Sometimes in the morning, as I slowly wake up, I recognize that something is bothering me. I’ve learned to acknowledge and explore such feelings; and thanks to years of meditative practice, I’ve learned how to open them up, get to their source, and move past them. A great luxury of being retired is that I have plenty of time to do this.
The first stage of this process is to recognize the state I’m actually in. I call this my fate. I use the word fate here to signify how I find myself at a given moment. It is the state in which the total history of my life has arrived; it is unalterable.
The second stage is to use my understanding to explore this fate. It is often easier to understand abstract concepts or facts about the world than it is to understand our own self. This is where mindfulness practices can help, particularly those whose goal is to increase self understanding.
Finally, I use the power I have within me to improve how I feel. This power can take two forms: I can change things external to me and I can change something within me.
Sometimes there is little if anything I can do to change the conditions of the external world that trouble me. In that case, often the best I can do is to change my perspective or attitude so that I can make some kind of peace with how this affects me.
Sometimes I can do something, but it takes a bold step to make the change. Then I have to weigh whether it is worth the effort. But in either case, by being mindful of my situation, I can bring about a change that moves me forward in a better way.
This simple process can be used to deal with a great many situations in life, from rather minor things, like the example above, to major life situations.
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What I’ve written above is how I experience this situation subjectively. Thinking about it from a more objective standpoint, it seems probable to me that both my ability to understand and the power that I have to make changes are also a part of my fate, part of what I am.
In his recent article here, Daniel Strain used the word “neuroplasticity” in reference to the brain’s power to modify itself through experience(1). What I experience subjectively as my power to change, from a more objective perspective is the brain’s power to change. But I wonder if the brain’s neuroplasticity is in some way dependent on our subjective view; if in acting as if I have a free will, I enhance my brain’s ability to modify itself, which is to say, to modify me.
At any rate, I think both the subjective view and the objective view give us a certain truth about the situation. If we take only the objective view, we may become passive and never learn how to fully take advantage of this power that we have within us. If we take only the subjective view, we may fall into the old mind/body dualism and fail to understand how fully integrated mind and body are, and how integrated mind and body are with the rest of the world.
In the objective sense, our fate is fully integrated into the fate of the world. Our ability to understand and effect change are talents that are given to us by Nature. Talents that the long evolution of our species have arrived at. Talents which we are fated to either develop or fail to develop.
I think that the failure to understand the truth that each perspective provides is at least partly responsible for the muddle that debates about freewill vs. necessity often become. But that is beyond the scope of this piece.
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My fate, it would seem, exists in the intersection where the history of the world and the history of my soul meet. It is at once the depths of my being and yet an otherness in which my being exists. Many mystics have spoken of the state in which subject and object are one and the same. That, it would seem, is the state of total mindfulness of our fate.
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