Reactive Patterns

The Buddha wasn’t the sort of person to go around picking fights, but there were a couple of times when he would seek out other teachers and challenge them on their teachings. It was a sign that he saw their teachings as really detrimental, creating huge obstacles in the path to the end of suffering. At the very least, if he couldn’t convince the other teachers that they were wrong, he could at least convince other people that they shouldn’t follow that particular teaching.

One of the teachings he challenged, at least twice, was the idea that everything you experience in the present moment is totally predetermined by the past: You may think you have the power of choice in the present, but actually you don’t. This, the Buddha said, would mean that if you were committing murder, committing adultery, or stealing, it wasn’t because of anything you were doing in the present. It was all because of something you had done in the past. You’d have no power to stop. That way, he said, you’re left unprotected and bewildered. There’d be no path to the end of suffering.

It’s good to keep this point in mind. It sounds kind of abstract, the kind of thing you’d talk about in philosophy classes, but it has a lot to do with your emotions in the present moment, your reactive behavior. It’s all too easy to tell yourself, “I have this old pattern of behavior and that’s just the way I am.” It’s better to think, “That’s what I’ve been doing. It’s a habit.” And the Buddha is basically saying, you can learn new habits. You don’t have to follow these old reactive patterns.

Remember, you have potentials coming in from the past, but how you experience them and what you do with them in the present moment: That’s fabrication. There are three kinds of fabrication.

 There’s the way you breathe.

 There’s the way you talk to yourself, what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation.

 And then there’s mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you hold in mind to identify what something is, what it means, or how important it is. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain.

When you behave in a reactive way, it’s composed of these things.

The Buddha also tells you to see, if something is unskillful: How does it originate? In other words, where does it come from in the mind? What sparks it in the mind? How does it pass away? After all, these patterns are not there 100% of the time. They come and they go. When you fall in line with them, what’s their allure? What are their drawbacks? And when you can compare the allure to the drawbacks and see that it’s just not worth going for the allure, that the allure is lying to you, then you can find the escape through dispassion.

That’s the attitude you have to take toward these reactive patterns. They have their allure — even though you know they’re bad and you don’t like them — but they’re familiar. And at least part of you does like them. They’re easy because you know the ropes. You can fabricate them really well. Very quickly, you can breathe in certain ways, talk to yourself in certain ways, hold certain perceptions and feelings in mind. And because it’s so quick, it seems natural. But remember, it is fabricated, it is something you’ve made up. You might say, “Well, that’s the way I am.” But actually it’s better to say, “That’s what I’ve been doing.” When you see these patterns as actions, then you can change your actions.

It’s like the Buddha’s teachings on seeing your own foolishness. He says, “The extent to which you see an action is foolish, to that extent you’re wise.” There are two ways of analyzing your foolishness. There’s the foolish way, which is to say, “Well, I’m a fool,” as if that’s your identity. If that’s what you are, then there’s not much hope. But if you say, “That was a foolish action,” that means you realize there was an alternative. You didn’t have to behave in that way, but you did. And that opens the door to the possibility to change, because you’re now stepping back from the action. You realize that a lot of identity was involved in it. A lot of how you talked to yourself, a lot of the perceptions you focused on, were around who you are, how you felt comfortable acting in that way. But those were decisions you made. You can decide to undo them.

You can see right here why some people like the idea of determinism: You say, “Well, I just couldn’t help myself,” but that just leaves you where you were. It lets you off the hook, but maybe the hook is a good place to be. Hold on to the hook, and it can pull you out. In other words, take responsibility. This is something you’ve been doing, this reactive pattern, but you can unlearn it. You can responsibly act in a new way.

Now, it may seem tedious. It’s like going in for a hip operation when you’re old. You come out and you have to learn how to walk all over again, how to do basic functions all over again, and it seems frustrating. These things you used to be able to do very quickly, now you have to do them very slowly and deliberately. But that’s how all new habits are developed.

You may say, “Well, I’m an old dog. I can’t learn new tricks.” We’re all old dogs. If you think in terms of saṃsāra, we’ve all been around for a long time. We all have old, old, old habits. But as the Buddha said, if we couldn’t abandon unskillful habits and develop skillful ones in their place, he wouldn’t have taught. This is something we can all do, even up to our last breath.

So notice, when you have an unskillful pattern coming up: How are you breathing? How are you talking to yourself? What perceptions and feelings are you focusing on? Try to change them. This is why we do breath meditation, to give you an alternative pattern to develop.

That’s one of the problems with your old patterns: You feel that “If I don’t fall into the old pattern, there’s nothing. A void. My whole identity collapses.” But you can deliberately work on a new identity: you the meditator, you the breather.

When the Buddha gives instructions in breath meditation, he talks in terms of fabrication. You calm bodily fabrication. In other words, once you’ve trained yourself to be aware of the breath through the whole body, then you allow the breath to calm down. Actually, there’s a missing step in there. In some of his other instructions, he recommends that you first energize the breath so that it feels good and refreshing to be here. You feel alive being here, just breathing in, breathing out. Then you calm things down. The Buddha calls it calming bodily fabrication, to remind you that this is one way you have of shaping the present moment.

The same with the mind: You breathe in ways that develop a sense of refreshment, a sense of pleasure, and you’re sensitive to mental fabrication, i.e., the perceptions you’re holding in mind, the feelings you’re holding in mind, and the effect they have on the mind. Then you calm them down. You focus on perceptions and feelings that are more calming for the mind.

Now, of course, the instructions in breath meditation, where you tell yourself, “I will do this, I will do this, I will train myself this way, that way”: Those are verbal fabrications.

The Buddha is trying to make you sensitive to these three kinds of fabrication so that you can see them more clearly when an old habitual pattern comes up. When you recognize where you’ve been breathing in an unskillful way, where you’ve been talking to yourself in an unskillful way, or where you’ve been holding on to unskillful perceptions or aggravating feelings, you can change them.

This is why the Buddha has so many instructions in the Canon, not only on how to talk to yourself, but also what perceptions to hold in mind. All those analogies and similes are basically instructions on, “Picture your situation in the present moment this way. Fabricate the present moment in this way. This is useful.” He even tells you how to breathe.

So they’re all instructions on how to undo reactive patterns and fabricate new patterns in their place. That’s why you can see that your foolish actions were foolish actions—which means you don’t have to identify with them anymore, trying to get away with that sense of, “Well, this is just the way I am.” Replace it with, “This is the way I’ve been behaving.” That implies you don’t have to keep on behaving that way. You have the freedom, the potential here in the present moment, to choose another type of behavior, to act in different ways, more skillful ways.

It may seem ponderous to go through the steps, step by step. But as with any habit, once you get the steps down, they get faster and faster. In this case, you’ve got better reactive patterns, more skillful reactive patterns, so you’re not left adrift, you’re not floating in midair with nothing to support you.

You are creating another state of becoming, and eventually you’ll be in a position where you can take it apart and not feel threatened by taking it apart, but first you’ve got to take apart these unskillful reactive patterns that cause you so much trouble, that you hate but that you hold on to for dear life. It’s that holding on for dear life: That’s what you’ve got to change. That’s a perception you’ve got to change. The perception that “This is the way I am”: You’ve got to change it. That’s why you can see your foolishness. See that it was a foolish action, a series of foolish actions, but you have the potential not to act in that way.

The Buddha gives you alternatives so that you can be more skillful in how you construct your present moment, construct your responses to other people, your responses to situations in a way that’s actually part of the path and not a burden holding you down. Because that’s what the current situation is: You feel that this reactive pattern is supporting you, but actually it’s not. It’s pinning you down. But you can work free. Because you’ve been creating it, you can stop creating it. The Buddha has that much faith in you. Have some faith in yourself.