Meditation and Human Freedom

Meditation Practice and Human Freedom: As you may have seen in a couple of my recent posts (here and here), I have recently been pre-occupied by questions related to human freedom, or free will. As most psychologists and other scientists understand it, human freedom is not unlimited (some psychologists are actually determinists, believing that human freedom is totally illusory; but I think that concept is a dead end, and will not deal with it in this post). If we reflect upon it, I think all of us would acknowledge that, as a practical matter, much of our behavior is thoughtless, even "automatic." We all have what we call "knee-jerk reactions." We all can probably recall occasions when we did something (maybe something contrary to our values), but cannot say "why" we did it, and cannot really recall making a conscious decision to do it. In my work as a forensic psychologist, it has many times been my sad experience to evaluate a person facing murder charges who tells me (when I ask him what his thoughts were, just before he killed someone): "I didn't think about it; it just happened!" There is, in such cases, the sense that the act of killing was something that happened to him, instead of by him (and these are people who do not have a psychiatric condition). And, in the (much more common) situations in which people engage in compulsive (or addictive) behaviors, they certainly have the subjective sense that their capacity for self-control is severely lacking (or even entirely absent).

The good news about this picture is that we need not be helpless in the face of limitations in our capacity to exercise freedom. One of the primary reasons that we engage in so much thoughtless, automatic behavior is that we allow ourselves to become lost in thought, even as we are going through the activities of our daily lives. We just "go through the motions," while mentally engaged in activities such as planning for the future, or re-hashing the past. In other words, we allow ourselves to be "mindless," a state in which we fail to pay attention to what is going on (within our minds, and in our surroundings), right this very moment. And, when we are mindless, we can easily act on an impulse that we never even realized that we had (resulting in what would label a "knee-jerk reaction"). Within psychology and psychiatry, in treating compulsive/addictive behavior, we teach people to pay closer attention to their thoughts and emotions, so that they can detect the beginnings of an impulse (or craving) early enough to make a conscious decision to head it off... and, in this way, they can begin to change their behavioral patterns, even those that have often felt uncontrollable.

This type of attentional training, or attentional enhancement, is a one very important aspect of meditation practice. Over and over again, we bring our mind into a state in which we are deliberately paying attention to what is going on right now, this very moment. As we do this, our brains become more capable of shifting attention from the internal train of mental chatter (worrying about the future, thinking about the past); and we are better able to remain consciously aware, in our daily lives. And, when this happens, we are also improving our capacity for self-control, because we actually know what we are thinking and feeling, and how we are responding to environmental triggers, in the here-and-now (instead of later, after we have done something that we might regret!).

In the Mind Hacks blog, there is a short discussion of a new article by Richard Davidson and his colleagues, about the effects of meditation practice on attentional processes; they note that: "many... studies... have reported interesting effects. For example, highly experienced focused attention meditators need minimal effort to sustain attentional focus, while even short courses on meditation can improve attention and decrease stress." In our contemporary world, one in which we all seem to suffer from attentional deficits to one degree or another, the implications are obvious...

Conclusion: I think it is fair to say that contemporary neuroscience is telling us that it is with very good justification that Joseph Goldstein, the great meditation teacher, titled one of his books (one I highly recommend!): Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom.