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Overconfidence As A Defilement - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 20, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Overconfidence As A Defilement

You know that saying, "If you think you’re enlightened, go home and spend some time with your family for the weekend"?¹ But the original saying is: if you think you’re enlightened, leave two hours early for a thirty-minute commute, be stymied by an entire closure of Market Street, sit in basically a traffic parking lot for ninety minutes while people dressed as Ken and Barbie and Super Mario Kart just lap you, and remember that the last time you were supposed to be here, you didn’t put it in your calendar and completely forgot it, and you come from a lineage of guilt-prone people.

And I did okay. Maybe equanimity-minus, but I’m happy to be here now.

Anicca as Uncertainty

The Buddha placed anicca² at the center of experience. We said, "The world trembles in all directions." Anicca is usually rendered as "impermanence," and it connotes two things in that way. First, the impermanence of people, places, and things—that we are all ruled by finitude, and it is all breaking apart. On the one hand, there is this level of anicca—the dying is in the being born.

Then there is another level of anicca, which is the micro-experience of change. Change is a kind of gateway for understanding. For certain kinds of insight pathways, anicca figures prominently where we are no longer focused on people, places, and things—the anicca of all of this—but focused on the changing of all phenomena, in the arising and the passing.

This is anicca rendered as impermanence, but also sometimes rendered as uncertainty. It strikes me as a testament to the genius of the tradition that uncertainty was placed at the heart of all things. Now, millennia later, in philosophy, science, math, and statistics, uncertainty is central. In epistemology—the philosophy of how we know—uncertainty is there. In all of our statistical understanding, uncertainty is there. In the understanding of our brain, our brain is basically coping with uncertainty moment by moment, doing what it can to reduce uncertainty, to not be startled.

Moral Uncertainty

There is this desperate tussle with what the Buddha highlighted in moral philosophy. We all have our views about what is right. We may not adhere to them all the time, but we have to have our views about what is right. And yet, how do we essentially hedge against moral uncertainty? How do we hedge against the permanent possibility of being wrong—not merely about this or that, but about goodness itself, about what goodness entails?

Toby Ord and his colleague Will MacAskill wrote in a book on moral uncertainty:

"Every generation in the past has committed tremendous moral wrongs on the basis of false moral views. Moral atrocities were, of course, driven in part by the self-interest of those in power, but they were also enabled and strengthened by the common-sense moral views of society at the time about which groups were worthy of moral concern. Given this dismal track record, it would be extremely surprising if we were the first generation in human history to have even broadly the correct moral worldview. It is of paramount importance, therefore, to figure out which actions society takes as commonsensical and permissible today we should really think of as barbaric."

They go on to conclude:

"We think, therefore, that considerations of moral uncertainty—the value of moral information—should lead us to conclude that further research is one of the most important moral priorities of our time. Ideally, one day, we will have resolved the deep moral questions that we face, and we will feel confident that we have found moral truth. In the meantime, however, we need to do the best we can given our uncertainty."

A Wise Relationship to Uncertainty

What is a wise relationship to uncertainty? Bertrand Russell said, "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

The Buddha said that one of the wellsprings of our suffering is attachment to views (ditthi-upadana). It strikes me that, in some way, our attachment to views is a defense against anicca, a defense against uncertainty and nuance. We seek the safety of the known, the safety of our categories, our moral certainties, and self-righteousness. All of this is aided and abetted by a clinging to view.

This plays out in small personal ways and in global ways—in our politics, in our judicial system. The Supreme Court often starts with a conclusion and then rationalizes its way to it, seeking confirmatory evidence after the conclusion is reached.

Certainty is a very dangerous state. Certainty is almost like a gateway drug for the other kleshas³—for the other forces of suffering: greed, hate, and delusion. So much of the harm we do, so much of the harm we cause to ourselves and to others, is a function of a certain kind of certainty. We don’t tend to cause so much harm from the perspective of nuance.

All of this clinging is understandable because, as an animal, anicca feels like risk. The sense of not knowing feels exactly like risk. Information is sometimes defined as the reduction of uncertainty. I hear a sound, I don't know what it is; I look over to see, "Oh, it's a person or an animal." There is information; there is a reduction of uncertainty.

There is a prominent model of our brain where our brain function revolves around desperate efforts to reduce uncertainty moment by moment. The brain is an uncertainty management machine, or a prediction machine, trying to guess the trajectory of this moment. If I can discern that, I can navigate; I don’t have to be startled by the next moment. So, I keep a compulsive sense of orientation: What is this? Where does it point? What’s the vector of this moment?

Often, clinging to view is a way we try to navigate uncertainty. We rely, we could say, on the past—on karma—as a way of understanding what is next. But that is not exactly the way of Dharma.

Loving Our Mistakes

Oscar Wilde said the secret of life is "to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived."

On the Dharma path, we come to love our mistakes. Not merely to be unashamed by them, but actually to delight, to revel in them. If you can get over the egoic blow and the defensiveness of it, it is exhilarating in the way that Wilde suggests to discover one’s wrongness, to find out that we’ve been deceived, to step out of self-deception. A lot of the Dharma path is the path of stepping out of self-deception—the moral pieties and self-serving autobiographical tales with which we’ve hummed ourselves to sleep forever.

When you come to love yourself deeply—not loving yourself for some reason, just loving yourself—the mechanisms of self-deception are no longer a cause for shame but actually a kind of exhilaration.

Understanding Delusion

Delusion is described in different ways. Here, I am talking about it as clinging—attachment to view—or delusion as a function of clinging to view. The clinging seals in some delusion.

Some teachers talk about delusion as merely being lost in thought—the moment when the bubble of discursive thinking collapses and you realize you have been in a different world, not here, and it was deluded to be living in the world defined by your thought. It is non-delusion to wake up to this moment, just being here.

Another way delusion is described relates to the "greed, hate, and delusion" types. Some researchers say even at the level of a single-celled organism, behavior must necessarily fall into one of three possible categories: move towards (approach), move away (withdraw), or neither (no response). These three basic options cannot be reduced further and represent the most parsimonious description of behavioral tendencies. Greed is approach; aversion is withdrawal; delusion is no response.

From this perspective, greed and aversion (or hatred) are very strong motivational states. We know exactly what we want; we know exactly what we want to go away. Delusion is characterized by the absence of a strong motivational stance and a lack of awareness of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. In some ways, it is a blessing because it is a relative of equanimity where we feel less compelled by a sense of urgency moment by moment. But it is also associated with troublemaking decisions; it manifests as indecisiveness. We don’t know what to listen to inside of ourselves. It is all noise, no signal.

Another way of understanding delusion is a more pervasive sense, which is something closer to ignorance. Ignorance is generally said to be about not understanding the Four Noble Truths: that there is suffering, there is a cause, there is an end, and there is a path. But I would say, more generally, I associate ignorance with just losing the plot. It is very easy to lose the plot in a human life. Maybe our default position is that we are losing the plot; we have taken our eyes off what actually matters. Here, delusion is a basic state of confusion, of bewilderment.

Greed feels like bottomless hunger, the hole in the heart that one is desperately trying to fill. Aversion is the heart on fire, likened to a cauldron of water boiling over. What does delusion feel like? Delusion feels exactly like the truth. We don’t differentiate our delusion from our wisdom. If we could do that, we would no longer be deluded; we would put it down. But we live in this strange way, basically in what Kathryn Schulz says is "assuming omniscience"—a pervasive all-knowingness—because we just don’t know what we don’t know.

The Dharma path is very much about unknown unknowns.

Overconfidence and Feedback

We talk a lot about the epidemic of self-doubt, but from a psychological perspective, overconfidence is a far more pernicious actor on this global stage. One researcher called it "the mother of all psychological biases."

How do we live with the permanent possibility of being wrong? This entails a commitment to live life as a continuous feedback loop where we are relying on the things, the people, and the problems we run into in our life as a way of illuminating that which we do not understand yet. Sometimes it is only in the collisions that happen with others that we can begin to understand the provincial qualities of our view—the places where our delusion lurks. Because it is so unnoticed in our life, yet it will have impacts on others. We will misconstrue others, we will fail to understand, to anticipate, to predict, and we will cause problems.

So we stay open to the surprises and the ways in which our delusion manifests. We stay open with humility to this feedback loop that is life: giving, receiving, growing. There are limits to our knowing; there will always be more to know.

I saw this astronomical fact that serves as a good metaphor. We currently see a sphere around us extending 46 billion light-years in all directions, known as the observable universe. Light from galaxies beyond this sphere hasn't yet had time to reach us. Based on our leading cosmological theory, the rate at which new galaxies will become visible will decline, and those currently more than 63 billion light-years away will never become visible from Earth. We could call the region within this distance the "eventually observable universe." Accelerating expansion also puts a limit on what we can ever affect. If today you shine a ray of light into space, it could reach any galaxy that is currently less than 16 billion light-years away, but galaxies further than this are being pulled away so quickly that neither light nor anything else we might send could ever affect them.

I found that beautiful: the eventually observable universe, and then something beyond that which will forever be out of our reach. That is a little how delusion feels to me.

Confabulation and Rationalization

There is a classic experiment where people were given identical pairs of clothing (stockings) and asked to pick out their favorite. People would do it; they would say, "Well, I like this one better, the fabric is softer," or whatever.

This relates to a model of confabulation. Usually, this is in the context of neurological disease, where we give rationales and reasons for having done something, but they are completely untethered to the actual causes of why we did what we did. Yet we believe it. We are not lying; we are not saying, "Oh, I just put that there because I thought I would need it for later." We just make it up. It is confabulated. Sometimes it is called "honest lying"—there is no intentional sense of deception, and yet we concoct and fabricate rationales for why we did what we did, why we believe what we believe.

From a Buddhist perspective, confabulation is not confined to neurodegenerative disease; it is our way of life. In a deep sense, we are confabulating. A lot of what we are doing is essentially rationalizing our defilements—the kleshas—making them look dignified. Our mind is very slippery. The reasons we give for our lives are often fundamentally different from the causes. Reasons are the best we can do; we can’t perceive causality exactly in this way, so we do our best to narrate it, to understand it. All we have at some level is what is conscious, even though there are a billion things happening beneath the radar of consciousness.

We have become too satisfied with the stories we tell about ourselves—the "whys" of our life: why I did this, why I believe that, why I want this, why we feel the way we do. Part of delusion is about becoming more and more sensitive to the ways in which we confabulate and pull a fast one on ourselves—the ways in which we lull ourselves into our pious certainties.

We have to develop some measure of courage for that because it is actually humiliating to see how easy it is to pull a fast one on ourselves.

Befriending Dukkha

How do we begin to perceive that which we do not yet perceive? Part of how we begin to uproot delusion is that we become radically accepting at the cognitive level. We befriend all of the dukkha⁴ in us; we befriend all of our quirkiness and defilements. We no longer try to sanitize them as something else. It is not blaming ourselves morally for it. There is a kind of innocence that animates even our greed, hate, and delusion. We want to really feel our way into that; otherwise, it becomes an object of shame, a testament about some defect at the core of our being. That will lead to many distortions and requires us to rationalize in order to keep a sense of dignity.

The invitation is to actually befriend all of the grizzled bits in our heart. Otherwise, we become ashamed, and when we are ashamed, we hide.

We want to get sensitive to our body. When we lose our bodily awareness and become embedded in narrative—when our words, our thoughts, our language start to get more and more remote from our embodied experience—this is a sign. How do I speak and live in an experience-near way, rather than being, as Gil Fronsdal describes, in those outer concentric circles of our being? The outermost circle is very elaborate mental proliferation and frameworks. We start to feel there is some alienation in those words; it is almost like I can’t channel my body into those words; they are out in some other orbit. Once we get out into that orbit, we lose contact with basic embodied experience, and we can tell ourselves anything. And we will believe anything.

So we have to come back a lot to feeling. Feeling (vedana)⁵ is the engine. So many of our stories, philosophies, and political orientations can be just the exhaust coming off of an unconscious relationship to affect. "I don’t like how this feels." We miss that, and then out of that friction arises a million things, and you can just live in a prison of one’s own delusion as if that is what matters. To begin to clarify delusion, we want to come closer back to the body, to the urgency of affect, of vedana, as it manifests in the circuits of our body.

Laundering Defilements

Equanimity with greed and aversion actually reduces the need for delusion to sanitize the first two. Sometimes I say delusion "launders" our greed and our hatred. The way that delusion functions is to dignify the other kleshas. To launder something is to take dirty money and make it clean. We do that with our greed and our hatred—we make it look like something dignified. If we can have equanimity with the affective current of greed and hate, we don’t have to build, fabricate, and proliferate so egregiously. We come to trust the vedana and are careful not to rationalize the clinging. If we are going to cling, okay, fair enough, but we don’t pull a fast one on ourselves by calling it by another name.

Justice and The Dead

This is on my mind in part because of my own grappling with the world and the suffering of the world. Views are channels into which our greed and hatred flow. The questions, the issues, and the pain points that most ignite us are, of course, what we care about. But there are also those questions that make the most frictionless channel into which our greed and hatred flow. That is what we tend to notice: we notice that into which our greed and hatred can flow, and we ignore other forms of dukkha.

Dr. King said, "Justice is love in calculation." But it is very easy to ignore Dr. King. In those issues where there is no one to hate, there is no way for us to channel some of our defilements. Even if those issues are actually of profound moral concern, we tend to just ignore them. The things that we care about most—on the one hand, we want to protect that care, but the care becomes ensnared with clinging, certainty, delusion, and attachment to views. It becomes a channel for our greed and our hatred. And greed and hatred will not resolve anything in a durable way.

All of this culminates for me in some lines from the always reliable Zadie Smith, writing about Israel and Palestine recently in The New Yorker. She says:

"At the end, we have arrived at the point at which I must clearly state where I stand. 'Where I stand' on the issue—that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein, by my stating of a position, you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or another. Putting me over there with those who lisp, or those who don't; with the Ephraimites or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in the fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place built with words, where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over. Where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified. Where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored. And 'Jew' and 'colonialist' are synonymous, and 'Palestinian' and 'terrorist' are synonymous. And language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized and instrumentalized and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do.

Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naive novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead."

Let’s just sit for a minute.

(Silence)

I offer this for your consideration. Please, as always, pick up whatever is useful and leave all the rest behind.