Church of the Churchless

Mindfulness and meditation aren't about improving ourselves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spirit isn't supernatural. It's physical.

Looking back, one of the strangest things about the India-based religious group I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is how the RSSB teachings taught that the mind wasn't to be trusted, supposedly being an agent of Kal, the negative power that rules the lower regions of creation.

Yet like all other religions, RSSB was thoroughly in the grip of mental concepts that had no foundation in any sort of discernible reality. 

Of course, I didn't realize that at the time, since I was in the grip of a mental concept called "blind faith" that led me to believe that what the RSSB gurus said was true, really was. So even though there was no demonstrable evidence of soul, God, Kal, divine light/sound, heaven, or any of the other entities RSSB claimed to exist, I trusted that with time all would be revealed.

That didn't happen. Not for me. And not for anybody else in RSSB that I knew. Which was a lot of people given how long I was a member of the organization.

So this taught me to be wary of any theology or philosophy that claims knowledge of a supernatural realm, because invariably the proof of that claim is mere words and concepts, not anything substantial. If I want empty promises, it's easier to listen to politicians rather than embrace a religion.

Yesterday I attended a 3-hour seminar that focused on the martial art aspect of Tai Chi. I wrote about it on my HinesSight blog: Why I enjoy Tai Chi as a martial art. 

Having spent about 12 years practicing the hard martial art style of karate, and now about 19 years practicing the soft martial art style of Tai Chi, with a bunch of years playing competitive tennis before that, like so many other people I enjoy the physicality of sports and physical activity. 

One reason is that physical activity can't be faked. You either can do something physical, or you can't. While naturally there's talking involved in learning a physical activity, a sermon can't be a substitute for it, whereas with religions words and concepts are their foundation.

Recently I wrote about Seth Gillihan's talks about Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on Sam Harris' Waking Up app. I liked what he had to say so much, I ordered his most recent book from Amazon. 

Here's some excerpts from the book that's called, unsurprisingly, Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Simple Path to Healing, Hope, and Peace. Though Gillihan says he embraces Christianity along with secular Buddhism, his religious approach is pleasingly rooted in reality.

When I first heard the call of my inner self, I thought it was beckoning me to become "more spiritual," as if my ideal self were a disembodied spirit, floating through life unfettered by thoughts and untouched by feelings.

But idolizing our spiritual selves would mean abandoning our minds and bodies and becoming less of who we are. In truth, our spirits are not narrowly focused on "spiritual" things, to the exclusion of our physical and mental realities.

...Our spirit permeates all of our experience and is intimately connected to the rest of us. 

...Knowing what is true about ourselves does not need to be deep and mysterious. My wife reminded me of a truth about myself when she encouraged me to go swimming at Cape May. She knew I am happiest when I am swimming; that is one of my truths.

We know mental truth when we practice right ways of thinking that bring us happiness and peace. We can find that truth in our relationship with our thoughts as we see through the endless fictions our minds create that can make us miserable, such as that we don't deserve to be happy and that we aren't lovable. 

The cognitive part of CBT helps us to replace these false beliefs with ones that are faithful to reality. We find joy as our mind dwells in the truth.

We experience physical truth when we give our bodies what they need and consistently do the things that bring us alive. We can enact truth through eating nourishing foods, getting adequate rest, moving our bodies every day, spending time with our favorite people, being of service, and doing work that we enjoy.

...We find spiritual truth through being wholly present in our lives because our spirits are always in the here and now of our experience. My swim in the bay was an encounter with spiritual truth as I reconnected with myself and what I love.

As my example shows, mindful presence is not an esoteric experience that's available only to a select few; being in our lives is a habit that all of us can cultivate in each moment. 

Our mind, body, and spirit form an integrated whole, intersecting with and affecting one another. For example, our bodies affect our minds, as when we're well rested and it's easier to recognize our negative thinking.

Our bodies affect our spirits, too, as when we step out of compulsive activity and thereby enter into connection with our spirit. 

And our spirits affect our minds, as when we focus our awareness on the present and discover that in doing so, it's easier to recognize when our thoughts are telling us lies. 

...We are constantly thinking: even if we decide to stop thinking, our minds will keep doing it anyway. It's what they are good at. If they aren't telling us stories in words, they're crafting made-up scenes or pulling up images from our memory banks.

Our minds are actually so caught up in thinking that we don't realize we're thinking.

We assume that the nonstop stream in our heads is something real and meaningful, and we mistake thoughts for actual observations of something true. In subtle ways we probably don't notice, mental events in our brains are fashioning our lives.

...We often don't realize when our mind has shifted from reading us front-page news to reading the op-eds. If we don't recognize our thoughts for what they are and treat them accordingly, we'll live in a false reality of our mind's creation.

That's a great description of what religions offer: a false reality of our mind's creation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on why mindfulness is better than mantra meditation

It goes without saying, but I'll say it regardless, that my Church of the Churchless blog posts reflect what I find interesting and what makes sense to me. 

If you disagree with a post, naturally that's wonderful. You're you. I'm me. We're different people, so we're going to look at some things differently. Maybe a lot of things differently. 

All I can do is explain myself as best I can, while all you can do is explain yourself as best you can in comments on my blog posts -- should you choose to do that.

So here's another try at explaining why I view mindfulness as being better than using a mantra, either in meditation or outside of meditation, which is what I did for the 35 years I embraced a mantra when I was devoted to the spiritual practice taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

I'll start by sharing what a friend said to me recently. She was meditating in the evening before going to bed. She likes the idea of oneness (as do I) and was getting frustrated with how her busy thoughts were keeping her from the inner quiet that she thought was needed to feel a sense of oneness.

Then a realization came over her: oneness means accepting everything, including her thoughts. Thus by viewing her thoughts as unwelcome, she was moving further away from oneness, while accepting them would bring her closer to oneness.

That happens to be a basic tenet of mindfulness, which typically is defined along this line: "a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations."

A mantra, on the other hand, generally is used as a means to stop thoughts other than the repetition of the mantra. 

That can be a way to practice concentration, a laudable aim. But it comes with a cost, since obviously when the mantra is the focus of attention, that leaves the mantra-repeater with less of an ability to focus on other things, both outside in the world and inside their mind.

In the case of RSSB, this was taken to an extreme. The mantra was composed of the five names of supposed rulers of supernatural regions of reality. By repeating these "Five Holy Names," the idea was that the consciousness of the meditator would leave behind the physical world and enter a higher one.

Thus this is an example of a mantra being a world-denying technique. RSSB disciples also were supposed to repeat the mantra as much as possible during the rest of the day outside of meditation, so long as they didn't have to concentrate on other things.

The "so long as" echoes what I've been saying in both my previous post on this subject, and this one. By its very nature, a mantra prevents us from paying full attention both to things out there in the world, and to things in here in our mind.

Imagine having an intimate conversation with someone who, while you're talking about something important to you, is mentally repeating a mantra instead of closely listening to you. If their mantra is "God," they're saying God, God, God... with their inner voice rather than focusing on you and what you're saying.

Aside from being impolite, this shows that a mantra can divide us from the reality both outside and inside us. It isn't quite like a child yelling at a parent "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!" as they stick their fingers in their ears after being told it's time to get ready for bed.

But it's damn close to that. I know, because like I said, for 35 years I did my best to repeat my RSSB mantra when I didn't have to concentrate on something else during my time outside of mediation. 

I'll admit that during the latter part of those 35 years I repeated the mantra less and less, since by that time I'd come to realize that repeating it was distancing me from other people, nature, and many other things.

That said, I understand why a mantra appeals to people. It's a simple way of meditating. It's easy to repeat a mantra. If you want to stop unwelcome thoughts, a mantra can be an effective way of doing this.

However, I've come to view a mantra as being akin to the hard style martial arts I embraced for about 13 years during my karate phase. It can knock down thoughts and feelings with a sort of brute force. Often effective, it isn't very elegant.

Mindfulness, on the other hand, is more difficult to learn than mantra meditation. It's akin to soft style martial arts like Tai Chi, which I've been practicing for the past 19 years. Mindfulness accepts whatever is present in reality, gently dealing with feelings, thoughts, and other things that need redirecting not through force, but by welcoming them as they are, then altering their direction with minimal exertion.

Again, though, you may disagree. This is just my experience.  

Mantra versus mindfulness -- which is better?

Paying $24.95 for a Learn to Meditate course based on a mantra, that is roughly akin to the Transcendental Meditation approach, had at least one immediate benefit for me.

It got me to pondering the pros and cons of using a mantra, versus pursuing mindfulness.

This is going to be a fairly short blog post, because after a couple of days where I experimented with repeating the one-word mantra that I chose for the course -- "peace" -- it dawned on me why I gave up on using a mantra and made mindfulness my meditation. 

Yes, I still play around with repeating a mantra. 

But almost always I've been doing this when going to sleep, when my eyes are closed and I'm not doing anything except falling asleep. As I said in the above-linked post:

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.

Not surprisingly, that same distancing popped up when I tried repeating my "peace" mantra during the day when I was doing things. It was fine when I spent ten minutes or so in closed-eyes meditation during my morning reading/meditating time.

Not so fine when I was trying to repeat the mantra while doing anything else. I didn't like the split between that word being repeated in my head and what I was doing with my body.

So I found that what I wrote about in 2015 still held true for me: Mantra meditation basically is useless. For me, at least. In that post I quoted from a 2012 post. Guess I needed a $24.95 reminder.

I've never practiced Transcendental Meditation (TM). But for over forty years I've meditated daily, mostly using a mantra (a word or words repeated over and over) just as TM does.

...For most of those forty years I used a mantra taught by a Sant Mat organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, that was known as the Five Holy Names. The mantra bore some resemblance to the ones used by the Transcendental Meditation folks. 

...I've come to much the same concluson as Sudarsha has: following the breath mindfully is a better meditation approach than is repeating a mantra mindlessly. 

...Why would you repeat a mantra in your mind when your goal is to be aware of what exists in what I like to call really real reality?

It'd be ridiculous to remain focused on mentally repeating sex, sex, sex, sex, sex when a beautiful willing partner is lying next to you on a bed, arms outstretched for your embrace. 

Likewise, it'd be ridiculous to keep saying sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset as the REAL sun is dipping below the horizon, displaying gorgeous colors across the sky.

And even if your aim is religious, does it make any sense to utter God, God, God, God, God (or other supposed names of divinity) instead of being receptively open to whatever divine presence might be capable of being experienced at the moment?

Occasionally I still use a mantra, but more and more it seems pointless to speak repeated words inside my head. Life is going on all the time I'm awake and aware; experience is happening all the time I'm awake and aware.

A mantra now seems like an unnecessary distraction from life and experience. When I'm ballroom dancing, I don't think to myself dance, dance, dance, dance, dance. I just dance. 

I pay $24.95 for a Learn to Meditate course

As I was reading Galen Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.", I read a mention by Stawson that he'd tried out psychologist Patricia Carrington's approach to meditation, liked it, but didn't stick with it for very long.

Curious, I headed to Carrington's web site, which has sort of an old-fashioned internet vibe to it. I poked around the site for a while, focusing on what she has to say about meditation, and liked her emphasis on meditation being as effortless as possible.

Since I'm a firm believer in spiritual laziness, I decided to fork over $24.95 for her Learn to Meditate course.

When the materials were delivered to me via an email message, I realized that if her web site seemed like something out of the early 2000's internet era, Carrington's meditation instruction manual and accompanying audio files seemed even more ancient.

Kind of charming in an old-fashioned way. Also kind of irritating. But I figured that for $24.95, the cost of some hard cover books that I buy, I shouldn't expect the meditation course to be packaged in a fancy manner.

Since I've been meditating every day for more than fifty years, I didn't expect to learn anything wildly new. Which I didn't. Carrington basically has repackaged the mantra-based approach of Transcendental Meditation into a pleasingly secular format with no religious overtones.

You get to pick your own one-word mantra. She suggests 16 or so. I settled on "peace."

Carrington says that you shouldn't share your mantra, though it isn't secret. So I've broken that rule. Her manual contains lots of other rules, which is kind of strange, since she says that her meditation approach is flexible, with the meditator being free to adapt her approach as desired.

For example, Carrington doesn't want you to chew gum while meditating because you might become so relaxed, you swallow the gum and choke yourself to death. And you're not supposed to ingest caffeine before meditating. Or alcohol. Or recreational drugs. Or eat more than a very light meal.

Naturally I ignored all those "should's," which drastically shortened the time it took for me to read her meditation manual. I think because Carrington is a licensed psychologist, she felt like she needed to cover her legal bases by warning purchasers of her meditation course to not do anything that might be remotely risky.

I did listen to several of her audio recordings. They were fine. Nothing new to me. Just a pleasant introduction to meditation. I'm enjoying my "peace" mantra, which is a nice change of pace from the mindfulness meditation I've been focusing on for quite a few years, after immersing myself in a more complex form of mantra meditation for over three decades.

I like how Carrington says that while effortful concentration works for some highly motivated meditators, her approach is to just let the mantra do its thing with as little effort as possible. If the mind wanders, no problem. Return to the mantra gently.

She appears to view positive change as happening naturally in meditation. It isn't something to be pursued, as that just makes meditation into another item on our to-do list.

There's some comparisons between mindfulness and mantra meditation on her web site that are fairly interesting. That link contains a description of her own approach.

My meditation program is not meant to “numb” any individual from experiencing and expressing our natural human tendencies to feel emotions of compassion, empathy, and full engagement with one’s surroundings.

I teach a type of mantra meditation, Clinically Standardized Meditation (CSM), which has much in common [with] Transcendental Meditation (TM).  I also teach Woolfolk’s breathing meditation, which is much like Benson’s technique.

CSM is a modern form of meditation that has been widely used, both in clinical practice to support psychotherapy, and as a self-taught method to create profound individual personality and life changes.

Unlike TM, or other forms of meditation, CSM, has no ceremonious or pre-conceptive goals, rather the meditator makes preparations to create a quiet space in which to relax and repeat a short, personally selected, standardized soothing sound, a “mantra.”

CSM is, ultimately, a non-directive form of meditating that is remarkably effective in bringing about profound positive changes in the meditator and it is very safe and simple to use. Furthermore, its beneficial effects have been widely supported by research. It is not based upon any religion or strict protocol.

With the CSM instruction, you can experience both mantra and breathing meditations to see how each feels for you, your family, and what comfortably compliments your goals for a meditative experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm reading a good book about depression and mindfulness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm a human being having a human experience. How about you?

During my religious believing days -- well, 35 years actually -- I'd frequently hear people talk about "We are spiritual beings having a human experience, not human beings having a spiritual experience."

That quote came from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and Jesuit priest. So it isn't surprising that he'd have such a dualistic attitude, with our bodily existence as humans just being a step on the way toward a supernatural experience as a spiritual being.

But early on in my churchless evolution, I realized that it makes no sense to view myself in that way. So if I had to describe my current approach to life, it would be that I'm a human being having a human experience.

Which isn't exactly an astounding observation. It's obvious, clear for both me and everyone else to see in their own lives. However, religions specialize in making what's simple and obvious, complex and indistinct.

In 2010 I wrote "Religions are wrong about self-realization."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

Well, that's highly doubtful.

Yet even if it were true, every human being who has any sort of experience is accomplishing this via a physical brain that, as noted in a quote above, processes most of what we come to be aware of outside of conscious awareness.

And what's much more likely is that we indeed are "only animals" who have evolved an ability to think of ourselves as having passed beyond our animal nature. This is belied, however, by the neuroscientific understanding of the brain's primitive parts.

Admittedly, the triune brain theory (reptilian, ancient mammalian, modern human) has been superseded by more accurate and sophisticated models. But the fact remains that whatever our "self" may be, it isn't something simple, obvious, supernatural, or transparently evident to awareness.

So this makes traditional religious/spiritual notions of self-realization laughably out of touch with reality. Whatever we are, it isn't what we intuitively consider ourselves to be -- often with ridiculously excessive confidence.

If somebody claims to be self-realized, or says he knows how this can be achieved, ask him to show you a "self." He won't be able to do it, just as no supposedly God-realized person ever has been able to demonstrate the existence of a "God."

And in 2013 I wrote "Be a real actual body, not an imagined abstract soul."

What are we? Ah, there's an ageless question. Matter? Energy? Mind? Spirit? Soul? A combination?

As noted in a post from a few years back, "Feeling the spirit... via body or soul?," I used to believe that our true nature was non-material soul-consciousness. After I died, or maybe before if my meditation bore fruit, I'd soar into a spiritual realm of existence and enjoy a soulful (literally) existence.

Yet where is the evidence for this? Nowhere. Except in the minds of people who believe this sort of stuff -- which seemingly includes the majority of the world's population, given how popular supernatural religiosity is.

(Though traditional Christianity taught that resurrection of the faithful was a bodily affair, I've seen surveys that indicate most Christians today think their soul will go to heaven after death and spend quality time with God, Jesus, departed relatives, and other souls who won the Salvation Lottery.)

One reason I've switched to embracing my bodily nature a lot more enthusiastically than I did in my churched days is this:

For me, living in my head, surrounded by abstract conceptions, isn't anywhere near as satisfying as dwelling in the physical world -- immersed in real live sensations and perceptions. This was the theme of a recent post, "To be 'spiritual,' get physical."

In other words, all our notions about divinity, spirituality, the supernatural, soul, spirit, angels, and such derive from our experience as physical beings in a physical world. 

If someone has a vision of God, that vision was processed through a physical brain and body. If someone writes a holy book, that writing was produced by a physical brain and body. If someone speaks about what lies beyond the material world, their speaking came from a physical brain and body.

Religious people are physical beings pretending to have a spiritual experience. Wisdom lies in seeing through this pretension. Genuine "spirituality" is achieved by being honestly physical.

Amen (secular version) to what I said back then, and believe even more strongly now. I feel a great sense of relief being what I so obviously am: a human having a human experience. Just like everybody else in the world, no matter if they wrongly believe otherwise.

Beneath all our differences; beneath all our political, religious, and other divisions; beneath all our widely varying views about what makes life meaningful -- there's the common denominator of our shared humanity. 

In one sense, none of us is anything special. Yet in another sense, we're all marvelously special. Each of us is a physical being in a physical world, sharing that being'ness with all of the other living creatures on our planet, which, given our current knowledge of the cosmos, is the only place life exists that we're aware of.

Beautiful. Inspiring. Unifying. It's what I see John Lennon talking about in the secular/atheist songs he wrote.

Sam Harris and Loch Kelly on nondual mindfulness

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

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

Here's my transcription of what Harris said.

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

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

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

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

Resolve to fully connect here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For thirty-five years I practiced a mystical meditative practice that involved considerable effort via repeating a mantra, sitting in a particular posture, and adhering to various other rules (such as ideally meditating for 2 1/2 hours a day, which I did for many years).

By comparison, mindfulness involves much less effort, since the focus is on attending to what is right before us, notably the breath.

In his interview with Harris, Loch Kelly talked about how his mindfulness approach derives from Tibetan Buddhism, which differs in some regards from other forms of Buddhism. Basically Kelly (along with Harris) considers that awareness itself is key to mindfulness, with the contents of awareness, though important, being secondary. 

OK, in a way this is obvious, especially if awareness is viewed as closely akin to consciousness, if not exactly the same thing. For we can't be mindful of anything unless we're able to be aware or conscious of that thing.

But even given this obviousness, re-reading the first few chapters of Kelly's book this morning was pleasurable, in part because so far I haven't come across anything that goes against the principles I listed in my first blog post about the book as being essential for me to resonate with a book of this sort.

Though I'm not 100% sure about anything -- the way of science -- I consider it highly probable that these premises are true.

(1) The mind is the brain in action
(2) There is no enduring, unchanging self or soul
(3) Free will is an illusion
(4) We humans see reality through a species-specific lens
(5) Consciousness is created by the brain
(6) All living beings exist in a web of interconnections

So my favorite books about mindfulness and meditation recognize that those six statements most likely are how us Homo sapiens relate to reality. The six truths are grounded in modern science and neuroscience, though naturally there's room for quibbling about the exact nature of what I've summarized above in a half dozen pithy sentences. 

I'm not saying that every author who writes about mindfulness/meditation needs to explicitly agree with each of the principles above to get my stamp of approval. However, at least what they say shouldn't conflict with those principles, or my highlighter is quick to insert question marks in the margin of their book's pages.

Often the sort of mindfulness Kelly espouses is described as being akin to the familiar sky/clouds metaphor. 

Mostly our attention is captured by clouds. Rarely do we view a clear blue sky as being worthy of special notice, though after a long rainy spell, it might be. Likewise, not surprisingly the contents of consciousness are what we're mostly mindful of -- thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and such.

Consciousness itself is like clear air. We need it to exist, but generally we aren't aware of air unless there's a breeze blowing. Inside as I am at the moment, air is an invisible entity that fills our house, yet isn't the sort of thing that draws anybody's attention.

(We've never had a visitor to our home say, "You have such beautiful air.")

Of course, a big difference between the sky/clouds analogy and consciousness/contents analogy is that we look at the sky as an object, while consciousness is the subjectivity that we are. Kelly uses "awake awareness" as a term for what effortless mindfulness is all about. He writes:

"So close that you can't see it" means that awake awareness is hidden in plain sight. It is closer than our own breath. We can't find aware awareness because awake awareness is not an "it." Awake awareness is neither an object nor thing that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted.

It isn't a thought, emotion, image, belief, feeling, or even energy. Awake awareness is invisibly inherent within us and is where we're looking from.

We need to learn how to have awake awareness look within, turn around, or rest back, so that awake awareness can discover itself. Then, awake awareness is the source of mind from which we are able to perceive. 

Well, if awake awareness is the same as consciousness, just under a different name, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. After all, consciousness discovering itself sounds more than a little crazy, since consciousness is how we know everything. 

Our ability to know isn't an object. Kelly has told us that. So how can awake awareness discover itself? Guess I need to re-read more of his book to find out.

Or maybe I should switch to a different mindfulness book.

"Open Mind, Open Heart" is an intriguing book about Christian meditation

It's probably surprising to others, and definitely surprising to me, that as churchless as I am, one of my favorite meditation books is Open Mind, Open Heart by Thomas Keating, a Catholic priest, monk, and abbot. 

(There's a new edition of the book, but I'm familiar with the old one, and the new one is more difficult to read typographically, from Amazon reviews I've read.)

I've written some blog posts about the book, which I bought in 2005.

Support for the churchless

Seeing clearly now

Let go. Then let go of letting go.

Let it go. So simple. 

 

The basic technique described in Open Mind, Open Heart is what Keating calls centering prayer. Except it isn't at all like the usual Christian notion of prayer. You aren't asking for something from God, but opening yourself up to God via outer and inner silence.

Of course, right there an atheist like me has a problem with the book, since I don't believe in God. But Keating says:

Every response to God, whatever it is, must begin with the full acceptance of reality as it actually is at the moment.

So I mentally substitute "reality" for "God" in the book.

This leaves centering prayer as closely akin to other forms of meditation in which one's attention is focused on the breath, a mantra, or some other object of attention while thoughts and other perceptions are allowed to come and go.

The next problem I have with the book is that Keating believes in pure awareness. Or at least, almost pure awareness. But so does Sam Harris and other Buddhist types, so I just look upon pure awareness as a possibility that doesn't make much sense to me, yet isn't all that crazy.

Especially since I've argued for it in the past, including in the first book I wrote, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder.

What I find refreshing about Open Mind, Open Heart is how Keating presents the via negativa approach to God in a modern fashion. That Wikipedia article includes a quote from Plotinus, an ancient Neoplatonist philosopher who I wrote a book about, that echoes what centering prayer is all about.

Our thought cannot grasp the One as long as any other image remains active in the soul [...] To this end, you must set free your soul from all outward things and turn wholly within yourself, with no more leaning to what lies outside, and lay your mind bare of ideal forms, as before of the objects of sense, and forget even yourself, and so come within sight of that One.

Keating describes how he views consciousness and God.

Our consciousness, as we have said, is like a great river on the surface of which our superficial thoughts and experiences are moving by like boats, debris, water skiers or other things. The river itself is the participation God has given us in His own being.

It is that part of us on which all the other faculties rest, but we are ordinarily unaware of it because we are absorbed with what is passing by on the surface of the river.

In centering prayer we begin to shift our attention from the boats and objects on the surface to the river itself, to that which sustains all our faculties and is their source. The river in this analogy has no qualities or characteristics. It is spiritual and limitless because it is a participation in God's being.

Suppose you get interested in some boat and find yourself looking in the hold to see what is on board. You are slipping away from your original intention. You must keep turning your attention from what is on the surface of the river to the river itself, from the particular to the general, from forms to the formless, from images to the imageless. 

...A thought in the context of this method is any perception that appears on the inner screen of consciousness. 

This could be an emotion, an image, a memory, a plan, a noise from outside, a feeling of peace, or even a spiritual communication. In other words, anything whatsoever that registers in the inner screen of consciousness is a "thought". The method consists of letting go of every thought during the time of prayer, even the most devout thoughts.

Thus Keating views human consciousness as a gateway to God when consciousness is reduced to inner silence. OK, interesting theory, one which I used to embrace -- which probably explains why I'm attracted to Open Mind, Open Heart, though I doubt that some basic tenets of the book are true.

Keating speaks positively about Eastern forms of spirituality. Not surprising, since he's basically espousing an Atman (consciousness/soul) -- Brahman (God) form of Christianity.

Probably false, but at least Keating presents a specific method of reaching out to God that makes more sense than the whole "Just have faith in Jesus" thing.

I'm pretty sure Sam Harris' "pure awareness" doesn't exist

As much as I like Sam Harris' approach to meditation, which basically is Buddhism (Vipassana variety) minus the Buddhist part, I'm still left with a key question.

Which if asked of a Zen master likely would earn me a smack on my head or kick of my butt -- or more mildly, a quizzical look and an admonition to return to my meditation mat and seek more diligently for the true nature of my self.

That self, of course, doesn't really exist in Buddhism, nor in Sam Harris' guided meditations on his Waking Up app.

So whoever it is who has this question about meditation isn't an enduring standalone Soul or Self with a capital "S." That who is something else. Which means my question might be unanswerable, since an answer seemingly would have to come from an entity that doesn't exist.

Confusing? Absolutely. So let's leave those thoughts behind and focus on the question.

Who or what is aware of the contents of my consciousness?

Harris, echoing the Buddhist notion of emptiness, that everything in existence is dependent on causes and conditions existing in a vast web of interdependency, likes to say that everything in a human mind is a modification of consciousness.

This includes the idea, everything in a human mind is a modification of consciousness.

Or, the feeling of being a self that has such an idea. No matter where you turn in the mind, no matter what elevated sensation of this'ness or that'ness that makes you think, ah, unvarnished truth, it's all just a modification of consciousness in Harris' view.

OK.

This assumes a dualism that sort of bothers me, since we have (1) consciousness and (2) contents of consciousness, even though I'm not aware of ever being purely consciousness, and can't imagine what this would be like or how one would know they were pure consciousness since Harris says that consciousness isn't something we possess but what we are.

Nonetheless, in his Waking Up book Harris claims to have attained a state of pure consciousness without any content during a lengthy meditation retreat.

But his consciousness must at least have contained the sensation, or memory, or perception, or something that allowed him to conclude that he experienced consciousness without any content. In other words, at minimum Harris' consciousness must have included the content of I'm not experiencing any content.

Which returns me to my question.

I doubt there is such a thing as pure awareness, or pure consciousness. Anyone who claims to have experienced such a state, including Sam Harris, almost certainly is mistaking a feeling or thought of pure awareness for the actual thing. 

So my attitude is that one part of my conscious brain is aware of other parts of my conscious brain, which could include a sensation of Wow, I'm experiencing pure awareness! My meditation rocks!

This leaves mindfulness as an activity, or ability, to be aware of the contents of consciousness, with mindfulness being part of those contents. Thus Harris is on the right track when he says that mindfulness practice leads us to see that the contents of consciousness are constantly shifting and changing within our mind.

Where I disagree with him is his assumption that somehow we are clear pure consciousness. This is at odds with modern neuroscience, as I wrote about in Brain's "dark energy" casts doubt on pure awareness. 

I wrote about my problem with Harris' claim of pure awareness in this post. What I said in 2016 still makes sense to me now.

But as I said in the previous post, I can't grasp what Harris is getting at when he writes about what he experienced while meditating:

There were periods during which all thought subsided, and any sense of having a body disappeared. What remained was a blissful expanse of conscious peace that had no reference point in any of the usual sensory channels. 

Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses -- and that the idea of a "pure consciousness" apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken.

Hmmmm. I'm just as confident that they are not mistaken.  It seems obvious that everyday consciousness isn't limited to sense experiences. Dreaming is a conscious act. It doesn't involve seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching via the five senses. 

Likewise, I can believe that in a state of deep meditation, Sam Harris did indeed lose any sense of having a body, and wasn't thinking in any ordinary sense. But Harris was still conscious of something, right? He speaks of this as "a blissful expanse of conscious peace." 

That doesn't sound like "pure consciousness." It sounds like consciousness of a blissful expanse of conscious peace. No thought. No sensory impressions. But there were contents within Harris' consciousness: bliss, an expanse, peace.

Harris appears to view consciousness as something separate and distinct from what the brain does. Yet Harris makes clear that brains are us. For example:

We know, of course, that human minds are the product of human brains. There is simply no question that your ability to decode and understand this sentence depends upon neurophysiological events taking place inside your head at this moment. But most of this mental work occurs entirely in the dark, and it is a mystery why any part of the process should be attended by consciousness.

This passage makes good sense. Aside from the final part of the last sentence. 

Harris sees a mystery where there doesn't have to be one. He distinguishes between (1) brain processes and (2) consciousness. But if consciousness is a product of the human brain, not something separate and distinct from the brain, then consciousness is part of what the brain does.

Consciousness is a brain process.

Sam Harris and I make up. All is good between us now.

For those worried about my previous post where I expressed some criticism of Sam Harris' approach to meditation -- are Harris and Hines at risk at breaking up? -- I want to reassure all of you, who likely number in the low single digits, that our relationship is back on track now.

Well, more accurately, my relationship with Harris is back on track. Harris has no idea that I exist, which makes for a decidedly unbalanced relationship, since my contact with him is limited to his writings and some recordings by Harris on his Waking Up app. 

Regarding the app, a few days ago I decided to do the beginner's mind thing and re-listen to the Introductory Course in the Practice section of Waking Up. I'm even taking notes!

One reason I'm doing this is that I realized I was doing to Harris what I dislike when it's done to Democratic politicians like Joe Biden. Namely, expecting that I should agree with everything Harris says. 

This is like Democrats who say things like, "I can't support Biden any more because he gave in too much to Joe Manchin when negotiating the Inflation Reduction Act." OK, maybe that's true. But the act has lots of good things in it, and it's a heck of a lot better than what Trump or Republicans could come up with.

Likewise, I agree with Harris on most things he writes and talks about. I like his approach to meditation. I just don't go along with everything he says about meditation. But almost everything is pretty damn good, since sometimes I buy a book about meditation and disagree with lots in it.

Here's most of the notes I've taken while listening to the "Getting Started" section of the Introductory Course.

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

In mindfulness we observe the nature of our own mind. We train it. Usually we spend little time content in the present moment. Through meditation we discover a sense of freedom, learning to dissolve the apparent boundary between meditation and everyday life.

A simple meditation is to become aware of the sensation of breathing. Notice other sensations, then come back to the feeling of breathing. When thoughts arise, observe the thought, then return to your breathing.

Paying close attention to mind is transformative. It's like a telescope observing the sky of the mind.

The unexamined life is less interesting. We can want the wrong things. The quality of our life depends on the quality of our mind. Changing our mind often is better than changing the world. Cease producing needless suffering for yourself and others. We manufacture our emotions.

Mind, not circumstances, determines quality of life. Vipassana is a Buddhist term for insight meditation, or mindfulness. It's a passion for discerning what is real in experience. Meditation is the act of being less distracted, then we can discover truths about the mind.

There's nothing especially significant about paying attention to the breath. Eventually, we pay attention to all that arises in consciousness. No need to control breathing. Just observe it.

The only tool we have is mind. Every decision you make, every relationship with people, depends on mind. But typically we find that mind is totally out of control. Thinking is the main obstacle to attention. The goal is not to stop thoughts, but to recognize them as soon as they arise. Just observe and come back to the breath.

You will do less in meditation. Discover what life is like when not controlled by contents of mind/thought.

We view minds as distinct from bodies. We like people who lose 100 pounds and become a tri-athlete. Their results are obvious. However, it also is possible to change our mind. Growth is possible all through life. When do we learn to have better conversations with our self?

Meditation is an essential part of growth. Most chaos is born of minds being totally out of control. How long do you stay locked in the prison of emotions? Meditation helps you decide how long to be angry. A multi-front war is being waged for our attention. Just see how many are addicted to their smartphones.

We learn to begin again in each moment. There is clear noticing of the next thing in consciousness. Notice self-judgment. Observing frustration is just as good as observing the breath. Beginning again is the essence of forgiveness.

Restart the clock in the present moment. Exorcise the ghost of mediocrity lingering around by beginning again. Notice any present thought as an appearance in consciousness, then just begin again.

Sam Harris isn't crystal clear about meditation

A few days ago I shared some brief thoughts from Sam Harris on what makes life worth living. He ended with:

I don't think there's just one answer to this question. We might want to say that love is what makes life worth living, or doing meaningful and creative work, or appreciating the beauty of nature, or helping other people and making their lives better.

And I'd probably say all of these things. 

But all of these things have a common property. They all depend on real attention, real presence of mind, real connection with life in the present.

And that's what meditation is, whether most people know it or not. Meditation is the essence of everything else that makes life worth living.

Not surprisingly, I took those words to mean that meditation is about real attention, real presence of mind, real connection with life in the present.

But since those qualities can be had outside of meditation, it seemed to me that meditation is just one way of manifesting those qualities -- which Harris said above also can be had through love, meaningful work, the beauty of nature, and helping other people.

This morning I re-read the "Meditation" chapter in Harris' book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. I came away confused about what he means by meditation, a confusion that I've felt since the first time I read Waking Up in 2014. 

I included this quote in I've finished Sam Harris' "Waking Up." Guess I have, sort of.

The form of transcendence that appears to link directly to ethical behavior and human well-being is that which occurs in the midst of ordinary waking life... The freedom from self that is both the goal and foundation of spiritual life is coincident with normal perception and cognition -- though, as I have already said, this can be difficult to realize.

Here we see three things: (1) Transcendence can occur in ordinary waking life and also in meditation; (2) Freedom from a sense of self is what Harris sees as the goal of spiritual life and meditation; (3) Freedom from a sense of self can be difficult to realize.

Note that while Harris said "freedom from self," I changed that to "freedom from a sense of self," because Harris is clear that there is no enduring self in the human psyche, no supernatural soul, no ghost in the machine, as Arthur Koestler put it in his book.

Here's a quote from another post I wrote about Waking Up, "How Sam Harris views Dzogchen."

Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience -- self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light -- constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work.

That principle is the subject of this book. The feeling that we call "I" is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is -- the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes looking out at a world separate from yourself -- can be altered or entirely extinguished.

Although such experiences of "self-transcendence" are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are.

Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by "spirituality" in the context of this book.

OK, I'm good with that. It's how we cut through the illusion of the self that I have questions about. The way I see it, there are lots of ways to diminish the feeling of being an "I" looking at a world separate from us.

This is how I put it back in 2014 in Questions I had in Sam Harris' "Waking Up" meditation chapter.

To me, this sense [of not being a separate self] is very common. Harris studied Dzogchen under various teachers to achieve the insight he describes. Other people experience it naturally in the course of everyday life.

It sounds virtually identical to "flow." That pleasant feeling when the thing you are doing isn't different from the doing itself. Athletes feel it. Dancers feel it. Musicians feel it. Thinkers lost in thought feel it. People having sex feel it.

For sure, I'm no enlightened being.

But often I feel little if any distance between what I'm experiencing and my experience of it. After I finish this post I'm going to return to reading an engrossing novel. Like an engrossing movie, I get absorbed in the fictional world and temporarily forget that it isn't real.

Well, actually it is real. For me. My mind makes it so. 

I think Harris makes this notion of selflessness more complicated than it needs to be. After all, since I agree with Harris (and Buddhism, and modern neuroscience) that we humans don't possess or are a self separate from the world and the goings-on of the human brain, there is no self to be gotten rid of, as is implied when people talk about losing the ego.

It's confusing that in his meditation chapter, Harris uses the analogy of looking through a window and seeing our own reflection in the glass. The way I see it, this would be a bad thing if the window is consciousness and the reflection is our sense of self. Aren't we supposed to be losing that sense? 

Yet Harris writes:

Of course, you could easily direct her attention to the surface of the window by touching the glass with your hand. This would be akin to the "pointing-out instruction of Dzogchen." However, here the analogy begins to break down. 

It is very difficult to imagine someone's not being able to see her reflection in a window even after years of looking -- but that is what happens when a person begins most forms of spiritual practice. 

Most techniques of meditation are, in essence, elaborate ways for looking through the window in the hope that if one only sees the world in greater detail, an image of one's true face will eventually appear. Imagine a teaching like this: If you just focus on the trees swaying outside the window without distracting, you will see your true face.

Undoubtedly, such an instruction would be an obstacle to seeing what otherwise be seen directly.

But there's nothing to see. The self doesn't exist. Harris is clear about this. His main approach in the guided meditations on his Waking Up app, which I've been listening to for several years, is to look for the self that is doing the looking. 

When you can't find it, that's what you're looking for: an absence, not a presence. So I favor more of a relaxed Taoist approach to meditation rather than Harris' rather serious Buddhist approach. There's no self to be found, so everywhere you look, you've succeeded in not finding it.

Congratulations! End of spiritual search!

Sam Harris answers "What makes life worth living?"

I came across a tweet by Sam Harris that was a (mildly) animated GIF with Harris' narrated words scrolling at the bottom. 

He asks a good question. Whether you think his answer is New Age bullshit, ancient spiritual wisdom, or something in-between is another good question.

What makes life worth living? This is an important question, probably the most important question, because if we don't know, then we can't prioritize what we actually value.

We tend to live as if we've answered this question for ourselves. But most of the time we're just doing one thing after the next, following our desires, reacting to what happens out in the world.

And only rarely do we step back and ask what it is that actually matters.

I don't think there's just one answer to this question. We might want to say that love is what makes life worth living, or doing meaningful and creative work, or appreciating the beauty of nature, or helping other people and making their lives better.

And I'd probably say all of these things. 

But all of these things have a common property. They all depend on real attention, real presence of mind, real connection with life in the present.

And that's what meditation is, whether most people know it or not. Meditation is the essence of everything else that makes life worth living.

I agree that attention, presence of mind, and connection with the present moment are key to a satisfying life. But obviously there's a chicken-and-egg issue here.

It's much easier to have those qualities when we're engaged in an activity that demands them. Yet almost every activity is more satisfying when we pay close attention to it in the present moment. 

I scrolled through some of the comments on Harris' tweet. I liked this one: "people need to live their lives like they're climbing a 50,000 foot tall ladder. gotta pay attention to whats right in front of you, or you'll fall."

That fits with a comment by Tucson, a frequent commenter on this blog some years back, who said something along the same line.

Namely, that we should be as attentive to our life as if we were walking through a forest in the middle of the night that was inhabited by a dangerous wild animal that could kill us.

A more positive image would be that we're walking in the middle of the day along a busy city sidewalk filled with people, one of whom reportedly is hugely attractive and has expressed a romantic interest in us, but told us only "Watch for my sign that I'm the person you're looking for." 

In each of these scenarios -- and we could think of many more, such as a combat patrol that has penetrated into enemy territory -- it behooves us to pay rapt attention in the present moment and not be distracted by thoughts of the past or future.

But then there's always someone with a more down-to-earth approach to what makes life worth living, like whoever left this comment on Harris's tweet: "Range day. Smoked meats. Blowjobs. Sci-fi novels. Boobs. Cats!"

The big problem with life is...life. So what to do?

Yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog about a stand-up comedian I like a lot, Taylor Tomlinson. The post started off with a bit of semi-tongue-in-cheek philosophizing.

My big problem with life is... (drumroll please)... LIFE. 

Meaning, insofar as I know what I mean, but now that I just wrote this blog's topic sentence, I'm stuck with explaining it, no matter how many problems get fixed in my life, new ones pop up like a perpetual motion machine designed by a sadist.

I suspect most people feel this way. So what are we to do? 

Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll only can take us so far, especially if we're (OK, me) so old, sex is starting to  look like the car that zipped by in the other lane and now is so small in the rearview mirror it's barely discernible; drugs are limited to marijuana because dealers of harder stuff are find to find when you're 73; and the last rock band truly worth listening to in your entirely personal opinion was Cream over fifty years ago.

Meditation? Yeah, I've been there and done that for a really long time.

The fact that I'm still as messed up in 2022 as I was in 1969 when I started to meditate every day tells me that based on that extensive flat trend line, the chance of me taking a sudden quantum leap to a blissful state of enlightenment is vanishingly small.

So I'm becoming increasingly convinced that television is the solution to my problems.

Well, maybe.

But even if television isn't the solution to my problems, the question still remains: if not television, then what else is the solution to my problems? Or your problems? Or the problems of anyone else in the world?

It seems virtually undeniable that no one's life is problem free. At least, anyone who is capable of recognizing problems. If someone lacks that capacity, then sure, they can be free of problems. For the rest of us, though, problems are always going to be a part of life.

As noted in last night's post, I've meditated every day for over 50 years. So if meditation was going to make me look at problems with a so what? eye because they couldn't interfere with my blissful state of elevated awareness, it sure seems like that would have happened by now.

Which assumes that bliss is a goal of meditation. I'd pretty much thought it was since my first days of yoga meditation during college. Back then, in 1969, I embraced the Indian notion of sat-chit-ananda, truth-consciousness-bliss, as a hallmark of meditation.

This morning, though, I listened to a guided meditation on Sam Harris' Waking Up app where he says that no state produced in meditation is worth much. I generally agree with his point, though naturally I prefer pleasant feelings to unpleasant feelings when I meditate.

But I readily admit that this preference could simply show that I'm missing what meditation is all about, at least according to Sam Harris, someone I respect a lot. Harris said: 

If at any point when you're practicing, you begin to feel especially calm, peaceful, even blissful, and you think, well, there it is, meditation's finally working, notice that inclination to grasp a transitory experience.

And, relinquish it.

There's no state you can produce that matters. If it arises, it will pass away. The goal here is to recognize that which doesn't arise and pass away: a condition of empty, open clarity that precedes and transcends every other experience.

And as a matter of experience you're not meditating on that. You are that. It is the light by which everything else is being seen. 

A compassionate perspective on Sant Mat and the spiritual pursuit

Here's a guest blog post from someone who writes well, thinks clearly, and has an interesting perspective on the spiritual pursuit. Kinder and gentler than my own attitude toward cults and religions. I added a couple of links to the person's post.

Dear Brian,

I was searching the internet for Sant Mat history and I found your blog.

As I was reading it, back and forth, there have been quite a few entries of people over the years, I felt glad that I found some answers that clarified my own thinking.

So then I wanted to , you know, say something too (^__^)

But I couldn’t post my ramblings directly from the comment section of the blog, so I registered with Typepad and tried to sign in, but that didn’t work either, so now I am sending my waffle to you directly.

Maybe you could be so kind and post it on my behalf. If not, no worries.

All I can do is say, Brian, nice of you to be so engaged with the world, I am glad you are lighting up the world you live in and are making a difference. You and me live far apart from one another, another world, another life, another reality and here and now we are. How wonderful. Thank you!

Love and Light. [name not shared at person's request]

Here is what I was going to post:
-------------------------------------------------
Ramblings:

I am from the the SOS [Science of Spirituality] branch, I knew nothing of the other branches of Sant Mat, indeed was unaware of this there is so much more to Sant Mat, it was a good eye opener to get some history on this here blog.

I’ve never really bought into the whole thing but grew up with it. I am doing my own thing though. I am just me. My conclusion after reading many people’s thoughts on this topic for me are:

At least Sant Mat is promoting a peaceful mind. Joy of inner self. Ok, so I think that Rajinder is fully engaged in the guru game, he has too many followers for it to be. I remember when it was Darshan one could still go and personally speak with 'the master’, he was available for talks for long into the morning hours to answer all questions his followers had.

And the Kirpal crowd even more so, small and intimate. I am speaking Westerner here.  Small gatherings. The group recognition one found, the validation through the other followers. It was a time of newness, hope and joy.

And yes, it can become a slog and a chore, but I think that would happen to the person anyway if that’s the blueprint of the person. We are what we are. Sometimes we can change. Often we get stuck. I think we all get drawn to something or other.

I mean look at these most ridiculous cults out there, the gullibility of human beings is just mind boggling. But there is all sorts out there. Before we patronise others' opinion, have we not all fallen for something or other at some point? And do we not understand how when one is convinced of something how one becomes zealous?

So when we meet a zealous person, do we need to throw stones at them?

Anyway the game is (joy, pain, love, hate, devotion, insert your own thing here), and we play it wholeheartedly. And pain is part of how we experience existence. Some people play seriously and for a long time, decades, and it is beautiful to watch, or painful; and then they find: nope, that’s not it.

And go away from it with things learned. Things experienced. Things understood and things misunderstood. And being the person that they are.

Not every human is the same but there are a variety of maybe self fabricated realities, some handed down generations to generation in human history, available to everyone, and we all chose that which is akin to us.

It is already perfect. And yes, the game is a trap, that is what Ram Dass said, and everything is a game, a play, and yes the cult prays on the gullible and enhances guilt. But it also encourages choice of goodness and positivity.

Maybe then we have the choice of recognition. We can try to understand the essence of any of these teachings and live it, understand our motivations and try to be a good person and incidentally Love is a thing. It’s ok to change ones mind, and its ok to be imperfect. Its already perfect.

A lot, I think, is just filler. With intuition and imagination we seem to be able to experience many things in life. Together with other people who experience something similar.

If not a cult, a religion then possessions, or philosophy, or intellectualism, or art, or shamanism, or hedonism, or trance; anything that we use as a template to fill our need, or to fill the void, or just to make us happy for a moment and then relive this moment with the help of that which has found us on our way and offers itself to us  - its good and right and real, and then it becomes a trap if we play it for real, if we play it to the detriment which is addiction. (Ram Dass said)

We can argue till the cows come home about that these are an impossibility these guru teachings, whether these mystics and sages are but power hungry ego trippers with their old old tales and so on, argue about the reality of all these things that are supposedly happen in other spheres, the existence of angels, ghosts, demons, gods, spirits and all that, but there is such a thing as a shared reality.

Many people together experiencing one reality. And it’s real for them. How important is it to be right if we deem it to be wrong?

And yes, it is up to us to question the things that we are told, when we are out of ecstatic state and in the light of day. And then use that which seems right to us at that moment in time. And it is up to us to be open to things that are improbable. And it is also up to us not to judge others too harshly.

I guess that the addiction to the cult is just like any other addiction. There will come a point when we say, yay or nay. And either just be, or move on to fit the raster of existence to our picture of how things should be. Hypnotised, enticed, duped or otherwise.

As Osho said: play it, play it with all your heart.

I think that we need not warn others overly much or with such vehemence, because no one will be swayed who believes, by what they then feel are naysayers and attackers. It is right to point things out, to offer another point of view, like for instance the fact that some of these people selling religion are also selling themselves on top of the religion.

Isn’t it that masters and priests have had their knowledge handed down to them, hearsay from the past, plus their own garnish of experience.  And sometimes people need these other people that point this out to them as a reminder that they can ask questions, but on the whole it seems to me the people have to change their minds from within, by themselves, alone, when they are ready. And some will never be ready till its over.

People can tune into time itself, one hears, but I don’t think this applies to everyone, or else we would all be geniuses and holy men and woman. I think for most of us we are just part of the Mandelbrot pattern of the universe.

It is. And it is already perfect. And isn’t it all exciting really?

I love all these different ideas that are floating around. And one can embrace it all. And the guilt thing, well, my mum made me feel so guilty over everything all my life, really the Master had nothing on me. I don’t think that we can really really overcome our blueprint, (free choice, you’re having a laugh, right?)

But there is so much variety of experiences. And there is so much goodness and Love along the way. And also there is so much pain and anguish of those that are it.

I have seen young, wonderful earnest and committed beauty of belief. Young men and woman, almost aglow with the effort to please the universe, the master and god. Lovingly applied and with such strong energy. And I have seen them fall into the maelstrom of despair. But I have also seen growth and letting go and moving on to the next thing that illuminated these friends from within.

Really, it doesn’t matter what the thing is that has replaced it, the person remains the same.

I love the tarot traditions too, more of an ego tool really, and also I love the ‘energy is a thing’ thing. And mumbo jumbo. What fun!

And biology is amazing too, how everything works in harmony (or doesn’t), how hormones work and how emotion is influenced by it, and one can try to influence ones body and bio rhythms with breathing techniques, pretty cool stuff floating around - and very, very old traditions at that. Yoga. Looking after ones body - well, it’s a good thing!

All the stuff that happens to us humans, to the microbes, to the plants, to the animals, to the planets, to the universe. It’s all pretty awesome.

And also it isn’t. It just is, we are experiencing it, we are judging it, we are playing it. So I hear.

I’m off to work now. I work in care. I found that all people just want Love in the End, we all have a need to be loved. Why not love one another more? People are filling their minds with gurus because they have a need. Let them be. And when they are disillusioned, be kind. It’s a thing: kindness. Do good. Have compassion. Get off the me, me ride. Well, this kinda works for me anyway.

Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing your experiences here on this blog.

Love and Light. Sincerely, the Fool.

I respond to a B.S. comment about my 52 years of meditation

UPDATE: Spence Tepper has apologized to me for his ridiculous attempt to claim that my 35 years of daily meditation while a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, usually for several hours a day, amounted to "nothing." Good for Spence. He recognized how wrong he was.

Hopefully from now on he will realize that my approach to meditation is the wise one: don't challenge someone's personal experience in meditation, but DO challenge any claim that this experience proves the existence of a supernatural realm beyond the physical.

Spence doesn't like my skepticism toward his brand of religious fundamentalism. I've pointed out to him that his proselytizing comments are being left on a Church of the Churchless blog, not a Church of the Churched blog. For 18 years I've criticized religious fundamentalists who want others to believe in their dogma without any evidence. I sure won't stop now.

One of the joys, if that's the right word, of having a churchless blog for the past 18 years is that I get a lot of first hand experience responding to religious fundamentalists who, for reasons known only to them, like to leave judgmental comments on a blog devoted to spiritual independence.

Here's a latest example, a comment from Spence Tepper today which was so ridiculous, I figured it deserved to be elevated to a blog post so its absurdity could be on fuller display. My responses to Tepper are in bold italics. 

Hi Brian Ji
You wrote
"Hope this clarifies things. Demanding proof of someone who, say, claims to have experienced the divine sound and light that creates and sustains the cosmos is fully warranted."

Exactly. And that's why there is the meditation.

Had you conducted the practice with any discipline at all you would have your own evidence first hand.

Wrong assumption #1. I was initiated by Charan Singh into the practice of meditation as taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in 1971, after first learning to meditate from a yoga teacher while in college.

I diligently followed the RSSB meditation instructions for 35 years. Never missed a day of meditation. Mostly I meditated for 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours a day. When I was working and had a young child, it was more difficult to do the prescribed 2 1/2 hours. So I had plenty of discipline in my meditation. You shouldn't make assumptions about someone else's meditation experience.

Also, hope you realize that RSSB stresses that initiates shouldn't talk about their meditation experiences. I'm OK with this being done, since I've done it myself. But you, like me, are breaking a RSSB rule.

You could have said," Yes, I saw the blinding light and have been able to reproduce it at will. Then I saw the sun, then the moon. I'm convinced it is simply the brain gaining access to signal directly outside the visual nervous system....but why the sun, why the moon? I'm still investigating to try to see where these images may have come from. They are far more intense than memory, especially when I can take time to look at them, even approach them... "

You could have developed a real theory around real information.

I did develop a real theory around real information. Based on my 35 years of RSSB meditation experience, and countless (almost) conversations with other members of RSSB about meditation, I've come to the conclusion that while some people report seeing scenes of supernatural regions of existence beyond the physical, almost certainly these don't reflect an objective reality but rather are subjective emanations of their brains, since there is no demonstrable evidence of those supernatural regions other than subjective reports.

Now all you have is the second hand evidence of the founders of every religion. And of every mystic who ever lived and documented what they went through.

Utterly false statement. There are lots of different approaches to meditation. What I experienced during my 35 years of RSSB meditation was very close to, if not exactly, how Buddhist and Taoist teachings describe meditation. I felt my self slipping away, probably because I don't have or am a self. I felt a sense of unity with all things, probably because everything is interdependent. Mystics have all sorts of different experiences. I don't really consider myself a mystic, but I've certainly had mystical experiences that are very difficult to describe in words.

Yes it evidence. And yes it deserves to be evaluated. But the only way to do this objectively is create the conditions to recreate the experience in your own lab and then you may test it as millions of others have done and are doing every day, with any way you like, including testing your own hypothesis about the causes.

You failed to do this.

Not true. I conducted the experiment of meditation, RSSB style, for 35 years. I've written a lot on this blog about what I found. Use the search box in the right sidebar to find those posts. Your fundamentalist attitude prevents you from realizing that different people can meditate and have very different meditation experiences. There isn't one right way to meditate, and there isn't one genuine meditation experience. If you believe there is, you're hugely mistaken about what meditation is all about. 

Let me be more pointed, Brian Ji.

You didn't have to reproduce the entire journey.

Again, you're assuming there's only one journey people take in meditation. Actually, people have all kinds of different journeys. 

Any part of it would have been fine. But what you report is zero.

Not at all. Every day I meditate, continuing to the present -- today -- I have a decidedly-nonzero meditation experience. Just because it isn't your experience doesn't make it any less meaningful or valid for me. 

That's practically impossible.

It's very possible. You should get out more and talk with other people about their meditation experiences. Since I did so much public speaking for RSSB, wrote three books on behalf of RSSB, and was the secretary of our local group for many years, as noted above I've talked with lots of people about meditation. Again, a Buddhist or Taoist would find my meditation experiences perfectly compatible with their spiritual outlook.

Anyone with a minimum of self-discipline can conduct any of a variety of meditation methods and at least watch their thoughts.

I've done that, and much more, for 52 years of daily meditation. It's astounding how you believe that, without ever having met me or knowing me in person, somehow you believe that you're privy to what I've experienced in meditation. How do you think you know this? Obviously it isn't possible. 

They could at least report what was happening to their body as they did so... And as they worked to gain some control, some level of mastery.

Geez, unbelievable. All of your own meditation sure hasn't affected the Judgmental part of your brain. I could ask, "Spence, how could you do so much meditation and end up such a religious fundamentalist with an exaggerated sense of your own divinity?" Oops, looks like I did just ask that.

They could at least notice the change in their thinking during meditation. And even learn how their brain reacts to different thoughts, how simran works, how distraction alters your level of consciousness wakefulness, and how focus raises it to observe more thoughts, their seeds and their destination all at the same time.

Been there. Done that. For 52 years.

But you report zero.

Wrong.

Not only does that make no sense at all. It is downright suspicious.

And not in any way scientific.

So there is no point in leaping to conclusions when you have not made the least effort to note just exactly what happened and to report it here for peer review. Then we can discuss what is going on within.

Why? I'm preaching the gospel of spiritual independence on this blog. I don't view meditation the way you do, as a way of demonstrating how evolved meditation has made me. I see meditation as a form of mental exercise and relaxation, in much the same way I view physical exercise. Tai Chi helps me understand what my body can do. Meditation helps me realize what my mind can do.  

As to what others report, they are reporting what happened to them, not for you to take second hand, but to note as their guide, testable reference points. Your own experience from your own effort is all that matters.

Hey, I agree with your last sentence. So why did you write this lengthy comment, most of which goes against what you just said?

The other testimony is meaningless to you because clearly you didn't take it seriously. Sorry to be so blunt.

I'm sorry to be so blunt in return, but you're totally wrong.

But you are being less than candd to suggest that 35 years x 365 days x 2.5 hours was spent entirely unconscious.

Wrong again. Amazing how many times you can be wrong in one blog post comment. I was awake and aware for virtually every moment in my 52 years of daily meditation. Sure, occasionally I fell asleep, but that was fairly rare.

31, 937.5 hours...

That's not meditation. It's sleep.

And what you just said isn't an intelligent observation. It's bullshit. 

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. 

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

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. 

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

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.