The Eight Worldly Concerns and Conceptual Framework

Let’s look at the basis, or conceptual framework, for this attitude we’ve been discussing. Here its important to understand conceptual thoughts. What is a conceptual thought? A conceptual thought is viewing things or experiencing things through a category, which could be like “something special.” It’s like having some sort of mental box, and when we experience something and we put it into that mental box of “something special.”

We do this all the time, because it’s how we’re able to understand and process things. There’s a mental box of “woman.” I see a person and put her in the mental box of “woman.” Like this, we’re able to put the various things we experience together into different mental boxes. For instance, the same person that we put into either “man” or “woman” could also go into “young person” or “older person” or “blond hair” or “dark hair”. There are so, so many boxes.

In actuality, things don’t exist in boxes. While it might seem obvious, it’s still a very difficult thing to really understand and digest. For instance, we might put someone in the “terrible person” box, but nobody exists just as a terrible person, because if they truly existed like that, then everyone would see them like that, and they would have to have been like that from the time they were a baby.

These mental boxes help us make sense of things, and our attitude toward others is very much determined by the type of mental box we put things in. We need to keep in mind that these mental boxes are simply a mental construct and don’t refer to reality – there are no boxes out there, are there?

Now let’s see how we identify and place things in this type of mental box rather than that type of mental box. We do this on the basis of a certain feature of the item that we think really distinguishes it from other things. This can be called the “defining characteristic,” a technical term for it. A simple example would be to see what the defining characteristic is when we put things into the box of being a “square.” Well, it’s to have four equal sides – so things that have this we put into the mental box called “square.”

That was a simple category, but how about the category of “annoying person”? What are the features on the side of the person that make us view them in this box of “you’re an annoying person”? It’s interesting to try and see what exactly it is that’s annoying. What do the fly buzzing around your head and this person have in common that makes us put them both in the “annoying” box?

What I would say is that both do something that causes me to lose my emotional balance and peace of mind, my calm state of mind. So, actually, we’re defining the mental box in terms of me, not really in terms of them, because what I find annoying you might not find annoying. And as for things that make me lose my peace of mind, that could also be something I’m totally attracted to, that makes me go crazy. So the interesting thing is that how we define things and put them into boxes is really all concerned about ourselves.

Then we have all these feelings. Now it starts to become interesting (maybe it was already interesting). So we have the mental box of “happy.” How do you put things into that box of “happy”? That’s very difficult to say. Somebody asks us, “Are you happy?” – and we don’t even know what to answer. If we ask ourselves, “Am I happy?” – well, I don’t even know really what that means? So what’s the defining characteristic of being happy? We want so much to be happy, but we don’t even know what happy is. Odd, isn’t it? The definition is it’s something that when you experience it, you don’t want to be parted from it; you’d like it to continue. That’s the definition we find in the Buddhist literature, so that helps us a little bit.

What about Facebook? How do we define things to “like”? It might be something that makes us smile and makes us feel good. But imagine if you had to look at it and nothing else for the whole day, we wouldn’t like it anymore, would we? So that’s strange, isn’t it?

When you have a conceptual thought, there is always a mental image of what represents the category. So when you think “dog,” you have sort of a mental picture of a dog, which I’m sure is different for everyone. It’s the same with the mental image of what represents a sexy person or an annoying person.

So what represents something that I like? That’s more difficult. We have this way of talking though, don’t we, of “I like this style, I like this type of food, I like this type of movie, that girl is not my type, that guy is my type.” What represents what I like? With an image on Facebook, do we compare it with our experience of what we like and then put it into our “like” category? We have to remember that this is all coming from the side of our minds, not from the object itself. If there was something coming from the object, like a real likeability within the object, then everyone would like it. So it’s all subjective.

The next step is to look at what makes something special. Is there something on the side of the object or just a mental box of “something special,” which we’ve defined ourselves? When we look at what makes something special, we start to understand the theoretical basis for “nothing special.” There is absolutely nothing special on the side of the object itself. Any idea of “special” comes totally from our own ideas, from our own mental box of “special.” It’s a filter through which we perceive things: this is special and that isn’t.

Then we can ask ourselves, how do we define special? Some people will say that it’s when something is unique: “This is a really special painting,” or “This is a special meal.” But isn’t everything unique? No two things are exactly the same. Each cabbage in a pile of cabbages is a unique cabbage.

Then you might think, “Well, things have to be different. To be special, they have to be different.” But how different do they have to be? How and where do we draw the line between ordinary and special? How could we possibly decide?

Then you could say that something special has to be something new. But is that new to me, or new to the universe? We usually define everything in terms of “me,” and every experience we ever have is new, isn’t it? I am not experiencing the same thing that I experienced yesterday as today. Today isn’t yesterday. So in a sense, everything is special, which actually means that nothing is special. Everything is unique, everything is different, and everything is individual, so there’s nothing we can posit as being special. If we say that something is special because we like it, well we all know that what we like changes all the time; if we get too much of it, we don’t like it anymore, and if we have it for too long, we get bored.

These are the things that we work on to help us overcome our addiction to putting things in the “special” box. “What I’m feeling now is so important.” Why? Why is it in the “important” box? So what we try to do is not view anything in unnecessary mental boxes. Of course there are useful, necessary boxes; we wouldn’t be able to understand language without them. People make different sounds with different accents and volumes to say the same word, which we can only understand due to having a mental box for the word.

So we can’t throw away all the boxes. Certain mental boxes aren’t helpful though, because they’re entirely subjective, like “something special.” When you start to analyze it, it’s all in our attitude: what we believe to be special, even if we can’t define what special is.

In this way, we’re not just using self-control and discipline to say, “I’m not going to view things as anything special,” because that’s actually very difficult to implement. But through understanding, we can see that because it’s all just a mental construct, really nothing is special.

There are so many levels with which we can work with our attitudes through mind training. We can perceive things through different mental boxes, and we can shift the objects we perceive from one box to another. So instead of placing someone in “annoying, complaining person” we place them in “unhappy, lonely person,” which completely changes our whole way of dealing with that person. We realize that there’s nothing inherent on the side of the person that makes them this or that, but that it’s our attitude of how we perceive them that affects how we experience and deal with them.

Some mental categories, like “special,” are just not helpful at all. There are special people and special occasions and all sorts. But have you thought of how arbitrary it is when we think of birthdays or New Year being so special? What makes it special? Just that people decided it’s special. There is nothing particularly special about January 1st, and the date doesn’t even correspond to anything astronomically. The Earth circles around the Sun, and you can’t posit a beginning: “Ah! This is the first day of the year.” There is no first, which is why each culture has their own New Year. Nothing special about that. If you’re in a culture that is celebrating a New Year, there’s no need to be a grouch or think it’s stupid, but there’s also no need to get so overexcited and make a big deal out of it.

When we understand this basic nature of how conceptual thought works, with mental boxes and categories and these defining characteristics or features, we can use it when it’s helpful and drop it when it’s not.

Lastly, when we change and improve our attitudes, there needs to be some motivation, and a lot of patience. The more familiar we become with the change through repeated practice, the more naturally it will come in our daily life. All we need to do when we feel unhappy is to remind ourselves, “Hey, I’m just thinking about me, me, me.”

Attitude training is a long process, but a very worthwhile one.

We wake up each morning with the same goal: we want a better, happier future. In this, we are all the same. We are also all equal in thinking that “I” am the center of the universe, a fact that causes us untold problems. Because of self-cherishing, which seems so attractive because it looks after “me,” we actually run toward unhappiness, and away from the happiness that we so desire. When we start to understand reality, the way things really exist, all of this is turned around. Life goes up and down, and it always will; we can’t control this, but what we can control is our own attitude: how we respond, every moment, to the things that we experience. With effort, we can transform our lives into happy ones, where we really care about ourselves and others, no matter what the external circumstances are.