I used to joke, that the 3 sexiest words to hear out of someone's mouth is "I was wrong". It's so rare that a person changes their mind, sees another perspective, or loosens their grip on their own perspective.
"I was wrong" has hidden connotations of permanence and self-identity. People can get stuck in an "I am bad, I am always wrong" mindset. So, the first edit I'd make is to say, replace "I was wrong" with "I made a mistake". That puts the focus on your actions, not on who you are. And, in Buddhism, the actions and intentions are the main game.
So, when is the phrase "I made a mistake" useful/helpful?
TLDR: The phrase is usually helpful, except when it is used as an excuse to give up.
I used to think it was always helpful (assuming it is said sincerely, and not just a knee-jerk apology out of politeness). As the opening joke stated, it's so rare that a person can admit a mistake.
Ajahn Geoff tells the story of a med school program for brain surgery who used two questions to applicants:
- When was the last time you made a mistake?
- What did you learn?
And, that's the crux of the determination of helpful. Mistakes are the path of learning. I'm learning a new programming language, and the key to my learning is to make interesting mistakes. (And to read the documentation and stay observant; but, not being observant can be seen as a mistake too. So, that strengthens the view that mistakes are the heart of learning.) So, to not admit mistakes is to not allow oneself to learn.
Mistakes are very helpful if there are two follow ups:
- What can I learn from this mistake? (perhaps about the consequences of the mistake, the causes, etc. I.e. How is new-you wiser than old-you?)
- What can I do not to repeat this mistake? (The focus here is less on knowledge, but more on action)
But, even with these two provisions, saying I made a mistake is not always helpful. What's the reason? It's because sometimes we can over-use that phrase, especially if we are scared. Or, in other terms, the kilesa's can hijack that learning.
The prototypical example is someone who tries something new, like meditation. It's a skill that takes time to learn, just like catching a baseball or playing guitar. And, like most skills, it takes time to learn the skill. At the beginning, it might feel like we are getting nowhere. We see others doing it so well, like sitting for 60 minutes. And we can't even sit for 5 minutes. Here, patience/endurance is a key supporting virtue. Keep trying and notice the small improvement. Or, if there is no improvement, trust that today was not a great day of practice.
THE NOT SUBTLE CASE
The danger is to try it one time or one week, not "get it", and then give up. In this circumstance, it's very tempting to say, "I made a mistake", along the lines of "I can't meditate".
If one focuses too much on the results, one can conclude from a few bad initial results that good results will never come. There are some domains, like learning an instrument, where we know that improvements always come but take time. So, in those domains, "I made a mistake to try" is giving up incorrectly. This is called information cascade... taking a small bit of seed information and concluding prematurely. In social situations, this might be called bias/prejudice based on anomalous seed data. (Or, I had one bad experience eating Korean food so I'll never eat Korean because it's all bad.)
It is okay to say "The effort to practice isn't worth the gain". But totally incorrect to say "I'll never be able to do it.
THE SUBTLE CASE
But, this is obviously not a good use of "I made a mistake". We can see that a kid that takes 2 days to learn to catch a baseball, doesn't get it, and quits--- that kid is making a false conclusion: "I'm not getting it quickly, so I can't ever get it". They write it off prematurely.
Not so obvious: Jon works is really good at "awareness" meditation. He can enter in a very non-judgmental state of watching his thoughts and not identifying. He is taught a new meditation technique: breath+body-focused meditation. He tries is 2 days and doesn't get it. He much prefers to stick with awareness. He (reasonable to most people) decides to stick to awareness meditation, saying, "I made a mistake to try anapanasati, breath meditation." He learned not to question awareness meditation. He decides not to try anapanasati again.
This is a classic business school / life problem. Do you stick with what you got? Or do you go exploring for something better? In biz school, they call this "exploration vs exploitation". In my life, it can be "do I stick with this taco recipe, or do I try new ones". There is a cost exploring, and one piece of advice is that you try about 10-17 recipes. (In that case, it's about how many houses you look at before you settle on which one to buy). The idea is that after you have explored 10-17, you're kinda guaranteed something about +/- 5% (I'm making up numbers) to the optimum item if you searched forever. However, you'll need to search about 20 new houses to find one that might be better. So, the gain (in statistical expectation) from searching is less than the cost of searching.
With Jon, the Buddhist, and awareness vs anapanasati, the difference is that the gains of anapanasati are huge and worthwhile. Yes, the search is very difficult, taking more time than visiting 20 homes. But, one can think that the gain is 100-1000X. And, the Buddha said it's worth it, colorfully saying that Nibbana (which is greater than anapanasati) would be worth it even if it meant being poked by 300 spears for 100 years. (SN 56.25).
It is up to Jon whether he wants to go forward. It is a struggle to practice and develop new skills. And awareness meditation well developed can put his mind in incredible ease. You might think of it as being in the top 1% of all humans who ever lived. But, Nibbana and what the Buddha taught wasn't a halfway measure.* So, he was always pressing his disciples to go all the way to Nibbana. To not rest on laurels of achievements in this world with it's eight worldly winds.
So, the big danger for Jon, is to say, "I made a mistake in trying for more". That is an excuse, given probably by the kilesa's, to sap Jon of effort and determination to go further in the path.
And, this is, in large part, what I think is a big danger in Buddhism today, in the west and also elsewhere. The really hard things, getting to Nibbana and moving deliberately toward Nibbana, are worthwhile. I have not tasted them myself, but I've had some states of rest that encourage me to keep searching.
There are people who just say, "That Nibbana stuff is too hard, and many people will never reach it in this lifetime. Stick with something attainable, like awareness meditation and lovingkindness." That's a fair opinion, but a dangerous one. Because by treating aiming high as a mistake, it is closing a door and locking it permanently. And it is also discouraging others from aiming high.
The story of the Thai Forest Tradition has many people saying that "Jhana is lost and not attainable" and "Nibbana is lost and not attainable" by the orthodox power-structure. But a few rebels said, "I'm not so sure, and I will go look for myself".
Had they concluded that 5 years of search without attainment meant "It was a mistake", it would have demoralized them.
Instead, sometimes when I'm tempted to say, "I made a mistake", i need to fall back on something I used to write off: faith. Faith that the Buddha awakened. That he honestly spelled out the roadmap to awakening. That I've explored a few years of that map and found some really interesting and helpful places. So, I'm going to give it a shot to really study the map and get to the treasure at the center of the map.
Until you see/touch/experience the treasure, you can never be sure the treasure is there. So, don't let not achieving it yet lead you to believe that looking is a mistake.
It's tricky, though, because 90%+ of what we need to do in Buddhism is let go and abandon things that are bad habits or dead ends. Some are even very pleasurable. So, we might think of the whole path as letting go.
As Ajahn Geoff points out, there is an important step of holding on to the right things along the path. Anapanasati is to be held onto tight. Metta is to be held onto tight, as a tool to fight aversion/animosity. Equanimity is a tool to be held on tight when we go on wishful-thinking binges. Effort and determination are to be held on to. Even rapture and some types of pleasure are to be held on to (see the seven Wings for Awakening). Hold on to helpful things. And, you often have to develop them first. And that development, when it doesn't come quickly, doesn't make it a mistake. Don't give up so easily.
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NOTE:
There is ample space for changes in tactics, readjustments, etc. Like, even within Anapanasati, there are at least 10-20 approaches that I've tried, some work more often than others, none works well everytime. But, even in the realm of appraoches-to-Anapanasati, make sure to give things a real tryout before abandoning any approaches.
The phrase I use often is "Idea to beat". In Anapanasati, get an idea, idea A, develop it. Then, mix in idea A and trying other ideas, B, C, D. By trying out the different ideas, we might find a superior tool. But, an even bigger part is that by exploring and comparing idea A with the other ideas, I learn a lot more about idea A. And that deepening of knowledge of the tool is HUGE.
Another phrase, "develop the menu". Holding on to one tool makes one fragile to problems that can't be solved by that tool. It also changes the perspective. If one only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Smash is our instinct, but not always appropriate/useful.
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* There is a sutta where the Buddha admonishes a monk for teaching a halfway lesson. A wise man was dying and the monk taught that dying person a few preliminary practices, maybe metta and equanimity. When the Buddha was told, he admonished the monk saying that he should have taught him the full path. That had the monk taught the wise man the whole path, the wise man would have had better rebirths and been led to a rebirth path leading to Nibbana.
