The Misleading Mind by Karuna Cayton

Author:Karuna Cayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781577319436
Publisher: New World Library

STUCK IN TRAFFIC

One aspect of this distorted perspective, explained extensively in Buddhist psychology, is that we come to regard people, things, events, and even thoughts and feelings as independent realities or entities. Nothing exists independently. First, as we’ve seen, our perception labels and colors reality, so we can’t know anything as it is in any truly objective, independent way. This is true for us, and it’s true for everyone. Everyone’s perspective is partial, and there is always a larger context to everything that happens — but we forget this. We see the world fragmentally, like the jerky images of a slide show, but we act as if we are directors of a movie, as if we could predict and shape the arising flow of experience.

For instance, ask yourself, how calm are you in traffic? Do you ever suffer from road rage? If you are someone who never gets agitated while driving, my hat’s off to you. But most of us find it extremely difficult to maintain our sense of emotional balance on the road, and some people literally go insane at the mere possibility that they will be five minutes late. However, traffic is a perfect arena to practice tolerance of unpredictability, and acceptance of our lack of control, while remaining calm.

According to news reports, road rage is on the rise, but why? Today, there are more vehicles on the road, more people driving, and more congestion than ever before. Armed with this knowledge, why do we still get so uptight, angry, and frustrated when we encounter traffic? Shouldn’t we expect it? Or is expecting it part of the problem? Could it be the way we see the situation? If we saw it differently, would it help? In truth, “bad traffic” does not exist as some independent entity like we think it does. It exists only in its relationship to oneself.

Traffic is only “bad” within the larger context of our labels, assumptions, and expectations. When are we the most frustrated by traffic? When we are trying to get somewhere specific at an exact time. We have “plans,” sometimes “important” plans; to be late could upset an entire world of desires and needs and expectations, which we share with the people expecting us. Then, when we encounter “bad traffic,” our desires get thwarted, the future we’ve conceived of and planned for is threatened, and we experience rage at this loss of control. The strength of our emotional reaction is typically equivalent to the rigidity of our concepts.

Consider the opposite: What happens on a road trip, when you have no firm destination or timetable? Maybe, as cars back up and everyone slows to a crawl, you get annoyed, but your expectation is to “enjoy the road,” so you do. You don’t have a fixed timetable. You go with the flow, or take a scenic detour, and let your annoyance go. Thus, our experience of “traffic” is directly related to the mental picture we created, consciously or subconsciously, before we left our house or office.

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