Acting ourselves into new ways of thinking

If practice makes permanent, what is praxis for?

*I need to slay the hydra-headed monster of procrastination that has been lodging in my psyche for a few months. It’s time to focus on a manuscript deadline that is so close I can now smell it - there’s some juniper in there and a little lavender, but it’s mostly ominous, like burnt cheese in the context of rising damp. That means I need to pause the series of reflections on peace until the second half of February. Between now and then I may add texture to the creative process by sharing a few cross-posts, extracts from current or prior writing, and an audio update or two, but my primary focus will be elsewhere. Thanks again for following, especially to those fabulously beautiful, wise, and generous beings called paid subscribers who help keep the show on the road.*

For now, this:

“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting.”

Last Monday, I received an email that contained the line above (thanks, Claudia). I remembered seeing this statement before, I agree with it, and it’s relevant to the manuscript I’m currently writing on the antidebate, so I went to check the source at QuoteInvestigator and soon found myself laughing. They offer a ridiculously detailed account of the record of different people who’ve said something similar since 1930.

I’m not surprised so many people have wanted to make this case with these kinds of words, becuase it’s a subtle but fundamental shift in the emphasis of conventional thinking. The line also gets to the heart of why Perspectiva embarked on creating a new social practice called the antidebate. The longer explanation is about the juxtaposition of established social practices and cultural continuity; and innovative social practices and cultural transformation. In this sense, the statement is a cousin of Buckminster Fuller’s celebrated line:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

As I was considering all this I remembered that I have a section in my book Spiritualise (pages 57-59) that is dedicated to practice and neural plasticity, and I felt my Substack readers might enjoy seeing it. Sharing it in this way, ‘airing it’ as it were, helps me to see which aspects of that old material to include in the manuscript about the antidebate.

Ivo Mensch is one of several colleagues contributing to the manuscript and he pointed out that ‘practice’ is often conventional, about keeping things going. However, there are forms of ‘Praxis’, applied theory in practice, where practice subverts theory, and even deeper kinds of praxis where the practice calls into question the entire frame of the theory/practice relationship. But that’s all for the near future. For now, an extract from yesteryear (2017). (Please see the original source for references).

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“The brain is a far more open system than we ever imagined, and nature has gone very far to help us perceive and take in the world around us. It has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.” - Norman Doidge

“In truth, the crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge: the practising life.” - Peter Sloterdijk

The idea of ‘neuroplasticity’ is relatively mainstream, and simply stated it refers to the brain’s capacity to change itself. We can do this much more than we previously thought, but it is not often understood that plasticity significantly declines with age, nor do we typically appreciate the extent of effort required to make significant changes in general or the effort to maintain the requisite effort, or what Claxton calls ‘the habit habit’.

It is now a truism in sports psychology that practice doesn’t make perfect, rather, practice makes permanent.154 You become what you repeat, and what you repeat may not always be optimal or consciously chosen. The idea of practice, or practise, or praxis differ in emphasis, but they all point to the idea of self-reinforcing patterns of behaviour, and the value of a practise often grows in a kind of compound interest.

The core idea is captured by the distinguished social theorist Sloterdijk: “Practice is defined here as any operation that provides or improves the actor’s qualification for the next performance of the same operation, whether it is declared practice or not.” There is a huge literature now on ‘social practice theory’ and how it informs our use of natural resources, particularly energy, and the importance of practice for musical competence is well known but public awareness of the range of contemplative practices seems to be somewhat underdeveloped. The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society presents a wide range of available contemplative practices that can be grouped into seven families, each facilitating the expression of a broad fundamental human need or capacity e.g. creativity, physicality, relationships, cyclical rituals and ethical generativity.

In this respect, emerging evidence from psychological and neuroscientific research helps to contextualise the value of such practices. Studies have found significant evidence that repeating a certain experience over an extended period of time (a habit, in other words) actually changes the size of the brain region(s) associated with that experience, but the point is not so much about neuroanatomical size, rather it is about connections between existing neurons, and to some extent the creation of new ones.

It follows that accessing the “fruits” of spiritual practice may only be accessible through habit and consistency. If part of spiritual practice is about seeking “a transformation that can ultimately alter and orient one’s life” and such transformation entails the development of several elusive qualities and human virtues like empathy, compassion, humility, patience, sacrifice, and others, then the case for fostering a culture of practice is very strong. In this regard, research is already indicating that mindfulness meditation serves as a means for developing compassion and empathy. Other studies support the requirement of long-term habitual practice to develop these deeper emotional qualities.

Over time, spiritual practices appear to affect the structural changes in our brains that likely reflect the forms of spiritual transformation recounted by various spiritual leaders and sacred texts. This evidence tallies with the general verdict of workshop participants; the value of spiritual practice largely depends both on the perspective of the practitioner and on the persistence with which it is practiced. In addition to Danny Penman’s reference to ‘dose-response relationship’, Clare Carlisle argues that continual spiritual practice gives natural and spontaneous rise to other beneficial habits.

There is a key paradox at work in spiritual practice, however, such that practice must become consistent and habitual in order to fulfil the spiritual aim of moving beyond the practice itself. In our second workshop, Rabbi Naftali Brewer says habits can be seen as “duties of the heart” rather than activities of the body, and the creation and maintenance of habits are at least partly about socialising a faith community i.e. “there is something more sacred than the habit”. Naftali quoted H.J. Eschel’s quote in this regard, “Prayer is a window, not a screen,” as the key to prayer is the development of a capacity to feel beyond the words. The point is that habits often remain even after the rationale for the habit is forgotten or superseded. In this respect, over-fastidious attention to rituals can undermine the very values they are espousing e.g. mind and heart in state of submission to higher power. On the other hand, Naftali added that habits can also be the trigger i.e. the relatively mindless repetition of the practice is the thing that brings one’s mind to a more open, receptive, ‘non habitual’ space. In other words, spiritual practice is partly about cultivating that discrimination between doing things by rote out of the habit of doing them by rote, and doing so with a deeper appreciation for the liberating qualities of repetition Naftali made reference to “pre and post-meaning naiveties” and wished people ‘a second naiveté’.

The more one engages with spiritual practice, the more it seems to develop, deepen and complexify as a result. For instance, Elizabeth Oldfield compared the development of Christian prayer to the deepening of a friendship, although she emphasised that there is a sense of asymmetrical wisdom in the actual experience of prayer. Clare Carlisle argued that one’s attitude to habits is very closely connected to one’s idea of freedom. However, for something to be habitual does not mean it is unfree: “Freedom is the uninhibited expression of our own nature. Not rational choice.” The point was developed through the thought of Ravission: “Practice wills the repetition”. The interplay of receptivity and resistance shapes our ethical and religious life, so meditation, for instance, is both about becoming receptive to some things and resistant to others. Sloterdijk puts the point forcibly: “It is time to reveal humans as the beings who result from repetition. Just as the nineteenth century stood cognitively under the sign of production and twentieth under that of reflexivity, the future should present itself under the sign of the exercise.”

(*And, though it’s a little gratuitous here, that section on practice is the end of the chapter which closes with a reflection I wrote that I was happy to see again):

Spirituality is not a monolith. Believing is fundamentally social, but beliefs will differ. The sacred is universal, but lines of the sacred will be drawn differently. We are all on auto-pilot by default, but people will be relatively ‘awake’ or ‘asleep’ to differing extents. We can all taste the numinous, but spiritual experiences will range in frequency, meaning, duration and intensity. We all live in two different perceptual worlds, but some balance these worlds better than others; and we would all benefit from some form of spiritual practice, but nobody can say exactly where we should begin. Spirituality therefore has some universal forms and structures but varying content. The challenge for us now is how to deepen the discussion in that context. How can we best speak of the spiritual in a way that helps us understand how best to live?