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Habit Engineering – How to make/break a habit?
This is more or less a summary of a video on dealing with bad habits, per the words of one of our favorite Bhantes on this forum.
The overarching thesis of this video is that habits are nothing more than collections of vipaka. This applies without exception to every being in existence. In other words, if the habit already exists, and the environment exists as the condition, the mind base is already primed to make contact with the mind vipaka.
To make this idea more concrete, let’s take the habit of watching TV. Say you were to 1) go home from work and enter the front door. This would be the vipaka to trigger this habit chain more or less. The next step (after perhaps taking off one’s coat and whatnot)- 2) walking to the TV, is the next vipaka. After the door opening vipaka has made contact with the mind base, after contact with this vipaka ceases, the mind base changes shape to anticipate the coming of the next vipaka. This is what makes a habit so frictionless. You can thus see the rest of this habit chain with this idea: after so many repetitions of mind base contact, the habit becomes ingrained due to the mind base instinctively changing shape to receive the next vipaka.
So what can we do to change the habit? Before we can explain that, we have a couple of preliminaries to go through.
- First of all, it is very unproductive to say that it is “your habit.” As far as Abhidhamma is concerned, you are nothing more than the current citta rising and passing away. Therefore, you didn’t pick up this habit. The citta that has long since passed away did. This is important to depersonalize and depathologize the act of breaking the habit.
- A right view is insufficient to break a habit. You might pick up the view of “I don’t watch TV” or even “All pleasure is simply relief from vexation, so it’s useless to continue watching.” But if you don’t do anything to change your vipaka or the series of cittas going through your mind, you will still engage in this habit, because at the end of the day, habits are nothing but collections of vipaka.
The “easiest” strategy in this case is to change the vipaka. In our example, one could unplug and even put away the TV in the closet, so if one does want to watch the TV, one has to force the mind base to accept a new series of vipaka that it hasn’t become primed towards yet. This serves as “open season” for one to change the course of the habit, especially since there is more delay experienced with the new vipaka sequence.
The “harder” strategy, albeit definitely doable, is the cultivation of determination. This can be done in conjunction with vipaka adjustment or can be done if it is simply impossible to alter vipaka (such as when your mom constantly puts unhealthy food in the house, but you resolve to eat more healthy meals despite her good intentions.) It should be noted here that determination is not willpower, but a faculty that can be exercised and made stronger. It is so fundamental a faculty that it is considered one of the ten perfections the Buddha attained, to not mention a cetasika that can accompany a citta in Abhidhamma.
If one is determined not to engage in the habit, when the vipaka and the sense base is there, the sense base will adjust shape to match that of the vipaka, but contact will not occur. When contact does not occur, the mind base will automatically become less pliable towards that vipaka shape. If this occurs over enough times, the mind base takes practically no anticipatory shape for contact of this vipaka.
I welcome any amendments to the above model given, and maybe some tips on cultivating determination. ;)
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DhammaSponge wrote: “The overarching thesis of this video is that habits are nothing more than collections of vipaka.”
- Where is that stated in the discourse? Please provide the time interval where this point is made. I would like to listen to that section.
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1:54:53
“The essence of today’s talk is this: this is not you. None of this is you. That’s why if you say ‘I have a habit that I can’t come out of or break,’ well… yeah, because it’s not you who has the habit to come out of or break. Because it’s not you who picked it up. Habits are simply patterns of vipaka.”
I misremembered the exact word then, a “pattern” would probably have a bit of a different connotation than “collection.”
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A Habit is formed by repeated actions that strengthen it. Until you see the bad consequences of a habit, you cannot break it.
- Once you comprehend the dangers of sticking to a specific habit, you can break it with determination.
- In a nutshell, that’s how you break a habit.
- A habit is formed not strictly due to vipaka (if that were the case, you would not be able to break it). Habits are induced mostly by environmental factors. For example, many young people develop the habit of drinking due to the association with bad friends.
The Thero may have explained the correct concepts in the discourse. It is not possible to capture the essence of a discourse by listening to a sentence or two. I have not listened to the whole discourse, so I cannot say anything specific.
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