Contemplative Survival Skills

I was reading an interesting article as part of an ESL teaching book for one of my students, which talks about survival skills (Gonzales 2014: 129-132). This article was interesting because it identifies the survival skills most likely to allow a person to survive and be resilient in the face of stress and crisis. Interestingly, I sense that most of the skills are contemplative, in the sense that they relate to a lot of spiritual ways of knowing that we learn about in ancient traditions. For one, being calm is emphasized, which essentially means being mindful and having a settled awareness that tries to take in everything without making impulsive decisions. Now this makes sense, both from a spiritual and evolutionary perspective. If I am in the jungle, and I act out of a false belief that I am stronger or more well equipped than a dangerous predator hiding in the trees, I will likely not survive. On the other hand, my ability to stay calm and not act on my emotions is very crucial to such survival scenarios.
    Other skills that are described in the article include the ability to think things through in small steps; use of mantras as ways to focus the mind when it is buffeted by many stimuli; a positive attitude; and, perhaps the strangest of all, the ability to surrender to the circumstances and the acceptance of death as a real possibility. I was struck by the fact that most if not all of these skills are the kinds of things that many spiritual traditions (including Buddhism) are emphasizing, which suggests that wisdom is always a common denominator in whether one survives or not.
   One of the areas that wasn't covered in this article, but which could be studied more, is what I might refer to as a 'lack of presumption.' I have sometimes heard this referred to as beginner's mind, but I would like to take it in a different way to mean the ability to soldier on with the details of one's thrown condition and circumstances, rather than endlessly questioning why they are in that situation in the first place. I use the term 'thrown' (Heidegger's term, in fact), because I want to suggest that this is where we always are, in the middle of it all, and there is no illusory starting point. If a person can sort through the messes they are in without revolting against the mess or trying to restore the mess into a fictitious 'purity', quite often one finds the things they need in the mess to make okay decisions. If, on the other hand, one starts to ask themselves "why am I in this? Ws predicament? Why me? What did I do to fall into this trap? What am I supposed to learn from thhat karma brought me here?", there will be no end to these questions, and one will end up succumbing to depression before getting eaten by the tiger. But these questions really represent unconscious longings to go to a place of innocence, where there are no messes or ambiguities or conflicts to sort out or to 'be within'. I think that survivors are the ones who are able to face the situation they are in and embrace it rather than trying to force themselves back into an original, idyllic state of being which never existed to begin with.

Gonzales, L. (2014). Mind Over Matter. In Mazur-Jeffries (2014), Reading and Vocabulary 4: Focus. Boston: National Geographic Learning.