This article really eliminated some suffering today, the mind here was fixated on what “should” be, once it was seen that things are as they are (so obvious), the suffering reduced dramatically. Thank you Robert.
Hi Robert. Is there any practical way to change one's belief that things could have been other than what they are? And how is one to know whether that belief has actually been dropped?
My mind is always producing alternatives to the way things could have gone, especially when I've made bad mistakes. I don't seem to have any handle on those thoughts.
Hello, Ryan. This is a question that crops up often since remorse about the past is a common experience.
If an aphorism will help, this one from Kierkegaard seems to apply:
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."
Another similar one is attributed to Oscar Wilde:
"Experience is a hard teacher. She gives the test first, the lesson afterward."
Thoughts about how things could have gone differently are not nothing. They are one subloop of the system processing the mistake, extracting whatever information is available for future use. That subloop is part of how the organism learns from experience, and it runs whether or not there was ever a controller who could have chosen otherwise, or not.
Consider what would have had to be different for you to have acted otherwise. Not just your decision in that moment, but everything that produced it: your mood, your history, what you had eaten, what you were afraid of, what you had learned and not learned up to that point, the state of your brain and body in that instant. To have chosen differently, all of that would have had to be different too. But then it would not have been you, in that situation, choosing differently. It would have been a different organism altogether, one that never existed, making a different choice in a situation that, for it, would also have been the only one available.
In that moment, the entire organism, given everything it was at the time, did what it had to do. No other choice was available because the organism that would have had to make that choice did not exist at the time, and only exists now in imagination.
What causes the suffering is the belief that a different choice was available and that you, specifically, failed to make it. That belief survives the recognition of determinism remarkably well because it operates beneath the level at which the argument lands. The argument for determinism can be granted intellectually, while the felt sense of "I should have chosen differently" keeps running undisturbed.
As for knowing whether that belief has been dropped, I would not look for certainty. The belief does not announce its own departure. What you can observe is whether the regret, when it arises, still carries the charge of "I should have known better, I could have done otherwise," or whether it has become more like information passing through, noted and used without the additional layer of self-accusation. You will not catch yourself in the act of dropping the belief. You may notice later that it is simply not as present as it once was.
Thanks for the clear and generous response, Robert. I love that Oscar Wilde quote. I guess there's no better school than the school of hard knocks, but boy the suffering that comes along with it sure makes it hard to be grateful for the lessons learned. I'm still waiting on the day when I can go through these experiences without the added layers of guilt and hatred.
This exchange perfectly mirrors what I learned during a period of my life when I was dealing with daily panic attacks. The suffering didn't come from the physical sensations themselves; it came from the exhausting, obsessive loop of trying to protect myself from them and get rid of them in advance.
The breakthrough only happened when I dropped my resistance and realized I didn't need to be protected from my own nervous system. I had to learn to accept the discomfort fully as whatever it was that was happening in that moment even to the point of leaning into it and daring it to be stronger. The moment you realize your body and its discomfort are completely OK as they are, the loop loses its fuel.
That's what comes to mind for me when I reflect on the impact of resisting what is.
Yes, suffering often comes from wishing reality were other than it is. There is wisdom in seeing that clearly.
But I am not convinced that every movement toward change is resistance.
A flower turning toward the sun is not resisting the shade. A wounded animal seeking shelter is not resisting reality. A human being wanting healing, connection, or growth may simply be expressing the next movement of life itself.
The desire to change can arise from fear and rejection of what is.
It can also arise from love.
From curiosity.
From the natural unfolding of a living system.
For me, the question is not whether I want things to change, but whether I am at war with what is while they do.
Can I acknowledge reality completely and still participate in its unfolding?
Can I say, “This is what is,” while also saying, “And this is where life seems to be moving next”?
I think you have misunderstood my exchange with Scott. I was not saying that every movement toward change is resistance to what is.
When I said, "What is, is, and in this moment cannot be different. Resisting that is psychological suffering," I was not saying anything about resisting change, but about resisting this moment. Things change when and as they do, just as things are as they are.
I agree with your distinction between being at war with what is while things change, and participating in the unfolding. Those are different psychological states. What you call war is what I mean by resistance. Participation in living, whether it arises from love, curiosity, or simply the organism doing what it does, is the flow itself.
The flower and the wounded animal are good examples. Neither is at war with what is. Both are doing what living systems do, moving toward what stabilizes them. That movement is the flow, not resistance to it.
Very nice Sarah! I like the middle way you describe…or perhaps what I am responding to is your openness to possibilities. Nothing definitive, per se, but allowing.
I don’t think I did. Becoming- means perpetual change and development. Most didn’t have a problem… just you and the author, which is slightly comical… perhaps ego it a barrier to understanding what I have written- the belief I was trying to correct rather than explain a personal stance.
You're always late for the show. :-) All you can do is comment. Sure at times there is a sense of agency - that's also true. I don't have any answers and that's not an answer. The 'me' - apparent or otherwise - that appears thinking away about this and that........ just happens like everything else. I can't seem to affect it anymore than the weather. The sense of being though always remains. Well except when I'm asleep or when in the two times I've had a general anaesthetic for a hospital operation that is. During those times I might as well have been dead. Time for a cup of tea. Thanks for the opportunity to talk Robert.
So if suffering is in the flow, resisting the suffering increases the suffering or introduces additional suffering. That might introduce into the flow the idea or urge to stop resisting the suffering in order to decrease the total suffering. But I think, if I understand everything I have read of yours (including "Depending on No-Thing" which I just finished the other day and loved), you would say that we do not have free will and therefore cannot simply decide to stop resisting suffering and then do so. We may stop resisting, and if we do, mazel tof as you say sometimes in "Depending". But it doesn't happen because we decide to, it just happens because it simply appears in the flow. Do I have that right? (Pretty much without fail, when I try to say what I think you would say, I miss the mark, so I am probably doing that now too).
On so-called free will, you are free to do what you like, but not to choose what to like. If you see this, then the sense of free will operates on one level of the system--one subloop, so to speak--but not on the whole system. The system does what it does when it does.
On resisting suffering, that is a misleading idea. What we resist is not just suffering, but the entire situation: being a biological entity that must struggle to survive and eventually decline, sicken, and die. That resistance--the denial of entropy--is a form of suffering, but not the only one.
Thanks for the clarification. Based on your prompting, a week or two ago I did do an experiment in which, for a good while, I inspected the flow of my experiences trying to detect if I ever made a free choice. When I had a strong desire, it was clear I didn't choose that desire, it just appeared, and choosing to act on the desire didn't happen in my conscious mind. It too just popped into the stream of my experiencing. If I decided to act against my desire, I could try to do that consciously, but then I asked myself, why go against that desire? Answer: another desire to try to prove I am free. Which was, like any other desire, just there from who knows where. When I had several roughly evenly intense desires competing for different decisions, a decision would appear (especially if I was feeling time pressure), but once again, that decision just appeared in consciousness rather than my being able to detect that I consciously made it. So I coild not tell that I ever consciously decided anything. What also appeared was this idea: maybe my unconscious mind is the way I make free decisions. Or to put it differently, maybe I delegate my free will decision making to my unconscious mind, but that is part of me so I am still the one making the decision. Except I can't tell whether it's free since and am not conscious of the process itself.
So that was an interesting experiment, but it needs some disambiguation. You say, "Maybe I delegate my free will decision-making to my unconscious mind, but that is part of me, so I am still the one making the decision."
What do you mean by "I?" If decisions are made unconsciously, then how can you say, "I made them," and how can they even rightly be called decisions? Isn't contemplating and then deciding a conscious experience, not an unconscious one?
I am not trying to say my unconscious mind is real and is a part of me. I'm just saying (and I did say in my comment) that the delegation idea and the existence of an unconscious mind that is part of "me" tends to appear in my experience stream when questions about free will are also appearing. I guess it's a desire for confirmation of free will and an attempt to make a model of self that allows for free will. But that does no good since even if the model were true, it still doesn't let me see or feel a decider actually making a decision. It's just something I go through (or experience) from time to time.
Beautiful. You reached for the unconscious as a refuge for the chooser, and then watched that model fail to produce what it promised. The decider did not appear. What appeared was the desire for a decider, which is a different thing entirely.
Words get tricky here, but since this exchange, I’ve found myself asking if it’s possible to see that a change is necessary in myself, but at the same time not turn that into some psychological problem that needs to be solved. To simply observe what I am without resistance OR acceptance maybe a better way of putting it.
Yeah, u dont have to believe or identify with the desire (to change/transform). And there are so many ways to relate without transforming or identifying as their goals.
Darius, I didn’t use the word desire because it didn’t fit what I was trying to say. Desire implies resistance. I felt like the word “necessary” pointed to something more “objective”, again for lack of a better word.
Im not sure there is a real difference between desires and needs. “I want to eat because im hungry. Vs i need to eat because im hungry.” End up in the exact same place but with a different narrative justification.
Its not that we want donuts. Donuts are made of sugar and sugar is rare in nature and represents “free energy”, which is exactly like air and water. Its easy to digest carbohydrates. Duh. Its not mysterious but it does require some understanding of evolutionary neurobiology.
Darius, for me it’s not about what I personally believe or like or dislike about those beliefs. From this perspective, it seems that if my actions cause conflict and are harmful to others, I can recognize that change is necessary, and, at the same time, not be resistant to that a fact. Not sure how else to put it. See what Sarah said.
I love the simplicity in and the clarity stemming from the dialogue. I also deeply appreciate the awareness that the agency to transform things is part of beingness. The realization that things are as they are and can't be different in this moment does not eliminate agency... it actually frees it!
So true...resistance IS futile...in the sense that resisting what has already arisen is not only pointless (it's too late to change what is), but doesn't positively influence our wellbeing.
We will continue to slip into resistance, but we can at least notice when we're doing it and then, maybe, respond skilfully. Go well. 🫶🈚️
This article really eliminated some suffering today, the mind here was fixated on what “should” be, once it was seen that things are as they are (so obvious), the suffering reduced dramatically. Thank you Robert.
Hi Robert. Is there any practical way to change one's belief that things could have been other than what they are? And how is one to know whether that belief has actually been dropped?
My mind is always producing alternatives to the way things could have gone, especially when I've made bad mistakes. I don't seem to have any handle on those thoughts.
Hello, Ryan. This is a question that crops up often since remorse about the past is a common experience.
If an aphorism will help, this one from Kierkegaard seems to apply:
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."
Another similar one is attributed to Oscar Wilde:
"Experience is a hard teacher. She gives the test first, the lesson afterward."
Thoughts about how things could have gone differently are not nothing. They are one subloop of the system processing the mistake, extracting whatever information is available for future use. That subloop is part of how the organism learns from experience, and it runs whether or not there was ever a controller who could have chosen otherwise, or not.
Consider what would have had to be different for you to have acted otherwise. Not just your decision in that moment, but everything that produced it: your mood, your history, what you had eaten, what you were afraid of, what you had learned and not learned up to that point, the state of your brain and body in that instant. To have chosen differently, all of that would have had to be different too. But then it would not have been you, in that situation, choosing differently. It would have been a different organism altogether, one that never existed, making a different choice in a situation that, for it, would also have been the only one available.
In that moment, the entire organism, given everything it was at the time, did what it had to do. No other choice was available because the organism that would have had to make that choice did not exist at the time, and only exists now in imagination.
What causes the suffering is the belief that a different choice was available and that you, specifically, failed to make it. That belief survives the recognition of determinism remarkably well because it operates beneath the level at which the argument lands. The argument for determinism can be granted intellectually, while the felt sense of "I should have chosen differently" keeps running undisturbed.
As for knowing whether that belief has been dropped, I would not look for certainty. The belief does not announce its own departure. What you can observe is whether the regret, when it arises, still carries the charge of "I should have known better, I could have done otherwise," or whether it has become more like information passing through, noted and used without the additional layer of self-accusation. You will not catch yourself in the act of dropping the belief. You may notice later that it is simply not as present as it once was.
Thanks for the clear and generous response, Robert. I love that Oscar Wilde quote. I guess there's no better school than the school of hard knocks, but boy the suffering that comes along with it sure makes it hard to be grateful for the lessons learned. I'm still waiting on the day when I can go through these experiences without the added layers of guilt and hatred.
This exchange perfectly mirrors what I learned during a period of my life when I was dealing with daily panic attacks. The suffering didn't come from the physical sensations themselves; it came from the exhausting, obsessive loop of trying to protect myself from them and get rid of them in advance.
The breakthrough only happened when I dropped my resistance and realized I didn't need to be protected from my own nervous system. I had to learn to accept the discomfort fully as whatever it was that was happening in that moment even to the point of leaning into it and daring it to be stronger. The moment you realize your body and its discomfort are completely OK as they are, the loop loses its fuel.
That's what comes to mind for me when I reflect on the impact of resisting what is.
I find myself somewhere in the middle of this.
Yes, suffering often comes from wishing reality were other than it is. There is wisdom in seeing that clearly.
But I am not convinced that every movement toward change is resistance.
A flower turning toward the sun is not resisting the shade. A wounded animal seeking shelter is not resisting reality. A human being wanting healing, connection, or growth may simply be expressing the next movement of life itself.
The desire to change can arise from fear and rejection of what is.
It can also arise from love.
From curiosity.
From the natural unfolding of a living system.
For me, the question is not whether I want things to change, but whether I am at war with what is while they do.
Can I acknowledge reality completely and still participate in its unfolding?
Can I say, “This is what is,” while also saying, “And this is where life seems to be moving next”?
Perhaps both are true.
Things are as they are.
And things are always becoming.
Hi, Sarah.
I think you have misunderstood my exchange with Scott. I was not saying that every movement toward change is resistance to what is.
When I said, "What is, is, and in this moment cannot be different. Resisting that is psychological suffering," I was not saying anything about resisting change, but about resisting this moment. Things change when and as they do, just as things are as they are.
I agree with your distinction between being at war with what is while things change, and participating in the unfolding. Those are different psychological states. What you call war is what I mean by resistance. Participation in living, whether it arises from love, curiosity, or simply the organism doing what it does, is the flow itself.
The flower and the wounded animal are good examples. Neither is at war with what is. Both are doing what living systems do, moving toward what stabilizes them. That movement is the flow, not resistance to it.
Very nice Sarah! I like the middle way you describe…or perhaps what I am responding to is your openness to possibilities. Nothing definitive, per se, but allowing.
Sarah, this seems to be what I was trying to point at in my comment, but you have said it much more eloquently.
Did I mention enlightenment anywhere??
I don’t think I did. Becoming- means perpetual change and development. Most didn’t have a problem… just you and the author, which is slightly comical… perhaps ego it a barrier to understanding what I have written- the belief I was trying to correct rather than explain a personal stance.
Blessings for opening
You're always late for the show. :-) All you can do is comment. Sure at times there is a sense of agency - that's also true. I don't have any answers and that's not an answer. The 'me' - apparent or otherwise - that appears thinking away about this and that........ just happens like everything else. I can't seem to affect it anymore than the weather. The sense of being though always remains. Well except when I'm asleep or when in the two times I've had a general anaesthetic for a hospital operation that is. During those times I might as well have been dead. Time for a cup of tea. Thanks for the opportunity to talk Robert.
So if suffering is in the flow, resisting the suffering increases the suffering or introduces additional suffering. That might introduce into the flow the idea or urge to stop resisting the suffering in order to decrease the total suffering. But I think, if I understand everything I have read of yours (including "Depending on No-Thing" which I just finished the other day and loved), you would say that we do not have free will and therefore cannot simply decide to stop resisting suffering and then do so. We may stop resisting, and if we do, mazel tof as you say sometimes in "Depending". But it doesn't happen because we decide to, it just happens because it simply appears in the flow. Do I have that right? (Pretty much without fail, when I try to say what I think you would say, I miss the mark, so I am probably doing that now too).
Well, Tim, two points.
On so-called free will, you are free to do what you like, but not to choose what to like. If you see this, then the sense of free will operates on one level of the system--one subloop, so to speak--but not on the whole system. The system does what it does when it does.
On resisting suffering, that is a misleading idea. What we resist is not just suffering, but the entire situation: being a biological entity that must struggle to survive and eventually decline, sicken, and die. That resistance--the denial of entropy--is a form of suffering, but not the only one.
Thanks for the clarification. Based on your prompting, a week or two ago I did do an experiment in which, for a good while, I inspected the flow of my experiences trying to detect if I ever made a free choice. When I had a strong desire, it was clear I didn't choose that desire, it just appeared, and choosing to act on the desire didn't happen in my conscious mind. It too just popped into the stream of my experiencing. If I decided to act against my desire, I could try to do that consciously, but then I asked myself, why go against that desire? Answer: another desire to try to prove I am free. Which was, like any other desire, just there from who knows where. When I had several roughly evenly intense desires competing for different decisions, a decision would appear (especially if I was feeling time pressure), but once again, that decision just appeared in consciousness rather than my being able to detect that I consciously made it. So I coild not tell that I ever consciously decided anything. What also appeared was this idea: maybe my unconscious mind is the way I make free decisions. Or to put it differently, maybe I delegate my free will decision making to my unconscious mind, but that is part of me so I am still the one making the decision. Except I can't tell whether it's free since and am not conscious of the process itself.
So that was an interesting experiment, but it needs some disambiguation. You say, "Maybe I delegate my free will decision-making to my unconscious mind, but that is part of me, so I am still the one making the decision."
What do you mean by "I?" If decisions are made unconsciously, then how can you say, "I made them," and how can they even rightly be called decisions? Isn't contemplating and then deciding a conscious experience, not an unconscious one?
I am not trying to say my unconscious mind is real and is a part of me. I'm just saying (and I did say in my comment) that the delegation idea and the existence of an unconscious mind that is part of "me" tends to appear in my experience stream when questions about free will are also appearing. I guess it's a desire for confirmation of free will and an attempt to make a model of self that allows for free will. But that does no good since even if the model were true, it still doesn't let me see or feel a decider actually making a decision. It's just something I go through (or experience) from time to time.
Beautiful. You reached for the unconscious as a refuge for the chooser, and then watched that model fail to produce what it promised. The decider did not appear. What appeared was the desire for a decider, which is a different thing entirely.
Wow, you put it so well, so elegantly. That's part of why "Depending on No-Thing" was such a pleasure to read.
Words get tricky here, but since this exchange, I’ve found myself asking if it’s possible to see that a change is necessary in myself, but at the same time not turn that into some psychological problem that needs to be solved. To simply observe what I am without resistance OR acceptance maybe a better way of putting it.
Yeah, u dont have to believe or identify with the desire (to change/transform). And there are so many ways to relate without transforming or identifying as their goals.
Darius, I didn’t use the word desire because it didn’t fit what I was trying to say. Desire implies resistance. I felt like the word “necessary” pointed to something more “objective”, again for lack of a better word.
Im not sure there is a real difference between desires and needs. “I want to eat because im hungry. Vs i need to eat because im hungry.” End up in the exact same place but with a different narrative justification.
I don’t agree with that. Humans seem to have observable needs, including in how we relate to one another.
I tend to agree Scott, though honestly I’m not clear why. “Needs” do feel different than “wants” (desires): we need air and water, we want doughnuts.
Its not that we want donuts. Donuts are made of sugar and sugar is rare in nature and represents “free energy”, which is exactly like air and water. Its easy to digest carbohydrates. Duh. Its not mysterious but it does require some understanding of evolutionary neurobiology.
In light of your viewpoint around this i can see why you posted originally and im glad i dont personally believe that. Whew! Hard stuff.
Darius, for me it’s not about what I personally believe or like or dislike about those beliefs. From this perspective, it seems that if my actions cause conflict and are harmful to others, I can recognize that change is necessary, and, at the same time, not be resistant to that a fact. Not sure how else to put it. See what Sarah said.
I love the simplicity in and the clarity stemming from the dialogue. I also deeply appreciate the awareness that the agency to transform things is part of beingness. The realization that things are as they are and can't be different in this moment does not eliminate agency... it actually frees it!
Yes. The freedom to participate in a normal way.
So true...resistance IS futile...in the sense that resisting what has already arisen is not only pointless (it's too late to change what is), but doesn't positively influence our wellbeing.
We will continue to slip into resistance, but we can at least notice when we're doing it and then, maybe, respond skilfully. Go well. 🫶🈚️