Church of the Churchless

We impose meaningfulness on the world through our stories

Yesterday my increasingly buggy blogging service, Typepad, kept generating a "503" error message all day long, so I wasn't able to write a post for one of my other blogs. I just did that, composing "My fall into a creek shows why doing one thing at a time makes sense." 

That post includes a mention of my recent post here about human cognition being amazingly slow, so it's worth a read. You also can see photos of an attractive creek that runs through our rural property.

Plus our electricity is off at the moment, owing to some downed power lines in our neighborhood. (We have a Generac whole house generator, so are doing fine, pretty much.) So I'm going to take the easy way out with this blog post and simply share a passage from Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, that I found interesting.

This passage follows a story from Wright about how he was on a meditation retreat where construction work was going on in the building, causing loud noises from buzz saws and other equipment. At first that bothered Wright a lot while he was meditating. But eventually he was able to simply listen to the construction sounds without thinking thoughts like, "This is really annoying." The passage starts with his speaking with a leader of the meditation retreat.

So I pressed her on what precisely was meant by the term [formless]. She confirmed my suspicion that it didn't mean that the physical world doesn't exist or that we are devoid of structure. Tables exist, buzz saws exist.

After a few minutes of conversation I felt I got her gist. I asked, "So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?" She answered, "Exactly."

I hasten to add that this doesn't mean we live in a meaningless universe. Deeply embedded in Buddhist thought is the intrinsic moral value of sentient life -- not just the value of human beings but the value of all organisms that have subjective experience and so are capable of pain and pleasure, of suffering and not suffering. And this value in turn imparts value to other things, such as helping people, being kind to dogs, and so on. Moral meaning, is, in that sense, inherent in life. 

But the point Narayan was making is that, as we go about our day-to-day lives, we impart a kind of narrative meaning to things. Ultimately these narratives assume large form. We decide that something we've done was a huge mistake, and if we had done something else instead, everything would be wonderful.

Or we decide that we must have some particular possession or achievement, and if we don't get it, everything will be horrible. Underlying these narratives, at their foundation, are elementary narrative judgments about the goodness or badness of things in themselves.

So, for example, if I start spinning a long narrative about how coming to this meditation retreat was a huge mistake, and I'm always making mistakes like this, and so on, there are a number of questionable premises on which this story rests. 

There's the premise that, had I not gone on this retreat, whatever I did instead would have gone swimmingly, whereas for all I know, I would have been run over by a bus. There's the premise that having a few painful experiences this week means the retreat was on balance bad for me, whereas in fact its long-term effects are unknowable.

And at the base of this narrative lie the most basic kinds of premises: simple perceptual judgments such as "This buzz saw sound I hear while trying to meditate is bad." And this kind of meaning, which seems so firmly embedded in the texture of things, isn't, in fact, an inherent feature of reality; it is something we impose on reality, a story we tell about reality.

We build stories on stories on stories, and the problem with the stories begins at their foundation. Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, a tool for examining our stories carefully, from the ground up, so that we can, if we choose, separate truth from fabrication.

Everyone is a creator, says Rick Rubin

I've done a lot of creating in my life. But I've never thought of myself as an artist. Artists create paintings, music, sculptures, pottery, all that stuff that most people, including me, think are art'y.

Rick Rubin is leading me to expand that limited point of view. Recently I encountered Rubin when I was watching some episodes of 60 Minutes that I'd recorded and hadn't gotten around to viewing. The segment on Rubin was fascinating.

Here's a guy who claims to know nothing about music, yet is a highly successful record producer. (These days maybe it's more accurate to say recordings producer.) The Wikipedia page for Rubin says that he has meditated since he was 14.

The 60 Minutes episode was the first time I've ever seen an interview start with the interviewee requesting it begin with a bit of meditation. There's a short video on You Tube of about a third of the 60 Minutes piece that captures the essence of what Rubin is all about. Basically, he's into feeling. (I couldn't embed the video in this post, as it needs to be watched on You Tube.)

Wanting to know more about Rubin's outlook on life, I bought his book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I'm enjoying it. The many chapters are pleasingly short and written in an engaging style. Here's the first chapter where Rubin talks about creativity and art.

Those who do not engage in the traditional arts might be wary of calling themselves artists. They might perceive creativity as something extraordinary or beyond their capabilities. A calling for the special few who are born with these gifts.

Fortunately, this is not the case.

Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It's our birthright. And it's for all of us.

Creativity doesn't exclusively relate to making art. We all engage in this act on a daily basis.

To create is to bring something into existence that wasn't there before. It could be a conversation, the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, the rearrangement of furniture in a room, a new route home to avoid a traffic jam.

What you make doesn't have to be witnessed, recorded, sold, or encased in glass for it to be a work of art. Through the ordinary state of being, we're already creators in the most profound way, creating our experience of reality and composing the world we perceive. 

In each moment, we are immersed in a field of undifferentiated matter from which our senses gather bits of information. The outside universe we perceive doesn't exist as such. Through a series of electrical and chemical reactions, we generate a reality internally. 

We create forests and oceans, warmth and cold. We read words, hear voices, and form interpretations. Then, in an instant, we produce a response. All of this in a world of our own creation.

Regardless of whether or not we're formally making art, we are all living as artists. We perceive, filter, and collect data, then curate an experience for ourselves and others based on this information set. Whether we do this consciously or unconsciously, by the mere fact of being alive, we are active participants in the ongoing process of creation.

To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention. Refining our sensitivity to tune in to the more subtle notes. Looking for what draws us in and what pushes us away. Noticing what feeling tones arise and where they lead.

Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.

Here's an excerpt from his "Tuning In" chapter that describes more about how Rubin views creativity.

We are all translators for messages the universe is sending. The best artists tend to be the ones with the most sensitive antennae to draw in the energy resonating at a particular moment. Many great artists first develop sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves. They have to protect themselves because everything hurts more. They feel everything more deeply.

Often art arrives in movements. Bauhaus architecture, abstract expressionism, French New Wave cinema, Beat poetry, punk rock to name a few from recent history. These moments appear like a wave; some artists are able to read the culture and position themselves to ride that swell. Others might see the wave and choose to swim against the current.

We are all antennae for creative thought. Some transmissions come on strong, others are more faint. If your antenna isn't sensitively tuned, you're likely to lose the data in the noise. Particularly since the signals coming through are often more subtle than the content we collect through sensory awareness. They are energetic more than tactile, intuitively perceived more than consciously recorded.

Most of the time, we are gathering data from the world through the five senses. With the information that's being transmitted on higher frequencies, we are channeling energetic material that can't be physically grasped. It defies logic, in the same way that an electron can be in two places at once. This elusive energy is of great worth, though so few people are open enough to hold it.

How do we pick up on a signal that can neither be heard nor be defined? The answer is not to look for it. Nor do we attempt to predict or analyze our way into it. Instead, we create an open space that allows it. A space so free of the normal overpacked condition of our minds that it functions as a vacuum. Drawing down the ideas that the universe is making available.

This freedom is not as difficult to achieve as one might think. We all start with it. As children, we experience much less interference between receiving ideas and internalizing them.

We accept new information with delight instead of making comparisons to what we already believe; we live in the moment rather than worrying about future consequences; we are spontaneous more than analytical; we are curious, not jaded. Even the most ordinary experiences in life are met with a sense of awe. Deep sadness and intense excitement can come within moments of each other. There's no facade and no attachment to a story.

Artists who are able to continually create great works throughout their lives often manage to preserve these child-like qualities. Practicing a way of being that allows you to see the world through uncorrupted, innocent eyes can free you to act in concert with the universe's timetable.

I like the idea that love is akin to spaciousness

Love. What is it? For me, love has been easier to feel than to describe.

It seems to have something to do with attraction, since I want to be closer to people and things that I love, while the opposite is true of people and things that I hate or dislike.

Every night I say "love you" to my wife before we go to sleep. She says the same to me. It's a ritual that means a lot to me, in part because it makes me feel good to know that if I die in my sleep, those would have been the last words my wife would have heard from me.

Bumper sticker sentiments, such as God is love, strike me as almost totally meaningless. They sound fine, but they lack the concreteness of feeling love for someone or something that clearly exists, which isn't the case with God.

As noted before, this is why the title of Zen master Henry Shukman's book, Original Love, gave me some pause before I decided to buy it from Amazon. Fortunately, after reading 105 pages I'm liking how Shukman looks upon love. 

Basically, love is about spaciousness, which he relates to awareness being able to encompass anything and everything we can be aware of.

Love is like space in the sense that it gives space for things to be the way they are. It allows us to be in a troubled state. When we're no longer at war with the state we're in, our sense of identification can switch from being wrapped up in the trouble and relocate to the state of acceptance.

So while the trouble is still there, our identity can migrate from the knot of trouble to the broader context that is accepting of that knot. It's the sense of love that pulls us there. Love is a magnetism.

It's like gravity, except that rather than drawing us toward an object, it draws us into its spaciousness, which can comfortably hold the difficulty. Love loves what is difficult, which makes it no longer difficult. Explore this for yourself and see if you agree.

But what is the source of this love? It's actually simple too.

Once we are less narrowly focused, once we uncouple attention from what it has been contracting itself onto. we sense simply more of the space of awareness. Rather than being stuck in one little quadrant of awareness, we recognize more quadrants.

...One of the very features of original love is its unlimited awareness. At the deepest level, all forms of awareness are forms of it. It not only is aware of all, but also allows all experience to arise, and immediately and unconditionally meets it.

...The path to awakening, to original love, can be summarized as follows. We start to settle down. We start to lessen the hold of the hindrances.

The suffering many of us have lived with as a vague background condition -- a sense of lack, of deficiency, or a hunger, a hankering after things not yet here -- has come to the fore, and we are getting to know it more clearly. As a result of allowing it to be as it is, it is starting to dwindle and at times release itself.

As this happens, we begin to open up more to our actual experience in the here and now. We notice the whistle of the wind in the trees, the distant hum of traffic, and the sounds of a neighborhood. We relish the play of light and shadow, and we feel the magnificence of the weather, whether sunshine, cold mist, or crackling thunderheads. 

...We are returning to a natural appreciation for being, for the gift of living itself, without any need for accomplishment.

There are things about my wife that annoy me, just as there things about me that annoy her. Same is true of our dog. She can be annoying at times, and I'm sure I can annoy our dog. However, love is able to encompass those annoyances, making them appear less important in the overall light of love.

This is why what strangers do can be especially annoying. Typically I'm only aware of my irritation about their action, lacking the context of love that makes it much easier for me to accept the annoying things my wife and dog do.

One place where I frequently get annoyed is the circuit training weight room in my athletic club. Two of the three times a week I exercise at the club is just before my 4:30 pm Tai Chi class. I arrange my arrival at the club so I'm able to get my workout in prior to driving to downtown Salem for the class.

Not having a lot of leeway in that schedule, I get irked when someone is sitting at a machine that I want to use, phone in hand, staring at the screen as if it was the most important thing in the world, rather than doing what I believe people should do with a weight machine: exercise!

Recently I've been experimenting with having a more spacious awareness of the situation in line with how Shukman views love. I look at the person with the phone on the machine that I want to use in the limited time I have left at the club not as someone who is trying to irritate me, but as someone who is doing something important to them.

That thought alone changes my attitude. I realize that they may be communicating with a friend or loved one or business associate. They may have a much more vibrant social life than I do. They may not have any sense that I, or anyone else, is waiting to use that weight machine.

My annoyance is fueled by narrowly limiting my awareness to (1) what I want to do, and (2) how an action of someone else is preventing me from achieving that want. As soon as I view the situation more broadly, seeing the other person as having their own wants and needs that are just as important as mine,  I feel my irritation lessening. Sometimes it disappears completely.

A small step, to be sure. But I'm grateful that some of what Shukman says in his book, and in his The Way app that I have on my iPhone, is having a positive effect on me.

We are both the mind and the observer of the mind

Recently I read an essay in either the New York Times or Washington Post by someone who spoke about how Thich Nhat Hanh's classic little book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness," had changed his life. 

That spurred me to head to Amazon to see if I'd already bought that book. Yes, Amazon told me, you did, in January 2019. Looking through the Buddhism section of my bookcase, there it was, all 139 pages of it.

I've been re-reading parts of The Miracle of Mindfulness the past few days. Published 50 years ago, in 1975, the book is wonderfully clear and concise. Here's a passage that I quoted in a February 2019 post. It's a great depiction of what mindfulness is all about.

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not "washing the dishes to wash the dishes." What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.

In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands.

Thus we are sucked away into the future -- and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

Today I had a glimpse of another way to appreciate mindfulness while on a dog walk along one of the trails in our rural neighborhood. I was strolling along the familiar path, thinking about what I was going to write about on this blog in a few hours.

Suddenly it struck me that my body was on a walk in nature, while my mind was contemplating a future activity that I'd do while sitting at my laptop computer in my home. I realized, "My prehistoric ancestors would have found this to be dangerous, having their thoughts in one place while their body was in another place."

For if dangerous animals, or dangerous fellow humans, were lurking behind a tree or in the brush, and a distracted mind failed to notice them, that could be the last distraction an early human ever experienced before their death.

Nowadays there usually isn't such a stark penalty to be paid for a lack of mindfulness, which Thich Nhat Hanh says is "keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality." He also says, "There is no reason why mindfulness should be different from focusing all one's attention on one's work, to be alert and to be using one's best judgment."

I'm grateful to Thich Nhat Hanh for clearing up something that has always bothered me, the familiar image of meditation as being akin to a rider controlling an elephant, with the elephant being our often unruly mind and the rider being... what? 

I used to think that maybe this was a higher mind or soul, something separate from our everyday mind. But the image still didn't make much sense to me. If there is an entity that controls the mind, then what controls the entity doing that controlling? Another entity? If so, what controls it? Where's the end of all this controlling by various entities?

Thich Nhat Hanh has a simple answer from the Zen perspective: there's just one entity, the mind. It's both the controller and what is controlled.

When I mentioned the guard at the emperor's gate, perhaps you imagined a front corridor with two doors, one entrance and one exit, with your mind as the guard. Whatever feeling or thought enters, you are aware of its entrance, and when it leaves, you are aware of its exit. 

But the image has a shortcoming: it suggests that those who enter and exit the corridor are different from the guard. In fact our thoughts and feelings are us. They are a part of ourselves. There is a temptation to look upon them, or at least some of them, as an enemy force which is trying to disturb the concentration and understanding of your mind.

But, in fact, when we are angry, we ourselves are anger. When we are happy, we ourselves are happiness. When we have certain thoughts, we are those thoughts. We are both the guard and the visitor at the same time. We are both the mind and the observer of the mind. 

Therefore, chasing away or dwelling on any thought isn't the important thing. The important thing is to be aware of the thought. This observation is not an objectification of the mind: it does not establish distinction between subject and object. Mind does not grab the mind; mind does not push mind away.

Mind can only observe itself. This observation isn't an observation of some object outside and independent of the observer.

...Mindfulness of feeling in feeling is mindfulness of feeling directly while experiencing feeling, and certainly not contemplation of some image of feeling which one creates to give feeling some objective, separate existence of its own outside of oneself.

...The objectivity of an outside observer to examine something is the method of science, but it is not the method of meditation. Thus the image of the guard and the visitor fails to illustrate adequately the mindful observation of mind.

The mind is like a monkey swinging from branch to branch through a forest, says the Sutra. In order not to lose sight of the monkey by some sudden movement, we must watch the monkey constantly and even to be one with it. 

Mind contemplating mind is like an object and its shadow -- the object cannot shake the shadow off. The two are one. Wherever the mind goes, it still lies in the harness of the mind.

...Once the mind is directly and continually aware of itself, it is no longer like a monkey. There are not two minds, one which swings from branch to branch and another which follows after to bind it with a piece of rope. 

...Your mind will take hold of mind in a direct and wondrous way which no longer differentiates between subject and object. Drinking a cup of tea, the seeming distinction between the one who drinks and the tea being drunk evaporates. Drinking a cup of tea becomes a direct and wondrous experience in which the distinction between subject and object no longer exists.

Dispersed mind is also mind, just as waves rippling in water are also water. When mind has taken hold of mind, deluded mind becomes true mind. True mind is our real self, is the Buddha: the pure one-ness which cannot be cut up by the illusory divisions of separate selves, created by concepts and language.

But I don't want to say a lot about this.

The goal is our chosen direction, says Zen master Henry Shukman

I think it'd be cool to be a Zen master. However, to do that I would have had to actually practice Zen under the guidance of a Zen master, rather than admire Zen from the outside and practice it in my own idiosyncratic fashion.

Henry Shukman, who wrote the book Original Love that I'm reading now, and fashioned The Way app on my iPhone that I've using every morning in a cyberspace form of Zen meditation, is indeed a Zen master.

I just checked out the Sanbo Zen International web site and Shukman is listed there along with other masters of Sanbo Zen.

Shukman has an appealing way of explaining what meditation is all about. I like these passages from his book.

Becoming a meditator, opening up to a path of meditation, could be viewed as slowing down the car, parking it, getting out of it, and walking -- going through life at a pace where we can experience the sensory details of the trip.

...The problem is that in our pursuit of goals, we tend to get distracted from the richness of our actual life. It's not wrong to have goals and aspirations. It's healthy, and inspires and motivates us. But what if we could let them simply be the valley track we've chosen to walk down?

We're going in a certain direction. Fine. But as we go, we're going to experience each step of the journey -- each moment, this very moment -- so that the goal is our chosen direction, not something we're obsessing about reaching as quickly as possible, to the exclusion of all current experiences here and now.

Otherwise, what will happen once we reach the goal? We'll very likely set another goal, and speed off toward that one as fast as we can. And so on.

By slowing down, by deciding that each moment is worth experiencing for itself, we can broaden our life. It's not that life has no direction. It's that paying attention to what happens along the way makes life richer and fuller.

Even though we're moving in a chosen direction, it actually matters more to us how it is here and now than how it might be down the road. And some even say there is a curious law of nature, by which we'll fulfill our goals sooner and more amply if we savor the journey toward them.

This very moment, right now, as it is -- somehow we start to recognize it as already complete. Already the world is fulfilled. That's not to say there aren't problems and immense challenges -- as well as cruelty and suffering, and injustice and oppression.

We must call out these issues and devote serious, sustained effort to their resolution. At the same time, we can appreciate the wealth given to us in any moment, by the moment itself. And we trust that the positive orientation that appreciation arouses will help us to better play our part in making this world a kinder place.

Shukman says that in early Buddhism the first of four foundations of mindfulness is "mindfulness of body."

This may seem obvious, but in some spiritual, religious, and mystical traditions the body is viewed as the jailhouse of the soul. Our goal supposedly is to break the bonds that tie soul to body so we can rise beyond the crude physicality of this lowest domain of creation and ascend to "heaven."

Such is completely at odds with Buddhism in general, and Zen in particular. Pleasingly, Shukman explains why mindfulness of body is so important from a modern neuroscience perspective. 

In a nutshell, our large hominin brains are well equipped for rehearsing future scenarios and for rehashing past events. Some speculate that our thick prefrontal cortex evolved to run simulations -- to model the outcomes of possible courses of action. Apparently, it was also to rerun past events, presumably to learn from them.

When we're involved with outward tasks that occupy our attention, we tend to feel okay. We're engaging what some researchers call the task positive network. When we're having downtime, or "idle time," the default mode network is activated, whereupon we spend more time lost in thoughts of the past and of imagined futures than we do experiencing the moment at hand.

This leads to unhappiness. Why? Because we tend to regret the past and fear the future. Our brains evolved to have a strong negativity bias, meaning they act more powerfully and persistently to perceived threats than to perceived rewards. After all, if we neglect a genuine threat just once, than we might die.

So our brains not only "fire" at threats but also "wire" the threat response more strongly, in order to prompt that response again more readily if necessary. So we have work to do just to get to a more balanced state vis-a-vis the world.

...To tell ourselves not to dwell on the past or future seldom works. The mental habit is too strong, reinforced by a million years of evolution. If we offer our attention an alternative area of focus, then this shift makes it easier to break the spell of rumination. 

Hence anytime we shift our attention to our body experience, we are necessarily focusing on the here and now. The body lives in the present tense. It doesn't have the capacity to "live" anywhere else. Only the mind can do that.

"The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," an essay by Mark Lilla

My wife subscribes to the print edition of the Sunday New York Times. As I was taking the discarded December 8 edition to our recycling bin, I noticed an essay in the Opinion section, which was on top of the pile, that looked interesting: "The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," by Mark Lilla.

(That's a gift link from my digital New York Times account, so it should be readable by everybody. But I've also copied in Lilla's essay in its entirety below, as it isn't all that long.)

Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming book “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know,” which I've gotten but haven't read much of yet.

I liked his entire essay.

My favorite part, though, because it rings so true with my own personal experience, which is decidedly not ego-less, is where he speaks about how we consider our opinions being extensions of ourselves. So when they're attacked by someone with a differing opinion, we take that personally, as if we were being accosted in a dark alley by a would-be thief of our money. 

But it's just our beliefs being attacked. And no one can forcibly remove them from our brain. Well, not without a lot of work, such as torture and psychoactive drugs used by intelligence agencies (I enjoy reading spy novels). In everyday life, we have nothing to fear from our opinions and beliefs being interrogated to see if they hold up under skeptical questioning.

Yet it sure seems like we do.

This appears to be one of the benefits of meditation: not reacting so strongly to discomfort, whether it be physical or psychological. The June 2025 issue of National Geographic had an article, "An Antidote to Stress," about meditation. Here's an excerpt about an experiment that contrasted the pain felt by a group that had gotten mindfulness training and a control group that listened to a "pretty tame" book.

Volunteers who meditated reported feeling less pain. "We see a 33 percent drop in pain intensity and unpleasantness during meditation, while the pain levels in the control group actually go up," Zeidan says.

Why does meditation provide relief? Zeidan says analysis of the meditators' scans showed pain relief induced by meditation was associated with reduced activation in neural networks involved in self-awareness. The greatest decrease in activation is seen in the medial prefrontal cortex -- a neural hub that plays a prominent role in self-reflection and valuing oneself.

"During the meditation, the self-value is deactivating," Zeidan says. "And the more it goes down, the greater the analgesia, the greater the pain relief." Pain signals are still being received by the brain, but "they are not going into the brain networks that are saying, This is my pain," he explains. In essence, mindfulness appears to help detach the self from the suffering.

This is the essay by Mark Lilla. It's encouraging to think that mindfulness meditation may be able to reduce the discomfort we feel when our beliefs are being attacked, allowing us to be more open and welcoming to those who view those beliefs skeptically. 

Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know. Our own experience teaches us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so. This has always been true, but there are certain historical periods when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological virus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. This is one of those periods.

Increasing numbers of people today reject reasoning as a fool’s game that only cloaks the machinations of power. Others think instead that they have a special access to truth that exempts them from questioning, like a draft deferment. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. And to top it off we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who idealize “the people” and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs.

It is always possible to find proximate historical causes of these surges in the irrational — war, economic collapse, social change. But doing so can distract us from recognizing that the ultimate source lies deeper, in ourselves and in the world itself.

The world is a recalcitrant place, and there are things about it we would prefer not to recognize. Some are uncomfortable truths about ourselves; those are the hardest to accept. Others are truths about the reality around us that, once revealed, steal from us beliefs and feelings that have somehow made our lives better, easier to live — or at least to seem that way. The experience of disenchantment is as painful as it is common, and it is not surprising that a verse from an otherwise forgotten English poem became a common proverb: Ignorance is bliss.

We can all find reasons we and others avoid knowing particular things, and many of those reasons are perfectly rational. A trapeze artist about to climb the pole would be unwise to consult the actuarial table for those in her line of work. Even the question “Do you love me?” should pass through several mental checkpoints before being uttered.

But each of us also has a basic disposition toward knowing, a way of carrying ourselves in the world as experiences come our way. Some people just are naturally curious about how things got to be the way they are. They like puzzles, they like to search things out, they enjoy learning why. Others are indifferent to learning and see no particular advantage to asking questions that seem unnecessary for just carrying on.

And then there are people who, for whatever reason, have developed a particular antipathy toward the search for knowledge, whose inner doors are fastened tight against anything that might cast doubt on what they believe they already know. These attitudes are not limited to the uneducated: We have all also fallen into moods where they emerge in ourselves, however uncharacteristically.

Why does this happen? Because seeking and having knowledge is not just a cognitive pursuit; it is also an emotional experience. The desire to know is exactly that, a desire. And whenever our desires are satisfied or thwarted, our feelings are engaged.

Given how rapidly everything changes in life today, doesn’t it often feel better to rest on our intellectual and moral laurels? Why seek truth if truth will require us to do the hard work of rethinking what we already know? Just as we can develop a love of truth that stirs us within, so, too, we can develop a hatred of truth that fills us with a passionate sense of purpose. There can be a clash of emotions, with the desire to defend our ignorance standing as a powerful adversary to the desire to escape it.

One source of this clash is that we consider our opinions to be an extension of our selves, a prosthetic device. When they are attacked or dismissed, we feel that something intimate has been touched. And when our opinions are shown to be wrong, we feel ashamed. Socrates maintained that there is no shame in being wrong, just in doing wrong. He was right. But it’s not the way we initially feel, especially when someone else exposes our errors.

No argument is disembodied. Behind every assertion there is an asserter, and it is he, not his assertion, who wounds our pride. Strange as it may seem, mathematicians and scientists debating matters at the furthest remove from their daily lives can be as dogmatic and touchy as any political partisan. A new elementary particle has been discovered: Is that one giant leap for mankind or one point for our side?

At some point we all decline the opportunity to discover what really is the case. We willingly give up a shot at learning the truth about the world out of fear that it will expose truths about ourselves, especially our insufficient courage for self-examination. We prefer the illusion of self-reliance and embrace our ignorance for no other reason than it is ours. It doesn’t matter that reliance on false opinion is the worse sort of dependence. It doesn’t matter that through stubbornness we might pass up a chance at happiness. We prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull.

So as we shake our heads at those charmed by charlatans and demagogues, let us not exempt ourselves. We all want to know — and want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.

"The Mindful Geek" is a meditation guide for secular skeptics

Do I really need another book about meditation? No, I've got lots of them at the moment and have read many more over the 55 years I've been engaged in daily meditation.

But do I want another book about meditation? Absolutely.

That's why Amazon delivered The Mindful Geek by Michael W. Taft to me recently. I was in the mood for a meditation guide that was based on secular non-religious principles that were in accord with modern neuroscience. Taft has a strong background in various sorts of traditions. His first paragraph is:

From Zen temples in Japan to yogi caves in India, I've been meditating for over thirty years. As a result, I have extensive experience in both Buddhist and Hindu meditation techniques. I started in the late 70s, because I was experiencing so much teenage anxiety. Meditation gave me some relief and I was hooked. In the 1990s, I worked as editorial director for Sounds True, a publishing company specializing in spiritual and psychological teaching programs. While there, I had the good fortune to meet dozens of the most popular and interesting spiritual teachers in the world. I produced their programs, which meant that I got exposed to the workings of dozens of traditions.

Taft starts out by talking about the benefits of mindfulness meditation, then observes:

If you are a card-carrying geek, however, the upside of all these possible benefits may be strongly counterbalanced by the downside of having to deal with religion, spirituality, or other things you may consider nonsense. Mindfulness meditation is mainly associated with Buddhist religion, and for that reason can seem deeply suspect to skeptical, rational people.

I'm here to lay that worry to rest. In my experience, you can get many of the benefits of meditation without joining any religion, going to church, or believing in reincarnation or karma. By treating mindfulness as a scientifically-based psychological technique, you can keep your atheistic or agnostic secular skepticism and still maintain a powerful, regular, and deeply effective meditation practice.

Meditation is really a technology. And like any good technology, if you use it correctly, it will do the job reliably whether you believe in it or not. At its heart, meditation is a technique for hacking the human wetware to improve your life. And this book is a manual for how to make the most of that technology for yourself. Let's look more deeply at what meditation actually is.

The definition of meditation offered by Taft is: a psychological practice which makes the unconscious conscious and which improves life. 

For me, "unconscious" points to that part of the brain which is hidden from conscious view. Taft notes that this is the majority of the brain. So I prefer "unaware," making the definition something like a psychological practice which makes us aware of what we're often unaware of and which improves life. This fits with Taft saying:

What does it mean to make the unconscious conscious? It means that meditation calls your attention to things you wouldn't have noticed otherwise. It gives you insights, in other words... When you use meditation to become more aware of what you're feeling, the unconscious or semi-conscious flavors of emotional experience begin to come into focus.

Speaking of neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change, Taft says that "all learning is neuroplasticity at work," adding:

It means that you can almost "sculpt" your brain in an intentional and directed manner. Whatever you focus your attention on, regularly over time, will change the brain itself -- physically alter it, some parts becoming larger or smaller -- to get better at processing the thing you're focusing on. Within limitations, you can make the brain you want.

He describes what mindfulness is.

What is the difference between meditation and mindfulness? Why use two different words? In short, mindfulness is a type of meditation, a subset of meditation. Specifically, mindfulness means paying attention to your present moment sensory experience in a nonjudgmental manner. That's the basic definition. 

The way the word is used in modern America, mindfulness not only means to meditate, but can also mean a way of directing attention in everyday life, even when you're not practicing formal meditation. 

"Mindfulness" is the modern American translation of at least two words from the ancient Pali language: vipassana and sati. When we're talking about a type of meditation, mindfulness represents the term vipassana, which actually means "insight" or "clear seeing" in Pali. This technique (really a whole group of techniques) is sometimes called insight meditation or vipassana.

When we're talking about a way of directing attention at any time, during formal meditation or not, mindfulness is the translation of the Pali term sati.  Sati actually means "mindfulness," to pay close attention to what you're doing. To go even deeper, sati literally means "to remember," as in "to remember to pay attention to what you're doing."

I like how Taft points out misconceptions about mindfulness meditation. 

The first is that mindfulness meditation means to "clear your mind" or to "have no thoughts." Nothing could be further from the truth. In mindfulness meditation, it doesn't matter how much thinking is going on during the meditation. It literally doesn't figure into the equation. The goal is not to empty your mind of thoughts; the goal is to pay attention to some aspect of your current sensory experience.

...Remember that there are a lot of different kinds of meditation. And some of these techniques do, in fact, ask you to clear your mind. For some reason, those techniques became one of our cultural images of what meditation is about, and that's unfortunate, because "stopping thinking" is not only very difficult to do, even for an advanced meditator, it's also not all that useful. So just let go of that image completely.

The second misconception is that meditation is something that is supposed to be blissful or pleasurable. The cultural image attached to this idea is that of a yogi seated in full lotus posture, fingers curled into a mudra (gesture) of perfection, face suffused with radiant ecstasy. The process of meditation, in this misconception, involves disappearing into a cloud of bliss.

Again, nothing could be further from the case. Mindfulness meditation involves paying attention to your present moment sensory experience nonjudgmentally. That counts no matter if your present moment sensory experience is painful or pleasant, positive or negative. Rather than acting like Ren wearing the "happy helmet" (from the Ren & Stimpy episode "Stimpy's Invention"), in mindfulness meditation, you welcome whatever experience is arising whether it's "happy, happy, joy, joy" or not.

It's possible to have a perfectly good mindfulness meditation while meditating on the body sensations of a headache, for example, or sitting in line at the DMV. There is no need to invoke, produce, or expect any sort of bliss. If bliss happens, that's fine, but you're not trying for it, and you're not trying to hold onto it if it does arise. That's the nonjudgmental part.

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.

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. 

Thinking positively isn't as important as being emotionally positive

I'm continuing to enjoy James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. As I indicated before, don't be put off by the title, which admittedly sounds a bit New Age'y.

With rare exceptions, and I'm approaching the halfway mark in my reading of Mind Magic, so I'm pretty confident that this is true, Doty stays within the bounds of modern psychology and neuroscience in his book. Which isn't surprising, since he's a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon. 

What's well known is that what we're consciously aware of is a very small fraction of what the brain perceives through the senses, and what the hugely complex brain -- about a hundred billion neurons with trillions of connections -- is doing behind the scenes of our conscious awareness. 

Robert Sapolsky told this story well in his book, Determined.

What we think, do, and feel is determined by causes and effects that extend all the way back to the big bang. If that's too far back for you, Sapolsky says that our recent genetic history, experiences in our life from the prenatal era to a few seconds ago, and societal/cultural influences combine to produce who we are and what we're doing at this very moment.

Where does an intention come from? Where does an emotion come from? Where does a thought come from? If we observe the working of our consciousness through mindfulness, meditation, or some other means, it seems clear that what spurs us to do, feel, or think arises from a hidden source within the brain.

Doty describes various brain mechanisms in his book. There's nothing supernatural or other-worldly about this. It's the current state of psychology and neuroscience, an incomplete and surely sometimes inaccurate guide to the brain/mind that nonetheless is the best knowledge we currently have.

Mind Magic is all about using knowledge concerning how the brain works to increase the chance that the life we want to lead is what we actually experience. Yes, this, like everything else mental or physical, almost certainly is determined, since free will appears to be an illusion.

But as I noted in my previous post about this book, it doesn't really matter if we possess free will.

Doty says that what's important is that we have the sense of free will, since that makes us feel more confident in our ability to chart our desired course in life through intentions that influence our subconscious, leading to a greater likelihood that those intentions will manifest as reality rather than mere imagination.

A friend of mind used to be fond of saying, "We humans are pleasure-seeking missiles." Doty would agree. In these passages from his "Clarify What You Truly Want" chapter, he talks about the necessity of being in an emotionally positive state of mind when we're visualizing intentions that we hope will manifest.

Positive emotions activate the reward systems of brains and therefore keep our inner compass set toward our intention. They also help us to free ourselves from the prison of old patterns created in our environment and past actions. One of the most powerful ways to indicate the value of an intention to our subconscious is through associating it with a strong positive emotion experienced in the present.

The more vividly we visualize our intention, the more emotionally heightened our inner experience will be. The more emotionally heightened the inner experience is, the more it has a chance to capture and hold our attention and alert the brain to give attention to it in the future.

Part of how the brain determines how to classify information is through a process known as value tagging.

Value tagging is part of the salience network and determines the importance of information entering our brain: emotional content concerning our sense of belonging, the strength of our bonds and connections with others, and life meaning, as well as our physiologic functioning and our immediate survival.

A strong positive emotion signals to our subconscious that the intention is highly meaningful and deserves to be cultivated through our behavior. For this reason, when we practice visualization, it is essential that in addition to imagining the physical circumstances of achieving our goal or intention in detail, we tune in to our heart and experience the joy, celebration, contentment, and connection in our bodies in the here and now. 

This change in the emotional pH of your consciousness, so to speak, is what sends messages to the brain to transform your hardware to prioritize future experiences that give rise to similar positive feelings. Where the emotions come from doesn't really matter as long as you can produce them, recognize their importance, and take the time to savor them.

You are teaching your brain to feel and become familiar with feelings of deep, authentic well-being, and having these feelings is what indicates to the brain to form a new neural circuit. Positive emotions increase the salience around an experience and teach the brain that experiences like these are important and worth pursuing. They then become the compass, or north star, for where to direct your intention.

...As we practice visualizing our desired result over and over again, our intention to experience the fulfillment of our desires is giving our attention (and therefore our subconscious) some velocity to influence the outcome. This is a tried-and-true practice used for years by countless elite athletes, who rehearse successfully executing a skill in their mind's eye before the big game or competition. 

Research has even shown that just thinking about an action such as building muscle can result in a measurable increase in muscle mass, and thinking about rehearsing the piano can measurably improve a musician's performance, whether they have touched a keyboard or not.

The paradox is that, through mental rehearsal and visualization, we are "reminding" ourselves of how the positive outcomes will feel when we experience it in a moment to come. Our minds are literally going back to the future.

Awareness is more important than peace of mind

Every day I repeat a brief loving kindness meditation.

It starts with "May I be happy; may I be safe; may I be healthy; may I be at peace." Then I visualize someone I care about, usually my wife, and say the same things but substituting "you" for "I." After that, I zoom out to visualize the entire planet, and say "all" instead of "I."

It's interesting that I have little trouble envisioning myself or someone else being happy, safe, and healthy. But while I enjoy the sentiment, "May ______ be at peace," it's more difficult for me to picture what being at peace consists of.

Is it not being bothered by troubling things? Is it embracing everything that happens with calm acceptance? Is it being detached from the usual ups and downs of life?

Whatever being at peace is, it seems that if I, or anyone else, had it, then being happy, safe, and healthy wouldn't be nearly as important, since even if I or anyone else was unhappy, unsafe, and unhealthy, if we were at peace with that, life would be fine.

I used to think that this was something that meditation would eventually bring to me: peace of mind. Well, that hasn't happened yet, and I doubt that it ever will. I've even become doubtful that peace of mind is something to strive for.

For it seems to be unnatural, not really human, an artificial concept that sounds wonderful, yet is never observed as a living reality -- especially if we're talking about lasting or permanent peace of mind. 

Mindfulness strikes me as not only much more attainable, but more desirable. Meaning, non-judgmental open awareness of what is actually happening within and without us in the present moment.  (Which, of course, is the only moment possible, since the past is gone and the future hasn't happened.)

There's no way I'm always going to be happy, safe, healthy, at peace, or any other quality. Life is constant change. That's what life is, movement. When our mental and physical movement ceases, we're dead. 

So if I want a foundation to my life that offers a solid place to stand no matter what my circumstances are, it won't be peace of mind, which comes and goes depending on the state of my joys, sorrows, anxieties, worries, satisfactions, and all that. 

Mindful awareness, though, that seems doable.

Sure, currently I drift in and out of mindful awareness. Evidence of this is me walking back to my car to make sure I locked it; not being sure whether I took my vitamins and other supplements at the time I usually do; missing a move in a Tai Chi form because I was thinking about what I was going to have for dinner after the class ends.

I've been slowly making my way through a short book by Toni Packer, The Wonder of Presence and the Way of Meditative Inquiry. I bought it because I'm a fan of Joan Tollifson's writings, and she studied with Packer for a while and speaks highly of her. 

Here's passages from a chapter called "Is Awareness Enough?" It isn't crystal clear what Packer is getting at here, but I'm fine with some murkiness when the general thrust of an idea makes sense to me, which these passages do.

Waking up during the night and looking out the window, such bright stars! The earth is enveloped in a fresh, white blanket of innocence. No footprints yet. No car tracks. No dirt. An amazing thing -- everything wiped clean. Like turning over a new leaf.

Yesterday I said, "Awareness is not enough." Why did I say that, some people were asking. Feeling the pain and sadness with tears welling up at memories of my late husband, Kyle, I said, "Awareness is not enough."

As I said it I wondered if someone would ask me about that. Somebody did. I do need to say more about what I meant at the time. Feeling love and pain and grief and sadness, one realizes how instantaneously remembrance creates a surge of sensations and emotions.

Memories and physical reverberations are as one -- it seems as though nothing could interrupt that immediate connection. Awareness appears to be there, but the remembering-paining-grieving cycle does not cease just because of it. And that's all right.

Awareness is like a mirror that shows what is happening, what we are at this instant, the joy and grief, pain and well-being, turmoil and peacefulness. Awareness reveals these memory connections but no one  intending or creating them. There is no I to be found directing things -- there is only what has been described. 

What does it mean, "Awareness is not enough?"

Where is our true abiding place at the rock bottom of everything -- an immovable presence? Is it just in the fleeting flow of events, both external and internal -- the thoughts, the feelings and emotions, the organism's reverberations -- and moving along with it all? Or is it simply awaring it all?

...People ask, "Would I be aware if there was nothing to be aware of?" Yes! Awareness needs no object. No subject I! Objects come and go and may even stay away in the depth of meditation. It doesn't matter. What matters is presence. 

Awareness, in which there is no fragmentation, no division, no me here and "everybody else" out there. All that is mind-made stuff. It needs to be seen as such.

Let me answer questions that may be lingering right now in people's minds: Does meditation mean I need to quiet down and be without thoughts? Does it mean I need to see everything about myself?

It's both. It's neither. It is without I. 

In seeing the hills and valleys now shrouded in fog, now lit up by sunlight -- do we see the ideas about them, or is there just unlimited space in which things freely appear and disappear? The open space being oneself, and what appears and disappears oneself, without division.

How to have less of a distracted mind

As evidenced by the title of the first blog post I wrote six days ago about The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, a book by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen -- "Why repeating a mantra during daily activities doesn't make much sense" -- I'm interested in the spiritual implications of the book, even though the authors pay zero attention to this.

They're concerned with how three modern innovations, the Internet, smart phones, and social media, are screwing up our ability to concentrate, though it isn't as if these innovations are forcing us to obey their whims.

For we are willing co-conspirators in the theft of our undivided attention, being driven to do this by foraging rules evolution has imprinted in our minds which have become turned into approaches guiding our foraging for information, rather than food.

The authors say that in addition to attention, an undistracted mind also requires good working memory and goal management. They present lots of research showing that excessive use of the Internet, smart phones, and social media causes us to shift our attention rapidly instead of keeping it focused on a single subject. 

Multi-tasking, which they say isn't really possible, for what we're doing is rapidly shifting attention between several tasks, like watching TV and texting a friend, not only messes up our attention but also working memory and our ability to choose the most important goals to work on.

This passage has implications for meditation in general and mindfulness in particular. 

One interesting aspect of this penchant for combining tasks is that we seem to have lost the ability to single task. Glance around a restaurant, look at people walking on a city street, pay attention to people waiting in line for a movie or the theatre, and you will see busily tapping fingers.

We act as though we are no longer interested in or able to stay idle and simply do nothing. We appear to care more about the people who are available through our devices that those who are right in front of our faces. And perhaps more critically, we appear to have lost the ability to simply be alone with our thoughts.

Since I started meditating every day in 1970, a habit I've continued for the past fifty-four years, obviously I wasn't influenced by the Internet, smart phones, and social media for much of the time, since those things hadn't been invented yet. 

So I'm well aware that it is difficult to either do one thing in meditation (concentration) or nothing in particular (open awareness) whether or not we're tempted to follow the allure of the Internet, smart phones, and social media. However, these things do seem to have a negative effect on our ability to be undistracted.

The information foraging theory that they favor, which I won't describe in any detail, says that external diminishing information resources, like having read all the stories you're interested in on a news web site, combine with internal factors such as boredom and anxiety to draw us away from a current focus of attention to something more appealing.  

There we are, meditating away, perhaps repeating a mantra, or being aware of our breathing, or simply being open to whatever is present within our consciousness. The book has a chapter called "Why Do We Interrupt Ourselves?"

Great question. What prevents us continuing to meditate in the way we set out to do at the time we sat down on a cushion or a chair? How is it that when I set out to count my exhales from 1 to 10, fairly often I'll get to 4 or 5 and then drift off into a thought that takes me away from my breath-counting?

The authors don't address these questions directly.

But having finished the book, I'll hazard a guess and say that our distracted mind in meditation, often called "monkey mind," follows the same rules as I outlined above: when we feel bored with the task we're doing and feel anxious that we're missing out on something better than doing that task, we're inclined to shift our attention.

Relaxing into complete acceptance of the present moment is probably the best way I've found to be undistracted in meditation. If I'm feeling peaceful, great, I just feel peaceful. If I'm feeling bored, great, I just feel bored. In other words, I try to follow a basic principle of mindfulness: nonjudgemental acceptance of what's happening here and now. 

This makes my meditation more interesting, because I'm not dividing what's in my mind between good thoughts and feelings and bad thoughts and feelings. Whatever is there is worth paying attention to. By not having a set goal for meditation, I'm less inclined to be bored with a single focus of my attention.

Which isn't to say that I don't try to be single-minded, usually on my breath, but sometimes on a mantra. Some days I can stay focused for pretty much the entire meditation period.

I'm just saying that by having minimal flexible goals -- I'm no longer seeking god-realization or enlightenment -- I'm better able to be content with small pleasures, like the slight tingling of the breath at the tip of my nostrils as I breathe in and out.

There's isn't a fear of missing out (FOMO) on something more and better if I'm content with whatever is happening right now. That reduces my desire to forage for information and stimulation somewhere else, since where I'm at is fine with me. Or at least, fairly fine with me.

Joan Tollifson on the groundlessness of reality

Tai Chi, which I've practiced for nineteen years, speaks about being rooted.

Not in the sense of a plant being attached to the earth, but something similar. Being connected to the floor, or ground, in a way that is stable, secure, capable of being the foundation of productive movement (especially important in a martial or self-defense application).

But this root isn't a static thing, because we humans aren't oak trees. It's dynamic, ever-changing, adjusting to circumstances. 

Which fits with a recent essay by Joan Tollifson that arrived in my email inbox yesterday. I've shared the first part of it below, since I liked what she had to say. As noted before, Tollifson has become one of my favorite writers about "spiritual" subjects, though she doesn't use that word very often. 

I agree with her that the search for Ultimate Reality is doomed to failure. I used to believe otherwise. When I'd give talks to members of the guru-centered organization headquartered in India that I belonged to for 35 years, Ultimate Reality was a term that I used a lot, because I considered that the teachings of this organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, accurately pointed to the nature of such.

Not any more, though. Like Tollifson, I've become convinced that just as science is nowhere close to grasping the ultimate nature of reality, spirituality, religion, and mysticism are ever farther away. So no one knows what the ground of being is, or even if such a ground exists. Maybe groundlessness will turn out to be the closest approximation to how Ultimate Reality typically is viewed.

Which doesn't mean that awe, wonder, delight, and even a sense of sacredness can't be part of our everyday awareness.

As Tollifson says in her essay below, our experiencing of what is Here/Now is all that we know directly. This means that attention in the present moment is the highest form of worship, to repurpose a religious term for my secular purpose. Of course, we don't really have a choice in this, since past and future only exist for us as concepts, not direct experience.

But our attention can be scattered. When my wife is talking to me, I can be half-listening while checking the news on my iPhone. This is akin to daydreaming while attending to a religious service. While everything is happening Here/Now, that Here and Now can become diluted, spread out, by a lack of attention to what most deserves our awareness. 

This is why mindfulness has come to be my favorite "spiritual" exercise (I don't much like that term, but it's hard to come up with a better word). Since there almost certainly isn't any final ground or bottom to reality, the best we can do is be as fully aware as possible of the ever-changing phenomena that manifest the boundlessness of existence.

Here's the excerpt from Joan Tollifson's essay.

A multi-dimensional extravaganza

All we ever know directly is this here-now aware presence / present experiencing. We don’t really know what this is, why it’s here, where it came from or where it’s going. We have many ideas about all of this—scientific, metaphysical, psychological, political—but all of these ideas can be doubted, and all of them are subject to change, and when we look closely, the apparently real “things” to which they all refer can never actually be pinned down or pulled out of the whole.

Both science and spirituality have been obsessed, each in their own way, with getting to the bottom of things, finding the fundamental ground and nailing down exactly what it is, as if it were something that could be found and nailed down. But as an old Zen koan says in response to a monk searching for this fundamental ground, “It just moved!”

My sense is that this living actuality is bottomless, that there is no end to the unfolding revelations and discoveries, and that there is great freedom in not needing to land anywhere or grasp anything or nail down what this is. Maybe the security and certainty that we long for isn’t about getting hold of some unchanging Ultimate Reality, some final bottom to everything. Maybe it’s simply about being fully alive right here as this one bottomless moment, just as it is.

I’ve noticed, as you probably have too, that experience shows up in a multitude of different dimensions and can be seen from infinitely different perspectives or viewpoints. There is ordinary, everyday life with all its varied facets and dimensions. There are transcendental spiritual experiences of all kinds, psychic experiences, near death experiences, out of body experiences, drug experiences, psychotic experiences, experiences that come from brain injuries and neurological disorders and illnesses.

There is the sense of being a particular person with a history and a lifespan, and there is the sense of being the timeless, impersonal, boundless aware presence being and beholding it all. There is waking life, dreaming and deep sleep. There are all the billions of different human viewing points, and the viewing points of all the other living beings. All of these infinitely diverse viewing points are continuously popping in and out of existence, dying and being born. It’s definitely a shape-shifting multi-dimensional extravaganza that never stays the same while never departing from the ever-present immediacy of Here-Now.

This one bottomless moment includes the whole universe, and yet it’s always just this. This cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through. Each moment is absolutely unique and unrepeatable, and yet the whole is fully present at every point. The ocean contains all the waves, and every wave contains the whole ocean. Nothing is really separate from everything else. It all belongs. It can’t be pulled apart.

To survive, we need to map our experience out in manageable ways. So thought labels, divides, categorizes, interprets and seemingly concretizes this seamless, boundless, centerless, inconceivable, multidimensional, uncontrollable flow of experience, creating the illusion of an apparently separate autonomous controller self encapsulated inside a body and living in an apparently solid and substantial outside world made up of many separate, persisting, observer-independent forms. This phantom self is supposedly authoring our thoughts, making our choices and navigating our life. But none of this holds up to scrutiny.

Every form dissolves as soon as it appears. Exprerience doesn’t hold still. There is no boundary between inside and outside. A person is like a waving of the ocean—an ever-changing movement inseparable from the whole. Our attention moves rapidly and uncontrollably from one thing to another, and however hard we work at controlling and taming it, that endeavor never quite works. It slips away again and again.

Our urges, desires, impulses, intentions, interests, preferences, abilities, talents, thoughts and actions emerge unbidden. Nothing could be other than exactly how it is in this moment. Seeing this is the freedom to be exactly as we are and for everything to be just as it is. It is freedom from blame and guilt and from the belief that anything should or could be different in this moment from exactly how it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t discover ways of healing and transforming ourselves and the world—we can. But it’s all a movement of the whole.

There is no finish-line in life, no formula, no method, nowhere to go, only this ever-fresh aliveness, just as it is.

Pain is a great teacher, though I'd prefer a more pleasant instructor

Back in 2020 was when my sciatica pain started. I don't know why. Often health problems appear mysteriously. Which would be fine if they disappeared just as mysteriously. 

But in my case, the extreme pain I had early on, where I'd shed tears uncontrollably while walking the dog or mowing the lawn if I was having an especially bad day, eventually abated. Maybe from time. Maybe from the physical therapy exercises I was given. Who knows?

For the next three years, 2021-23, my right leg always had some discomfort. It was manageable, though. I didn't need pain relievers. I was able to do whatever I wanted, albeit with some pain if it involved standing or moving for more than a few minutes. 

Then things changed last December. The locus of the pain shifted from my leg to my leg plus my hip area and part of my butt. It also got more intense. So my primary care provider referred me for more physical therapy. 

That helped for a while. Until it didn't. Last Saturday I finally got a lumbar MRI after I met the criteria for my MedAdvantage insurance: got an X-ray, tried physical therapy, pain won't go away with medication or other means.

Now I'm in an awkward waiting period. The MRI result, which had a lot of "extreme" words in the report (age-related spinal degeneration, basically), opened the door to me getting referrals to two Pain and Spine clinics here in Salem, Oregon.

They likely will be able to help me. Cortisone injections, maybe. Surgery as a last resort. I'm sure they have other options that are better than what I'd doing now. That's mainly alternating Tylenol and Advil every four hours throughout the day, exercising, and simply dealing with the pain as best I can.

This morning it was excruciating, because sleeping causes my nerves and muscles to tighten up, making it extremely difficult to get out of bed when I have to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, or upon waking up in the morning.

That gets me to the philosophical part of this blog post. 

I've tried thinking positively, visualizing myself as I'm getting ready for bed with manageable pain in the morning. That's better than thinking gloomingly, which creates more tension in me, something I don't need.

I've tried repeating a mantra, the Buddhist Namu Amida Butsu being a favorite. This also helps, yet it seems artificial to me, being a distraction or barrier from what my mind would be doing absent the mantra. 

Then there's simply being in the present moment. That's my go-to approach when the pain is so great, my attention narrows to doing Just One Thing. That's how I picture the situation: Just One Thing, followed by Just One Thing, followed by Just One Thing.

Last night I was sleeping soundly until I awoke around 5 am. I groggily realized that I didn't feel any pain. My semi-awake brain thought, "Great, your sciatica is better; you won't have much of a problem getting up to go to the bathroom."

Until I moved. A little. Which hurt a lot. So much so, I cried out in pain. Not enough to wake my wife, thankfully, who sleeps in another part of our house. That cry was repeated several more times as I struggled to move my right leg, which was locked in an excruciating sciatica death grip.

All I could do was Just One Thing. Eventually I was able to swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand up. Just One Thing. Then I got a crutch that I keep next to the bed for nights when it's extremely painful to walk into the bathroom. Just One Thing. I shuffled along, one crutch-assisted step at a time. Just One Thing.

I couldn't handle the entire situation, which seemed like a nightmare if I let my mind drift in that direction. However, I could do Just One Thing, followed by the next Just One Thing. It took quite a while, but eventually I was able to get back into bed and fall asleep again. Just One Thing.

There's a lesson here. Maybe just for me. Maybe for others also. 

When things are going well, or at least not too badly, it's easy to believe that we've got life figured out. Our coping mechanisms work for us. Existence is pleasant enough, and we can handle the rough spots that pop up. 

But when we're pushed to a limit, beyond what we're used to handling, that's when we might realize the limitation of our usual manner of going about things. Such was the case for me, for sure. 

When excruciating sciatica pain comes over me, it washes away my customary positivity, my mantras, my meditation, my life lessons, my knowledge -- just about everything. What's left isn't really me. At least, not the me I ordinarily consider myself to be. 

What's there is what my body is doing and feeling. What's there is my consciousness, my awareness engaged in Just One Thing. Taking a step. Swallowing a pill. Going to the bathroom. Washing my hands. Always, Just One Thing.

And that, actually, is what's happening every moment of every day whether I'm feeling such pain. I'm always doing Just One Thing. I just don't realize it, because my attention can flow in many different directions. Intense pain narrows that focus. Pain screams, "Only me, only me!" 

I can't help but obey. Yet in the midst of that pain, I can still do Just One Thing in addition to feeling the pain. That's my reality at that moment. As I said, maybe at every moment, if I could just realize it.

A passage in the Preface of Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp, says what I feel in painful moments.

Liberation is finding freedom in limitation and perfection in imperfection. It is the freedom to be exactly as we are. But what are we? What is real Here/Now? What is life all about? Who is reading these words? 

Is reading these words an individual choice, or is it the only possible activity of the whole universe at this moment, and is there a difference? 

Mind-body dualism ignores the close connection between mental and physical

Most religions are dualistic. They assume that something ethereal exists within us, or as us, that is separate and distinct from the physical body: mind, soul, spirit, divine energy, and such.

To which I say, maybe, since anything is possible. However, there's no convincing evidence that this ethereal something exists, with zero evidence that this something that can't be shown to exist has any observable effects.

Today I finished reading Ellen Langer's book, Mindfulness. In a final chapter, this Harvard psychologist has quite a bit to say about mind-body dualism, though not in a religious sense. She starts off by saying:

From earliest childhood we learn to see mind and body as separate and unquestionably to regard the body as more important. 

We learn that "sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you." If something is wrong with our bodies we go to one kind of doctor, while with a "mental problem" we go to another.

Long before we have any reason to question it, the split is ingrained into us in endless ways. It is one of our strongest mindsets, a dangerous premature cognitive commitment.

Later in the chapter, Langer talks about placebos, those supposedly inert substances that nonetheless often have substantial physical effects if a person believes they are effective (and sometimes even if that belief is lacking, an even more surprising effect).

When patients are given a placebo and then get well, the illness is considered to be "only psychological." (Here we see the old mind/body dualism, alive and well.) It is interesting that no one tests the effectiveness of active drugs by telling patients that "this is only a placebo." (Is this implicit recognition of the power of the mind to change the effect of the drug?)

...Placebo effects are real and powerful. Who is doing the healing when one takes a placebo? Why can't we just say to our minds, "repair this ailing body"? Why must we fool our minds in order to enlist our own powers of self-healing? 

Placebos, hypnosis, autosuggestion, faith healing, visualization, positive thinking, biofeedback are among the many ways we have learned to invoke these powers. Each can be seen as a device for changing mindsets, enabling us to move from an unhealthy to a healthy context.

The more we can learn about how to accomplish this mindfully and deliberately, rather than having to rely on these elaborate, indirect strategies, the more control we will gain over our own health.

Here's some of what Langer has to say about developing that sort of control.

Whenever we try to heal ourselves, and not abdicate this responsibility completely to doctors, each step is mindful.

For example, we question destructive categories of disease (such as the image of cancer as a death sentence). We welcome new information, whether from our bodies or from books. We look at our illness from more than a single perspective (the medical one). We work on changing contexts, whether it is a stressful workplace or a depressing rather than a positive view of the hospital.

Finally, the attempt to stay healthy rather than to be "made well" necessarily involves us with process rather than outcome.

...In a sense, we should be able to "take" a placebo instead of a pill. Conceiving of the mind and body as one means that wherever we put the mind, we may be able to put our bodies. Fo most of us, at present at least, the mind may have to be fooled to reach a healthy place. Once we learn to put it there consciously, the evidence suggests that the body may well follow.

In a book aptly titled New Bottles for New Wine, Julian Huxley quotes his grandfather, the great nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Huxley, on the subject of belief: "Everyone should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him. My faith is in human possibilities."

Me too. I much prefer faith in human possibilities to faith in divine/godly possibilities, for humans are clearly real.

Beware of ideologies, even though most of us embrace them

I enjoyed this recent comment on a churchless blog post from "sant64." There's valuable wisdom here. The first paragraph comes from what I said in the post.

"This makes sense in many situations. However, when it comes to solid facts, such as the reality of human-caused global warming, 'trying out different perspectives' isn't the right thing to do. In these sorts of cases, reality almost certainly is a certain way."

The proper perspective that jibes with "reality" is what? Believing that we're in the end-times because there's little hope we can reverse GW, or believing that GW is manageable and not the extinction-level event it's often characterized as? "Science" and "reality" aren't synonyms.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where many believe that scientific opinion is absolute truth. And perhaps just as many believe that scientific opinion is another term for propaganda. The best practice of mindfulness is like the best practice of science. Not looking for reasons why the party line in or outside one's head is right, but constantly observing how it is wrong.

What's being gotten at here, the way I read the comment, is that none of us, I'm pretty sure, is capable of achieving what I recall the detective on Dragnet, a TV show from my childhood (so a long time ago) was fond of saying: "Just the facts, ma'am."

Facts always are part of a certain worldview. They don't stand alone, though certainly some facts are more objectively true than others. As sant64 said, we have a party line that represents our political, religious, scientific, or other sort of leaning -- which could be called an ideology.

We like facts that support our favored ideology. We don't like facts that undermine our favored ideology. Usually. For it is possible, though rather difficult, to enjoy different perspectives, including as sant64 noted, observing how our party line or ideology is wrong.

Today I read a section in David Chapman's book about artificial intelligence, Better Without AI, that addressed the perils of ideologies. Here's some excerpts.

Ultimately, the problem is ideology as such. All ideologies are mistaken about many things, so each has to use underhanded tricks to blind you to realities that conflict with its narrative. However, with experience we've figured out how to keep the traditional ones mostly in check.

Most of the world has driven the nastier ones (absolutist religions and twentieth century totalitarianisms) to extinction. We've learned to live with the relatively benign ones, in part by stalemating them against each other. 

Almost all countries now employ mixtures of the better features of socialism and capitalism. That works reasonably well, confining conflict to comparatively minor aspects. 

...Everyone can examine their own relationship with ideology. Do you have an ideology? Or does an ideology have you. Do you "belong to" a political party or religious group? Maybe, if so, you are a slave, as the term implies. 

Ideology's trick is to convince you that it is True and Good, in absolute senses. Therefore, any evidence that contradicts the narrative can and must be ignored or explained away. Also, therefore, you are Good to the extent that you propagate the ideology (and Bad to the extent that you question it).

Mostly, nobody wants to get free from the ideology that owns them, because it constantly assures you that you are Good, so long you keep retweeting its messages. Everyone wants that cheap method for feeling morally adequate, and wants to avoid the painful shame of violating the sacred dictates.

That doesn't sound like you, of course. Your political opinions are just common sense, well thought out, and obviously true. You are entirely rational about specific issues. Not at all like the Bad Tribe, who are mysteriously possessed by an evil brain-eating quasi-religious fanaticism. If you sometimes make strong statements online, it's because their stuff must be stopped at all costs. 

I have mostly avoided naming examples of the new ideologies, because I expect a substantial fraction of readers are possessed by one or another of them. I've used QAnon as the example because I'm guessing few readers of this book are owned by it.

I suggest taking seriously the possibility that whatever ideology you are subject to appears similarly irrational and dangerous to anyone who isn't. I suggest considering what that may imply about that ideology, and about you -- not about its opponents.

The cultural assumption that everyone must "have" an ideology gives them much of their power. If you have any doubts about your ideology, you can reassure yourself that the alternatives are all vastly worse so switching is out of the question. Or, if your faith deteriorates sufficiently, you may switch after all -- and become a slave to Tweedledum rathe than Tweedledee.

You can free yourself entirely, if you realize you want to. I explain how, step by step, in "Vaster than ideology." You can turn the tables, and own ideologies instead. Many are useful for particular purposes in particular circumstances. You can recognize whatever actually is true and good in any of them.

Standing outside and above all ideologies, you can even see why so many adopt QAnon and sympathize. The current American ruling elites, both left and right, are pervasively mendacious, corrupt, self-serving, incompetent, and entrenched. They do need replacement. 

...The longer-run solution is broad cultural understanding that being a slave to any ideology is bad for you and everyone else. This observation is startlingly rare; nearly everyone assumes that you must belong to one. 

However, it's obvious once pointed out. Most people are also tired of ideological conflict, and understand that it's destructive; yet persist because the alternative seems to be surrendering to the Bad Tribe. I am optimistic that anti-ideological understanding could spread rapidly once it gets going.

I prefer the Eastern, rather than Western, approach to mindfulness

Since I enjoyed psychologist Ellen Langer's most recent book so much (The Mindful Body), I figured that I'd also enjoy what may have been her first book, or at least an early book, Mindfulness. 

Actually, not so much. As Langer says in a section called "Mindfulness East and West," she takes a decidedly Western approach to mindfulness.

The definitions of mindfulness in this chapter, especially the process orientation just discussed, will remind many readers of various concepts of mindfulness found in Eastern religion... While there are many similarities, the differences in the historical and cultural background from which they are derived, and the more elaborate methods, including meditation, through which a mindful state is said to be achieved in the Eastern traditions should make us cautious about drawing comparisons that are too tidy.

From what I've read so far in Mindfulness, which was first published in 1989 (I have the 2014 25th anniversary edition), I'd disagree that Eastern approaches to mindfulness are more elaborate than Langer's Western variety.

After all, mindfulness basically is just paying nonjudgmental attention to what's occurring in the present moment. That's pretty damn simple. The classic Buddhist approach to mindfulness in meditation is following the breath. Again, pretty damn simple.

When thoughts of past, present, or future arise, and are noticed, the attention is to be returned to the breath. Yes, Buddhism has an elaborate system of writings and practices that go far beyond attention to the present moment. But those aren't mindfulness. 

So I prefer my practice of mindfulness to be based on the simplicity of Eastern approaches. However, what Langer offers in her book is valuable, because she provides a conceptual or research underpinning to mindfulness. Langer notes that this is at odds with traditional Eastern teachings.

As an example of the semantic and philosophical tangles that arise if we try to compare Eastern and Western views of the mindful state, consider the activity of creating new categories. While this is a form of mindfulness in our definition, it appears to be in direct opposition to what one does during meditation.

In meditation, the mind becomes quieter and active thought is discouraged. In some forms of meditation, thoughts and images that come to mind are considered unimportant and are relinquished as one discerns their presence.

At the same time, in many Eastern views, the proper meditation techniques are said to result in a state that has been called de-automatization. In this state, old categories break down and the individual is no longer trapped by stereotypes. Such freedom from rigid distinctions is very similar to the mindfulness being described in this book.

True. That's why I'm enjoying certain parts of Mindfulness more than the overall approach, which is decidedly conceptual and research-based. For example, I like what Langer has to say in a section called "More Than One View." 

I aspire to the message of these passages, even though I readily admit that I'm attached to my own view and often find it difficult to take other views seriously, or even respectfully (especially when it comes to politics at odds with my liberal/progressive leaning).

Once we become mindfully aware of views other than our own, we start to realize that there are as many different views as there are different observers. Such awareness is potentially liberating.

For example, imagine that someone has just told you that you are rude. You thought you were being frank. If there is only one perspective, you can't both be right. But with an awareness of many perspectives, you could accept that you are both right and concentrate on whether your remarks had the effect that you actually wanted to produce.

...Every idea, person, or object is potentially simultaneously many things depending on the perspective from which it is viewed. A steer is steak to a rancher, a sacred object to a Hindu, and a collection of genes and proteins to a molecular biologist.

Good point.

My view of Langer's book is just one, my own. Everybody who reads Mindfulness will have a different response to it. Having just reminded myself of this, I'm going keep on reading the book with hopefully a mindset that is a bit more flexible.

Just because I prefer an Eastern approach to mindfulness doesn't mean I can't appreciate and value Langer's Western approach. As she says:

The consequences of trying out different perspectives are important. First, we gain more choice in how to respond. A single-minded label produces an automatic reaction, which reduces our options. Also, to understand that other people may not be so different allows us empathy and enlarges our range of responses. We are less likely to feel locked into a polarized struggle. 

This makes sense in many situations. However, when it comes to solid facts, such as the reality of human-caused global warming, "trying out different perspectives" isn't the right thing to do. In these sorts of cases, reality almost certainly is a certain way.

Sure, people can have valid individual responses to agreed-upon facts. But recognizing facts as facts seems as mindful to me as recognizing my inhale as breathing in and my exhale as breathing out. It's simply the way reality is at this moment.

Meditation isn't about doing it right. It's about trusting yourself.

TIME magazine rarely has stories about meditation. So it was a pleasure to turn a page of the February 12, 2024 issue and see a title: "The noises in my head at a silent retreat."

I could relate to those words. For after starting to meditate every day in 1971, during the past fifty-three years my meditation has involved a lot of noises inside my own head. 

Thoughts. Emotions. Cravings. Things to do. Cosmic conceptions. Crude desires.

You know, everything that's going through my mind outside of meditation. It's just more obvious when I'm sitting still, usually with eyes closed, doing whatever sort of practice appeals to me that day. 

The online version of the TIME story also has a good title: "How I Learned to Speak My Truth at a Silent Retreat." Here's a PDF file if that link doesn't work for you.
Download How I Learned to Speak My Truth at a Silent Retreat | TIME

Dorie Chevlen's description of the retreat made me realize why I've never wanted to go on a 10-day Vipassana meditation session.

So off I went, first to Chicago, then the middle of seemingly nowhere, for the retreat. I signed away my wallet and cellphone; I listened to the rules: No speaking, no eye contact, no physical contact, no drugs or alcohol, no sex or masturbation, no technology, and (scariest to me) no writing. I felt like screaming, but I trusted my boyfriend more than my own instincts; if this was good for him, this will be good for me, I assured my racing heart.

Had I bothered researching Vipassana prior to attending one, I would have read plenty about the hours. We awoke at 4 a.m. each day to make it to our first meditation by 4:30 a.m. After two hours of that, we’d congregate for our 6:30 a.m. breakfast. Then a brief break. Then more meditation. Lunch. A break. More meditation. Tea. More meditation. Then a viewing of a taped lecture by an esteemed teacher of the practice. More meditation. Then bedtime to prepare to wake up and do it all again.

That sounds ghastly to me, though I know many people enjoy retreats of this sort. It just strikes me as unduly structured and artificial. Shouldn't meditation be aimed at helping us navigate life as it usually is, not as how life is lived during a rare Vipassana retreat? 

(Vipassana basically is meditation based on Buddhist mindfulness principles.)

Initially, Chevlen doesn't do well with her meditation, or other aspects of the retreat.

In our nightly lectures, the teacher encouraged us not to think while meditating, and when a thought inevitably did cross our minds, to pass it aside without judgment. I floundered at this initially. Unintentionally, I’d screen entire films in my head (mostly M. Night Shyamalan, because even my subconscious has no taste), and analyze years-old interactions.

Constantly, helplessly, my mind kept replaying “Closing Time,” for which, unfortunately, I didn’t know all the lyrics. The result was a horrible mental performance in which Cohen would croon “And the bupbupbupbup dun-dun and the ladadadada and the Johnny Walker wisdom runnin’ high,” Plus, the campus’s picturesque geese were in the midst of mating season, so Cohen’s half-wrong lyrics were punctuated by the honking of fornicating waterfowl.

What I mean is meditating was difficult for me. But so was the time spent not meditating. Have you ever heard a cafeteria full of people eating in silence? An entire room echoing with the sound of conversation-less human mastication—all wet chewing and slippery gulps, suppressed belches and scraping silverware. 

But after a few days, she did better.

To my relief, meditating became easier, slowly, as the first days of the course passed. Whereas initially I couldn’t sit for five minutes without needing to shift my hips, I found myself still for longer and longer stretches of time. My hummingbird brain, too, slowed its vibrations; my thoughts still fluttered, but I could go stretches of time before they pulled me away. And yet, I still fantasized about leaving. Yes, I can sit here and not think, but what is the point, my mind demanded. “Run,” it urged. “Run!”

Chevlen ends up running, leaving the retreat after a few additional days. Her boyfriend was disappointed. So was she. Eventually, though, she realized that she also needed to run from the relationship with her boyfriend.

I considered leaving the life we’d built. But I didn’t. Not at first. I spent a few more months unhappy; I was sure, more so now than ever, that there had to be something wrong with me. I couldn’t meditate right. I couldn’t love right. Was there anything right about me?

Eventually, my fast-expanding misery burst like a balloon in my mouth. Pop!  “This isn’t working.” The words felt like poetry on my lips. My boyfriend helped pack up my stuff and drove me to the airport. This lovely man, with real sheets on his bed and the generosity to schlep me all the way to O’Hare International Airport—I was leaving him?

My intuition shouted to be heard over reason and though I thought it would break me, I hugged him goodbye and walked away. My legs nearly collapsed with relief on arrival. I was in the wrong place, with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, yes, but I wasn’t wrong. That toilet was probably busted before I ever used it [at the retreat, where she had to deal with a clogged toilet].

Her final paragraphs appealed to me. It mirrors, in a way, how I felt when I trusted myself and ran from the India-based religious organization that I'd belonged to for 35 years. It was a difficult decision, but I embraced the notion that after practicing a form of spirituality that involved a lot of rules, commandments, dos and don'ts, it was time to relax into a less rigid approach to life.

I’d love to say I’ve followed my instincts since then, but trust is a muscle, like any other; it only grows with pain and repetition. So I kept writing, even though it seemed doomed. I moved to New York, then I moved to LA. I got rejected; I got published; usually I got ignored. I fell in love and fell out of love and fell in love all over again.

I made a lot of mistakes, is what I mean. But they were my mistakes, at least; made from listening to my own inner voice, a voice which sometimes stuttered or misspoke or vocal-fried, but always rung true as my own. I made a lot of mistakes. But slowly, I started trusting that I could fix them. Even better, I could learn from them.

I didn’t finish the meditation course my ex-boyfriend recommended, but I sometimes still try to meditate. I’ll sit for 20 minutes and try to focus on my breath, on nothing else but just being, until my alarm goes off. I’m still not sure I’m doing it right. But I trust, now, that I don’t have to.

Pain is a good example of how mind and body are united

I'm intimately familiar with pain.

All of us are, of course, since everyone experiences pain -- aside from the unfortunate people who don't feel it at all, which isn't a good thing, because they usually suffer serious injuries or even death from not recognizing when something is dangerous, like a fire burning their skin.

Often pain becomes a more familiar companion the older we get. That's true of me. I was mostly pain free until early in 2020 when, at the age of 71, I developed sciatica in my right leg. 

Because this coincided with the beginning of the Covid pandemic in the United States, I wasn't able to get an MRI even though the pain was excruciating much of the time. I was determined to go for a lengthy walk around our rural neighborhood every day with our dog, since walking was supposed to be a good thing to do if someone had sciatica.

There were quite a few times when I'd cry for most of the walk, the pain was so severe. Ditto when I mowed our lawn with a walk-behind mower. I did it, but with a lot of tears. 

The sciatica pain eventually was markedly reduced, thanks to physical therapy and time. However, it's always been with me whenever I'm on my feet. I just have learned to tolerate or tune out the pain. For about the past six weeks the pain has been quite a bit worse, which led to me starting another round of physical therapy where I've gotten additional exercises to do several times a day.

My problem is that I'm not bad enough off to justify spinal surgery (the most frequent cause of sciatica is a bulging disk).

I might be able to get a MRI after I complete five physical therapy visits, but that depends on my insurance company. Cortisone injections in the spine are a possibility, though a MRI is needed to target their location.

So basically I've got sufficient pain to make it really annoying, yet not enough pain to justify a surgical or medical procedure. For the moment, I'm left with what I've been doing for the past four years: handling the pain as best I can with minimal outside help aside from physical therapy and pain patches at bedtime offered by SalonPas and BioFreeze.

Today I had a physical therapy appointment where I talked about the mental side of pain with Amanda, an experienced physical therapist who was familiar with the book I've been writing about recently, Ellen Langer's The Mindful Body.

Amanda agrees with Langer that every mental activity affects the body, and every bodily activity affects the mind. As an example of this, I told Amanda that even though my leg is hurting when I go to exercise at a gym three times a week, it doesn't bother me too much, because I'm focused on physical activity -- 30 minutes on an elliptical trainer, 20 minutes of lifting weights, 10-15 minutes of solitary Tai Chi.

However, twice a week, after the gym sessions I go to a Tai Chi class in downtown Salem at Pacific Martial Arts, where I've studied both hardstyle (karate) and softstyle (Tai Chi) practices for about 23 years.

Then I feel the pain in my leg considerably more. One reason seems to be that Tai Chi involves a lot of standing still along with slow movements that, when I have to put all my weight on my right/sciatica leg, is quite painful. 

A larger reason, though, is that I feel trapped in a way during the 90 minute class. Sure, I could go sit down and watch for a while if the pain was too intense, but I have never done this and don't want to do it, if at all possible. So there I am, me and my leg pain, with my mental focus much more on the pain, as contrasted with how I am at the gym, where I'm doing different things and control that doing.

Thus my experience is that while pain is undeniably physical, it also has a strong mental component. Meaning, the sort of attention I give to pain, along with my attitude toward pain, has an effect on how much pain I feel. 

(Pain is an interesting medical phenomenon, since it is entirely subjective, while usually having a physical aspect to it, one exception being "phantom limb" pain where someone feels pain from an arm or leg that has been amputated.)

I liked Langer's most recent book so much, I ordered one of her early books, Mindfulness, the 25th anniversary edition. I've only read a few pages, but saw in the index some mentions of pain. This quotation from William James, the noted psychologist of the late 1800s, mirrors what I've said above about how I experience pain.

The effect of context on pain has been known for a long time. In The Principles of Psychology, William James describes a Dr. Carpenter who suffered severe neuralgia:

He has frequently begun a lecture while suffering neuralgic pain so severe as to make him apprehend that he would find it impossible to proceed; yet no sooner has he by a determined effort fairly launched himself into the stream of thought, than he has found himself continuously borne along without the least distraction, until the end had come, and the attention had been released; then the pain has recurred with a force that has overmastered all resistance making him wonder how he could have ceased to feel it.

When one can take one's mind off pain, it seems to go away. Conversely, when the mind returns to pain, so does the body. If one can reinterpret a painful stimulus, it may cease to be painful.

Well, that'd be wonderful. I just haven't been able to do it.

However, as I said, I find myself able to lessen my sciatica pain by focusing on something other than my painful right leg. I recall that when I went on those super-painful dog walks around our neighborhood in 2020, tears welling up in my eyes, if I encountered someone else on the road, I was able to exchange some friendly greetings with them just fine. 

This shows the power of the mind. It can make painful things better, or pleasant things worse, depending on how we view those things and the meaning we ascribe to them.

Great observations about life in "The Mindful Body"

It was kind of a strange way for me to learn about a book. I usually ignore emails from Strong Towns, an organization devoted to making cities and towns more livable, but this one featured messages from staff members about what they're finding interesting in books, film, and such.

I saw that a woman spoke highly of Ellen Langer's book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. Since I'm big on mindfulness, and also liked the creative mention of "chronic health," I ordered the book after reading some laudatory reviews on Amazon.

The cover copy says that Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is known worldwide as "the mother of mindfulness" and "the mother of positive psychology." Okay, I'm willing to believe that, though I don't recall hearing of Langer before in connection with mindfulness. 

(Wikipedia says she's a year older than me, being born in 1947, so that lends some credence to those mother of claims.)

Anyway, I've read the first chapters in her book. Langer is an excellent writer with an appealing style. I'm enjoying The Mindful Body more than I thought I would, in large part because Langer starts off by sharing some perspectives on life that I'd call philosophical, if they weren't based on either psychological research or arguments that strike me as persuasive.

Here's some quotes of what I've liking in those early chapters.

Mindfulness. But mindfulness -- as my students and I have shown -- is instead the simple process of actively noticing things, no meditation required. When mindful, we notice things we didn't notice before, and we come to see that we didn't know the things we thought we knew as well as we thought we knew them. Everything become interesting and potentially useful in a new way.

Mind and body. I believe the mind and body comprise a single system, and every change in the human being is essentially simultaneously a change at the level of the mind (that is, a cognitive change) as well as the body (a hormonal, neural, and/or behavioral change). When we open our minds to this idea of mind-body unity, new possibilities for controlling our health become real.

Rules. In life as in art, although we tend to praise rule followers, I believe that breaking the rules is often necessary. Too often, we follow rules mindlessly. We buy the "right" brushes and wear the "right" clothes and ask the "appropriate" questions. When we approach the rules mindfully, however, we realize they are often arbitrary and don't make sense. You don't need to use that brush or obey the rules of perspective. It's your painting. It's your life.

Continuums not sharp distinctions. An athlete earning a medal by a few milliseconds. A patient barely meets the threshold for a diagnosis. A law student fails the bar exam by one question. Are these people truly substantially different from the medalist, the healthy patient just below the threshold, or the attorney who just barely passes the bar exam?

Everything in the world exists on a continuum, whether in speed, size, virulence, or any other possible descriptor you could think of. Still, we create and mindlessly adopt sharp distinctions, and those distinctions change lives far more dramatically than marginal differences ever do.

Question. When we recognize that rules, labels, and cutoff points are made by people, there is lots of room to question how any situation could be otherwise. We gain a newfound sense of freedom. We expand our possibilities. This is true of our behavior, but also of our health. The key is to question those things we mindlessly accept, to mindfully interrogate all of the descriptions and diagnoses that can hold us back. When we do, we can get better. We can learn to heal ourselves.

Risk-taking. We behave in ways that make sense to us or else we would act differently. When my expectations for success in some pursuit exceeds yours, you see me as a risk-taker. However, if you believed what I did, then you'd probably behave as I did. In other words, risk-taking is really an observer's phenomenon. "Risk-takers" do things that make sense to them, even if the same actions seem inexplicable from someone else's perspective.

Prediction. In this sense, prediction is no different than a guess or a hunch and, as we will see, a decision is also just a prediction or guess... Perhaps we think we can predict because we overlook the many mistaken predictions we make daily. Every embarrassment we suffer is an instance of our mistaken predictions. How often do we push or pull when we should pull or push to open a store door; reach into the silverware drawer for a knife and pull out a fork; unsuccessfully look for the sock in the dryer?

In each of these scenarios we predict that our action will be successful, and we come up short. How many people predicted they'd never get COVID-19? How many of us predict we'll never really lose our strength or our ability to remember? How many of us predict we'll be fine with very little sleep? We predict these things incorrectly all the time. What about our inability to predict the behavior of others? How often have we waited for a phone call that never came, or came a day later than predicted?

Control. In short, I believe that the illusion of control is not always an illusion. While it might lead people to choose seemingly worse gambles in the lab, it can also help us cope with risk and uncertainty in real life. In this sense the so-called illusion is often a necessary psychological strategy. Control is motivating, helping us handle all sorts of unpleasant and difficult situations. After all, if you believe you have no control, then you may become helpless. 

Mindful optimism. I propose we adopt an attitude of mindful optimism. This doesn't mean we should bury our heads in the sand with a certainty that all will be fine. Rather, it involves recognizing that uncertainty is not new. Neither is risk. Everything has always been uncertain, we were just oblivious to it.

We can worry or relax, and things will turn out good or bad. If we worry and everything turns out fine, we've stressed ourselves unnecessarily. If we worry and things turn out to be bad, we're usually no more prepared for it than if we didn't worry. If we relax and things turn out bad, we'll be stronger to deal with it, and if it all turns out to be fine, we can continue behaving adaptively.

Joan Tollifson's "awakening" seems to be mindfulness, basically

I'm continuing to enjoy Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp. As noted before, she has an approach to spirituality, and life, that resonates with me. Simple. Clear. Non-dogmatic. 

But I'm coming to believe that as distinctive as her views are, they seem to boil down to a familiar subject: mindfulness.

Since Tollifson doesn't use this term in her writing and speaking -- at least, I haven't come across it yet -- at first I thought that her worldview was founded in the disciplines mentioned on the back cover of Nothing to Grasp in an "About the Author" section: 

Joan Tollifson has an affinity with Advaita, Buddhism and radical nonduality, but she belongs to no tradition.

(By the way, her web site says that she currently lives in southern Oregon, my state. Good choice, Joan.)

However, Tollifson's favorite notion is Here/Now. That's decidedly mindful. She also favors sensory experience and action over thinking as much as possible. That's decidedly mindful. And she says that everything Here/Now is to be embraced, pain as well as pleasure, sadness as well as happiness, and so on. That's decidedly mindful.

This passage illustrates what I'm talking about. It's more flowery than most writings on mindfulness, but Tollifson has a poetic sensibility.

The so-called journey of spiritual awakening is not about arriving somewhere else or acquiring anything new. It is about recognizing what is most obvious, and seeing through (or waking up from) the false ideas and mirage-like imaginations that seemingly obscure what is right in front of us most intimate, closer than our breath, impossible to actually avoid or overlook. 

When we hear words like awakening or enlightenment, we tend to imagine that "I" might one day cross some magic line in the sand and become an "awakened person," forever after established in some perfect (and hopefully permanently pleasant) state. This is fantasy and illusion. This way of thinking is precisely what awakening wakes up from.

In fact, awakening or enlightenment is always only about Here/Now. This is the jewel beyond all price. This jewel is inconceivable and unimaginable not because it is something mysterious and esoteric and far away, but because it is so close, so all-inclusive, and so seemingly ordinary.  Although this aware presence is invisible, it is visible everywhere! It is the whole universe, and it is what remains when the whole universe disappears.

Is the mind trying to grasp what that is? Is there a thought that "I don't get it"?

To awaken is to see through this movement of the thinking mind, and to simply be awake here and now, hearing the traffic sounds and the bird songs, breathing, seeing the colors and shapes of this moment. This is effortless because we can't not be here, present and aware, doing whatever we are doing.

But thought has the ability to convince us that we are separate from our experience, that we are a fragment lost in an alien world, a ship on the ocean in danger of sinking. One very common way of seemingly overlooking the jewel is by searching for it "out there" somewhere. 

Thus they say in Buddhism that if you see the Buddha on the road, kill it. In other words, if you imagine that Ultimate Reality is something outside of you, something you can objectify, something you find or lose -- a person, an event, an experience, a state, a memory, an idea, an understanding, a belief -- then you must kill it.

You must wake up. When you wake up, there is nothing outside of you. You are no-thing and everything.

If you try to pay attention to awareness or to the One Immutable Self, you objectify it -- you make it into something outside of you. Whatever you imagine you see or find or experience is some subtle conceptual object. This same thing happens if you try to identify "yourself" with awareness. You objectify both "yourself" and "awareness," divide them (mentally) into two, and then try to merge these two (imaginary) objects and make them identical.

This takes lots of mental efforting and imagination. And whatever experience of unity and expansion you manage to have, it inevitably disappears, leaving you with the belief that you've lost it and then the frustrating task of trying to recapture it.

On the other hand, if you stop all such convoluted efforts and simply relax to what is effortlessly occurring -- hearing, seeing, sensing, breathing, awaking, being -- then you realize you already are present as this whole undivided happening Here/Now. 

So instead of trying to get this, or do this, or identify as this, simply be this, which actually you can't not be. Even if a train of thought captures your attention and a mental movie unfolds in the imagination, this too is simply another movement of this undivided happening.

Here's a good description of what Buddhist mindfulness is all about

There's lots of ways to look upon mindfulness. Mostly I view mindfulness as a practice that doesn't require a grounding in Buddhism. However, I enjoy reading about how Buddhist practitioners view mindfulness, or vipassana insight meditation. 

A concluding chapter of Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, a Buddhist monk, contains a description of what mindfulness can lead to that I found clear and mostly convincing, though I have some doubts about whether the supposedly unconditioned state of nibbana/nirvana actually can be achieved.

Enjoy.

As you continue to observe these changes and you see how it all fits together, you become aware of the intimate connectedness of all mental, sensory, and affective phenomena. You watch one thought leading to another, you see destruction giving rise to emotional reactions and feelings giving rise to more thoughts.

Actions, thoughts, feelings, desires -- you see all of them intimately linked together in a delicate fabric of cause and effect. You watch pleasurable experiences arise and fall, and you see that they never last; you watch pain come uninvited and you watch yourself anxiously struggling to throw it off; you see yourself fail. It all happens over and over while you stand back quietly and just watch it all work.

Out of this living laboratory itself comes an inner and unassailable conclusion. You see that your life is marked by disappointment and frustration, and you clearly see the source.

These reactions arise out of your own inability to get what you want, your fear of losing what you have already gained, and your habit of never being satisfied with what you have. These are no longer theoretical concepts -- you have seen these things for yourself, and you know that they are real. You perceive your own fear, your own basic insecurity in the face of life and death.

It is a profound tension that goes all the way down to the root of thought and makes all of life a struggle. You watch yourself anxiously groping about, fearfully grasping after solid, trustworthy ground. You see yourself endlessly grasping for something, anything, to hold onto in the midst of all these shifting sands, and you see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing that doesn't change.

You see the pain of loss and grief, you watch yourself being forced to adjust to painful developments day after day in your own ordinary existence. You witness the tensions and conflicts inherent in the very process of everyday living, and you see how superficial most of your concerns really are. You watch the progress of pain, sickness, old age, and death. 

You learn to marvel that all these horrible things are not fearful at all. They are simply reality.

...In the midst of every pleasant experience, you watch your own craving and clinging take place. In the midst of unpleasant experiences, you watch a very powerful resistance take hold. You do not block these phenomena, you just watch them; you see them as the very stuff of human thought. 

You search for that thing you call "me," but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further, and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns, and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them.

You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective, and defensive over these pitiful things, and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself -- physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings, and emotions -- it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for "me."

You find nothing.

In all that collection of mental hardware in this endless stream of ever-shifting experience, all you can find is innumerable impersonal processes that have been caused and conditioned by previous processes. There is no static self to be found; it is all process. You find thoughts but no thinker, you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them. 

The house itself is empty. There is nobody home.

Your whole view of self changes at this point. You begin to look upon yourself as if you were a newspaper photograph. When viewed with the naked eyes, the photograph you see is a definite image. When viewed through a magnifying glass, it all breaks down into an intricate configuration of dots.

Similarly, under the penetrating gaze of mindfulness, the feeling of a self, an "I" or "being" anything, loses its solidity and dissolves. There comes a point in insight meditation where the three characteristics of existence -- impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness -- come rushing home with concept-searing force.

You vividly experience the impermanence of life, the suffering nature of human existence, and the truth of no-self. You experience these things so graphically that you suddenly awake to the utter futility of craving, grasping, and resistance. In the clarity and purity of this profound moment, our consciousness is transformed.

The entity of self evaporates. All that is left is an infinity of interrelated nonpersonal phenomena, which are conditioned and ever-changing. Craving is extinguished and a great burden is lifted. There remains only an effortless flow, without a trace of resistance or tension. There remains only peace, and blessed nibbana, the uncreated, is realized.

If we're only happy when life has no problems, we'll never be happy

After recommending a conversation between Sam Harris and André Duqum after listening to only ten minutes of it, now I can really recommend the conversation after listening to two hours of the 2:20 talk between them.

Harris is in fine form here. Having been an avid user of his Waking Up app, I've heard quite a few talks between Harris and some other spiritually inclined person. He tells some of the same stories in the Duqum conversation but much of what Harris says is new to me.

I haven't been taking any notes, so will simply relate what I remember most about what I've heard in the two hours, figuring that since it stuck in my mind, that's what appealed to me, and maybe the same is true of others.

When Harris talks about finding happiness, I was blown away by how clear and eloquent he is. My description of what he said won't do justice to his words,  but this is the best I can do.

Harris is right on when he observes that for most of us -- certainly true of me -- life is a never-ending battle between problems that arise for us and our desire to make those problems go away. We feel satisfied when something is checked off our to-do list. That gives us a happiness boost.

Briefly. Until the next problem comes along. Now, "problem" doesn't quite capture what we're dealing with. Sometimes it's a gap between what we want and what is present now. Some sticky spots on my car's windshield have been bugging me (they might even be squished bugs).

When I notice them, right in my field of vision, I'm driving along and can't clean the windshield. When I get home, I forget to clean it. Today I did. That felt good. I'll feel even better next time I drive my car. Until new spots appear.

Harris' point is that if our happiness depends on having every problem or unmet goal dealt with successfully, we're never going to be able to experience lasting happiness, or satisfaction. Somehow we have to find a way to to be happy even though there's a gap between what we'd like to have happen, and what is actually happening. 

This is fairly easy to do with minor gaps. It's much tougher when the gap is larger, as when we're having to deal with a serious illness or the death of a loved one. In these cases basic Buddhist precepts can be of some help.con

We can embrace the notion of emptiness -- that all things are marked by interdependency, change, lack of inherent existence. We can feel whatever pain, distress, and suffering is present in our consciousness while recognizing that it will arise and pass away as all things do.

Well, unless death comes upon us before the passing away does, in which case the passing away will be complete, since almost certainly we won't exist anymore.

Harris stresses that our thinking plays a large role in our unhappiness. Much of the time, if not most of the time, the problems we're worried about don't exist in the  present moment. They're anticipated problems, potential problems, concerns about events that we imagine happening, yet haven't yet.

So even when things are going well for us, our mind is prone to envision things going badly in the future. Or we remember past problems and worry that they'll pop up again. 

Mindfulness of what's occurring in the present moment helps to tone down thoughts of past and future. Sure, thinking is a great tool. However, it needs to be used appropriately, not indiscriminately. Too much or too little thinking can both be unproductive, which is why the Middle Way of Buddhism makes a lot of sense. 

I also liked what Harris had to say about Advaita Vedanta. Nonduality, which is what Advaita is all about, is a wonderful perspective on reality. Who isn't attracted to oneness?

But Harris cogently criticizes teachers, or preachers, of Advaita who irritatingly blab on about how there is no one to be enlightened, since the Self doesn't exist, so every spiritual effort is misguided, because there's nothing to attain. Just be what you already are, blah, blah, blah. 

The Advaita Trap makes this annoyingly clear.

Regarding consciousness, I like how Harris discusses the Hard Problem, which basically is why there is something to be like a conscious being. Me, I'm more open to the notion that the Hard Problem will disappear when the nature of consciousness is better understood, while Harris seems to believe that it will always be with us.

His discussion of Artificial Intelligence was well-informed and thoughtful. I think he's right that soon we will be able to recognize an AI not because it lacks human mental capabilities, but because it surpasses them. 

Anyway, I look forward to hearing the last twenty minutes of the Harris-Duqum conversation. Harris does most of the talking in it, which is as it should be, since while Duqum asks good questions, Harris is an exceptional explainer of meditation and spirituality from his rational mystic perspective. 

Don't watch yourself. Be yourself. In meditation, and in everything.

I usually listen to a daily guided meditation on Sam Harris' Waking Up app. But sometimes I enjoy other offerings on the app, which includes a section called Theory. There's also Practice and Life.

Now and then Harris correctly says in his guided meditations that listening to a conversation in the Theory section can be just as valuable of meditating. After all, meditation is about paying attention to what's happening in the present moment.

If that thing is an interesting conversation between Harris and someone else, and I'm paying close attention to it, then, hey, that's a form of meditation.

As is everything else in life, since Harris and most other meditation teachers emphasize that there's no real distinction between formal meditation and what we do the rest of the day. It's all about attention and experiencing life as fully as possible in the present moment.

This morning I only had time to listen to about ten minutes of a several hour conversation between Harris and André Duqum. I liked what I heard. Duqum has a video of the conversation on his Know Thyself web site. It's in the middle on the bottom row, "Sam Harris: A Rational Mystics Guide to Consciousness and Awakening."

It's a YouTube video, which I'll share:

In what I heard today Harris speaks about the familiar theme of how our thoughts can prevent us from genuinely experiencing reality. Obviously there's nothing wrong with thinking. It's essential for much that we do. However, thinking interferes with experience when it isn't needed.

Though we can become fully absorbed in thinking, which makes it a form of meditation, typically thinking creates distance between us and the world. We're paying attention to thoughts inside our head rather than attending to the outside world.

For a long time, 35 years, I practiced a form of meditation that aimed at "going within." This wasn't only closed-eye meditation. It also was closed ear meditation for much of the meditation session. Since, I've learned that the best thing I can do to feel more in touch with both myself and the world is to go without, not within.

When I meditate now, which includes everyday activities, since mindfulness has become my meditation, I try to focus on the sensations of what I'm doing and what's around me rather than thoughts. One thing at a time. Look out, not in. Those are two of my basic principles.

Harris spoke about how there can even be a watcher in meditation/mindfulness. By "watcher," he means the feeling, or assumption, that there's a person inside our head who is viewing reality like an air traffic controller in a high tower.

The watcher is mistakenly considered to be our true self, not the body/brain. But actually the watcher is an illusion. For when we try to find that person inside our head, the Self who is in charge of things, we come up empty.

It's better to experience life directly, not through a made-up watcher. We all know how pleasant it is to lose ourself in dance, music, walking, conversation, sex, work, or any other activity marked by a minimal distinction between us and what we're doing. 

This is a flow state, which is much different from a thinking or watching state, for those are marked by duality.

I find that usually it makes sense to trust my deeper mind or consciousness. After all, I heartily agree with Harris that both free will and an independent self are fictions. We don't need to worry that if we stop thinking, worrying, and fretting about the past and future, nothing will get done.

In my experience, I get more done when I simply trust that whatever I need to do will appear as something that needs doing. Yeah, I realize that sentence doesn't make logical sense. But it resonates with me. 

I do use to-do lists. I find them helpful in lessening my need to think, since I'm outsourcing some of my thinking to a piece of paper, my iPhone, or laptop. Often, though, some task that I've forgotten to jot down yet needs doing will pop into my mind unbidden, which strengthens my faith that a part of me beyond thinking can handle things just fine much or most of the time.

Tomorrow I'll listen to more of the conversation between Harris and Duqum. I find Harris to be my kind of spiritual teacher. He truly is a rational mystic. Harris has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, yet also is well versed in Dzogchen and other forms of Buddhist meditation. 

A mindfulness lesson in the checkout lane

This afternoon I was in a south Salem Fred Meyer checkout lane. There was only one person ahead of me, so I decided to skip the self-checkout, which I usually prefer as the lines aren't as long.

When the person in front of me moved forward, I didn't immediately do the same with my grocery cart. I heard the man in back of me say something. Couldn't make it out exactly, but it sounded something like "you can move now."

Anyway, I ignored the comment, unloaded my groceries on the conveyor belt and soon was at the head of the line. As the female clerk rang up my items, I got out some coupons for certain items I was buying. I handed them to the woman after she had scanned all of my purchases.

Everything went smoothly until she said, "Oops. I pushed the wrong button. Got to ask for an override." She picked up a phone and dialed her manager. As we waited for him to show up, I told her that it'd be nice if she could punch in her own override. Why did a manager have to do it?

She said that her manager trusts her, but the corporate higher-ups don't. That led to a discussion between the clerk and me about how employees of a big business shouldn't be criticized for having to implement policies established by executives. 

We had time to talk because even though the clerk could see her manager down at the self-checkout section, he wasn't moving in her direction. I suggested she wave her arms, which she did, but that didn't help because the manager was facing away from her. 

Eventually she phoned him again and he indicated that he'd be doing the override soon.

At that exact moment, pretty much, I saw that the man in back of me in line, who had put all of his items on the conveyor belt, was picking them up and placing them back in his cart. I said to him, "We'll be done here in just a bit."

He angrily told me, "Thanks for holding up the line," as he continued to pick up his items. I replied, "Hey, this wasn't my fault, and it wasn't her fault either. It just was a glitch." The manager then appeared, held out his override tag or whatever it is for the clerk to scan, and said to me, "Sorry it took so long. I had something else to deal with."

So the irritated man in back of me, who looked to be somewhere around my age, in his 70s, put all of his stuff back in his cart and left the checkout line just as the clerk was finishing up my purchase. I said to her, "Bad timing on that guy's part. Now he's going to have to wait in another line."

Now, since I'm in a mindfulness frame of mind, having written a few days ago about my re-reading of Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are, I found this check-out line experience to be a great example of what goes wrong when mindfulness is forgotten.

Meaning, when we allow our negative thoughts and emotions to override the evidence of our senses. Believe me, I'm an expert on this, because frequently I've had feelings akin to the irritated man in the line behind me. 

It's easy to jump to conclusions based not on objective reality, but on what we believe is happening. I doubt that the man understood that the reason for my delay in checking out was an innocent error by the clerk in pushing a button on her touch screen.

Maybe he wasn't listening closely to what she said to me and to her manager on the phone. Maybe he was hard of hearing. Or maybe he knew what the problem was and still became irritated. He might have been having a bad day and this was the experience that sent him into a major irritation. 

Regardless, as noted in my previous post, there's a lot to like in Kabat-Zinn's observation:

Think of yourself as an eternal witness, as timeless. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

The man behind me was seeing the checkout line through the lens of his impatience and irritation. Again, I've been there and done the same thing, so I can't judge the man for this. He was simply reacting from his own subjective perspective.

For me, on the other hand, the delay in checking out as we waited for the manager wasn't bothersome at all. The clerk and I were talking about what was happening. We shared a common view that big corporations like Kroger, which owns Fred Meyer, can have absurd employee policies. 

I knew that the clerk was doing her best. When the manager finally appeared, I had no doubt that he also was doing his best. This was just a minor problem caused by a simple mistake. When the clerk told me, "I pushed the wrong button," I said to her, "I do that all the time." 

Hopefully I've learned something from this episode.

Maybe the next time I start to get irritated at someone, I'll pause and remind myself that whatever is happening, it's what is happening. Almost certainly no one is trying to make me irritated. I'm doing that to myself by expecting something to occur which is different from what is actually occurring. 

That's why I'm attracted to mindfulness so much, which is defined by Kabat-Zinn as paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally.

UPDATE: After writing this post, this morning I woke up irritated at a fairly minor health problem that bothers me at times. I was going to tell my wife how I felt. Then I realized that my irritation wasn't very different, and maybe not different at all, from the man in my checkout lane story getting upset at having to wait a while in line behind me while the clerk dealt with a problem. 

The lesson for me is that it's a heck of a lot easier to observe when someone else is being unmindful and self-centered than when I am. But maybe I've learned something. By not complaining about my problem, which wouldn't have done anything to help the problem anyway, my wife had an open conversational window to talk about some things she was interested in. I ended up feeling better listening to her than I would have if I'd done my complaining.

Sure, sometimes it makes sense to let our negative feelings out. But sometimes it isn't. 

 

Mindfulness meditation is like briefly being dead

Whenever I need a heaping dose of reality shorn of unnecessary concepts, my eyes wander to a bottom shelf in my office where the mindfulness books hang out. 

This morning I was drawn to pick up a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn that I'd read before, Wherever You Go, There You Are. 

I've read other mindfulness books by Kabat-Zinn. As he says in the introduction, his previous book, Full Catastrophe Living, is largely aimed at people akin to those who use his stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center run by Kabat-Zinn.

That book had to be quite detailed and comprehensive. Also, thick. Wherever You Go, There You Are is aimed more at a general audience. It's clearly and simply written with many short chapters, several of which I re-read today.

I was struck by how much I agree with Kabat-Zinn's description of what meditation is all about. His take on meditation is pretty much how I've come to view it. When I meditate now, I follow my breath, not trying to change my breath, like by making it shallower or deeper, faster or slower, just being aware of the sensation of breathing.

But this sort of meditation is markedly different from the form of meditation I practiced during the 35 years I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru which taught that the purpose of meditation is to leave this world behind and enter a supernatural better world.

Meditation, according to Kabat-Zinn and Buddhism, is almost precisely the opposite of this. Today I read:

New Yorker cartoon: Two Zen monks in robes and shaved heads, one young, one old, sitting side by side cross-legged on the floor. The younger one is looking somewhat quizzically at the older one, who is turned toward him and saying: "Nothing happens next. This is it."

It's true. Ordinarily, when we undertake something, it is only natural to expect a desirable outcome for our efforts. We want to see results, even if it is only a pleasant feeling. The sole exception I can think of is meditation.

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are. Perhaps its value lies precisely in this. Maybe we all need to do one thing in our lives simply for its own sake.

But it would not be accurate to call meditation a "doing." It is more accurately described as a "being." When we understand that "This is it," it allows us to let go of the past and future and wake up to what we are now, in this moment.

People usually don't get this right away. They want to meditate in order to relax, to experience a special state, to become a better person, to reduce some stress or pain, to break out of old habits and patterns, to become free or enlightened.

All valid reasons to take up meditation practice, but all equally fraught with problems if you expect those things to happen just because you are now meditating.

You'll be caught up in wanting to have a "special experience" or in looking for signs of progress, and if you don't feel something special pretty quickly, you may start to doubt the path you have chosen, or to wonder whether you are "doing it right."

In most domains of learning, this is only reasonable. Of course you have to see progress sooner or later to keep at something. But meditation is different. From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now.

Beautiful! So refreshing.

This demolishes the absurd notion that just because someone has a different experience in meditation than you do, that means one of you is more advanced spiritually or mystically. I love the simple wisdom in From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

There's no better or worse in meditation, no higher or lower. There's only "This is it." Doesn't matter at all what it is. 

I also enjoyed reading Kabat-Zinn's description of meditation as being akin to dying, except, of course, the actually being dead part. He writes:

People think of meditation as some kind of special activity, but this is not exactly correct. Meditation is simplicity itself. As a joke, we sometimes say: "Don't just do something, sit there." But meditation is not just about sitting, either.

It is about stopping and being present, that is all. Mostly we run around doing. Are you able to come to a stop in your life, even for one moment? Could it be this moment? What would happen if you did?

A good way to stop all the doing is to shift into the "being mode" for a moment. Think of yourself as an eternal witness, as timeless. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are. Things get simpler. In some ways, it's as if you died and the world continued on.

If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you. No one else can take over your unique agenda. It would die or peter out with you just as it has for everyone else who has ever died. So you don't need to worry about it in any absolute way.

If this is true, maybe you don't need to make one more phone call right now, even if you think you do. Maybe you don't need to read something just now, to run one more errand.

By taking a few moments to "die on purpose" to the rush of time while you are still living, you free yourself to have time for the present. By "dying" now in this way, you actually become more alive now. That is what stopping can do.

And when you decide to go, it's a different kind of going because you stopped. The stopping actually makes the going more vivid, richer, more textured. It helps keep all the things we worry about and feel inadequate about in perspective. It gives us guidance.

Try: Stopping, sitting down, and becoming aware of your breathing once in a while throughout the day. It can be for five minutes, or even five seconds. Let go into full acceptance of the present moment including how you are feeling and what you perceive to be happening. 

For these moments, don't try to change anything at all, just breathe and let go. Breathe and let go. Die to having to have anything be different in this moment; in your mind and in your heart, give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.

Then, when you're ready, move in the direction your heart tells you to go, mindfully and with resolution.

More wise advice.

I enjoy taking a few breaths, feeling the air passing into my nose, visualizing the air filling an empty cavity on the inhalation, then leaving the cavity empty on the exhalation. That emptiness is akin to the dying Kabat-Zinn speaks of.

It helps me look upon whatever I'm experiencing at the moment from a perspective of me being absent. What would the situation be like if there was no "me" aware of it? Well, then there would be the same thing happening, but not with a sense of like/dislike, pleasure/pain, good/bad, and the other pairs of opposites that aren't objectively there, but are part of my subjective response to what's going on.

What if religions are wrong and there's nothing to find?

In my experience, the most difficult part of writing is the first sentence and the last sentence. With one, there's nothing that comes before. With the other, there's nothing that comes after. So those sentences are unique.

I struggled with the first sentence in my book, Return to the One. Until finally, a sentence popped into my head that seemed just right to me.

If something has been lost and you're not sure where to look for it, there's good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield.

Then I spoke about the familiar situation (familiar to me, at least) of looking for your car keys only to discover that they were sitting unnoticed in a pocket or purse the whole time.

But let's think about what's necessary for a search to make sense. To begin with, you really need to have lost something. Meaning, it was in your possession at one point, and now it isn't. Then there has to be a decent probability that you can find that thing you used to possess.

If you're on a cruise and drop your glasses into the ocean while leaning over a railing, you know what you've lost, but for all practical purposes you have a zero chance of finding that item.

In Return to the One I argued that we have a sense of loss, yet most of us don't understand what we're longing to recover: God, or the One. I feel like I did a pretty good job making that argument, yet in my current frame of mind I no longer find what I wrote to be persuasive.

I still like my first sentence in the book, though. But now I see it as pointing toward the desirability of living in the here and now, rather than a there and then. After all, where we are, where everyone is, without exception, is the present moment.

No searching required. Just be here now.

This, of course, is the essence of mindfulness. And of the non-religious aspect of Buddhism, which includes Zen. Such distinguishes these forms of spirituality from the seeking forms of spirituality and religion where there is much talk of a path to be followed, and signs of progress along the way.

Here's some illustrative passages from Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life.

Not only is it always now. The "curriculum" of this adventure we call living, where mindfulness can play such a pivotal role, is always what is unfolding in this moment, whether we like what is happening or not. 

Whatever is arising in this moment becomes the curriculum for liberating ourselves from the shackles of greed, hatred, and delusion. We do not need some ideal or romantic fairy tale of what would be best for us. What we most need is what is already given to us: the actuality of things as they are in the only moment we will ever have -- this one.

...So as we have already seen, the notion that in meditation practice there is no place to go, nothing to do, and nothing to attain can be quite strange and mysterious -- even foreign -- to our striving temperaments and our need to always be getting better.

...Non-striving is not trivial. It involves realizing that you are already here. There's no place to go, because the agenda is simply to be awake. 

It is not framed as some ideal that suggests that after forty years of sitting in a cave in the Himalayas, or by studying with august teachers, or doing ten thousand prostrations, or whatever it is, you will necessarily be any better than you are now.

It is likely that you will just be older. What happens now is what matters.

If you don't pay attention now, as Kabir, the great Indian poet of sixteenth-century India said, "You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death."

...Awareness itself is what mindfulness is about. It is not about achieving an ideal, or a particularly desirable or longed-for special state.

If the mind is thinking: "If I meditate I'll always be compassionate. I'll be like the Dalai Lama. I'll be like Mother Teresa" or whoever your spiritual guru/hero of the moment is, it may help to remind yourself that you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being like the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa or anybody else. Nor do you know what their interior experience is.

The only person that you have the remotest possibility of being like is yourself. And that, when it comes down to it, is the real challenge of mindfulness: the challenge to be yourself.

The irony, of course, is that you already are.

Mindfulness: whatever happens is the curriculum of that moment

One of the things that I like about the Buddhist notion of emptiness, where change is omnipresent because nothing possesses an inherent existence, is how much money it saves me on books.

For I've found that rather than buying a new book to get some fresh ideas, I can look over the books I already own and reread them. This gives me fresh ideas because I've changed from the last time I read the book, so much of it will seem new to me.

Case in point: a few days ago I was looking at the mindfulness section in my office bookcase and noticed Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life. 

Amazon tells me that I bought the hardcover version in 2011, twelve years ago.

Since, I've learned a lot abut mindfulness, but I still consider myself a beginner, so I decided to take another look at the book. Based on my highlighting and notes in the back part of the book, I can tell that what most appeals to me now is different from what I liked in my first reading. 

Here's some passages that resonated with me in the first part of the book, which I finished re-reading today.

(1) I'm not opposed to the idea of discipline. However, I also like to flow with life as much as possible. A mini-chapter on "The Beauty of Discipline" (they're all just a few pages long) had some good things to say on this subject.

The discipline I am referring to is really the willingness to bring the spaciousness and clarity of awareness back over and over again to whatever is going on -- even as we feel we are being pulled in a thousand different directions. 

Just taking this kind of of stance toward our own experience, without trying to fix or change anything at all, is an act of generosity toward oneself, an act of intelligence, an act of kindness.

The word discipline comes from disciple, someone who is in a position to learn. So when we bring a certain discipline to the cultivation of mindfulness and are aware of how challenging it is to bring a sustained attending to any aspect of our lives, we are actually creating the conditions for learning something fundamental from life itself.

Then life becomes the meditation practice and the meditation teacher, and whatever happens in any moment is simply the curriculum of that moment. 

(2) I've never understood why some people view thinking as negative, something opposed to a spiritual life, a mindful life. A "Befriending Our Thinking" chapter corrects this misconception.

It is very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.

Meditation is not suggesting that it would be better if you didn't think and were simply to suppress all those sometimes unruly, disturbing, and disquieting, sometimes uplifting and creative thoughts when they arise.

If you do try to suppress your thinking, you are just going to wind up with a gigantic headache. Such a pursuit is unwise, pure folly -- like trying to stop the ocean from waving. It is the very nature of the ocean for its surface to change as a result of changing atmospheric conditions.

...The mind is similar. The surface can be extremely labile, changing constantly with the changing "weather patterns" of our lives: our emotions, moods, thoughts, our experiences, everything, often with little or no awareness on our part.

We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mistake them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times.

The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.

(3) There's a me. But it's not mine. This teaching of Buddhism, and also of modern neuroscience, is both wonderfully appealing to me and also wonderfully confusing. Jon Kabat-Zinn explains things in a chapter called "Our Love Affair with Personal Pronouns -- Especially I, Me, and Mine."

The Buddha taught for forty-five years. He is said to have said that all of his teachings could be encapsulated in one sentence. If that is so, perhaps we might want to remember what it was, even if we don't necessarily understand it at first. Imagine forty-five years of profound teaching distilled into one sentence: "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine.'"

It might be helpful to reflect on what the Buddha might have meant when he used the verb "to cling." "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine'" does not mean there is no "you." It isn't suggesting that perhaps you will have to hire someone to put on your pants in the morning because there's no "you" to do it.

Nor does it mean that you should give away all the money in your bank account because it is not yours and there is no real bank anyway.

What it means is that clinging is optional, that we can recognize it when it arises and choose not to feed it. It means that the selfing habit is a major part of our default setting, that mode of mind that we revert to constantly when we go unconscious or drone on in the automatic pilot doing mode. 

It means that how we relate to all our moments, all our experiences, is a choice.

It means that we can make the choice, moment by moment, to recognize how much we do cling to "I," "me," and "mine," how self-oriented and self-preoccupied we can be, and then decide not to cling to them, or more reasonably, to catch ourselves when we do it.

It is saying that we don't have to automatically and with no awareness fall into the habits of self-identification, self-centeredness, and selfing. What is more, if we are open to looking at ourselves afresh, we can really see that these thought-habits actually distort reality, create illusions and delusions, and ultimately imprison us. 

Important truth: what we need isn't God, but our own being

Well, today I finished a book I've been blogging about for a while, Seth Gillihan's Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. As is the case with most books I read, I liked almost all of it, finding just a few parts annoying.

I'll mention the annoying parts first, to get them out of the way.

Gillihan doesn't mention religion or his own faith very often in the book. But given his subject, even a few times seemed too many to me. I was OK with him using "spirit" as a way to describe the deeper aspect of life.

Here he describes his take on spirit.

We don't have to add anything extra or overtly "spiritual" to find deep connection with another person. Spirit emerges in our relationships through our everyday words and actions when our attention is in the present. 

We go beyond minds and bodies by fully present with our own body and mind. When we completely inhabit the shared here and now of this world, we find connection that transcends here and now, beyond space and time.

OK. I doubt that Gillihan means this literally, since being in the present doesn't really take us beyond space and time. I'll grant him that literary license, though, since it can seem like we're beyond space and time.

What bothered me much more was how he felt the need to say this on the final page of his book, which obviously won't resonate with the many readers who don't share his devotion to God.

The integrated approach of Think Act Be that emerged from the intersection of my trials and my training has been discovered by innumerable people across the millennia. Thomas Merton captured it beautifully in New Seeds of Contemplation:

"The 'spiritual life' is then the perfectly balanced life in which the body with its passions and instincts, the mind with its reasoning and its obedience to principle and the spirit with its passive illumination by the Light and Love of God form one complete [person] who is in God and with God and from God and for God."

I suppose Christian readers of his book will like that sentiment. I sure didn't, especially since it contradicts Gillihan's statement that spirit emerges when our attention is in the present -- no need for any illumination by God.

However, as I said, on the whole I enjoyed his book a lot. I especially liked his emphasis on not expecting to gain anything from mindfulness and meditation other than a better relationship with our experience of the life we already have.

Gillihan writes:

Most of us seek security and belonging in a home outside ourselves. We look for it in relationships, in work, in acclaim or material things. In reality, the home we long for is always right here. It doesn't exist anywhere else.

"This is a country whose center is everywhere," wrote Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation. "You do not find it by traveling but by standing still."

But that doesn't stop us from searching for it everywhere except where it is, as if we were tearing the house apart trying to find the keys that we're holding in our hand. The answer must be out there somewhere, something more than just ourselves, because we're convinced we're not enough.

...So much of our suffering comes from struggling to find something more. More than myself. More than the person sitting across from me. More than this house, this table, this meal, this spoon. More than this moment.

I've also been reading a book by physicist Alan Lightman, The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science. In a chapter about consciousness and the brain, he describes an experience that was thoroughly materialistic, yet spiritual in one of the ways Gillihan uses that term. 

Near the end of my conversation with Professor Koch, I described an experience I had some years ago. I was out on the ocean alone in a small boat, late at night, coming back to my home on a small island. It was a clear night, and the sky bristled with stars. No sound could be heard, except for the soft drone of my engine.

Taking a chance, I turned off the engine. It got even quieter. Then I lay down in the boat and looked up. 

After a few minutes my world dissolved into the star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. Awareness of my self and my ego disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them.

And the vast expanse of time -- extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I would die -- seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt part of something much larger than myself.

After a time, I sat up and started the engine again. I had no idea how long I'd been lying there looking up. I asked Professor Koch whether he thought such an experience could arise from mere atoms and molecules.

"First, it is a true experience," he said. "I call these mystical experiences. You can get them in near death experiences, you can get them with a drug called 5-MeO-DMT, you can get them when you meditate. We know that our brain can produce love and hate. This is another experience that the brain can have. And experience shows that our brain can produce all the feelings of love and hate, of ecstasy, of feeling connected."

Absolutely. The brain does this with no God, with nothing supernatural. Just with 100 billion neurons interconnected with about 100 trillion synapses. 

Mindfulness and meditation aren't about improving ourselves

I used to believe that meditation, and its close relative, mindfulness, were supposed to make me and my life better. 

Wiser. Calmer. More spiritual. Happier. And more besides.

In other words, I looked upon mindfulness and meditation as akin to exercise. I put in the work of training my mind and I benefit from that workout. Maybe not instantly, but over time I'd reap the rewards.

I can't say that I've totally discarded that perspective. However, it isn't as strong in me anymore. 

Instead, I've come around to the notion that the idea of gaining something from mindfulness and meditation is at odds with what these practices are all about: being in touch with here-and-now reality.

When part of me is resting contentedly on my meditation cushion (which happens to be attached to a chair) and part of me is expecting to become someone better than I am now, there's a disconnect.

It's difficult to embrace what is happening inside and outside of me now, while also anticipating that what I'm doing now will lead to future positive changes.

I recall that Buddhists speak of this sort of thing as having "gaining ideas." Meaning, an expectation that mindfulness and meditation will help the practitioner gain something.

Another way of putting it is being attached to the outcome of mindfulness and meditation, as contrasted with simply pursuing those activities without desiring particular changes.

Here's a few passages from Seth Gillihan's book, Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that get at what I'm trying to describe.

My patient Jon had stopped meditating when he found that it didn't get rid of his anxiety. Many of us expect that meditation practice will get rid of the less desirable parts of our lives, such as stress, anxiety, and other difficult emotions.

Sometimes that happens, given the calming nature of mindfulness practice. But feeling more comfortable is not the purpose of openhearted presence -- and it is less likely to happen if we make it the goal.

Expecting certain outcomes from our mindfulness practice will get in the way of our experience. Expectations lead to evaluation -- Am I relaxing? Is my mind quieting? Am I having a mystical expericnce? -- which pulls us out of the present.

Instead, we can approach each moment of meditation as if it's the first time we've experienced it, without preconceptions or goals. 

Mindful awareness is about relationship. In my work with Jon, he practiced a new way of relating to his anxiety. When the anxious spells came, he opened to the experience with curiosity rather than resistance. 

Instead of telling himself, "I can't stand this!" and "I have to make it stop," he said, "Let me see what this is like. What's happening in my body? How does the anxiety shift over time?" Jon discovered not only that he suffered much less but also that the attacks came less often.

Mindfulness changes our relationship with our experience, not necessarily the experience itself. 

...As you invite mindful presence, you don't have to force anything or try to make it feel "spiritual." Keep it very ordinary and uncomplicated, and just notice what's happening. See what you're seeing. Hear what you're hearing. Take in colors and textures around you.

You can turn inward, too, seeing what emotions are present and watching what your mind is up to. This can all happen in real time as you go about your activities. You can try it with cooking, cleaning walking, bathing -- anything at all, including reading this book.

As you pay attention, open to anything that comes your way. Receive it. Proactively say yes to it all. Release the constant drive to improve your situation. Settle into it instead: "This is what's happening. This is my reality."

That doesn't mean you don't fix something that's wrong or tell someone no. Just stay open to all of the experience as it's happening, even the uncomfortable parts.

Mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy

I got a Master's Degree in Social Work way back in 1973 that exposed me to the fundamentals of counseling before I headed off in the direction of health services research and planning.

Then I married my second wife, Laurel, in 1990. She also had a MSW, but unlike me, pursued a career in social work, ending up after our marriage by starting a private psychotherapy practice.

Laurel would talk about how cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was used in her practice, since it is fairly short-term and insurance companies don't like paying for lengthy psychotherapy aimed at delving into the root causes of someone's problems.

They want results. Which is what everybody wants, really.

So when I saw that a series on "Mindful CBT" by Seth Gillihan had been added to Sam Harris' Waking Up app, I decided to listen to what Gillihan had to say. I've finished Part 1 of Mindful CBT, which includes eight short (8-10 minutes) talks by Gillihan. 

Here's some of what Gillihan had to say. I took notes, most of which I can actually read -- my handwriting is terrible, even to me -- but these aren't verbatim quotes.

In Fundamentals of CBT, I learned that traditionally thoughts, feelings, and actions comprise CBT. These interact with each other. You can change any one and affect the others. Integrating mindfulness introduces depth to thoughts, feelings, and actions. 

The quality of changes is based on the quality of attention. How do we relate to our thoughts, feelings, and actions? Instead of pushing away anxious thoughts, give them less weight. We shift from "should" to mindful acceptance. 

In Finding Leverage, Gillihan said that we have to match our intention with the right tools. Advice alone isn't very helpful. Willpower alone is a recipe for failure. For example, if someone is afraid of spiders, they need to start small and work up from there -- not by letting a giant tarantula crawl on your arm right off the bat. A ladder is a series of small steps. The question isn't why did I fail, but what can I do to succeed?

In Working With Thoughts, I heard that thoughts can cause anxiety and affect actions. But thoughts often are misguided in some way. We ask, what story is my mind telling me? Not objective facts, often, but a subjective story.

Examine the evidence underlying thoughts, like a scientist. What evidence is for and against the thought? What's true in the situation? Is there a more realistic way of thinking that fits the data better? 

These are some some common cognitive disturbances: (1) Fortune telling -- making predictions about a future that hasn't happened yet; (2) Catastrophizing -- seeing things in the worst possible light; (3) Mind reading of another person -- believing we know what someone else is thinking.

In Addressing Core Beliefs, Gillihan says that you become more aware of negative thoughts. Our core beliefs drive thoughts. These are regular patterns, a lens that guides how we see the world. Example: seeing disapproval everywhere, even though you're doing a good job. 

Thoughts can feed back into a core belief and strengthen it. This is circular, yet completely convincing. Instead, focus on what is actually happening right now. Minds invent stories that often aren't true. Be in a situation as it is. Brush off unhelpful thoughts.

Not "oh no" but "oh well." Just a mental event. One core belief might be that wellbeing depends on things working out for us. Don't assume how life has to go. Life doesn't have to meet our expectations.

In Thoughts Support Mindful Presence, I learned that mindfulness supports thinking and thinking supports mindfulness. Thinking is just what the mind does. We don't have to take thoughts too seriously. Thoughts can play a positive role in our lives. Meditation is being present with what is, noticing what's already there.

In Working With Behavior, I heard about Pavlov's dogs. Animals learn certain things go together. Ringing of a bell is followed by food. Dogs salivated just with the bell. This is classical conditioning. A baby begins to cry when at the doctor's office because previous visits were disturbing.

We also learn by consequences of actions. This is operant conditioning. We learn patterns in the world and outcomes of our behavior. Classical and operant go together. A cat goes to the kitchen after hearing the can opener.

Make it easier to do what you intend to do. Make exercising rewarding, right-sized, starting easy. Put things in place to guide actions when motivation leaves you.

In Mindful Action, Gillihan says that mindfulness determines the quality of actions. With more awareness, you experience a walk more fully. But beware of this taking on a moral quality: you're bad if you're not mindful. 

Sometimes it's helpful to be on autopilot, like while driving, when you can carry on a conversation or listen to the radio. But there are costs when we're in divided attention much of the time. We'll have richer memories if we're more present.

Act in ways that align with reality. Mindful action doesn't try to force an outcome. Stop struggling against what is. Notice when your actions are at odds with reality.

In Working With Distress, I learned there are three ways to feel better in Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Shift thinking. Act differently. Practice mindfulness. However, sometimes these tools don't work, so we need to make peace with discomfort. 

Respond with openness and curiosity to discomfort. Maybe it will feel interesting, not bad. Mindful acceptance helps us endure uncomfortable situations. Stop fighting against reality. Change your life to match your limitations. 

Focus on what's happening right now. Don't subject yourself to future pain that you're anticipating, but hasn't happened yet, and may never happen. Be present with uncomfortable feelings. Stand up for issues you care about even if it upsets some people.

Wellbeing doesn't depend on eliminating stress. Can I open to this?

If our attention wanders, the question is where it should rest

Most of us are afflicted more often than we'd like with what often is called "monkey mind."

Meaning, our attention is prone to flitting around from this to that to whatever, sort of like monkeys swinging from branch to branch in a seemingly aimless fashion.

But why is monkey mind a bad thing? Monkeys seem to have a good time in trees. Why are we humans so concerned about controlling our attention?

That's one of the themes in an article by Casey Cep in the January 30, 2023 issue of The New Yorker, Eat, Pray, Concentrate. The online version is titled What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention: Lessons from a centuries-long war against distraction.
Download What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention | The New Yorker

This is a book review of Jamie Kreiner's "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction."

One thing they tell us is that we can't blame our own wandering mind on the internet, smartphones, television, digital games, or the other culprits we in the 21st century summon as reasons for our inability to focus.

Because back in the middle ages books were viewed with suspicion by many monks. 

Although books are rarely associated with distraction today, desperate as we are to escape our screens, they were objects of concern in early monastic circles—diversions that might need to be regulated as carefully as sexual urges. Monks hemmed and hawed about when and where and for how long it was appropriate to read.

In the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus, himself an avid reader, described a common scene in the monasteries where he lived in Jerusalem and the Nile Delta: a monk who was supposed to be reading “yawns a lot and readily drifts off into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning his eyes away from the book, he stares at the wall and again goes back to read for a while; leafing through the pages, he looks curiously for the end of texts, he counts the folios and calculates the number of gatherings, finds fault with the writing and the ornamentation. Later, he closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep.”

Evagrius had a name for this inability to focus—acedia—and scholars now variously define it as depression (the so-called noonday demon) or spiritual ennui (a kind of sloth). Acedia wasn’t caused by books, exactly, since a monk could suffer from it even without reading, but the book was initially as suspect a technology as the smartphone is today.

For me the most interesting part of the article was the end, which is a discussion of what the monks feared being distracted from.

Such careful study of the mind yielded gorgeous writing about it, and Kreiner collects centuries’ worth of metaphors for concentration (fish swimming peaceably in the depths, helmsmen steering a ship through storms, potters perfecting their ware, hens sitting atop their eggs) and just as many metaphors for distraction (mice taking over your home, flies swarming your face, hair poking you in the eyes, horses breaking out of your barn).

These earthy, analog metaphors, though, betray the centuries between us and the monks who wrote them. For all that “The Wandering Mind” helps to collapse the differences between their world and ours, it also illuminates one very profound distinction. We inherited the monkish obsession with attention, and even inherited their moral judgments about the capacity, or failure, to concentrate. But most of us did not inherit their clarity about what is worthy of our concentration.

Medieval monks shared a common cosmology that depended on their attention. Justinian the Great claimed that if monks lived holy lives they could bring God’s favor upon the whole of the Byzantine Empire, and the prayers of Simeon Stylites were said to be like support beams, holding up all of creation. “Distraction was not just a personal problem, they knew; it was part of the warp of the world,” Kreiner writes. “Attention would not have been morally necessary, would not have been the objective of their culture of conflict and control, were it not for the fact that it centered on the divine order.”

Most people today, me included certainly, don't believe that their attention is necessary to bring God's favor upon their chosen religion and those who follow that faith. So the question becomes, what is deserving of our attention?

Perhaps that is why so many of us have half-done tasks on our to-do lists and half-read books on our bedside tables, scroll through Instagram while simultaneously semi-watching Netflix, and swipe between apps and tabs endlessly, from when we first open our eyes until we finally fall asleep.

One uncomfortable explanation for why so many aspects of modern life corrode our attention is that they do not merit it. The problem for those of us who don’t live in monasteries but hope to make good use of our days is figuring out what might.

That is the real contribution of “The Wandering Mind”: it moves beyond the question of why the mind wanders to the more difficult, more beautiful question of where it should rest. 

Everyone has to answer that question for themselves. My answer is quite simple: by and large, my attention should be focused on whatever my body is doing.

Right now I'm sitting in a chair in front of my MacBook Pro, composing this blog post. For about 35 minutes my mind has been focused on what my body is doing, pressing keys on my laptop's keyboard that form words and paragraphs.

Yes, a few minutes ago I got up, went to the kitchen, and ate a cookie. Once that minor distraction was over, I went back to finishing this post.

This is the essence of mindfulness, the way I've come to understand it. Paying attention to what our bodily senses are experiencing; keeping mind and body in sync; keeping in touch with the physical reality we're part of at any given moment.

When I'm lying in bed, heading off to sleep, I try to keep my mind focused on sleepy things. When I'm in my Tai Chi class, doing a form with my classmates, I try to keep my mind focused on my body's movements.

So unlike medieval monks, I don't consider that there's any one thing most deserving of my attention. That depends on the situation. When I'm watching TV, or scrolling through my Twitter feed, what's on a large or small screen is what I try to keep my attention on.

And because I've been guilty of not wholeheartedly listening to my wife and friends when they have something to say to me, I especially try not to be distracted when we're having a conversation. I could definitely do better on this front, but I think I'm making some progress on being a better listener.

Mindfulness helps bring body and mind into the same place

Inspiration can be found anywhere. When I started to read the current issue of TIME magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to turn a page and find "5 ways to be mindful without meditating." (The online version of the story has 8 ways.)

I liked what Angela Haupt had to say about how our body can be in one place while our mind is in a far distant place -- often not just geographically, but also in time, since almost everybody is prone to thoughts of the past and future even as our body is firmly in the present.

After reading Haupt's story, I've tried to pay more attention to bringing my mind into sync with what my body is doing. As she says in the excerpt below, my body can be in either a neutral or pleasant place while my mind is worrying about something that happened in the past, or about something that could happen in the future.

Of course, our ability to time travel is part of what makes us human. So it's fine to do this in moderation. But when our mind is habitually at odds with the state of our body, that's not conducive to our happiness and well-being.

Here's the first part of the TIME story. Click on the PDF file at the end of this excerpt to see the eight non-meditative ways to practice mindfulness. Or click here for the TIME story.

There’s a certain disconnect that plagues almost everyone nowadays: Your body is doing one thing—sitting in a meeting, eating dinner with the family—while your brain is miles away.

Some might call it multitasking, but mental-health experts say it’s more problematic. Corrie Goldberg, a clinical psychologist and founder of Shore Therapy Center for Wellness in the Chicago area, says that a lack of mindfulness can deprive us of a deep connection to our most meaningful experiences. “Our body moves through the motions of life, but our head isn’t in the game,” she says.

Not being grounded in the moment—instead allowing our thoughts to skip from place to place—is an open invitation to stress and unpleasant emotions. “Our minds tend to focus on worries about the future, or upsets from the past, even when our body may be in a neutral or pleasant place.”

Enter mindfulness. The now-ubiquitous concept, which is rooted in Buddhism, has surged in popularity in recent years and is generally defined as turning your attention inward and maintaining an awareness of your thoughts, bodily sensations, and environment. The benefits are vast. A mindfulness practice can help lower stress, reduce anxiety (as effectively as medication, in some cases), increase a person’s capacity to savor positive experiences, stop rumination, promote concentration, and more.

Mindfulness can also help cure the blahs. Three years into the pandemic, Kelly Neupert, a psychotherapist in Chicago, says that many of her clients feel like they’re languishing. Becoming more mindful has helped them get in touch with what they’re feeling and why, she says—and cultivated a greater capacity to handle life’s curveballs.

After adopting a mindfulness practice, “I typically see that they’re less reactive and more intentional,” Neupert says. “They can respond to other people rather than react. The things that used to set them off, like running late for work or getting cut off, feel more tolerable.”

Meditation is the best-known way to achieve mindfulness—but it isn’t appealing to and doesn’t work for everyone. Some find that it’s awkward, or that they have trouble sitting still. Fortunately, “a person can practice mindfulness while engaged in literally any activity,” Goldberg says, and with any available amount of time.

Here are eight ways to practice mindfulness if meditation isn’t your thing.
Download How to Be Mindful if You Hate Meditating | Time

Mindfulness made simple, by my own mind

I like mindfulness a lot. It's become my favorite approach to meditation. But given how many books I've read about mindfulness, I'm struck by how overly complicated this activity can be described.

Which I think says more about the economics of the book business than about mindfulness.

After all, few people want to buy a book that's just a few pages long. So authors who write about this subject have to say a lot about something that appears to me to be quite simple.

Thus here's my exceedingly brief summary of how I've come to view mindfulness.

Naturally others likely will have a considerably different view of mindfulness. This is just what works best for me at the moment, though I readily admit that my perspective is continually changing.

When I can recall a blog post that dealt with an aspect of my approach to mindfulness, I'll share a link. (Turns out I could do this with all five.)

(1) As much as possible, I try to look without rather than within. The physical world grounds me when I pay attention to it. Often my mental world distracts me.

(2) Living in the present is better for me than living in a remembered past or imagined future, though often it is necessary to briefly sojourn in what was or might be.

(3) Emotions are to be embraced, not denied, whatever they are. What works for me is being happy when I'm happy and being sad when I'm sad. Ditto for every other emotion.

(4) The small things in life are just as important as the big things. One of my adages is I am a child of the present moment, who finds delight in small things. 

(5) Seeking perfection is an absurd quest. I realize that just as every other aspect of my life is imperfect, so are my attempts to be mindful. 

Feel more with the body, less with the mind

When someone asks "How are you feeling?" that familiar question contains within it a lot of profundity. Because how we answer it reveals quite a bit about ourselves.

Mostly I take a few moments to think about what I've been doing recently. You know, how well or poorly my day is going. Or week for a longer time span. I'd remember what's been bothering me and what's been pleasing me, then try to describe the net effect of my joys and sorrows.

There's nothing wrong with this. But reading "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness" has led me to see that, like most people, I tend to look upon feelings in a mental fashion, not a bodily fashion.

Here's an excerpt from the chapter, "A Different Way of Knowing: Sidestepping the Ruminative Mind."

As we have seen, in doing mode we see the world only indirectly, through the veil of our thinking and labeling. If we think about our bodies in the usual way (from the perspective of our heads), then as soon as we feel listless on awaking, our mind fills with ideas about the body, what is going on in our lives, everything.

This way of paying attention will just make things worse. If, instead, we begin to focus on the body from the perspective of being mode, we open to a direct sensation of the body itself.

Moment by moment, we can become aware of body sensations but now in a new way, a way that does not keep us so stuck obsessing in our thoughts about how we are feeling in the body. This can help our feelings of sluggishness to dissipate or dissolve, like a fog lifting. We don't have to make them go away.

Sooner or later, they will inevitably fade on their own because we are no longer feeding them with incessant negative thinking, without even realizing it. In the process we shift from feeling powerless in their presence to having viable ways to be in relationship to them or anything else that arises.

The idea here is sound: we don't possess a body; we are our body.

When we look upon our body from on high, considering that we're an observer perched inside our head, we distance ourselves from the natural wisdom of the body as the varied experiences of life come and go. So if we want to know how we're feeling, being acutely aware of bodily sensations often, or usually, is the best approach. 

As we've said, doing mode and its thinking patterns tend to obscure the experiential quality of being mode. For this reason, mindfulness training involves extensive practice in getting in touch, moment by moment, with the direct experience of life unfolding.

The body is a great place to start cultivating this new way of being. The very physicality of raw bodily sensations provides an ideal base from which to develop a new, more direct, experiential, sensory way of knowing.

Anger. Joy. Sadness. Excitement. Calm. Love. Revulsion. Virtually every emotion and feeling manifests in bodily sensation. We say, "I had a sinking feeling," "My heart soared," "There were butterflies in my stomach when I got up to speak," "I was tingling with anticipation."

So instead of thinking about how we're feeling, or remembering how we've been feeling, becoming aware of bodily sensations is a more direct approach. Sure, after listening to what the body tells us, we may then want to put that knowledge into language that can be shared with others, since feelings are mostly private -- albeit often obvious to others, maybe more so than to ourself.

"You look upset," my wife may say to me. At times I deny this, but almost always my wife is right. I might be so used to that feeling of being upset that I don't recognize it in me. Dogs also are sensitive to human emotions. They don't need words to be aware of how we're feeling. 

Neither do we.

If, paradoxically, we can turn and face whatever it is that we are finding scary, difficult, or depressing rathe than perpetually distracting ourselves to no avail, we are actually still doing what the brain wants us to do: giving high-priority attention to the matter at hand.

It's just that we are no longer giving it attention in the old "doing" way. We are approaching the moment -- whatever it is, however it is -- not by reacting but rather by responding, by bringing an open, spacious, and affectionate attention to the feeling in the moment as it expresses itself in the body. 

Now we are in relationship to the alarm in a new way, one that provides us with a viable alternative to endlessly thinking about it. 

Why I find mindfulness so appealing after 35 years of religion

Having given up on organized religion, an Eastern/Indian variety, after 35 years of embracing the lure of returning to God by traversing supernatural realms, I've become enamored of mindfulness.

(See here and here for some previous blog posts explaining why.)

Before making another attempt at this, this is how a book I'm reading, and enjoying, "The Mindful Way Through Depression," describes mindfulness.

As we said toward the end of the preceding chapter, mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, to things as they are. It's a way of shifting from doing to being so that we take in all the information that an experience offers us before we act.

Being mindful means that we suspend judgment for a time, set aside our immediate goals for the future, and take in the present moment as it is rather than as we would like it to be.

It means we approach situations with openness, even if we notice that they bring up feelings such as fear. Being mindful means intentionally turning off the autopilot mode in which we operate so much of the time -- brooding about the past, for instance, or worrying about the future -- and instead tuning in to things as they are in the present with full awareness.

It means knowing that our thoughts are passing mental events, not reality itself, and that we are more in touch with life as it is when we allow ourselves to experience things through the body and our senses rather than mostly through our unexamined and habitual thoughts.

This is a wonderful balance to how religions typically view life, which definitely includes the religion I was a part of for those 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

The present moment isn't valued highly by religions. Neither are the body and senses. Nor is looking at things as they are rather than as they're hoped to be. Or giving up judgment.

For over three decades I accepted (with gradually increasing doubts, admittedly) that the purpose of life wasn't to be found in this physical world, but in leaving material existence and entering higher domains of reality beyond the physical.

So what RSSB taught basically was an anti-mindfulness: fill your mind with thoughts of God, the guru, and returning to the supernatural realm of Sach Khand; reject your weaknesses, often summarized as lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism; continually judge yourself to see if you're living up to the other-worldly standard of the RSSB teachings; look upon everyday life as an illusion not meant to be taken seriously, since your genuine divine form of existence lies elsewhere.

When I broke away from my religious dogmatism, it felt wonderfully refreshing to simply look upon myself as a human being having a human experience. Yeah, I realize that if you've never been religious, you're probably thinking, "Well, duh, why'd it take you so long to realize something so obvious?"

Good question. But not one that I spend a lot of time pondering.

The past is gone. I try to learn from my past mistakes. However, since they didn't seem like mistakes at the time, I do my mindful best to stay focused on the present rather than dwelling on what could have been if I'd done something differently in the past.

In no way do I claim to be proficient at mindfulness. I regret things that I've done. I worry about things that might happen to me in the future. I judge myself. I judge other people. Still, learning about mindfulness has helped me tone down all that.

I've learned that whatever I may think about reality, including the reality of my own life, the actuality of reality often turns out to be quite different.

So being open to surprises, to new information, to fresh insights, to being wrong -- that feels wonderful after so many years of erroneously believing that I knew what life was all about, including cosmic secrets that one day I would be privy to thanks to my initiation by a RSSB guru.

Now I look upon myself as an ordinary person living an ordinary life. After 35 years of religiosity, that feels absolutely extraordinary to me.

Instead of trying to fix ourselves, it's better to be just be ourselves

One of the joys of reading for me is finding connections between seemingly disparate books. As I wrote about a few days ago, I'm reading a book about depression and mindfulness.

I've also started a book by a neuroscientist, "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness." Patrick House, the author, says that he doesn't agree with all of those ways, but in brief creatively-written chapters he makes the case for each way in accord with how proponents argue for it.

In his first of the nineteen ways, House puts us in the place of a sea creature.

It needs fast reflexes rather than slow contemplation because by the time either prey or a predator appears in the short distance things are visible in highly murky water there's no time for planning. By contrast, when creatures evolved to live on land, now they could see a lion, say, on the far-0ff horizon, and so had an opportunity to decide on the best course of action.

Thus there isn't much need for clock making beyond intervals of a few seconds [for the sea creature], which means that there is no need for the brain to whir up an emergency motor-response plan for the shark cresting over the horizon of the Adriatic shelf, because there is no way to sense the shark cresting over the horizon of the Adriatic shelf.

This usefully constrains the metabolism needed to keep track of the far outer reaches of the outside environment and means any need to plan movements is limited to the timing of events with a small, near-reflexive range.

Hiding in the center of these plans is the observer, the conscious creature, who is just an accumulation of movement preferences and plans trapped inside a sensorium, keeping track of what it thinks the objects around it are and what it might otherwise do with itself.

Then, in his third way, House speaks of a theory of consciousness focused on movement, on doing, which fits with the first way.

A body, too, is restless to get moving; in fact, the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience, and everything else, including consciousness, is downstream of those efforts. 

...Any act of thinking is just pretending to act out. Consciousness requires cells that want to move and that know roughly what will happen when they do, but are prevented from doing so.

...We are irritable animals that move well and think no faster than ten times per second; we are the product of the reduction of the one-trillion body problem [number of cells in the body, I believe] to the one-body problem; we are the product of a brain that is creating hypotheses the entire time about how best to act, knowing that all the outside world can do is irritate it and all it can do is learn, while alive, as much as possible from those irritations.

So we're hard-wired for doing, for action, for dealing with problems and opportunities in the world as conveyed to us by our senses and interpreted by the brain.

Which returns me to the depression and mindfulness book, "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness,"

The authors persuasively argue that a central problem of being human is that we try to apply the same procedures that work well in dealing with problems outside of us to problems inside of us.

This is a big mistake, though one that makes sense to most of us, since it is how we've succeeded in figuring out why our car won't start, how to get a better job, and so many other things that pop up every day that need dealing with.

In short, we assume that doing will work as well for our internal problems as it does for our external problems, while actually what we need is being.

We're rightly proud of what we can do through critical analytical thinking. It's one of the highest achievements of our evolutionary history as human beings and does get us out of a whole slew of fixes in life.

So when we see things are not going well in our internal, emotional life, it's hardly surprising that the mind often quickly reacts by recruiting the mode of mind that functions so effectively in solving problems in our external world. 

This mode of careful analysis, problem solving, judgment, and comparison is aimed at closing the gap between the way things are and the way we think they should be -- at solving perceived problems. Therefore we call it the doing mode of mind. It's the mode by which we respond to what we hear as a call to action.

...Imagine a car trip during which, every time we check to see how close we are to our destination, we find that the car has instantly moved farther away from it. This is tantamount to what happens in the interior world of emotions and feeling states when we call in the doing mode of mind.

That's why we often find ourselves saying things like "I don't know why I feel so depressed; I've got nothing to be depressed about," and then discovering that we feel even more unhappy. We've checked our destination of feeling happy and found ourselves farther away from it. We can't seem to stop reminding ourselves how bad we feel.

No big surprise, given the title of the book, but the way out of this trap is mindfulness, which puts in a being mode of mind. A subject for another blog post.

I'm reading a good book about depression and mindfulness

Given how disturbing it's been for me to endure four days of non-functionality from Typepad, my blogging service, following a failed data migration to new servers (shared that post on Blogger since Typepad is so screwed up at the moment), I guess it was good timing that I got a book from Amazon about depression and mindfulness.

 Not that I'm actually clinically depressed, though I was at one point in my life, about five years ago.

What attracted me to "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness," was a reader review on Amazon that said this was one of the best books about meditation, whether or not someone is depressed.

I've only read a few chapters, but so far I'm anticipating that the reviewer was correct. I'll share a section called "Get Me Out of Here!" that illustrates a central theme of the book: how our efforts to fix ourselves can make things worse, not better.

The fact is that when emotions are telling us that something is not as it should be, the feeling is distinctly uncomfortable. It's meant to be. The signals are exquisitely designed to push us to act, to do something to rectify the situation.

If the signal didn't feel uncomfortable, didn't create an urge to act, would we leap out of the path of a speeding truck, step in when we saw a child being bullied, turn away from something we found repugnant? It's only when the mind registers that the situation is resolved that the signal shuts itself off.

When the problem that our emotions signal needs to be solved is "out there" -- a charging bull or a roaring funnel cloud -- reacting in a way that will allow us to avoid it or escape from it makes sense. 

The brain mobilizes a whole pattern of mostly automatic reactions that help us deal with whatever is threatening our survival, helping us get rid of or avoid the threat. We call this initial pattern of reactions -- in which we feel negatively toward and want to avoid or eliminate something -- aversion. 

Aversion forces us to act in some appropriate way to the situation and thereby turn off the warning signal. In this regard, it can serve us well, can even save our lives. Sometimes.

But it's not hard to see that the same reactions are going to be counterproductive and even dangerous to our well-being when directed at what's going on "in here" -- toward our own thoughts, feelings, and sense of self. 

None of us can run fast enough to escape our own inner experience. Nor can we eliminate unpleasant, oppressive, and threatening thoughts and feelings by fighting with them and trying to annihilate them. 

When we react to our own negative thoughts and feelings with aversion, the brain circuitry involved in physical avoidance, submission, or defensive attack (the "avoidance system" of the brain) is activated. Once this mechanism is switched on, the body tenses as if it were either getting ready to run or bracing itself for an assault. 

We can also sense the effects of aversion in our minds. When we are preoccupied, dwelling on how to get rid of our feelings of sadness or disconnection, our whole experience is one of contraction. The mind, driven to focus on the compelling yet futile task of getting rid of these feelings, closes in on itself. And with it, our experience of life itself narrows.

Somehow we feel cramped, boxed in. The choices available to us seem to dwindle. We come to feel increasingly cut off from the wider space of possibilities that we long to connect with.

Over our lifetime, we may have come to dislike or even hate emotions such as fear, sadness or anger, in ourselves and in others. If we have, for example, been taught not to "be so emotional," we will have picked up the message that expression of emotion is somewhat unseemly and may have assumed it wasn't okay to feel emotion either. 

Or maybe we remember clearly the drawn-out feeling of an emotional experience like grief and now react with dread when a hint of similar feelings arises.

When we react negatively -- with aversion -- to our own negative emotions, treating them as enemies to be overcome, eradicated, and defeated, we get into trouble. So understanding aversion becomes fundamental to understanding what gets us stuck in persistent unhappiness.

We run into problems because the unhappiness we are feeling now triggers old, extraordinarily unhelpful patterns of thinking from the past.

Sam Harris and Loch Kelly on nondual mindfulness

Today I set aside my doubts about Loch Kelly's approach in his "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness: A Revolutionary Guide For Living an Awakened Life," and continued on with my re-reading of his book. 

I liked what I read, by and large. Then I listened to the daily guided meditation by Sam Harris on his Waking Up app. It struck me as highly compatible with what I'd just read in Kelly's book. Which isn't surprising, since both Harris and Kelly embrace a similar Buddhist approach, that of Dzogchen.

Here's my transcription of what Harris said.

Just sit comfortably. And close your eyes. And become aware of the weight of your body, the feeling of gravity holding you in place. See if you can let the shape of your body dissolve. And notice whatever sensations spontaneously appear.

As you pay attention to sensations, let your mind expand and become an open space in which everything is appearing. Notice if your mind feels contracted at all. Are you stressed, or tired, restless? Notice if there is any pattern of energy here that's coloring your awareness.

Recognize that too as a mere appearance in this prior condition of consciousness. 

However your mind feels in this moment, recognize that this moment is the only moment in your life that is your life. This is the only moment that stands a chance of being real. Everything else is just something you're thinking about.

Resolve to fully connect here.

The moment you realize your mind has been captured by thought, drop back and recognize thought itself as an appearance. Where does it come from? And where does it go? There is a single space of consciousness. 

See if you can feel your identity with that. Not meditating on it. Not wandering from it. Everything that's happening is happening in, and as, consciousness. And if it feels like you are the observer, the center of experience, see if you can observe how that feeling arises.

It must be something, yet another appearance. Otherwise you couldn't feel it. It too is arising in a condition that is totally undefined. Just be that condition. 

In the last minutes of the session, pay careful attention to each breath. Simply cover each inhalation and exhalation with your awareness. 

OK. Well, as you go about your day today, you might try an exercise. You'll confront many things that annoy you, that cause you anxiety. You'll see many things online about which you have a strong feeling of judgement.

As a frame for the rest of the day, see if you can just decide in advance to dial down your reaction to all of that. Dial it down to 50 percent. Be 50 percent less reactive, less perturbed, less judgmental. Just see if you can decide to do that, and see if it has an effect.

And I'll see you here tomorrow for the next session of the Waking Up course.

Before speaking more abut Kelly's approach to mindfulness, I'll share a recent Pearls Before Swine comic that illustrates what I find lacking in my own approach to mindfulness. 

OK, usually I'm not quite as bad off as Rat, but some days I'm right there with him. And I have to say that I think Rat is correct about what mindfulness is all about. Kelly includes a quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn, a leading teacher of mindfulness.

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. 

Here's how Kelly distinguishes traditional mindfulness from effortless mindfulness. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this in another blog post. For now I'll just share this passage, which appeals to me even though I'm not completely confident that what he describes is attainable.

One simple way to distinguish the two types of mindfulness is to say that they are both being mindful but from different levels of mind. This is important because what you can be mindful of depends on what level of mind you're mindful from.

In effortless mindfulness, it is not as important to focus on what thoughts and emotions are arising but rather to ask, "Who or what level of mind are they arising to?" In effortless mindfulness, we shift from focusing on what we are aware of into focusing on awareness itself -- moving from a detached observer and into a view from interconnected awake awareness.

In deliberate mindfulness, we are aware, from our mindful witness, of things arising and passing. Effortless mindfulness invites us to be more intimately connected with our experience and all that is happening. This begins when we shift out of both our conceptual mind and our mindful witness and into awake awareness.

Deliberate mindfulness focuses on the contents of consciousness, while effortless mindfulness turns back to be aware of the context -- awareness itself. With deliberate mindfulness, we discover who we are not. With effortless mindfulness, we discover who we essentially are.

Effortless mindfulness does not lead to being detached from emotions but rather to both feeling more vulnerable and to having more capacity to be tender and welcoming of all feelings. The radical reports from my students are that our essential nature is loving, joyous, and free of worry, and we just need to untie the knots of conditioning to reveal these natural qualities. 

I'm giving "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness" another read

This morning I felt like brushing up on mindfulness, one of my favorite subjects, since mindfulness has become my meditation. 

Looking through my books about mindfulness, I decided to pick up Loch Kelly's The Way of Effortless Mindfulness. As I noted in a 2019 post, "Effortless mindfulness versus deliberate mindfulness," I liked the idea of putting in no effort.

A book by Loch Kelly, "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness," came to my attention via an interview Sam Harris conducted with Kelly and shared on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app that I'm a fan of. 

Any book about meditation that has effortless in the title is going to get my attention.

For thirty-five years I practiced a mystical meditative practice that involved considerable effort via repeating a mantra, sitting in a particular posture, and adhering to various other rules (such as ideally meditating for 2 1/2 hours a day, which I did for many years).

By comparison, mindfulness involves much less effort, since the focus is on attending to what is right before us, notably the breath.

In his interview with Harris, Loch Kelly talked about how his mindfulness approach derives from Tibetan Buddhism, which differs in some regards from other forms of Buddhism. Basically Kelly (along with Harris) considers that awareness itself is key to mindfulness, with the contents of awareness, though important, being secondary. 

OK, in a way this is obvious, especially if awareness is viewed as closely akin to consciousness, if not exactly the same thing. For we can't be mindful of anything unless we're able to be aware or conscious of that thing.

But even given this obviousness, re-reading the first few chapters of Kelly's book this morning was pleasurable, in part because so far I haven't come across anything that goes against the principles I listed in my first blog post about the book as being essential for me to resonate with a book of this sort.

Though I'm not 100% sure about anything -- the way of science -- I consider it highly probable that these premises are true.

(1) The mind is the brain in action
(2) There is no enduring, unchanging self or soul
(3) Free will is an illusion
(4) We humans see reality through a species-specific lens
(5) Consciousness is created by the brain
(6) All living beings exist in a web of interconnections

So my favorite books about mindfulness and meditation recognize that those six statements most likely are how us Homo sapiens relate to reality. The six truths are grounded in modern science and neuroscience, though naturally there's room for quibbling about the exact nature of what I've summarized above in a half dozen pithy sentences. 

I'm not saying that every author who writes about mindfulness/meditation needs to explicitly agree with each of the principles above to get my stamp of approval. However, at least what they say shouldn't conflict with those principles, or my highlighter is quick to insert question marks in the margin of their book's pages.

Often the sort of mindfulness Kelly espouses is described as being akin to the familiar sky/clouds metaphor. 

Mostly our attention is captured by clouds. Rarely do we view a clear blue sky as being worthy of special notice, though after a long rainy spell, it might be. Likewise, not surprisingly the contents of consciousness are what we're mostly mindful of -- thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and such.

Consciousness itself is like clear air. We need it to exist, but generally we aren't aware of air unless there's a breeze blowing. Inside as I am at the moment, air is an invisible entity that fills our house, yet isn't the sort of thing that draws anybody's attention.

(We've never had a visitor to our home say, "You have such beautiful air.")

Of course, a big difference between the sky/clouds analogy and consciousness/contents analogy is that we look at the sky as an object, while consciousness is the subjectivity that we are. Kelly uses "awake awareness" as a term for what effortless mindfulness is all about. He writes:

"So close that you can't see it" means that awake awareness is hidden in plain sight. It is closer than our own breath. We can't find aware awareness because awake awareness is not an "it." Awake awareness is neither an object nor thing that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted.

It isn't a thought, emotion, image, belief, feeling, or even energy. Awake awareness is invisibly inherent within us and is where we're looking from.

We need to learn how to have awake awareness look within, turn around, or rest back, so that awake awareness can discover itself. Then, awake awareness is the source of mind from which we are able to perceive. 

Well, if awake awareness is the same as consciousness, just under a different name, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. After all, consciousness discovering itself sounds more than a little crazy, since consciousness is how we know everything. 

Our ability to know isn't an object. Kelly has told us that. So how can awake awareness discover itself? Guess I need to re-read more of his book to find out.

Or maybe I should switch to a different mindfulness book.