How to Be Human Read online

  Ruby Wax

  * * *

  HOW TO BE HUMAN: THE MANUAL

  A Monk, A Neuroscientist and Me

  Contents

  Preface

  1. Evolution

  2. Thoughts

  3. Emotions

  4. The Body

  5. Compassion

  6. Relationships

  7. Sex

  8. Kids

  9. Addiction

  10. The Future

  11. Mindfulness Exercises

  12. Forgiveness

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  HOW TO BE HUMAN: THE MANUAL

  Ruby Wax is a successful comedian, TV writer and performer of over 25 years. Ruby additionally holds a Master’s degree in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University, and was awarded an OBE in 2015 for her service to mental health. She is the author of books Sane New World and A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled, and has toured all over the world with the accompanying one-woman shows. Both books have reached the number one spot on the Sunday Times bestsellers list.

  With special thanks to Ashish Ranpura for his outrageous knowledge of neuroscience and Buddhist monk Gelong Thubten for his wisdom of the mind and great sense of humour. Ash is funny too.

  Also, with great gratitude to my editor (and wonderful husband) Ed Bye, and to my other editor (not my husband), Joanna Bowen.

  And thanks to my kids Maddy, Max and Marina for not becoming crackheads. And making me so happy.

  Thubten, me and Ash

  Preface

  After writing my last book I said to myself, never again. It’s like having a baby: you’re in such pain during the birth, all you want to do is chew your arms off; it’s the same with writing a book, except you’re dilated for more than a year. But when it finally comes out and it thrives (hits number one on that bestseller list), oh my God, all you want to do is get fertile and do it again. So here it is, my next baby.

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD … and then my book. I’m going to start where we all started, back in the swamp and with a fine-toothed comb find out exactly what happened to make us who we are today. (I spoke a little about this in Frazzled but am now digging deeper). Are we everything evolution dreamed we’d be? If not – who can we blame? Not that we can do anything about it, but if there’s life on other planets, they may learn from us. The human race is a miracle when it comes to survival. If you’re alive and reading this book right now, you’re a bona fide, gold medal winner in the ‘Evolutionary Hunger Games’ where you had about a trillion to one chance of not being born a frog. This should make us the happiest species alive, but we’re not. We spend our time on earth in a constant hunt for contentment, and as far as that goes we’re in a holding pattern. So what’s going to happen and where are we going?

  You can’t stop the future from arriving, no matter what drugs you’re on. But even if nearly every part of us becomes robotic, we’ll still have, fingers crossed, our minds which hopefully we’ll be able to consciously upgrade, making us more human and less machine. You only need a mind to practise mindfulness and compassion skills (no fingers or toes necessary) and no amount of titanium in the world can give you those qualities. Mindfulness isn’t for everyone but from my own experience and according to scientific evidence, mindfulness rules.

  Maybe in the future someone will invent a wearable mental Fitbit which can help us achieve insights and awareness but it ain’t here yet.

  Since writing the last book, A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled, I’ve practised every day along with every excuse in the world not to do it. It’s a constant struggle, but somehow, I squeezed it in, the result being I’m happier, calmer (except when I’m handed a traffic ticket; then I’ll go for the jugular), and more able to focus my mind where I want it, when I want it and to me that’s a big part of happiness.

  Most importantly, it’s helped me sense a depression coming before it hits. This doesn’t mean I dodge it but now I’m ready for it. When I sense the tiny, far-off footsteps of despair, I batten down the hatches, swiftly unplugging from any contact with the rest of the world, both onscreen and in person, giving me a chance to cold-turkey off my addictions to emailing, needing to be liked by everyone, even people I don’t like and worrying about what’s going to nix us next – North Korea or too much salt?

  I’d say I’m different since the last book, but my insatiable desire to know everything about everything remains, and I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. Luckily, I found a brilliant neuroscientist and a Buddhist monk to help answer some of my niggling questions. I figured the monk could explain how our minds work and the neuroscientist could tell me where it all goes on in the brain.

  After living and breathing for what seems eternity with the monk and the neuroscientist, it feels like we’re an old married threesome. We harangue, nag and bitch but our relationship continues to flourish because we can make each other hysterical. I might say to the monk, ‘That’s way too Buddhist-sounding. I don’t want to hear another “B” word out of you tonight.’ And he’ll flip me back a ‘That’s two thousand years of wisdom, sweetheart, swallow it.’ At one point, we were thinking of writing another book, combining our separate wisdoms, called ‘Act Like a Buddha, Think Like a Jew’. When the neuroscientist starts cocking his high-IQ feathers at us, the monk and I tell him to start speaking in human tongue or we’ll cut him out of the book.

  I’ve been squeezing them dry for more than a year, leaving them empty and exhausted, but I got a book out of them, and that’s all that counts. At the end of each chapter, I let them out of their cages to riff.

  Chapter 1 Evolution

  As I said earlier, it’s those ancient whispers that have instilled in us a drive to be top gun or at least top gun’s best friend. They made us survive as a species but, individually, they’ve made us miserable because we feel like we’re in some race but we don’t know what for? By showing you how we evolved and why, you’ll come to realize that you are not your fault. Evolution did it. What a relief.

  Chapter 2 Thoughts

  Why do we have them? And why, oh, why are they so bitchy? My hope is that in this chapter you’ll come to understand that your thoughts aren’t who you really are. If they were, who is the one observing them? Once you understand this then you can pick and choose which thoughts to use and which to lose and that is the Yellow Brick Road to happiness.

  Chapter 3 Emotions

  Emotions are like the old joke they say about wives: you can’t live with ’em, you can’t live without ’em. The reason we have ’em is to help us navigate our lives; informing us what we like, don’t like and why you chose to buy this book over all others (a huge thank you for that). Without emotions, we’re zombies. So, really, it’s not, ‘I think therefore I am,’ it’s more like, ‘I feel therefore I am.’

  Chapter 4 The Body

  Many of us don’t think that our brains have any relationship to our bodies; they’re strangers in the night. Some of us (like me) find the body to be an irritating piece of skin I have to drag around under my neck, like an old wedding train. The fact is, the brain and body are in constant communication, each influencing the other. If you think happy, your body is happy and vice versa.

  Chapter 5 Compassion

  So much social media and we’re more isolated than ever before, partially because we’re not talking to each other face-to-face, only face-to-screen.

  In this world, few of us have the time for compassion, being so busy with such a tight schedule, but we’re going to need it if we want to survive as a species, not forgetting that it’s the glue that makes our lives worth living.

  Chapter 6 Relationships

  Who’s got that one right? We’re all caught with conflicting impulses, a cross
fire of desires which tear us in opposite directions. The sex god or the safe one? This has always been the female dilemma: choosing between brute or good guy (see Wuthering Heights or Gone with the Wind or any episode of Friends). Many of us grew up with the delusion that someday, our prince will come. This explains why many of my friends are miserable today, because they never found one. We’re so used to upgrading things like our iPhones as soon as they get old, we don’t think twice about it, we dump them. Many people I know are now on iWife4 or iHusband8. The motto being, if it’s new, it’s better.

  Chapter 7 Sex

  You’ll love this one.

  Chapter 8 Kids

  You are the sculptor of your child’s mind. Every look, reaction and gobbledegook that spills out of your mouth, will influence who they’ll ultimately become. Before you panic and reach for the Xanax, you can still learn to change your behaviour, thoughts and emotions to give your kids a better chance of becoming resilient, balanced and basically a better human being. You can teach an old dog new tricks.

  Chapter 9 Addiction

  Throughout history, there’s always been something to be addicted to, but these were substances you could chew, smoke or snort; physical addictions. Now, we’re addicted to eating, gambling, shopping, sex, the phone … the world has become an endless buffet of temptations. These days it’s not just physical, we’re also addicted to our obsessive thoughts. So the idea is, if we change our thoughts, we can change our addictions.

  Chapter 10 The Future

  I only hope that, whatever apps or robotic appendages we end up with, we’ll still be able to look inside ourselves and have some awareness of our thoughts and feelings. The danger is that we might live life floating from one hit of pleasure to the next, from experiencing sex with blowfish to being able to read the minds of trees, which will only lead to a craving for more, and there won’t ever be enough toys on earth to make you feel full.

  Chapter 11 Mindfulness Exercises

  For all the above topics, the monk and I will provide accompanying mindfulness exercises. All the practices are like using barbells in the gym, but with these weights you’re making your mind more focused, more flexible, more aware, less distracted, less addicted, faster, healthier and above all, more compassionate.

  Chapter 12 Forgiveness

  We’re all capable of forgiving but in our world, like compassion, with so many things to do and people to be better than, it’s hard to slot it in. Only if we can forgive ourselves will we be able to forgive others. Rather than always finding someone to blame for our discontent, we might be able to finally negotiate and relate to people ‘not like us’ by seeing them as ‘just like us’.

  I’d now like to introduce the monk and the neuroscientist without whom I couldn’t have written this book.

  The Monk

  Gelong Thubten became a monk at the age of twenty-one, at Kagyu Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Scotland. I didn’t know this until recently, but ‘Gelong’ is a title meaning life-long senior monk. I thought it was his first name. Thubten is now forty-six and teaches mindfulness at companies such as Google, LinkedIn, Siemens and many other organizations around the world. He also trains school kids and medical students in mindfulness and, more importantly, worked on this book with me.

  A little about his childhood: his father, who is English, made a fortune as a successful computer programmer, and his mother is the well-known Indian actress Indira Joshi from The Kumars at No. 42. They are now divorced. At six, Thubten ran away from home, planning to hitch-hike around the world. He only made it to the end of the street, where they found him holding a globe of the world and a box of Kleenex. His mother took him home.

  At school, the other kids thought Thubten (pronounced ‘toop-ten’) was highly intelligent and had no friends; they thought he was nerdy. What they didn’t know was that, at night, he and his English teacher from school played music in venues across London. Thubten was a jazz pianist, tinkling the ivories while his teacher belted out classics like ‘Summertime’ and ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ in a smoky red dress. Thubten was fourteen at the time but pretended he was twenty-one; he slicked his hair back and wore a dinner jacket to look older. The pair planned to take their act on to cruise ships. No one at school knew about his double life.

  Thubten went to Oxford University to study English literature but finally ‘blew it out of the water’ to pursue his dream and become an actor. He got an agent in London who sent him out to audition for parts. Most of them had the word ‘Buddha’ in the title: The Buddha of Suburbia, Little Buddha … He didn’t get any of those roles, so decided to move to New York to pursue his dream. He lived an incredibly wild life as a budding actor but, eventually, after two years, he burnt out, coming close to having a heart attack. That was when he had the wake-up call that made him re-evaluate his life.

  So, at twenty-one, Thubten went to a Buddhist monastery to get his head straightened out. Four days later, he became a monk. Everyone he knew, including his parents, were very surprised. First, he became a temporary monk for a year to clean up his act. His plan was to go back to New York after the year, to his old life. It never happened; he stayed for life.

  After a year he went on a strict nine-month solitary retreat where he could only eat one meal and drink water on alternate days. He spent five months of it in total silence, practising meditation for twelve hours a day. Later, he went on an even more intensive retreat on a secluded island off the coast of Scotland, this time lasting four years, again with five months in total silence. At times, he says it became too much; he was holding on by his fingernails, sometimes literally clutching his seat, battling with his mind for two and a half years, facing his demons, and then, suddenly, there was a shift and he gave into the practices. He says he felt himself relax and make friends with his mind, and now knows how to hit a mental switch and access feelings of peace and happiness.

  Thubten was trained by Akong Tulku Rinpoche (a seriously big player) who took him around the world, showing him how to speak for large audiences. As well as teaching Buddhist philosophy, Thubten has been a pioneer in teaching mindfulness in prisons, hospitals, schools, charities, universities, drug rehabilitation centres and companies, starting twenty years ago before it became popular. In those days it was always called meditation and only became known as mindfulness in the last ten years. When Thubten teaches, he keeps religion out of it, focusing on the breath, body and compassion. As a monk, Thubten doesn’t get paid, but the big companies give donations which he uses to build retreats and mindfulness centres that help thousands of people.

  Recently, he was asked by Disney to be the mindfulness advisor on the set of the movie Dr Strange, and he taught Tilda Swinton and Benedict Cumberbatch mindfulness between takes. (Both were already into it.)

  I met Thubten at a conference in Sweden, loved him on sight and he now stays in my house when he’s teaching in London. I call him ‘my air freshener’ or ‘the human smudge stick’. We know how to make each other laugh until one or both of us fall on the floor.

  The Neuroscientist

  Ash Ranpura is a clinical neurologist and a neuroscientist. He received his Bachelor’s degree in molecular neurobiology at Yale, his MD in clinical medicine at the Medical College of Ohio and worked on his PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, where he also taught Master’s courses in statistics and research methods. He conducted research on learning and autism at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Yale to complete his speciality training as a consultant in neurology. As a doctor, he sees patients with unusual disorders that fall between the disciplines of neurology and psychiatry, and he has treated everything from brain parasites to hysterical paralysis. Ash has published academic papers on topics ranging from growing slug neurons on glass and whether fish can count, to the prevention of communicable disease in Bangladesh and the use of medication in Alzheimer’s. (I asked him, and he said fish could count but only up to about eight.)

 
; I don’t think I have to say that he’s very smart, and I was intimidated when I met him. Now I’ve got to know him and I see his flaws loud and clear – too many to mention, so I’m not so scared of him any more. He was born in Dayton, Ohio, which he says was once home to the Wright brothers and is now the home of the twenty-four-hour pancake-breakfast special. His mother, who was born in Mysore, India, was recruited to the US for a job in internal medicine and anaesthesiology because of a dearth of qualified doctors in rural America. She met Ash’s father (also a doctor of anaesthesia) at a hospital in Ohio (I’m guessing over someone they had just knocked out before surgery). Ash says his mother was overprotective and when he was a child she would do ‘drive-bys’ at his school and friends’ homes to keep tabs on him. Later, she tried to stop him from dating, hoping for an arranged marriage. It didn’t happen.

  Ash inherited both his mother’s and his father’s intelligence; he never got a grade below an A at school. He says, ‘Getting a B was an Asian F. Straight A’s were the basic expectation.’ Though his mother was highly educated, she believed in omens, saying things like, ‘The cactus always blooms before your sister comes home,’ or ‘A bird chirping three times means your dead grandmother is watching us.’ Ash describes her premonitions as ‘Hallmark card meets witchcraft’. He assumed this mixture of the mystical and the medical was normal.