Let’s start with a little thought experiment.
Imagine what it might feel like to receive no credit for your achievements and no blame for your failings.
In this thought experiment, you can accumulate as much wealth, power, and trophies as you want, or suffer the hardest defeats and setbacks. You don’t get credit for the former or blamed for the latter. No accolades. No shame.
Put another way, imagine that your worth is never at stake. Your successes don’t create it. Your shortcomings don’t diminish it.
How might that change your experience?
I call this a thought experiment because, on its face, it seems absurd. When we succeed, we naturally assume it is the result of our hard work and skill. We feel entitled to the credit. When we fall short, we tend to feel it is our fault. We might feel despondent, embarrassed, or even ashamed.
Underneath these feelings is a certain perspective:
I am responsible for my life.
I am responsible for my successes and my shortcomings. If I don’t make the team, pass the exam, or get the job, it’s because something about me wasn’t good enough. If I have a great salary, win a medal, or ace the exam, it’s because I’m good at what I do.
Individual responsibility is the bedrock of modern culture. It creates untold creativity and prosperity.
It also has a dark side.
We often feel imprisoned by the pressures to perform, to be successful, to be someone. Even when we succeed, we can be consumed by the need to keep it up. By the same token, falling short can cause us distress, even despair.
We don’t have to look far for evidence. Stress, burnout, anxiety, and the relentless pressure to perform have become familiar features of modern life.
Buddhist thought offers different ways to address these stresses. One is to use meditation to bring more calm and perspective to our experience. These are the meditations and ideas covered under Everyday Mind. They help us recognize and work with the patterns that shape our everyday experience.
Another is to examine the premise causing us hardship in the first place. In this case, that premise is that we are autonomous beings fully in control and responsible for our choices: our successes and failures are on us.
Enter the Middle Way.
As we saw in First Principle, the Middle Way is a method to examine the nature of reality. It asks if a premise is fundamentally, unquestionably true, or if it is a truth-for-a-purpose, a pragmatic truth.
Applied to personal autonomy, Middle Way thinking would investigate how much of our lives we are really authoring versus merely feeling we are.
One way to examine this is to strip from our choices the parts we didn’t have anything to do with and see what’s left.
We might start with our genetic inheritance. Whatever advantages or disadvantages it gave us, we didn’t choose them.
We can go on. We did not choose our natural abilities or intelligence. We did not choose the body, family, race, culture, or socioeconomic status we were born into. We did not choose how safe we felt as a child, the way our parents spoke to us, or the education available to us. We did not choose the economy we live in, or the opportunities available to us within it.
If we stop and ask ourselves how much these factors have to do with our successes and failures, we might well conclude: a lot.
In fact, follow the chain far enough and almost everything contributing to our choices seems to have arrived before “we” had anything to say about it.
By this assessment, the autonomy we perceive may be greater than the autonomy we have. This gap between how things appear and how they are is central to Middle Way thinking.
You might protest: Is the Middle Way saying I have nothing to do with my life? That it’s all determined according to whatever my circumstances might be?
No. The Middle Way says our sense of autonomy is a truth-for-a-purpose, not an ultimate, beyond-doubt truth. Our experience of autonomy is valid. It does real work: we make choices, we’re responsible for them, and they matter. But that doesn’t mean an independent chooser stands behind them.
We can now see what the “middle” in the Middle Way means. It refers to the middle between two extremes. In the case of personal autonomy, the two extremes are:
At one end, an independent, autonomous self that bears full responsibility for everything we do.
At the other end, no autonomy whatsoever, thereby absolving us of any role in anything we do.
In the middle lies the feeling and function of autonomy. We live as choosing, responsible human beings without having to imagine an independent “me” behind it all, authoring the whole production. We make choices and decisions, but we don’t have to carry the burden of making everything come out right.
This brief examination of autonomy illustrates how Middle Way thinking works. It asks if there might be a wider lens through which we can examine our assumptions, and free ourselves from their grip.
If we’re feeling down on ourselves for not living up to our own or others’ expectations. If we feel the pressure to do more, succeed more, and constantly prove ourselves. If we feel that we are never quite good enough. Then a perspective that says, “Wait a minute! I may not have as much to do with what is happening to me as I previously thought,” might be just the permission we need to let up on ourselves.
I’m not saying that’s easy. Reading one piece won’t be enough. But if we meditate on it, let it sink in, then on the other side of that pressure is freedom. The freedom to be who we are. To embrace and enjoy life, whatever our circumstances might be. And, returning to our thought experiment, the freedom of knowing our worth isn’t at stake in everything we do.
That freedom is what the Middle Way thinkers were going for. They were not trying to stifle our autonomy.
They were relieving us of its burden.