Detachment: “this is what is” -- which can be stressed several ways, tho my primary meaning would make it: this is what is.
Regarding any phenomenon that you cannot personally influence, to judge that thing on any subjective scale -- good/bad, right/wrong, skillful/stupid, ugly/beautiful -- is first, futile, and second, harmful to yourself.
Judging is futile because -- given the first requirement, that this is a thing you cannot personally influence, such as the weather, the outcome of an election, or a stranger’s behavior -- your judgement does not and cannot alter the thing in any way. Your thinking it wrong, stupid, or ugly does not make it cease to be or improve it; and your thinking it right, moral, skillful, or beautiful does nothing to preserve or multiply it. Your judgement is simply irrelevant to what is.
Judgement is harmful because the very formation of a value-opinion creates an emotional pull or push that cannot be resolved (because, again, this is something you cannot influence). Say the weather is not what you hoped for: if you feel emotion about that (anger, distress, frustration) this emotion cannot be discharged. You have no choice but to eat your liver until the emotion subsides; or worse, until you vent your spleen on another person or thing, making an innocent bystander pay for how the weather makes you feel.
Emotion that results from value judgements of what you cannot affect is precisely the “stress” of the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism: suffering that is caused by craving for what is good but unobtainable, or by aversion to what is bad but unavoidable.
The only valid attitude you can take regarding a thing-you-cannot-personally-influence (TYCPI), that is, the only productive attitude and the only attitude supportable by logic, is the attitude of “this is what is.” It is a third attitude, distinct from liking and disliking, and not the same as either.
Some might call this third attitude “acceptance” -- as in, “you must accept things as they are” -- but that word carries a connotation of approval, or at least, of acquiescence, as if you agreed to the thing, or would permit it to be (supposing you had any say in it at all). The proper name for this third attitude is: recognition. You recognize what is: you see it, you comprehend it, as far as possible you understand the causes of its origination and its likely results. Recognition does not imply acceptance; does the pathologist who recognizes cancer in a biopsy approve of it?
Our society likes binary choices, and popular wisdom does not allow much room for this third attitude. People like to say things like, “If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” and “Silence is consent.” If you simply acknowledge that something exists, in our culture, it is often taken to imply that you approve of its existence. “It looks as if it will rain on our school picnic tomorrow.” “Well, you don’t sound very unhappy about it, aren’t you sorry that the kids will be disappointed?”
One important reason our culture favors this sharp dichotomy and prefers not to acknowledge the detached stance is that cliques and causes draw their influence, and gain their memberships, from just this source: by creating strong value judgments in people’s minds, and then, having fomented a state of emotional distress, promising to release that distress in group action. This is what a political party is: a group organized around a set of stressful value judgments. The party creates the itch by trumpeting the badness of one set of things, and promises to alleviate the itch by political action. Political activists can never allow that it is possible to recognize an issue without also judging that issue. All their membership, contributions, and influence depend, first, on getting people to make value judgments about issues which those people can’t personally influence, and second, by making them feel emotionally bad about those judgments, and third, by promising to relax that emotional stress with group action -- if they will only contribute a little more time and money.
Recognition, the third stance, may also be wrongly called denial. If we do not form an emotional judgement, especially of a wrong or a tragedy, we may be accused of denying that it has happened. In psychology, the mechanism of denial is seen as having a practical purpose, of sheltering the mind from overwhelming emotion. That also is the purpose of recognition, but recognition does not deny, it investigates. It does not withhold vision; it is willing to see microscopically and comprehend; it only withholds judgement and emotion because they are useless.
Recognition may also be mislabeled resignation, passivity, or apathy. If we do not react to some event we cannot influence with conventional elation or dismay, other people use these words to say we are somehow incapable of feeling or reacting. But feelings and reactions, when they cannot possibly lead to change, are simply pointless. It is much more helpful to gain a cool, clinical understanding of the situation than to characterize it.
In fact it is not only possible but immensely valuable to be able to recognize and comprehend phenomena while not judging them on a value scale. You perform this act often, without realizing it amounts to anything special. Look at an ordinary chair, look at your thumbnail, or think about the public transit system in your city. You know a great deal about these subjects, and you could learn more if you needed to, yet you never form a value judgment about them. Is this a virtuous thumbnail, or a pretty one? A moral transit system or an ugly one? Not especially, either way. You understand these ordinary phenomena intimately; you could become expert on them if you needed to, and you do that while never judging them on any subjective scale of values.
The secret of detachment is to be able to form the same kind of clinical, intelligent, detailed knowledge about an issue that tugs at your emotions, but about which you can do nothing. As part of that kind of thinking, you may have to form a similarly detached, nonjudging appraisal, not only of events, but of other people’s actions and their emotions. As a result, someone may accuse you of being “cold.” Before you allow yourself to feel guilty about that charge, ask yourself why your accuser makes that accusation at all. That person wants to influence you: your nonjudgmental recognition calls into question the validity of the person’s own emotions; they have been made to feel isolated; and they want you to join them in their stress and validate it. This is the difficulty that every psychological therapist has to deal with: how to walk the line between being sympathetically understanding of someone else’s pain while not agreeing and joining in with that pain.
You may find that your emotional engagement, your hating or loving some particular issue, is hard to shed. In that case, you can adopt a clever trick used by meditation teachers: make the disturbing emotion itself the object of your attention. When a student tells a meditation teacher that restlessness or anger or some other problem is interfering with meditation practice, the teacher is likely to tell the student to make that very discomfort the focus of the meditation, telling the student to focus full awareness on the discomfort, to examine it, to locate it precisely in the body, to observe its every facet; in short, to create a nonjudgmental recognition of the disturbing emotion. When this is done, the emotion itself tends to evaporate. The same strategy can be used in practicing detachment. When you cannot emotionally detach from an issue, begin in a detached way to examine your own emotions about the issue. Recognize them and their sources and effects, grasp them as thoroughly as you understand, say, the catalog system at your library, or the tax code, or some other neutral subject you know well. Why does this issue perturb you? What will be the worst possible and best possible outcomes? If you felt differently about it, would the outcomes be any different? Is there any conceivable way you can have personal influence on the outcomes? If not, is there any conceivable preparation you can make to take advantage of, or improve, the good outcome, should it come to pass, or to shelter from the bad outcome or to minimize it for yourself or for others?
There are two purposes for developing detached recognition in this way. First, to reduce your own emotional distress, and to achieve tranquility. But second, to improve your own ability to act and to influence events. To say of something that is going on, “that’s bad, that’s evil, that’s stupid, that’s wrong” is to harm yourself by increased stress, first; but also we tend to stop at these judgemnts, as if making that pronouncement ended the matter. Even worse, we might judge incorrectly or superficially; and then, because we have our indignation to maintain, because we are emotionally invested in a belief that the event was evil (or wonderful), our judgment actually gives us a motive to not look too closely at the facts, or to look selectively for details that will sustain and justify our emotions.
The attitude of detached recognition permits us to go much further in understanding events and their causes and their outcomes. Everything, when examined, turns out to be more complicated than we knew at first. If we can dispense with the pain of negative emotion and the waste of time of futile judgement, we can look deeper into the why of the thing, and further forward in time. We might very well discover that there is an opportunity, after all, for us to influence this event, or its sequels, not now but after some time has passed, if we are tranquil and prepared. And even if that does not turn out to be so, we will at least be wiser in how things like this come about, and be able to see them forming sooner in the future. None of this penetrative wisdom is possible if we are wrapped up in the stress of judging the quality of the thing or supporting a judgment.
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