“All Lazy Practitioners Fail to Reach Enlightenment Ever”
Share this
“All lazy practitioners fail to reach enlightenment ever” – skillful ways with language for spiritual practitioners
If we were enlightened, we would experience reality. We create our own reality. So the teachings tell us.
Another way of saying this: if we could experience the world without distortions, deletions and generalizations, we would experience it for real.
Imagine these statements by two people in a relationship:
A: You always take things the wrong way.
B: You never listen properly.
People make these kinds of statements in relationships of all kinds every day. And there is an easy way to challenge the two words ‘all’ and ‘every’ in that last statement. Just ask: “All kinds? Every day?”
These simple questions might drive the other person crazy OR they might help draw their conscious attention to the generalizations of reality in their statements. They can support them to choose more appropriate language, which will reduce the suffering they create for themselves and others through distorted perceptions of the world.
Distortion means an inaccurate internal representation of experience. You rearrange sensory data and alter perceptions to create fantasies and your ‘model of the world’. Distortions enable us to prepare for experiences before they occur, both positively and negatively.
Imagine you have to make a presentation of some kind and you go in with the thought: “I’m sure I will do a bad presentation, the audience won‘t like me, they‘ve heard much better presenters than me.” You will probably program yourself to fail and create the reality you fear. What if instead you go in with the thought “I know my stuff and I have prepared well, I will be myself, I am good enough at presenting.”? It is pretty likely in this case you will create a different reality.
When you choose the words ‘bad presentation’, you create a ‘nominalization’, a favorite way of distorting reality. Verbs turn into nouns – ‘presentation’ instead of ‘presenting’ -, processes turn into events – presentation is a frozen ‘thing’ in your mind rather than a constantly changing experience of interacting with an audience. Nominalizations delete information and reduce choices, eg ‘fear’ from ‘be afraid’. Remember, it is a representation of experience, not the experience itself.
One test of whether a word is a nominalization is this: is it concrete enough that you can put it into a wheelbarrow? You can put potatoes and gravel into a wheelbarrow and with enough imagination even a brontosaurus! But can you put ‘fear’ or a ‘presentation’ into a wheelbarrow? No. So stop carrying it around as though you could!
Finally, deletions. What‘s missing from that sentence? A verb. A doing word. We often unconsciously filter out stuff we do not want to face when we communicate with others, so we delete uncomfortable, active information. Much of a therapist‘s time is spent helping clients retrieve such ‘lost’ information.
What has all this got to do with Buddhism or spiritual practice?
Buddhism claims the ‘Middle Way’ between ‘eternalism’ and nihilism. Generalizations and nominalizations are a kind of ‘eternalism’, which freezes the flow of living experience into fixed categories. Deletions are a kind of nihilism that denies that stuff exists.
We can gradually increase our ‘skillful means’ with language by training ourselves first to notice our own distorted perceptions and those of others and then to choose words that gently and carefully challenge our limited model of the world and shift us in more healing directions.
Look at the provocative title of this post again: “All lazy practitioners fail to reach enlightenment ever”. Can you spot the distortions, deletions and generalizations? How would you challenge or correct them? Look away from this text and write down your version before you read my ideas below.
Here is my version: “Careful people practising meditating will eventually experience awakened states of mind.” Now what could be more motivating than that?!
By Yeshe Özer
Yeshe is an English author, teacher, storyteller, community currency nut, converted dog lover and trombonist living in exile in the magical Brothers Grimm land of Germany. He has been a student of Domo Geshe Rinpoche since 2007 and hopes one day to graduate to an even bigger tent than the new one he uses on retreat in Wisconsin.
