We are good?

I was asked that question by a waitress in the restaurant at Holiday Inn in Port Moresby a few months ago. I told her that I was good and asked whether she was good. She responded: “We are good”.

This novel use of the hospital ‘we’ seemed amusing. But the incident came to mind just now because of the potential for ‘good’ to mean different things.

How do you respond when someone greets you by asking: How are you? There was a time when I nearly always said “I’m good”, but I became more conscious of what I was saying after some clever person responded that he was not asking about my morals. In retrospect, I should have told him that I was referring to my emotional state, which was good because I was in good health and also felt somewhat virtuous and competent.

A few years ago I wrote a post on the topic: Is our inner nature good? What I wrote still seems ok; perhaps I could even claim it is good. I ended up more or less endorsing the view that our inner nature must be good because moral beliefs and motivations come from a small set of intuitions that evolution has prepared the human brain to develop. Those intuitions enable and constrain the social construction of virtues and values. 

There is scientific support for that line of thinking, but a scientific approach cannot take us far in considering our inner natures.

It may be worth considering why a scientific approach cannot be particularly enlightening about our own inner natures. One basic reason is that we live our lives as players rather than spectators. If we try to observe ourselves in the way we observe other people we tend to make predictions that get in the way of our intentions. We cannot escape the fact that our perceptions influence our behaviour, and vice versa. If I perceive myself as the kind of person who behaves in a particular way, then that will influence my intentions and how I behave; and if I change my behaviour, that will influence how I perceive myself.

In order to become more like the person you would like to become, you need to know how and to “do it like you mean it” (to use a phrase I heard often as a child while helping grown-ups with farm work). A story told by Tim Gallwey in The Inner Game of Golf comes to mind to illustrate the point (p183). A golfer came to Gallwey for coaching to improve his golf swing. After the golfer demonstrated his dreadful swing, Gallwey asked him how he would like to be able to swing. When the golfer started to explain, Gallwey asked him to demonstrate. That resulted in an immediate improvement in performance.

Now, it is fairly obvious that people can’t become experts in any field by just pretending to have expertise. The golfer only had the potential to improve his swing instantaneously because he knew how to do so.

Going back a step, how do we know we can trust our intuitions about what kind of person we would like to be? Our perceptions about our inner natures must influence our thinking about what kinds of persons we would like to be. There are many different stories we can tell ourselves about our inner natures. If you tell yourself that “the flesh warreth against the spirit” then I guess your goal must be to overcome the temptations of the flesh.  If you tell yourself that your body is just a machine designed to make you happy then I guess your goal would be to keep all the parts in good working order and become a proficient machine operator. If you tell yourself that all sensations are illusory or impermanent and that attachment to them causes suffering, then I guess your goal would be to become equanimous. If you tell yourself that you have an authentic self which grows into a strong, healthy and peaceful presence when you practice unconditional acceptance of all your bodily sensations, then I guess your goal is to get into the flow and let that happen.

Although it must be fairly obvious that I think some of those stories would serve me better than others, I don’t think it is possible to prove any of them to be false. Even so, it seems to me that plausibility is still an important consideration in choosing which stories to accept. As a general rule small leaps of faith are probably better than large leaps of faith. That thought occurred to me as I was reading Michael Winn’s book, Way of the Inner Smile, a few days ago. For example, the following passage explaining how the inner smile differs from feelings of love and compassion seems to me to be a plausible description of personal experience:

“The Inner Smile is probably something closer to the experience of unconditional acceptance. The seed quality of unconditional acceptance is smiled through the outer biological layers of the self in towards the core of one’s being, and this generates a counter-wave of smiling energy that emanates back out from the core and flows in the chi (subtle energy) channels of the body”. (p 55)

The plausibility of that story relies on personal experience rather than on scientific verification of the existence of such things as smiling energy and chi channels. Some ideas in the book seem to me to be less plausible, but it would distract from the points I am trying to make if I elaborate now.

So, what points am I trying to make? Feeling good is about competence and virtue as well as health. Feeling good is about becoming more like the person you want to become. In order to develop a strong sense of what kind of person you would like to become it may be helpful to find a story about your inner nature that you find plausible. When considering your inner nature, the most relevant test of plausibility is personal experience rather than science. And we should not forget to smile.

Postscript:

Lucy Lopez has provided the following comment:

 You wrote: "Feeling good is about competence and virtue as well as health. Feeling good is about becoming more like the person you want to become. In order to develop a strong sense of what kind of person you would like to become it may be helpful to find a story about your inner nature that you find plausible. When considering your inner nature, the most relevant test of plausibility is personal experience rather than science. And we should not forget to smile."

Firstly, the thinking mind is almost never inactive and so intervenes in every experience.  So much so that most people find it hard to distinguish between their thoughts, beliefs and ideas and their FEELINGS.  In fact, most find it hard to actually allow themselves to feel, almost always reporting on what they think rather than how they feel.  

So, for instance, if I ask you how you feel and you say 'I'm good'. that is more than likely an expression of the idea of 'I'm okay' or 'There's nothing terribly wrong with me' rather than an expression of how you're really feeling.

But it is possible to get in touch with our feelings and acknowledge them even when we sometimes may not have any existing words for them.  When you really allow yourself to FEEL, or should I say to ACKNOWLEDGE how you're feeling, it can be quite a revelation.  That's because we have been so conditioned to deny, distrust and hide our feelings.  

When we do allow ourselves to tune into our feelings fully and acknowledge them, we can do two things:

1. We can decide if we want to continue feeling the way we are feeling or not.  If we want to continue feeling the same way, there is nothing more to do.  If we don't want to feel the way we're feeling, we can ask the question: How would I LIKE to feel?  Without presuming we know the answer (in other words, without resorting to thought/ideas, we allow that feeling to arise spontaneously.  Again, it may often surprise us how different that feeling is to what we might THINK we want to feel.  (BTW, this is a technique I teach).

2. We can look for the thoughts and beliefs that underlie our feelings and examine these for their validity, whereupon we might consider different thoughts and different beliefs.

The point to all this is that you don't need to rely on some intellectual concept of the kind of person you'd like to be.  Sure, you may begin by thinking about it but it is far more effective, efficient and natural to FEEL the kind of person you want to be because more than likely, you'll be guided by what feels good i.e. peaceful, joyous, blissful, equanimous even...The kind of states you experience during meditation as Voltaire describes it:

'Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or pure consciousness without objuectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity'.

Always happy to respond to your ideas :)

Lucy's blog:  "Get Enlightened Today"