In his youth, Diego Hangartner was a member of the Swiss rowing team and participated in World championships. While everybody was physically similarly ‘fit’ and trained, he became increasingly aware that the main difference was the mental fitness. Outcomes were mostly determined by the mindsets. What did the winners do differently? How did they develop and train their mental strength and agility?

This fascination for the mind guided the life path of Diego: he has dedicated almost forty years to external scientific research and internal meditative exploration of the mind and consciousness. Studying pharmacology and working with drug addicts helped him to learn more about the dysfunctions of the human mind. With the methods he learned it was possible to identify pathologies. However, he was much more interested in discovering what a healthy mind is, and how it can be cultivated. Therefore he spent more than 11 years at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in India and then organised large events with His Holiness the Dalai Lama all over the world.

As the COO of the Mind and Life Institute in the US, and co-founder and director of Mind and Life Institute Europe, Diego contributed to bringing together scientists and contemplatives to discuss, investigate and fund research into how to tackle some of the toughest challenges facing mankind. Today Diego is sharing his teaching more broadly through the “Institute of Mental Balance and Universal Ethics” (IMBUE) and methods like the “The Wheel of Mental Balance”.

How does the mind work?

Majka: Sometimes when we consciously think, we can feel like we are sitting in a cinema and watch the movie of our life. There are sequences we are happy about, but sometimes we may feel frustrated. Why is the director making everything go wrong now? Why is the movie of my life becoming a sad story of self-destruction? I don’t want this. Can we change the director? Can we change the movie of our lives?

Our experience defines our reality

Diego: The first thing to realise is that whatever we call reality, is not determined by the things of the outside world only, but is highly conditioned by our experience. This means that the way we perceive the things of the world, our experience, it defines our reality.

For instance, if you touch a pot on the stove you will feel that it is hot. Should it be so hot that it creates a sensation of pain it will make you retract your hand immediately. The pot is there, it is hot independently of us touching it. But we realise that the pot is hot only at the moment we touch it. By way of our direct experience our concept of the pot has changed from a pot to a “hot pot”. This illustrates that one of the ways for us to know the world out there is through our personal experience.

Our mind classifies experiences as: pleasant, neutral or unpleasant

Diego: This leads to the second realization: when we experience something, our mind classifies an experience as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The “default” way to react to a pleasant experience is to grasp onto the pleasantness and keep repeating the actions leading to this experience, while the “default” way to react to an unpleasant experience is to feel aversion and to stop doing the actions that make it happen. With neutral experiences, we often end up ignoring them, even though they are experiences. At the center of that process stands the mind. While this is quite simple in theory, the ramifications are profound in view of how we experience the world, and the reality we create as a function of our experience.

Our experiences are a function of time

Diego: The third thing to realise is that our experiences are also a function of time. They depend on the moment they are experienced within the context of a larger setting, as well as the length of exposure because even the same experience can change.

For example, imagine that I was hiking in the mountains for a few hours and I feel exhausted. I finally get to sit on a bench. First, when sitting down on the bench I feel totally relieved. I experience sitting as very pleasant. After sitting for a while I may even forget that I’m sitting, the experience becomes neutral. However, if I keep sitting for a few hours without getting up, sitting may become an unpleasant experience.

What drives human action?

Majka: Our main drivers are to avoid unpleasant experiences and seek pleasant ones?

Diego: In the short term we are very similar to other animals: we seek pleasure and try to avoid pain. However, human beings have also a deeper driver that influences how people take action.

During the last 100 years, western psychoanalysis went through three waves of increasingly profound understanding of human drivers. Freud thought that humans mainly take actions based on their sexual drive. For instance, I want to have a well-paid job and have money in order to conquer an attractive woman. Next Adler, a student of Freud, argued that there is a deeper driver: people seek power. I want to have a specific job in order to gain power on other people, be it through status, position or money. Later on, Frankl posed an even deeper level: he found that humans look for meaning and purpose. I make a specific career as a doctor because helping others provides me with a sense of meaning. We can see that in many of the Millennials: they prefer to have a job with a meaning rather than a high paying job that does not make any sense.

Humans are driven by the quest for happiness and well-being

Diego: The Buddhist tradition goes even deeper than the quest for meaning. In the Buddhist view, all our actions are driven by the quest for personal happiness and well-being. Unfortunately, we often succumb to the conditioning of searching for happiness outside (status, house, money), which causes unsustainable consumption, instead of looking inside of our mind and cultivating the positive qualities that lead to mental flourishing (such as equanimity, compassion, mental balance). Most recent social, psychological, economic and clinical research has developed many methods to investigate these fundamental questions empirically and seems to largely agree with this statement. (In this post Sonja Graham also shared how overconsumption is linked to mental health.)

Majka: What is the difference between happiness and pleasure?

Diego: Pleasure is a feeling that happens in the moment, but quickly vanishes. I may enjoy eating a piece of chocolate cake. But if I eat a second piece I may already enjoy it less, and if I eat a third piece I may already feel disgusted. Furthermore, pleasure mostly depends on an external trigger.

Happiness is not pleasure, but an inner state of being

Diego: Happiness is not a short-term feeling like pleasure, but a general state of being. It is a sense of equanimity, inner glow that is not so much dependent on external conditions. When things in life go the way we want them to go, we are fine and at ease. But if you do not achieve the wished for state, you do not have a crisis, nor feel angry and sad. You can accept it and still feel happy. Another concept that describes this is inner resilience.

Unfortunately, people realise what makes them truly happy only at the end of their lives. Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse recorded the most common regrets of people dying in her book “The Top Five Regrets of The Dying”. The 5 most common regrets are:

  1. I wished I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not to the life others expected of me
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier

At the end of their lives, people don’t regret that they did not have a bigger house or another car. Interestingly, they regret non-material things. They realise that they were spectators of their lives, but not the directors. They let someone else direct their lives. Which did not lead them to things that truly mattered to them – like spending time with friends and family. Instead they were working restlessly.

In the book How to Be Alive written by Colin Beavan, that I interviewed in 3 stages of waking people up to their power for change shares practical exercises to find out how to live a life true to the ownself. In a blog post coming soon Diego will share more insights on how to change our minds and behaviours and why this contributing to the common good.