wylo .:
Hi EIS, just stumbled across this thread now.
Just wondering how are you getting on with this line of inquiry? It seems to make total sense but am still unsure as to what specific areas it could be applied to?
Is it a case of applying it to pretty much everything in our life and why we chose to do anything?
I've had lots of thoughts concerning what behavior does and doesn't depend on, but you'll have to give me a while to come up with a good way to summarize them if that's what you're looking for.
On a practical level, one big thing that still stands out to me is this:
Relating this to a different aspect of practice, I suspect that indulging a behavior that no longer matches one's current motivational state causes a decrement in mindfulness, so perhaps one can both use this as a sign that indicates their occurrence, and as an independent reason to work to eliminate their occurrence.
* When I behave in ways that don't have any obvious root in current desires, I would say that, almost always, there's a lack of mindfulness that occurs at the same time as those behaviors are being executed.
* When I lack mindfulness, it's much more likely that I'll behave in a way that doesn't have any obvious root in current desires.
I've found, however these issues are approached (via more mindfulness or via explicitly re-thinking the behavior patterns), that the result is that old cached behaviors are replaced by new behaviors, which themselves eventually become cached...in other words, I haven't developed a strong sense that I can pick and choose between various responses in the moment, based on what I think is best, but just have more skillful default ways of responding. However, it does seem to me that, if I could fix my long-standing problems with attention (described elsewhere), I would have rock-solid mindfulness, and that would be the key to being able to dynamically choose a response, rather than having to play around with changing what comes out by default.
As for what to apply the original inquiry to...what behaviors do you want to change? For me, this sort of approach isn't suitable as a replacement for meditation (though fivebells and others may think otherwise), so I picked things that I thought would be of benefit for me to change, and left the rest to hopefully work itself out, either now or in the future.
One overall thing that I'd like to emphasize is, ironically, the biggest changes in behavior for me have been in areas that I haven't focused on (often that I hadn't even considered worth focusing on); behaviors that I've tried to change have, by contrast, been a lot more resistant. It's possible that if I focused on this sort of inquiry with more dedication (e.g. as a main practice or something) I'd get stronger results. As of now, overall, I'm not sure whether to evaluate my experiment as a failure or a success.