Delight in Denying the Denier

Looking closely at our habitual patterns of behavior, we can notice that our preferences and aversions trace the contours of the allowable shapes of our lives.  With steady reinforcement over time, these contours can calcify into incredibly rigid structures, hardened by decades of inertia. Settling into them too deeply, we can even learn to call these strict limitations “comfortable.”

Outside of these brightly painted lanes however is an entire realm of new territory, new experiences, perfectly safe and ripe for exploration.  Occasionally we get the urge to visit this fantastic-seeming place, and yet we allow it to always somehow exist just beyond margin of the attainable, and forever in the fictional world of, "let's just chill today, and I'll get to it tomorrow,” or “sounds nice, but I don't feel quite ready to dive into that new endeavor yet (even though I've been thinking about it for the last five years…).

And so we deny ourselves growth, experience, exploration – Life.  Over and over and over again. Perhaps more times a day than we can even count, for is not just the times that we put off all these potential “25th hour things,” but every act of robotically going through the motions of our well-established routines without ever stopping to interrogate whether they really serve us aside from creating a comfortable playbook to navigate our day without thinking too hard.  They sink us deeper into the clutches of the known, the predictable.

Such is life that there is no counterfactual scenario or control group available to fully illustrate what we may be missing.  At times we may have an inkling, an unsettling sense That there must be more to life, but this can be allowed to drift unaddressed in the background for years, again in that fictional netherrealm of, "I'll figure it out eventually."  

What do we ever “figure out”?  Or is this phrase just a lazy shorthand for complacency?  Perhaps we have some latent suspicion, a fear of knowing for certain, that nobody holds us back more stubbornly from experiencing the full richness of life than our very selves.

Thus this post is a call to learn to take delight (but not attachment, yes) in denying the denier.  Who is this denier? None other than our ego mind. What does it deny? All of the potential experience that we necessarily forego when we live a life constrained by our habitual patterns of behavior, when, without resistance, we passively acquiesce to the flimsy justifications as to why we should not do such and such a thing that the ego-mind concocts to keep us within the ruts of routine.

For example: I feel it may be a good thing to go for a run today. The mind says, "I don't know, it looks a little cold outside… what if you sprain your ankle?  What if it starts raining?  What if you run so far and then get tired and have to walk all the way back?”  It is things as small as the little voice in your head while immersed in that nice warm shower that knows it has to get dinner ready, but says,"let’s just stay in here one more minute," or which does not want to get out of bed.  “One more minute” turns into fifteen.  And we ask, “where does the time go?”  I guess that thing I wanted to get to can wait until tomorrow™.

To borrow a framing employed by Jonathan Haidt in his book, "The Righteous Mind", the ego-mind is always asking two questions with respect to any potential pursuit: “can I?” or “must I?”  When facing a situation in which the mind already knows it wants something [i.e. desires attainment of a thing] - another cookie, for example, it asks the former question and then proceeds to produce a list of all of the justifications as why it deserves the reward of a cookie.  And likewise, when faced with a situation in which it does not want to pursue the behavior question, such as vacuuming the house, it will ask the latter question, and proceed to produce a string of excuses as to why it is not a good idea to engage in that behavior at this time. In such excuse generating, it is important to note that there is effectively no future time in which we will do the behavior, only a hypothetical rain check that the mind cooks up in order to get out of doing it now.  Tomorrow, when we face the same decision as to whether to vacuum, you can bet that the mind will find a way to try to defer it to an equally hypothetical tomorrow.

In learning to recognize this behavior however, we can see through the mind’s tricks (so often they are poised to gain or conserve energy) and then with some practice, we can learn to take a little delight in doing exactly the opposite of what the mind wants. You will find that a little dose of insubordination directed towards this repressive authoritarian that [we have let] hold us back for so long. 

Indeed, we find that when we do go out for that run - or whatever the mind said it was that we shouldn’t do - that even though it is challenging, we feel great and as though we accomplished something after we are done. It is not as though the mind does not know this, though it does conveniently leave it out; When it doesn't want to do something, it almost never offers pros to go along with the long list of cons.

Why should our own minds - generators of sensory data on the same level as what we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell - be allowed to narrow the confines of our lives?  The old Zen saying, “it is better to master the mind than to be mastered by the mind” applies.  The mind is not at the top of a pyramid in which the other five senses are the base; it deserves no privileged position, and often we find it is less trustworthy than the other senses.

The more we can practice doing the opposite of what the mind does or doesn't want to do, and extrapolate into the necessity and virtue of doing this the more we can unravel the tightly wrapped threads of control that bind our lives into shockingly narrow and confining patterns of habitual behavior. The more we get to shaking these off, of exploring new territory and being in the unknown, the more we thrive as individuals, coming to realize that we are capable of doing and experiencing a much greater breadth of experiences then we previously allowed ourselves to.  

This aspect of allowance, willingness and giving permission to ourselves to override the mind and properly subordinate it as just another sensory data input - thank you for your opinion, you may sit down now - is a powerful lever to apply towards the transformation of thinking of ourselves as a person who does X, or a person who doesn't do Y, and into individuals capable of doing anything, regardless of whether we have permission from the ego mind.

Leverage this idea of delighting in denying the denier, we can turn the negative, life-restricting impulses into fuel for greater change towards an energy-rich mode of living.  Sink in and take joy in each of these small victories.  Especially if you feel you lack motivation, consider the mind’s own protests to be a “free” source of motivation, a self-sustaining fuel source that you can learn to tap into (well, until it starts to just become automatic to override the self-centered desires of the mind and move towards the higher good, as though there were neither alternative nor struggle in the first place).  

In this way, we realize the gradual reversal from:

1. automatic/reflexive routine action (negative - self-indulgent) > 

2. struggle against mind / inertia towards the negative > 

3. tide turning > 

4. struggle against mind / inertia towards the positive > 

5. automatic/reflexive routine action (positive - greater good)

So we should learn to be skeptical of both the justifications and excuses generated by the mind, especially when they are so biased in a certain direction. For some situations, we might consider that even though we do not necessarily want to engage in a behavior because we know the experience may not be pleasant, it will nonetheless be a positive and beneficial thing to move that task to a state of completion. 

Leaning into this further, we can expand our practice by considering the virtuous effects doing a task might confer to other people, whether going for a run will call us down, clear our mind, or if vacuuming the floor, will delight our spouse when they get home.  This looks past the simplistic what's in it for me level rationale that the mind applies its reasoning and gives us a broader sense for how even the smallest actions resonate beyond us and touch the lives of everybody.

Every decision or action is a battleground, every victory against self-centered ego-mind another pebble that dams up the habitual flow of habitual inertia, eventually redirecting it entirely.  At this point, you are a new person, living comfortably in the realm of the unknown, but armed with the knowledge that you are capable of thriving there.