The role of narrative themes in everyday experience

This topic isn't exactly Buddhism, but at the same time essentially based within the same set of ideas.  It seems likely to me that if some of the most related themes in Buddhism (on duality, or rather non-duality, for example) were developed more in contemporary writings it might seem more so.

The rejection of self is seen as a more common starting point, or the aspect of experience of suffering.  Non-attachment also tends to come up more, and to me that's fair as a critical concept at the core of Buddhism.  In modern writing Zen emphasizes a potentially improved perspective when  ordinary thought and experience relate to not over-analyzing reality, taking things as they are, but I've not researched how these are derived from earlier Buddhist concepts and teachings.

Some of these general themes remind me of mindfulness teachings.  One of my favorite references is Mindfulness with Breathing, by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, so this is tying back to the Thai Buddhist tradition and early Buddhism.  When you read some of the content (like this introduction) there might seem to be no connection to narrative themes in experience at all, or perhaps even just a focus on meditation without a clear connection to everyday experience.  But it goes in that direction later, and the effect on everyday experience is really the point, not accumulating merit or a vague and general "inner peace."

At any rate this take is sort of my own, for what that's worth.  It's only here because it's close enough that I won't start another blog for psychological observations that relate to Buddhism but don't clearly map onto core teachings.

It's based on personal observation, just my take on things, so there are no Pali-based concept references.

Role of narrative themes in everyday experience

So what is the role?  We like to think that what we do makes good sense, that we are rational, and that both ideas and actions in our life are based on a logical framework of how things make sense.  To some degree this is true, and for some experiences it's not as relevant.  Something like a change of employment should relate to a lot of reasoning; a favorite ice cream flavor not really at all.  But my point here is instead that we tend to map most of what we experience into a series of narrative themes, regardless of whether that is functionally required or not.

Assuming I had established that to be true--the next part--we might wonder, so what?  Is this really related to Buddhism, or is it a good or bad thing, or not really functional or non-functional?  To what end do we do this, or just as habit, not towards an end.  But then I'll get to that after some more background.

How we organize events into narrative themes should be apparent to everyone with a worldview and life experience, to everyone, but then for the sake of argument I'll have to assume that some aspects of experienced reality aren't really apparent to everyone.  Put another way, that different people "do" introspection to different degrees, so that it could make sense for me to explain it all.  Of course sometimes I wonder if I'm really making any sense, but that's a separate issue.

One starting point for noticing this came when I noted that I tended to organize days into good or bad days, that early in the morning things seemed to be going well or not well.  "Luck" was invoked to explain why a train might have a long queue, for example.  Some of the same ground might be covered by the concept of "getting up on the wrong side of the bed."  That wouldn't relate to the timing of trains, or traffic patterns, but it would set a positive or negative tone for the earliest part of the day.  But then I could be more superstitious than most, right?  Or maybe I was caught up in explaining things that didn't really need to be explained, as much as really doing those things myself (meaning maybe the tendency to categorize was as much a function as the tendency to examine and explain, as it was a "real" thing).

A separate aspect of this general theme relates to noticing patterns in your own mind, how events match up with more general series of events.  Of course any version of this is essentially what reason was originally for.  My later thoughts on this have turned towards the role social media plays in this, how a decade ago we might have described these many small events to someone else in conversation, but now we do so in short messages in lots of different places online.

I'm not sure if this means narrative theme means more now than it would have a decade ago, or if it is experienced differently now or not.  Surely conversation would have covered a lot of the same ground in the past (the distant off-line-experience past of 25 years ago), just not as frequently, and not as documented in text.

Back to Buddhism

Seems a good place to circle back to why I see this as related to Buddhism at all.  The connection reference might be clear already; it's about the Zen directive towards direct experience.  Now more than ever we experience our own reality through our own commentary of it.  As a lot of commentary has it to an absurd degree, so that talking about our lives in messages becomes more of what we do than actually living it.  But then that perhaps that separation is artificial; it might be as well to say that one of the main components of life experience is commentary on life experience, or perhaps small talk that doesn't even relate to much.

The typical take in Zen teachings is that this isn't a good thing.  The thinking goes that direct experience is the main defining aspect of our lives, so constant talk about actual experience (the non-verbal, non-logical part) is noise, except in the other cases where the higher order message is necessary.  For example, you need to resort to abstract verbal constructs to order lunch.  During lunch you don't need to talk constantly or keep typing text messages, or surfing feed images.  Then again it's hard to imagine how looking around, or focusing on the actual experience of eating, could be so much better than those things.  In a McDonald's it probably wouldn't be, but that doesn't necessarily contradict Zen teachings, that in general people probably should drift towards eating decent food in more pleasant surroundings.

This "ought" might not be clear still.  What's the problem with observing story lines in our daily life?  To start, it's really not clear any tenet of Buddhism should be interpreted this way, or that any "should" really applies.  It's a possible connection I'm discussing here, because it's an interesting line of thought to me.  To most people, even those interested in Buddhism, it might not be.

To clarify further, let's assume there is some potential problem with seeing every single life event as part of any number of individual story lines.  Put the opposite way, let's assume there is some benefit to not doing that.  What is it, or what is both?  I'm proposing that life really isn't like that, that many things are just random, with no point, and no connections to other series of events, and it's a waste of time and an improper use of logic to keep linking them.  I guess this starts to overlap with a critique of superstition, although it's still a different thing.

I can't really say I notice this is a huge problem in how I experience reality, so some of the "what if" related to suggesting a problem doesn't work.  I have noticed that my mind can tend to get a bit noisy as a matter of habit, and that in the past steps I've taken to quiet it down have been positive.  In general I can't suggest an easy way to do that, since I've had mixed results with meditation, and the only thing that really did work was spending a few days alone in nature.

Continuity versus change in narrative

The function of the stories is really to put an order to things, to measure out real patterns for what they are.  One could easily overdo primitive human references but it's obvious enough how in the distant past gathering food and avoiding danger would draw on recognizing continuity in what happened before related to the present.  Of course we're not exactly in those circumstances, so as well to not make too much of all that.

In the present one type of narrative one might follow could relate to patterns of how a spouse or significant other is helpful / not supportive / etc.  Or related to work, or hobbies, or any number of social circumstances.  Drawing on the continuity in those patterns would sort of be the point, even though there would be regular variation.  What if a significant other or job or whatever other subject altered between positive and negative, between desired outcomes and positive correlations and the opposite?  Our own read would be inconsistent, always changing.  This seems to be how experienced reality actually works.

Not necessarily a bad thing, of course.  One could say the degree to which we rise above the ups and downs to measure it all well we are actually rational.  Or maybe that's going too far.  There is a tendency for people to accept that men want to be more rational, and women are better about accepting that ordinary experience isn't about reason, so there is a natural gender-based tension related to both the nature of reality and reason.

Being married it's easy for me to pin inconsistency on my wife, for not stepping back and weighing out what individual variations in experience mean.  She comes across as "crazy."  This definitely doesn't relate to writing out too many text messages, of course.  If she wrote a lot more or a lot less I think the end result wouldn't be so different.  We tend to add our interpretive biases to those messages, and within the conversations they are a part of, so the narrative themes are already there.  Someone I send messages to would already expect my wife to be crazy, and for me to be whatever the messages would say I am, as often not supportive or the like but related to negative triggers for communication.  So goes married life, or at least mine.

What alternative, direct experience?

This part I'm not so clear on.  It seems we have to keep doing this, that human experienced reality really does depend on it.  I recently took a break from my smart phone and it is possible to not send messages or check feeds but I still can't say how it actually changes experience.  Maybe it did seem slightly more direct.  Here there seems to be two related but different considerations:  by typing messages or updates into a phone a few times every hour we seem to condense our off-line lives into commentary more consistently, and then also life experience seems to be conditioned by including that ever-present element, so that in a way we never completely leave there.  Still hard to condense all that into a "we shouldn't."

It would help to have a "Buddha" as a reference, someone experiencing reality in a different way, one that somehow seems clearly better.  Unfortunately even the people that claim to have taken a limited step towards that are typically selling something, or just a bit out there.  I've interacted with a lot of monks in the last 8 years (in addition to having been one, briefly) and there's not much direction from there either, no higher perspective to draw on.  Even people that just talk about Buddhism seem to be all over the map, more often simply repeating cryptic, archaic references than making useful points (as likely myself included, just with less references).

A long time ago it seemed that to the extent I was able to notice the nature of my own experienced reality that I could also change it, experience it in a more direct and consistent way.  Maybe to some extent I'm still doing that; maybe not.  One could as easily argue this direct experience should be about noticing less, not doing so in a different way, but really who is to say.

I try to be aware of my own immediate reactions (the mindfulness part) and also keep an eye on the interpretive themes I'm adding, and maybe to some degree that helps me work with what I've got.  For me it's also helpful to keep in mind that not everything means something, that to some extent relatively random things can also happen, so there's no need to organize or manage or make sense of a lot of things.