Post #26: Monkey Mind and Mental Hygiene

23 May 2023

By any historical standard, our millennial human world does spectacularly well when it comes to physical hygiene: the number of human beings who take daily showers (or nearly that), who do not smell much even at the end of the day, who wear clean clothes as a matter of course, and who are free of lice and fleas on top of that, would simply astound, nay stupefy our ancestors. But whether we are doing equally well at the mental level is another matter.

The very idea of mental hygiene is probably strange to many, as we tend to think of the mind as something that cannot really get dirty. Of course we do all make some room for “dirty minds” in a metaphorical sense, but that is usually limited to smut, or even to sex itself, which can be dirty of course (if it is done right, as Woody Allen quipped) and which has often been considered as a stain on the mind and body alike by purists. Whether it really compares so very unfavorably with the other desire-driven things we do, seems much more doubtful to me. It is not, at any rate, what I am concerned with here.

I am much more worried about sources of mental pollution that are vastly more diffuse and widespread, the daily mega-feed of unsifted pseudo-entertaining and addictive junk—some of it perhaps tasty, and a very little also nutritious—on which we are munching all day long, a steady stream of pre-fab mental fast food that is on a completely different order from its physical equivalent.

How many junky meals can a human being really consume in a day consistently without breaking down under the weight and the malnutrition? Our minds, on the other hand, put no such limits on us: we can gorge ourselves from morning till night on an unrelenting all-you-can-eat-and-more smorgasbord of pap, without ever having to ask how good such a heap of stuff indiscriminately gobbled down all day long, all year round, could possibly be for us upon closer scrutiny. Better not look too closely, seems to be the motto of our times. While every speck of pollution in the air brings on veritable paroxysms of physical fear and existential dread, and while the food we eat is scrutinized, in much of the affluent world, with a degree of fastidiousness that was once reserved to the most squeamish of priestly diet-watchers, our mental intake, though it is filling our minds at rates that are awe-inspiring to contemplate, seems somehow not to figure much, as if it had nothing much to do with either our psychosomatic wellbeing in this world or with the meaning-bound bigger questions about the life well-lived that ancient philosophy, including the Teaching of the Buddha, confronts us with so urgently and insistently. (In Socrates’ own telling it was his unrelenting insistence upon this point, more than anything else, that got him killed.)

The Buddha’s warnings against monkey mind applied to his own age no less than any other: the hunger for continually renewed stimulation never ends by itself, not then any more than it does now. Yet what a stupendous difference in possibilities! The underlying principle—the human condition for lack of a better word—may not have altered all that much, which is why the very words “monkey mind” still resonate with such a timely and embarrassing ring (you might as well admit it, if only to yourself); but to say that nothing fundamental has changed would be as true, and as false, as saying that the Buddha’s contemporaries had banquets too and that they traveled. Sure they did: but they could not order food from anywhere in the world for delivery at your doorstep, sometimes within minutes, at a click of a mouse; and when they traveled it was on foot or by ox-cart, not by jumbo-jet.

Nor does the trouble end there, with squeamishness about sex or concern over what our mental diet is doing to our focus, our concentration, our very ability to make sense of a world that is presented to us in ever more fragmented and disconnected pieces, as Neil Postman already warned forty years ago, when what we have before us today was yet but a haunting specter on a farsighted mind. No, there is another dimension that gets far less play, though it was the other side of Postman’s argument in 1985, namely the rapid deterioration of our remedial resources. What dams and dikes do we have to hold back the daily tsunami of over-information lest we get completely inundated, overwhelmed, and perhaps drowned? Meditation, is one answer, the more hopeful one, because it has been making strides in the Western world almost as great as, though infinitely quieter, than those of the great information stampede. But there is another, far more melancholy point of reference, which was Postman’s own, and which is mine: the dying art of serious reading, not for entertainment, but precisely for the kind of mental hygiene that is at issue here.

Yes, yes, it sounds a tired old refrain, a mere geezer’s tic, to the ears of the digitalized generations—that is to say, not only those who are competent in the electronic world, but those who have never known any other. Still it remains a bedrock principle of finding your bearings in the present and making wise choices about the future that you need to know something of the life before you as an option before you can reject it with authority, and that those who know the alternatives well speak with greater credibility when they express a preference, or at least a relative valuation, though of course they may also be invested in the old to an extent that nobody younger will ever be.

It is not that I wish the brave new world away, whether or not I feel fully at home in it. Not only would it be pointless, it would be unfair too, because there is in it such an abundance of possibilities that I appreciate very much, and that other ages would have considered achievements more than human. It would be tedious to enumerate them, there are so many. In many ways we have become gods as our ancestors might have imagined them, though prosthetic gods, as Freud put it in his Civilization and Its Discontents. Potentially, at least, we really do live in the best of times, in a world of almost paradisiacal conditions by the standards of the past. But as for the uses we are making of our possibilities, and what we are doing to our mental hygiene, I see a much darker picture, not least in my classrooms, and I catch myself wondering whether we do not perhaps live in the worst of times also.

For there is an Achilles heel to our heroics that we do not consider enough. A world of previously unimaginable potential does not, cannot tell you what to do with all this newfound power. It does not by itself give you direction or orientation in the topsy-turvy welter of overabundance; it merely carries you along, which is a very different proposition, on a profusion of short-lived trends and shallow currents that cannot be trusted to stand the test of time (and that do not even pretend they could, dismissing it as an irrelevance). In terms of ordered thought, cogent reasoning, coherent writing, I would without a moment’s hesitation pick an 18th-century library over one of our own that only stocked the latest books.

But we do not have to choose in this way, that is the beauty of our situation, if only we knew what to make of it. We have everything before us, a veritable space-age Library of Alexandria, or as Borges imagined, a Library of Babel that contains practically everything ever known to man. Alas, there is a catch, as always: we can locate anything we want, with relative ease even, but only once we know precisely what to look for; then it is ours for the mere asking, often for free. But if we don’t know where to look for the best guides, which is perhaps the greatest skill of all and requires a lifetime of cultivation, then all the specious riches are not likely to do us much good beyond furnishing us with ever more commodious sties to live in and toys to play with. It is for developing and refining our knowledge of where to turn for reliable guidance, in things big and small, that mental hygiene seems so indispensable to me, and it is for this reason that it would be a fearsome prospect if we were indeed, as it sometimes seems to me, rapidly losing and carelessly frittering it away.

Reading: Samyutta Nikaya 12:61 (the Buddha on monkey mind); Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death