We’ve looked at what we’re dealing with in attitude training or mind training, which is our experience of everyday life. We live our lives, and experience each moment ourselves. Even if we broadcast everything that we do on Facebook and Twitter, still, we’re the only ones who are experiencing it.

Nowadays, it seems that so many people are almost addicted to text messaging and posting their feelings and activities on Facebook and Twitter. What’s the difference between reading about this stuff in terms of someone else’s daily life, and our own daily life? There’s obviously some distance between our own experience of life, and what somebody else is experiencing in theirs, especially when it’s put into a very small amount of words.

While we can empathize with others and what’s going on in their lives, it’s still not quite the same as the happiness or unhappiness or neutral feelings that we have in terms of what we’re experiencing ourselves. At the most fundamental level, this is what we have to deal with in daily life; sometimes we feel happy, sometimes unhappy. Sometimes it’s like we’re not feeling very much at all. Despite the fact that we would like to always be happy, our moods go up and down all the time, and it doesn’t seem to necessarily follow with what we are doing. Often, it also seems like we don’t have much control over our moods either. With attitude training, we’re looking at how to make the best of each situation as we go through the moments of our life and experience what’s happening and what we’re doing.

We looked at two main points that are very important in terms of how we deal with life: we exaggerate the importance of what we’re feeling and we exaggerate the importance of ourselves. For instance, we make a big deal out of feeling unhappy, which just makes it worse. When we’re happy, we’re insecure about it, which destroys it. When we feel neutral, we get freaked out because we feel like we need to be entertained all the time. We’re not satisfied with feeling calm and at ease, but we want something going on all the time, whether it’s television or music or whatever. Some sort of stimulation is constantly needed, as it gives some sort of sense of life.

I have an aunt who always sleeps with the television on. Actually she has it on 24 hours a day. She says she likes it because if she wakes up a bit during the night, the television is on. She’s totally frightened of the quiet. It’s not only a bit strange, I find it also quite sad.

There’s Nothing Special about What I’m Feeling

The first thing we need to see, in order to improve our attitude about the ups and downs of life, is that it’s nothing special. There’s nothing particularly special or peculiar about the fact that sometimes we don’t feel happy, and that sometimes we feel alright, sometimes calm and quiet. This is totally normal. It’s just like waves on the ocean, sometimes the wave is high, sometimes you’re in the trough between the waves, and sometimes the ocean is completely calm. That’s just the nature of the ocean isn’t it, and it’s not big deal. Sometimes there might even be a big storm with huge, turbulent waves; but when you think of the whole ocean from its depths to the surface, it doesn’t really get disturbed in the depths, does it? It’s just something that appears on the surface as a result of many causes and circumstances like the weather and so on. There’s nothing surprising about it.

Our minds are like this ocean. It’s useful to think like this, to see that on the surface there might be up-and-down waves of happy, unhappy, this emotion, that emotion, but in the depths we’re not really disturbed by that. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be trying to have a calmer and happier state of mind, because that is always preferable to the storm. But when the storm of extreme emotions and feelings does come, we don’t make it into a monster hurricane. We just deal with it in terms of what it actually is.

Many people practice Buddhist methods and over the years really see results, of not getting angry or jealous so much, not being horrible to others and so on. Then after many years they might have an episode of getting really angry or falling in love and experience extreme clinging and emotional turmoil, and they get discouraged. The source of this discouragement is that they forget the whole approach of “nothing special,” because our tendencies and habits are very deeply engrained and it takes an enormous amount of time and effort to overcome them. We can provisionally take care of it, but unless we get down to the root of why we get angry and so forth, it will recur from time to time. So when it does recur, we have to make sure we think, “Nothing special.” We are not liberated beings yet, so of course attachment and anger are going to come up again. If we make a big deal out of it, that’s when we get stuck.

The idea is that if we understand and become convinced that there’s nothing special about what we experience or feel, then whatever happens, even if it’s some extraordinary insight, you just deal with it. You bang your toe against the table when it’s dark, and it hurts. Well what do you expect? Of course it’s going to hurt when you bang your toe. We can check if there’s a broken bone, but then you just go on. No big deal. No need to jump up and down and expect mommy to come and kiss it all better. So we try to lead our lives in this easy, relaxed way. It helps us to stay calm no matter what happens or what we feel.

There’s Nothing Special about Me

The second point, again, was also exaggeration. This time, instead of our feelings, we exaggerate the importance of ourselves. This is actually the main topic of the attitude training (mind training) teachings, because our problems and difficulties and so on come from one thing: self-cherishing. This means that we’re obsessed with and always focusing on just “me,” and we are the only one that we are really concerned about. It has an aspect of egoism and egotism, as well as selfishness and self-preoccupation. There are many ways to describe this attitude and the things that come along with it.

When we make ourselves into something or someone special, this is really the source of our problems. We think, “I’m so important. Therefore it’s really important what I feel.” If we’re so concerned about “me, me, me,” then of course we’re going to get worried about this “me” being happy or unhappy or not feeling anything at all.