Edward Slingerland

Wu-wei, Truth Serum and Spontaneity

Image generated by Stable Diffusion. Prompt: “An abstract representation of wu-wei”

Today's research note takes a deep dive into the books ‘Trying Not to Try’ and ‘Drunk’ by academic and author Edward Slingerland. Let’s get cracking.

Background

Links

Website | Twitter | Edward’s Episode

Books

• Trying Not to Try

• Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

Themes

• The Paradox

• The Limits of Rationality

• Awakening the Unconscious

• Honesty

• Being Part of Something Bigger

• Solutions

Theme 1: The Paradox

Summary

• We are living in a success-driven culture where we are preoccupied with working and striving.

• However, in certain areas of our life the use of self-discipline and willpower is counterproductive.

• Often, success can be found when we are in a state of doing something automatically, rather than thinking through every step. In Chinese philosophy, being in this state was called being in ‘wu-wei’, meaning the automatic and harmonious integration of body, emotions and the mind to effortlessly perform an action. People in ‘wu-wei’ can be said to emanate ‘de’, which is a radiance that serves as an outward signal that one is in wu-wei.

• As wu-wei is ‘automatic’ and ‘harmonious’, it cannot be found via brute willpower. It must come naturally. Thus we have a paradox – how to try not to try.

• This paradox rears its head throughout history, suggesting it is a fundamental feature of human life. Modern examples are sportspeople losing their rhythm when they overthink their game. Examples can also be found in Zen Buddhism, Augustine Christianity and modern secularism.

• During the Warring States period of Chinese history (c.475-221BC) different thinkers proposed ways of solving the paradox of wu-wei:

  • Confucius

    • Solution: argued that we should use ritual, ancient cultural routines and willpower to institutionalise positive social practices in our behaviour. In other words, with enough work we can replace our problematic innate dispositions (i.e. automatic behaviours) with socially desirable ones.

    • Paradox: to succeed, this strategy requires inner love for ‘the Way’, otherwise it is just rote learning of traditions without any internal desire to change. However, one cannot find inner love for the ‘Way’ without pursuing the strategy. How can you teach someone who is not driven by a need to learn?

  • Laozi

    • Solution: trying is the source of all suffering. The solution is to undo – to unwind your mind and body. You must shed book learning and artificial desires.

    • Paradox: Laozi’s writings offer real, instrumental benefits (e.g. they inform Sunzi’s Art of War). But to use Laozi for instrumental purposes (i.e. to ‘get ahead’) you are undermining the central message of not trying. To truly receive the benefits of Laozian wu-wei one must have to not want them in the first place.

  • Mencius

    • Solution:  wu-wei requires training and effort – self-cultivation. In this sense Mencius’ theory is a development of Confucianism. However, unlike Confucius, Mencius believed that we already tend toward good. Everyone has inner love for the Way, we just need to make an effort to seek it out.

    • Paradox: despite Mencius claiming that we all already love the Way, he acknowledges that it can be incredibly hard to see and that it takes a lot of guidance and work to feel. If this inner moral love is so hidden, and is not apparent until we have worked on it, then in searching for it we are being asked to love something we don’t seem naturally inclined to love.  If we really loved it would it be so hard to find?

  • Zhuangzi

    • Solution: we must weaken the hold of the conscious mind. To enter wu-wei our focus should be on the world and not on ourselves. Zhuangzian wu-wei is a non-prescriptive state of perfect equanimity, flexibility and responsiveness. The goal is to attack ordinary reason – verbal, physical, social – in order to free our mind from the limits of rationality.

    • Paradox: Zhuangxi is effectively arguing that our use of logic and reasoning is unnatural. But  our capacity to use reason and logic is what it means to be human! By completely disregarding this we are being ‘unnatural’ – we are denying what makes us unique. Moreover, Zhuangxi’s theory is supposed to be non-prescriptive, however it sets up a right and wrong via its scathing account of logic and reasoning.

Questions

• Edward has written a number of books. How much of the writing process was driven by wu-wei, and how much was driven by self-discipline and willpower? Does the ratio change depending on whether he is writing for an academic audience or the wider public?

• One thing David Senra (the host of Founders Podcast) talks about is how a recurring theme amongst founders is that they love the journey – the journey is the reward. I wonder whether wu-wei emerges when you optimise for the journey and not for the destination.

• Why don’t wu-wei and de have equivalent concepts in the West? Is this just a quirk of language, or are there more profound cultural / historical explanations that Edward can point to?

• Not a question, but as an aside, in the concept of wu-wei I can see some parallels with the Ancient Greek concept of aristeia, which was a moment in battle where a hero has his finest moments and operates at a level of divinely inspired, and effortless, supremacy.

• Is Mohism basically just a 2000-year-old precursor to Effective Altruism?

• What explains the relative longevity of (1) Confucianism and (2) Taoism relative to the other schools of thought in the Warring States period? Does their relative longevity imply that they are more effective at producing wu-wei?

• Are wu-wei and flow interchangeable?

Key Quotes

• For the most part, we—and by “we” I mean pretty much anyone with access to this book, inhabitants of modern, industrialized societies around the world—are preoccupied with effort, the importance of working, striving, and trying.

• Our excessive focus in the modern world on the power of conscious thought and the benefits of willpower and self-control causes us to overlook the pervasive importance of what might be called “body thinking”: tacit, fast, and semiautomatic behavior that flows from the unconscious with little or no conscious interference. The result is that we too often devote ourselves to pushing harder or moving faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive.

•  The fact that this tension pops up again and again, reemerging at widely separated points in history in more or less the same form, suggests that it reflects a fundamental feature of human life.

• This is the paradox of wu-wei—the problem of how you can try not to try.

Theme 2: The Limits of Rationality

Summary

• Western conceptions of the mind tend to focus on rationality at the expense of the body. The mind is seen as superior to the body. This is a dualistic account of our biology – it sees the mind as radically distinct from the body.

• The mind is our ‘cold’ system and the body is our ‘hot’ system.

• When we try in areas that are counterproductive this is our mind acting to the expense of our body. Where we are in states of wu-wei our mind is acting in concert with, or even secondary to, our body.

• In reality we are not purely rational beings. We are dictated by our body as well as our mind. We are social creatures and therefore highly dependent on others. Our ecological niche is to be ‘creative, communal and cultural’.

• Using our cold cognition is difficult. It costs our attention (‘ego depletion’), it is paralysed by choice. In practice we rely on our hot cognition to unconsciously bias the reasoning process and to automate our mental processes. Often actions we think are rational were in fact driven by emotion.

Questions

• Edward writes how Western models of rational thought existing distinct from the physical world are ‘strongly dualistic’. But, to me, his distinction between a ‘hot’ and a ‘cold’ system is also dualistic. Is the underlying issue here the fact that our models are dualistic? Or is instead that within a dualistic system the two sides are calibrated incorrectly?

• ‘Drunk’ argues that our ecological niche is to be ‘creative, communal and cultural’. Does this mean that rationality is somehow outside of our ecological niche? If so, does this expose Edward’s argument to the same critiques as were made against Zhuangxi, namely that in denying the naturalness of our capacity to use reason and logic he is denying what makes humans unique?

• At the current margins, would the world be a better place if it was more, or less rational? If the answer is more then how does this impact Edward’s model of wu-wei?

• My gut instinct is that most people would answer that the world as a whole could use with being a bit more rational, but that legalistic advanced Western societies could use a little more hot cognition. If this is true, then does this suggest that the pursuit of wu-wei is something that only the privileged can afford to pursue? Another way of putting it is that wu-wei is a concern only if you are sufficiently high up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Key Quotes

• One thing we can say is that it tends to portray rational thought as the essence of human nature, and reasoning as something that occurs in an ethereal realm completely disconnected from the noise and heat of the physical world around us. This view is strongly dualistic in the sense that the mind, and its supposedly abstract rationality, are seen as radically distinct from, and superior to, the body and its emotions.

•  Things are slowly changing. Scientists have, in recent decades, begun moving away from abstract models of human cognition toward more embodied ones. They’re coming to recognize that the sort of knowledge that we rely on most heavily is hot, emotionally grounded “knowing how” rather than cold, dispassionate “knowing that.” We’re made for doing, not thinking.

•  Left alone, without the help of our hot cognition, cold cognition is simply paralyzed by choice. Therefore, the hot system normally helps out by biasing the reasoning process, usually unconsciously, with somatic markers before it even begins.

•  When questioned, people will often invent plausible-sounding rationales for their decisions, but clever experimental manipulation shows that these typically come after the fact—the “rational tail” wagged by the “emotional dog.”

•  attention is costly, and if it is “spent” on one task there is less available to spend on another. This phenomenon is known as “ego depletion.” Exerting conscious cognitive control in one domain—say, choosing a healthy radish over chocolate, or suppressing an emotional reaction—makes you subsequently less able to exert it in another domain, like persisting in trying to solve a difficult puzzle.

•  It seems, then, that we have a fundamental problem to solve. Conscious control is crucial for civilized human life. You could never get large numbers of people to live and work together without employing it on a large scale. But this sort of control is physiologically expensive, fundamentally limited in nature, and easily disrupted.

• In reality, we are not autonomous, self-sufficient, purely rational individuals but emotional pack animals, intimately dependent on other human beings at every stage of our lives.

Theme 3: Awakening the Unconscious

Summary

• Rationality requires us to focus on external inputs. But research shows that explicit external pressures cause people to focus on activities that should be handled by the unconscious.

• As wu-wei requires us to be in a state of spontaneity, this means that to reach it we should find ways to shut down the rational mind.

• The task then becomes: how can we find a way to temporarily shut down our conscious mind.

• Enter alcohol. There are two common theories to the evolutionary role of alcohol: the hangover and the hijack thesis. Hijack = a behaviour that reaps a reward that was originally meant to be generated by another behaviour. Hangover = behaviour arising from a drive but once adaptive but no longer is. Edward argues that our love of alcohol arises from neither of these. In fact, alcohol offers clear evolutionary benefits – one of which is that it awakens our unconscious.

• The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the home of rational thinking. Alcohol targets and shuts down the PFC, allowing our unconscious mind to come to the fore.

• Creativity is what drives cultural innovation. Alcohol allows us to loosen the slow, cautious, wary rational mind and release the creative and cooperative irrational mind.

• Drink has played a crucial social role in the development of human civilisation. By shutting down our cautious cold mind it creates space for our spontaneous mind to come to the fore. It helps us be creative, communal and cultural.

• This is also the main thrust of Zhangzian wu-wei – the need to shut down the conscious mind.

• Meditation is another way to slow down the rational mind.

Questions

• My model of the throughline from Edward’s previous book ‘Trying Not to Try’, to his latest book ‘Drunk’ work is that drink is one of many solutions to the paradox of wu-wei. So, ‘Drunk’ is in a way a strict subset of ‘Trying Not to Try’. Alongside the philosophical and theoretical solutions offered by the Chinese philosophers in the Warring States period (as set out in ‘Trying Not to Try’), Edward is now focussing on a ‘real world’ solution in alcohol. Does he agree with this framing? Can ‘Drunk’ be conceptualised as a book length treatment of one of many solutions to the ultimate problem set out in ‘Trying not to Try’?

• If so, then what other possible solutions would Edward like to explore? How effective is meditation relative to drink? How about other chemical stimuli? Exercise?

• The framing I set out above would put a different spin on the ‘beer before bread’ argument Edward makes in Drunk. He cites scholars who argue that it was our desire to drink that drove agriculture. But if we accept that drinking is a solution to the paradox of wu-wei, this would suggest that what ultimate drove the rise of civilisation is wu-wei – alcohol was merely a tool to achieve this. What are his thoughts on this framing?

• Does Edward see alcohol as something which has intrinsic value, or does he purely admire its instrumental benefits? For Zhuangzi, drink was used as a metaphor for heaven – Zhuangzi wanted society to obtain wu-wei by becoming ‘drunk’ on heaven. Should society be aiming to leave alcohol behind and aiming for a metaphysical route to spontaneity?

• How much weight does Edward give to the ritualistic elements of social drinking relative to the actual chemical / physical effects? Which is more significant and why?

Key Quotes

• Such people have fallen out of their usual, wu-wei immersion in the internal goods of the game; they have become alienated from the goals, the values, and the flow of play. It is not that their actual physical skill has changed, it’s that they’ve allowed concern with externalities to make them “clumsy on the inside.” Zhuangzi’s insights in this regard find confirmation in what is now a fairly extensive psychological literature on the phenomenon of “choking.” The consensus is that, in most cases, external pressures—explicit demands for good performance, concerns about reputation or awards—cause people to consciously focus on activities that should be handled by the unconscious.

•  It’s also becoming increasingly clear that the kind of cognitive flexibility that Zhuangzi saw as so fatally lacking in his contemporaries is something that is best achieved when we can weaken the hold of the conscious mind.

•  In other words, at least some forms of wu-wei appear to involve shutting down active conscious awareness and control while maintaining background situational alertness. When your conscious mind lets go, the body can take over.

•  The conscious mind has limited capacity, and often the best thing to do when you run into difficulty is shut it down for a while and let the body take over.

•  Intoxication enhances cooperation in at least two ways. First of all, it reduces social faking by inhibiting cognitive control centers. Second, if we all get drunk together, we create a situation of mutual vulnerability that makes trust easier to establish. Getting drunk is essentially an act of mental disarmament.

• OK, but here’s the thing about the PFC. It’s wonderful, we’d be lost without it, but it’s not great for collaboration and creativity, qualities that – as you know – we need in order to occupy our ecological niche. It’s not great because being purely rational, which is what the PFC is all about, often results in being purely selfish.

•  It is still the best social lubricant and Google has a whisky room, a communal space to boost groups creativity. Nobody can go there alone.

Theme 4: Honesty

Summary

• The rational mind can lie and fake. The irrational mind can’t.

• Liars are a threat to community. For societies to succeed they need to be built on trust. The problem is, although we are very good at detecting lies, we are also very good at telling them.

• Alcohol has played an essential civilisation role in weakening the rational mind, strengthening the irrational mind, and thus increasing our trust with one another and incentivising cooperation. It weakens our PFC and in doing so operates like a truth serum. It also, unlike some other stimulants, makes us more extroverted, thus enhancing cooperation.

• The trappings of communal activity – speaking language, dancing, drinking etc, are useful for quick determinations of whether someone is part of the in or the out group. But it is always possible to fake commitment (e.g. someone following rote Confucian routine without any belief in the Way).

• This means that we are always wary of a gap between internal motivation and external behaviour. Being in wu-wei (and therefore ‘giving off’ de) is a way to bridge this gap. Wu-wei is by definition genuine – you cannot fake it. When you are in wu-wei you are sincerely ‘in’ what you are doing. Your actions and your motivation are aligned.

• Not having wu-wei / de is a reliable indicator that you don’t care.

• Both Confucians and Daoists agree that you acquire de only if you are sincerely committed to the Way. The very fact you are not exerting conscious control indicates that you don’t need to.

Questions

• The implication here is that our ‘honest’ self is the animalistic, unconstrained, emotional core, and that all the layers of calculation, empathy, thoughtfulness, consideration, foresight etc that we put on top of this are somehow dishonest or not our ‘real’ self.

• An alternative model of human honesty would be that the layers we place on top of our unconstrained emotional core are exactly what makes us human, and the sum product of our ‘honesty’ is in fact a combination of all these different layers. In this sense, our rationality and compassion and empathy etc are all part and parcel of our honesty rather than restraints upon it. Pursuant to this model, alcohol doesn’t make us more honest – it makes us less honest. It peels back layers of our honesty leaving a shallow, misformed version. What’s Edward’s response to this framing?

• Can Edward think of any historical examples where a higher than normal amount of people have operated in a state of wu-wei? What were the environmental factors that caused this?

• How contingent on external factors is wu-wei as a mechanism of building trust? For example, the Societ Union was a low trust society (as trust in your neighbour was superseded by obedience to the Party). Does wu-wei have a role to play in such societies?

Key Quotes

• And liars are an existential threat to any community. But it’s more difficult for people to lie when their cognitive control is weakened – say, via a PFC-disabling truth serum.

•  We’re attracted to genuinely wu-wei people—they have de—because evolution has shaped us to home in on signals of sincerity that are difficult to consciously simulate and even harder to experience on demand, and to do so in response to basic challenges inherent to human cooperation.

• Because of the constant danger of free riders faking commitment—putting in the time to learn our cultural skills, while secretly ready to betray our shared values as soon as an opportunity presents itself—a potential gap opens between external behavior and internal motivation. What we want, then, is a particular type of desirable, hot behavior where there is absolutely no gap between action and motivation. We want to assure ourselves that there is no extraneous cold cognition sneaking around backstage with potentially nefarious plans of its own. What we’re interested in is not mere physical skills but what philosophers call “virtues”: stable dispositions to perform socially desirable actions in a manner that’s sincerely motivated by shared values.

•  Self-confidence sends the signal not only that you’re happy—you are engaged in activities that are genuinely pleasing to you—but that you are what you claim to be. Relaxation and absorption in something that is valued—true wu-wei—is thus a sign of genuine commitment to the activity and its larger framework. If you’re not enjoying singing the hymns, maybe you’re not a real Christian. Maybe you’re just pretending to be a Christian in order to get the benefits of being part of the group. So let me watch you when you’re singing and you think that no one is looking.

•  Wu-wei reveals your inner character—your de or lack of de—not only because it’s automatic, and thus not subject to the conscious spin-doctor, but because the very fact that you’re not exerting cognitive control indicates you have no need to.

•  We have a very strong intuition—increasingly confirmed by work in cognitive science—that the conscious, verbal mind is often a sneaky, conniving liar, whereas spontaneous, unselfconscious gestures are reliable indicators of what’s really going on inside another person.

• Spontaneous behavior is hard to fake, which means that spontaneous, unselfconscious people are unlikely to be fakers.

Theme 5: Being Part of Something Bigger

Summary

• Western models of thought and organisation often focuses on individuality.

• In reality, unlike many other animals, humans depend on social solutions for problems. Our ecological niche is threefold – cultural, communal and creative. Humans as individuals depend on societies as groups.

• One of the problems with modern drinking is that social drinking has declined – it is far easier to drink alone.

• Wu-wei is based around a connection with a larger, valued whole. It means being part of something larger – the cosmic order represented by the Way.

• The defining element of wu-wei is the absorption of the self into something greater. Wu-wei is about being absorbed in something you love and value.

• The difference between wu-wei and flow is that wu-wei is defined by being at home in some framework of values. There is a social dimension.

Questions

• A common theme to Edward’s writing on wu-wei and on alcohol is the importance of social connection and feeling part of something larger than yourself. How concerned is he about the decline of religion as an organising force in Western society?

• How does Edward model forms of online cooperation and community? Does he see them as a subset of the ‘communal’ element of our ecological niche? Or are they a pale imitation of it?

• How can we build new cultural traditions? Is this a top-down or a bottom-up process?

• Can wu-wei tell us about what we love and value? Or do we already need to love and value it to find wu-wei?

Key Quotes

• Self-confidence sends the signal not only that you’re happy—you are engaged in activities that are genuinely pleasing to you—but that you are what you claim to be. Relaxation and absorption in something that is valued—true wu-wei—is thus a sign of genuine commitment to the activity and its larger framework. If you’re not enjoying singing the hymns, maybe you’re not a real Christian. Maybe you’re just pretending to be a Christian in order to get the benefits of being part of the group. So let me watch you when you’re singing and you think that no one is looking.

•  For both Confucians and Daoists, you acquire de only if you are sincerely committed to the Way—the power of de serves as a palpable, unfakeable signal of commitment to the group’s values.

•  The idea here is that, if you are to successfully enter wu-wei, your focus should be on the world, not yourself. You have to forget everything—your ego, even your own body—so that you can be absorbed into the larger movement of Heaven’s Way.

•  Wu-wei involves giving yourself up to something that, because it is bigger than you, can be shared by others.

•  One of the key features of the wu-wei state is a sense of being absorbed in some larger, valued whole—typically referred to as the Dao or “Way.”

•  Spontaneity in the West is typically associated with individuality—people just doing whatever they want. Wu-wei, on the other hand, means becoming part of something larger: the cosmic order represented by the Way. Sages from Confucius at age seventy to the Daoists describe wu-wei as a state of “fitting” with the universe. Similarly, de is powerful because Heaven has made humans, animals, and even the natural world in such a way that they respond instantly and unquestioningly to virtue. The de-bearing sage can attract people, calm wild animals, and ensure good harvests and clement weather. By rewarding the wu-wei ruler with this power, Heaven ensures that its will is done. De is like a halo that surrounds someone in wu-wei and signals to everyone around: “Heaven likes me! You should too! I’m okay.”

•  It is the connection with a larger, valued whole that allows wu-wei or true flow experiences to leave us feeling “clean and happy,”

•  is this focus on caring—on getting beyond the self—that, in turn, allows us to connect wu-wei states characterized by high complexity and challenge to their infinitely more common relatives: very routine, thoroughly familiar, low-complexity activities that allow us to be fully absorbed in something that we love and value and that we see as being larger than our individual selves.

Theme 6: Solutions

Summary

• So what can we do? How can we solve the paradox of trying not to try? As set out in the opening section of this note, different schools of Chinese philosophy offer different solutions, but ultimately the paradox keeps rearing its head.

• As already discussed, drinking in moderation and in healthy social environments offers one path to spontaneity.

• The benefits of the communitarian, tradition led ethos of Confucianism are perhaps more apparent in our current individualistic society than they have been in recent history.

• Trivial aspects of our social and physical environment can have profound effects on behaviour. We therefore need to pay attention to our small inputs, for example the music our kids listen to. We should set up our home and workplace to reflect our tastes and values. Find a desirable model then reshape our hot cognition by immersing ourselves in reminders and cues.

• Submerging people in a particular cultural tradition helps them to learn something they do not love.

• Acceptance strategies are another technique. Our conscious mind has limited capacity and often the best thing to do is to shut it down for a while. Allow unwanted thoughts or memories to pass over you rather than actively suppressing them.

• Where you notice yourself trying too hard, embrace the uncarved block- stop trying so hard.

• Key to all this is having an experienced coach or teacher who can refine and redirect your perception, creating a positive feedback loop.

• Meditation has been shown to increase traits crucial to interpersonal relations such as self-esteem and trust.

• However sometimes analysis and introspection are counterproductive. Sometimes it is better to focus on the external. Focusing on the environment and effects one wishes to have on it is more effective than focusing on one’s own bodily movements or internal states. In social situations having an external focus means focusing on what is around you rather than yourself.

Questions

• How has Edward’s daily life changed as a result of researching wu-wei and alcohol? What practices has he put in place and which ones have and haven’t worked?

• Edward talks about the benefits of ‘submerging people in a particular cultural tradition’. What does this mean in the modern world? How can our listeners submerge themselves in a cultural tradition?

• Who have been Edward’s mentors?

• When was Edward last in wu-wei? Why? What triggered it?

• How much do modern forms of therapy such as CBT and ERT owe to Chinese philosophy?

Key Quotes

• The role-centered, tradition-bound, communitarian model of the self that we find in Confucianism could serve as an important corrective to the excessive individualism, alienation, and materialism that characterize modern Western societies.

•  From the perspective of academic psychology, it has become increasingly clear that seemingly trivial aspects of the social and physical environment can have profound effects on behavior. This means that paying attention to the music your kids listen to, what they wear, and whom they hang out with might do both them and society a lot of good.

•  Moreover, work in cognitive psychology suggests that submerging people in a particular cultural tradition also helps them learn to love something they do not already love.

• If you can set up your home and workplace, to the extent you have control over it, to reflect your tastes and values, the things that make you feel good and at home, you’re going to be better off.

•  The basic idea is simple. You choose a desirable model, then reshape your hot cognition to fit by immersing yourself in reminders and environmental cues.

•  Doing nothing allows your unconscious to take over, and, as we’ve seen, the unconscious is often better at solving certain types of particularly complex problems. In the field of psychotherapy, so-called “acceptance” strategies, in which clients are instructed to simply allow unwanted thoughts or memories to flood over them, or march before their mind’s eye, often prove to be more effective than active suppression strategies. The conscious mind has limited capacity, and often the best thing to do when you run into difficulty is shut it down for a while and let the body take over.

• When it comes to things like dating, or job interviewing, or any situation where the impression you make is important, it’s probably best to embrace the uncarved block. If you can follow Laozi’s advice and refrain from trying too hard, it’s almost inevitably going to go better for you.

• What you choose to embrace doesn’t matter, as long as it’s something that you’re doing genuinely, not for strategic reasons.

•  This whole process works much better, and proceeds faster, when guided by an experienced coach or teacher.

• The result is a refining feedback loop, where the expert advice helps to focus and redirect your perception (I never thought to look for pencil lead, but sure enough there it is), giving you a broader and more subtle descriptive vocabulary, which in turn serves to open up previously unnoticed aspects of your experience.

• Compassion might very well be something like a sprout that can be developed, or a muscle that can be strengthened, through imaginative training or meditation.

•  Nonetheless, there are certainly other times when analysis and introspection are decidedly counterproductive. We’ve seen that focusing conscious awareness on the mechanics of one’s performance, while useful in very early stages of skill acquisition, has a disruptive effect on more experienced players or performers. Similarly, regardless of level of expertise, focusing on the environment and effects one wishes to have upon it (“external focus”) is more effective than focusing on one’s own bodily movements or internal states (“internal focus”).

• In social situations, having an “external focus” would mean turning your attention to the personalities, conversations, and body language around you, rather than focusing on yourself.