Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / The Mind's Cognitive Errors - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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The Mind's Cognitive Errors - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jogen: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:23
  Jogen: Think I'm going to start. Well, good evening, everybody. Thank you for being here, and thank you for those who brought a friend. And thank you, friends, for taking a chance on this tonight. It's good to be here with you.
• 0:40
  And we finished, I think for now, I'm done talking about the precepts. We are doing a class on basically the Buddhist understanding of integrity. For those who are interested, there'll be a class series that I'll do. I believe I'm going to start sometime in the fall or late summer. And so it'll be that topic, but more in-depth and more ability to really unpack it and for each person to add their wisdom to the mix about that.
• 1:14
  I feel like it's such a rich topic. It's hard to do justice in that format. Okay? Tonight, I want to talk about cognitive errors. If you're a therapy type of person, if you're a therapist or you've been around those circles, or if you're just someone who's interested in these kind of things, you've probably heard of cognitive errors.
• 1:42
  Or maybe you've heard of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is basically therapy or a way of understanding how to reduce human suffering by basically looking at the ways in which our mind is malfunctioning. Buddhism is interesting. When you listen to a teaching, as you become more settled in the different terminology and the different traditions and so forth, you can begin to hear that sometimes a teaching is emphasizing your wisdom nature, sometimes we call it Buddha nature or awakened awareness. They're emphasizing that in you which is indestructively sane, which is immovably, divinely pure, radiant, always there, can't be destroyed, etcetera. And a lot of people like that, and you should like it because it's a deep celebration of what it means to be a human being.
• 2:48
  Not a lot of traditions, spiritual traditions, really emphasize that. That's very far from original sin. Then, even in Zen, there's also the emphasis on how confused we are as human beings. Buddhism, maybe here's where it starts to sound like other religions, says that every human being, unless they have done extensive training, lives in significant confusion about reality. Cross the boat.
• 3:25
  It's not like, Oh, yeah. Me, us, and our little clique, we're kind of sane, but those people over there that watch that one channel or listen to that news program there, yeah, we know about those people. From a Buddhist perspective, to be a human is to be awash in cognitive error. To be living in a mind that is malfunctioning all the time. And one of the ways you know it's malfunctioning is you suffer.
• 4:00
  You get caught on the natural happenings of life. They're not simple. So many problems happen all the time that can't always be traced to an external source. We can know we live awash in cognitive errors because other people don't share a point of view. Now I'm going to go into what a cognitive error is because I'm just throwing this word around, and it sounds like an old computer malfunctioning or something.
• 4:40
  This is kind of like an old computer, these brains. They're still basically, generally, a lot of time functioning like Neanderthal level functioning. This OS has to be upgraded, and in some sense, dharma can upgrade your OS. Big sweep of the cognitive errors that Buddhism talks about, big sweep, slightly philosophical, but I'm gonna name it anyway. The major cognitive errors of human beings, the way we misperceive reality is permanence on one hand and nihilism on the other.
• 5:16
  Okay? Permanent means we take to be stable and self same across moments that which is not. We're constantly mistaking phenomena for what they used to be in some moment. We're constantly mistaking experience for what we want it to be according to our stable vision of it, and it's not. It's moved on because life flows.
• 5:45
  Permanence on one hand is a major category of of our malfunctioning mind. Very, goes very deep. Then on the other hand is nihilism, and nihilism is the other extreme that really has two important things about it. One is nihilism is we believe that things don't have an effect. We generally ignore cause and effect unless it's very specific domains in our lives.
• 6:22
  You might have pretty good cause and effect awareness around your bank account. You might. But in other domains of your life, you don't understand why things happen even though you are involved in them happening because cause and effect is real. Another way of saying it is nihilism believes that we can think and act in certain ways and that there's not going to be some ripple in our own lives. We have this kind of scot free attitude.
• 6:51
  We don't understand that reality doesn't work like that. So how do you implement? How is this implemented before I get to the specific cognitive errors? First of all, as far as permanence, we take our self image, which is a virtual self. It's not a real self.
• 7:20
  It's a virtual self that is a conglomeration of images and perceptions and memories and reflections from other people, and we believe it's stable and true. That's called the delusion of self, the cognitive error of believing my virtual self is an actual real thing that's not virtual. There's a guy Has anyone read Thomas Metzinger? I highly recommend reading some people like that. Metzinger wrote a book called The Reality Tunnel.
• 7:51
  That's very good. Basically, I always get confused. Is it neuroscience or neurobiology or do they all agree? I think they all agree on this. Basically, the brain generates a simulation of an abiding center with identity.
• 8:08
  It's a simulation. That's what the scientists are saying. Buddhism has known that for a long time. When we don't know that, we suffer, a particular kind of suffering. That's one of the deepest cognitive errors is we don't know that this picture is just a picture, and our picture of other people and other things in the world is actually just a picture.
• 8:35
  Sometimes that picture is pretty close to reality. Sometimes it's pretty far. It's like sometimes you remember that restaurant had really good Pad Kee Mau, and you go back and it's meh, C minus. My partner and I were always grading Pad Kee Mau. That's a Thai noodle dish.
• 8:53
  If you don't know, you need to. But sometimes we have this sort of cognitive error about we believe it was a certain way, but we made a picture in our mind that we were relating to, and we get to the actual thing, and there's a big discrepancy. We do that with lots of things all the time. So then the cognitive errors I'm going to talk about, really, they flow down from those larger categories of what Buddhism might call the roots of illusion that we live in. These are things that, as you move through your day, as you interact with people, as you're at work, as you're interacting with media, as you're reflecting on your own life, you can catch these in action.
• 9:49
  Now, mindfulness is a popular word, and one of the things that mindfulness is from a Zen perspective, it's that power that you develop or you uncover that allows you to catch cognitive errors in action. Mindfulness gives you that power. If you don't develop that power, it's unlikely that you'll catch those in action. Someone might tell you about them, but you won't observe them in your own mindstream, and therefore, it doesn't really impact you. Right?
• 10:29
  Like, I mean, I've never gone on TikTok, but lots of people say, Oh, there's so much good therapy advice. Someone told me today, some great coach on TikTok, and I just have to believe them. Might be a cognitive error. And a lot of what people are doing is they're telling you about these things. They're telling you, Oh yeah, if you think this way, wrong.
• 10:51
  If you think this way, wrong. If you go about your life this way, wrong. Don't do that. But what actually helps you is when you are in action and your power of mindfulness that you have developed catches the thing happening, and then you go, Oh, there it is. That's when it starts to become liberating.
• 11:12
  That's how what we do in a hall like this or what you do at home has an afterglow that leads to more happiness in your life. It's the afterglow of presence of mind that catches the cognitive errors. So I'm gonna talk about the cognitive errors, but, basically, what what do you do with them if you notice them? First of all, you recognize it a cognitive error as a cognitive error. Shorthand for that in Zen is a delusion.
• 11:47
  Right? You recognize it for what it is, then you rest in not knowing. Right? And then from not knowing, you can have actual encountering with life. I should return to that in my summary if I can remember.
• 12:06
  But that's really how you work with these. Recognize it, drop into not knowing, the open mind, the mind that has space, the mind that hasn't decided yet, that space. And then you can actually encounter things because a lot of these are about not actually encountering things. So if you look up the list, which I recommend doing as a kind of homework if this catches your attention, I think there's 25 or 30, and I definitely can't talk about all of them. We'll see how many I address.
• 12:45
  So I'm going to go through them, and maybe I'll have an example or maybe I won't. Okay. First cognitive error. This is called personalizing, taking something personally that may not be personal. For example, someone has a brisk tone.
• 13:03
  You imagine they're irritated with you because they're brisk. You're mistaking cause and effect. Right? What is it that we confuse correlation for causation? Someone is irritated and you go, Oh, they're definitely mad at me.
• 13:19
  What did I say? Our self centeredness kicks in and we get paranoid, right? Sometimes other people know we're like that, and whenever they're around us, they just smile all the time because they're afraid that we're going to get triggered. They don't want to deal with it. This says, Seeing events as consequences of your actions when there are other possibilities.
• 13:44
  So we notice we're doing that. I'm imagining such and such is mad at me. I lived in a place where people were sleep deprived a lot of the time, so there was lots of scowls. There was a lot of scowls and heavy looks, and you couldn't tell if someone was really concentrated or if they were pissed off sometimes. It's like that in dharma centers.
• 14:10
  And if I wasn't careful, I would look around and they'd be like, All these people think I'm an a hole. Look at that face. Every time I walk in the room, she's got that face. It's definitely me. That's a cognitive error.
• 14:25
  You got to check it out. Related, number two on the list is mind reading. Guessing what someone else is thinking when they may not be thinking that. Raise your hand if you're sometimes a psychic. Amazing, amazing.
• 14:50
  I, at this point, have made habit that if I begin imagining what someone else is thinking, I really am like, No, I have no idea. Not only do I have no idea, I probably don't want to know what they're thinking, and I'm grateful for that. Mind reading. Number three, negative predictions, overestimating the likelihood that an action will have a negative outcome. Now, an interesting thing about mindfulness, when the Buddha taught it, the Buddha taught that there are really four facets of mindfulness, and one of them that's not talked about so often is your basic feeling state.
• 15:34
  If you don't know what your basic feeling state is, then you often don't understand why your mind is doing what it's doing. For example, if you make negative predictions about an action, if you have pessimism, often that's because you have a basic negative feeling tone and your thoughts rise out of that basis, or they're colored by that basis. And you wonder why you always think those kinds of why people are like, You're always pessimistic, and if you get close, it's because you just feel kind of negative. So to work with that, it's more than just suspending the outcome that's important. You've got to drop down and begin to attend to your basic mood, just to hang out at that It's visceral.
• 16:28
  It's vibratory. But when pessimism, which I think is a good equivalent of negative predictions, is operating without mindfulness, we just think it's true. We just think it's true, and sometimes it's self fulfilling. Right? The next one is related, underestimating your coping ability, underestimating your ability to cope with negative events.
• 17:01
  Your mind sells you short. Your mind underestimates your capacity. From a Zen perspective, we could say that, actually, your mind never knows your Buddha nature. Very hard to convince your cognitive mind of your wisdom nature. It seems to be able to doubt it for a very, very long time in the practice.
• 17:26
  Dogen Zenji, who's one of our important teachers, he was talking about this reality and he said, An enlightened person and a deluded person live in the same boat or share the same boat. Underestimating your ability to cope with negative events partially because we don't trust that place of spontaneous response that we call Buddha nature. Okay. The next one, catastrophizing, thinking of unpleasant events as catastrophes. How does the mind do that?
• 18:11
  Blows things out of proportion. It's not with the direct happeningness of things, but it kind of pops out in its narratives of how bad this is and how this bad thing is going to lead to more bad things. Makes a prediction based on this moment's feeling that this is just going to keep on going forever. It forgets permanence. That morning when you wake up and you feel like crap, it's a catastrophe, it means fill in the blank.
• 18:49
  Number six, biased attention towards signs of social rejection and lack of attention to signs of social acceptance. For example, during social interactions, paying attention to someone yawning and assuming you're boring them. Right? It's similar to all the scowly faces thing. But you're not paying attention to the same degree You're not paying the same degree of attention to other cues that suggest they are interested in what you're saying.
• 19:22
  Identity is very interesting. Identity There's a Sanskrit word, which I can't remember, but it describes identity as something like a creeper vine. An identity is this mechanism in consciousness, at least in human consciousness, that basically will climb and grab onto whatever it can grab onto. In other words, a sense of self image will organize around even something incorrect, negative, unhelpful, outdated. And it doesn't like to let it go, even though it's painful.
• 20:02
  It doesn't like to let it go, even though it's painful, and it will defend its perception, even if it's wrong. Why? I'd rather have identity than not, says identity. The vine wants to live, right? It wants a trellis.
• 20:21
  If you try to take away the trellis, the vine is quickly going to find something else to latch onto. Right? So sometimes it's in the service of our virtual self image, even if it's negative, rejecting information that challenges it. It's like a program that doesn't want to be updated. I don't know if such a thing exists.
• 20:53
  I'm going to skip a couple. This is a long list. This is a lot, right? Each one, it can kind of be a whole dharma talk. But I just sometimes like to do a deluge style.
• 21:05
  I just like to dump it all out there and let you sort it out. Number eight, thinking an absence of effusiveness means something is wrong. Now, this one is really interesting because speaking of TikTok, at some point someone said, If you're going to get in a relationship, you should feel hell yes. And how many times I've worked with someone who's suffering because they're like, My hell yes is like a, Should I get divorced? Let's think about that.
• 21:37
  The delusion of permanence shows up here. It is not possible to feel anything all the time. It is not possible to sustain a feeling continually. If you base anything in your life about needing it to feel the same all the time, you're not going to do anything really. You're going to give up.
• 22:04
  This is kind of hooked into with algorithm culture because it just kind of keeps trying to feed you something stimulating. Oh, let me get stimulated. Let me get the next, oh, for a moment. And then you're onto the next, oh, on and on and on. You definitely can't be effusive about spiritual practice for very long.
• 22:27
  Maybe for a year or two. Some people, five years. Once in a while, someone has like a ten year honeymoon. But eventually, you're not effusive anymore. The honeymoon ends because you're encountering yourself.
• 22:42
  And yourself is whole, like this circle back here. And whole includes the feelings that aren't effusiveness. Apparently, this is partially an American problem. Maybe it has suffused other countries, but in other countries, like other European countries, people don't feel obligated to always smile, right? And then Americans come They can spot the Americans in the cafe because they're like, No, it's The line here says, believing an absence of a smiley face in an email means someone is mad at you.
• 23:25
  That's a cognitive error. Okay. Number nine, unrelenting standards. You're impermanent. Number 10, entitlement beliefs.
• 23:38
  This is interesting. Believing the same rules that apply to others should not apply to you. All right? Now, most people go, Yeah, I worked on my basic entitlement. No, that's not me.
• 23:51
  I remember when I was here, I these came I thought these bibs were cool, but I didn't want the other thing that people wear. And I was like, I'm just skipping the other thing. Just give me the bib. People are like, No, no, you got to go through the steps. And I didn't know I had entitlement.
• 24:07
  Was like, Just give me the bib. Bring on the bib. And the cognitive error is related to the virtual self image. We feel that we're different. All of us have a little bit of feeling we're special.
• 24:21
  Sometimes it's, I'm negatively special, sometimes I'm positively special. Yeah, I know they need to do it, but I don't really Nah, just give me the bib. I don't really need to wait in line. This example says, believing you shouldn't need to do an internship, even if that is the normal path to employment in your industry. I'm concerned about convenience culture and spiritual practice.
• 24:48
  I did not I grew up in the '80s. Things were much less convenient, right? You had to go to bookstores. You had to rewind cassettes. Do you know how long it takes to rewind a cassette?
• 25:05
  It's like at least two minutes. It's a terrible experience. But when I came to the practice, I somehow understood that it is not wrong that this is hard work. It's not wrong that it takes a long time. It's not wrong that people don't elevate me in the organization in my first five years.
• 25:32
  I grew up having to rewind tapes. Entitlement beliefs is interesting because that's a cognitive error that is kind of bound up with the virtual self image. We have to check out, Do I have an entitled self image? Right? Sometimes that's there.
• 25:56
  I'm running out of time. Let's see which ones seem important. This is core to mindfulness, recognizing feelings as causes of behavior. Sometimes I'm angry and I kick a cabinet, but not equally attending to how behavior influences thoughts and feelings. For example, you think, When I have more energy, I'll exercise.
• 26:26
  But you don't think, Exercising will give me more energy. Right? People often say, I just don't feel like practicing. I just don't feel like it. I don't feel like it.
• 26:45
  Jogan, help me. Make me feel like it. Sometimes we come to our spiritual teachers, and that's what we're kind of doing. We're like, Ting. Please inspire me.
• 26:56
  I don't really want to do this. Will you inspire me? Sometimes you get hooked. Okay. Think about death.
• 27:04
  Think about impermanence. Think about enlightenment. Now stop. Don't think about it, but And so the catch-twenty two is if you believe, When I have more inspiration, I'll practice, you don't actually sit down in your practice and touch the font of inspiration. It's like someone who plays a musical instrument.
• 27:26
  Everyone hits these points where you're like, I just don't feel like practicing. It's And that can derail you as an artist, as a creative. I don't feel like it. But when you get to a more mature stage, you just go down to your basement or whatever it is. You just sit down, and you move your body.
• 27:47
  And sometimes that's where inspiration comes from. Shoulds and musts is on the list. There's a whole category called delusions. Holding a fixed false belief despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For example, believing global warming doesn't exist.
• 28:11
  Right? Don't want to get political here, so I'm going to move on for now. Assuming your current feelings will stay the same in the future. Permanence. The belief in permanence.
• 28:27
  Right? Number 22, I'm almost done with the list here. Cognitive labeling. For example, mentally labeling your sister's boyfriend as a loser and not being open to subsequent evidence suggesting he isn't a loser. Okay.
• 28:46
  Now this is a big deal in dharma. It's emphasized a lot because we believe our own horse and pony show all the time, right? Our minds generate a perception based on many factors, and we will often relate to that perception rather than what that perception is a symbol of. And we could do that with a person for decades based on one encounter, based on something we heard. Right?
• 29:21
  Maybe based on a past trauma, could be, could just be one past moment, right? It is possible for human beings, let's just say there's experience B. To have a perception of experience B that has nothing to do with experience B and believe that their perception of experience B is experience B. And the scary thing is you have to free yourself from that. It could just go on indefinitely.
• 29:54
  That's part of why we work on emptying our minds. It's not a permanent state, but what's it like to go back into our life or to encounter our life without all of the noise going on? Do we catch some of those in action? You can make light of it, but with people, really the stakes are very high. This is where wisdom and compassion meet.
• 30:21
  A lot of times we don't give people the chance. In fact, we are completely mistaken about some people. And it's pretty sad. Minimizing flaws, maximizing flaws is on the list. Cognitive conformity, seeing things the way people around you view them.
• 30:47
  Research has shown that this often happens at an unconscious level. Well, that's interesting. How much of what we see or the way we see is just because we hang out with people that see that way? Maybe, ideally, spiritual groups are people who are working on cognitive errors. They're committing to working on them so that if you hang out with them, you're more likely to do the same thing.
• 31:19
  Right? You're more likely to recognize cognitive errors. Be nice if that was true a good amount of the time. Cognitive conformity. How much of what we believe do we actually believe or has it just been passed on?
• 31:35
  Have we just kind of taken the baton and run with it? The last one, to number 27, overgeneralizing. Generalizing a belief that may have validity in some situations, such as, if you want something done well, you should do it yourself. Generalizing that to every situation. It's a kind of lack of flexibility.
• 32:04
  It's a lack of actually encountering the moment and seeing what comes forth. We're operating from our program. I like to call operating from just this ordinary unchecked mind as being an automaton. I think we can feel that. We don't like to feel that way, especially when you get a taste of what it's like to be freed from that.
• 32:34
  To be on automatic on a spiritual level is very distasteful for human beings. It's like we're called to actually be conscious. So to work with these, and again, I think they're worth taking some time and reading through on your own, it's an easy internet search to pull them up, mindfulness gives you the power to actually catch them in action, which is when it matters. That moment of, Oh, when you retract it, There I go, I'm moving into it, that's the moment when wisdom starts to penetrate. You recognize it for what it is, and you practice dropping it.
• 33:21
  It's the same practice that you practice on your cushion when you open the hand of thought. You're strengthening that capacity. And then you encounter the situation in front of you the best you can. The best you can. The other, I think, interesting thing about, at least, Zen is, in a way, we're always a little bit living in illusion.
• 33:47
  Always a little bit. I'm going to maintain some humility. We're never completely out of that camp. So there's no reason for despair or pride.
• 34:08
  Jogen: Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendust.org. Your support supports us.