This book attempts to blend the Chinese philosophy of wu-wei with some recent researches from cognitive sciences. Wu-wei or “non-action” implies that our action is done without our doing. We are the object through which the natural forces work.
As much as the author tries to explain how
wu-wei can be achieved in our daily lives, he alludes to the elusiveness of
this task or as he quoted from Shunryu Suzuki in chapter 8: “You cannot try,
but you also cannot not try; trying is wrong, but not trying is also wrong.”
I do quite like some of the things he said,
many of which I find to be very meaningful and consistent with my own Christian
beliefs. For example in Chapter 4, he wrote: “Knowing the contentment of
contentment” requires resisting the siren call of consumer culture and instead
holding fast to primitive and simple pleasures.” The Bible too has much to say
about contentment: “Now godliness with contentment is great gain. (1Ti 6:6 NKJV)” and “Not that I speak in regard to need,
for I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content (Php 4:11 NKJV)”.
Slingerland further wrote: “The desires of
the eye form, of course, the entire basis of modern advertising industry, which
has turned the continuous ramping up of our desire for “goods hard to come by”
into a refined science. The minute the latest iPhone is released, our current
iPhone suddenly seems less attractive. And as author puts it “Our belly may be
perfectly comfortable in our current car, but our eye can see the nicer, newer
car in the driveway next door (or in the magazine ad or billboard), and this
perception immediately decreases our satisfaction with what we’re currently
driving. The car itself has not changed the slightest bit, but our benchmarking
mind has demoted it anyway.”
The Bible says: “For all that is in the
world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not
of the Father but is of the world. (1Jn 2:16 NKJV)”
This is called the hedonic treadmill, where positive or negative events result
in only temporary increases in happiness or unhappiness (http://tinyurl.com/o8zd3n3). Or to state it in another way, human beings have the tendency
to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major
positive or negative events or life changes. This term was first coined by two
psychologists, Brickman and Campbell, in 1971.
One of classic experiment on the concept of
hedonic treadmill is a study by Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman in 1987 titled
“Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?” (Download full
text in pdf: http://tinyurl.com/kr5rupg) In
that study, the authors found that, although there were strong initial emotional
reactions of happiness and sadness respectively, but in the long term, neither
group appeared to be happier than the other.
The basic mechanism for hedonic treadmill is
adaptation. It is a phenomenon where after perceiving something for a certain
period of time, your sensory system “adapts” to it, causing it to recede into
the background. Adaptation can be good as it helps to cope with our tragedies.
But adaptation can also be bad when we begin to covet what others have that we
do not. And this never-ending cycle of initial euphoria, adaptation and
covetousness results in a rat race.
As Slingerland says, again in chapter 4:
“Another source of dissatisfaction is our incessant need to measure our
achievements against those of our peers…once a certain minimum threshold of
material well-being is reached, our objective level of wealth seems to be much
less important than our relative wealth – that is how we stack up against our
neighbors or colleagues. Once you have enough money to buy the basics and
indulge in some pleasures, like eating out or buying new clothes, ranked status
comes to matter much mire than wealth per se. Status, in turn, is inherently unstable because it is by its
very nature relative – the benchmark is always moving as others around us rise
or fall. Moreover, we seem designed to focus more on what we don't have than
what we do; we are much more irked about those two people ahead of us than
pleased about twenty behind.”
The Bible has much to say about the
deceitfulness of our heart that can never be truly satisfied with the material
things. "The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked;
Who can know it? (Jer 17:9 NKJV)”
The Bible also has much to say about
covetousness: “Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth:
fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is
idolatry. (Col 3:5 NKJV)”
Note:
I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review.
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