What’s Going On

Ideas about What’s Going On are basically just entertainment for idle moments.

In an active situation, practiced patterns of response take over, and it’s very rare that post hoc reflections are practiced nearly enough to pattern new behaviors.

It can be confusing because something like “belief” seems so important to OTHER people — at least some of them. One looks at believers believing things and envies how they seem to just DO STUFF without getting bogged down in thinking.

But those “beliefs” are behaviors, not ideas.

When contemplating idly, ideas seem like the result of a deliberate activity.

But in a non-hypothetical situation, ideas about it are RESPONSES that FOLLOW the experience, and thought responses — skillful or not — are conditioned by practice just like action responses are.

Crucially, mental responses are VERY minimally related to What’s Really Going On in a situation. They’re for getting through the situation as it appears. Metaphysics later, if ever.

Training useful mental responses is about PREPARING for situations, not explaining them.

This recalls a beloved example, which I either got directly from this book or concocted to explain what I learned from it:

If our ice age ancestors beheld the sabertooth tiger AS IT REALLY IS, they would have offered themselves up to its awesome beauty.

Nothing wrong with idle moments, of course. May we all have as many of them as possible.

But that’s only something we can get by regularly, successfully managing what comes up.