at all, when there is enough space for it to emerge.
Of course, this is easier said than done. We can’t let go of our habit of over-analyzing just by wishing it to go away. We need to see clearly that the analyzing serves an emotional purpose for us – and to sometimes gently inquire, what is it distracting us from?
From a larger view, also, the asking of ‘why?’ can lead us down the garden path. We can never really know all the reasons why things happen, and how those causes inter-relate. There are times when this seems quite clear to us – when we find out we had completely misunderstood what caused something, for example. We see the limits of our ability to understand, and how much of a vast mystery our world is. Yet it can be terrifying to think we are adrift in an ocean of events without really knowing for sure why anything happens. It can be hard to face that directly, so we distract ourselves from the aliveness of the mystery by putting life into an explainable set of boxes.
“When difficulties arise, one of our first reactions is to ask, ‘Why?’. We want certainty, logic, simple causality. We think this kind of knowing is necessary to alleviate our discomfort. Yet, most often, the reasons we come up with to explain why we think and behave the way we do are at best only marginally adequate. In reality, everything affects everything else, everything relates to everything else. The complexity of this inter-relatedness defies description, and our subjective filters make explanation even more dubious. Yet we still look for simple explanations to account for what we see, unaware of the blinders obscuring our vision. Deep understanding never lies in the cognitive world of why, but in directly experiencing the ambiguous complexity of the present moment.” Ezra Bayda, Saying Yes to Life
Next: The Five Whys