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Are You Living the Good Life?

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Does living “the good life” mean living a happy life? Or does it mean living a meaningful life? Although happiness and meaning correlate positively, as the researchers put it—or at least overlap to some extent—they are not the same thing and in some cases they represent two entirely different paths.

The concept of “the good life” is often credited to Aristotle, although there was considerable debate among the Greeks as to exactly what constituted a good life.

Aristotle thought the good life included virtue and excellence of character, along with health, wealth, and beauty. His view fits somewhere in between the Stoics, who believed virtue was sufficient, and Epicurus, who believed the good life was strictly one of pleasure.

The Greeks had a word for happiness, which they considered to be an important element of the good life. Eudaemonia has several possible translations, including “human flourishing” or “good spirit.” But what does that mean?

For most people today, the concept of the good life has come to represent the life one wants to, or would prefer to, live. For some, that’s a life of pleasure, but not for all. Whatever its components, the good life is something to strive for, wish for, or hope to achieve. Interestingly, however, no matter how we define it, or how well off we are, the good life is persistently difficult to attain.

When people are dissatisfied with their lives, their dissatisfaction seems to be the starting point for identifying what a good life would look like and then going after it. But how you go about pursuing the good life depends on what you think the solution to your dissatisfaction might be: happiness or meaningfulness.

The Pursuit of Happiness vs. the Pursuit of Meaningfulness

Quite a bit of research has been conducted to determine how people who pursue happiness actually feel and how people who pursue meaningfulness actually feel. The results of the research are pretty clear, but there are a few problems with the concept.

One problem is with the way the issue tends to be phrased. The pursuit of happiness vs. the pursuit of meaning doesn’t accurately describe what we’re talking about. Meaningfulness doesn’t reside “out there,” so it isn’t something we can go after. We determine the meaning of things. Things (or people or situations or activities) mean something to us because we have assigned meaning to them. And the meaning we assign to them is very specific and very personal. A thing can mean one thing to one person and something else to another person. In addition, the meaning we assign to things, people, situations, or activities can change. If meaning resided within the thing, the meaning of the thing wouldn’t change.

As David DiSalvo says, we are meaning-makers. We can focus our lives on what we determine is meaningful to us, but we can’t go looking for meaning out there and expect to find anything.

Another problem is that happiness vs. meaningfulness represents an apples and oranges kind of comparison. Happiness is a feeling, and therefore transient. It’s the nature of feelings to come and go. Happiness bubbles up in us, often unexpectedly, and the unexpectedness is part of its charm or desirability. If we were happy all the time—which is impossible, anyway—we would miss out on that aspect of it. And since happiness is a feeling—an experience—it is subjective. It’s not easy to describe our personal experience of happiness to someone else.

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” —Humpty Dumpty

A third problem results from this ephemeral nature of happiness: how do you define it? Some people have decided that happiness means what they choose it to mean:

In her 2007 book The How of Happiness, positive psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky [describes] happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.” —Greater Good Science Center website

The Greater Good Science Center is well-meaning, but the notion that you can’t experience happiness unless you also believe your life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile—whatever that means—is absurd. Ask a toddler.

Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) said, “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’” So he and Lyubomirsky appear to be on the same page. But it isn’t true that happiness can’t be pursued. It’s pursued all the time by quite a large number of people—not only pursued, but attained—at least temporarily. It’s also not true that money can’t buy happiness. It doesn’t always, but it definitely can. At least for a while.

Attempting to maintain a steady-state of happiness requires the ongoing pursuit of bigger and better things or experiences. We have an unfortunate tendency to become complacent with what we already have. We then require more things and more experiences to feed our happiness addiction—or our pleasure addiction, if we’re on board with Epicurus and consider the good life to be a life of hedonism. Yet another piece of bad news is the overwhelming evidence that most of us don’t really know what will make us happy, which can make the pursuit of happiness extremely frustrating and possibly even futile.

Happy as a Clam*

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with feeling happy or wanting to feel happy. Happiness is great stuff, but there’s a reason why pursuing it or trying to be happy all the time is not a good idea.

A good mood is a signal [to the brain] that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required.

Good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

*The full expression is happy as a clam at high tide. Clams are happy at high tide because they can only be dug up at low tide. At high tide they’re safe and secure, which is what System 1 wants us to be.

The Good Life: Gratified or Satisfied?

So what’s the solution to the problem of dissatisfaction? Pursuing happiness and pursuing what is meaningful use different parts of our brain. The pursuit of happiness keeps us fixated on ourselves and on gratifying our immediate wants and needs. Our unconscious (System 1) is focused on the short-term rewards that make us feel good in the moment (because that indicates we’re safe) but which can actually add up to an increase in dissatisfaction. The pursuit of happiness doesn’t appear to be the solution to our existential dissatisfaction.

We have the ability to determine what is meaningful to us. Because what is meaningful is less transitory, we have a much better chance of achieving and sustaining a meaningful life—and therefore a satisfying one—than we have of achieving and maintaining a happy life. When we’re oriented to something bigger than we are—and bigger than our immediate wants and needs—we’re less susceptible to the pull of immediate gratification. When we give our big brain (consciousness, System 2) something worthwhile to focus on, we can achieve goals or create things that actually make a difference, to us and to others.

Our obsession with happiness may be intimately related to a feeling of emptiness, to a sense that our lives lack meaning. Although we recognize our dissatisfaction, we don’t realize the source of it. As a result, we’re stuck on the hamster wheel of System 1 looking for the solution in all the wrong places, unable to look up long enough to even identify what’s most important to us, let alone figure out how to attain it.

Character or Circumstances: Which Factor Is Stronger?

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When it comes to determining how a person is likely to act or react at any given time, which factor plays a bigger role: personal character or the situation the person is in?

Research can be found that supports both sides, but I think we intuitively believe character plays the bigger role. We’re pretty sure we know how we would react even in situations we’ve never experienced because we believe we know who we are. And we behave consistently often enough that this belief isn’t usually tested or threatened. Feeling certain we know what we would do leads to many of the critical judgments we make about other people’s behavior.

On the other hand, classic experiments like Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment and Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments indicate that in some situations, ordinary people who would not otherwise do so are capable of behaving very badly toward their fellow humans. There has also been quite a bit of research on the effect of our environment on what we think and feel and the way we act. So before passing judgment on others, it has been suggested, we should try to “walk a mile in their shoes.”

This fascinating topic is addressed in one chapter of philosopher Julian Baggini’s book, The Ego Trick, which is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

The answer to the question of which plays a bigger role, character or situation is, not surprisingly, it depends.

When someone’s character is variable, the situation plays a bigger role in determining action. But when someone’s character is consistent, the situation plays a lesser role.

It’s more interesting than that, however.

Passive or Active

Some of our character traits are passive: they are “the set of dispositions we just happen to have as a result of our genes, upbringing and experience, without any particular effort on our own part.”

And some of our character traits are active: they are “the set of dispositions that we have because we’ve worked on developing them. To use a philosophical term of art, dispositions are active if they are the result of an individual’s attempts at self-constitution, to build who they are.”

As Baggini states, you can’t tell from the trait whether it’s passive or active. Someone who behaves in an extraverted manner may have had that tendency all along, which would make the trait passive. Or a person with a tendency toward introversion may have decided to try to become more extraverted, in which case their extraversion would be considered an active trait. He also says that “in real life, traits are never purely active or passive. Rather, they tend to greater activeness the more they reflect deliberate efforts to mould our own behaviours.”

Variable or Consistent

He further distinguishes passive traits as either variable or constant across situations, and he does the same with active traits. This leads to four trait categories:

  • passive and variable
  • passive and constant
  • active and variable
  • active and constant

All of us have traits in each of those categories. All of us are affected to one degree or another by the situations we’re in. However, the more our traits lean toward the passive and the variable, the more likely we are to be affected by situations. And the more our traits lean toward the active and the constant, the less likely we are to be affected by situations.

Results of behavior studies indicate that the majority of people behave differently across different situations and only a minority behaves consistently.

The evidence is that unless you try to cultivate traits, whether you display them will depend more on circumstances than on you. So consistency in character is something to be created; it does not arise organically.

As philosopher Christine Korsgaard says:

Beliefs and desires you have actively arrived at are more truly your own than those which have simply arisen in you.

The Takeaway
  • If you want to be less at the effect of your circumstances, one way to do that is to make a deliberate effort to cultivate those character traits you value.
  • Don’t be entirely surprised when your behavior is “out of character.”
  • And don’t be so sure you would behave differently in a given situation than other people who are in it are behaving.

Giving the Unconscious a Makeover

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Humans have been aware for quite some time that the unconscious—a powerful yet mysterious force that exerts some degree of control over us—must exist. But what exactly is it? It can’t be accessed directly, and the technologies for observing brain activity are relatively recent. So over time, numerous theories about the unconscious have been proposed, including concepts for what it does, what its purpose is, and what’s actually in it.

The various, often competing, theories of the unconscious have clouded our current understanding of it.

Some earlier theories have been proven to be partially (even surprisingly) correct, while others appear to be far off the mark. The current perspective of the unconscious has challenged many cherished and long-held beliefs. For one thing, it has added considerable fuel to the debate about free will, which is normally the province of philosophers and religious scholars.

There remains some disagreement, mainly within different branches of psychology, about how the unconscious functions and what it does. But although there is much left to discover about the unconscious—and about the brain, in general—we have learned quite a bit about it in the past few decades.

The Freudian View
It’s a jungle down there.

The idea of the unconscious existed before Freud, but his model is the one most closely associated with the concept.

He came up with the “tip of the iceberg” view of the conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind.

Freud was correct in regard to the powerful impact of the unconscious on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior: we are not entirely aware of what we think and often have no idea why we do some of the things we do.

He based his model of the unconscious on case studies involving “abnormal thought and behavior.” It was not arrived at by scientific experimentation, many of the tools of which were unavailable to him.

Freud thought the unconscious contained repressed thoughts, feelings, and memories, which were too disturbing to admit to consciousness. He didn’t think people repressed things intentionally. He thought the unconscious, at least in part, determined what was repressed.

Over the years, empirical tests have not been kind to the specifics of the Freudian model, though in broad-brush terms the cognitive and social psychological evidence does support Freud as to the existence of unconscious mentation and its potential to impact judgments and behavior. —John A. Bargh and Ezequiel Morsella, The Unconscious Mind

He believed there was an aspect of consciousness called “preconscious” that contained thoughts, ideas, memories, etc. that were not in conscious awareness, but that could easily become conscious—meaning they were not repressed.

He also considered the unconscious to be the source of anxiety-provoking drives that were unacceptable to the individual for one reason or another.

He proposed that the unconscious was divided into the id (primitive; the source of drives), the ego (regulator or satisfier of the id; referee between the id and the superego), and the superego (censor of the ego, source of guilt, moral monitor). These concepts are not generally used outside of psychoanalysis, one of the aims of which is to make what is unconscious conscious.

Freud believed we can become aware of some unconscious motivations indirectly through dreams (“the royal road to the unconscious”), slips of the tongue, and free association.

The Jungian View:
It’s a mystical, magical place–but what does it all mean?

Jung believed it was possible to link consciousness to the unconscious through the process of individuation (self-realization). According to Jung, we have a persona—a mask or a false self—that we present to others and to ourselves, but which is not our true or authentic self. Only by “becoming conscious of the unconscious,” which includes facing our shadow—or dark side—can we become who we are meant to be and “fulfill our unique promise.”

Jung believed that “the unconscious had in mind” this process of individuation or self-realization.

James Hillman, who studied with Jung, authored The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, in which he wrote, “[T]his book is about calling, about fate, about character, about innate image. Together they make up the ‘acorn theory,’ which holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.”

However, psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists currently hold the view that we are not one self, but many. Rather than having one persona, we have several personas we present at different times and to different people. Philosopher Julian Baggini endorses a shift from thinking about ourselves as “the thing which has all the experiences of life” to thinking of ourselves as “simply that collection of all experiences in life.”

The true self, as it were then, is not something that is just there for you to discover. You don’t sort of look into your soul and find your true self. What you are partly doing, at least, is actually creating your true self.

While Freud was a religious skeptic, Jung studied a number of different religions and believed in the soul—an immaterial, immortal aspect of a person.

In addition to the personal unconscious (which is unique to each individual), Jung believed there is another layer he called the collective unconscious which contains elements that do not develop from our personal experiences but are inherited by everyone. The components of the collective unconscious, according to Jung, include symbolic motifs, especially in the form of archetypes.

Dream interpretation was central to Jung’s theories, as it was to Freud’s. He considered dreams an important element in the process of individuation, believing they drew on contents of both the personal and the collective unconscious.

The Jamesian View:
It’s not a place or an entity; it’s a set of processes.

William James refuted Freud’s concept or model of the unconscious, but he was well aware of the existence of the unconscious—and of its importance. He was also an excellent observer and without the benefit of any of the tools now available to researchers he arrived at several conclusions about how our minds and brains function that have since been confirmed.

His book, Habits, written in the late 1800s, is worth reading today. He says, “[H]abit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed.” And, “[N]ot only is it the right thing at the right time that we thus involuntarily do, but the wrong thing also, if it be an habitual thing.”

William James defines the term “ahead of his time.” Before neuroscience gave scientific backing to concepts such as “automaticity,” James was already writing about them. His astounding intuition concerning why we think as we think and act as we act has never been eclipsed and has few parallels in any field. —David DiSalvo, Brain Changer

James is one of the first proponents of the dual-process theory of thinking—the idea that our thinking consists of associative thinking as well as “true reasoning.” In that regard, he drew a pretty accurate bead on the unconscious (associative thinking).

The Neuroscience View:
It’s a web of vast, intricate, processing modules.

Because early theories about the unconscious were primarily (or purely) psychological or philosophical, they did not include an understanding of brain “mechanics”—synapses, neurons, neurotransmitters, etc. So those explanations were incomplete and unscientific.

Beginning about twenty-five years ago, the fields of psychology and neuroscience underwent a revolution. Psychology was primarily using decades-old methods to understand human behavior through things that were objective and observable, such as learning lists of words or the ability to perform tasks while distracted. Neuroscience was primarily studying the communication among cells and the biological structure of the brain.

The psychologists had difficulty studying the biological material—the hardware—that gave rise to thought. The neuroscientists, being stuck down at the level of individual neurons, had difficultly studying actual behaviors. The revolution was the invention of noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, a set of tools analogous to an X-ray that showed not just the contours and structure of the brain but how parts of the brain behaved in real time during actual thought and behavior—pictures of the thinking brain at work. The technologies—positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and magneto-encephalography—are now well known by their abbreviations (PET, fMRI, and MEG). —Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

Consciousness is the reasoning, rational part of the brain we’re aware of that makes decisions; it’s what we think of when we think of who we are. The unconscious consists of all the activity behind the scenes that keeps us alive and maintains our model of the world. The unconscious contributes to our conscious sense of self much more than we are aware. But because the operations of the unconscious are invisible to us, we tend to dismiss or discount them (or in some cases, invest them with magical superpowers).

The unconscious keeps us alive; if it intends anything for us, it intends for us to survive.

Many of the operations of the unconscious are universal—they work pretty much the same for everyone. But since one of the jobs of the unconscious is to create our particular model of the world, other elements in it are unique—or at least not identical—for each individual.

Our unconscious programs are constantly being tweaked, usually without our being aware of it. That programming initiates our responses to what happens to us, which is why we often react in ways that surprise us. It’s also why habits get formed without our intending them—and why they are so hard to change even when we want to change them. It’s why we can—and do—do, think, and feel so many things on autopilot.

The new model of the unconscious is a more mechanical model than the models of Freud or Jung. But this model more accurately describes and explains how and why we do the things we do, think the things we think, and feel the things we feel.

It’s also an enlightened model that offers a straightforward and practical approach to understanding ourselves and others, changing undesirable behavior, and creating more of the life we want to have and a world we want to live in.

Are You Thinking Outside the Box Yet?

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boxIf you’ve ever felt stymied by the prospect of thinking outside the box, you may be relieved to find out that you can’t actually do that. The box is the mental model through which you view and interpret the world. You are always inside the box, in one compartment or another. The box constrains what you see, what you think, how you feel, and what you do. And the less aware of them you are, the more power these constraints have over you.

The concept of thinking outside the box comes from what is called the Nine-Dot Problem, first used by psychologist N.R.F. Maier in 1930. The task is to connect all of the dots by drawing four straight lines without retracing any lines or removing your pencil from the paper. The solutions to the Nine-Dot Problem all require you to extend your lines outside the “box” created by the dots.

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The box has come to represent all of the things that limit our thinking, so thinking outside the box means being able to transcend those limitations. In the 1970’s, thanks in part to psychologist J.P. Guilford and his study of creativity, thinking outside the box became a popular metaphor for unconventional and original—i.e., creative—thinking.

Your Mental Model:
Don’t Leave Home Without It.

Of course the concept of thinking outside the box has spawned some contrarians who suggest there are benefits to thinking inside the box. The assumption in both cases is that we have the option of thinking either inside or outside the box and can choose the location from which we think. But that’s not the case, since we don’t have the option of getting outside our mental model.

Just as the unconscious part of our brain monitors our breathing and heart rate to keep them in the normal (for us) range, it creates a model of the world that represents what’s normal in it for us. Our particular model of the world determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret and explain what we pay attention to, and the meaning we assign to events.

Our mental model is created and (mostly) maintained by the unconscious part of our brain, which is always running. We can’t access it directly to find out what’s in it. The contents are a combination of genetics, experiences, information, beliefs, skills and talents, and assumptions. Some of it is coherent; some of it isn’t. Some of it is stuff we want to have in there; some of it isn’t. In general, the best word to describe it is functional.

Although we’ve had a hand in programming our mental model over the course of our lives, it is being continuously updated according to our brain’s set of survival-based criteria. The unconscious part of our brain processes around 11,000,000 bits of information at a time, while we can consciously process only about 40 bits. If we had to rely on consciousness to get through the day, we would be in big, big trouble.

Fortunately, our mental model, operating outside our awareness, helps predict what’s going to happen next and “readies” us to respond appropriately. In fact, many researchers have referred to the brain as an anticipation machine. When the brain’s expectations aren’t met, it actually “protests.” That’s what underlies the feelings of surprise we experience.

As long as things are going according to plan, the brain can operate at a lower level of energy, which is what it prefers to do. When something unexpected occurs, it has to shift into a higher energy consumption mode.

Aha?

Since our mental model is the lens through which we view and interpret the world around us—and even ourselves—we can’t think outside it. Some theorists on the subject claim that insight is the result of thinking outside the box, but it isn’t. No matter how mind-blowing they may be, our insights still depend on what’s already in our particular box. This seems obvious when you consider it. Someone whose mental model includes a vast amount of experience and knowledge in a particular area is likely to have more and bigger creative insights than someone else who only dabbles in the field.

When we’re learning something new (e.g., a language, how to get around in an unfamiliar city, a new artistic technique), we have to rely heavily on the conscious part of our brain. But as we continue learning, more and more information is turned over to the unconscious part of the brain. We develop greater facility. We become faster and better in part because our brain is making associations and anticipating what is coming next. As this occurs, our mental model expands and we are able to see things differently, think different thoughts, and do different things.

The physical brain has a great capacity to be plastic, which means it can change, and in some cases, we can actually see what those changes look like.

In violin players’ brains, the neural regions that control their left hands, where complex, fine motor movement is required on the strings, look as if they’ve been gorging on a high-fat diet. These regions are enlarged, swollen, and crisscrossed with complex associations. By contrast, the areas controlling the right hand, which draws the bow, look positively anorexic, with much less complexity. —John Medina, Brain Rules

Complexity is the key. The more knowledge and experience we have in a particular area, the more complex our mental model will be. Experienced violin players can not only play more complex tunes, they can also identify more complex musical problems to solve. And they can solve them faster. The situation is the same whether we’re talking about an artist, a musician, a performer, a movie-maker, a chef, a businessperson, an athlete, a hobbyist, a writer, or a world leader.

If we want a brain that can think more complex thoughts and solve more complex problems, one thing we can do to help make that happen is get in the habit of moving.

Physical activity is cognitive candy. Exercise stimulates one of the brain’s most powerful growth factors, BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). According to Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, “It keeps [existing] neurons young and healthy, and makes them more ready to connect with one another. It also encourages neurogenesis—the creation of new cells.” The cells most sensitive to this are in the hippocampus, inside the very regions deeply involved in human cognition. —John Medina, Brain Rules

Build a Better Box

Our brain can change, which means our mental model can change, too. Instead of trying to think outside the box, we’re better served by deliberately stretching and expanding it via physical activity, learning, exposing ourselves to new situations and different viewpoints—in short, by challenging ourselves.

New ideas are not spun from thin air. Creativity involves synthesizing, remixing, and re-envisioning what’s already inside the box.

Buddhism, the Enneagram, and Neuroscience

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lebowski
I got up so tight I couldn’t unwind
I saw so much I broke my mind
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

 —words by Mickey Newbury, vocals by Kenny Rogers

The “human condition,” according to at least three sources—Buddhism, the Enneagram, and now, neuroscience—is that we’re all operating on autopilot, asleep at the switch, in a “consensus trance,” staggering through life like zombies. We humans have been advised as to what condition our condition is in for 2,600 years or more. There’s not much left to debate about it.

But if that’s the human condition, why can’t we just go with the flow? Why not simply accept things as they are? Why should we care or make the effort to become more aware? Buddhism, the Enneagram, and neuroscience, while in agreement on the nature of the human condition, have slightly different answers to the question of why we might want to do something about it.

Buddhism: We Want to Get Out of Jail

We’re stuck inside this prison we ourselves constructed, and we want to locate the exit.

Most traditional spirituality and religion, including Buddhism, really, is really about … How do we get the hell out of here, and how do we get away from the Earthly mess, or the limitations or the conditioning? How do we rise above it, how do we go through it, move through it, how do we evolve beyond it? —John Welwood

This is more or less an attempt to escape the human condition or at least escape the suffering and unhappiness it gives rise to. In Buddhism, you escape from this prison by achieving Nirvana, either in life or after death. The perspective is that much of “the Earthly mess” is illusion and we can free ourselves from its pull—and from the cycle of life and death—by waking up to that reality.

You are already enlightened. All you’ve got to do is stop blocking yourself and get serious about attending to what’s going on. You are not lacking a thing. You only need to stop blocking or interpreting your vision. —Steve Hagen, Buddhism Plain and Simple

Buddhism gets it right that we create much of our own dissatisfaction, suffering, and unhappiness. But it gets it wrong about why and how we do that, as well as about how much power we have to stop doing it and to get in touch with so-called reality. Perception is not reality. Our inherent and limited perceptive abilities constrain us from making direct contact with “reality,” and there’s nothing we can do to change that no matter how enlightened we may be. That’s also part of the human condition.

There is a lot more to Buddhism than this, of course. Perhaps its greatest contribution has been the attention it has given to developing awareness, both self-awareness and awareness of the world around us.

Enneagram: We Want to Be Authentic

We’re at the effect of our compulsions and aren’t acting freely or making free choices and we want to locate our true selves so we can act authentically.

The wisdom that is foundational to the Enneagram propels us out of that stuck place where we are caught in the cares and anxieties of life, and it guides us toward our souls. The Enneagram reveals the relationship between our souls (or true selves) and the experience we have of ourselves daily, which we usually name personality and which, in reality, is a combination of our true personality with our false personality (emphasis theirs). —Kathy Hurley and Theodorre Donson, Discover Your Soul Potential

According to most teachers, writers, and practitioners of the Enneagram, operating on autopilot keeps us out of touch with our essence. When we’re at the effect of our type-related compulsions, we’re not acting authentically. But if we can recognize and transcend the automatic behavior of our Enneagram type, we can get in touch with—and act from—our essential nature.

By helping us see how trapped we are in our trances and how estranged we are from our Essential nature, the Enneagram invites us to look deeply into the mystery of our true identity. It is meant to initiate a process of inquiry that can lead us to a more profound truth about ourselves and our place in the world. —Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, The Wisdom of the Enneagram

This is an attempt to strip away the veneer of the human condition (our false personalities) to get at something that’s deeper and truer, but a bit hard to describe and contact. What is our true identity? Is it our soul or is it something else altogether? And what profound truth are we being led to? How will we know when we’ve found it?

Searching for our true, authentic identity seems to be a bit of a fool’s errand, given that in recent decades, psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, and people in many other fields have reached the conclusion that rather than being one self, we are actually many selves.

The esoteric elements of the Enneagram seem to fascinate the majority of people who work with it. It hasn’t been around—or at least hasn’t been known—as long as Buddhism, but it has given rise to a number of variations just as Buddhism now takes many different forms.

The Enneagram tends to be spot-on when it comes to identifying the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and even motivations of the different types. In that regard, it’s an incredibly practical and useful tool for identifying our autopilot, asleep-at-the-wheel behavior. But things quickly become muddled when we start trying to identify and home in on that nebulous thing called essence or soul.

Neuroscience: We Want to Understand How Our Brain Actually Works (or Do We?)

Regrettably, some people want to understand how the brain works in order to manipulate people into doing one thing as opposed to another or into buying whatever they’re selling. But that isn’t unique to this day and age. And some are hoping brain research provides evidence to support their particular beliefs and positions so they can be proven right.

Most of us are satisfied with our theories about ourselves and accept them with confidence, but we rarely see those theories tested. Scientists, however, are now able to test those theories in the laboratory, and they have proven astonishingly inaccurate. —Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal

All these theories were based on an assumption—that human behavior was the product of knowledge and conscious intention. We believed that if you educated people, and provided them with accurate information, and offered them the right incentives, and threatened them with suitable punishments, and appealed to their better natures, and marked the exits clearly, the errors would vanish. Bad outcomes had to be the product of stupidity, ignorance, and bad intentions. —Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain

Inevitably, what we have learned from neuroscience in the past few decades has undermined a lot of what we previously thought and believed about the mind and brain. I think the biggest revelation has been the discovery of the extent to which we are quite irrational yet fail to see and acknowledge this basic fact of life. Blinders firmly in place, we operate as though we are rational and we expect other people to be rational, too. But rational acts are the result of conscious (System 2) thinking, which is generally in short supply and often misapplied. Our belief in our rationality is not supported by the evidence.

This isn’t just opinion; it has now been repeatedly demonstrated and the reasons for, and the underpinnings of, our irrationality have been explained in great detail. No matter how much we want to believe otherwise, we are not rational animals. We do not act rationally. We do not think rationally. It’s not just that guy over there who’s irrational or the members of that other political party. It’s you and me, too.

The preface to the book Beasts by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (ex-psychoanalyst and former director of the Freud Archives) is titled “Can the Human Species Wake Up?” It begins with this quote:

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. —Stephen Hawking

Moussaieff’s book is an examination of human nature, particularly in regard to our propensity for cruelty, violence, and war. Whereas we often describe people who behave badly as “beasts” (of the animal kingdom), no other animals demonstrate the type and degree of violence humans do, to each other and to other creatures. Yet we continue to see ourselves as rational beings, superior to those “beasts.”

The main thing we can wake up to, according to the findings of neuroscience, is the full extent of our limitations. This is quite a different message from the ones we get from either Buddhism or the Enneagram. It doesn’t feel like good news. It’s not easy to accept. But the fact that, bottom line, we are all irrational beings explains quite a bit about humans and human nature. And the implications for us as individuals, groups, nations, and the entire human race are nothing short of enormous.

The second part of the quote from John Welwood (in the section on Buddhism) is this:

And I think the problem we’ve seen over time, over the centuries, is that spirituality then is completely cut off from daily life, and our spirituality and religion is not transforming daily life. You can see after thousands of years, we’ve had thousands of years of Buddhas, people who’ve been waking up and having beautiful, transcendent realizations, but how much of it percolated down into daily life, and into the human realm of our lives and what’s going on on the planet? Not very much, I have to say. So I think the time is calling on us to say, if we want to survive as a species here, you’re going to have to really bring the largest truth down into the very heart of how you relate to other people and how you relate to yourself in a personal way as well.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the “largest truth” turns out to be the one now being illuminated for us by neuroscience?

What Can We Do?

Buddhism, the Enneagram, and neuroscience all have practical tools to offer us for approaching and dealing with the human condition. Each tool is certainly useful by itself, but combining them creates a synergistic effect, enhancing all of them, and giving us the best chance of transcending those limitations—at least a little.

Buddhism: Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a great practice for increasing awareness and quieting the mind. Instead of being completely at the effect of what is going on around you or inside your own head, you can stop for a period of time to simply be present and aware of those things, non-reactively.

Mindfulness meditation has a slew of physical, mental, and emotional benefits, including:

  • Lowering stress
  • Reducing chronic pain
  • Improving sleep
  • Treating heart disease
  • Alleviating depression and anxiety
  • Improving recovery outcomes for substance abuse

It can even change your brain for the better.

Mindfulness is a specific application of System 2 attention, and since System 2 attention is limited, you can’t be mindful either all or most of the time. It’s not so hard to maintain a mindful state if you live cloistered or in a monastery. The fewer things you have to mind, the more mindful you can be. But if you live in the world as we do, and have the brains we have, you simply can’t be mindful all the time.

If we attempted to be mindful—that is, pay conscious attention—to every single thing from the time we woke up in the morning, we would quickly deplete our reserve of conscious attention. Then, if a situation arose that required conscious attention, we might not be able to think clearly because we wouldn’t have enough attention to devote to it. That’s an example of being “brain dead.”

We have to allocate our System 2 attention to various activities throughout the day, and there’s no point in allocating it to insignificant activities we can perform on autopilot given that we do need to use it for more complex activities.

In Living the Mindful Life, Charles Tart says:

We can have levels of mindlessness, ranging from simple inattention to the immediate physical world through insensitivity to our interactions with others we care about to a deep and fundamental mindlessness about our most important values and real nature.

I think it’s a mistake to think of these as simply different levels of the same thing (mindlessness). What he calls inattention to the immediate physical world is simply System 1 doing its thing. There’s nothing wrong with it per se and there’s no way to stop it.

What we can do is aim for practicing mindfulness meditation (or any form of mindfulness) on a regular basis instead of trying to be mindful all the time. Practicing mindfulness meditation will allow us to detach from our monkey mind, at least a little, and allow us to slow down, breathe, and notice some of the things we usually tune out of our awareness.

Enneagram: Develop the Habit of Self-Observation

The Enneagram shows us how each of us is asleep by describing our automatic reactions (or compulsions). It’s possible to spend an inordinate amount of time in a fruitless search to discover the underpinnings of our recurring patterns of behavior. Why do I do this? What causes me to react this way? The antidote for that is to see ourselves described in a book by an author who doesn’t know us, and to learn that a multitude of other people we’ve never met, with entirely different backgrounds from ours, share those patterns of behavior with us.

While we can certainly observe our thoughts, feelings, and reactions without knowing anything about the Enneagram, knowing the characteristics of our Enneagram type can save us a lot of time by providing us with some direction as to what to focus on or pay attention to. If we want to stop being at the effect of our autopilot behavior, it’s helpful to have some understanding of what that behavior actually is.

If we know we tend to have a particular reaction or pattern of thought, we’ll find it much easier to begin recognizing it when it shows up. If we don’t know what to look for, we’re in the position of trying to find multiple needles in multiple haystacks.

When you strip the esoteric and spiritual elements away from the Enneagram, what remains is an extremely practical and valuable tool for seeing our own autopilot behavior clearly and understanding other people—without judgment. The danger from a little knowledge of the Enneagram is a tendency to use it as an excuse for our behavior and/or as a rationale for stereotyping other people. Combining mindfulness with self-observation puts the brakes on those tendencies.

What we can do is learn the particulars of our Enneagram type and then develop the habit of observing those thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and reactions in ourselves. The Enneagram doesn’t explain every single aspect of every person. It’s not a Theory of Everything. But it does give us a context for our behavior. By observing what we tend to do, we can begin to see some of our own limits and limitations. We have to know what we’re doing now before we can do something else.

Neuroscience: Face the Facts

This is our basic human situation. Most of us sense that something is amiss with our lives. But we haven’t any idea what our problem really is, or what we should do about it….All the pain we bring to ourselves and others—the hatred, the warring, the groveling, the manipulation—is our own doing. It comes out of our own hearts and minds, out of our own confusion. Furthermore, if we don’t see exactly what the problem is, we’re going to perpetuate it. We’re going to teach our children our confusion, and we’ll go on, generation after generation, doing more of the same to ourselves and to each other. —Steve Hagen, Buddhism, Plain and Simple

Although this quote is from a book on Buddhism, it applies just as well to what we’re learning about the human condition from neuroscience. As long as we don’t understand how our brain actually works, we’re going to keep doing the same things, making the same mistakes, and passing the whole mess on to the next generations.

Practicing mindfulness and developing the habit of self-observation can alleviate some of the pain and discontent. But that’s not enough. As long as we fail to acknowledge how irrational we are, our irrationality will color everything we do, both individually and as a species.

What we can do is get to know how our brain works and be mindful—non-reactively—of the limits of our perception, our control, and our rationality. We can loosen the reins on our craving for certainty and for being right. We can observe—non-judgmentally—our own cognitive biases, prejudices, and flawed reasoning. If we can accept these things in ourselves, we might have a chance of accepting them in others.

Continuing to operate under the assumption that we are rational beings—when, in fact, we are not—has consequences in almost every area of our lives and in nearly every problem we face on this planet. There may be nothing more important than coming to terms with this basic fact of life, the condition that our condition is in.

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