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Shift In Perspective

Dharma Lab · Episode 5 excerpt (Watch full talk here.) 

Speakers: Richie Davidson & Cortland Dahl

Contents

1. The Perceptual Illusion
2. The Problem Orientation & The Shift
3. Effort, Curiosity, and Judgment
4. Growth Mindset & Brief Interventions
5. What Meditation Really Means
6. Short Moments, Many Times

The Perceptual Illusion

Richie: One of the things I liken this to -- many of you, I'm sure, have seen perceptual illusions. One of the classic ones is an illusion that could be seen as a vase or seen as two faces.

Cort: Two faces, like facing each other. Yeah.

Richie: Yeah. And you often get locked into one perspective, and it's hard to see the other. But once you see the other, it becomes much easier to see it again. And what we're talking about, I think, is very similar to this. Once you see this kind of difference in perspective, it becomes more accessible and you can just tune into it -- and it's like a perceptual illusion where you see it one way, and then all of a sudden you can have this shift.

Cort: Yeah. It just -- it flips almost. Mm-hmm.

Richie: Exactly. Exactly. And that's just enormously freeing, to be able to see it in that way.

The Problem Orientation & The Shift

Cort: That reminds me of the series that you and I did with Mingyur Rinpoche a few months ago, where we did this whole series and we were talking about all these different approaches and methods to work with inner experience.

But the key thing, actually, is this perspective shift that you're talking about, Richie. And for me, one way to look at that is shifting from what you might call a problem orientation -- where if you look at your life, most of us, most of the time, we're relating to ourselves, to the world, to our relationships, to our jobs, to really everything through the lens of the stuff that's going wrong.

And maybe how we can improve it. But we tend to see the stuff that feels off or wrong more easily. We tend to get stuck on it. We get fixated on it. And the shift with this is, as you and I have talked about many times, it's like the shift to what's right -- what are the things that aren't broken, that never were broken, that don't need to be fixed?

So, as you said, with distraction and awareness: we start to meditate and we think, "Oh, there I go again. My mind is just distracted again." And probably everybody in the history of meditation has felt that they were a failed meditator when they began, right? Because you just see the distraction.

And so we pay attention to the distraction and we think, "Okay, distraction's the problem. Now I'm going to meditate and it's going to help me fix my broken mind, which is so distracted and so messed up." The big shift here is not, in a way, towards less distraction. It's seeing that even in the midst of distraction, awareness is actually present.

We're equally aware in a moment of distraction and in a moment when we notice the distraction. It's simply that we're more or less attuned to awareness. Like, if I tapped you on the shoulder in a moment of distraction and said, "Hey Richie, what's going on?" -- you would say, "Oh, I was just distracted." How would you know that? Because there's a thread of awareness present. If that thread were not there, you could not answer that question.

So it's really just orienting to the qualities we already have. And again, that's like this perceptual flip -- away from seeing the problems to seeing that there are parts of ourselves that are always here. They're so commonplace, it's like the air we breathe -- we just tune them out or screen them out. But it's such a huge shift.

Effort, Curiosity, and Judgment

Richie: It is. And I think one of the really interesting things is that once you make that shift, it becomes much less effortful, because you're not fighting with your mind. And when it becomes less effortful, it allows curiosity to naturally arise. When we're struggling with our mind, it suppresses curiosity -- because we're so invested in trying to fix something --

Cort: -- powered by judgment rather than curiosity.

Richie: Exactly. And I think that humans actually have a kind of innate curiosity instinct. But it often gets obscured by our effortful struggles. And when we can relax those, the natural inclination to be curious about our own minds can arise.

Growth Mindset & Brief Interventions

Cort: There's such cool science in this. Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset is probably the most obvious example. But again, when it comes to meditation or doing these practices, it's easy to think that whatever happens in your formal meditation -- how distracted or undistracted you were -- is the measure. But if you think about it from this perspective, it's really about what new perspective you're bringing online. And Carol Dweck's work shows that just having a different way of viewing yourself can have all these benefits. So --

Richie: -- and actually -- the number of minutes you're meditating might not matter that much. And the research you're referring to -- Carol Dweck and her colleagues on growth mindset interventions -- often involves incredibly brief interventions. And again, they're about a shift in perspective.

Cort: And they have effects that show up years later. It's actually remarkable when you think about it -- these tiny, very short interventions with effects that are literally years later. That was mind-blowing to me when I saw some of that research.

Richie: Yeah. So that's a great example of how this kind of shift in perspective is really like a disjunctive change. It's just a shift -- almost an instantaneous shift in orientation. And we clearly need to practice that to be able to access it spontaneously, and that's where meditation really can help. But once we have a glimpse of it, it really helps us come back to it. And it's just like a perceptual illusion -- once we're able to see the two faces as opposed to the vase, we can more quickly see that again. And that really helps in terms of accessing this shift in perspective.

What Meditation Really Means

Cort: Yeah. In fact, that is exactly what meditation means -- particularly in the Tibetan tradition, which you and I have practiced for many years. The word meditation means to grow familiar with, or to get to know, something.

So in one sense you could say it's about getting to know yourself, getting to know your mind -- but actually what it really means is you're growing familiar with the view. You're doing exactly what you just said: we have our contracted mindset, and you're just flipping it, and then it flips back, and then you're flipping it again, and it stays a little longer, and it flips back -- and you're getting more and more habituated to and familiar with being in that mindset.

So in a way, that's really what a formal meditation practice is about. It's less about how focused you are, or the mechanics -- the mechanics are more the "how" of it -- but the "what" of it is shifting. It's shifting into this new mode of being.

So that's maybe one way to look at the view, or the mindset: if you notice, for example, during your formal meditation that "oh, I'm back in this problem mindset -- I'm looking at my mind through the lens of perceived flaws and shortcomings, I'm trying to fix myself, I'm trying to improve myself" -- here we're just shifting it into a mode of self-discovery and self-exploration. You're learning to bring something into focus that's already there, versus fixing a perceived flaw. And that's this little switch.

Short Moments, Many Times

Cort: But because the momentum is oftentimes in the other direction -- we have a lot of mental and emotional habits that pull us back -- we need that period of practice.

So there are a few pieces: there's the shift in perspective; there's the formal practice, which just helps us rewire our minds and probably our brains in the process; and then applying that for short moments, many times throughout the day -- which is equally important. It's not some huge, massive, heavy soul-searching exercise. It can be light and playful moments where you just remember -- like right now, we're talking. The fact that we're talking about this -- I've had many of these moments where it's like, "oh yeah" -- you just notice all these things. We're used to it because we practice this. But you train yourself to notice these things, and it just becomes -- as you said earlier -- your baseline.

Richie: Yeah, absolutely.

Transcript edited for clarity and readability. Awakin.org / ServiceSpace.