You Don’t Have to Solve Everything | Buddhist Wisdom（原声文稿）

Transcript of 你不必解决所有问题｜把负担放下的心智练习 （中文完整文稿）。

Imagine a bad tempered man in a boat colliding with another boat on a misty river.

If the other boat were empty, he might be irritated, but probably not very angry.

But if there was another man in it, he might start shouting, calling him an idiot and telling him to learn how to steer.

This comparison found in the Taoist text Zhuangze raises an interesting question.

If the impact of the collision is the same in both cases, why does one provoke rage while the other barely bothers him?

Aside from the man in the boat, the difference is what the mind adds to the collision.

A story about what happened, that someone caused it, that he shouldn't have done so, that he is inconsiderate and that he needs to change his ways.

If you have an average human mind, you may have noticed that it loves stirring the pot.

Wherever we go, wherever our boats collide with reality to follow Zhuangzi's metaphor, our minds seem eager to point out what's wrong, insisting that we cannot, for a moment, relax and enjoy the journey.

Instead, they tell us to be outraged, afraid, and ready to fix whatever problem has has appeared.

Before we know it, life begins to feel like an endless stream of problems, many of which disturb our peace of mind.

And because the mind keeps adding new concerns to the pile, we become perpetual problem solvers, often spending our lives feeling as though we're carrying water in a sieve.

But what if many, if not most of our problems, don't need to be solved?

This video explores the nature of what we consider everyday problems, why we may better off not solving them and what to do instead.

My name is Stefan, if you enjoy my work you can subscribe to my newsletter on Substack.

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Many people experience life as endless stream of problems to solve, problems that just keep coming, never giving them a break.

For some, this becomes so overwhelming that they feel constantly overloaded, often leading to anxiety, despair or even anger.

Having a history of depression, I'm very prone to this.

I'm a massive over -thinker and I remember already being so as a child.

Many times in the past, I felt my troubles piling up faster than I could possibly deal with them.

It's like a dark cloud slowly spreading across the sky, until there's barely enough light left to see where I might even begin.

The pressure was often overpowering and I couldn't see a way out.

Feeling swamped by problems isn't very pleasant, but in many cases it's also unnecessary.

Before we continue, let's define problem first.

Cambridge Dictionary defines problem as a situation, person or thing that needs attention and needs to be dealt with or solved.

And Merriam -Webster offers a handful of descriptions such as a question raised for inquiry, consideration or solution and a source of perplexity, distress or vexation.

Oxford Dictionary defines it as a thing that is difficult to deal with or to understand.

In the ordinary sense of the word, a problem is not merely a neutral situation to be dealt with, it's also something we experience as difficult, troubling or distressing.

Hence, talking about our problems often goes hand in hand with expressing discontent, implying saying that what we're talking about isn't very good and needs addressing.

But this raises a question. How does a situation become a problem in the first place?

What happens between something simply occurring and are experiencing it as difficult, troubling or needing resolution?

In Buddhism there's a concept called Papancha in Pali or Prapancha in Sanskrit.

There is no real consensus on how to translate it, as the concept is notoriously difficult to define.

But terms such as mental proliferation, conceptual proliferation, complication, elaboration and objectification are often used.

Broadly speaking, Papancha seems to describe the mind's tendency to expand on experience mind, generating interpretations, judgments, memories, fantasies, theories and other mental constructions.

Now, aren't most of our problems the result of mental proliferation?

Aren't they first and foremost stories created by the mind rather than the actual events they refer to?

In other words, aren't we creating the problem by adding our own narratives and judgments to an otherwise neutral world.

When we look at our own problems, we see they come in all sizes, fragrances, and intensities, and they concern the past, present, and future.

When it comes to the past, we may experience a memory perhaps triggered by our surroundings, which quickly evokes thoughts about that memory, judgments about why that particular event was wrong, who was to blame, and why we're still suffering in the present because of it.

And before we know it, we have written a whole novel in our heads about something that happened back then that we now consider a problem to be solved.

When the past doesn't give us something bitter to chew on, there's plenty of misery to be found in the present.

We may encounter something in the streets that we don't like, someone acting very rudely or inconsiderately.

Instead of simply noticing it and letting it go, we begin to create a whole narrative around this individual, that society is getting worse, that we are witnessing an erosion of civility in the West, that Europe is going down the drain.

So what began as a single encounter turns into an ever -growing collection of problems bouncing around in our minds.

Many everyday occurrences also have the potential to become problems in our minds, such as a friend not responding to a text message, a coworker who doesn't like us, someone expressing an absurd opinion, a brief feeling of loneliness, looking in a mirror and noticing we're getting older, embarrassing ourselves.

All these things can lead us to create stories that occupy our minds for hours on end, asking us to be dealt with in some way.

And then there's the future.

Many of us are experts at navigating a future that, as we all know, doesn't even exist yet.

Suppose we have an important conversation coming up next week.

Nothing has happened yet, but we're already imagining everything that could go wrong, what the other person might say, how we might respond, whether we'll say something stupid and what the consequences might be.

So long before even a word is exchanged, we're already trying to solve a future that exists only in our imagination.

Whether it's rumination on the past, worry about the present, or catastrophic thinking about the future, all these stories generate not -so -pleasant emotions, from grief to anger, from anxiety to full -blown panic.

But as you probably have concluded, many of these mental proliferations vary from superfluous to downright ridiculous.

They don't benefit us in any way, yet the mind keeps producing them, like a problem machine that in many cases refuses to shut down.

It might do so to protect us, which is a nice gesture, but it isn't doing a very good job and it brings about a lot of emotional suffering as a by -product.

Aside from generating problems, there's something else the mind is good at. Solving problems.

When we're drowning in problems, what else can we do but try to solve them?

After all, if we don't tackle everything life throws at us, how will we ever get out of this mess?

How will we ever get the break we feel we deserve?

earth. The problem -solving part of the mind seems to work like a hammer.

Whatever it encounters begins to look like a nail that needs to be struck.

A memory, an awkward interaction, an unanswered message, something a family member could say in the future, each can quickly become another problem to solve.

We imagine that once all the nails have been hammered will finally be able to sit back and relax, like carpenters, at the end of a long day.

However, as you may have noticed, the mind keeps producing new nails to pound.

We're like Hercules chopping off Hydra's head, only for them to grow back.

And so our efforts never seem to bring us any closer to the finish line.

There's always something else to reconsider, anticipate, correct, understand, or resolve.

In that sense, solving never really solves it.

We're basically mopping the floor with a tap still running, and for many of us, this is what life feels like from dawn to dusk, trying to address one problem after another, yet still feeling overwhelmed.

And here we see the diabolical situation a restless, discursive mind puts itself in.

it creates the very issues it is so anxious to get rid of.

It is both the arsonist and the firefighter.

So while we're busy putting out fires, we're starting new ones all around us.

Sure, for some this might be a nice form of occupational therapy, but for most of us, for me at least, it's not a pleasant way to live.

Luckily, there's another way of dealing with the problems that arise in our minds.

Instead of buying a better mob or hiring a cleaning crew to deal with the unending stream, we could simply turn off the tap.

Returning to the Taoist example of the boat, not every collision needs to make the front page, becoming the subject of outrage, analysis and possible solutions.

Likewise, not every thought or situation we encounter needs to become an issue that demands our attention.

It's important to distinguish between mental proliferations that pose as problems and things we actually need to do in order to prevent unwanted trouble later on.

We need to pay our electricity bills to keep the lights on, pay our rent to keep a roof over our head and take our medication to treat an illness.

These are practical issues with with relatively straightforward solutions.

Of course, some of these problems can become more serious and immediate and really need our attention, preferably from a place of calm.

But as we have discussed earlier, many of the things we consider problems, things that genuinely feel like problems, are largely stories.

They may be rooted in real events and situations, but much of their content is made up, exaggerated versions of what happened, misinterpretations of reality or even complete fantasies and all the judgments we attach to them.

These are the narratives we construct around events in the past, present and future.

And even though the mind can't wait to solve whatever it insists needs solving, we could ask ourselves, do we really need to?

Do we really need to solve a co -worker who doesn't like us?

Do we really need to solve every disagreement?

Do we really need to solve the fact that others are doing better than us in their careers?

Or that people we don't even know might judge us for not living up to the societal ideal?

Do we need to do something about every piece of bad news, every opinion, every comment, every potential threat we encounter in the media?

Do we need to find closure for every old regret or set right every past mistake?

Are all these things truly the problem?

Or is the real problem the mind's endless proliferation around them?

The narratives about why all these things or people are horrible, how things could and should have been different, and how everything only gets worse?

is the problem, the problem.

And if so, instead of trying to solve all these apparent issues one by one, wouldn't we be better off addressing the root of it all, the mind that keeps manufacturing story after story?

Wouldn't we be better off turning off the tap?

So how do we turn off the tap?

How do we put an end to this endless generation of thoughts and stories about the past, present and future.

Maybe the Buddha's surprisingly simple reminder is exactly what we need.

You shouldn't chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached.

Whatever quality is present, you clearly see right there, right there.

The right there, right there, speaks to me.

What truly matters is what's right there, as it is, in the present.

Not what we have constructed in our minds.

Simply put, the Buddha teaches us not to keep feeding these mental proliferations, not to welcome them, cling to them, or relish them.

What remains is simply what is, right there.

The man in the boat is a man in a boat.

There is no need to make him into anything more.

The burden of a haunting past that should have been different, a present that seems too full of trouble to endure, and a future that looks too intimidating and bleak to face, is simply too much to bear.

At least for me, trying to carry it all has often made me miserable.

We don't need an inner agitator constantly pulling us down into the flames of suffering and depriving us of the likeness that comes with an unencumbered mind.

What we need is equanimity in a world already challenging enough on its own.

Thank you for watching.