…and it has made all the difference, has me cringing on the inside.
Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’ is world renowned. The final three lines “…two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled,” has famously been used in marketing and advertising, motivational speeches and all things regarding making the “I”, the individual stand out, possibly making the most popular undertaking of this passage to alert others to your individualism and ability to step away from more traditional paths. However, like my last blog that talked about the Chinese bamboo parable, this poem is also often misunderstood so today I would like to offer my own reflections on it with a Buddhist spin. First though, let me offer it up for you to read through and make your own assessments before I offer mine.
The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
What this poem invokes in me is a reflection on the conditioned mind and how our thought processes manifest around choice and decision making and whether we have free will.
From the moment we are born our mind is conditioned by our external environment. You may think of your mind as a blank page which accumulates more and more computer code as you age, where once a code has been entered, will run a certain programme in the future once certain conditions have been met. If you are familiar with the science experiment conducted by Pavlov on dogs, you’ll know that he conditioned those dogs to salivate for food on the ringing of a bell, regardless of whether food was presented or not. In much the same way, in exactly the same actually, we too have behavioural responses that are pre-determined as a result of our conditioning. Some of these behaviours we may have awareness of and may chastise ourselves for behaving in a given way when pleasurable circumstances haven’t arisen, yet mostly we don’t realise our programmed response at all.
This is where the beauty of Buddha’s teachings come in which illuminate the workings of the conditioned mind – you may think of it as an incredibly helpful guide book. The Buddha speaks to bring awareness to the workings of the mind and show us that the mind is influenced by conditioned phenomenon. In the West, in particular, we are conditioned through childhood to believe that we are the mind, that we are our nationality, religion, gender and traditions of our society, that we are our choice of sports team, clothing or political party. To refer back to the computer programme analogy where our minds are just lines of code; a code is not capable of recognising that it is a code, in the same way, the mind (which can also be read as the ego) is not capable of recognising itself. So who or what is it that is aware that the mind is only a set of conditions? This is what is to be considered in finding your ultimate reality or true self. If you identify as being a sports fan of a particular team yet realise that the only reason you support that team is because your father did, then that conditioning cannot be you. If you only eat certain foods because you were cooked only certain cuisines when you were a child then that conditioning can also not be you. By stripping away all these ideas we have of ourselves, then what is left? Surely it is only awareness itself.
To bring Robert Frost’s poem back into the picture it seems to me that he is aware of this preconditioned decision making, that there is no decision maker or free will, the mind is simply running a programme based on the conditions it has encountered. The poem finishes off by reflecting on how the author will interpret and narrate the choice he made to his future self, ruminating that he would tell himself he did have a choice perhaps because it is more comforting to believe so. I would suggest though, that with awareness one would come to realise there are no paths in life and no decisions to be made, perhaps even that free will isn’t desirable. As I have mentioned in my blogs before, there is only present moment awareness and its awfully hard to draw out a path in the present moment, after all, the Daoists refer to experiencing living as the ‘pathless path’.
As its not possible, or even desirable to erase the mind (as some horrifying experiments have attempted to do so), yet it is still able to be conditioned over time, we can behave with awareness to direct ourselves towards beautifying our minds with wholesome actions. We can, in a sense re-programme our minds as we come to realisations through awareness that we are not our minds. We are awareness itself. And from there, it seems to me, is just the beginning of self discovery.
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