On Vipassana (Part 2: The Big Thoughts)

Philosophy

Man Pointing, Alberto Giacometti, 1947

Quick Summary (Spoiler Alert): I will never know the balance of pleasure and pain in my life. I will always have some memories of pleasures and of pains. What I perceive to be the balance of pleasure and pain will be more a product of my mental habits and disposition than any bearing on reality. Given I cannot hope to construct a true narrative, I may as well construct one that tells me I have lived in more pleasure than pain.

We expect to be able to say how our life has gone. A wizened farmer looks out on the sun setting, grandchild at his side and says ‘I’ve had a decent innings, son’. A bejewelled dowager comforts her family, assures them that it’s her time and ‘I’ve lived a happy life’. One fugitive looks at the other, smiles, and says ‘I’ve had a good run’ before stepping out into the final shoot-out. We want to be able to say what sort of life we’ve lived. We think that we can.

Please note - the concepts of a good life and a happy life are not identical (and whether one entails the other is beyond the scope of this Substack). My Big Thought on Vipassana concerns the latter - about whether or not I’ve lived a happy life, what I would say if this were my final scene. Do I spend more time happy or sad? Would one of the ‘Colour-a-Day’ charts be mostly blue, or mostly yellow? Are most of my moments enjoyed, worth having? What is my net balance of pleasure over pain?

The answer I reach on Vipassana is 42. (Bad joke. Sorry).

The answer I actually arrive at is I’m never going to know. Our memory retains so breathtakingly little that most of our life is unknowable to us. Over the ten days it feels like I push up against the absolute limits of what I can remember - and that is in ten days out of the 8,504 I have been alive. Even if I try and stack up each of the individual moments I can remember from today, I’d be gobsmacked if it added up to more than half an hour.

And - not only is the sample size small, it’s also pretty crap. The information we retain is wildly biased depending on the narratives we tell ourselves of who we are, and how we came to be. What we choose to retrieve and re-encode is far more a product of a mental habits than anything that attempts to have a bearing on reality. There’s the people who can always pull out a silver lining, and those who can find the grey cloud on an otherwise clear sky. The data available in our memory is not something that a scientist would extrapolate from with any confidence. *

All this has the really weird consequence that we don’t really have any idea how our life has gone. And it is weird. Really weird. It feels like a statement that we should be able to make with at least some degree of confidence - that “I’ve lived a happy life” or “I’ve lived a sad one” - and being able to make it is part and parcel of knowing who we are and how we’ve come to be. But I think that we have no idea, and never will do. They’re just not claims that I think we are warranted in making given the paucity and the biased nature of the data available. **

So where do we go now, if we accept the idea that most of how your life has felt is unknowable to you? If that is the case, what should we do? I think the answer is found (as is so often the case) in Kant.

One of the main thing Kant does is sort questions into buckets. Pre-Kant, (massively simplifying here) philosophy swung between two extremes - the ‘Oh-My-God, nothing is real, what if we’re all an alien hallucination, am I just a brain in a vat, nothing can be trusted’ vibe of the sceptics and the ‘Woohoo, we can believe in everything because God has got our backs, and everything can be trusted’ vibe of the dogmatists. (There was also a third camp - the indifferentists - which was more ‘Please Shut Up and Who Cares’. Hopefully not too relatable, them.)

Kant’s genius was sorting questions into things we can be certain of - things in experience, and those necessary for experience - and those we can never know - the things that go beyond experience. He puts a limit on the doubt of the sceptics, and a check on the ambitions of the dogmatists. So, for example, you can be sure that you are seeing the white space-time shape that makes up your iPhone as a rectangle in your experience. But ideas like God lie out of the realm of experience, and so they aren’t something you can ever know the truth or falsity of. You can be certain of your experience as experience, and you simply cannot know the things beyond it. (Again, massively simplifying/ bastardising here. I can hear the howls of my tutor echoing in my ears)

What Kant does with some of these unknowables that’s interesting here. When we believe things, we should - generally - try to believe things that are true. That’s our first epistemic duty as knowers. But what Kant says is that if truth can’t have any bearing on a belief - because it falls into the bucket of Things We Can’t Possibly Know - then we can look to a second-order reason to believe in something, and this second-order reason is moral. Is it good to believe this sort of thing? Does it help us do the right thing?

For Kant, this kind of second-order reason justified believing in God. You can’t know if God exists, so you can’t have a true or false reason either way - but it can be the right thing to do (because it means you will behave in the right way), even if you can’t know if it’s the true thing.

For us, I think this kind of practical reason justifies our building a narrative and a story of how our life has gone that at least allows us to answer the old ‘To Be or Not To Be’ question in the affirmative - as otherwise we can’t do any good at all. We’re warranted in telling ourselves a story of our lives as ones that are worth living, and there’s a practical reason to do so.***

(Goop Alert) This is what I start to do on Vipassana. I realise it’s not enough to be aware of moments of joy, individual times that I have been happy. I want to slot them into a narrative, into the story of who I am and who I have been, give them the same patina of inevitability that the sadder moments I have brooded over have. In order to do this I trace them. I think back to every time I am happy, and all of the happy moments that led to those, and the happy moments those relied on in turn. It is a very nice narrative.

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My friend Marley asked me what I learnt on Vipassana, and this is what I told him. Depressingly, Marley had not only got there significantly before me, he’d also added in lashings of Buddha, Terry Pratchett and Tennyson and reached the same conclusions without a philosophy degree or spending ten days locked into a cell. Which is just cheating.

So either (1) this isn’t as earth-shatteringly, uniquely revelatory as I felt it to be whilst on the course or (2) Marley is a spritely incarnate sent by SN Goenka to re-affirm my Vipassana conclusions. I know which explanation is more accurate, and which one my ego prefers. Regardless - this was really important to me. So thank you for reading.

I’ve also softened my thinking a little since Vipassana (details in the comments) if you’re interested in seeing more/ a glutton for punishment. Have a gorgeous week everybody.

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*An Example: I like to think of myself as a striver - someone whose overcome some tough shit, which means quite a lot of my memory is taken up with… well… tough shit (there’s a charming mental image). I’m also a brooder - someone who worries about doing the right thing, and whether wrong has been done to her - which creates a handy little bias towards dwelling on the fun double whammy of BOTH every wrong that has ever been done to me AND every time I was a less than exemplary human being. Neither trait is bad per se - the former is a source of pride, and confidence in what I can get through in the future; the latter, though sometimes quite toxic, means I do try very hard to do the right thing. But both serve to bias my remembering towards the less fun parts of life.

**I’m not making a normative claim here - not saying that it is a good or bad thing that we can or can’t remember, that it should or shouldn’t be this way. It’s an empirical one - I simply think this is the case. And if I’m wrong, the grounds for my being wrong have to be empirical in turn - an explanation that suggests, somehow, memory is able to accurately record the balances of pleasure and pain.

***I hope it also allows us to do more than that - to allow us to build a narrative that tells us we have lived a happy life - but I can’t be sure. Maybe people who believe their lives are miserable are more likely to do the right thing; maybe they are more compassionate, less Polly-Annaesque, never forget an umbrella. A question for another time.