Church of the Churchless

Meditators need to avoid mistaking subtle dullness for meditative joy

As noted in a previous post, I've been re-reading the first part of a book by Culadasa (John Yates), The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness. 

I'm almost back to where I stopped my reading about six years ago for a reason I can no longer recall. The book is an amazingly detailed and comprehensive approach to Buddhist meditation. I find it refreshing, because there's hardly any mention of Buddhist scriptures, Buddhist terms, or Buddhist stories. 

The whole focus is on guiding the reader through ten stages of meditative practice. So far I've read about  the first five, each of which I'm fairly competent at. Which shouldn't be surprising, since I've been meditating every day for about 55 years.

Stage One: Establishing a Practice
Stage Two: Interrupted Attention and Overcoming Mind-Wandering
Stage Three: Extended Continuity of Attention and Overcoming Forgetting
Stage Four: Continuous Attention and Overcoming Gross Distraction and Strong Dullness
Stage Five: Overcoming Subtle Dullness and Increasing Mindfulness

There's also Interludes in-between some of the stages where Culadasa discusses general principles that apply to various stages. I've read these.

First Interlude: Conscious Experience and the Objectives of Meditation
Second Interlude: The Hindrances and Problems
Third Interlude: How Mindfulness Works
Fourth Interlude: The Moments of Consciousness Model

I find the discussion on dullness both interesting and helpful. Here's how strong dullness is described.

Dullness occurs when we turn the mind inward, which reduces the constant flow of thoughts and sensations that usually keep the mind energized and alert. Therefore, the overall energy level of the mind drops. With less stimulation, the brain winds down toward sleep, and the mind grows dull. This normally happens when we're fatigued or at bedtime.

In meditation, it's not just turning inward that decreases mental energy, but when we focus on the breath too intensely and for too long, we are also excluding the thoughts and sensations that usually keep the mind alert. This is another reason why "looking beyond" the meditation object with peripheral awareness is so important. When we stay aware of things in the background, we continue to stimulate brain activity and won't sink into dullness.

This helps explain why some meditators practice with their eyes open, and why it isn't important to block out noises, like in my case, the sound of our heat pump blowing air into the room or a dryer/washing machine operating in the nearby utility room. When I'm meditating, those sounds are part of my peripheral (background) awareness, while my main focus is on my breath.

Subtle dullness is, not surprisingly, not as easy to recognize as strong dullness. That makes it more difficult to deal with. This is discussed in the Stage Five chapter.

This new level of stable attention is precisely what makes us more vulnerable to slipping into a deeper state of sustained subtle dullness. That's because the mental agitation that stimulated the mind and helped keep us awake in the earlier Stages has subsided. As subtle dullness deepens, it causes both peripheral awareness and subtle distractions to fade. 

If we don't recognize this as a sign of subtle dullness, it can easily be mistaken for the strong exclusive focus of Stage Six. The pleasant feelings that accompany subtle dullness can also be misinterpreted as first signs of the meditative joy of advanced stages. Without guidance, meditators often confuse a deeper state of subtle dullness with having achieved the more lofty states of later Stages.

We can sustain this type of subtle dullness for very long periods. It's often described in these kinds of terms: "My concentration was so deep, an hour seemed like only minutes." Or, "I don't know where I went, but I was just gone, and felt so peaceful and happy." 

When the pleasure of dullness is particularly strong and our peripheral awareness of thoughts and sensations fades completely, our meditation can even seem to fit the description of a meditative absorption (jhana). We can quickly get attached to such experiences, prizing them as proof of our meditative skills. Yet, relative to the practice goals in this book, they are complete dead ends. It's crucial we learn to recognize and overcome subtle dullness to progress in your practice. Therefore, do not skip this Stage!

...At first, it may be difficult to distinguish between the wholesome pleasure of stable attention and the pleasure of subtle dullness, but in time, you will recognize the warm, soft, quiet pleasure of subtle dullness as something quite different from the bright, alert enjoyment of being in the flow of mindfulness.

There are various ways to detect and combat subtle dullness. Here's a couple of them.

Remember, dullness arises when perceiving moments of consciousness become non-perceiving mind moments. A strong intention to perceive actually reverses this process by producing more perceiving moments of consciousness. By just setting the intention to observe the breath clearly and vividly while sustaining introspective awareness, you directly influence the root cause of dullness.

Sharpen up your observation of the meditation object when you notice a decrease in the quality of awareness and attention. Use the techniques of following and connecting. Follow the sensations of the breath while intending to perceive the details as clearly and vividly as possible. It's especially important to connect changes in the breath with the degree of alertness or dullness of the mind.

When you're more alert, does the breath tend to be deeper or shallower, longer or shorter, and how do the pauses change? What about when you're dull?

Another way to counter subtle dullness is by expanding the scope of your attention to include the sensations of the body. This works to energize the mind because we automatically use more conscious power to observe sensations in a larger area. You will even find that your scope of attention tends to spontaneously expand at this Stage. 

For instance, you might find yourself observing the sensations of the breath in both the chest and abdomen when you were intending to focus only on the nose.

...You've mastered this Stage when you're able to consistently sustain a high level of intense and clear perception -- of both attention and introspective awareness -- during most or all of your session. 

Attention will gain intensity, making all the details of the meditation object quite vivid. It will also gain in clarity, so you experience the actual arising and passing away of individual breath sensations.

Your brain has three gears. Gear 2 is the best.

Buddhism has the middle way. There's a saying, "Everything in moderation." The fable of Goldilocks and the Three Bears involves three choices where "the first is wrong in one way, the second in another or opposite way, and only the third, in the middle, is just right."

So it isn't surprising that, according to a recent article in New Scientist, Take control of your brain's master switch to optimize how you think, the human brain has three gears that are coordinated by a small bundle of cells called the locus coeruleus, Latin for 'blue dot."
Download Take control of your brain's master switch to optimise how you think | New Scientist

This research has now reached a critical mass, with multiple scientific papers calling for a greater appreciation of the locus coeruleus. Of particular interest is the discovery that it has four different modes of activity, each with distinct effects on our thinking and behaviour. It is this that led Storoni to describe the blue dot as the brain’s “gear system” in her new book Hyperefficient: Optimise your brain to transform the way you work.

According to this metaphor, Gear 0 is the state of the locus coeruleus when you are asleep. It is almost completely silent at this point, apart from transient bursts of activity that seem to enhance the long-term storage of memories.

,,,Once we awaken, the locus coeruleus moves into Gear 1 – a low hum of baseline activity. The noradrenaline eases the brain into consciousness, but it is a state of low arousal. As a result, sharp focus is lacking and we may be prone to mind-wandering.

As levels of noradrenaline increase, communication across the different regions of the brain becomes easier. Neurons in the prefrontal cortex, the area typically associated with self-control and abstract reasoning, respond first because they are sensitive to low levels of noradrenaline. Crucially, the hum of activity in the locus coeruleus is now accompanied by spikes of noradrenaline released in response to relevant stimuli.

This combination of moderate baseline activity and short-lived bursts of neurotransmitter release is characteristic of Gear 2 and allows the brain to process new information more efficiently. If they are large enough, these spikes can trigger a “network reset” – a shift in focus to new and important information – which is essential for flexible thinking. “It reorganises the forebrain, precisely at the moment when you need to switch your attention and adapt your behaviour,” says Sara.

Problems may arise when the hum turns to a roar. This is what happens in Gear 3. Here, high levels of noradrenaline streaming from the locus coeruleus can activate areas of the brain associated with emotional processing. These tend to have receptors that respond only when concentrations of the neurotransmitter have reached a higher threshold.

This can lead to the fight-or-flight response – useful if we are in danger and need to be hyperalert. Unfortunately, many situations that don’t involve danger, such as pressure at work, can also put the locus coeruleus into its top gear. We may then feel overwhelmed when what we need is greater focus.

In people with anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, the locus coeruleus may become too easily locked into the high-arousal mode of Gear 3. “We know that there is increasing release of norepinephrine, both in wakefulness and sleep, in patients suffering from PTSD,” says Sara.

...Given these findings, many neuroscientists now consider moderate locus coeruleus activity – that is, Gear 2 – to be key to optimum cognitive performance, a sweet spot between dreamy and frantic. “It’s when the prefrontal cortex is completely engaged and working at its best,” says Storoni.

So how do we get our brain to spend more time in Gear 2, which is associated with the pleasant "flow state" marked by being totally engaged in a task and losing track of time? The article contains some tips.

Flow occurs when you engage in an activity that is just challenging enough for you. So choosing the right task difficulty may be one way to change mental gears and harness the power of the locus coeruleus. Shine also points to evidence that practices like meditation can enhance overall focus and emotional regulation. “I think of it as a way of training the arousal system – which the locus coeruleus is a part of – so that you have much more conscious control in everyday life,” he says.

Another strategy is to make the most of the mind-body connection. Storoni says the locus coeruleus has a direct relationship with the autonomic nervous system, which regulates things like our heart rate and breathing. This means physical movement can influence its gearing. For instance, light exercise – such as a brisk walk – in the early morning can move us from Gear 1 to Gear 2. To wind down from Gear 3, meanwhile, we might engage in yoga and controlled breathing.

...We might also reconsider the way we manage our work. Monotonous or boring tasks can shift us down into Gear 1, for example, so that we lose focus and begin daydreaming. Here, the solution involves increasing mental load. “Perhaps by doing something in parallel, a form of multitasking,” says Storoni. Listening to music is one option, but sometimes you may need something that requires more concentration, such as an audiobook. With intense work, we face the opposite problem: the brain can only spend so much time in Gear 2 before it starts feeling fatigue. That’s why we should arrange regular breaks.

...But simply knowing about your brain’s gears can make a difference. The key is self awareness: noting when your brain is under- or overstimulated and adapting your behaviour appropriately. It may have taken more than two centuries, but it is time we all learned to respect our little blue dot.

Doty's book, Mind Magic, made sense to me. With one glaring exception.

Well, today I finished reading James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. I started off liking the book more than how I ended up liking it. 

The general thrust of Mind Magic is hard to argue with. The human mind is like an iceberg: the conscious tip, which we're aware of, is much smaller than the subconscious bulk, which we aren't aware of.

Yet thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and such mostly bubble up from the subconscious rather than our conscious awareness. We all are familiar with thoughts that appear unbidden and depart without a conscious goodbye. Emotions, even more so.

Still, the conscious aspect of us is important, obviously. Leaving aside the question of whether we have free will (Doty says it doesn't really matter if we do), every experience, whether it be conscious or subconscious, has an impact on us.

This means that we can influence how the subconscious operates through our conscious thoughts, visualizations, intentions, and goals. In this way our mind can become attuned to facilitating what we want to have happen. 

In my first post about the book, I shared a passage from the introduction that summarized the Mind Magic approach.

There is much confusion about manifestation in popular culture, so before I go any further, here is what I mean by the term: manifesting is defining an intention such that it gets embedded into our subconscious, which functions below the level of consciousness. By doing so, we activate brain networks associated with goal orientation that make an intention important, salient, or noteworthy.

In practice, this means that regardless of whether or not that intention is present on a conscious level, brain mechanisms that remain focused on the goal are activated around the clock. Our inner intention now guides our life. By using our inner power to tap the vast resources of our own brain, we gradually decrease the impact of our external environment and begin living from our deepest intentions.

In fact, the first step in successfully manifesting is to separate yourself from the belief that there is an external source for solving your problems and that this external source is what is manifesting in your life. If you want to live a rich, meaningful, and prosperous life, you do not have to appease any power beyond yourself.

I really liked what Doty said here, including how he began his book.

THE UNIVERSE DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.

It may not sound like it, but this is good news. The universe doesn't give a fuck about you, not because you are not worthy or are out of alignment with the cosmos or have been put under a curse for ten generations. No, the universe doesn't give a fuck about you because it has no fucks to give.

Many of us are taught to spend our lives hoping for something outside of ourselves to fix our problems and make us whole: a winning lottery ticket, a wise guide who knows all the answers, a guru, a guardian angel, or some magical being, force, energy, or genie sitting out there in the universe who will make everything work out for us. For years I longed to believe this, too.

I thought there was a stern cosmic parent tracking all our actions and deciding if we were worthy to receive our dream house or to meet our soulmate or to be cured of cancer. As a neuroscientist and physician, I know today that we have no proof of such a force or being but we have a great deal of scientific evidence of the power of our own minds to produce changes in our lives that may at first appear impossible. This is the practice of manifestation. 

However, I got the feeling after reading the final chapters that either Doty decided to alter the message of the universe not giving a fuck about us, or an editor of his publisher advised he do this, since manifesting is a trendy topic and likely most of those interested in this subject believe that, as in The Secret, the universe actually does bring us what we desire if we approach the "I do give a fuck about you" universe in the correct way.

The best example of this in Mind Magic is in the final chapter before the conclusion, "Step Six: Release Expectations and Open to Magic."

Doty describes the tale of Lynne Twist, an executive for the Hunger Project, who took a trip to Guatemala and  "had an extraordinary experience, led by a shaman in the mountains" that led her to feel she should "devote her energies to the project of protecting the Sacred Headwaters and its Indigenous people."

Soon after, Doty says, Twist received a gift.

"It sounds terrible," she says, "but the gift I received from the universe was malaria." In fact, there were two strains of it at once, one from India and the other from Ethiopia.

For many months she couldn't do her Hunger Project job. When she got better, she realized that she didn't need to go back to that job.

As Lynne describes it, the mystical power of the rainforest and the power of the Indigenous people's voices drew her toward them, and the seduction of the natural world became almost an obsession... "I believe the circumstances of my illness arranged themselves to ensure this huge life pivot or reallocation of who I am and what I was about."

Doty says:

This is indeed a subtle practice, because part of the power of the manifesting techniques is to ground our intention in highly specific and emotionally coded visualizations. However, we have to remember that the high level of detail in our visualizations is for classifying our intention as important within the subconscious, not for actually exerting influence on our external world.

In other words, holding a powerfully imagined and emotionally resonant vision of our intention in our minds allows our subconscious to guide our activity, but the results of that activity come from the world around us and what it needs... The reality is that we rarely need to know exactly how our intention will be realized or how we will reach our destination. We only need to look for the next right step.

Now, I readily admit that these passages are much less objectionable than the craziness of The Secret, which did indeed claim that thoughts alone can change the objective circumstances of one's life. All I'm pointing out is that Doty is skating on the edge of the universe responding to our intentions, though he doesn't quite go that far.

I did end up with quite a few question marks penned in the margin of that final chapter. Also, in the Conclusion, where Doty writes:

In my life, I have experienced the power of manifesting in ways that I cannot explain. When I first began the practice, I devoted all my energy and attention and heart to making sure my family's rent was paid so that we would not be evicted from our apartment. Out of the blue, a man who owed my father for a job showed up at our door and handed me an envelope full of money -- enough to pay our rent with plenty left over for food.

I remember the excitement and joy I felt as I rushed as fast as I could on my bike, with tears in my eyes, to share the news with Ruth. That was my first taste of the true power of the practice. From a neuroscience point of view, I cannot say how I influenced the situation, but the wonder I felt laid the foundation for my belief in manifesting.

Since then, I have had countless similar experiences that may defy scientific logic but nonetheless speak to the inner power of setting an intention in the heart and mind.

To me it isn't a good sign when an author uses the phrase "that may deny scientific logic" in a book whose subtitle says "the neuroscience of manifestation." But I liked the final paragraph of the book, though it seems to be somewhat at odds with what Doty said above.

Lying back and taking in the beauty, abundance, and connection in my life, I remember the good news: it is the realization that the universe isn't separate from you but that you are the universe, and it is only you who can give a fuck. It is only you that can harness the power within yourself. And that is the real magic.

Learning new skills is key to improving both mind and body

Like most people, I'm a big believer in improving my skills. This is such an obvious thing to do, it hardly bears mentioning. But I feel like I need to stress the obvious, because some visitors to this blog seem to view spirituality as a "one and done" sort of thing. 

Meaning, you find a religion, meditation technique, mystical path, or whatever that suits you, and you stick with that approach with no modifications for the rest of your life. Yeah, I realize this sounds ridiculous, and it is. Yet I've encountered people who actually seem to believe it's the way to go.

Which goes against how we deal with just about every other activity of mind or body. 

I started playing tennis at a young age, twelve or so. I played competitively into my 30s. I never stopped trying to improve my game: taking lessons, trying new racquets, stringing racquets at various tensions, hitting balls against a backboard.

I began learning Tai Chi in 2005. Nineteen years later, I'm way past being a beginner. My Tai Chi instructor, even more so. Yet my instructor is continually teaching new techniques. Naturally they become subtler since almost everyone in our classes is well versed in the basics of Tai Chi. There's always something more to learn about Tai Chi, though.

When it comes to meditation, I've meditated daily for about 55 years. Just as with tennis and Tai Chi, I'm always open to fresh ideas about how to make my meditation more pleasant and fulfilling. That's why I like to read new books about meditation and mindfulness, along with re-reading old books -- since I've found that as I change over the years, how I look upon a meditation/mindfulness book will change also.

Teachers are helpful in improving skills, whether they be an actual person or a virtual person (book, video, web site, etc.). I've never agreed 100% with any teacher I've had. All I look for in a teacher is the ability to help me learn something new. They always will look upon some things differently than I do, so I pick and choose what I accept from a teacher and what I reject.

For example, I'm enjoying James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. However, some of what he says doesn't resonate with me, either because Doty is wrong, or he's right and I don't understand what he's getting at.

Doty speaks about synchronicity being a way for us to manifest what we desire through unexpected connections that arise in our life.

Okay, we've all experienced amazing coincidences that can seem as if the universe is sending a message to us. That's possible, though unlikely. Given how many happenings there are every day in everybody's life, coincidences and synchronicity are going to occur once in a while just by chance, like rolling a pair of dice and getting two sixes five times in a row.

Yesterday I stopped by our bank to deposit a check. I wanted to get that errand done as quickly as possible, since I needed to go grocery shopping afterwards and then walk our dog before it got dark, which happens pretty early this time of the year in Oregon.

I had to wait a while before a teller was free. I got a woman who I'd noticed had spent quite a bit of time with a previous customer. That transaction required the assistance of a supervisor. When I was called to her station, I was mildly irked at having to wait so long. I handed her a deposit slip and a check, but she asked, "What do you need to do?"

"A deposit," I said, "I just gave it to you." "Anything else?" "No." She then fiddled with her terminal before asking me for my I.D. I dug out my drivers license, gave it to her, and said, "Why do you need I.D.? I've been banking here for a long time." "Because I'm new and don't know you."

That changed everything. Now I knew why she was taking so long to help customers. She needed assistance from a supervisor to do my transaction, but that didn't bother me after I realized she was learning on the job. 

After going grocery shopping at a couple of stores, I decided to get a grande decaf nonfat vanilla latte at the Starbucks within the south Salem Fred Meyer store. The barista, an older man, needed me to repeat my order several times before he got it right on the terminal. Eventually he had to call another barista over to show him where "vanilla" was on the screen.

This was fine with me, as I'd noticed that he had to use a "cheat sheet" of how to make Starbucks drinks with the customer ahead of me. Meaning, he also was learning his job. This is rare for me, encountering someone who is new at their job. Yet it happened twice in the space of an hour or so.

Doty might say that was synchronicity, that I needed to learn something about patience and compassion for slow employees. However, I just see it as a coincidence. Regardless, I learned something about myself. Next time I won't be so quick to get irritated at an employee who takes extra time to do something for me.

That's all we can hope for from life. Learning. Becoming more skilled. Having more compassion and love. As my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Marshall, was fond of saying, "Do your best. Angels can do no better." 

Mindfulness is focused attention plus peripheral awareness

In December 2018, six years ago, I wrote what seems to be my first (and only) post about a book I'd just started reading, The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness.

A few days ago something spurred me to pluck the book from a bookshelf where it had been languishing after I'd read about half of the 415 pages, then put it aside.

I decided to re-read it, since the book methodically describes ten stages of Buddhist meditation and I wanted to start at the beginning rather than jump right into Stage Six, where is where I left off. 

I liked the book before, and I'm liking it now. The author, John Yates, who also goes by Culadasa, is deeply versed in what meditation is all about, and has a knack for describing meditation in a manner that is clear, creative, and compelling. 

In my 2018 post, I noted how the book's discussion of attention and awareness makes a lot of sense. Both are necessary in both everyday life and meditation. (RSSB refers to the India-based religious organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.)

In my reading this morning I was struck by the wisdom of clearly distinguishing attention from awareness. A Glossary in the back of the book defines these terms.

Attention: The cognitive ability to select and analyze specific information and ignore other information arising from a vast field of internal and external stimuli. Attention is one of two forms of conscious awareness. Peripheral awareness is the second: we pay attention to some things, while simultaneously being aware of, but not attending to, others. 

Awareness: As used in this book, awareness always has the same meaning as peripheral awareness. It never means attention, nor does it refer to covert or non-conscious awareness. 

Any meditation approach that doesn't combine the benefits of attention and awareness is like a bird trying to fly with one wing. Both are needed. When we drive a car, we can't focus all of our attention on staying in our lane and keeping a safe distance from the car ahead of us. 

We've got to have peripheral awareness also. What if a car unexpectedly runs a stop light at an intersection? What if a child chasing a ball runs into the road? There are so many things we need to be aware of, other than what our primary focus is.

This is why mantra meditation, where a word or words is repeated (usually soundlessly) as a focus of attention, is very limited. Repeating a mantra was emphasized by the RSSB teachings that I followed for so many years. And not only during the time of meditation, but as much as possible throughout the rest of the day.

I eventually realized that this had some major drawbacks.

I found that when I put too much attention on the mantra, I distanced myself from the reality of what was around me. Like, the person I was talking with, or nature, if I was out on a walk. I also observed that many RSSB devotees acted a lot like robots, lacking spontaneity, naturalness, social awareness. 

They were so focused on keeping their attention from scattering out into the world, they were clueless about what was happening in the world -- the exact opposite of mindfulness, which requires a wise balancing of attention and awareness. There's a time to be focused on one thing, and there's a time to be aware of the entirety of what surrounds us.

Since recently I've been reading and writing about a couple of books aimed at making the reader better able to manifest their goals, with each book emphasizing the importance of positivity in our affirmations, visualizations, and such, I was struck by how The Mind Illuminated echoes that advice in a chapter I re-read today. 

Here Yates is discussing the process of (1) forgetting the meditation goal of focusing attention on the breath at the nose, (2) engaging in some mind-wandering, and (3) waking up again to the goal of focusing attention on the breath at the nose.

Awakening to the present is an important opportunity to understand and appreciate how your mind works. You've just had a minor epiphany, an "aha!" moment of realizing there's a disconnect between what you're doing (thinking about something else) and what you intended to do (watch the breath).

But this wasn't something you did. Nor can you voluntarily make it happen. The process that discovered this disconnect isn't under your conscious control. It happens unconsciously, but when the "findings" become conscious, you have an "aha!" moment of introspective awareness.

The way to overcome mind-wandering is by training this unconscious process to make the discovery and bring it into consciousness sooner and more often. Yet, how do you train something that happens unconsciously?

Simply take a moment to enjoy and appreciate "waking up" from mind-wandering. Savor the sense of being more fully conscious and present. Cherish your epiphany and encourage yourself to have more of them. 

Conscious intention and affirmation powerfully influence our unconscious processes. By valuing this moment, you're training the mind through positive reinforcement to wake you up more quickly in the future.

Also, avoid becoming annoyed or self-critical about mind-wandering. It doesn't matter that your mind wandered. What's important is that you realized it. To become annoyed or self-critical in the "aha!" moment will slow down your progress.

You can't scold the mind into changing, especially when dealing with entrenched mental patterns like forgetting and mind-wandering. It's like telling your unconscious you don't want to have the mind-wandering interrupted. If negative emotions do arise, simply notice them and let them come, let them be, and let them go. 

It's like training a pet. Consistent, immediate positive reinforcement of behaviors we want will be far more effective than punishing behaviors we don't. 

My fear of death is less now. But is there anything to fear, really?

I used to have a strong fear of death. So much so, as I described in a 2004 HinesSight post ("Give me liberty or give me gerbil"), I made an attorney say gerbil rather than death whenever she needed to refer to my eventual demise. 

Kathleen Evans, the attorney, did a masterful job at a whiteboard injecting into our legal-impaired brains the gist (but not the details, blessedly) of why what we did in 1993 still made sense in 2004, even with arcane changes in some estate and tax laws whose sole purpose seemed to be to make things so complicated that you had to hire a lawyer to explain them to you. Isn’t that the reason behind most laws?

When we first sat down in Kathleen’s office, I reminisced that in 1993 we did our talking at a table by her Court Street window. That was where I made Kathleen substitute the word “gerbil” for “death” when she was referring to my eventual, um, gerbiling. It just was too uncomfortable for me back then to hear, “So, after Brian’s death, Laurel will need to….”

I’m not sure if “So, after Brian’s gerbil” was much better, but it added a certain levity to what otherwise was a not-so-pleasant discussion. Laurel has no trouble talking about her own death. I admire her. Death scares me shitless, though the older I get, I suppose enough shit has been scared out of me already to make what remains less noticeable.

Early on yesterday I noticed that Kathleen wasn’t saying “death” when she spoke to me. She wasn’t saying “gerbil” either, but was substituting the usual sorts of euphemisms: “gone,” “no longer with us,” and such. I told her, “It’s OK to say ‘Brian’s death’ now. I’ve gotten past the whole gerbil thing.”

It's interesting that I was so afraid of death in 1993, as that was when I still believed in the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization led by a guru considered to be God in Human Form who supposedly would guide his disciples after their death -- either to heavenly realms beyond the physical, or, if your karmas were in bad shape, into a new human form through reincarnation.

Yet it was during my true-believing days that my fear of death was greatest. By 2004, when I wrote the gerbil post, I had started to distance myself from the RSSB teachings, which coincided with an increased willingness to speak directly about my eventual death. 

Now I'm even more accepting of death. Sure, that may be partly due to my age, 76, since the older I get, the more I feel like I've enjoyed a decently long life. Plus, with age comes increasing aches and pains, along with other health problems, so it becomes easier to visualize a time when life becomes so difficult, death will seem like a relief.

However, it seems to me that the main reason why death doesn't seem so scary is that I no longer feel like I'm a special spiritual person, a disciple of a Perfect Living Master whose destiny is to be united with the highest manifestation of God, far above the limited godliness that members of ordinary religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam will attain.

Instead, now I have rejoined the ranks of ordinary human beings. And that feels extraordinary. 

Occasionally a sense of "one day I'll die and be nonexistent forever!" will wash over me. I'll be in awe of the amazing preciousness of whatever I'm doing when that realization strikes my mind like a bolt of reality lightning. This usually-taken-for-granted activity -- doing Tai Chi, washing the dishes, walking the dog, whatever -- suddenly seems infinitely valuable, since after I die, there won't be any moments of living at all.

But here's the thing: if I reflect upon that sense of leaving life behind forever, I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing than whatever I'm doing right now. I'm not big on "bucket lists," those activities people come up with that they're determined to engage in before they kick the bucket. (Meaning, die.)

I don't feel that taking a trip to Europe would make death more acceptable than staying at home. I don't feel that writing another book would make death more acceptable than composing a blog post every night. I don't feel that meditating twice as long in the morning would make death more acceptable than how I currently meditate. I don't feel that contemplating nature would make death more acceptable than watching a football game. 

Since I'm back to looking upon myself as an ordinary human being, which is how I saw myself before I joined RSSB, I'm comfortable with the fact that death comes to everybody. I had no control over being born. I have no control over being dead. Both are inescapable aspects of life.

This is a big relief for me. When I was religiously-minded, I'd feel like I had to make every moment count, since I'd been taught that this physical plane of existence wasn't my real home, that my destiny lay elsewhere. 

Now, I don't see myself as a spiritual being experiencing physical existence, but simply as a physical being experiencing physical existence -- along with everybody else in the world. One day my experiencing will end, as will that of everybody else. And that's just the way things are. Which is fine by me.

Understanding how our mind works requires going back to prehistory

Before I share more about what I'm learning in James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, here's a revelation that I found germane to Doty's message.

In a recent issue of New Scientist, there was an article about what happened to the Neanderthals. You know, our prehistoric relations who aren't around any longer but live on in the fact that most humans of non-African ancestry have a genetic makeup that's about 1-4 % Neanderthal, which shows that us Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred.

The article said that recent archaeological discoveries, notably from a cave in France, indicate that the last Neanderthal died about 42,000 to 45,000 years ago. Prior to that, Neanderthals and early humans took turns living in the cave over a lengthy span of time, many thousands of years.

This brought home to me an important fact: the brain and body of us modern humans are essentially unchanged from that of our ancestors who lived in the French cave along with Neanderthals. What's changed is human culture, technology, and such, not how our brain and body function. 

As noted in a post on my HinesSight blog, Doty points out that the sympathetic nervous system evolved to aid prehistoric humans in dealing with the many threats that endangered them long ago. Speaking of the autonomic nervous system, he says:

This part of the nervous system developed early in our evolution as a species and has two divisions. The first to evolve was the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), whose job it is to ensure our physical survival and the survival of our genes, and whose primary activity is to engage the fight, flight, or freeze response. 

...Because it evolved to act in life-or-death situations, it moves along very short neurons and therefore has the power to completely commandeer our physical and emotional resources in a split second, filling our body with stress hormones like cortisol and tensing our muscles for action.

Later, the human nervous system evolved further with the addition of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), also known as the rest-and-digest response, whose job is to return the body to a peaceful resting state, a process known as homeostasis. 

The switch to rest-and-digest is accompanied by a wide variety of physiological changes to promote balance and harmony: our muscles relax, our heart rate and blood pressure decrease, and we produce more saliva for digestion.

We still have a bias toward negativity, in line with the fact that fight, flight, or freeze responses were an earlier evolutionary adaptation than rest-and-digest responses.

This helps explain why voters appeared to be so swayed by Donald Trump's appeals to fear and anxiety: Migrants are streaming across the border raping and killing Americans! (ignoring the fact that migrants have lower crime rates than other people); Your child can go to school as a boy and come back as a girl! (ignoring the fact that parents have to give approval for transgender operations and these are very rare in childhood).

So it takes more effort to overcome that negativity bias than to give in to it. This applies to our negativity toward ourselves, as when we want to improve our life in some way and come up short. If our weight loss program doesn't work, we blame our lack of willpower. Ditto for exercising more, being less stressed at work, or other goals we might have.

That's why Doty, along with other neuroscientists, is big on positive affirmations and visualizations. These send a signal to our mind about what is important in our life. I like his analogy about the filing clerk and the bloodhound.

We teach our subconscious what is important through repetition and and positive emotion. As we repeat our rituals and visualizations, we enter a state of flow, or complete absorption in our inner activity. Deep experiences of positive emotion, whether from real or imagined experiences, teach our subconscious to associate the goals we wish to pursue with the biological reward systems of our bodies.

In this state, our sense of self-consciousness is dialed down and we transcend the limiting beliefs of our mental habits and invite guidance from our deeper resources, such as our capacity for compassion or the creations of our imagination. Absorption in our inner vision is the state that connects us to creativity and clarifies our intention in our subconscious.

The magic is that, as we go about our daily lives, while we may not be directly thinking about our inner intention with our conscious mind, the subconscious goes on processing it and attuning toward it.

We might think of the subconscious as comprised of a filing clerk and a bloodhound. The filing clerk oversees a limited filing cabinet governed by the brain's conservation of energy and the needs we've placed on it. Once the filing clerk places a file in the cabinet, the bloodhound gets the scent and relentlessly scans our environment for the slightest whiff of it.

The bloodhound will then be on the trail at the subconscious level, attending to manifesting our intention around the clock, employing whatever powers, focus, or opportunities it can find. This is the experience of synchronicity, when seemingly unexpected connections begin to appear in service of a particular desire. This is a fundamental component of manifesting.

As we can see, the real estate of the subconscious is precious and has the power to shape our destiny. What the subconscious seeks, the conscious mind finds. So, if we feel threatened and believe on a subconscious level that we live in a threatening world that is out to harm us, our bloodhound will scan for threats and we will find ourselves discovering more and more threatening elements in our outer environment. 

If we have taught our subconscious mind to seek connection, joy, fulfillment, and thriving, we will naturally find ourselves discovering more and more opportunities to experience those positive emotions in reality. 

...The important thing to understand about the subconscious is that it responds to repetition. The more we focus on a particular outcome, visualize it, imaginatively experience it with our five senses, and repeat the desire to ourselves and to the world, the more the filing clerk will catch on to the salience of our desire and the more our bloodhound will get to work to have our mind manifest our intention.

...As long as the SNS [sympathetic nervous system] is curating the subconscious, the filing cabinet will be filled with fears, phobias, insecurities, and habitual beliefs that will be skewing our experience of life to the negative, the frightening, and the limited. Before we bring the light of awareness to our subconscious, we must see that it is really the domain of our survival fears and desires, the legacy of our evolutionary inheritance.

And so the first step in harnessing the power of our subconscious is to sublimate all the whims and wants of the SNS. In practice, this means recognizing that our tendencies to be stressed and anxious derive from the experiences of evolutionary predecessors that have been embedded in the subconscious and become the default software. 

As we learn how the subconscious works, this gives us the power to get information into the system. We begin to put the information we choose into the subconscious and thereby replace the information it is getting by default from the SNS. We are manifesting our own agency.

What we are doing is using the cortex, the higher level control system in the brain, and changing how the vagus nerve responds to our intentions on a conscious level. By doing so we are creating a direct neural route to influencing the subconscious. 

When we consciously practice repetitive visualization techniques and rituals to conjure powerful positive emotions around our desired outcomes, we are increasing the power of the PNS [parasympathetic nervous system] and diminishing that of the SNS.

The subconscious has both expansive and contractive sides. In other words, the SNS has the power to subconsciously influence the subconscious, while the cortex has the power to consciously influence the subconscious. 

As we access this power, we begin to break up the SNS's unholy monopoly on our subconscious, freeing ourselves from the grip of survival fears that we find hard to ignore and that distract us from our deepest intentions. Using practices of suggestibility and conscious repetition, we limit the SNS's own direct path to the subconscious and gain the power to positively choose its contents.

Tiny Habits is a good way to change our behavior for the better

As I was making my way through James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, I came across an intriguing mention of another book: Tiny Habits, by B.J. Fogg. 

After perusing the Amazon listing, and seeing how well liked the book was by thousands of readers, I decided it was worth $11.67 to click on "Buy Now." I've only read the first 40 pages, but I'm liking what Fogg has to say. 

Sure, it appears that Tiny Habits has become a sort of cottage industry since it was published in January 2020. The Tiny Habits web site is testimony to that. However, I suspect that the appeal of the Tiny Habits approach to behavior change isn't so much due to clever marketing, but to the simplicity of the basic notions.

The Introduction describes what they are.

Over the last twenty years, I've found that most everyone wants to make some sort of change: eat healthier, lose weight, exercise more, reduce stress, get better sleep.

...When our results fall short of our expectations, the inner critic finds an opening and steps on stage. Many of us believe that if we fail to be more productive, lose weight, or exercise regularly then something must be wrong with us.

If only we were better people, we wouldn't have failed. If only we had followed that program to the letter or kept those promises to ourselves, we would have succeeded. We just need to get our act together and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and do better. Right?

Nope. Sorry. Not right.

We are not the problem.

Our approach to change is. It's a design flaw, not a personal flaw. 

Building habits and creating positive change can be easy -- if you have the right approach. A system based on how human psychology really works. A process that makes change easier. Tools that don't rely on guesswork or faulty principles.

Popular thinking about habit formation and change feeds into our impulse to set unrealistic expectations. We know habits matter; we just need more good habits and fewer bad ones. But here we are, still struggling to change. Still thinking it's our fault.

All my research and hands-on experience tell me that this is exactly the wrong mindset. In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things:

-- Stop judging yourself.
-- Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors.
-- Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.

I've been trying out the first two exercises in the book. I usually never do exercises in books, because they're too damn hard, like those in Doty's Mind Magic book. He'll say to do a progressive relaxation exercise for 10 minutes or so, then engage in visualizations of some sort, like what's most important for the reader to achieve in this life, then spend five minutes writing down those insights, and so on.

By contrast, Fogg says: 

I won't prescribe exact habits in this book. I'm sharing a method for wiring in any habit you want. You pick the habits. But right here, right now, I'm making an exception. I invite you to start practicing a new habit each and every morning. It's simple. And it takes about three seconds. I call it the Maui Habit.

After you put your feet on the floor in the morning, immediately say this phrase, "It's going to be a great day." As you say these seven words, try to feel optimistic and positive. The recipe in Tiny Habits format looks like this.

I've been doing this for a few mornings. It really does make me feel better when I say, "It's going to be a great day." Or "I'm going to have a great day." I liked that Fogg said that if saying this feels phony to him, he modifies it to "It's going to be a great day -- somehow."

A basic notion of the Tiny Habits approach is that to be successful with a new habit, it has to be easy to do and pleasurable. 

Here's another exercise that I also like a lot and have been doing regularly.

If there's one concept from my book I hope you embrace, it's this: People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. For that purpose, I have created this exercise for you.

Step 1. Write this phrase on a small piece of paper: I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. 

Step 2. Tape the paper to your bathroom mirror or anywhere you will frequently see it.

Step 3. Read the phrase often.

Step 4. Notice how this insight works in your life (and for the people around you).

I've put this phrase in my iPhone's Reminders app, which I use as my to-do list. It reminds me that my long-standing habit of feeling bad when I make a mistake, screw up, say something that I regret, or otherwise fail to live up to my expectation about myself isn't at all productive. 

It's almost like I've been addicted to beating myself up. I guess that would be fine if this sort of self-inflicted punishment caused me to be a better person, but it doesn't. That's why I've enjoying saying "I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad," quite a few times a day. It reminds me to be as compassionate toward myself as I seek to be with other people.

There's much more to say about the Tiny Habits book, of course, as I get deeper into it. Here's the basic model of the book's approach. You can probably figure out what it means on your own, but I'll talk about the model, which makes sense to me, in another blog post. B:MAP means "behavior happens when motivation, and ability, and prompt converge at the same moment."

Open Thread 48 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

Buddhist meditation and psychology can learn from each other

My undergraduate major in college was psychology. I also started to practice daily meditation while in college. So for me, psychology and meditation always have been linked, though not always as closely as they are now.

I say this, because for thirty-five years my meditation had an otherworldly emphasis. After being initiated by an Indian guru, my goal was to meditate in a fashion that would enable my soul-consciousness to leave this worldly plane of existence behind and travel to higher regions of supernatural reality.

Yeah, right...

All that had very little to do with modern psychology. But for about twenty years, I've been meditating in a Buddhist'y fashion, though I don't consider myself a Buddhist. Following the breath. Mindfulness. Loving kindness. 

Those sorts of things are firmly within the realm of psychology. Which is why I printed out a 2002 talk by psychologist Eleanor Rosch, "What Buddhist Meditation has to Tell Psychology About the Mind." 
Download Buddhist meditation paper

I just came across the talk in a stack of magazines and other material that I hadn't looked at for a long time. Re-reading it this morning, I found interesting what Rosch had to say, even though it didn't really break any new ground for me. I'll share some excerpts, along with my comment on each excerpt in italics.  

One of the best-kept secrets of the last several centuries may be that some of what we classify as religious experience can make a fundamental contribution to scientific psychology. One hundred years ago William James suggested this radical idea in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, yet today mainstream psychology is no closer to considering the idea than it was in 1902.

Surely one root of this recalcitrance is the way in which the categories and imagery of our society envisage an otherworldly religion and a naturalistic psychology which are on different planes of existence altogether and cannot communicate with one another.

I believe that the Eastern traditions now arriving on our shore, particularly Buddhist thought and meditation, can bridge this divide and can reveal a quite new understanding of what the human mind and its knowing capacity actually are.

Agreed, by and large. Genuine Buddhism isn't otherworldly, though many people overlay Buddhist teachings with a heavy dose of religious supernaturalism, such as, for example, making the Buddha into a sort of god rather than an earthly teacher.

We all know the image of a human that is common in present psychology and cognitive science: the mind is seen as something isolated inside the body, peering tentatively out at a piecemeal and initially incomprehensible world, trying so hard to find simple predictive relationships between events so that it can survive. It stores the results of its experience in memory to form a coherent but inherently indirect and abstract representation of the world and of itself.

Ideas, emotions, actions, and consciousness have evolved to fulfill the only originating value which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner in a world of limited reward and much threat.

Such a portrait is not alien to the Eastern traditions. In Buddhism it is somewhat analogous to samsara, the wheel of existence to which sentient beings are bound by their habits; in Hinduism it might be depicted as lower states of consciousness; and in Taoism it might be portrayed, with a smile, as the activities of the monkey in us.

All three Eastern traditions agree that in this habitual state of mind, we are mistaken about everything important — about who and what we are, what is real, and how to act. But this is not the only possible mode of knowing the world. And here we come to the central topic of this talk. There is an alternative way of knowing. And that alternative is seen as our original, natural, fundamental state, what we are right now, not any particular or special experience.

For simplicity in this talk let us call our more limited habitual mode of knowing consciousness and the alternative more basic, comprehensive, and wiser form of knowing awareness.

Interesting. I've always considered consciousness and awareness to be very similar, if not identical. After all, how could we be aware of something without consciousness? But I'm open to the distinction Rosch is making, as discussed below, even though I don't really comprehend it.

Were awareness available only to a few skilled and practiced religious athletes, it would be of little use either for daily life or for science. But it is said to be widely available, in fact closer to us than our own eyes.

The trick is that consciousness and awareness are not actually two separate things — and this is where talking about such matters becomes elusive — because all experience is actually made out of awareness. This is analogous to Plotinus’ “what sees is not our reason, but something prior and superior to our reason.” And Rumi reminds us: “We seldom hear the inner music / But we’re all dancing to it nevertheless.”

This point might be clarified, hopefully, by a computer analogy. The consciousness mode of knowing the world can be likened to a particular computer program running on a more basic operating system. In daily life and in cognitive science we mistake the limited consciousness program for the whole system.

We keep trying to study how the system works, but all we can see is the functioning of the program in which we are confined. Every attempt to see beyond or get out of the program, either in science or in religious striving, is frustrated because to try to get out, we are only using the operations of the program itself.

Such a possibility ought to give scientists of the mind some pause because it implies that the very techniques, rules, hypotheses, assumptions, tests, and suspicions designed to make the study of the mind objective are themselves but products of operations of that same program. So how do you ever get out; where’s the exit key?

There are a number of methods common, in varying degrees, to the world religions, but the specialty of Buddhism is to find awareness in the everyday experiences of consciousness itself, including all the senses, by means of cultivating intense mindfulness and intimacy with ongoing experience. That is what makes Buddhist practice particularly valuable as a link to psychology.

Here's why I part company with Rosch somewhat. I don't find her computer analogy persuasive, nor do I find it compatible with my understanding of Buddhist meditation. I don't believe that Buddhism makes a distinction between thoughts and feelings, abstraction and concreteness, or any other division between states of the brain/mind. 

The idea that there's an "exit key" strikes me as an add-on to Buddhist philosophy, which teaches that emptiness is form and form is emptiness. The duality that Rosch speaks of here, where "the program" is distinct from some form of non-programmed awareness, seems at odds not only with modern neuroscience but with ancient Buddhism.

Anyway, in her talk Rosch then discusses "some ways in which the wisdom of awareness shows up in the functioning of our minds in everyday life." She says that "consciousness is really awareness in disguise," a statement that I don't understand.

I invite you to read her entire talk and decide for yourself whether what she says makes sense to you. I don't find anything truly objectionable in what Rosch says. I just have trouble with grasping what she's really getting at, aside from the rather obvious fact that Buddhism and psychology both study the workings of the human mind and have something to learn from each other.

Here's a paragraph from her "Interdependence" section that's an example of how Rosch uses words in a fairly elegant way, but I still find it difficult to fathom her basic point.

An understanding of interdependence has clinical significance. It can provide people who suffer from guilt, depression, or anxiety with a vision of themselves as part of an interdependent network in which they need neither blame themselves nor feel powerless. In fact it may be that it is only when people are able to see the way in which they are not responsible for events that they can find the deeper level at which it is possible to take responsibility beyond concept and (depending upon the terminology of one’s religious affiliation) repent, forgive, relax, or have power over the phenomenal world.