Church of the Churchless

Don't repress your feelings because you think that's "spiritual"

I'm coming to dislike that word, spiritual. It conjures up an image of something ethereal, other-worldly, supernatural, divorced from the messy reality of this physical world.

Which, of course, is the only world there is -- because there's precisely zero demonstrable evidence that any other realm exists. No heaven. No hell. No divine regions of reality. 

This is it. So rather than say something like "I'm a spiritual person," how about simply "I'm s person." Just as we all are. Doing our best to live a good life in a world that's filled with challenges.

That includes dealing with challenging emotions, such as anger. 

I've continued reading a book I mentioned in my previous post, "The Joy of True Meditation" by Jeff Foster. Below I'll share some wise words he has to say about anger, and by implication, any sort of supposedly negative emotion.

I say supposedly, since there is no such thing as a negative emotion. Or, a positive emotion. There's just emotions. How we label them is up to us. Emotions don't come with labels attached. That's a human invention. So I"m not saying that Foster's view of anger is objectively correct. It's just his perspective. 

I enjoy reading books like "The Joy of True Meditation" not because I think they point to some cosmic truth.

For many years I did do that, in my religious phase -- which lasted about 35 years. I'd consider that writers about meditation or spirituality might have achieved a vision of something true about a realm that transcended the physical world.

Now, I look upon people like Jeff Foster as I do novelists or movie makers.

They are communicating creative insights that mean a lot to them, and can be entertaining for other people. If I find something in their vision that resonates with me, great. I can learn about what I find interesting and valuable by noting what I find attractive in someone else's perceptions.

Keep that in mind as you read what Foster has to say about anger. He makes some good points. It fits with observations I've made of so-called "spiritual" people who are so afraid of normal human emotions, they become almost robotic in how they talk and act, not natural at all.

But this is just one person's point of view. If you find something useful in what Foster says, wonderful. If you don't, that's fine also.

Spiritual teachings that tell us to extinguish our anger completely, that judge anger to be a categorically 'negative' and 'destructive' emotion, or call it 'unhealthy' or even 'unspiritual', can be very misleading teachings indeed.

Anger is life, a powerful expression of the vital life force that infuses and flows through and animates all things, and must be honoured as such.

Of course, we don't want to be ruled by our anger! We don't want anger to speak for us, put words in our mouths or control our bodies and behaviours. We want to have space around our anger, be able to use it consciously, as a tool, when necessary and appropriate and kind.

We don't want to be consumed by it, identified with it, blocked by it, or lose ourselves to it. We want a healthy -- and even loving -- relationship with this most powerful and fiery of friends.

When we try to be 'spiritual' and suppress our anger, when we push it deep down into our bodies and into the waiting room of the unconscious, it festers there and wreaks havoc with our immune systems. We no longer 'have' anger. Anger 'has' us.

Anger is no longer a feeling that comes and goes. We are angry now; anger is in our bones, we are identified with it. We find ourselves perhaps exploding in aggression and rage in our search for relief from the pressure within.

Or maybe we become passive-aggressive, simmering quietly with resentment and hostility towards the world and others -- the neighbours, politicians, family members, our partners. We find other unconscious ways to express or deflect from the anger: lying, blaming, sarcasm, complaining, or simply giving others 'the silent treatment'.

All ways to avoid ourselves. We are still angry inside.

Even if we think we are "spiritual" and "beyond anger". There are stories of the most "peaceful" and "enlightened" and "spiritually evolved" gurus and self-help teachers exploding with rage behind the scenes at students or shaming and blaming staff members or participants. 

The anger never really goes away, you see, it just finds new and creative ways to move.

There is a healthy, sacred middle between numbing out anger on the one hand, and habitually acting it out and hurting others on the other hand. Between repression, pushing the anger down, and unconscious reactive expression, pushing the anger out in search of relief.

In the middle, which is the sacred realm of meditation, we can breathe, and we can begin to actually feel our anger deep inside our bodies. We can come out of our minds -- out of the drama in our head, the blame and the attack on others and the revenge fantasies -- and go right into our own bellies, chests, throats, solar plexus, head.

Go right to the core of the aliveness, to the raw fiery sensations of the present moment... We can slow down and respond lovingly to our anger instead of unconsciously reacting to it. 

Embrace everything about yourself, including the good, bad, and the ugly

I'm cured!

But before I get too excited over this news, I need to remind myself that what happened yesterday was, after three counseling sessions, Wayne, the counselor I was seeing, agreeing with me that there wasn't any need for me to continue seeing him.

What caused my therapeutic breakthrough is interesting, because it fits with the blog post I wrote about a week ago, "Zen'ish adage: when you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy."

I mentioned that post to Wayne in the course of explaining my Big Realization. Namely, that the goal I'd written down at Wayne's request after our first session, which I brought to our second session, no longer made sense to me.

The details don't matter, which relate to a couple of nagging health problems I have. The broad goal is what's important, as this pertains to just about everyone. It was that I wanted to not feel upset when a health problem was going badly for me. Or at least, only minimally upset.

I told Wayne that I realized this didn't make sense. After all, it's natural to feel better when my life is going smoothly, and to feel worse when my life has some annoying problems. 

It struck me that what really had been bothering me wasn't so much feeling bad now and then when a health problem was more active, but a sense that I shouldn't be feeling that way. So I'd fallen into the common trap of being sad that I was sad, or angry that I was angry, or upset that I was upset.

Instead of just having a simple emotion -- sadness, anger, upsetness -- I now had a double dose of emotion: the original feeling, plus a secondary feeling caused by my reaction to the original. 

Wayne agreed with my take on this. It's better to accept unpleasant emotions, he said, rather than try to pretend that you're not feeling them, or otherwise submerge them under a fake facade of positivity.

I told Wayne that in his guided meditations, Sam Harris frequently observes that when an emotion like sadness, fear, or anger arises, the "half life" of the emotion is much briefer when it is felt intensely rather than pushing it away. Embracing the feeling burns it up quite quickly, instead of letting it smolder under a covering of repression.

This also is the message of a book I've just started reading, The Joy of True Meditation by Jeff Foster. I ordered it after seeing that Foster had created the cartoon You Tube video that makes fun of those who take nonduality and Advaita too seriously.

Checking out Foster's web site, I saw that he'd written a book about nonduality, so I ordered it. He starts off by talking about how he felt as a youth that he didn't belong anywhere and contemplated suicide in his darker moments even though he'd been admitted to Cambridge and was a star student.

He writes:

And then, one ordinary day, all my defences against life, all my resistance to being alive, all my conditioned protection against the pain and pleasure of raw experience, started to break down.

All the repressed unconscious material, all the thoughts and feelings and desires I had held down in order to appear 'normal' and 'civilised' started leaking, then pouring, then gushing into conscious awareness.

Pandora's Box had broken open inside of me. I could no longer run from the darkness within, no longer push life away and seek refuge in the conceptual mind; there was no longer any safe haven to be found there.

I was being called to face life. The joy, the terror, the rage, searing feelings of abandonment suppressed since childhood, waves of unspeakable grief -- I could no longer escape them now. Raw trauma had been unleashed inside, everything held back was now rushing into me, like an unstoppable torrent of life!

I thought I was going to die, convinced that I would not be able to tolerate the intensity of it all for another moment. 

But I did not die. In fact, I was beginning to heal. The old unhappy 'me' was beginning to break down. My no to life was burning up and my true self was coming alive. Something deep inside me was starting to say yes -- yes to being alive, yes to not knowing, yes to the joy and the sorrow of existence, yes to the mess of being an imperfect human being, yes to the darkness and the light, yes to all of it!

...This sense of being alive was so intense sometimes, I thought it would kill or damage or at least overwhelm me, or perhaps send me spiraling into a void I would never escape from.

But feelings are always safe. It is our defences that hurt so much. 

I will say that again. Our feelings are safe, no matter how intense they are. It is our tensing-up around our human feelings, our rejection and refusal of them, our unconscious efforts to destroy and annihilate and purify them inside of us, our shaming of our vulnerable inner life and the smothering of the inner child, which causes so much pain and suffering. Not the feelings themselves.

Nonduality says nothing about how the world really is

Following up on my previous post about David Loy's book, Nonduality, here's some additional thoughts on a subject that both intrigues me and irritates me.

The intrigue part stems from a desire most of us have, me certainly included, to look upon the world without feeling so separate from it. That separateness is inherent in a central fact about we humans.

Each of us views things from an inescapable subjective perspective.

Meaning, we are subjective beings in an objective world. Or at least, what sure appears to be an objective world.

No one knows what it is like to be us other than ourselves. I can do my best to describe how I feel about something, but in the end, all that describing can't encompass my direct subjective experience of that feeling.

Same is true for you. Same is true for everybody.

We are subjects to ourselves, and objects to other people. Each of us assumes that other people also have a subjective life, but their subjectivity is off limits to us, as our subjectivity is off limits to them.

As Loy notes in his book, Western philosophy has pretty much accepted that reality is dualistic.

Even though it has moved beyond the dualism of Descartes, where mind and body are distinct entities, there's still an assumption that the subjective inner side of us is qualitatively different from the objective outer world.

Eastern philosophy, though, has explored ways we humans could attain a nondual way of experiencing reality. 

Basically, Indian philosophy (Vedanta, notably) holds out the idea that soul, or atman, can merge with God, Brahman. You know, the whole drop becoming the ocean thing. So nonduality is achieved by consciousness expanding to become the entire cosmos.

The emphasis here is on an experience of an ethereal universal force/energy/power that lurks behind everyday reality yet is distinct from it. So closed-eye meditation is viewed as a means of achieving a state of being one with everything.

Chinese and Japanese philosophy, Loy points out, is quite different. Here the emphasis is on experiencing the physical world. Instead of expanding to become everything, the goal is to shrink one's personal perspective as much as possible so only the world remains.

Bingo! Nonduality, but approached from the opposite direction favored by Indian/Vedanta philosophy. Nature is revered. Making tea is revered. Chopping wood and carrying water is revered. 

I've over-simplified Loy's arguments here, which are considerably more sophisticated. Check out this 2015 blog post for a more expansive description of how Loy analyzed how various Eastern philosophies view the relation between dualism and nonduality. 

He concludes that an experience of nonduality can be interpreted in various ways. Thus experience can't tell us how reality actually is. A nondual experience can be compatible with the soul merging with God thing, or compatible with the consciousness being absorbed in the world thing.

Loy also shows that for Taoism and Yoga, both nonduality and duality can be "real." That word is in quotation remarks, because the reality being spoken of in a consistence with those philosophies, not with how things really are in an objective sense.

Which gets me to the irritating part of nonduality. 

I'm fine with viewing nonduality as a word game, or as philosophical speculation. I'm also fine with the notion that nonduality and duality aren't incompatible opposites but the extremes of a continuum. Meaning, we humans can look upon the world as more or less nondual or dual. 

There isn't a right or wrong way to do this. Just different ways. At times we can feel separate and distinct from the world; at times we can feel that we're an integral aspect of the world.

But all those feelings say nothing about how the world actually is in an objective sense. So when people have some sort of experience that leads them to claim nonduality -- basically, oneness -- is an inherent feature of reality, that's irritatingly absurd.

Their experience is simply an experience. They're entitled to speak about it, obviously. However, a subjective experience of nonduality in which the difference between us and the world narrows markedly shouldn't be mistaken for a groundbreaking discovery about the nature of reality.

We've all had those kinds of experiences.

Maybe in deep meditation. Maybe in a breathtaking connection with nature. Maybe in a psychedelic drug trip. Maybe in an intense sexual orgasm. There's no end to the ways people feel closer to other people, to the world, to the cosmos.

Yesterday I mowed part of our property, plus our lawn, on a dry Saturday that was a break from an unusually rainy April here in western Oregon. About a month ago I wrote a blog post about how much I'm liking the John Deere X394 lawn tractor that I bought last year.

Now that I'm familiar with what the X394 can do, and am comfortable with the controls, mostly I can sit back and enjoy the power, the four-wheel steering, the power steering, and yes, the cup holder. 

I can't say that yesterday afternoon I became one with my lawn tractor. But I definitely felt a pleasing harmony where the mowing flowed harmoniously, in part because mowing on the challenging non-lawn parts of our property requires constant attention.

Branches fall in high winds. I have to look out for them. There's rocks and tree stumps I don't want to mow over, so I have to remember where they are. I have to miss trees and shrubs. All in all, it was a nondual'ish experience, since I felt that the mower and the mowing and the person controlling the mower (me) weren't really separate.

But in no way can I claim this says anything about reality. It was just an experience that I had.

Sam Harris speaks eloquently about non-dual mindfulness

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about my Zen'ish adage that when you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy. 

I mentioned that part of the inspiration for that post came from listening to a conversation Sam Harris had with Nikki Mirghafori on his Waking Up app. 

Mirghafori believes that equanimity is central to spirituality. She has a dualistic approach to enlightenment, or realization, where the goal is to attain an inward state of silent/pure consciousness that is separate from everyday consciousness. 

I skipped quite a bit of the more than two hour conversation. But at about the 1:18 mark of the "Practicing With Ease" recording, I came across a response, or retort, from Sam Harris that I liked a lot. So today I made a transcript of what Harris said.

He's talking about the difference between dualistic mindfulness and non-dual mindfulness.

Dualistic mindfulness is akin to thinking "I'm washing the dishes" while you're washing the dishes. There's a doer separate from the doing, a perceiver separate from what is perceived, a feeler separate from what is felt.

Non-dual mindfulness doesn't make those distinctions. As Harris says in the transcript, it's not where people begin mindfulness practice. But his Dzogchen training, which fits with his neuroscience Ph.D., leads Harris to consider, along with most Buddhists and many or most neuroscientists, that an enduring self is an illusion.

A little while ago I Googled "Sam Harris non-dual mindfulness" to see what has been written on this subject.

The description of a search result on the first page of results looked promising, so I clicked on it. It turned out to be a 2014 blog post I'd written, Non-duality is simply this: observer and observed are one. Cool. What I was searching for turned out to be something the searcher had written. Nicely non-dual. 

So if you want to learn more about non-duality, that's one place to look. This web page also has a good description of non-dual mindfulness. Here's the transcript of what Sam Harris said in the course of his conversation with Nikki Mirghafori.

When I look at how I suffer psychologically, in what sense is mindfulness really an antidote to it? The mindfulness that really is an antidote to it, is the mindfulness that cuts through to this non-dual recognition.

There certainly is some kind of significant relief from suffering possible even with dualistic mindfulness. I'm not going to deny that. It's very useful to learn to be strategically aware of everything, thoughts and feelings and everything you can be aware of. And to have that kind of unhook you from the gross identification with thought that keeps you ruminating and perseverating and miserable.

But take an experience of sadness or anger or fear. You have the full-blown energy of one of those classically negative emotions arising in your mind. And the default state for most people is to feel that as suffering. It's unpleasant, and it's also being sort of connected to thoughts about one's life or one's past or one's future, or the state of the world.

Whatever is occasioning the grief or anger or fear. And now we're not talking about some version of the impersonal vale of tears you went through on your first retreat, but you have reasons, presumably, for being unhappy in this case. You're thinking about those reasons. 

The feeling state is provoking the thought. And the thought is ramifying the feeling state. The whole wheel works of psychological suffering is turning. Yes, you can interrupt that with dualistic mindfulness. But when you ask, what is the recognition that truly equalizes the energy of sadness or fear or anger with anything else?

It's like your freedom is no longer contingent upon this even disappearing, because in this moment even the energy of it has no meaning and no implication. That, to my eye, requires this full insight into non-duality. 

Short of that, there's still this sense of -- I could be slightly overstating this -- but for most people, and perhaps for everyone practicing dualistic mindfulness in a moment like this, there's still this subtle sense that you're paying attention to it in order for it to go away. Right?

Like you've got some distance from it. You've recognized that you're not identical to it. But there is a bit of a vigil still happening where you think your freedom is elsewhere. Your freedom is in no longer experiencing this thing, even though, yes, you've managed to convince yourself that you're just going to patiently experience it and pay attention and you're open to it and you're feeling it and you're not resisting it.

But there's still this sense of "I" in relation to the energetics of experience in that moment. That's enough dukkha [suffering]. The problem still has its usual structure. And you're vulnerable to the next moment of it not going away, or your getting captured by the next thought about it.

Whereas, if in the seeing of just seeing, and the feeling of just feeling, there really is no problem. Right? There's no one to have a problem in that moment. I guess what I'm arguing for here, the assumption that you might have detected, is that this is an inconvenient thing to be arguing for as a teacher. I don't want to say anything that discourages people wherever they are in their practice.

It's fantastic to be starting a practice, and everyone starts dualistically. That's the place you have to start from. But I guess the other message is, I want to say to people, you shouldn't be satisfied with mindfulness until it really does meet the test of, in this moment is there something you can be aware of that is synonymous with freedom?

Like, it actually meets the requirement -- however you form that requirement -- of, if freedom is this, well then, that is good enough. Right? The search actually is over in this moment. If you can't do that, to put it into terms of doing, you still do have a problem to solve, as much as you might spend a lot of your time convincing yourself that there's no problem to solve and you just have to be aware.

The final statement I'll make here is that it felt like so much of my practice, in the first few years -- I think I'd probably spent a year on retreat -- and this still would have been true of me even after a full year on retreat, my practice was a kind of vigil. 

What I was mindful of was the evidence of my unenlightenment. That's not to say that it wasn't punctuated by beautiful, joyful experiences of where I would have said, if I could just keep this, that seems like the mind of the Buddha. This is fantastic. But all of that is impermanent, obviously.

I couldn't recognize that ordinary consciousness that is compatible with having a conversation like this or driving a car is already totally empty of a self that would seek enlightenment.

Zen'ish adage: when you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy

Whenever I have a Grand Intuition about something that really is obvious, I'm never sure whether (1) I deserve to be honored in the Great Hall of Enlightened Beings or (2) laughed at for not realizing sooner what I should have understood long ago.

(Personally, I'll go with #1, but I can't argue with someone else who favors #2.)

The core of today's Grand Intuition is the title of this blog post: When you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy. It's an emotional echo of some familiar Zen sayings.

Chop wood, carry water. 
When hungry, eat. When thirsty, drink. When sleepy, sleep.

Probably what got me to pondering this today was a slightly delayed reaction after listening to part of an interview on Sam Harris' Waking Up app yesterday. Harris spoke with a woman who said that equanimity was a central pillar of spiritual practice.

I didn't listen long enough to learn what she meant by equanimity. I'm assuming that this refers to remaining in a more or less steady calm emotional state no matter what happens to you: good things, bad things, neutral things.

This is in line with what the Sant Mat teachings I followed for thirty-five years as a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based spiritual organization, taught.

Lust. Anger. Greed. Attachment. Egotism. 

Those were the five deadly sins RSSB books and speakers warned against. Each has an emotional component. And in my current state of mind, each seems perfectly fine to me. They're simply a part of being human.

Sure, it makes sense to keep emotions within certain bounds. But those bounds are pretty damn loose. 

For example, lusting after someone you find attractive is how relationships, and marriages, often get started. Forcing them to have sex is out of bounds. Otherwise, lust is a natural feeling. Ditto with anger, greed, attachment, egotism, and every other feeling/emotion.

What I realized today more clearly than ever before was how, even though I'm no longer overtly religious, I still carry around vestiges of the religious teachings that were such a big part of my life for over three decades.

One vestige is how I've been considering that meditation and mindfulness were supposed to help me not get very upset when something went wrong in my life, nor unduly attached to the pleasure I feel when something goes right in my life.

In other words, I'd bought into that whole equanimity thing, albeit semi-consciously. 

Suddenly it hit me that life would be a whole lot simpler if I took a different approach. Be sad when I feel sad. Be happy when I feel happy. Be angry when I feel angry. Be ________ when I feel _________.

Again, not crazily emotional. Not emotional in a way that harms anyone. Just honestly emotional, embracing whatever I'm feeling at the moment without wondering, "Is it OK to feel this way?"

Yeah, it sure is OK. In fact, I've been feeling especially good today, because it feels like a weight has been lifted from my emotional shoulders. For a long time, more than 50 years, I've felt a need for self-improvement.

Simply being the person I already was -- not good enough.

I needed to meditate every day, read spiritual books, write spiritual books, improve how I related to other people, be kinder, more loving, less prone to negative emotions, you know, all that stuff the self-improvement/spiritual realization proselytizers tell us is necessary to truly be a Decent Human Being.

Which mostly is bullshit. Yes, if someone has a serious psychological problem that prevents them from functioning well or being satisfied with life, that points to a need for improvement.

But the notion that we need to become anyone other than the natural human being we already are is entirely false. When you feel good, feel good. When you feel bad, feel bad. Likely neither feeling will last very long. Embrace each while it lasts.

No pressure to become your "higher self." For one thing, there's no high or low when it comes to being human. For another thing, you aren't a self. You're simply you. 

Lose yourself to find yourself

For a long time, over three decades, I assumed that a central goal of my life was to know myself. Another way of saying this was self-realization. The idea was that somewhere hidden away in my psyche was a True Me who was different from the current Untrue Me.

So I diligently meditated every morning. Sometimes as long as two and a half hours, sometimes for a shorter period, but never less than an hour. 

I don't regret all that meditating, which totaled well over 20,000 hours. Plus, I've continued to meditate every day since the end of my religious phase some 18 years ago.

Now, though, I'm much more inclined to believe that (1) I don't have an enduring self, so (2) being mindful of what I'm doing in the world, and what the world is doing to me (could be the same thing) is the best way to know who I am at any given moment.

This attitude is in line with a story in the March 5 issue of New Scientist, Lose Yourself. A subtitle says, "Transcendent experiences, where our sense of self takes a back seat, seem to be good for us -- and there is no need to go to extremes to get the benefits, finds Jess Craig."

The story starts out by describing a study by Roland Griffiths where fifty-one people facing imminent death were given the psychedelic psilocybin, which the state where I live, Oregon, voted to legalize for therapeutic purposes. Sixty-0ne percent had a clinically significant reduction in depression symptoms and 51 percent had a reduction in anxiety symptoms.

 Craig writes:

Frederick Barrett, part of Griffith's team at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, says it isn't clear that the therapeutic effect was entirely down to the transcendent experience. But "a lot of people believe that is the case," he adds, "and I am one of them."

If he is right, it is a striking example of how self-transcendent experiences, though temporary, can provide a lasting boost to well-being. And they don't have to be the intense experience induced by psychedelics. Just staring in awe at magnificent trees or concentrating intensely on a challenging task also seems to have the capacity to make you happier, less stressed and kinder to others.

The story includes a quote from William James: "We can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace."

In my experience, that's absolutely true. But union comes in many forms. It doesn't mean totally losing yourself in another entity, such as someone on LSD feeling they've become a giant oak tree. That way lies madness, were it to continue.

Rather, greater peace and pleasure comes from any degree of moving away from a focus on our own self. For most of us, that involves inward-directed thinking and feeling. 

What makes self-transcendent experiences so beneficial? At first blush, you might think it would be unsettling, even terrifying, to suddenly lose your sense of self. Indeed, many people report that intense transcendent experiences are "psychologically challenging and difficult," according to Yaden. For that reason, clinical trials aimed at inducing these states are under close supervision.

But there is ample evidence from clinical psychology to demonstrate that excessive self-focus can have negative effects -- it is a hallmark of depression, for instance -- which could explain why reducing that focus, even temporarily, can be helpful.

When I'm not feeling very positive, I find that going for a walk with our dog in nature (we live in the country) helps a lot. So does going to my Tai Chi class, which requires concentration on what my body and the bodies of others are doing, which is akin to dancing. 

Even simply washing the dishes can improve my mood. That gets me out of my head and into soapy water, a sponge, the drainer, and such. Writing a blog post makes me feel better also, since I can't be thinking about my problems when I'm focusing on what to say about some subject outside of me.

If being inside our own head was so great, prisoners would want to be in solitary confinement, rather than fearing it. Sure, meditation can seem like an inward pursuit, but usually it isn't. When I'm focusing on my breathing, I'm aware of something that's happening in my body.

That awareness obviously is part of my subjective consciousness. However, what I'm aware of is part of the objective world. Breathing is real in a way that a thought or emotion isn't. It anchors me in outward reality, while my thoughts can rattle around in the confines of my mind with little purpose or meaning.

When I used to play competitive club tennis, a ploy was frequently used when, if we were playing doubles, one of the guys on the other team was serving really well. During a changeover of sides, my partner or I would say to that guy, "Hey, your serve is great today. Wow, no double faults."

Often that not-so-innocent statement would cause the person who had been serving so well to start thinking of his serve, rather than simply serving. Then his serve went downhill. This relates to the notion of "flow," something mentioned in the New Scientist story.

Supposedly a state of flow happens when we're competent at something, yet find it challenging. There's truth in that. However, I find that flow can also occur in unchallenging situations, such as raking leaves or mowing grass. 

It's getting out of our head and into the world that's important. Which is my cue to share one of my favorite dance videos, Alex and Twitch dancing to "Outta Your Mind" on So You Think You Can Dance. Absolutely mesmerizing. 

Bruce Lee's Six Diseases of a competitive attitude

I'm prone toward feeling competitive. That was obvious when I was playing competitive tennis. I didn't like to lose. It's been less obvious now.

But today when I started reading Be Water, My Friend, a book written by Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee's daughter, after putting it aside for a while, I came across her description of how Bruce Lee viewed a competitive attitude in everyday relationships and situations.

I saw myself in these Six Diseases. Maybe you will also. Shannon Lee says: (the indented passages are from Bruce Lee)

If we want to look at how we practice all forms of rivalry, there are six diseases my father wrote about, all of which stem from the desire we have to win at all costs. These diseases rely on being in competition, which is typically where we go in a relationship the moment any discord pops up.

When we relate to others in these ways, we are disconnecting from them and disconnecting from our true selves in order to access some form of outside validation. In other words, there is no relationship, no collaboration, no cocreation. There is only the victor and the loser.

The Six Diseases are:

The desire for victory
I have to be the winner. If I don't win, I'm a loser. If I win, everybody else is a loser.

The desire to resort to technical cunning
I rely on the power of my wits to show you how great I am. Who cares about people or their feelings as long as everyone can see how clever I am?

The desire to display all that has been learned
Check me out. I know lots of things. I can speak at length about anything. It doesn't matter what anyone else has to say (especially if it's dumb).

The desire to awe the enemy
I am a force to be reckoned with. Look out! I will wow you to get your approval even if I have to do something shocking and wild to get your attention.

The desire to play the passive role
I am so easy to get along with. Who wouldn't like me? I am so unobtrusive and sweet. I will put anything that's important to me aside to make sure that you see how likeable and wonderful I am. How could you not like me when I sacrifice everything just for you?

The desire to rid oneself of whatever disease one is affected by
I am not okay as I am. I will perform constant self-work and read as many books as I can and take so many classes to make myself good that you will see that I am always trying to be a good person even if I continue to do lots of shitty things. I know I'm not okay as I am. And I know you know that I know I'm not okay as I am, which makes it okay not to get truly better as long as it looks like I'm trying.

With all of these pitfalls, there's an attachment to an outside outcome, which ultimately disconnects us from people and situations. There is only the desire to manipulate or shock and awe the "opponent." Even in the noble desire to be rid of the disease, there is a characterization of oneself as "the afflicted one" and therefore a denial of your own power.

I offer you these six diseases to consider as possible avenues of self-exploration because we have all participated in them when relating to another person or a situation. Can you recognize any of these in yourself?

If you were to dig a little deeper, where would you find the wounding perception that motivates the disease and where could the healing begin? Allow yourself the awareness to notice your tactics and the freedom to feel your pain points. Realize that the diseases are just a delusion of the mind and the ego.

You complain about how judgmental people are? Guess what you're being -- judgmental. You give someone the cold shoulder for not being nicer to you? Guess what -- you're not being nice. You gossip about what a gossip someone is? You're a gossip yourself. You get mad at someone for not loving you the "right" way -- that's not very loving.

Take a look in the mirror and see how you are extending the life of the disease rather than finding the cure and, ultimately, the healing.

These diseases are traps. They will keep you locked in isolation and stagnate your growth. They will keep your success always outside of yourself and out of your hands as you chase victory and validation through the eyes of someone else.

And what's more, they will keep you from being fully yourself. Attachment to outcome is denial of one's true commitment to self.

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of an engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat. See that there is no one to fight, only an illusion to see through.

You can't go beyond mind, because that's what you are

Yesterday Spence Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog, responded to Appreciative Reader, another frequent commenter. I enjoy how Tepper thinks, even when I don't agree with him. Below I've shared in bold italics some observations on his interesting comment.

Hi AR
You asked
""Please explain in clear words what exactly you were trying to say."
Thank you for the clarity of your question.

It was a great question. And I appreciate the response from Tepper below, which is pleasingly direct.

Beyond mind meaning beyond your own conventional thinking.

OK, I agree that it isn't possible to go beyond the mind, because mind isn't something we can go beyond, since mind is what we are. At least, that's what all the neuroscientific evidence shows. When mental activity ceases, we're brain dead. In other words, dead.

From your perspective, all human experience is biologically based. If you start with that gooey bag called the brain and the intricate and delicate biochemical network of trees within it, and the active network of billions of interacting signals, you can reduce the brain to two levels of functioning, maybe three.
1. The brain itself as described above.
2.the programming / conditioning of the brain.
3.it's operating system programming

This is a dubious description of the brain and how it works. It assumes that the brain is akin to a computer. Some neuroscientists believe this, but many or most recent books I've read on this subject say that the mental activity, or consciousness, is inseparable from that amazingly complex network of neurons and the connections between neurons.

Meaning, the brain is a physical entity and mind can't be separated from that messy, gooey activity. Maybe one day mind and consciousness can be off-loaded to a computer or some other device. For now, though, there's no evidence that the mind is anything other than the brain in action. So (2) and (3) above also are the brain in action.

The view of consciousness can be viewed from this perspective.
Normally we are only conscious of item 2, and even then only a portion of that. .We therefore think there is nothing beyond it. We identify with it, personalize our experiences and identify purely with our programming.

The last sentence above is close to how mindfulness is viewed in Buddhism and secular versions of mindfulness. We can indeed be carried away by thoughts, emotions, and the like. However, once again, there's no evidence that the programming of the brain is separable from the brain itself. 

Sure, it is possible to make a verbal distinction, as when Alan Watts pointed out that "flash of lightning" actually refers to only one thing, since there's no difference between a flash and lightning. So naturally I'd agree that we can develop new mental habits -- that's a big part of what life is all about -- but I disagree that this involves going beyond the conditioning of the brain. The brain just can be conditioned to do new things.

Mystics claim that you can learn to withdraw from the senses and mind and look within and watch item 2. above functioning from a distance, as an observer.

Sure, they claim that. I used to believe that claim. Where, though, is the evidence that anyone has had an experience that didn't involve their mind, which again, I define as the brain in action? If there's a different definition, it would have to be a supernatural one, since as noted before, a brain is necessary for mind, and mind is necessary for awareness/consciousness.

If what's being talked about here is just mindfulness, I have no problem with the idea that it's possible to develop some distance between our thoughts/emotions and the part of mind that is able to be aware of thoughts/emotions. But mindfulness occurs as part of the mind, obviously. It doesn't involve going somewhere outside the mind/brain.

From a purely biological view, this isn't out of body. But it is real and a regular part of advanced meditation practice. Moving consciousness inward and upward through practice: Beyond mind. Beyond 2.

Agreed. It isn't out of body. However, since it isn't out of body, what does "inward" and "upward" really mean? We're always inward, because all experience occurs through the brain, which is encased in our skull. There's no outward to experience. It's all inward. There's no upward, unless this is meant in a metaphorical sense. How can you move up when the mind is a hundred billion neurons with a trillion or so connections?

That means seeing from a different vantage point, which I suggest is 3, the operating system. From that perspective we are entirely free of emotional drives, reactive conditioning. We are liberated from those and can watch them from that vantage point. That provides us with a new perspective, like the Space Telescope.

Well, the Space Telescope is in space, while the vantage point spoken of here is within the mind/brain. Perhaps it is possible to be entirely free of emotional drives and reactive conditioning, though I doubt it. What does seem entirely possible is to be more free of negative emotions and unproductive reactions than we are now. This is what mindfulness is all about.

That perspective offers completely different views and observations, and of course increases our objectivity. We see that we aren't our thinking, nor our emotions. We aren't even this body, because we can view these in action from a separate point. One that is reached through practice, such as those advocated by Buddha and his more advanced followers.

Again, we can be less attached to our body, but we're still a body with a mind/brain. So the separate point mentioned above is just a manner of speaking about a certain sense of detachment, not an actual point separate from the body/mind/brain. 

I'll end by sharing how Sam Harris, who is very knowledgeable about Buddhism and mindfulness, describes what was generally discussed above by Tepper and me. This is from the Spirituality chapter in his Waking Up book.

So what would a spiritual master be a master of? At a minimum, she will no longer suffer certain cognitive and emotional illusions -- above all, she will no longer feel identical to her thoughts.

Once again, this is not to say that such a person will no longer think, but she would no longer succumb to the primary confusion that thoughts produce in most of us: She would no longer feel that there is an inner self who is a thinker of these thoughts.

Such a person will naturally maintain an openness and serenity of mind that is available to most of us only for brief moments, even after years of practice. I remain agnostic as to whether anyone has achieved such a state permanently, but I know from direct experience that it is possible to be far more enlightened than I tend to be.

The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present. 

Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states -- deeply, not merely as an idea -- can transform your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact -- but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being can readily confirm.

We don't have to know any more about the brain or about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about our own mind. 

The promise of spiritual life -- indeed, the very thing that makes it "spiritual" in the sense I invoke throughout this book -- is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

The best spiritual practice could be...nothing

Here's some thoughts about the value of basing your spiritual practice on... drumroll please... absolutely nothing. But I'll introduce this topic by sharing an anecdote.

Yesterday I took our dog for a walk around the community lake near our rural property. A house is for sale that overlooks the lake. A woman and two children were walking down from the house toward the lake, seemingly because the family was looking into buying the house.

A young boy came up to the fence that our dog and me were on the other side of. He pointed and said, "nice lake." Then he crawled through the fence with no problem.

His mother, I assume it was, came over to him. "Look," she said, "there's some barbed wire on this fence. You could have gotten caught on it. There's a gate over there. I'll show you the proper way to get through the fence." 

The gate, with a kayak peeking from the side

I said, looking at the boy, "Proper? That's no fun." As dog and I continued on our walk, I thought about my own boyhood days growing up in a rural area in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. 

Barbed wire was used in all the fences on the land where my friends and I played and cattle roamed. Rarely were there gates. Early on I learned various tricks to get through a barbed wire fence.

If the wire was tight, stand on the strands next to a post and hop over the fence. If the wire was loose, put your foot on the bottom strand and crawl through the fence. Or have a friend pull up on a strand while you step on the bottom strand while you crawl through.

Telling the boy that only a gate is the proper way to cross a barbed wire fence not only isn't true, it prevents the boy from learning other ways. The mother could have said, "Let's think of some ways to get through the fence safely without using a gate."

I was right when I said Proper is no fun. Often we have to act properly to fulfill a societal expectation. But I've found that improper behavior tends to be more enjoyable, because it flows from our natural inclination, not someone else's view of how life should be lived.

Anyway, back to the best spiritual practice being nothing. I can relate this to what I wrote above with just a little cramming of the fence/gate metaphor into the subject at hand. 

Religions are fond of gates. They like to control who passes through their gate that supposedly leads to God, heaven, enlightenment, or some other elevated state. So there are requirements to approach the gate.

For example, the Eastern religion I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, required initiates to be vegetarian, meditate 2 1/2 hours a day, not use alcohol or recreational drugs, abstain from having sex outside of marriage, and follow a vaguely stated pure and moral life.

Members of other religions follow other sorts of rules. The underlying rationale is that the spiritual seeker is different from what is sought. So the gap between seeker and sought has to be bridged by a gate that leads between what a person is now and what they hope to be.

Thus almost all religions have a dualistic philosophy. Humans are on one side of a cosmic fence -- the worldly, physical, limited, time-bound side where suffering is commonplace. Religions promise a way to get through that fence into a very different supernatural, spiritual, expansive, eternal side of the cosmos.

But what if that side doesn't exist? After all, there's no proof that it does. Then we're left with two basic approaches to spirituality, one that isn't based in reality, and one that is.

(1) There's much to do and become (non-reality based)
(2) There's nothing to do and become (reality based)

Yet here's why (2) still exists in the form of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Advaita, and similar non-dual approaches to spirituality. Religions who preach (1) are so ubiquitous, and have been so for thousands of years, currently billions of people are lined up in front of gates that don't lead anywhere.

So they need to be told, "Hey, guys, wanted to point out that there's no need for those gates that you wrongly believe lead to divinity. Actually, you can just walk right around them, since there's no fence either."

Meaning, reality isn't divided into a natural world and supernatural world. There's just one world, and it isn't supernatural. It's right here, right now.

Thus nothing needs to be done to be "spiritual," viewed as being in touch with how you and the world really is, other than giving up the erroneous belief that you're separate from reality.

This is akin to someone being afflicted by a psychosis of sorts where they imagine being judged by an outside power, told by that power that they lack something without which they can't live a meaningful life, and instructed how to search for it under the guidance of people in tune with that power. 

What that person needs is the ability to recognize that what they imagine to be true, actually is false. They don't need to do anything. They need to stop believing in a fantasy.

Sam Harris likes to say in the guided meditations on his Waking Up app, "Rest in the condition in which everything is appearing." That condition is awareness, or if you like, consciousness. Without awareness/consciousness, there is no reality capable of being known.

So in that non-dual sense, the observer isn't separate from what's observed; the thinker isn't separate from what is thought; the hearer isn't separate from what is being heard. Alan Watts speaks of this when  he says, "We don't come into the world; we come out of the world."

In other words, we aren't separate from the world.

I'm reading Stephen Bodian's book, "Wake Up Now: A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening." There's many places in the parts of the book I've read so far that echo the notion that the best spiritual practice is nothing.

Here's an example:

From a direct intuition of the imminent availability of the truth of your being, you've been lured into the spiritual marketplace, where well-intentioned vendors hawk their wares, promising enlightenment somewhere in the distant future as the result of years of effort if you're willing to buy their product, take their course, join their community, and invest thousands of hours of your time.

The innocent initial impulse to orient, listen, and move toward truth the way a child naturally returns to its mother or a bird to its nesting ground has been co-opted by an established tradition and turned into a circuitous path to spiritual realization. Welcome to the progressive approach!

Progressive paths are extraordinarily appealing because they've been so carefully elaborated, often over many centuries. Bearing the imprimatur of an established tradition, they suggest that if you just follow the instructions wholeheartedly, the results will take care of themselves. 

If you listen to enough teachings, spend enough hours in meditation, attend enough retreats, cultivate enough of the right attitudes and qualities, you'll one day discover the truth of who you really are. As inspiration, the progressive scriptures are filled with exhortatory tales of masters who began as seekers just like you and me and eventually achieved enlightenment through prolonged and concerted effort.

...Eventually, after giving up the effort and the formal practice of meditation, I met a teacher who told me, "The seeker is the sought, the looker is what he or she is looking for." My mind couldn't wrap itself around these words, but one day soon after, in a moment out of time, the seeker and the sought collapsed into one another, and I knew who I was once and for all.

The one who had been looking so hard for true nature was the very true nature I had been looking for. Truth had been playing hide and seek with itself. As long as I continued focusing so much on searching, I couldn't possibly stumble backward into the silent presence that was the source of all searching.

...In fact, the prolonged practice of a particular technique may have the opposite effect, deadening and habituating the mind, rather than making it more open and accessible to truth. If you want to know how a progressive path might affect you, spend some time at one of the tradition's residential meditation centers or ashrams.

Do the longtime practitioners appear happier, freer, more peaceful, more enlightened? Or do they seem rigid in their adherence to structures and rules, lacking in spontaneity, proud of their spiritual progress or stature, addicted to control?

Every center, tradition, and practitioner is different, of course, but many of the ashrams and monasteries I've visited lack the joy and aliveness one would expect to find there; instead, they exude a quality of emotional repression and subservience to form.

Which is why I started off this post by saying, Proper is no fun.

 

This talk by Alan Watts is marvelous

Thank you, Sam Harris. As of January 1, he's arranged to have about 100 hours of recorded talks by Alan Watts put on his Waking Up app. 

I've read just about of all of Watts' books. Some I've read numerous times, notably The Wisdom of Insecurity, one of my favorite books. 

The recordings are arranged in categories: Tao of Philosophy, Philosophies of Asia, Myth & Religion, Philosophy & Society, Comparative Philosophy, Ways of Liberation, Religion of No Religion, Eastern & Western Zen, Taoism, Zen & Meditation, Comparative Religion, Early Radio Talks, Human Consciousness, Buddhism, Spiritual Alchemy, The Arts, The Future, The Self, The Universe.

I suspect there's considerable overlap between the various recordings, but I'll learn if that's true as I make my way through them. I'm starting with Tao of Philosophy, described as "Explore the limits of language, man and nature, the illusion of control, the myth of the self, and more."

Today I finished listening to a 54 minute talk, Not What Should Be. Here's a summary based on notes I took. Watts is an excellent speaker, who spoke without notes, according to a short introduction by Harris. 

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We have a false sense of personal identity, which creates a profound discord between man and nature. Actually, the environment is not something other than ourselves. Yet we make the mistake of viewing intelligence as being inside us, while outside is just a blind mechanism.

People say of a baby, it came into this world. In truth, we come out of this world. Our head is as much a part of the environment as our body.

Education leads us to view reality as made up of discrete lines/facts, linear scanning. Yet in the universe everything happens together all at once. We confuse the world as it is with how the world is described. 

"I" is a symbol of ourselves. The real you is the universe centered on your organism. Your behavior is part of the environment. There's a continual push-pull between organism and environment. 

A sense of cosmic consciousness causes us to say either "I do everything" or "I do nothing." There's just a single process going on, so both points of view are right. 

Our sense of ourself is very limited. If we're asked what our childhood was like, we'll relate a few stories. But that's just a vanishingly small proportion of what actually happened during those years. We know nothing of how our heart beats, what is being secreted by our glands, the operation of our stomach, liver, and other organs.

Thus we have an impoverished image of ourselves. The unconscious is a mystery. We're full of illusions. Our history leaves out most of what happened. All I have is a caricature of myself, a skeleton. It's no wonder we feel so inadequate.

We hope for a divine event that will change our viewpoint. Yet we fail to realize that our "I" is an illusion. Any attempt to change ourselves through effort is bound to fail.

When you will, you grit your teeth. Muscular tension accompanies our effort. Try! We strain with the thought of gaining a psychological benefit. "I" is marked by chronic tension. When an organ is fully functioning, we are unaware of it. It's only when something goes strong that we're aware of our stomach, say.

The big difficulty is that I want to find a method to improve myself. But the self to be improved is that which is doing the improving. Unloving me has to make me into loving me. So I hope God will improve me.

In Zen many feel that it takes hard work to get rid of ego. The biggest ego trip is getting rid of ego. Actually ego is an illusion. Mystical experience is a gift of God. You can't do anything about it because you don't exist.

There is no method. Good news! The main obstacle to mystical realization has collapsed: you. You can't control thoughts and feelings. They are you. 

Do you breathe? Do you see? There are just happenings. You can only preach to ego. I just talk about what it is. And I get paid for doing this.

The hallucination of ego disappears only in recognition of our own futility. You can't control your own mind. Quietness naturally comes over you when there is no controller. The experiencer of experience is just experience. 

In nature there's just knowing. Not "I am feeling." There is feeling there. Just a happening. That space is meditation. 

Don't try to get rid of mind chatter. This just keeps up the illusion of a controller. Eventually there is silence when thoughts and feelings are allowed to be like clouds appearing and disappearing in the sky.

Reality isn't material or spiritual. That's just an idea. You are this universe. Other people's doings are your doings. If you're going to say "I'm God," you must allow it for everybody else too. This was the mistake of Christianity. Only Jesus supposedly was godlike. 

There are endless games of spiritual competition. My guru is better than your guru. My yoga is better than your yoga. You are this universe. The universe is still beginning now.

-----------------------

Lastly, here's an actual transcript of part of Watts' talk dealing with the idea of us being a caricature of ourselves. He starts off talking about the richness of his present-moment experience talking to a large group of people, and how different it is when he's asked to describe what he did that evening. 

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Instead of this rich physical experience, which is very rich indeed, I have to attenuate it in memory and description... So, therefore, in thinking of ourselves in this way, what I did yesterday, what I did the day before, in terms of this stringy, mangy account. All I have is a caricature of myself.

...We are, as it were, conceiving of ourselves as a bunch of skeletons. And there's no flesh on them, just a bunch of bones. And no wonder we all feel inadequate. 

We're all looking to the future. To bring us a goodie. We know what we want to have is a golden goodie at the end of the line somewhere. There's a good time coming be it ever so far away, that one far-off divine event toward which creation moves. 

We hope. And therefore we say of something that's no good, it has no future. I would say, it has no present. But everyone says it has no future. No. 

Here we are, as it were, psychically starved. And always therefore looking, looking, seeking, seeking, seeking. And this confused seeking is going on everywhere. We don't know what we want.

Nobody knows what they want. We say what we want in vague terms. Pleasure, money, wealth, love, fulfillment, personal development. But we don't know what we mean by all that. 

Mental Tai Chi and dissolving the remove

Yesterday I had one of those pleasing experiences where I got the same message from three different sources -- one inside my head, from me, and the other two from outside, a guided meditation and a book I was reading. 

First, me. I was idly going to sleep, not thinking about much of anything in particular, when the notion mental Tai Chi popped into my mind. 

For seventeen years I've been practicing Tai Chi under the guidance of a skilled instructor who is adept at teaching the martial aspect of Tai Chi, as well as the more typical relaxation/exercise aspect. 

One of the keys to Tai Chi, an internal martial art (in contrast to an external marital art like karate), is not meeting force with force. Instead, when it comes to dealing with some sort of attack, the idea is encapsulated in ABC.

Accept. Blend. Control. There's other words to describe these concepts. I just like the ABC'ness of these.

Say someone tries to punch you. Though this takes practice, the goal is to guide the punch away from you with minimal force. You accept the punch without letting it hit you, such as by gently diverting the punch past your head -- maybe with your hand/arm, or just by turning your body.

In doing this, you're blending with the attacker's movement, using their energy to redirect the movement into a more productive direction than you getting hit in the head.

Then control probably might be called for. This gets into defensive joint locks and other aspects of the martial side of Tai Chi that resemble controlling moves in other styles like judo, jujitsu, and such. The aim isn't to injure the other person, but to stop them from attacking you.

It struck me that mental Tai Chi is similar.

Except the "attacker" is words spoken by someone else, or perhaps our own mind. Instead of forcefully resisting what feels like a threat, we do our best to to accept the words and let them slide by, blending with them rather than trying to push them away or respond with our own attacking speech.

This is an ideal, of course.

I don't claim to be adept at doing this. I often react to an insult or accusation as a threat, rather than doing the mental Tai Chi thing. Meaning, I jump right to trying to control the other person, or my own mind, rather than first accepting and blending.

That morning I listened to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren on my iPhone's Calm app. It was called Dissolve the Remove. Here's a partial transcript.

The meditation teacher Susan Tiver has a nice phrase. She says meditation is often described as observing something, like the breath, as though we were operating from a distance, from a remove.

But meditation, she says, is also about dissolving the remove, about collapsing distance. Getting really close to our experience, really feeling what's here. I love this duality. That sometimes we want space around our experience. That's legit. 

And sometimes we want to collapse that space. We want to become more intimate with everything that's going on, more intimate with exactly how this moment is feeling, I'm right inside it. 

...There sometimes can be a sense that we're up here looking, and the sensation is down there, it's down in the body. Or maybe it's a sound that's out there in the world. Let's see if we can dissolve that remove a little bit. 

Come on down from the observing head, and climb into the body. So this is about feeling. Instead of only observing body sensations from a distance, see if you can feel what's here from the inside.

...When we truly dissolve the remove, what's left? Just one thing. A single experience of self and world, a single continuum of feeling and sensing that kind of blurs the boundary between inside and out. Intimate with everything.

In the morning I also read some pages in Happiness and How It Happens by The Happy Buddha (Suryacitta Malcolm Smith). Here's a passage I liked.

So how do we let go?

As an example, let's look at how we relax and let go when we meditate. When we sit, we tune into the felt experience of the body. As we do this, we sense how the body is. We may see that we're a little agitated, maybe a little tense.

We feel how we are and we accept how we are.

We don't try to relax but let everything be simply as it is. We let go trying to be different from how we are, which leads to greater relaxation. This is the essence of meditation, nothing special at all.

Within the felt experience of the body, we let whatever comes into awareness simply be and move on. Our work isn't to interfere or to try to change it, but to observe it and let go and relax. 

Genuine spirituality is very simple. Not like religion at all.

Here's what I've come to realize after over fifty years of searching for spiritual truth.

For most of that time, I had things completely backward, because I didn't understand how simple genuine spirituality really is. 

I've got lots of company in that regard. 

At first, almost everyone approaches spirituality, or religion, like everything else in life. It's viewed as something to be desired, then worked for, then hopefully attained.

This is how we get a college degree. This is how we get our first real job. This is how we get married. This is how we have children. This is how we become proficient at a sport like golf, surfing, or tennis.

We seek instruction from people who have the sort of knowledge we want. We put in effort aimed at achieving our goal. We get support from friends and family who inspire us to keep pursuing our dream rather than get discouraged.

Then... we repeat the process. Because desires and attainments never end. 

When spiritual advancement or a religious quest is viewed in this way -- and almost everyone does just that -- disappointment is inevitable. 

After all, how many people do you know who are completely satisfied with their life? I'm willing to bet, zero. And naturally that includes you, along with me.

This is the problem with making spirituality into a commodity, something to be purchased with the proper amount of time, energy, knowledge, enthusiasm. 

We expect that just as we're able to achieve a good education, get a worthwhile job, or find a loving partner, we should be able to become a spiritual person if we channel our desire in that direction.

Most people pursue this approach for their entire life.

A few stick with the same religion or spiritual path until they die. Most, though, try several forms of spirituality, moving from one to another in the same way people change jobs, romantic relationships, athletic activities, cars, homes, and such.

New spiritual goals replace old ones. Or the same spiritual path/religion undergoes a sort of remodeling project. Fresh ideas take the place of stale ones. But the same basic approach mentioned above holds:

Something is desired, then worked for, then hopefully attained.

There's a better way, though. It's so simple, most people fail to grasp it. I certainly did, even though I've been an admirer of Zen Buddhism and Taoism ever since my college days in the late 1960s.

Zen and Taoism, in their non-religious forms, come the closest of any organized philosophy to that simple better way. Mindfulness, also -- which really is Buddhism expressed in a different modern fashion.

This way actually is better described as a non-way, since it doesn't involve any steps, any path, any destination, any goal. 

It's just attending to life as it appears to us at every moment.

Now, I realize that statement sounds ridiculously trite to most people. All I can say is that I agree. It is ridiculously trite. Which is why I love it so much.

I'm not saying I've become a Zen master or a Taoist sage. Far from it.

I'm just a regular old guy doing his best to keep my head above water as I cope with the everyday problems I've had to deal with my entire life. However, I'm gradually starting to see life in a different fashion.

Which is difficult for me to put into words. So I'll let Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher whose words make up the book I've been rereading, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," describe what I'm struggling to say.

In our practice we have no particular purpose or goal, nor any special object of worship.

...You may think that if there no purpose or no goal in our practice, we will not know what to do. But there is a way.

The way to practice without having any goal is to limit your activity, or to be concentrated on what you are doing in the moment. Instead of having some particular object in mind, you should limit your activity.

When your mind is wandering about elsewhere you have no chance to express yourself. But if you limit your activity to what you can do just now, in this moment, then you can express fully your true nature, which is the universal Buddha nature. This is our way.

When we practice zazen [meditation] we limit our activity to the smallest extent. Just keeping the right posture and being concentrated on sitting is how we express the universal nature. Then we become Buddha, and we express Buddha nature.

So instead of having some object of worship, we just concentrate on the activity which we do in each moment.

When you bow, you should just bow; when you sit, you should just sit; when you eat, you should just eat. If you do this, the universal nature is there.

Right in the middle is where life really happens

I really liked today's guided meditation by Jeff Warren, which I regularly listen to on the Calm iPhone app. So much so, I made a transcript of what Warren had to say.

The ellipsis (...) in the transcript below indicate a marked pause in the guided meditation. 

This afternoon I shared some copies of the transcript with my Tai Chi class. There's a close connection between the notion of staying in the center of a movement and basic principles of Tai Chi. 

More philosophically, I enjoyed Warren's observation that when we're right in the middle, we have the greatest ability to adjust to the changing conditions of life. 

Meaning, if we're not strongly mentally leaning in one direction or another, when life pushes us we're able to flow with that demand more easily than when our mind is determined to head somewhere else. 

In the Middle 
Transcript of guided meditation from Jeff Warren on the Calm iPhone app

One thing we explore often in the Daily Trip is the idea of being present to exactly this present moment. Not a bit ahead or a bit behind, but right here, right now, in the very middle of it all.

This is one of the meanings of equanimity. The ability to be right here, in the middle, balanced at the very center of your life, free and available to go in any direction. 

And that's the idea we're going to play with today. First in stillness, and then, in the last minutes, just for fun, in motion.

Let's go. 

Start by closing the eyes, or keeping them half open, whatever is comfortable for you. And take a few deep full-body breaths. Stretching up the spine on the inhale, alert, poised, and then settling into your seat on the exhale, relaxed, bringing out any tension. 

Already, we're right in the middle between alert and relaxed, between the in-breath and the out-breath.

We're also in the middle of this exact moment. All the sounds around you, maybe distant, or close. All the sensations, and feelings, and thoughts inside you. Maybe lots of them. Maybe very few. Sitting in the middle of it all, letting everything be here.

If you like, choose a simple home base. This will be a place you can rest your attention on, returning to it again and again throughout the meditation. 

So maybe the soft sensation of the breath down in the belly, or it could be another body sensation, or it can be a sound. Whatever you choose, practicing right here with it. 

...OK, present with some sound or sensation, not gripping it. Light, noticing the subtle details. Keep going.

...Sometimes, we get a bit ahead of ourselves. Anticipating the next breath. Or thinking about the future. Or we get a bit behind, dwelling on something that's already past. Can you come back and stay right here, poised in the exact middle of everything?

...Sitting in the middle. Thoughts and feelings, of course, will be there. But they're just passing through. And you sit, centered and poised and aware.

...So let's play with a very simple movement.

Maybe lift your hand, and gently turn it back and forth. Can you move it so slowly and deliberately, that there's no momentum at all? In other words, at any moment you could as easily turn your hand the other way. Or move it forward, or backwards, or really any direction. 

The idea is to stay at the very center of the movement. This still point, where anything can happen, where you're not committed to moving one way or the other, where there's no habit taking over. Keep playing with this.

Maybe turn your head, or twist your body a little bit. Playing with the same principle of moving really slowly and staying right in the middle of the movement. 

OK, so you can keep moving if you're enjoying that.

Being right in the middle is the place where you're most available to life. It's this zero point where we have the potential to move in any direction. It's a practice of freedom. Free to respond, and not to react. Free to be present. Free to live. It all happens right here, in the middle.

OK. When you're ready, open your eyes. Thank you for your practice. I'll see you back here tomorrow.

"There is no path" -- poet Antonio Machado

For a long time I believed in a path. A path back to God.

The religious group I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, taught there was such a path. One of their books was called "Path of the Masters."

Since I no longer accept that such a path exists, I like this poem by Antonio Machado. There are various translations from the Spanish. I've shared several.

Wanderer, your footprints are
the path, and nothing else;
wanderer, there is no path,
the path is made by walking.
Walking makes the path,
and on glancing back
one sees the path
that must never be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no path—
Just your wake in the sea.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road–
Only wakes upon the sea.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
Walking makes the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path that you
will never tread again.
Wanderer, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.

Walker, your footsteps
are the road, and nothing more.
Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
Walking you make the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path you never
again will step upon.
Walker, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.

Transcendence and immanence: two paths to attain oneness

It's important to not get one-sided in our approach to meditation and spirituality. After all, oneness is a laudable goal, even if it can't be attained perfectly.

(If there truly was only one, there would be no one else to know there was only one, so oneness would never be experienced.)

A one-sided coin doesn't exist. It takes two sides to make a coin. 

So we shouldn't get locked into a single way of looking upon oneness. Many commenters on this blog appear to be so enamored with transcendence -- leaving this world behind to find a better one -- they forget that a big chunk of humanity embraces Taoist and Buddhist approaches to oneness that are focused on immanence rather than transcendence.

Here's passages from Jeremy Lent's book, The Web of Meaning, where he discusses transcendence and immanence.

Later in his "Everything is Connected" chapter he investigates the question, "Could the sense of immanent oneness described in traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism, and many Indigenous cultures be commensurate with these insights of modern science?"

I'll share his answer to that question in another blog post.

A critical step is to recognize that even among those who describe a vision of oneness, different cultural assumptions generate important distinctions over what that oneness signifies. 

Some traditions -- such as Vedic, Neoplatonic, and Christian -- emphasize transcendence as the route to the realization of oneness. Transcendence, which means literally to 'climb over,' implies that the world as we see it, with all its messy details, must be left behind to achieve a state of unity.

The higher you go, the purer and more visionary you become, until ultimately you might reach a state of communion with divinity up in the heavens. 

...The underlying idea that 'higher is better' is so embedded in language and culture that it has shaped our patterns of thought. 

When we hear about a 'peak experience,' a 'higher purpose' or the 'high point' of a journey, we instantly know that the references to height denote something good. Is it any wonder that we conceive of spiritual knowledge as something reached by transcendence?

But transcendence is not the only path for attaining a state of oneness.

An entirely different way to conceive oneness is through immanence (coming from the Latin for 'remain in'). From this perspective, oneness is not found in the heavens but is right here, in this world with all its disorderly muddle.

The immanent view of oneness came naturally to the Chinese, who had no concept of a transcendent, omniscient God.

'One takes the mass of confused things,' said Zhuangzi, the Taoist sage, 'and unites it as one ... For him who can but realize his indissoluble unity with the whole ... death and life, end and beginning, are no more than the succession of day and night.'

The Tao, Zhuangzi explained, is to be found everywhere in the world, not just in a transcendent realm: it is in the ants, the grass, the earth -- even in the 'piss and shit.' Zen Buddhism, influenced strongly by Taoism, similarly taught that enlightenment was to be found within the mundane realities of everyday life.

Master Rinzai, founder of a major branch of Zen, declared, 'If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion.' 

I'm enjoying my Mendi neurofeedback device

Recently I got the Mendi brain exercise (neurofeedback) device that I'd ordered early last year via a Kickstarter campaign. Repeated delays kept pushing back the estimated time us backers would get our Mendi.

Finally it came, from Sweden. Here I am modeling my Mendi. I took the photo in front of several katana swords and a fan in my office, because the Mendi has a certain Japanese/samurai look to it.

The Mendi web site describes what the device does.

An iPhone app connects with the Mendi via bluetooth. You train your brain by playing a game. You focus on a ball, with the goal to have the ball rise vertically. This video shows an early version of the app. The current version is a bit slicker, but works in the same way.

I've only been using the Mendi for a short time and need to do more exploring with it. This is my initial impression of what works best to get the ball moving upward.

My first try with the Mendi produced a pretty good score. I think this was because I simply focused on the ball and didn't try to make the ball go up.

The next few Mendi sessions didn't go so well, probably because I was trying to get a better score. From what I can tell so far -- and my experience likely is different from other Mendi users -- trying isn't the best way to train the brain.

Not trying is. 

Meaning, I do best when I simply look at the ball with a sense of open curiosity. This is hard to put into words. My best scores come when I'm alert and aware of the ball, yet am looking at it with no motivation to control it, just to observe it.

Which, of course, is what mindfulness is all about: nonjudgemental awareness of what is happening in the present moment. 

I started meditating in 1970 when I was 21. Now I'm 72 and have only missed a day or two of meditation in the past 51 years. So I have a lot of experience with various forms of meditation: mantra, open awareness, mindfulness, counting breaths.

But I've never used a neurofeedback device like Mendi. I'm seeing the benefits of it. When I enter a certain relaxed state of mind, the ball moves upward. If I'm tense or trying too hard, the ball jumps around or goes down.

I'm already able to visualize the ball going up and thereby approach the same state of mind I'm in when using the Mendi device. Can't say my life has markedly changed, just that I see the potential of this form of brain training. 

Here's a screenshot of my most recent session. 

This is what the three scores mean.

The app keeps track of all of your sessions. I was definitely in a zone during the 3-minute session at 8:24 pm yesterday. Focusing on the ball seemed quite effortless. I was sitting on the floor for that session, rather than in a chair.

A few times the app has told me that something was wrong, like I was moving too much (I wasn't) or light was shining directly on my head (yes, I was facing a bright window). It's advised to use the Mendi in a dim room.

This might explain whey I did better when I used my Mendi in the evening when it was almost dark here in Oregon. I also could have been in a more relaxed frame of mind.

Testimonials on the Mendi web site are impressive. But that's to be expected of testimonials on a web site. I'll keep experimenting with the device and report on how that goes in a subsequent blog post. Some early reviews are here, here, and here.

Is a mechanism required for realizing Oneness?

Below I've shared a lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" that deserved to be made into a blog post. Why?

Because the comment is nicely thought out and well written.

It addresses an interesting question: whether someone's experience of Oneness just happened, and can't be described in a step-by-step fashion, or whether a mechanism that leads to an experience like this can be communicated to others.

I tend to agree with Appreciative Reader that in general, someone's spiritual realization is capable of being analyzed and critiqued to a significant degree.

As I've noted before, dreams are highly personal and unlike everyday experiences. Yet if I remember my dream, I can describe it to another person -- albeit with that description including language like "It was sort of like this" and "Hard to describe, but this is the best I can do." 

Of course, dreams aren't considered to be a reflection of a reality existing outside of the mind of the dreamer, while many, if not most, people view their spiritual experiences as reflecting something true about the world/universe/cosmos.

I'm assuming that an experience of Oneness is more like that, and less like a dream.

So while it doesn't make sense to challenge the veracity of a dream -- this is just what the brain does while we sleep -- it does make sense to question the nature of a spiritual experience, if the person who had the experience claims that it points to a truth about our shared reality.

As a final observation, I agree with Appreciative Reader that Oneness isn't what the Buddhist notion of emptiness is all about. Emptiness concerns the lack of a lasting essence or permanence in objects, including us.

The emptiness of existence is characterized by interdependence, interrelationships, dependent arising based on causes and conditions. Superficially this has to do with unity or oneness, but not in a deeper sense. 

Oneness implies a foundation to reality. Buddhism teaches that actually there is no such thing. Even emptiness is empty, not standing by itself as an independent metaphysical principle.

Here's what Appreciative Reader said in the comment. I've corrected a few typos and broken up some paragraphs to make them easier to read.

=========================================

Osho Robbins, I just read the seven posts you’ve addressed to me. Thanks for the detailed response.

I’ll compose this response to you in two parts. In the first part, I’ll touch on all of the points you raise, in those six posts of yours, in the order you’ve raised them ; but I’ll do that very briefly. I’ll number these out, and if you wish me to expand on any of these, then I’ll be happy to if you ask. And in the second part, I’ll concentrate on one specific part of your comment ; and I’ll do that at some length, because I think this might be crucial to our discussion, and will, or at least I hope it will, settle this might-there-or-might-there-not-be-a-specific-mechanism-for-Oneness issue once and for all.

------------------------------

(1) I’m afraid your Oneness is nothing at all like Nothingness, nor Buddha’s Emptiness. Do you remember, in our original discussion I’d clearly demonstrated exactly this to you, beyond all doubt, by quoting your own words back to you? I can do that here as well, if you want me to.

No, it isn’t, at all, a matter of semantics. Your Oneness, or Non-Duality, is very different from Nothingness, and no, it does not comport with the Buddha’s teachings.

(2) Your invoking the Buddha at that point was exactly and entirely a case of fallacious appeal to authority. We refer to Einstein or Newton as authorities when speaking of reality, because it is established that what they published, within their core field, is descriptive of reality.

That isn’t something we can say about the Buddha’s teachings, any more than we can say that about the Bible or the Quran. The only thing that the Buddha is a bona fide authority on, are his own teachings (just like the only thing that Tolkien is a bona fide authority on, is Middle Earth).

To invoke the Buddha’s words as an argument on actual reality is as fallacious as invoking LotR as an argument on actual reality : to do that you’d first have to show that what you’re referring does comport with reality in the first place.

(3) You’ve gone into great detail discussing your experiences. Despite not buying into the core arguments you present, nevertheless I do find your core experience fascinating, and your account of your broader experiences very appealing.

Please do not let my repeated refutation of such of your arguments as I find fallacious stand in the way of your sharing more of these, because I find them both enjoyable and instructive; and, like I’d said, in some odd way I find myself empathizing very closely.

(4) You’ve discussed at some length, across three posts, why you believe your Oneness is neither perception nor knowledge, and why asking for a mechanism is meaningless. I intend to focus on one particular example you’ve presented to illustrate your point, and address that particular example at some length ; and hopefully show you thereby, once and for all, what exactly I mean when I keep demanding that you discuss the mechanism of this knowledge, and why your claim that such demands are pointless is mistaken. I’ll do that in the next section of this post of mine.

(5) The video you’ve referenced, on the Multiverses, seems fascinating. (Watched a short portion of it for now.) As with the earlier one of Brian Greene’s that you’d linked, I’ve bookmarked it. Bears listening to, absolutely. One keeps putting these things off, time constraints I’m afraid, but thanks for posting the link. I’ll get to watching all of it when I can.

(6) You’ve asked me about the origin of thoughts, et cetera. That question is actually very much like that other question you’d asked me (Who am I?). Both questions are seemingly very deep, and people of earlier ages clearly had a blast faffing around with those questions, but modern neuroscience has very clearly and simply answered both questions.

The answer to the earlier question I’ve already given you. And the answer to the latter question is, apparently our thoughts arise in our brain before we even become aware of it. So that we are, in effect, no more than witnesses of our consciousness.

(Mind you, the above does not present you with a get-out-of-jail-free card. To answer the question you’d asked of Spence in a subsequent post : Even if, as it appears, the narrative we build around our actions and our lives is a post-facto construct, nevertheless that construct is still a fact, so that for all practical purposes that makes no difference.

Although sure, knowledge of this mechanism might nudge us to be more consequential in our evaluation rather than purely judgmental, but that’s about it, as far as what difference this makes.

You still need to produce the narrative explaining your thoughts and your actions, or else admit to ignorance of it. This last won’t help you in this particular discussion we’re having, because this is simply a broad outlay underlying all of our thoughts and actions, not just that particular realization of yours.)

---------------------------

And now, here’s the portion I wanted to focus on in some detail in this comment of mine.

In discussing why you think asking for a mechanism isn’t really applicable to your realization of Oneness / Non-duality, you present this example, that I’ll first quote here in full :

This is my answer. There is no mechanism because the thing you are asking about (How the oneness communicated) didn't happen.
It is like this:
Person A - sitting at home.
He does not realise he is at home.
He thinks he is somewhere else.
He now decides it is time to go home. He puts on his coat to leave the house to go home.
"where are you going?" asks his friend.
"I am going home" he replies.
His friend takes him outside the house.
"Take a good look: is that your house?
Look at the garden - it's your garden.
Look at the front door and the door number and the street name"
"Oh yes - you are right - I am already at home.
I was just mistaken for a while when I was sitting the settee" he says
He then re-enters his house and sits on the same settee.
Nothing has changed. He is sitting in the same place.
He has not gone anywhere.
His mistaken idea that he is not at home has been corrected,
He now KNOWS he is at home and does not seek to go home anymore.
What is the mechanism by which the home communicated to him that
this is his home? How does he know he is not mistaken again?
There has been no communication and no mechanism is needed.
He simply was mistaken when he thought he was not at home.
That mistake has been corrected and he can now see clearly that in fact he was ALWAYS at home.
He didn't go anywhere, and nothing has changed.
Only his mistaken notion (that he is far away from home) has been removed.
This is what it is like. ONENESS is already the case - always was and always will be. ONENESS did not suddenly happen. It always was. no mechanism is needed.”

In that example of yours, here’s how I’d describe the mechanism of how Person A, who had hitherto believed he was not at home, has now come to believe (or has come to know, if you prefer that latter word) that he is at home after all and in fact has been at home all along.

I think we can split up that process, or that mechanism if you will, into four distinct parts:

Step 1 : Person A, on being directed by friend, clearly sees his house and garden and neighborhood and door number and street name. Direct perception, if you will.

Step 2 : Person A then brings up the conception that he has of his own home.

(And what does that conception comprise of? We don’t know, in this case, because you haven’t detailed that. It’s probably his own memory, And it might, possibly, also include other ideas he’s gleaned about his home from other sources, including his friend’s words. If we are to study Person A’s identification of his present locale as his original home, then it becomes imperative that we do find out what exactly this conception of his own home comprises of, that is, how exactly he’s come by this conception.)

Step 3 : Person A then compares his direct perception of what he’s seen just now, with the conception that he has of his own home.

Step 4 : Having compared his immediate perception with his conception of his home, Person A then decides that his perception coincides with his conception of home (that is, his perception is either exactly identical to his conception, or else it is sufficiently close).

Therefore, he concludes that he is, indeed, sitting in his own home. As a result, he replaces his old belief (or old knowledge, if you will), that he’s NOT in his home, with this new belief (or new knowledge, if you will) that he IS, indeed, in his own home.

As you say, this is indeed a paradigm shift. That is, it is an outright overhauling of Person A’s worldview.

However, to say that no mechanism is applicable here is clearly entirely erroneous. There is a very definite mechanism at play here, that you yourself have not been aware of, because you hadn’t been watching out for it.

Now that I’ve clearly spelt this out, using your own detailed example that you yourself had presented to explain your POV, I hope you do understand what I’m asking for? I hope you now get what I mean by “mechanism”? And I hope you see how a demand that you clearly discuss that mechanism is entirely reasonable in a discussion on how Person A came to believe (or know, if you prefer the word “know”) he’s now at home?

And also, why I’m insisting that you discuss this mechanism also is probably obvious now. First, in order to clearly understand your POV — because any discussion of your Oneness is incomplete without a discussion of this mechanism, and because a clear understanding of your POV is simply impossible without a clear discussion of this mechanism.

And second, once you clearly describe that mechanism, then we can suss out to what degree we can rely on different portions of this mechanism. That is the only way to reasonably arrive at an opinion on how reliable is your realization.

(And forget me, even if I did not exist at all, even then I should think even for you this exercise would be essential, for you to clearly understand your Realization, and to then clearly evaluate if your Realization holds up to scrutiny. To simply gloss over those steps and to focus on the paradigm shift itself, while ignoring the underlying mechanism of that paradigm shift, and what is more to directly assume that that paradigm shift is bona fide, is clearly fallacious.)

(Mind you, I’m not saying here that your paradigm shift is fallacious. But I AM saying that your directly assuming that your paradigm shift is beyond examination, and your assuming without examination that it is bona fide, is what is fallacious. It is only after carrying out this examination, and this evaluation, that one can arrive at a reasonable conclusion as to whether that paradigm shift is bona fide or not. Because, as you can see, and as I can further elucidate at greater detail if you ask me to, each of those steps, in your particular example, can admit of error. Which is not to say there is necessarily any error there ; but absolutely, at every step there is the possibility of error.)

The point of clearly identifying this mechanism is twofold : first, it facilitates a clear understanding of your paradigm shift ; and second, it gives us a clear basis to evaluate how reliable is your paradigm shift.

I realize you might need to introspect, to go back to clearly recalling and visualizing that experience of yours, in order for you to clearly identify and to describe this mechanism of your realization of Oneness. Take your time, Osho Robbins. Identify the steps involved.

(Probably it will mirror the four steps that I myself identified in your example, but feel free to structure it out as you think might best capture the process.)

As and when you’re done with identifying this in your mind, and at such time as you’re comfortable doing this, let’s now, finally, have a clear description of the mechanism of your having arrived at your paradigm-shifting understanding of Oneness or Non-duality.

Bruce Lee's daughter writes about her father's philosophy

A fellow Tai Chi student and friend mentioned "Be Water, My Friend" a while back. This is a book by Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee's daughter.

I'm enjoying it. 

My favorite Tai Chi form is called in English, Water Boxing. It's very long, difficult to learn, not known by very many, and involves a lot of subtleties. 

I probably should call it a Tai Chi'ish form, because few of the hundreds of moves look like traditional Tai Chi.

But that's the way of water. It can take on an infinity of forms, because water is fluid, flexible, formless.

Which is the way Bruce Lee approached both martial arts and life as a whole. 

Here's some excerpts from the first few chapters, which is as far as I've gotten in the book. 

Emptying your mind does not mean forgetting everything you've ever learned or giving up everything you believe. 

What it means is that you should try to meet each conversation, each interaction, and each experience with a willingness to consider something new without the burden of your judgment in the process.

You must give up everything you think you know and believe, for just an instant, in order to fully experience that which you are encountering in the present moment.

Make room for the possibility that maybe you don't already know all of what you believe to be true -- that what you believe is, in fact, a work in progress, capable of changing and evolving as you learn and grow.

------------------------------

For our purposes in this moment, meditation should be understood as a method of loosening the mind and letting it float a bit. It's a practice of creating space -- freeing yourself from all motives and helping you to make contact with your relaxed and serene nature.

You can think of it as the feeling you have when you daydream. You're awake, but your mind is untethered and moving easily from image to idea to thought and through states of nothingness, without getting hung up on any one thing -- like it's floating in a gentle and deep pool of water with inflatable water wings on. 

It doesn't need to do anything to stay afloat. It feels loose; it feels free. 

------------------------------

There are many techniques for establishing this space of calm. Some people follow the breath in and out, directing the mind back to the breath when it starts to wander or judge the experience (which it invariably will).

Some people use mantras or visualizations. My father liked to meditate a little differently for the most part.

He often liked to untether his mind and let it float while he was moving, surprise, surprise. He used his morning jog as meditative time. He sometimes would also walk around our backyard while simultaneously meditating.

It's not about how you do it -- whether your eyes are open or closed, whether you are sitting or moving -- it's about that space of mental calm.

------------------------------

I want us to consider this type of meditation as a potential tool in our tool belt for practicing the art of being like water. My father was very certain that meditation should not be about "striving" to be still and calm.

"Striving" is the antithesis of  being empty. When he was a young man, my father wrote about the cognitive dissonance we often experience in meditation. 

"I must relax." But then I had just thought something that contradicted my will at the precise moment I thought, "I must relax." The demand for effort in must was already inconsistent with the effortlessness in relax. 

In meditation, we should allow, surrender, loosen, let go. Just make space and embody space.

Reactivity amplifies our suffering in the moment

I'm an admirer of Jeff Warren's guided meditations on my iPhone's Calm app. Here's how a recent offering from Warren starts out. I liked it a lot.

His tar metaphor is great. When I react to a problem in my life with a strong negative emotion, it does indeed feel like I'm covered in a black sticky substance that makes it difficult to see what's going on with any sort of clarity. 

But notice that Warren says we shouldn't fight what's happening. Rather, we need to accept everything both inside and outside of us. 

The less we fight, and simply deal with the situation as calmly as possible, the less tar we get on ourselves.

What is acceptance?

Hi, I'm Jeff.

So, acceptance is a technical term in meditation, similar to equanimity. When we meditate, we notice a sensation, or a sound, or a feeling, and then we accept that it's present.

We don't do what most of us do reflexively, all the time. Which is, we subtly interfere with sounds, and feelings, and sensations.

 We block what we don't like, and we grab on to what we do. Doing both of these feeds a pattern of reactivity that actually amplifies our suffering in the moment.  

It's a bit like wrestling with a blob of tar. The more we fight, the more tar we get on ourselves. All of a sudden we're running through life in a flailing tar-covered freakout. 

We can't get a clear view of any situation because we're flopping tar everywhere. 

Plus, we're wearing tar-smeared sunglasses. Our friends are like, "Hey buddy, what do you think of this?" And we're like, "Tar, tar, tar, tar, tar." We only speak tar.

I say this, by the way, as someone who has spent a lot of my life flailing around in a tar-covered freakout. We all have. So fixated on our thing, that we miss all the cues happening around us. 

What's the alternative? 

The alternative is taking a breath, finding our poise, and allowing everything to be there. Then, from that place, we act. No tar.

That's acceptance. It deserves the hype. 

Another guest churchless post from John

Here's another guest post that I fashioned out of an email from John, a guy I regularly communicate with. I always enjoy his thoughtful responses to stuff that I've written about. I believe TNH stands for Thich Nhat Hanh.

Hey Brian, how are you and yours doing? Hopefully as well as you can be.

As always, I’ve been enjoying your posts. Especially the two about what we can learn from the internal arts.

It is funny when I tell people that tai chi has legitimate martial applications for self-defense. They look at me like, right…. Like you, I trained in external styles for 20 plus years. I do think that gives guys like you and me who learn tai chi some advantage over people who have not practiced karate or boxing or something like that.

But, we also have the disadvantage of having to un-learn all kinds of shit. LOL I’m teaching my daughter’s best friend self-defense using tai chi. She is 24 years old, around 5’6” and maybe 140 lbs. She probably has never been hit or kicked.

Realistically, against an average dude like me, 5’11”, about 240 lbs, in a combat situation, she probably has no chance.

But, I can teach her how to evade and get away from someone using tai chi. I’ve actually been pretty amazed at how effective it is! LOL You and I know how effective it can be after being effortlessly tossed around by our instructors! She is picking things up very quickly. So that’s cool.

I saw a link to an article that I thought was interesting, and kind of fits in with some of your writings about “enlightenment”.

https://sameoldzen.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-enlightenment-scam.html#comments

Your post on ending the spiritual search really resonated with me. Early on in my leaving Christianity, I went through phases of authors. There was TNH, Tolle, Walsch, Watts, ND Tyson, and several books that you have written about.

In those earlier days, it seems like I had regular “ah ha!” moments or mind blowing realizations. I think that went on for a while.

Now, I don’t really have many of those moments, at all. It’s not that I’ve learned all I can learn or anything like that. I think it’s more like, I’ve settled into a place where the practices that I used to have to think about doing, I don’t have to think about it so much anymore.

I have to admit, it seems boring in comparison. But it’s also kind of comforting or maybe restful…? I’m not sure exactly how to describe it. But I don’t feel like I’m chasing after so much anymore. You said it very well in your post. This really stood out along the lines I’ve just been talking about:

Always looking for more from life than what life already is giving me is beginning to seem unwise. (Yes! And it’s a bit tiring to look for more.)

More meaning. More happiness. More purpose. More depth. All that more, more, more seems to lead to a hamster-wheel sort of existence. (Again, yes!)

Spiritual seeking can become such a habit, the seeker doesn't realize that they're going around and around without really getting anywhere. (And yes, again!)

I still very much enjoy reading and listening to talks by Watts and Sam Harris and TNH and the likes. But my motive for reading or listening has shifted a bit.

I don’t feel the “need” to have to be reading all the time. Now I feel more relaxed in my reading. I read when I feel like it and focus more on enjoying what I’m reading instead of trying to get something out of it to make me… better, more aware, more peaceful, etc.

I do still have the occasional “ah ha!” moment, or something like that. But it is pretty rare. I no longer seek those moments, but I still enjoy them when it happens.

Take care and as always, thanks for the great blog posts.

John

Ending the spiritual search

It's a bit difficult for me to tell when my spiritual searching began.

Was it when I tried to figure out in high school the deeper meaning of Bob Dylan's enigmatic song lyrics? Was it when I devoured Sartre, Camus, and other existentialists during my early college years? 

Maybe.

But for sure it started when, in 1969, my wife-to-be and I began learning hatha yoga and meditation from a crazed Greek guy who melded Christianity and Eastern philosophy in a decidedly weird fashion. 

Ever since, I've pursued some sort of spirituality. 

For several decades I spent about two hours a day meditating in accord with a mystical practice that aimed at uniting my soul with God.

Eventually I came to doubt whether soul and God even existed, which understandably deflated my interest in trying to join them together.

In my early 40s martial arts became a sort of spiritual search.

After earning a black belt in a karate style that was pleasingly eclectic, I switched to Tai Chi in 2004, which I've practiced ever since.

Taoism and Buddhism became my favorite spiritual philosophies. I made mindfulness my meditation.  

Now, at the age of 72, I've started to ponder the pros and cons of ending my spiritual searching -- with a emphasis on the pros. 

Always looking for more from life than what life already is giving me is beginning to seem unwise. 

More meaning. More happiness. More purpose. More depth. All that more, more, more seems to lead to a hamster-wheel sort of existence.

Spiritual seeking can become such a habit, the seeker doesn't realize that they're going around and around without really getting anywhere.

If we're in an endless loop of seek-find-seek-find, the way out is to either stop seeking or find that which satisfies completely. 

Since I'm not completely satisfied with life (who is?), it seems to me that giving up a quest to make life into something that it isn't already is the best way to go.

Understand: in no way do I see this as embracing fatalism or not trying to make my life better.

But I want to do this in a natural fashion. I want to just be an average person living life as it is, not as some imagined Spiritual Life with capital letters. 

Three weeks ago an inguinal (groin) hernia came into my life, an unexpected guest. 

About a quarter of men will get a hernia at some point. So what I'm dealing with is common. Last week I had a consultation with a surgeon, which went well. 

My old spiritual self would have tried to find some deeper meaning in the hernia. Working off karma? A way to test my equanimity? The universe sending me a message of some sort?

My new not-so-spiritual self just wants to handle the hernia as smoothly as I can and to get it surgically repaired ASAP.

In other words, I'm viewing myself realistically. I'm just a guy who, like lots of other guys, has a hernia that he wants fixed. End of story.

This is, of course, the way lots of people look upon problems in their life. 

Not as an opportunity to evolve into a more refined spiritual being. Just as a damn problem that needs attention. 

I can't say that I've totally given up my addiction to spiritual seeking. I just see the light at the end of the seeking tunnel. 

Or maybe more accurately, the lack of extra light. 

Life already has plenty of light. That's how I'm able to write this blog post. An LED bulb is shining on my desk. My laptop's screen is aglow. 

Where's the need to be spiritually enlightened when the world already has so much light?

Buddhism can help silence your inner critic

I enjoy reading movie reviews. The people who write them are called critics.

When they criticize a movie, or streaming show, that I was considering watching, often I'll decide to see something else instead. So critics can be wonderful.

However, there's also a critic who is uncomfortably close to me. In fact, it is me.

Or at least, a part of me who isn't shy about pointing out my screw-ups, mistakes, and such -- often in a caustic manner that leaves me feeling bad about myself.

I don't mind getting feedback about things I could have done better, whether from myself or anybody else.

But that inner critic often goes overboard, constantly reminding me of mistakes from long ago that I'm already well aware of and which can't be undone because they're in the distant past.

So I perked up when I came to a section in Robert Wright's book, "Why Buddhism is True," that talks about how Wright was able to deal with his own inner critic through mindfulness meditation. 

Here's what Wright said about this.

I've always been good at convincing myself I've made a mistake, at chastising myself for it, and sometimes at pretty literally hating myself for it. For decades people have told me I shouldn't be like this.

They've said things like, "Don't beat yourself up about it." 

This has always annoyed me. My feeling has been that you should beat yourself up about things you do wrong. Otherwise you may keep doing them!

And let's be honest, isn't one of the big problems with the world how many people do bad things and then don't feel any need for self-chastisement?

...The experience I had that night wasn't a full-fledged hallucination. As I entered that weird visual space, I didn't lose contact with the real world. I was aware that I was sitting in a meditation hall and that intense concentration had put my mind in a place it had never been.

But where was this place? Only after looking around a bit did I realize that the place my mind had entered was my mind -- or, at least, my mind's representation of my mind.

The tipoff was that I "saw" -- and, I guess, "heard" -- a particular thought I've had many times after doing something arguably stupid or inept or wrong. 

The thought was "You screwed up."

Actually, "screwed up" is a sanitized version of the phrase I tend to use and of the phrase that constituted the thought I observed that night. Anyway, the main thing is this: I now saw this thought assume a form I had never seen it assume before.

Come to think of it, I had never seen this thought assume any form at all. But it now looked as if -- literally looked as if -- one part of my mind was speaking the thought to another part.

There was even a kind of line tracing the path of the message, like an arrow on a diagram indicating the direction of communication.

I watched this intracranial conversation, watched the message travel from sender to recipient, as a kind of outside observer, even though I thought of the recipient as in some sense being me.

It's almost impossible to convey in words the power of this experience and its aura of significance.

...And what was the truth I was seeing? What struck me at the time was that, for the first time ever, this standard thought of mine -- "You screwed up" -- didn't seem to be coming from me.

It was just some guy in my head doing the talking. And it wasn't clear that he was worth paying attention to. Who the hell was he, anyway?

Now, more than a decade later, having thought about this stuff more and written this book, I might answer, "He was a module in my mind."

But at the time I was thinking less academically, and the lesson seemed to be that in the future I could treat my inner critic with some critical distance, if not outright disdain.

As much as I had resisted efforts to quit beating myself up, as much as I had minimized the toll it took on me, the prospect of living without this self-torture now seemed powerfully appealing. I'm not much of a crier, but I started crying. I tried to do it quietly, but I did it fully.

...And then I lived happily ever after.

Actually, no. Another line in that Foreigner song, right after "feels like the very first time" is "like it never will again." And, indeed, I haven't had a meditative experience that joltingly powerful since then.

My belief that I would be able to access this plane again and again and use it to orchestrate my own personal spiritual renaissance was naive.

So was my belief that I would quit beating up on myself, though the frequency and severity of the beatings seems to have fallen off a bit.

OK, Wright's meditation experience wasn't truly mind changing. Still, it benefitted him. Here's another excerpt from his book that's an overview of his attitude toward meditation.

In case all this sounds too abstractly philosophical, let me try to put it in more practical form, as the answer to this oft-asked question: Will meditation make me happier? And, if so, how much happier?

Well, in my case -- as  you will recall, I'm a particularly hard case -- the answer is yes, it's made me a little happier. That's good, because I'm in favor of happiness, especially my own.

At the same time, the argument I'd make to people about why they should meditate is less about the quantity of happiness than about the quality of the happiness.

The happiness I now have involves, on balance, a truer view of the world that the happiness I had before.

And a boost in happiness that rests on truth, I would argue, is better than a boost in happiness that doesn't -- not just because things that rest on truth have a more secure footing than things that don't, but because, as it happens, acting in accordance with this truth means behaving better toward your fellow beings.

So that's why I'd say that increments of happiness that insight meditation may add to your life are especially worth working for: because these are increments of valid happiness.

This is a happiness that is based on a multifaceted clarity -- on a truer view of the world, a truer view of other people, a truer view of yourself, and, I believe, a closer approximation to moral truth.

Escaping from the need to escape

My wife and I have been without electricity for 11 days during the aftermath of the worst ice storm to hit Oregon in a long time. In fact, it might have been the worst ice storm ever to hit the state.

Today, while I was on a dog walk around our rural south Salem neighborhood, I heard someone scream in delight. Then I noticed lights on in houses. 

For the rest of my walk home I visualized coming back to a house with electricity. I pictured myself taking a hot bath for the first time in over a week and a half. I thought about the joy of turning our generator off.

Then I walked in our front door and flipped a switch in the entry way. Nothing happened. We still lacked power. After calling PGE, our utility company, it became clear that we were one of only a few houses whose electricity hadn't come back on.

On our neighborhood's Facebook page person after person was posting about how happy they were.

Me, I was astoundingly sad. After eleven days of worrying about when our power would be restored, now I had to start over -- worrying about when a repair crew would fix the small outage of ourselves and a couple of neighbors.

For much of tonight I felt listless, low energy, too despondent to write a blog post.

So I decided to make a transcript of a guided meditation by Jeff Warren I'd listened to this morning on my Calm iPhone app. It helped a lot to do this. 

You won't get the same feel from Warren's words as if you heard him speak them himself. And the pauses in the guided meditation aren't shown in the transcript.

But I hope you'll like what Warren says as much as I did. Enjoy.

The Great Escape

Do you ever find yourself plotting your escape? I do. My mind goes around and around, trying to figure how to get out of my situation. 

I think, maybe I can travel somewhere new. Nope. 

Maybe I can go see my friends. Nope.

Maybe I can just go outside and lay down in the sun, and just escape my responsibilities for one day. Nope.

Right now the pandemic has many of us confined. All our normal escape routes are blocked, all the usual ways we take care of ourselves. 

What to do? It's an ironclad rule of human existence, when there's nowhere else to go, when we can't escape from our life, then we have to learn to escape into our life.

The greatest escape actually isn't an escape at all. It's showing up in a new way.

So here's a practice for whenever you're having a hard time and feeling trapped. If you're feeling just fine, this is also a good practice to explore.

Because the skills you strengthen here are relevant to being human anytime. Let's go.

Close your eyes and then take in a few full deep breaths. As you inhale, stretch up the spine, find some dignity in the posture, like you're connecting to human nobility and fierceness in facing your life.

Then, as you breathe out, imagine you're breathing out an intention, or reservations, or worry. 

Some nice long exhales. Now find your equanimity. Equanimity is the muscle of staying open. Open to the full 360 surround of sensations and sounds and thoughts, open to what actually is here.

So let's start with some basic Humanity 101. 

Sometimes life is hard. Feeling like life is hard puts everyone of us in good company. So we can practice sending some kindness to ourselves, whether we're feeling just fine or whether we're not feeling so fine.

You can say something to yourself like, hey, I've got your back here. I'm the part that sends in the love. Here you go. 

So you're not after some big sentimental swell here, though that can happen. You're more after an acknowledgement of caring. 

Take a moment to just feel what you feel. Caring about yourself exactly as you care about a friend who is having a hard time. To you, it feels calm, patient. You're just being present.

Or maybe I feel strong and supportive. Maybe it feels warm and loving. All these are expressions of caring. You can say your phrase and send in your caring, in your way.

Try this for a bit.

OK, so keep that caring attitude going on in the background. Our next move is acceptance. Can you feel everything you're feeling without needing to change it?

This is how we make space. It's the beginning of escaping from the need to escape. 

If you want a bit of extra support, it can help to lightly pay attention to a home base. It may be the feeling of the breath at the nostrils, or some background sound. 

Keep going here.

OK, so maybe you are lightly paying attention to a home base, like the soft sensation of the breath. And all the while, you've got this attitude of caring, of accepting your situation. 

Letting go the problem solving, the scheming, of any attempts to avoid whatever it is you're feeling. You're just being where you are.

This is being human practice. Opening to how we are. And if the feelings are strong, remember your support. The breath, or your home base. 

Remember your caring acknowledgment that this can be hard.

And now, in this final stretch, just rest. 

No external freedom is forever, because life keeps mixing it up. That's just how it is. Fortunately, freedom also can come from the inside. 

It has to do with our capacity to make space, moment by moment, for exactly what's here. 

Instead of getting free from our life, we get free around it and with it. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes this is ridiculously hard. We do it anyway. 

Because that's what humans do. 

When you're ready, open your eyes. Very good to be human with you.

Too much mindfulness can increase anxiety

Someone sent me a link to an interesting BBC story, "How too much mindfulness can spike anxiety." It describes research about the downside of mindfulness and meditation in general. 

In any discussion of mindfulness, it’s important to remember that there are many different techniques that train particular types of thinking and being. The best-known strategies are mindful breathing, in which you focus on the feelings of respiration, and the body scan, in which you pass your attention from head to toe, noting any physical sensations that arise in the course of the session.

These kinds of practices are meant to ground you in the present moment and the effects can be seen in brain scans, with growth in the insula cortex, a region that is involved in bodily perception and emotion. As a result, mindfulness training can leave us more in touch with our feelings, which is important for good decision making.

Many mindfulness practices also encourage a more general “observing awareness”, in which you train yourself to notice your thoughts and feelings without reacting or judging. With practice, this can increase your capacity for emotional regulation so that you are no longer as susceptible to flashes of anger, for instance.

Ideally, these changes should complement each other and result in greater wellbeing. But that’s only possible if they occur in balance and moderation. Unfortunately, some meditators may pass the optimum point on either one of these elements, leading to distress.

The article ends with some sentiments that I heartily agree with. Sticking with one meditation approach for the rest of your life doesn't make sense if you aren't getting the results you want from it. Experiment. Try something different. Be flexible.

For those who still like the idea of contemplation, it may be time to consider a broader range of techniques. Certain religious traditions encourage practitioners to focus on things outside your body, for instance – such as a bunch of flowers on your desk or even a passage from a poem. These may be better at calming overwhelming feelings of anxiety, or coaxing yourself out of those feelings of dissociation than observing your body or your breathing, says Britton.

There’s also a growing interest in meditative techniques that encourage you to think about others’ perspectives and to cultivate feeling of compassion – strategies that are especially effective against feelings of loneliness.

At the moment, some people may feel like they have to stick with one particular strategy – like mindful breathing or the body scan – without considering the alternatives. But this is a mistake, says Britton.

“We should really honour the diversity of contemplative practices that are available, because they all do different things, and people would have a much better chance of matching what they need, if they had a bigger buffet of choices.” Each person should choose the best technique – and the correct “dose” – for their particular situation, rather than doggedly pursuing a plan that is not working.

Ultimately, Britton thinks that these issues should be incorporated into all mindfulness courses – in much the same way that the visitors to a gym are taught about the potential for injury. “It comes down to giving meditators a bit more agency.”

And as I discovered myself with my own ill-fated attempts to gain mindfulness, this may sometimes include the decision that enough is enough.

There are pros and cons to repeating a mantra

On this blog I've done a lot of writing about mantras. I just used the Google search box in the right sidebar to locate posts dealing with "mantra." The results went on for 10 pages, all of most of the posts being written for Church of the Churchless rather than my other two blogs.

I assiduously repeated a mantra silently both in meditation and during some of the rest of my day for thirty-five years. 

That was the meditation method I first was taught, though it had a component of open awareness to go along with the focused attention of repeating a mantra.

At times I've considered that mantra meditation basically is useless. In part, that's because I no longer like the idea of separating my body and mind. 

When I was really into repeating a mantra, I found that this created a distance between what I was doing physically and my awareness, because part of my mental energy was devoted to the mantra while, say, I was doing the dishes.

Now I prefer to be mindful of whatever I'm doing, no mantra required, which is why I've said that mindfulness has become my meditation. 

But I still play around with repeating a mantra -- the operative word being "play." I no longe view a mantra as anything serious, a cosmic secret between me and the guru who gave me supposedly sacred words to repeat in my mind.

Nor do I consider that a mantra has any special powers, or is a means of achieving some sort of supernatural consciousness. Rather, I like to try out various mantras just to see how this feels to me, sort of like an actor playing various roles. 

An actor tries to inhabit the role being taken on in order to make their acting appear genuine. But they never lose themselves in a role so deeply, they aren't conscious that what they're doing is just an act.

Being inclined toward Buddhism, though in no way am I a Buddhist, I've been trying on the Shin/Pure Land mantra of Namu Amida Butsu. 

Basically those words mean "I take refuge in the Buddha." There's quite a bit of weirdness associated with the Shin branch of Buddhism, but I don't have to embrace all that when I'm repeating Namu Amida Butsu. 

I like how those words sound, especially when repeated slowly, one word to each out breath.Namu ends in "ooh." Amida ends in "ah." Butsu ends in another "ooh." Nice soft vowels. They relax me.

Mostly I play at repeating the Nembutsu, as it is called, when I'm not doing anything else. Going to sleep, for example. 

But there's other times when I enjoy repeating this mantra, or some other word(s), especially when my mind is overly active. Yes, in general I believe in not diffusing my attention with a mantra when I could be simply fixing lunch, taking out the trash, or whatever.

That assumes my mind is quiet enough to be mindful of what I'm doing physically, However, sometimes thoughts of something I've done, or something I need to do, keep intruding. 

In that case, I figure that it makes sense to have a few simple words being repeated mentally than to have a whole bunch of complex thoughts rattling around in my head. 

I'd rather be speaking to myself Namu Amida Butsu than, say, "Geez, I can't believe Governor Brown decided Oregon teachers should get a Covid vaccine before seniors. So wrong. Maybe I should write about this tonight. Or maybe not. Hard to decide. Politicians are doing so much that's stupid. Mostly Republicans, but Democrats also. So irritating..."

Most of our inner speech isn't productive. it's just how our mind likes to pass time, by talking to itself. So a mantra can be a useful means of quieting the mind, sort of like giving a baby a pacifier it can suck on rather than crying. 

Don't let Phantom Energy Vampires suck you dry

This morning I listened to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren on my iPhone's Calm app that I liked so much, I wanted to describe what he said before it slips my mind.

Phantom Energy is a real thing. It's the energy consumed by electronic devices when they are off, but still using power, such as the clock on a microwave oven that displays even when the oven isn't being used.

Within our mind, Phantom Energy Vampires are those worries, anxieties, frettings, and such that are running in the background of our consciousness even when there is no real purpose for them. 

Meaning, there isn't anything we can do about those concerns at the moment. So the mental energy they're using is being wasted. Taken to extremes, this can leave us feeling tired, listless, out of sorts -- just as we would if a vampire were sucking blood out of us without our being aware of it.

The wise advice is to do one thing at a time, as much as possible. This means that if we're walking the dog, say, as I'm about to do, we should walk the dog -- not use that time to fret about the future or lament the past.

Daniels says we should approach our Phantom Energy Vampires as a loving hippie would, not as a combat soldier would.

We don't try to kill them. We simply ask them respectfully to leave us alone. The first step in doing that is becoming more acquainted with them. We need to check in from time to time and see what background worries are running in our mind. 

Then we say to them, "Hey, Phantom Energy Vampire, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me alone. I have better uses for the mental energy you're sucking out of me."

Nice. I'm going to give this a try. 

Living with fewer expectations can be more fulfilling

Expectations come in many guises. Perhaps the simplest and least problematic expectation is anticipating the outcome of a physical action. I raise the lever of a faucet and expect that water will come out. I take a step and expect that I won't fall down. Almost always I'm right about this.

On the other extreme, I may buy a single lottery ticket and expect that I'll win a hundred million dollars. Or I take up meditation and expect that I'll learn all the secrets of the cosmos. Those expectations are so grandiose, I don't really  believe they will come to pass (though I'd be ecstatic if they did).

It's the middling sort of expectations that cause us the most trouble. We expect more from life than we're getting, so that makes us dissatisfied. Whether or not our expectation is justified -- often or usually it isn't -- that gap between what is and what we feel should be sets us up for disappointment. 

This morning I read another chapter in Domyo Sater Burk's book, Idiot's Guide to Mindfulness. It's called "Accessing More Joy." A key to enhanced joyfulness is managing our expectations. 

And this isn't really about lowering our expectations, something I did recently when the long-awaited Starlink satellite internet device arrived via FedEx and I could test out how it worked. As I wrote about in a HinesSight blog post yesterday, I didn't expect much because I hadn't yet gotten the equipment needed to mount the dish on our roof.

So when I got a fast download speed from a spot on our upstairs deck, but the connection kept dropping because of trees obstructing the signal from space, I wasn't disappointed because my expectation for the first Starlink test was so minimal.

As you can read below, Burk has a more radical view of expectations. We should be cautious about having them. Instead, experiencing things as they are is a better way to go. This can be difficult, since we're so used to expecting that life will give us this or that.

I enjoyed what Burk says about expectations. She is skilled at taking Zen teachings (she's an ordained Zen monk) and communicating the essence of them in an easy to understand fashion without resorting to Buddhist language.

Enjoy.

There is a lesson we can take from the natural mindfulness of someone facing death: living with no expectations lets you see being alive as very precious. When I suggest you live with no expectations, you may think I'm telling you to take a pessimistic approach, but that isn't the case.

When someone says they have no expectations about something , it often means they have strong expectations -- they're just low. Living with no expectations at all is very different.

It means you're watching and waiting for things to unfold and then engaging them directly.

You aren't focusing your attention based on expectations of what's going to happen, and you're not comparing results to ideas about what should have happened. 

There are an infinite number of ideas you can hold about life and how it should go, and each can interfere with your mindfulness. Simply identifying your expectations and ideas is the first step in getting free of them. Here's the kind of thoughts to look out for:

• • If I work hard, things should go well for me.
  • If I take care of my body, I won't get sick.
  • If I'm nice to people, they will like me.
  • As long as I do my best, my efforts will be appreciated. 
  • The world should be free of injustice, violence, and greed.
  • My life should be pleasant or fun.
  • I shouldn't have to deal with this.
  • That person is always _______.

Identifying your preconceived notions doesn't mean they disappear. You simply recognize them for what they are: thoughts. Thoughts are generated by your body-mind in response to a given situation, and they're just part of the whole picture.

"Oh," you might observe when a new policy is announced at work. "I'm having a thought that this isn't fair." Your judgement is most likely based on preconceived ideas you have about fairness, or about your workplace.

To practice mindfulness, you take note of your thoughts about things, but then try to stay receptive to all aspects of the situation instead of completely believing your ideas about it.

Holding on to expectations about how things are, or how they should go, not only interferes with mindfulness, it can also make you miserable. 

When you experience something, you immediately compare it to your expectation about it. Viewed objectively something may be unpleasant, disappointing, or even painful, but it seems even worse if you dwell on how it shouldn't be happening to you. 

Alternatively, it may be unfortunate that something you want is eluding you, but your expectation that you should have gotten it by now makes the situation even more frustrating.

As mentioned earlier, sometimes the prospect of letting go of expectations sounds like adopting low expectations instead -- as if you're sighing in resignation and inviting the world to walk all over you.

On the contrary, letting go of all expectations leaves you even more able to engage life effectively and take care of your responsibilities. 

When you live your life directly instead of constantly comparing it to your ideas, you're more receptive and open-minded. You can adapt quickly when things surprise you, and are less likely to bias outcomes ahead of time. You'll deal with challenges as needed without getting caught up in resentment.

All of your skills and intelligence will be available for your use -- the only difference will be that you're paying more attention to the way things actually are than to your own ideas.

...Life experienced without any expectations lets you access joy much more easily. It helps you feel sincere gratitude for the good things you already have or experience. Imagine if you replaced the preconceived notions above with these observations:

• • I try to work hard, and it's great when things go well.
  • I take care of my body, and it feels good to be healthy.
  • I try to be nice to people, and it's great when they like me.
  • I do my best, and appreciation is sweet.
  • It's inspiring that there are so many people who voluntarily work for justice and refrain from violence and greed.
  • I love it when my life is pleasant or fun.
  • I don't really like this, but it's what I get to deal with right now.
  • That person is sometimes _______; I wonder what they'll do now.

...If you were to die right now, would your heart be filled with gratitude for all you have, or would there be lingering regrets about the past? Is some of your current happiness contingent on the fulfillment of hopes for the future?

Few of us can honestly say we are perfectly satisfied with all aspects of our lives, all the time, but if you're able to live mindfully and free of expectations, it's possible to experience a deep sense of peace about the state of your life.

Mindfulness isn't a fad. It's awareness of present experience.

After discovering the great writing of Domyo Burk on her Zen Studies Podcast episodes, I was eager to buy the Idiot's Guide to Zen Living that she wrote. But that book is out of print, with only expensive used copies available, other than the Kindle version (I like my books on paper, not a screen).

However, I found another book by Burk, the Idiot's Guide to Mindfulness.  It arrived yesterday, and I already can tell that I'm going to enjoy it a lot.

Below is the Introduction, which is a great short summary of what mindfulness is all about. In it there's a mention of stimulus-independent thought. Since this isn't a familiar term to most people -- it sure wasn't to me -- here's a description from a section that follows the Introduction.

Researchers have recently made a very interesting discovery: when you're not otherwise occupied, you're usually engaged in very active self-referential thinking. It's like your mind takes advantage of any down time by analyzing, planning, and evaluating all the stuff in your life so you can be better prepared for it.

This thinking is what researchers call "stimulus-independent thought," because it is all in your head -- it generally has little or nothing to do with what is going on around you at the moment. This stimulus-independent, self-referential processing is called the brain's default mode.

This is the Introduction itself.

Over the last 25 years, the practice of mindfulness has been shown to be very beneficial to all kinds of people, for all kinds of reasons. It's really quite amazing. 

Mindfulness has been shown to improve cardiovascular health, increase rates of healing, decrease reported pain levels, and improve immune response. There is evidence it can decrease anxiety and stress, provide a way to cope with depression. increase levels of satisfaction with relationships and work situations, and help people change problematic behaviors.

It has been effective with populations that other methods have not reliably been able to benefit, including at-risk youth, prison inmates, and people suffering from certain kinds of intense and complicated mental illnesses.

Is mindfulness a fad? Is it a quick, easy answer to things we'll later discover has a serious downside? Ten or twenty years from now, are we going to look back and laugh, saying, "Remember when mindfulness was all the rage?"

I don't think so. Mindfulness isn't a special technique you add to your life. It's about learning to use your body and mind more effectively. It's a simple process of cultivating receptive awareness of your present experience, no matter what it is.

To do this, you have to learn to let go of your stimulus-independent thinking, such as ruminating on the past, planning, analyzing, evaluating, judging, fantasizing, and daydreaming.

What's remarkable is that such a simple practice makes such a big difference.

Science will undoubtedly be able to explain why this is the case someday, but in the meantime we have to rely on our subjective experience of mindfulness to understand it. Essentially, it means that human intelligence, while very advantageous in many ways, also causes you problems.

You come to rely too heavily on the abstract world that only exists in your own mind. You spend more time thinking about things that aren't actually going on around you than you do paying attention to your present experience. 

You perceive things through the filter of your ideas and judgments, and fail to notice cause-and-effect relationships because you're so preoccupied with your thoughts. You believe your feelings, concepts, judgments, and emotions reflect reality, and therefore you're compelled to defend or act on them.

Simply and repeatedly turning your attention back to the present moment counteracts the effects of spending so much time stuck in your head.

It isn't easy to make mindfulness a stronger habit than dwelling on stimulus-independent thinking, but each time you become aware of your actual experience here and now, it helps you gain perspective on your life.

For a moment, you notice what's in our own mind versus what's actually going on. This moment opens up many possibilities for different ways of thinking and behaving.

The greatest thing about mindfulness is that it's very simple to do, and anyone can do it. The necessary tools are accessible to anyone, they cost nothing, and they have no negative side effects! 

It may sound too good to be true, so I'll let you know what the catch is: mindfulness takes work. This book will tell you what that work entails so you can make mindfulness a part of your life, no matter what kind of life you lead.

Great meditation advice: relax, do less, let go

After writing a few days ago about what a great resource the Zen Studies Podcast is, every morning I've been reading one of the 131 episodes in the order they were published. 

Today I tried to also read a book I have about Shikantaza, the Zen approach to meditation that involves not doing anything special. I did my best to absorb a chapter consisting of the words of an 8th or 9th century Zen teacher, but they didn't make much sense to me. Too poetic, too meandering, too unclear.

So I closed that book and happily read another podcast by Domyo Burk, the Zen Studies Podcast creator. Here's excerpts from her Part 2 regarding what zazen (meditation) is all about, which includes a discussion of what to do if you find that you're thinking too much.

In short, nothing. Which makes perfect sense. What follows is some of the best advice about meditation that I've ever come across. And believe me, I'm familiar with a lot of that advice, since I've been meditating every day for about fifty years.

If you’ve tried zazen (or any other kind of meditation), you’ll know that even if you really want to meditate, and you fully intend to be present without an agenda for the whole period of meditation, you’re still liable to get caught up in thinking – usually many, many times over the course of a meditation period.

What can you do about it?

In zazen, when we realize we’ve been caught up in thinking, we try not to react at all. We just return to wholeheartedly sitting. A classic analogy for this is trying to hold a bowl of water very still. If you shake, or the wind blows, the water will be disturbed, but there’s nothing you can actively do to make the water calm again. Any motion you make, like patting the surface of the water, will only make things worse; the only thing you can do is hold still.

Stimulus-independent thinking is like the turbulence in the water, and absorbing yourself in just sitting is like holding the bowl still. Patting the surface of the water is analogous to evaluating your meditation and mulling over how to improve it, feeling frustrated with your mind or with yourself, judging thinking as being bad, or even trying to hold your mind on something in a rigid way in order to brace yourself against stimulus-independent thinking.

...The second you realize you’ve been caught up in thinking, that’s great – you’re no longer caught up! You’ve woken up to what’s happening in the present!

Even if you had totally forgotten you were even meditating, even if you spent 15 minutes planning an elaborate meal you want to cook next week, simply be grateful that you remembered your intention to meditate and let go of the past as quickly as possible. Forget about your previous mind-wandering as if it doesn’t matter at all, and throw your energy into just sitting.

It may seem like it will help to strain harder, feel regret, or try to figure out what’s wrong with your zazen, but those things just make it worse.

This “forget about it and keep sitting” approach may seem foolhardy – as if you’re working on a practice but forbidden how to learn how to get better at it. But zazen isn’t ordinary effort; it’s more about not doing than doing. When you realize you’ve been doing (thinking, striving) all you can do is not do. More doing (such as thinking about how to meditate better) isn’t going to help at all.

...Zazen is difficult, but not for the reasons we think. We think it’s difficult because we’re not trying hard enough, or we’re haven’t figured out the right way to do it yet. But it’s difficult precisely because in zazen we’re aiming to return to a natural state of simple, open awareness.

Issho Fujita sensei (see the show notes for a link to his writings on zazen) offers this analogy: Imagine you’re holding a bamboo stick by the ends and then applying pressure so the stick bends. If you want to allow the stick to return to its natural state, all you have to do is release the pressure you’re applying.

This bent state is our ordinary way of operating; we think it’s the way we have to be, the way things need to be, but it isn’t true. Our conscious efforts, self-interest, and discriminative thinking are extra things we add to our experience, like bending the bamboo stick. In order to allow our minds to return to a natural state of awareness, all we need to do is relax the extra effort we’re making.

But we all know it’s not so easy to “relax” or “be natural!” Habits are strong.

For example, what happens when someone tells you to breathe naturally? It becomes more difficult to breathe naturally! So relaxing into our natural state of open awareness is not so easy for us. This is why zazen is difficult and requires almost Herculean effort – but not our usual kind of effort. If we strive harder, if we try to make something happen (or not happen), we are just applying more pressure to the bamboo stick.

A significant part of our Herculean effort is becoming more and more subtly attuned to our experience so we can begin to recognize the extra things we are adding to our experience, and learn to let them go.

My meditation evolves to an exalted state of doing nothing

I've got some amazing news to report about how I meditate.

I toyed with the idea of issuing a press release in case the New York Times and Washington Post want to cover this breaking news (CNN also, since everything is breaking news on CNN), but I decided that readers of this blog deserved to be clued in first.

Today, before I meditated, I decided that what I'm going to do from now on -- unless I change my mind -- is... drumroll, please... a little longer drumroll to let the anticipation build... 

Absolutely nothing. 

OK, take some deep breaths. Calm down. Let your heartbeat get back to normal. I realize that this meditation news could be as exciting for you as it was for me this morning, when I first heard about it from myself.

I've been edging toward this exalted approach to meditation for many years. I must be close to full enlightenment, since I heartily enjoyed the 20 minutes I spent today embracing what Zen calls Shikantaza. 

I like that word because it sounds much more profound than my "absolutely nothing," though that's pretty much what Shikantaza meditation is all about. Doing nothing. Or rather, doing nothing special.


For 35 years, 1970 to 2005, my approach to meditation was decidedly special. In my own mind, at least, which reflected the teachings of the Indian religious group I was a member of during that time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

RSSB taught that through meditation it was possible to raise one's consciousness beyond awareness of physical reality into a spiritual domain that could loosely be called "heaven," even though that's a Christian term. 

So the goal of my meditation was to concentrate on what lay within my mind, ignoring sights, sounds, and other manifestations of what the world had to offer. I tried to meditate in a quiet dark place to avoid distractions.

After I realized the drawbacks of the RSSB teachings, I gradually shifted to a mindfulness sort of meditation practice. Mostly I focused on my breathing in accord with a common Buddhist meditative approach. But I still had goals in mind: remain aware of my in- and out-breaths; try to relax; don't think too much.

Today, though, something shifted in my psyche. 

I didn't want to keep on dividing reality into what I paid attention to in meditation, and everything else. That isn't what I did during the rest of my day. I just was aware of whatever I was experiencing at the moment.

So this morning I simply set my iPhone timer for 20 minutes, shut my eyes, and sat in my chair. I was aware of my breathing, because I was alive. I was aware of heat being blown through air ducts, because it was cold outside. I was aware of the dryer going in the nearby utility room, because my wife was doing laundry.

It was refreshing to feel that nothing could be a distraction, since I wasn't focusing on anything I could be distracted from. I was awake and aware, just without a preference on what my awareness settled on. I couldn't go wrong in my meditation, given that there was no standard of rightness.

There really isn't a whole lot to say about this kind of open awareness meditation. However, I've said something about it and so have other people. Here's some examples of writings about Shikantaza with an excerpt from each source.

Just Sitting, Going Nowhere
The practice of “just-awareness” is the essence of Zen meditation. The Japanese word for this, shikantaza, is usually translated as “just sitting,” but Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen, specifically taught that zazen is “beyond sitting or lying down.” Shikantaza is more than the mere physical posture of sitting, although it certainly includes that. Fundamentally it is the practice of just being here, being present—except that we are not rocks or stones, but aware beings—so I think “just-awareness” more fully captures the essence of the term. But awareness of what? That is the first question.

Shikantaza: Having the Guts to Just Sit and Let Go of Doing Anything 
I’ve been sitting zazen for over 20 years, but only recently have I had the guts to really do shikantaza or “just sitting,” and it feels profoundly liberating. In this kind of zazen, you utterly let go of doing anything except just sitting there. Really. I discuss why beginners are usually taught to count or follow breaths instead of do shikantaza, and why I think this is unfortunate. I also discuss the surprising results of a practice in which you don’t try to control your experience in any way.

Shikantaza: The Methodless Method of Zazen
A few years ago I came across an unusual description of shikantaza, the objectless meditation at the heart of Soto Zen Buddhism. “Shikantaza,” said Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, “is like sitting in the center of a clearing in the forest, knowing that ultimate danger is about to strike but not knowing what form it will take or from what direction it will come.”

I’d found this quote in an essay by Flora Courtois, a long-time Zen practitioner who’d studied with Yasutani Roshi at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Her account of her spiritual unfolding was so striking that I was riveted the moment I began reading. But it wasn’t until I arrived at her analysis of Yasutani’s metaphor for shikantaza that I realized I’d found in it a teaching I didn’t even know I’d been missing. And like any good teaching, it would challenge much of what I thought I knew about zazen.

Just Sitting: The Zen Practice of Shikantaza
Once or twice a day, I sit facing a wall in my home. I just sit. I sit for twenty minutes, a half-hour, sometimes more. But I just sit. I sit and think not thinking; I do that by non-thinking.

This is the Zen practice of shikantaza, or “just sitting.” You sit, cross-legged if you can, and let your mind alone. When you stop thinking, you reach a point of non-thinking. It’s one of the typical paradoxes of Zen that makes your brain try and twist around those words, “not,” “non-” and “thinking” to figure out what they mean.

Unlike other forms of meditation, shikantaza doesn’t involve concentrating on an object, such as your breath or a mantra. It is “objectless meditation,” where you focus on everything you experience – thoughts, sounds, feelings – without attaching to any of them. When you get there, you know what it is.

Clear thinking is a big part of Buddhist spirituality

I've never understood why some people are so down on thinking as an avenue to spiritual growth -- using "spiritual" in a non-supernatural sense, basically an exploration of what it means to be a caring, compassionate person who is grounded in reality.

Naturally those thinking skeptics express their view in, no big surprise, thoughts. So they cast doubt on the value of thought while thinking thoughts. 

One reason I enjoy reading Buddhist books (non-religious variety) is that Buddhism is fine with thinking. Also, with not thinking. That's an example of the middle way favored by Buddhists.

Thinking and not thinking both have their place. Which we do depends on the situation, on what makes sense at the time. 

A favorite Buddhist book of mine is Guy Newland's "Introduction to Emptiness: Tsong-kha-pa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path." I've read it several times. The highlighted passages in different colors produced at different times in my life remind me of the book's core idea.

Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. Nothing has inherent existence, being able to exist purely as itself. Everything is dependent on causes and conditions in never-ending processes of this giving way to that. 

That's what emptiness is all about. The emptiness of inherent existence. Which includes emptiness itself. 

All Madhyamaka philosophers agree that there is nothing that can withstand ultimate analysis. By this they mean that there is nothing anywhere that ultimately exists -- including, of course, the Buddha and the teachings of Buddhism. 

Even emptiness is itself empty; that is, when one searches for the ultimate essence of emptiness, it too is unfindable. One finds only the emptiness of emptiness.

This distinguishes Buddhism from Indian philosophy (along with the philosophy of other religions, including Christianity), which rest on a belief that there is something unchangeable and eternal -- such as the soul/atman and God/Brahman. 

Buddhists don't believe in either, the soul or God. As to realizing your true self, Buddhism replies, "Give up that notion. You neither have nor are an enduring self."

In his book Newland describes why clear thinking is so important to Buddhist practice of the Tibetan variety espoused by Tsong-kha-pa. 

You can't sit down and thoughtlessly meditate your way into an understanding of emptiness. That will leave you in the same state of delusion you were in before.

Sure, meditation feels good. It's relaxing. It calms the mind. It fosters concentration. That's why I've meditated every day for fifty years.

But by itself meditation doesn't lead to a firm grasp of the most important characteristic of the cosmos: that the cosmos has no enduring characteristic. And since humans are a part of the cosmos, neither do we.

As the suffering world has no independent, objective reality but is only an empty convention, we might suppose that stopping conventional thought in a meditative state would be the most liberating move.

The Chinese Buddhist master Ha-shang Mahayana, Tsong-kha-pa reports, regarded any sort of conceptualization whatsoever to be a distorting reification. Throughout the Great Treatise, Ha-shang functions as a stock character representing the perspective that we should dispense with all thought and meditate on reality by not bringing anything to mind.

Tsong-kha-pa argues repeatedly and passionately that meditative thoughtlessness is never going to get us any closer to freedom. Understanding born of careful analysis is at the very heart of what is distinctive about the Buddhist path. This is the third training, the training in wisdom.

Other religions share with Buddhism profound ethics as well as techniques for accessing amazing non-conceptual states. But Buddhism claims as its distinction a penetrating, thoughtful analysis of exactly how the world exists.

Only by engaging in this analysis, thinking it through and taking it to heart, do we begin to create the basis for real liberation from unnecessary misery.

Here's a rough analogy to what Newland just said. Imagine that you are thoughtlessly watching the sun set, your entire attention being focused on the beauty of the colors in the sky as the sun disappears below the horizon. 

That could be a wonderful experience. But it doesn't bring you closer to understanding that actually the sun is standing still, while the Earth rotates on its axis, creating an appearance that the sun is what is moving.

Or, imagine that you are meditating thoughtlessly with eyes closed, your entire attention being focused on a single internal subject of awareness. You could have a feeling of pure consciousness, that the real you is beyond time and space, an eternal I-ness. 

But that experience doesn't bring you closer to understanding that actually there is nothing permanent or independent about you. Your meditative concentration may be pleasant, yet fails to reveal your genuine nature -- emptiness.

"Dependent arising" is how Buddhism treads the middle way between nihilism and eternalism. Things actually exist, but they don't exist as themselves only. They have no inherent existence, but only come into being as a result of causes and conditions, a never-ending complex chain of causes and effects.

This present moment, whatever it might be like for you or me, has been produced by past causes and conditions extending back to the big bang (and perhaps beyond, if big bangs happen over and over). So the ephemeral instant of now is a snapshot of what actually is a very long-running movie of cosmic proportions.

In the next instant, things have changed both within and without us. This may not be obvious, but it is undeniably true.

So wisdom, or spiritual growth, doesn't reside in finding something unchangeable in us or the world, but in grasping that everything, us naturally included, is interconnected with everything else in a seamless web of ever-changing causes and conditions without end.

Here's what meditation is and isn't, from a Buddhist perspective

People have a lot of different views about what meditation is and isn't. I've changed my mind on this subject considerably. 

For thirty-five years I viewed meditation as a way to access a supernatural realm of reality, have mystical experiences, and realize God. But that's a narrow perspective, something I realize now.

Currently I embrace a form of meditation that is vaguely Buddhist, even though I don't consider myself a devotee of Buddhism. I enjoy being as fully aware as possible of what is happening both inside and outside me, within my mind and without in the world. 

Which, I suppose, could be called mindfulness. 

This morning I started reading a book by Steve Hagen, "Meditation Now or Never." I thought I'd read all of Hagen's books, but somehow I'd missed this one until recently.

It's good. Short, simple, direct. In all of his writings Hagen takes religion out of Buddhism, which leaves the Buddha's original teachings, insofar as it is possible to discern what they were.

Below are excerpts from a right-on chapter, Things Mistaken for Meditation. It turns out that almost everything I thought was meditation for those thirty-five years actually isn't. At least, not from a Buddhist viewpoint. 

Let's start, though, with what Hagen says meditation is. 

Meditation is, finally, just to be here. Not over there, in some other place called peace or freedom or enlightenment. Not longing for something else. Not trying to be, or to acquire, something new or different. Not seeking benefit. 

We need to understand that the wanting mind is the antithesis of the mind of meditation. The mind of meditation is a mind not driven by desires and fears and longings.

Indeed, a mind that seeks to rid itself of these painful mental qualities is already the dissatisfied and confused mind from which we seek to free ourselves. 

When we desire the desirelessness, we remain trapped in desire. When we want the wantlessness, we bind ourselves with yet another chain.

And here's the excerpts regarding what Hagen says meditation isn't. 

Relaxation. If your goal is to temporarily calm down, a simple relaxation technique is helpful. If, however, you want to experience a mind that is present and collected, this is the mind of meditation. Meditation, in other words, is not a quick fix. It's long-term -- that is, it's a lifelong approach to peace of mind, tranquility, and stability.

Visualization. With visualization, you actively conjure up images in your mind. In meditation, however, there's no deliberate effort to conjure up anything, or to create any mental phenomena. Plenty of them will bubble up anyway, and in meditation, we don't try to hold on to them or drive them out. Contrary to visualization, in meditation we allow our mental images to freely come and go.

Trance. In most trance meditations, you turn inward and tune out awareness of your surroundings, your body, and your mind. Your attention becomes filed down to a very narrow, still point, which can feel temporarily blissful. But every trance is itself temporary. When you come out of it, you're back to all of the problems and confusion that were there when you went into it. There's no transformation.

Supernatural powers. But meditation is not about acquiring anything. In fact, it's about getting rid of the clutter of our mental lives. It's an act of mental housecleaning... Meditation is not about acquiring supernatural powers. It's about being present and living life completely... If you think about what you're getting from this moment, you're not in this moment. 

Going beyond. Another misunderstanding about meditation is that it's a bodily form of philosophical inquiry, a method for breaking through some cosmic mystery to a transcendent reality beyond our everyday world. Meditation is not about any "beyond." Truth and Reality are right here, in plain view. They are not vague or far away... In meditation, we see that there is no cosmic mystery to break through.

Enlightenment. You can't become enlightened. It's not possible. You can't become enlightened for the same reason that you can't come into contact with Truth: you're already here, immersed in it. It's like trying to become human, or searching high and low for air. When we search for enlightenment, we're like a fish searching for water or a bird seeking the sky.

Escaping from reality. Sometimes people get the idea that meditation is about escaping from our lives, or our painful feelings, or even Reality itself. In fact, meditation is just the opposite It's about settling down and facing Reality. In meditation we investigate our own mind openly and honestly, without denying anything. We see how we tell ourselves stories about ourselves, about others, and about the world.

Bliss. Many people come to meditation hoping to experience bliss, euphoria, ecstasy, or some superconscious state of mind. Many spiritual practices and exercises aim at inducing such states. But so can any number of things, both good and not so good -- a gorgeous sunrise, rapturous music, sex, street drugs, or even a double expresso. Meditation is not about creating any particular feeling. Meditation is about awareness, about waking up to Reality.

Spiritual thoughts. Occasionally, people use meditation to try to experience lofty or highly spiritual thoughts. These thoughts are just more distractions, more forms of delusion. In meditation, whether our thoughts are lofty or low, mundane or spiritual, we view them in the same way. We allow them, and whatever else comes up, to appear and to pass away.

Quick cure. Lastly, meditation is not a quick cure for anything. It won't magically heal your illness or fix your depression or get rid of your loneliness. It won't provide comfort or solace or nurturing, at least not the kind we typically look for to try to temporarily ease our pain. Instead, the practice of meditation involves transformation. 

...Through our effort of coming back again and again to this moment, where all of us live, we learn how to live in this world with sanity, intelligence, and true compassion.

 

"Mystical" experiences aren't what meditation is about

Today someone asked me and someone else some questions about the meditation I did during the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization headquartered in India. 

Here's what Tony Wims said in a comment.

Hey Brian or Osho. Just curious: Did either of you ever see the light or hear the sound during meditation?

If you did, what stopped you from developing your perception further?
If you didn't, I'm actually really surprised that you didn't and you were initiated.

Were you following the precepts? ( If you didn't see/hear).
Did you not start by placing your attention at the 3rd eye center?

I know I shouldn't be, because anything is possible, but I'm very surprised to hear of initiates who left the path. Especially if they had even a brief glimpse of the light or a snippet of the sound.

Thank you in advance for your answer. Forgive me for asking if you don't feel like it.

Hey, I have no problem with questions about my meditation experience. But before I get to the answers, I'll share some observations about the assumptions underlying Tony's comment.

The main assumption is that there's such a thing as supernatural light and sound emanating from higher spiritual regions of reality. I used to believe this was true, but beliefs are different from what actually is the case.

There's no demonstrable evidence of anything supernatural, much less mystical light and sound. So the burden of proof rests on those who claim that there is, not skeptics like me who doubt the existence of realms beyond the physical.

Another assumption is that meditation is aimed at anything other than being fully in touch with what appears in one's consciousness. Yes, I realize that Tony is talking about a very special form of meditation, Surat Shabd Yoga, or uniting one's soul with a divine sound current. 

Again, this is a religious belief, not a proven reality.

In fact, a comment Sonia left today appears to accurately describe how the current guru of RSSB, Gurinder Singh Dhillon (GSD), looks upon meditation. What Sonia says fits with the notion that Dhillon has moved RSSB to what's been termed v. 2.0 and v. 3.0. 

@Tony Most people don’t recognize the light or sound.

GSD just said some people go to the doctor thinking they have tinnitus when really it’s the “sound”. He also said if you want to see lights go to a disco. He’s made it abundantly clear that seeing the light or hearing sound is not what meditation is about. Many people won’t recognize it. He said just do your meditation.

The reason he says all of this is because satsangis complain over and over and over again to him about not hearing the sound or seeing light during meditation.

And the only reason I’m sharing this with you is so that you will understand that your Master never promised you a rose garden—he never promises you’ll see light and sound and most of your fellow satsangis don’t have that experience.

That was my clear impression also from the three-plus decades I spent talking with countless (more or less) RSSB initiates, or satsangis. i used to do a lot of speaking on behalf of RSSB, where one of my favorite lines was "The easiest vow to uphold is the one against talking about your mystical experiences, because no one is having any."

The line always got a laugh.

And no one ever came up to me afterwards and said I was wrong. As Sonia said, most RSSB devotees aren't focused on experiencing inner lights and sounds. They're focused on other things: the guru, going to RSSB meetings, being a vegetarian, socializing with RSSB friends, and such.

Getting back to Tony's questions, in 2014 I wrote a blog post called "I'm asked about my RSSB meditation experience." These lengthy excerpts address the more recent questions from Tony.

In "Why I'm justified in complaining about Sant Mat" I wrote:

I was initiated in the spring of 1971. For over thirty years—until 2002 or so—I was damn near a model satsangi (disciple).

I never missed a day of meditation. Mostly it was for the full proscribed two and a half hours. Sometimes less. One and a half hours was a minimum, such as when my daughter needed after-work attention and I was working full time. I followed the other vows perfectly, aside from having a single drink at my ten year high school reunion, which was just too freaking weird to endure without a dose of alcohol.

So don't tell me that I can't complain about Sant Mat and Radha Soami Satsang Beas. I'm totally justified in doing so. Because I know more about this philosophy and this organization than most initiates. Not just book knowledge—direct experience also.

Or, lack of experience, when it comes to meditation. I'm typical in this regard. Over those three decades I talked with hundreds, maybe thousands, of RSSB meditators. Very few, perhaps none, had experienced what they were told to expect. Those flights to inner mystical regions and the meeting with their guru's radiant astral form.

With me, it wasn't for lack of effort. Again, I did everything right. And the results were wrong. Now, many of the faithful would say, "Brian, you expected too much, too soon." Give me a break.

Thirty years isn't too soon. A glimpse of the promised spiritual land isn't too much.

In "Q and A about me and Sant Mat" I wrote this in response to another question that I'd gotten:

(2) Why do you think you never had a spiritual experience despite 30 years of devoted meditation?

Like I've been saying in several posts lately, including here, I'm not sure what "spiritual" means anymore. I had plenty of experiences in meditation.

What I didn't have was the sort of out-of-body, astral projecting, soul-flying, blasts of cosmic light and sound experiences that the Radha Soami Satsang Beas version of Sant Mat tells disciples to expect in meditation.

A few days after I was initiated I heard loud bell sounds inside my head while I was meditating. These never came back. I've had other glimpses of inner light and hearings of inner sound, but these could be (and probably are) produced by the brain, not immaterial soul or spirit.

Over more than three decades I've talked with lots of fellow RSSB initiates about their experiences in meditation. More accurately, their lack thereof.

When these people spoke honestly and openly (which usually isn't done in the formal satsangs, or talks), I learned that my lack of mind-blowing meditation experiences was par for the course in Sant Mat.

So there you have it.

Naturally I had lots of experiences in meditation. It was impossible not to have them, since I was awake and aware for most of the 1.5 to 2.5 hours of meditation I did each day for over thirty years. (Yeah, I'd fall asleep occasionally.)

I feel like I gained a lot from all that meditating.

It was a mix of "mantra meditation" (repeating a word or words to concentrate the mind) and "open awareness" meditation (trying to be still, mentally and physically, and being aware of what passes through consciousness).

Thus even though Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) views its meditation technique as something special, actually it is very much in the meditation mainstream. Mantras and open awareness are used in many other meditative practices.

The RSSB meditation did focus on "going within," though, to a much greater extent than mindfulness practices do. That is, the initiate was supposed to direct his/her attention to the third eye, or eye center, which supposedly was a gateway to higher realms of consciousness.

Now my daily meditation usually involves more of a balanced approach.

I like to follow my breathing for part of the time, either counting breaths or simply being aware of my breathing body doing its thing. I also enjoy mantra meditation. Usually I choose different words than the Five Holy Names taught by RSSB, but for old time's sake I'll occasionally return to the mantra I repeated for so many years.

It's difficult for me to describe what I experienced during my RSSB meditation years. As noted before, I've sat for tens of thousands of hours in meditation. How is it possible to sum that up in a few words? 

I laughed; I cried; I was joyful; I was sad; I was peaceful; I was restless; I felt at one with the cosmos; I felt alone. And so much more.

One of the key things I learned was the difference between what my conscious mind does, and what the rest of my mind does. Well, let me rephrase that, because I no longer believe there are two entities inside my head: me, and my mind. 

There is just one: brain/mind, or whatever you want to call it.

I used to enjoy, and still do, the sensation of either repeating a mantra, or doing nothing, and being aware of what happens inside my head when the brain/mind aspect called "I" isn't trying to direct the show of consciousness.

As anyone who meditates knows (or anyone who is alive knows)... a lot happens.

The brain/mind, like an iceberg, consists of a whole lot more than our conscious awareness, will, intention, and such. Dualistic forms of meditation, which see a distinction between soul and mind, or pure consciousness and impure consciousness, consider those unintended goings-on to be a distraction. Non-dual forms of meditation, such as mindfulness and Zen, don't.

To them, as to me these days, what happens in the brain/mind is what is happening. To deny it is to deny reality. Thoughts come and go. So do emotions, perceptions, intuitions, and much else. 

Thus whereas I used to believe that God and the guru were responsible for what happened within my consciousness when I wasn't trying to make anything happen, now I realize that the part of brain/mind outside of conscious awareness is responsible.

I still feel that I'm part of something much larger than myself. I just don't call it God, or divine. It is me. And the world, which really isn't different from me. 

Don't be proud of losing your self. You never had one.

Today I heard Sam Harris say something interesting, yet rather obvious, in a dialog with Loch Kelly on Harris' Waking Up app.

Basically, Harris said that no one should feel proud of having become selfless through their meditation, because they never had a self to begin with.

The self is a mirage. So teaches Buddhism, and so teaches modern neuroscience. It's akin to the illusion of seeing water ahead on a hot desert road. When you get closer, you realize there's no water there at all. It's a mirage.

I've written quite a bit about the illusion of a self. It's common in some religions, being manifested as the illusion of an enduring soul rather than the equal illusion of an enduring self. 

Hinduism falls prey to this illusion. So does Christianity. By and large, Buddhism doesn't. Nor does Taoism. Here's some of my blog posts on this subject.

Self, no-self...what's the difference?
We humans have selfhood without a self
Not-self a teaching of Buddhism, not Hinduism
The self as illusion
Self/Soul is evolution's trick to make us think "I'm important!"
Spiritual illusions are as deceptive as worldly illusions

I also liked how Harris spoke about the importance of making everyday life the touchstone, or test, of whether you're gaining more equanimity through meditation or some other spiritual practice.

He said that back when he actually had to be someplace at a particular time, before the COVID era did away with a lot of traveling, at times he would get irritated when he was late. Then he'd do something unthinkingly, like break a glass while putting it in the sink. Having to clean the mess up would make him even later. And more irritated.

It's easy to have an inflated sense of spiritual progress when you feel all calm and one with the cosmos while sitting cross-legged on a cushion in the morning with no stressors acting on you.

If you can feel that way when things are going to shit in your life, that's a much stronger sign that your meditation is having some positive effects. 

Know when to step back, to reassess, to go in a different direction

As I make my way through Maria Konnikova's book about learning poker, "The Biggest Bluff," I keep my eye out for insights by this Ph.D. psychologist that pertain to a churchless way of life.

Below are some passages I read this morning that are pertinent to those who are wondering whether they should stick with a religion, spiritual path, or mystical teaching that no longer seems to make sense.

Konnikova speaks of the sunk cost fallacy. Basically, it means that you keep on doing something because you're invested in it. The investment could be money, but it also could be psychological, mental, emotional. 

You're reluctant to give the thing up even though if you had to do it over again, you wouldn't want that thing. But those sunk costs make you think that you need to hold on, even though this is irrational, as in the saying "Don't throw good money after bad." A Wikipedia entry on this subject offers an example:

In an everyday example, a person may purchase a ticket to a baseball game and find after several innings that they are not enjoying the game. Their options at this point are:

• • Accepting the waste of money on the ticket price and watching the remainder of the game without enjoyment; or
  • Accepting the waste of money on the ticket price and leaving to do something else.

The economist will suggest that, since the second option involves suffering in only one way (wasted money), while the first involves suffering in two (wasted money plus wasted time), option two is preferable.

In either case, the ticket-buyer has paid the price of the ticket so that part of the decision should no longer affect the future. If the ticket-buyer regrets buying the ticket, the current decision should be based on whether they want to see the game at all, regardless of the price, just as if they were to go to a free baseball game.

Many people, however, would feel obliged to stay for the rest of the game despite not really wanting to, perhaps because they feel that doing otherwise would be wasting the money they spent on the ticket.

They may feel they have passed the point of no return. Economists regard this behavior as irrational. It is inefficient because it misallocates resources by taking irrelevant information into account.

With that introduction, here's excerpts from Konnikova's book.

Why not exercise some creative thinking in what my journey is going to be?

I am too married to what it is all "supposed" to look like, and not critical enough of the fact that I simply made some decisions earlier on with incomplete information -- and now that I know more, I should change course. No one is telling me to quit poker, merely to reassess where I am.

But somehow I convince myself that swerving wouldn't be a demonstration of my adaptability and flexible thinking. Instead, it would be a hit to my reputation, a demonstration of failure, of a lack of ability.

It's the classic sunk cost fallacy in action: you keep to your course because of the resources you've already invested. 

I've written about it many times. Only it seems that when it comes down to it, I don't quite apply it to myself, right now. In my mind, sunk costs are supposed to be physical. Somehow it doesn't occur to me that they can also be intangible. 

An accurate self-reassessment would have shown that I was nowhere near ready to take on what I had planned, and that the bigger blow to my reputation might actually be proceeding with my set course. No matter.

It's easy to spot sunk costs in others. This person held on to their investment too long. That CEO didn't switch his management strategy in response to a new market environment. That company didn't recognize that their star product was going obsolete.

In yourself, it can become more difficult -- especially when you're dealing not with a concrete action but rather a lack of action.

One of the most important lessons of poker strategy, intimately connected to self-assessment, is this: sometimes, it's the hands you don't play that win you the title. We remember the hero calls. What about the hero folds? What you don't do rather than what you do -- that can be greatness.

The art of letting go can be the truly strong one. Acknowledging when you're behind rather than continuing to put good money after bad. Acknowledging when the landscape has shifted and you need to make a shift yourself as a result. 

It happens all the time in our lives. We find ourselves in an appealing situation -- and then we hold on to it for dear life, even when any objective outside observer would tell us that the appeal is long gone. We start at a promising job, only to be stymied in promotions over and over -- yet we cling to the notion that the job is great.

We embark on a promising relationship, only to find that we have less and less in common with our partner -- yet we forge ahead, refusing to admit that what seemed so right is now wrong.

Sometimes, the most difficult thing of all is to stop playing. All too often, we stay in a hand long after we should have gotten out.

...In 2018, Kaitlin Woolley and Jane Risen demonstrated that people will often actively avoid information that would help them make a more informed decision when their intuition, or inner preference, is already decided. 

They will, for example, avoid learning how many calories are in an attractive dessert, or how much they will be paid if they choose to take on a boring task instead of a more exciting one. Part of them knows that the information might mean they need to change their decision, so they choose to ignore it.

...Never feel like you have to do something just because it's expected of you -- even if you're the one who expects it of you. Know when to step back. Know when to recalibrate. Know when you need to reassess your strategy, prior plans be damned.

Let everything be just as it is

Here's part of what Sam Harris said yesterday in a guided meditation on his Waking Up app that I listen to most mornings, along with a guided meditation by Tamara Levitt on my Calm iPhone app.

What would this moment be like if there truly was nothing missing, and nothing to do? Nothing to improve. Nothing to wait for.

What if this is it? Is there any sign that it is insufficient? Is there any sign of its imperfection?

Is there something you’re trying to accomplish? Simply relinquish all effort to try to improve experience in this moment.

Let everything be just as it is. 

Give up all effort. Simply notice whatever appears, grasping at nothing, pushing nothing away. 

Just realize everything is in its own place. And everything is all there is in each moment. 

Isn’t everything enough?

There’s always just consciousness and its contents as a matter of experience. 

See if you can recognize this. 

Now, one thing that came to mind is that seemingly there's a considerably difference between (1) letting everything be just as it is while I'm sitting peacefully in a chair, headphones on, listening to a guided meditation, and (2) letting everything be just as it is while, say, I'm sitting in a dentist's chair having a tooth drilled into. 

Or having some other painful, unpleasant, or disagreeable experience. 

It's unclear whether Harris meant for his words to apply to all sorts of moments, rather than just peaceful moments. I have a feeling that he did mean just that, since later in the guided meditation I recall him saying that it is important to blur the distinction between formal meditation and activities of everyday life.

And it would indeed be strange if the advice above about pushing nothing away only was relevant to pleasurable experiences where there would be no inclination to push something away.

So I believe that Harris is pointing toward something universally applicable, as difficult as it may be to envision simply noticing whatever appears without trying to grasp at something or push something away. If we've got a painful headache, doesn't it make sense to push it away with an aspirin, or whatever?

Sure it does. I don't think Harris is espousing an extreme fatalism where no effort is made to improve our condition or that of others. Rather, he seems to be talking about a view of life that, as his app puts it, involves waking up. 

The question is, waking up to what? Having listened to a lot of what Harris has to say, and having read each of his books, here's some ideas about what he's asking us to wake up to.

-- The present moment, which by definition, can't be changed. It simply is what it is.
-- The interdependence of everything in existence. Emptiness, to use a Buddhist term.
-- The passing nature of reality, notably including our own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.
-- Our lack of free will, even though most of us consider that we possess it.
-- Our incessant habit of dividing realty into good and bad, based on our own subjectivity.
-- Our constant desire to find something new and better.
-- The lack of evidence for an enduring self. A "me" separate and distinct from experience.

I'm not saying that what I just wrote actually reflects what Harris is getting at. This is just how I look upon his words that I shared at the beginning of this post.

If you have different ideas about Harris' meaning here, leave a comment with your own viewpoint. The screenshot below is from the Waking Up web site.

Blast from the past: "I reveal my mystical experiences"

To inspire myself, an admittedly circular task, I've been reading a mini-chapter from my "Break Free of Dogma" book every morning before I meditate.

Naturally I like everything in the book, because it consists of posts I selected from the early years of this Church of the Churchless blog, 2004-06.

But some of those old posts appeal to me more than others, which gets them highlighted in the Contents section. Here's the first of a two-part Blast From the Blog Post Past, the second being a follow-up I wrote on the theme of mystery.

Enjoy...

I reveal my mystical experiences

There: Right there. See the blank space after “There:” That’s where I revealed my mystical experiences.

I was impelled to disclose the status of my inner spiritual realization after reading a comment by A fellow bubble-bursted soul on my recent “Bursting Belief Bubbles” post. This person, a fellow Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) initiate, said that he/she was still pursuing the experiment of meditation even though positive results to date had been lacking.

The commenter said, “Unfortunately if I have a break through I won't be able to tell you because us satsangis [initiates], conveniently, aren't suppose to reveal our inner experiences.”

Yes, that’s true. And “conveniently” is the operative word here.

I used to think that the reason for the injunction against revealing inner experiences was that if you had a profound experience and talked about it, other people would start looking upon you as a divine being. This could inflate your ego, thereby causing you to be dropped from the Mystic Experience Club.

However, that reasoning doesn’t make sense to me anymore. Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, and many other supposedly elevated souls have spoken about their inner godly experiences. They don’t seem to have been spiritually harmed by sharing their contacts with divinity.

If I hike up to an alpine lake, then descend and tell people how lovely the scenery was, am I now an egotistical maniac who should forever be barred from entering the mountains again? Of course not. I’m just telling about my experience.

So I’ve concluded that the main reason RSSB initiates aren’t supposed to reveal their inner experiences is that hardly anybody is having any. Maybe nobody. I can say this quite confidently because over the past thirty-five years I’ve talked to lots of mystic meditators. Plus, I talk to myself all the time.

The constantly-recurring theme that I hear is “My meditation sucks.” Not always said quite so bluntly, but that’s the message. Now, “sucks” is a value judgment made by comparing one’s actual experience with an expected experience. Some mystical paths (such as Zen) don’t speak much about what is going to happen along the way.

But RSSB does. There are various metaphysical regions that the initiate is told about, along with the sights and sounds that will be seen and heard in each higher domain of the cosmos.

So if you’re stuck in the dark silence of your own brain, repeating your guru-given mantra over and over like an obsessive-compulsive parrot, it’s difficult not to eventually come to the conclusion, “My meditation sucks.”

That said, and I’ve said it countless times, I still meditate every day for an hour or so. I enjoy my meditation. But I’ve never experienced anything that I could conclusively call “mystical,” “spiritual,” or “divine.” I’ve felt like I was rising up into a blissful void, but neuroscientists theorize that this could be the result of sensory deprivation (I usually use earplugs and a blindfold).

I’m a strong believer in inner meditation. It seems to me that this is the best way to grapple with eminently scientific questions about the essential nature of consciousness, life, and existence. If I can simply be conscious, simply live, and simply exist in meditation, I feel that I’m going to be closer to getting some answers.

Who knows? Maybe I am indeed closer. But close doesn’t count in scientific research. You either get a definitive finding or you don’t. I’m still waiting for results. And believe me, I’ve been experimenting for many years—most of that time doing just what I was instructed.

Now I’m modifying my meditation, tinkering with alternative approaches, becoming more open to different ways of opening myself to whatever reality may lie beyond that which I know now. This feels right and good to me. Why should I keep on doing the same thing in meditation when I’m not getting the results that were anticipated?

Life is too short to spend bumped up against a dead end. When I hear a whisper—“back up, turn around, and head in a new direction”—I’m going to listen to that inner voice. And I’ll let you know how the advice turns out.

I have a friend who likes to say, “Nobody’s life is ever completely wasted. He always can serve as a horrible example for others.” Great saying. Science progresses by researchers sharing the results of their experiments and investigations. A negative result can be almost as valuable as a positive result, helping to guide research in a more productive direction.

I wish more meditators, of the RSSB variety or whatever, would speak more clearly, honestly, and forthrightly about their inner experiences (or, lack of them), even though spiritual practice always will be highly individualistic and personal. I doubt that a foolproof, 100% effective, guaranteed-results system of meditation ever will be discovered or developed.

However, if people who meditate talked more openly about what works and doesn’t work for them, I think we’d be more likely to achieve the illusive goal of making spirituality a genuine science rather than merely a collection of competing unproven beliefs.

Get out of your own way. Good TEDx Talk by Judson Brewer.

Here's ten minutes of inspiration from Judson Brewer. This is an excerpt of the video description. Scroll down for the video.

We have all experienced moments in our lives where everything just comes together in some almost magical way --whether playing music, participating in a sport, or just getting totally absorbed in a project. These moments are timeless, effortless, completely free of worry and delicious!

As described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, this is "flow" and is often a hallmark of exemplary performance --whether it is Michael Jordan scoring 50 points in a basketball game, or someone rising to a challenge that they never thought they would be able to handle. We're lucky if we get into this "flow state" a few times in our entire lives. Is this flow state that hard to achieve? Is it more accessible to all of us than we think? And are we the only barrier that is keeping us getting into flow?

Judson Brewer MD PhD, an addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Yale University outlines several common ways that we get in our own way. Using examples such as Lolo Jones tripping on a hurdle in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and smokers resisting their cravings, he describes how we can get caught up in thinking, as well as resisting our own body sensations as ways that we prevent ourselves from performing optimally, in whatever situation arises.

He details how his clinical research has found that techniques that help us get out of our own way, such as mindfulness training, can have large effects; for example, in a randomized controlled clinical trial for smoking cessation performed at the Yale University School of Medicine, Dr. Brewer's laboratory found that mindfulness training showed twice quit rates compared to the American Lung Association's Freedom From Smoking program.

He also describes the brain processes behind getting in our own way, which involve a network of brain regions dubbed the "default mode network" because of how often it gets activated --for example, when we are regretting something we did in the past or worry about something in the future.

Importantly, he details some of the neuroimaging research his laboratory at Yale University has performed using experienced meditators, and how he found that a key region of the default mode network, the posterior cingulate cortex, gets deactivated during meditation. This work suggests that the posterior cingulate cortex may be a key brain marker for both getting in our own way and stepping out.

He finishes by listing some simple ways that we can pay attention so we can get out of our own way in our everyday lives. He also unveils a new fMRI neurofeedback tool that can track and potentially augment training of this elusive flow state.

 

Our dog teaches me about spirituality

Mooka, our Husky mix dog, has a lot of talents. One of them that struck me on our daily two-mile dog walk this afternoon reflected how I feel about religion and spirituality.

In short, prove it. 

Mooka does a lot of sniffing as we walk along. More accurately, she both sniffs as we walk, and also stops to sniff when I'd prefer to keep walking. Here she'd just sniff-inspected a small branch that had fallen from a large oak tree in-between our walk yesterday and today.

I'm fine with her doing this because I recognize that a dog's sense of smell is hugely more sensitive that what we humans are capable of. 

So we inhabit different sorts of sensory realities. I'm focused mostly on what I can see as we walk on the two-lane rural road that winds through our neighborhood. Mooka also is highly aware of those sights, but she has a smell talent that I lack.

Now, how do I know this?

I see Mooka stopping frequently to press her nose close to some blades of grass, a spot on the road, countless other stuff. I can't sense anything special about those places her nose is so interested in. What leads me to conclude that Mooka has a capability I lack, in contrast to a conclusion that she's a neurotic dog who keeps pressing her nose against random items we pass?

Many reasons. Here's one of them.

Laurel, my wife, is by far the most experienced and capable dog trainer in our family. One trick she's taught Mooka is to find an item that she hides somewhere in our house after placing a few drops of vanilla on it. When Mooka finds it, she gets a dog treat.

It may take Mooka a while to earn the treat depending on how cleverly Laurel has hidden the item. But she always finds it eventually. Thus Mooka passes the smell test, so to speak. As do dogs trained to find drugs, warn of a cancer on a person, or, as I read today, possibly detect the coronavirus. 

Thus dogs have an ability that can be demonstrated to be true, even though the scents they're able to smell are undetectable by humans. 

Which is also what genuine spirituality should be about: a demonstrable ability to do something tangible. Like, sit still while meditating. Not becoming angry when someone insults you. Helping other people. Uttering kind words when a person is upset.

Yet much of religiosity, spirituality, and mysticism is abstract with no connection to the real world. It is filled with talk of God, soul, heaven, spirit, angels, demons, supernatural powers, and such. When asked to perform the equivalent of a "smell test," religious believers come up with excuses for the absence of any evidence that what they incessantly blab on about actually exists.

Meanwhile, our dog is finding vanilla-scented items quite easily. 

I understand the allure of repeating fantasies to ourselves, because those fantasies are pleasing. I did that myself for about thirty-five years, until I realized that there was no substance to the fantasies I enjoyed playing over and over inside my head.

"I am on a path that leads to God." "A higher power is watching over me." "After death I'll enter a higher realm of reality." Like every other religious beiiever, I could talk the talk, but not walk the walk, as the saying goes. Meaning, I had beliefs about spirituality that weren't grounded in reality, because neither I nor anyone else could show that what we believed was in fact true.

Our dog can.

Mooka doesn't simply believe that she can smell scents undetectable to humans. Mooka can actually demonstrate this. And that puts the family canine way above all the religious fakes -- gurus, preachers, imams, yogis, rabbis, etc. etc. -- who talk a good game but are utterly unable to play it in reality.

I've repeated this quote from Thoreau's Walden several times before. Here it is again, courtesy of one of the first posts on my HinesSight blog, "Corn on the cob: my calling."  

A passage from the last chapter of Thoreau’s “Walden” comes to mind: “Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. ‘Tell the tailors,’ said he, ‘to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.’ His companion’s prayer is forgotten.”

I love that line, Any truth is better than make-beiieve. Our dog lives it. I aspire to it. 

Anchor yourself by attending to here-and-now physical reality

I wanted to share a great image from a guided meditation I listened to this morning via my Insight Timer app. I clicked on a Ten Minute Pause by Judson Brewer called "Anchoring in The Present Moment."

(Looks like you can listen to it for free by clicking on the above link.)

Brewer's image was of an anchor in the ocean or in a flowing stream. That anchor can be any part of our body that we choose. Traditionally it is the breath, but it can be anything -- hands, feet, whatever works for you.

The idea, which is simple, is that the current of our thoughts can carry us away to places that we really don't want to go, but sometimes are powerless to resist.

Anxiety. Fear. Worry. Tension. Anger. Sadness. And so on.

It isn't that we should consider those sorts of thoughts and emotions as things to be fought against. That produces an unproductive conflict within ourself. And why should we fight against our own self?

But an anchor can keep us from moving too far downstream, so to speak. Remembering the sensation of breathing, to feeling air entering and leaving our nostrils, can anchor us in the present moment rather than some imagined nasty place in our past or future.

Yes, this isn't exactly groundbreaking meditation news. I just found it to be a useful way of visualizing what a focus on the breath or some other physical sensation can do for us. 

I've also heard a meditation teacher speak of this as our Home Base, a place to return to when we feel pulled away by unwelcome thoughts or emotions.

Embrace uncertainty, doubt, and open-minded faith

I'm an ardent worshipper of Amazon, because it brings me so much inspiration. My current object of literary worship is a compelling little (204 pages) book by Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto.

Now, I don't see much difference between atheism and agnosticism, but Hazleton does, so I'm good with that. I'd still argue that at times she views atheism as excessively certain God doesn't exist, because every atheist I know (including myself) would be pleased to acknowledge the existence of God if there was good reason to do so. 

Which, there isn't.

But this is a minor quibble with the book. So far I've read three of the eight chapters and I'm liking it a lot. Hazleton is an excellent writer. And I agree with almost everything she says about the need to embrace mystery and the unknown, not a rigid fundamentalism marked by rigid conviction that the Truth about the cosmos already is known.

Here's some passages from the "In Doubt We Trust" chapter I read this morning. In the passage below Hazleton addresses why people are so fond of belief and so distrustful of uncertainty.

Sociobiologists have argued that humans have an innate bias toward belief as a matter of physical survival. A prehistoric hunter would have been wiser to take a rustling in the forest as ominous than to blithely trust it was not. Or, in more familiar terms, better safe than sorry. If this theory means that I would not have lasted long in a prehistoric forest, I can live with that.

But it may also go some way toward explaining why so many people long for certainty: why they experience uncertainty as an unpleasant state of being, as though a saber-toothed tiger were waiting to pounce, and why, despite the occasional criticism of someone as credulous and thus liable to believe anything at all, the idea that belief is good seems built into the way we think.

Someone may be praised as being true to his beliefs, for instance, as though the act of belief were a value in itself, a moral stance, no matter the content of the belief in question. In matters of religion, belief can even develop into something of a full-time occupation -- a profession, in both senses of the word.

You don't simply believe; you become a believer. You are defined by living in the state of belief, both in the eyes of others and in your own.

Belief can then develop into an impassioned state of being where the act of believing is more important than its content, which is why the most ardent fundamentalists can turn into the most vehement atheists, flaming red socialists into deep-blue conservatives, hedonists into ascetics (and all, by the same token, potentially vice versa).

Conviction is deadening, in Hazleton's view. No one should be certain of their convictions, because there's a reason "conviction" and "convict" are so similar. Rigid convictions keep us confined in a mental jail of fundamentalist self-righteousness.

The more firmly I hold a belief (and note that word hold, that sense of possession, of its being mine), the more liable it is to fossilize into conviction, as tightly constricted as that army cot, or as a convict in his cell. And when my belief is so adamantly held that it becomes central to my identity, your disbelief then undermines not only the assumed truth of what I believe, but me. 

This is no mere schoolyard "I am right and you are wrong."

Instead, it is "I am right and you are wrong, and your wrongness is a threat to my identity." Or even to my existence. As Samuel Johnson put it in rather more elegant terms: "Every man who attacks my belief diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy." 

To be secure in one's convictions is thus to be absurdly oxymoronic, since conviction is really a state of insecurity. If you know something for a fact, you have no need to believe in it or to be convinced of it. You need belief only when you are not sure. Belief is thus the product not of knowledge, but of uncertainty. It contains within itself the possibility of disbelief.

If I gird myself in the psychic armor of righteousness, it is precisely because on some level, conscious or not, I am aware of my vulnerability. Why else would I need any kind of armor?

As with the stiff gait of an elderly arthritic person, the tenacious rigidity of conviction indicates not strength, but frailty. Or perhaps it is an evasion of a deeper, more complex, and far more challenging response to uncertainty, which is to embrace it. 

For Hazleton (as for Alan Watts), faith is an open-minded pursuit of understanding and knowledge that has no guarantee of success. Thus faith is founded on doubt, on unknowing, because without doubt there is no fuel to power the engine of faith.

Those I know of deepest faith are not convinced. "Perfect faith" is a cruel and absurd oxymoron so far as they are concerned. Their minds are not made up, and their faith offers anything but smug self-satisfaction. Indeed they have faith not only despite their doubts, but precisely because of them.

They have made a commitment to faith, not in the assurance that they are right and that they have found or possess the truth -- the consumerist approach to religion -- but in the acknowledgment of how much cannot be known, and how presumptuous it is to imagine that everything can be.

They do not claim to have all the answers, or worse, the answer. Instead, they have a deep sense of unknowability, of the ineffable mystery of existence referred to in metaphysical shorthand as God.

Here Hazleton says that doubt is what makes religion, or any other aspect of life, human. Indeed, people who lack doubt generally are insufferable: self-righteous, full of themselves, lacking in humility. The #1 criterion of spirituality is the willingness to honestly say, both to oneself and others, "I could be wrong."

As Graham Greene indicated in his novels of those struggling with faith, doubt is the heart of the matter. It is what keeps religion human, because when doubt is banished, faith is rendered moot. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith but absolute, heartless conviction, a blind and blinding refuge from both thought and humanity.

You are certain that you possess "the Truth" -- inevitably offered with that that uppercase T -- and this certainty easily devolves into dogmatism and righteousness: a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right. You occupy this assumed truth, stake it out as your exclusive territory, and see all who live beyond its borders as a threat.

Then you add insult to injury by loudly insisting that in this, you and you alone are, as fundamentalists say, "the faithful."

...But faith -- and the vulnerability and humility that come with it -- is the most important thing lacking in fundamentalists of all religious stripes. Indeed, their absolutism is the opposite of faith, and this makes them the real infidels. By insisting on absolute belief, they have found the perfect antidote to thought, and the ideal refuge from the hard demands of faith.

They don't have to struggle with it like Jacob wrestling through the night with the angel, or like Jesus in his forty days and nights in the wilderness, or like Muhammad -- not only that night on the mountain but throughout his years as a prophet, with the Quran constantly urging him not to despair, and condemning those who most loudly proclaim that they know everything there is to know, and that they and they alone are right.

Terrified of what existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard famously called "the leap of faith," fundamentalists cling to conviction. 

Maybe it's time to give up on hope

I'm conflicted about hope, the desire for something to happen. It certainly seems like a good thing, a shoulder to lean on in tough times, a positive compass heading when happenings in your life are going in the wrong direction.

I've relied on hope a lot, as have we all, most likely. I've dreamed of better times, of bouncing back from a disappointment, of finding a way to accomplish something difficult.

For most of us, it's difficult to imagine not living without hope. 

If we get sick, we hope we'll soon be well. If a romantic relationship falls apart, we hope that love will return to our life in a different guise. If we're fired from our job, we hope that our next employment opportunity will be better.

So hope appears to be a psychological drug with no negative side effects. It lifts us up when we're down, a mood elevator that doesn't require a doctor's prescription. 

However...

There's also something to be said for giving up on hope. It's unclear to me whether that saying, whatever it might consist of, outweighs the benefits of hope. I simply have a feeling, based on my own experience, that hope isn't always a good thing.

One drawback is that it contains the seed of disappointment. Whether that seed sprouts depends on the outcome of our hoping. If we fill our mind with a strong desire that X will occur, the appearance of Y with no sign of X is going to cause us to feel letdown. 

Now, would it be better if there was no hope for X? I don't know. Perhaps.

That way, if X comes to be, it would strike us as a wonderful surprise, not the fulfillment of an expectation. And if X never happens, the disappointment caused by a gap between hope and reality wouldn't exist. 

Another potential drawback is that hope can prevent us from living in the here-and-now. It's tempting to fill our mind with visions of what might be, rather than what is. Taken to extremes, this can prevent us from fully appreciating the life we actually have, because it is so different from the life we hope for.

Still, I find it difficult to recommend giving up on hope, which is why the title of this blog post starts with "Maybe." Hope can be the only thing that stands between us and despair. Yes, hope can be a crutch. But when we're limping along, a crutch can be what we most need.

Since I've become a fan of mindfulness, a middle ground strikes me as a good way to go. Keep on hoping, yet be aware of what you're doing.

Sometimes I say aloud, "Yes, I hope that..."

This helps me realize that I've got an expectation that might be fulfilled, or it might not. There's no guarantee, just a hope. It's when a hope becomes an obsession that problems arise. If we can't stop thinking, "It would be so wonderful if...", perhaps we've allowed hope to occupy too large of a place in our life.

Or, maybe not. There's certainly an argument for letting hope become as grand as possible, bigger than a mountain, more enduring than a diamond.

Like I said, I'm conflicted about hope.

Calm clear consciousness -- my new favorite "mantra"

OK, calm clear consciousness isn't really a mantra for me, notwithstanding the title of this blog post.

Those are just three words that I've been saying to myself a few times a day, because they do a good job of summing up my current approach to meditation and spirituality.

Here's some additional words that explain part of the meaning that I attribute to calm clear consciousness. 

Consciousness. Everything we have experienced, are experiencing, and will experience is dependent on consciousness. No consciousness, no experience. 

But there are degrees of consciousness.

There's a big difference between someone comatose, in a dreamless deep sleep, awake, and so on. We also can be conscious but not aware, such as when we do something yet don't know that we did it -- like locking a car and then wondering if the car is locked as we walk away from it. 

And consciousness is inherently subjective. Humans have a different form of consciousness from other primates, and even more different from bats, birds, bees, and the many other living creatures that appear to possess consciousness to one degree or another.

Thus consciousness is private. No one has direct access to anyone else's consciousness. At least, there is no demonstrable evidence of this.

Some people view consciousness as something separate from what we are conscious of. I'm skeptical about this, since I have no idea what consciousness without some conscious content would feel like or be like. 

That, though, is a peripheral issue for me. The brain produces consciousness. Whether consciousness is something that can stand alone, or is always associated with some conscious experience -- that's scientifically unanswerable at the moment, and may always be.

Clear. We don't see things as they are, but as they appear to us. That's the nature of conscious experience. Just as there are degrees of consciousness, so are there degrees of conscious clarity.

This is difficult to put into words, though I think almost everyone knows what I'm talking about. 

Sometimes life seems murky, shadowy, difficult to discern. In my experience, this occurs most often when too many things are competing for my attention at the same time, since the human brain isn't equipped to multi-task. 

Typically we can do one thing at a time well; two things with some difficulty, like driving while having a phone conversation; three things at a time is very difficult, like driving, talking on the phone, and changing the station on a car radio.

So to me, "clear" has a lot to do with being mindful.

Meaning, knowing what we're experiencing while we're experiencing it. If I lock my car, that's an experience. However, if i don't know that I've locked the car because I was thinking of what to have for dinner while performing this habitual action, i'm into murky conscious territory, not clear territory.

In other words, I aim to be as clear as possible about what I'm doing, feeling, thinking, and otherwise experiencing. Not in the sense of watching myself as an outside observer, but rather as a conscious undistracted subject.

Calm. Even if water isn't murky or clouded, it still can be difficult to see what's beneath the surface of it if the water is rocked by waves.

Likewise, even if my consciousness is quite clear, if I'm focused on one thing and am well aware of it, my emotions can make it difficult to really tell what is happening with my experience. Or, can make it difficult for me to respond appropriately to what I'm experiencing. 

For about 30 years I've practiced some form of martial arts. Karate at first, then a mixed form of martial arts, and Tai Chi for the past 16 years. 

So this has offered me a lot of direct experience of what happens when my mind isn't calm. Being anxious about getting hit in the face doesn't help with not getting hit in the face. All it does is make me tense up, which reduces my ability to dodge a punch and respond in an effective fashion.

Likewise with other situations where I'm not calm. Arguing with someone when I'm angry doesn't help me "win" the argument (assuming anyone ever wins an argument; I just can't think of a better word).

But I've also found that it doesn't help to pretend that my mind is calm when it actually isn't.

Which gets me back to mindfulness. Simply saying to myself, "I'm upset," has a way of making me less upset, because speaking those words to myself creates some distance between the emotion and my awareness of it.

Anyway, I'm enjoying playing around with using calm clear consciousness as words that represent a sort of goal for me.

I'm a believer in the power of our unconscious or non-conscious mind, which modern neuroscience and psychology tell us is by far the greatest part of our mind. Since most of us talk to ourselves a lot, it makes sense to me to speak some words, now and then, that point to how I'd like my mind to be.

Not all of the time, obviously, since I don't have that much control over my mind. But more of the time.

Calm clear consciousness. Something to aspire to.

 

I agree with Alan Watts. Except when I don't.

Below is a quotation from Alan Watts that someone emailed to me, asking what I thought of it. I've shared my response after the quotation, but I want to add on a few additional thoughts that came to mind after re-reading what Watts said.

I completely agree with Watts that there's a time and place for fully immersing ourselves in the lush sensuality of the world without putting on unnecessary coverings of thoughts, concepts, abstract ideas, and such.

Likewise, a warm bath or hot sauna feels best when completely naked.

But note my use of the word "unnecessary." Sometimes it makes sense to think while we're engaged in sensing the world. And sometimes it doesn't. Also, there are gradations of thinking, from mild to intense.

So it depends. There's no way to specify what "it" and "depends" refer to, because people are different; situations are different; so many other things can be different. 

In the first paragraph, Watts speaks of "giving up the attempt to make sense of the world in terms of any fixed idea or intellectual system."

YES! On this I heartily agree with Alan Watts.

Which means that what Watts says below can't be taken in any fixed way, nor can what I say in this blog post, nor can anyone else's ideas about anything. All we can do is do our best in any given situation. 

As one of my elementary school teachers, Eleanor Marshall, liked to say: Do your best. Angels can do no better.

Here's the quote from Watts:

Atheism in the name of God is an abandonment of all religious beliefs, including atheism, which in practice is the stubbornly held idea that the world is a mindless mechanism. Atheism in the name of God is giving up the attempt to make sense of the world in terms of any fixed idea or intellectual system.

It is becoming again as a child and laying oneself open to reality as it is actually and directly felt, experiencing it without trying to categorize, identify or name it. This can be most easily begun by listening to the world with closed eyes, in the same way that one can listen to music without asking what it says or means.

This is actually a turn-on, a state of consciousness in which the past and future vanish (because they cannot be heard) and in which there is no audible difference between yourself and what you are hearing. There is simply universe, an always present happening in which there is no perceptible difference between self and other, or, as in breathing, between what you do and what happens to you.

Without losing command of civilized behavior, you have temporarily "regressed" to what Freud called the oceanic feeling of the baby, the feeling that we all lost in learning to make distinctions, but that we should have retained as their necessary background, just as there must be empty white paper under this print if you are to read it.

When you listen to the world in this way, you have begun to practice what Hindus and Buddhists call meditation, a re-entry to the real world, as distinct from the abstract world of words and ideas.

If you find that you can't stop naming the various sounds and thinking in words, just listen to yourself doing that as another form of noise, a meaningless murmur like the sound of traffic. I won't argue for this experiment. Just try it and see what happens, because this is the basic act of faith of being unreservedly open and vulnerable to what is true and real. ~Alan Watts

And here's what I said in my email reply.

I sort of understand what Watts is saying here, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. 

We adults are not babies. We can’t regress ourselves back into a baby-like state where we lack words, concepts, and such. I can’t look at my coffee mug without thinking, “I just drank coffee out of it.” Viewing it simply as a blueish object with a semi-circular thingie on one side seems exceedingly backward and counter-productive.

It’s a coffee mug with a handle.

Sure, I enjoy going on dog walks and doing Tai Chi with minimal thinking. But minimal doesn’t mean non-existent. In the back of my mind there’s an awareness of where I am and what I’m doing that involves words and concepts. I see no problem with this.

I read a lot of books about neuroscience. There’s no such thing as “pure awareness.” The brain is actively engaged in making sense of the senses, so to speak. Our past experiences with something inform how we view that something now. This isn’t a problem. It’s a feature of how the human brain makes sense of reality.

In my view, we shouldn’t be trying to regress ourselves into an infantile state. Instead, we should use our current adult consciousness as a springboard to become wiser, more compassionate, kinder, more caring.

That said, I should have noted in my response that Watts spoke of listening to our verbal inner dialogue "as another form of noise, a meaningless murmur like the sound of traffic."

This is close to my understanding of what mindfulness practices teach, though Watts is more extreme in his disavowal of concepts and thoughts. There's nothing wrong with thoughts. There's nothing wrong with concepts. There's nothing wrong with the words we speak inside our head. 

(Most people do this. However, I've read that some people lack inner speech, substituting images, intuitions, and such for words spoken to ourself.)

My problem with what Watts said in the quotation above is that while he claims that his goal is to be "open to reality as it is actually and directly felt," seemingly he wants to ignore the reality of thoughts, concepts, and abstract ideas when they are directly felt within one's brain. 

Mindfulness means being open to everything we experience. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Thoughts and thoughtlessness. Emotions. Sensory impressions. And so much more. Our goal is to be as non-judgmentally aware as possible of what is within and without us.

This leads to living life more vividly. It doesn't mean that we welcome everything that happens, or give up our hopes for our life to change in certain ways. It simply means that, as Watts correctly said, we open ourself to reality as it is.

Belonging is what we long for

I'm not religious now. But I used to be. 

What turned me off about religions was how divisive they often are. Each religion has its own theology, its own rituals, its own moral codes. 

I got tired of feeling special. I got tired of feeling different. My spiritual quest now is to find common ground, to come to grips with whatever universal human yearning leads people to seek solace in religions.

Today I started reading a book about how psychedelic entheogens -- psilocybin, peyote, mescaline, LSD, and I'd add marijuana in a sense -- can produce a sense of divinity that is common to other varieties of mystical experiences.

The second chapter of Entheogens and the Future of Religion featured a transcript of an extemporaneous talk by Brother David Steindl-Rast that he gave at a 1984 gathering of scientists and religious thinkers at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

I liked how Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, spoke of belonging as being what we all long for. Sure, as you can read in the passages below, he gives the term "God" to that to which we absolutely belong. 

Since I'm an atheist, I prefer "cosmos," "universe," or "world." But what's important isn't the word used to describe what we long to belong to, because there's no end to those words.

Family. Neighborhood. Friends. Nation. Lover. Humanity. Planet. Ecosystem. Life.

So many words, all pointing to a sense of belonging, of connectivity, of interrelationship. There aren't any bounds to belonging, because we can feel that we belong to all kinds of entities, with "God" being a traditional way of expressing the grandest sense of belonging (though again, cosmos or existence is equally grand).

Here's what Steindl-Rast says about belonging in his talk.

I thought I would briefly sketch how I see the relationship between spirituality and religion and theology -- all terms that have been tossed around here. In my understanding of it, and from the particular perspective from which I come to it, it all starts with our mystical experience.

This is one point where I would question how John Perry meant his statement. I wrote it down and tried to capture it verbatim: "It is impossible to convince the general public that there is such a reality as a mystical experience."

Now I question that.

I have had the opportunity to address all kinds of "general public." Some of them were most unlikely to be convinced offhand that there is such a thing as a mystical experience, let alone that they themselves had one. But I have never come across a group in which the majority could not be led to realize that they had had a mystical experience.

In fact, I am convinced that our typical awareness as humans, our human consciousness, is based on the mystical experience, i.e., the experience that we unconditionally belong. This is my way of expressing the essence of a mystical experience: an overwhelming sense of unconditional belonging. 

I would be very interested in hearing how some of you express the same thing from different perspectives.

I always try to speak about it in common human language, in terms that anybody can understand. First, I get people settled and willing to listen, willing to look at themselves. 

Then I ask them, "Does it make sense to you that before you are aware of anything else, you have a sense of belonging? Not necessarily before in time, but ontologically. Is that sense of belonging not the basis of your awareness that you are and who you are? 

Almost everyone says "Yes." That is enough for me.

...In some respects it is easier to speak about these things without using the term "God." It lends itself to too many misunderstandings. But if we want to use it as a kind of shortcut, it is in the context of our mystical awareness that "God" comes in.

For anyone who uses that term "God" will agree: God is the one to whom we absolutely belong. We are back at that sense of belonging. 

Before you fill this notion of God with anything else, you can say, those who use the term "God" correctly mean by it the reference point of our sense of belonging. But with this sense of belonging goes a sense of longing. Check that out against your own experience.

Here this whole thing comes in motion. This is something I cannot explain further. It is an experiential fact. We long for that to which we most deeply belong. Poets have expressed this very beautifully. T.S. Eliot says:

We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and knew the place for the first time.

That is Home. Home is where one starts from. This tension of belonging and longing constitutes the dynamism of our inner quest.

Yes, I've changed my mind about spirituality. That's a good thing.

Today a commenter on one of my blog posts said something astoundingly obvious -- that what I write about now is different from what I wrote about five or ten years ago.

Well, duh...

I'm constantly changing, as are we all. I learn, grow, evolve, change my mind, look upon things differently. 

Since I've published a book that consists of Church of the Churchless posts from the early years of this blog, 2004 to 2006, I'm well aware of how my approach to spirituality has changed since then.

If you read Break Free of Dogma, and naturally everybody should, you'll see that I've added a short introduction to each post that talks about how I look now at what I wrote back then.

That's because my own journey of breaking free of religious dogma was a gradual affair.

I can liken it to dismantling a Belief House that was built up over my 35 years of being an active member of a India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

It took me quite a while to figure out what parts of that Belief House still appealed to me, and what parts needed to be demolished because they didn't fit with my current understanding of reality.

Earlier this year I wrote "Changing your mind is a superpower. Use it." Here's excerpts.

I have a superpower. But unlike those with superpowers who inhabit the pages of comic books and the screens of movie theaters, my astounding ability is available to everyone.

It's called changing your mind. 

I'm sure you've used it  -- many times. After all, we change our minds about countless things during the course of our lives. For example, I've changed my mind about my...

Politics (Used to be conservative, now I'm a liberal).
Cars (I've gone from a 57' VW bug to a 2017 VW GTI, with many other makes in between). 
Marriage (Got divorced, then remarried).
Profession (Earned a master's in social work, then went into health planning/research).
Eating (Loved meat until I became a vegetarian in 1970).
Residence (Grew up in the country, then lived in cities, now back in the country again).
Religion (Was Catholic for a while as a child, then a believer in an Eastern religion, and now an atheist).

So how is changing your mind a superpower? After all, everybody does this, all the time. True, but since we're so used to changing our minds, it's easy to overlook how marvelous this ability is.

First, to change your mind you need to have one.

Rocks don't have minds. Nor do stars. Living beings, though, have various sorts of minds. We humans have a powerful one. Other primates, ditto, though to a lesser degree. Plants have some sort of cognizance, but probably not a mind. Computers are very adept at certain tasks, yet so far lack what we would call a "mind."

Thus people are able to learn, adapt, modify our thinking, feeling, intuition, and such.

Because very little of human behavior is controlled by instinct, we have the capacity to transmit knowledge between people and across generations. We can read Plato and understand a great mind that lived thousands of years ago, thereby altering our own.

One of the best things about being able to change our mind is how good it feels, and how freeing it is. 

...I'm not saying that change is always welcome, or even tolerable.

That isn't what I mean by changing your mind being a superpower. Sure, it is possible to reduce anxiety, fear, suffering, and such by altering one's thoughts and feelings, but I'm not aware of anybody who can remain completely unmoved by severe pain, disappointment, or loss. 

What is possible, though, is altering our psyche to embrace a new reality, even though it may be unwelcome. That's a superpower in and of itself -- the ability to say "This is...," no matter what those three dots stand for.

Here's some examples of what I mean.

On this blog I've been writing quite a bit about the legal, financial, and ethical troubles involving the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon. I was a member of RSSB for 35 years, so I like to use this organization as an example of how religions can be wrong, and do wrong, since I'm so familiar with it. 

(If I'd remained a Catholic for 35 years, then became an atheist, likely I'd be using Catholicism as an example of bad religion.)

Fairly frequently commenters on my blog posts about the Dhillon family's alleged criminality will say something like, "Brian, when it turns out that the guru did nothing wrong, you're going to be unable to accept this." 

That really isn't true. 

Because I'm adept at changing my mind, if the Indian legal system ends up exonerating Gurinder Singh Dhillon, I'll accept that reality with very little trouble. In the same fashion, back in November 2016 it took a few days for me to fully accept that Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States.

But it didn't take long for my mind to adjust to a new reality.

Now I'm hoping Trump will be a one-term president. If that doesn't happen, and he is re-elected, I'll be disappointed. However, I won't deny that this happened. (I do worry, though, that Trump won't be able to accept the reality of a 2020 defeat.)

I'll end by noting that even though I'm used to many varieties of religious craziness after 15 years of regularly writing here on the Church of the Churchless, it still surprises me when a commenter expresses extreme surprise at how I could have changed my mind about the validity of the RSSB teachings after being a member of the organization for such a long time.

Often I'll ask them how many things they have changed their mind about during their lifetime. Have you stuck with the same job, same car, same residence, same friends, same political views? Almost certainly not.

There's something about religion that encourages a rigidity of mind that isn't nearly as evident in other areas of life. Members of some religions, like Mormonism or Scientology, will shun people who leave the religion. Yet if someone changes their mind in a way that leads them to join the religion, that's not only fine, it's marvelous. 

For many fundamentalists, mind-changing is a one-way street. It's great if you convert to their religion, yet horrible if you deconvert.

Strange? Yes.

But since just about every religion believes that it, and it alone, is privy to the eternal ultimate truth of the cosmos, this encourages true believers to denigrate anyone who embraces that religion, then chooses to leave it. I guess changing one's mind makes those fundamentalists fearful that their chosen faith really isn't true.

Which, almost certainly, it isn't.

I feel good about having changed my mind to realize this. It's much more pleasurable to accept reality as it is, or at least as it appears, than to cling to a rigid way of thinking that no longer makes sense to me.

Mindfulness is calculus made spiritual

OK, I'm wading into some deep philosophical waters here, given the title of this blog post, because I only took one semester of calculus in graduate school, and then only because I was forced to by the powers-that-be in control of the Portland State University Systems Science Ph.D program.

I found calculus to be difficult. By contrast, I've gotten back to reading an engaging book by Stephen Strogatz about calculus, Infinite Powers, which I blogged about back in August, noting that it had some spiritual aspects.

This morning, reading a chapter on "The Vocabulary of Change" before I meditated, I was struck by how mindfulness practice -- which basically involves focusing on what's going on here-and-now versus there-and-then -- resembles what Strogatz calls the Infinity Principle. 

Here's how Strogatz described this in the chapter I read today. 

Notice that we are using the Infinity Principle here -- we are trying to make a complicated curve simpler by chopping it into infinitesimal straight pieces. This is what we always do in calculus. Curved shapes are hard; straight shapes are easy, even if there are infinitely many of them and even if they are infinitesimally small. Calculating a derivative in this way is a quintessential calculus move and one of the most fundamental applications of the Infinity Principle.

In his book, Strogatz uses a graph of the length of days to talk about how an underlying mathematical function, in this case the complex motions of the Earth as it revolves around the sun, is used to produce a graph such as the one below that I found via some Googling.

What struck me is that while it's impossible to derive a mathematical function of life, we all have the feeling that our life consists of ups and downs. 

Our most significant "up," of course, is the moment of our birth. And our most significant "down" is the moment of our death. But in-between those moments we experience a wide variety of joys and sorrows, triumphs and disappointments, pleasures and pains.

It's natural to view the present moment in the context of both remembered previous ups and downs, and of imagined future ups and downs. However, this makes more sense when something is genuinely cyclical, as is the case with the amount of daylight (vertical axis in image above).

In our own life, it's often difficult to predict what is going to happen next. And our memory of what's happened in the past is prone to errors, since we tend to remember most clearly the Big Moments in life, not the Ordinary Moments -- even though the latter are much more common than the former.

So there's a lot to like about mindfulness, which I've noted is my current approach to meditation. 

Calculus can deal with curves such as those in the image above because it divides them into an infinity of straight lines. Similarly, mindfulness helps us to deal with the ever-changing circumstances of our life by guiding us to focus on the small things that are happening at this very moment, rather than the largeness of our actual past and potential future.

I'm not saying that mindfulness in any way takes away ups and downs, or pleasures and pains. But just as a portion of a curved line looks almost exactly straight if it is zoomed in enough, so are we able to look upon our life with more equanimity if we're able to be mindful of what is actually occurring to us -- versus what we hope will occur, or are worried will occur.

As a final observation, Strogatz uses Usain Bolt's record-breaking 100 meter dash performance in the 2009 World Championships as an example of how small ups and downs are largely meaningless when looking at a curve that is smooth at a larger scale. He shares a graph based on laser guns that tracked Bolt's speed hundreds of times a second.

The little wiggles on the overall trend represent the ups and downs in speed that inevitably occur during strides. Running, after all, is a series of leapings and landings. Bolt's speed changed a little whenever he landed a foot on the ground and momentarily braked, then propelled himself forward and launched himself airborne again.

...To me, these wiggles hold a larger lesson. i see them as a metaphor, a kind of instructional fable about the nature of modeling real phenomena with calculus. If we try to push the resolution of our measurements too far, if we look at any phenomenon in excruciatingly fine detail in time or space, we will start to see a breakdown of smoothness. 

...Yet if what we care about are the overall trends, smoothing out the jitters may be good enough. The enormous insight that calculus has given us into the nature of motion and change in this universe is a testament to the power of smoothness, approximate though it may be.

in the same way, mindfulness requires an appropriate level of resolution. Our life shouldn't be viewed in such excruciating detail as to miss the big picture, nor in such a broad scope as to miss the reality of what is actually happening at any given moment.

"Don't know" is a great thing to keep in mind

All of us are prone to making mistakes with our minds. That comes with being human. Nobody sees reality as it is, because there's no way to tell what as it is means, since every conscious being views the world through their own set of perception filters.

But there's ways to come closer to the truth about reality.

Basically, we need to accept true things as being true. Like global warming, gravity, and the honking of geese.

And we need to to accept false things as being false. Like Donald Trump's claim that he didn't want the Ukraine president to announce an investigation into a political rival in exchange for getting military aid and a White House visit.

In between the poles of true and false there's something else: don't know. 

I love those two words. I wish everybody on Earth adored them also. If they did, the world would be filled with much less dogmatism, holier-than-thou self-righteousness, and rigidity.

Don't know is ubiquitous, because few things (maybe zero things) can be known with 100% certainty. This is the way of science, and of wise everyday life. 

We can be highly confident that something is true or false, but there's always at least a tiny bit of don't know lurking in the shadows. Facts might pop up that would change our point of view, where "our" encompasses both an individual's ideas and an entire culture's way of looking at the world.

Today I listened to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren on my Calm iPhone app that focused on the benefits of embracing don't know.

It's a great thing to keep in mind during a meditation session, because those words lead us toward a sense of openness, or beginner's mind. 

Of course, most religious people hate don't know, because they wrongly believe that they know. About God. About heaven. About life after death. About divine messengers.

They do their best to cover up their truthful lack of knowing with false certainty in a holy book or holy person. Not surprisingly, this leaves them less likely to actually know, since a feeling of don't know is what impels us to learn, explore, try new things.

Don't know also is an aid to peace of mind.

After all, most of us find ourselves worrying about unwelcome possibilities that often don't come to pass, or if they do, aren't as bad as we thought they'd be. So telling ourselves, don't know, can be comforting. Rather than being sure a dental appointment, for example, will be dreadful, we can truthfully say, don't know. 

Which doesn't mean that things will turn out fine. Often, they don't. But it's better to be disturbed by a nasty present-moment reality, than by worries that precede that reality by hours, days, weeks, months, or even years. 

And usually we don't know how long a bad situation will last, even though our anxious mind may be thinking, it will never end. 

If you want to know more about how Jeff Warren looks upon don't know, there's a 41-minute talk on this subject on his web site. I just came across it, so haven't listened to the talk yet. I'm confident that the talk contains a lot of wisdom.

But I don't know for sure.

 

 

Stephen Batchelor on enlightenment and listening

Following up on my previous post about a charming little book by Stephen Batchelor and his wife Martine, which consists of talks they gave at a 2016 retreat in England based on the Korean Buddhist tradition (Son), here's some passages from What is this? that I resonated with in my pre-meditation reading this morning. 

I liked this take on enlightenment, which is very much in line with Zen teachings. Son, which means "meditation," is the Korean equivalent of the Japanese "Chan" and Japanese "Zen."

So once we let go of the idea that to be enlightened means to understand the nature of reality as it really is, or to gain some privileged mystical insight into truth with a capital "T" -- the way of thinking Deshan and other Son masters are trying to shake us free from -- then we shift into a practice that that is inextricably tied up with how we respond to life in each moment, which is the foundation for engaging with the world in an ethical way.

And I also liked this description of how listening can be a better way of describing what meditation, and life, is all about, than seeing is.

When you are asked to watch something carefully, what do you do?

You tend to narrow the focus of your attention onto the object, thereby letting it stand out in the wider field of vision, in order that you can look at it more precisely. What you're looking at is invariably something outside of yourself, 'over there' somewhere.

What often happens in meditation is that we fail to acknowledge the metaphoric nature of the visual language being used. Quite unconsciously, we adopt an inner stance or posture that mimics the act of seeing.

You might feel, for example, that when you're meditating there's a bit of you, in the back of your head somewhere, that's peering in on your body and breath and mental states. You've created a distance between an observer looking in and an object being observed.

But if you think about listening or hearing it's often completely the other way round. Rather than narrowing your attention on a particular sound 'out there', you open yourself up to allow the sound to enter you. 

When you listen to a piece of music in your living room, for example, what do you tend to do? Very often you dim the lights or close your eyes, then raise the sound so that it envelopes you. Then you relax and let yourself be completely receptive to the sounds that enter you from all around.

So the internal posture you assume is not that of a detached observer looking out onto something, but rather a completely vulnerable and open attention that allows sounds to stream into you from every direction.

Now that's a very different inner stance. Your physical posture might be the same, but your mental posture is the opposite to that of looking at something. 

...To think of listening in this way can help us better understand how to attend to what arises in response to the question 'What is this?'. In posing that question, allow yourself to be completely open to whatever you 'hear' in the pregnant silence that follows, without any hopes or expectations.

Metaphorically, you're waiting to hear a response rather than expecting to find an answer. The point of Son practice is not to look for an answer, or to see the nature of reality. Again, pay attention to the metaphors we use unthinkingly. 

You might find it helpful on our last full day together just to explore what it feels like in your body to be open to this question in the same way that you would open yourself to a piece of music or listen with total attention to the polyphony of the birds and wind outside, the occasional plane that flies overhead, the patter of rain on the windows.

Listen more carefully, and at the same time notice how that listening is not just an opening of the mind but an opening of the heart, a vital concern or care for the world, the source of what we call compassion or love, which brings us back into the world of relationships that we will be returning to tomorrow.

Don't look within for inner peace. Look without.

This Pearls Before Swine comic humorously sums up my evolving approach to meditation. Which, as you can read below, also is the approach favored by my new favorite mindfulness teacher, Amit Sood, M.D.


Now, actually I'm more of a blend of Rat and Pig. I still enjoy closed-eyed meditation, but I no longer am devoted to what the spiritual organization I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, referred to as "going within."

That notion was based on religious assumptions I've come to reject.

Namely, that supernatural realms of reality exist, and it is possible to experience them through meditation aimed at bringing every bit of conscious attention away from one's body and the outside world through concentration on what lies within one's head.

I have no problem with focusing attention on what lies within -- thoughts, emotions, imaginings, visions, inner speech, and such -- but this is a one-sided approach to meditation and mindfulness. 

At its worst, and I experienced this during my time as an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, avid devotees of "going within" can become seriously damaged psychologically. They lose interest in work, family, and other normal human pursuits, having become fanatically committed to detaching from the world and entering imagined non-physical domains of existence.

Not good. Meditation should make us a better person, not a worse one. If we aren't becoming a more loving, caring, and compassionate friend, relative, spouse, employee, volunteer, or parent, meditation isn't working for us.

After all, what makes us feel better when we're listless, lacking energy, down in the dumps, sad? (1) Sitting by ourselves in a room with eyes closed, focused on the contents of our mind, or (2) Getting out and doing something like walking in nature, talking with friends, patting our dog or cat?

I don't know about you, but I find #2 much more appealing.

Here's some quotes from Amit Sood's book, Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, along these lines. I shared Sood's seven tenets in my previous post. The third tenet is: Intentional attention, external or internal, engages the same brain network. Focus your meditation on the world if you struggle with the mind.

In the third tenet, we explored ways to develop meditative attention by cultivating curiosity and focusing on meaning in the outside world. This helps us with engagement and flow.

These externally oriented practices are not only easier but also more effective than trying to see the light in an inwardly focused meditative stance.

The pursuit also makes you a more engaged spouse, parent, employee, and citizen. Attention so strengthened loses its rigidity, It becomes supple and flexible. Flexibility gives you freedom. In most situations, flexibility is a sign of health.

...An important aspect of the brain is that thinking about an activity engages similar brain areas to those engaged in actually practicing the activity. Thus research shows that imagining playing piano or violin or imagining dancing can help you improve your piano, violin, or dance performance.

When I read all this research, I speculated that the same networks should be engaged whether you focus externally or internally (playing piano versus thinking about playing piano). Thus meditation with eyes closed (internally directed) or eyes open (externally directed) should engage the same or similar parts of the brain. I was excited to see that an interesting study supported precisely this speculation.

In this study, investigators evaluated which brain areas activate based on two variables: external versus internal focus, and intense versus low-grade attention. Researchers found that the intensity of focus had much greater effect on the activation than did the direction of focus.

Thus, very similar areas were activated when the participants were intensely focusing, whether looking out at an object externally or thinking about the details of the object internally. An additional research team has recently corroborated these findings.

Realizing this has freed me. I meet so many colleagues who find the internally focused meditation practice very difficult. I have similarly struggled with sitting meditation. I feel comfortable now in suggesting externally focused meditation, in which you experience your world with full attention.

Because from the brain's perspective it doesn't matter whether you are focusing externally or internally. Therefore, in addition to or in lieu of sitting with the eyes closed, you could meditate immersed in the world, with your eyes open. It will activate the same or similar areas of the brain.

Since we spend most of the day in the world and not sitting on a cushion, we could get ten thousand hours of training (which some but not all experts suggest is needed to become really good at anything) in just a few years.

The third tenet builds on intentionality and emerging research, offering you a different way to meditate: instead of meditating with eyes closes, you meditate with eyes open by intentionally projecting your attention externally. 

...A few thousand years ago, when our threats were mostly external, training attention would have meant pushing it toward the depths of the mind, the basis of most meditation practices. A lot has changed since then, such that the definition of escape isn't escaping into the mind but escaping from the mind.