Notes on an event in a 50+ year attempt to learn and benefit from spiritual practices….

For some years now, I have been trying various meditation techniques from many world traditions, particularly techniques which meditation teacher Shinzen Young has modified in various ways to make more sense to and be more doable by modern people.  A month ago, I was participating in one of Shinzen's monthly telephone retreats.  For these, 20 to 50 people telephone  into a conference call number and Shinzen leads us in some guided meditation for 2 to 4 hours.  There's time for reports and questions at the end, and often individual phone consultation with him during a break in the middle of the period.  These "mini-retreats" are a very useful way to stay connected to intensive meditation practice, and much more convenient, inexpensive and practical than flying off to some residential retreat site.

On this particular day, I was participating in a two-hour guided meditation session on a technique Shinzen calls "Do Nothing" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ6cdIaUZCA).  The basic instruction here is that you don't attempt to do anything in particular, to have any kind of particular meditation experience, or to "correct" or guide what happens in your mind during the meditation.  Indeed, the instruction is that if you sense that you intend to change something, relax that intention.  You're not actively looking for such intentions – that would be doing – but, if intentions are noticed, you drop them, relax them.

This is a technique I have not tried much and which I find rather difficult.  But I also find it quite interesting, as I think becoming aware of intentions, especially subtle intentions, as they first well up my mind, is an important factor for my spiritual growth.

Fairly far along in meditation, after a little period of quiet, Shinzen instructed us that the search was over, we didn't have to do anything, we didn't have to try to make anything happen or not happen.  As he said that, a deep feeling of sadness suddenly welled up in me and tears came to my eyes.  I realized that I have never stopped trying! My entire life, from childhood on, has been spent trying to do the "right thing" at practically every moment!  Even though I appear to be a relaxed and easy-going person, even though I think I'm actually quite relaxed compared to people in general, in the background I'm always trying to figure out what the right thing to do is and to do it.  Not that this was and is a "bad" thing to do, but I just suddenly realized how very, very tired of trying I was!  I hoped that someday I would be able to stop for a while and get some rest.  But it was a very faint hope, I was always, always trying, why would anything change?

After a few moments the feeling passed, the tears dried, and I went back to the do nothing practice.  At the end of this telephone meditation retreat I didn't think anything special about it, other than that this insight about how tired I was of always trying, had happened.

Rancho Palos Verdes Retreat – Flow

Two weeks later, my wife Judy and I are at a Catholic nunnery and retreat Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, for a 12 day retreat with Shinzen.  While I know he will present a variety of techniques for people to try, with the aim of finding what works well for you or simply making your mind more flexible, I've already decided that I'm going to concentrate on meditation procedures for sensing "flow."  That is, whatever sensory channel I'm paying attention to, input from the five classical senses or the actions of my mind (visual imagery or internal talk), I'm going to try to be aware, with concentration, clarity, and equanimity, not only of the particulars of the content at any moment, but of the way it changes from moment to moment, its flow.  Flow is Shinzen's modern term, which he thinks covers most, if not all, understandings of the crucial concept of "impermanence" in Buddhism.

If I happen to be meditating with my eyes closed, for example, observing visual imagery on my inner mental screen, I might notice that it's relatively restful at this moment, mainly black-and-white or faintly colored dots flickering on and off, like looking at static, "snow" on a TV set tuned to a channel which has no broadcast on it.  But the flickering on and off of these dots can actually be seen as flow, one momentary pattern changing into another.  Indeed, more specific imagery will almost certainly appear as I continue to pay attention, and one image will morph, will flow into another and another and other.  A brief image of a car driving along a highway, e.g., morphs into a forest, which morphs into clouds in the sky, which morphs into a wall, etc., etc.  Keeping aware of these changes, with equanimity, concentration, and clarity, is what Shinzen describes as meditating on flow or impermanence.

Peace – Resting in the "Nature of Mind?"  Or?

To my surprise – except I didn't really feel surprised at the time – I had five or six experiences, each 5 to 20 min. or so long, that were, from their own internal perspective, nothing special, but, from the perspective of my ordinary mind activity, were extraordinary!  I didn't do anything that had the intention of bringing these specific experience or states on, or to maintain them, or to prolong them.

While there is much formal meditating in the zendo (meditation hall) during Shinzen's retreats, one can attend these or not, as one wishes, and I often skip a number of these formal sessions in order to meditate outside in nature.  The retreat center is very pleasant that way, located in the hills above Los Angeles, and having a relatively undeveloped area off the parking lot with bushes, pine trees, etc. as well as more formal gardens and lawns.  In these "extraordinary but nothing special experiences," I would be sitting in a chair, looking off into the distance or at nearby pine trees or bushes, and practicing the previously described observation of flow meditation.  With my eyes open there was always flow in the sensory world: the movement of tree branches in the wind, occasional people walking at a distance, changing automobile noises from cars passing on a nearby road, etc.  With my eyes closed there was always plenty of flow in terms of morphing body sensations, morphing internal visual imagery and morphing internal talking.

Then I would notice, usually when my eyes were open, that I was "at peace."  That phrase doesn't quite describe it accurately, but I'm at something of a loss for words here – which is unusual for me, a champion talker.  I would be just sitting there, looking at the pine trees, for example, and find I was just contentedly sitting there looking at the pine trees.  I was awake and alert, but no longer doing any kind of technique, I was not wishing for anything in particular to happen or not happen.  I wouldn't say I was practicing the "Do-Nothing" technique, rather I wasn't striving to do or not do anything at all, I was just here, and now.  There was no effort, no striving involved in maintaining this feeling of peace, of calm presence.

I'm tempted to describe this as an experience of Peace, capital P, but from the inside it simply wasn't any big deal.  It's only from my ordinary perspective of knowing how incredibly rare an experience like this is in my life, especially one lasting more than a few seconds, that I realize how extra-ordinary it was.

I think I have experienced something like this only once before in my life.  Several summers ago my wife and I were on a Dzogchen retreat with lama  Tsoknyi  Rinpoche at his country center, Rangjung Yeshe Gomde, in northern  California.  After one of the teaching sessions one afternoon, we found ourselves just sitting on the hillside, watching the clouds move, feeling the wind blow, and the touch of the sun on our skins.  It was just so very peaceful and natural.  Again I make that statement as if this were very special, a retrospective judgment, but at the time it was just natural to simply be there for a few minutes, enjoying the sun, the wind, and the sights.

Although Shinzen's was a silent retreat, I did have my little pocket voice recorder with me, and since I was far enough away from others to not disturb their silence, I dictated occasional notes, trying to capture something of the essence of the experience.  Here's one dictated after several previous occurrences of this sort.

A moment outside that I think of as a Dzogchen moment.  I'm relaxed and enjoying the touch of the sun on my skin, the warm temperature.  The sound of a chain saw being used nearby is just the sound of a chainsaw, I'm not taking it as annoying, "What a horrible noise spoiling this peaceful place!"  My mind is spacious.  I'm not particularly trying to improve things.  I wouldn't say I'm Here and Now in any profound sense, I'm just here and now, quietly enjoying sitting or walking around.  I didn't do anything in particular to bring it on, except perhaps expected it, as it's happened several times already on this retreat.  I was doing a meditation, mainly on flow, a few minutes ago.

Rigpa, or Resting in the Nature of Mind?

Although I've been a student of lama Sogyal Rinpoche for many years, primarily trying to understand and practice his Dzogchen teachings about rigpa, the ultimate nature of mind, I've always had trouble, though, understanding what "rigpa" means, what "resting in the nature of mind" means.  Sometimes I think I basically understand it, sometimes I'm not at all sure that I understand any aspect of it.  The last few years I've felt that any intellectual attempt of mine to evaluate whether a particular experience is indeed "rigpa" or "resting in the nature of mind" always has the answer, "No."  If I'm trying to intellectually pin it down, I am in an ordinary intellectual state, not in rigpa.

As Sogyal Rinpoche's translation of a Tibetan prayer, Dudjom Rinpoche's Calling the Lama from Afar puts it,

Buddhahood is not attained by fabricated Dharmas;

Meditation made by the mind, fabricated by the intellect, is the deceiving enemy.

During these periods of peace, I felt that this was it, or at least a small manifestation of resting in the nature of mind…..

Because I hadn't done anything specifically aimed at bringing these episodes on, one of my notes concluded:

So an important part of "resting in the nature of mind" is not wanting it to be anything in particular.

Thoughts

As I understand it at this time, one of the clearest understandings Buddhism has is that our thoughts often run wild and both delude us and create all sorts of unnecessary suffering.  In my experience, though, this insight is linked to other teachings in many sources about thoughts that make it sound like a state with no thoughts at all is the ideal one.  I know intellectually this is an extreme I think is wrong, for as Sogyal Rinpoche has often taught it's not the arising of thoughts that's a problem, it's the "running after them," getting identified with them and tangled up in them in maladaptive and crazy ways that's the problem.

As I noted during one of these episodes at the retreat,

It's not like I don't have any thoughts.  Thoughts come occasionally, but not steadily, not all the time.  They're not terribly "loud," they don't automatically dominate my mind.  I still maintain some touch with the world around me, and can easily let the thoughts go.

Physical Pain

One of the reasons I had decided to focus on meditation on flow on this retreat was that I thought developing more skill at it would be helpful in dealing with my chronic, daily headaches.  If I could focus on various aspects of pain with concentration, clarity, and equanimity, and then see how these characteristics continually changed, either slowly or rapidly, I think the physical pain would create less suffering.  And indeed, I have found this to be true to some extent, although I'm not that good yet at meditating on flow.  The suffering is definitely reduced during a headache while I concentrate on observing flow.  Unfortunately, as soon as I stop doing the formal meditation technique, the headache comes back with its previous intensity, but Shinzen agrees with me that there will probably eventually be carryover from developing skill in meditating on flow that will reduce headache pain.  Here's a note I made on this during one of these peace episodes.

As I sit here, mainly just being present, looking out at the trees and grounds, I feel a headache coming on.  I can feel that the pain that kind of "squeezes," contracts my head is also kind of "squeezing," contracting my consciousness, reducing its clarity and scope.  I don't know whether it's "squeezing" it directly, or just triggering worries that the pain will get worse, so I worry that I should hurry to take some medication.  But it will be interesting to see if I can stay in this nature of mind – dare I use that phrase?  …..   Wow, the pain still builds some…

It's a few seconds later and I'd say yes, I can stay in this "nature of mind," at least temporarily.  I say that because it's easier to just relax, to just let go of a train of thought and come back to the present moment.

Comparison of Peace and Self-Remembering

This is not like Gurdjieffian self-remembering, sensing looking and listening (SLL) usually is for me.  SLL involves a deliberate distribution of attention, a small part of my attention keeping track of body sensations (usually those of the arms and legs), more devoted to listening to the qualities of whatever sounds occur, and, since vision is our dominant sense, most devoted to attentive looking at sight qualities.  For SLL, there is a small effortful quality to it, you have to do it, and when you stop doing it, it's effects (usually but not always aliveness and sensory clarity) stop.  These peace experiences, though, were spontaneous.  I didn't "start" them, I didn't "end" them.

What's amazing to me now is how it (this state) just goes on relatively continuously, rather than being (when I make deliberate attempts to rest in the nature of mind at other times) just sort of a second or so long, being rather undefined, being hard to see whether I've made any change as a result of my making an effort to turn my mind inward.  I guess I'm blest!

Dzogchen teachings, as I understand them, typically say that when you are resting in the nature of mind, there's no need to do anything else, no need to apply some specific meditative technique, but that if you do engage in such a technique, it is more effective than if you are in your ordinary state of consciousness.  I recalled this during one of these peace states, and decided to try a specific technique.

I just did the hundred syllable mantra, intending it as a blessing on the world, while I was resting in this nature of mind.  It's different than when I do it normally, it just flows more naturally, without being such a big deal.  Yet it takes away from the resting in the nature of mind to some degree to try to do it deliberately, to do a directed practice like this.  Perhaps it would get easier with practice, with "getting used to."  There's that wonderful phrase that Sogyal Rinpoche uses all the time, "getting used to."

Cessation of the Experience of Peace

Anything that starts also ends, and so

I'm now feeling, maybe half an hour after this clarity began, that it's starting to fade.  It doesn't particularly matter to me, it's just change….

But given how satisfying these experiences were, wouldn't I very much want them to continue?

One of the curious things about my experiences of peace is that I'm not particularly attached to them.  I sort of hope they will occur once in a while again, but it's no big deal!  It's nice to know I can be like that.  I don't think I'd want to be like that all the time, though, I don't think it would be very good for doing my primary work on bridging science and spirituality, writing, and so forth.  Curious that I'm not feeling attached.

Knowing With Words and Intellect, Deeper Knowing

Finally I should note how intellectual knowledge can long precede direct knowledge.  That's not bad, but it's not the same thing at all.  

Many years ago, intellectually I had the understanding that it was good to develop an "observer" separate from the ongoing content of experience, as it increased your freedom, but that this observer could indeed ossify and turn into something rigid itself, which prevented freedom, so you later had to break loose from this.  Perhaps I'm now ready to see it on a deeper level than just intellectually

And So……

All this reminds me of Gurdjieff's admonition to work as if everything depends on work, pray as if everything depends on prayer.  Do what I can and do it well, and be open to "gifts."  My intellectual mind that likes to understand things (on its own terms!) can't see a clear reason why these peace experiences happened.  Oh a vague one, yes, all these years of a variety of psychological clearing and spiritual development practices laid the groundwork, but that's not at all specific.  So perhaps I should just relax and accept that, in some deep sense, this was a gift?  And while I want to continue my work of bringing science and spirituality closer, knowing that it's possible to be at peace like this sometimes is indeed a great gift…..

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One of these paths, centered around the vipassana-type meditations I've learned from Shinzen Young, is about exploring the deeper nature of my mind.  On it, typically I'm sitting still with my eyes closed, observing some set of internal reactions.  If I'm paying attention to external sensations, like sound, still, my primary interest is in the internal reactions that are created, and in learning how to observe them with concentration, clarity and equanimity.  On this path, I learned a lot about how my mind works, either in response to sensory stimuli, or how it functions when it's not being driven by external stimuli, not being engaged in coping with the external world, but running on its own.  For example, I've learned how difficult it is for me to follow the simple instruction to simply pay equanimous attention to the qualities of sensation X, without getting lost in acceptance or rejection, or trying to change X, or trying to prolong or shorten it.  One of the most insightful things I see, even after years of practice, is that there are usually subtle biases to try to make my experience be of such-and-such quality, rather than simply observing it as it is.

I feel like this exploration of the inner workings of my mind gives me a deeper understanding of myself, and I have some faith that, as Shinzen says, paying equanimous and clear attention to these internal processes eventually clears out a lot of junk in the way the mind functions.  It also trains the skills of concentration and clarity.

The other main line is centered around my Dzogchen practice with Sogyal Rinpoche.  Now I should qualify what I'm going to say by noting that I consider myself a "poor" student in terms of what I think is the standard model of a "good" Vajrayana student.  I don't do the various sadhana, mantra-type practices, simply because I have no real faith that they will somehow make me acquire a lot of merit which will automatically up the quality of my spiritual life.  It would take a lot of time and energy to do 100,000 of this, that, or the other practice, and I think that, for me, that time is better spent in my work advancing knowledge as a transpersonal psychologist.  These kind of practices undoubtedly work for other people, but they just don't appeal to or resonate with me.  At times I worry that this means that I'm never going to make much spiritual progress because I am a "bad" student and I'm not following the basic instructions.  At other times I remember, because of course I'm motivated to remember this, that Sogyal Rinpoche says he offers a lot of practices, and while he recommends them all, he also strongly recommends that you find the practices that inspire you and work for you, and concentrate on them.

I should also add my usual qualification that my feeling of whether I understand the basic Dzogchen approach varies wildly, ranging from "I think I basically understand the main practice" to "I have no idea what they are talking about!"  So I need to occasionally evaluate what I think I do or don't know, but not get too attached to such evaluations…..

The Dzogchen practice which is of most concern to me is that of suddenly turning the mind inward, instead of being lost in the ongoing contents of mind, lost in one's "story."  This is based on the traditional teaching that samsara is mind turned outward, lost in its projections, nirvana is mind turned inward, directly seeing its own true nature.  When I take a moment to turn the mind inward, there is usually a brief moment to a few seconds in which the ongoing stories and reactions I was having to various content before, my "story," dies back down, and I'm simply here, now.  The vast majority of the time, my experience is that it's nothing "special."  I'm just here, now.

This is, in one way, a great disappointment to me in terms of my expectation that Dzogchen, touted as a fast path to enlightenment, would produce all sorts of wonderful spiritual experiences that would reassure me that I was on The Path and doing the right thing.  But I've decided that, in general, I'm not the kind of person who has extraordinary experiences, but I am a sensible, grounded person, able to be somewhat helpful to others.  Whether this is a rationalization for my inability to practice in a way that produces "spiritual" experiences, or whether it's the truth, I don't know.  Again a concept that is useful in some ways, but which I had better not got too attached to…..

On the other hand, since my usual state is to be lost in my thoughts and reactions to external situations, samsara, these occasional moments of simply being calmly here and now are rather extraordinary, extra-ordinary, outside or beyond the ordinary.

I'm seeing my current spiritual practice, then, as following these two main paths.  Usually I sit for 20 minutes or so each day to do eyes closed, vipassana-type meditation, and sometimes when doing this I learn something new about the nature of my mind.  Usually it's just a calming, restful period of time.  As to its long-term "purification" effects, I'm not sure, I hope that's what's happening, as Shinzen believes.  The Dzogchen practice of turning the mind inward, on the other hand, I find useful primarily in the midst of ordinary life.

Although it would probably be a mistake to totally equate them, I find this Dzogchen turning inward practice ("resting in the nature of mind" or "rigpa") to be like Gurdjieffian self-remembering practice.  In both cases I deliberately use my attention and intention to stop being caught up in the ongoing, unceasing story of reactions of my mind and come to the present.  As I've written elsewhere, when I first began doing this Gurdjieffian practice, for many years the immediate effect was a feeling of not only being here-and-now but of being much more alive, much more in contact with my environment and with myself.  Now it seldom seems that special, it's just here-and-now, but that's still quite good!

Okay, this is all very nice, but I must remember that the primary point is learning to be in the present, here-and-now, accurately perceiving what's happening outside and inside, rather than coming up with more and more clever sets of words and concepts about what's going on!

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I knew this to be true from modern psychological studies.  Our common sense model is that perception is accurate, seeing, e.g., is like taking a picture with a camera, whatever is actually in front of your eyes registers on the film, and we think a picture never lies.  "Seeing is believing."  Of course with modern digital cameras and software to edit photos, we now know a finished photo may be very different from what was actually in front of the camera.  Similarly psychological research in the last century has shown over and over that perception is seldom a simple registration of what's actually there, it's much more a form of high-speed (you think it's instant), automatized thinking, a construction that's a guess as to what's there.  But presented as an obviously real perception, with no "best guess" label attached.  For us digital types, it's better to see the eyes, e.g., as a digital camera and there's Photoshop type processing automatically going on before we perceive the picture.  How this biological Photoshop alters the picture has a lot to do with our emotions, our personality, and our cultural conditioning.  Believing is seeing, or at least has a lot to do with what you perceive.

I notice this once in a while in myself.  Sometimes I look out my bedroom window at night, e.g., and notice a tree in a neighbor's yard is underlit by a floodlight, it's very pretty.  Except as I look more closely I realize I'm seeing a patch of partly lit night sky through the trees, not an underlit tree.  I've seen this many times, but still often at first see the illusion, then suddenly it switches – my biological Photoshop changes its functioning – and it's a patch of dim night sky.  I can almost never switch it back, but next time it may happen again.

In spite of intellectual knowledge about "Believing is seeing," though, I seldom think that this is something that applies to me.  After all, I'm a scientist, I strive to perceive accurately and like to believe I'm good at that!

So I was somewhat startled, then pleasantly surprised when I had a strong personal demonstration that "believing is seeing" this morning.

Our neighbors are having their kitchen remodeled, and I looked out our living room window and noticed that a couple of workers were rolling a very heavy looking machine across the street toward the kitchen.  I wasn't quite sure what the machine was for, but I thought it was a tile cutting machine, something I know is heavy and massive.  A few minutes later I looked out our kitchen window, and could see their truck parked across the street, which I figured would give me a clue as to what kind of machine it was.  The distance was sufficient that it was somewhat difficult for me to see clearly, but I could make out a company name and, by squinting a little, underneath the company name it said "tile floors."  The figure below gives you an idea of the level of clarity I could see with from a distance.

I went and told my wife that it was now clear that our neighbors were installing a tile floor on their kitchen, and we would probably hear a fair amount of noise during the day as they cut tiles.

Imagine my surprise a few minutes later when my wife told me that our neighbors had had a hardwood floor put down yesterday, and the machine I had seen was a large floor sander!  I now went and looked at their truck from closer window and, as the figure below shows, the words below their company name clearly says "hardwood floors!"

I can't say there were any powerful emotions driving this, but what a clear example that "seeing is believing!"  I had decided a tile floor was going down, and under somewhat difficult seeing conditions, I saw my proof in the words on the side of the truck.  I think this is especially amazing, as the word "hardwood" is twice as long as the word "tile" would be.

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Small Song of Small Realization?

Ordinary samsara.

A moments stimulus, sixth consciousness

Fast reaction, seventh consciousness

I like, I dislike, which reminds me, which I like or dislike which reminds me….

On and on and on.

My endless story of ME, MY FEELINGS

New stimulus

Not noticed much or clearly

I'm busy with my story…..

New stimulus: added into my Story, twisted to fit,

Seventh rules sixth, believing is seeing…..

I think I'm aware, but

Just deeper into samsara, moment after moment, hour after hour.

Many brief moments through the day

A few seconds of just being here, noticing what's happening

Nothing special, just here, now

My story is interrupted, I'm calm, present

Stimulus comes along, sixth consciousness

I notice it

Perhaps think no further about it

Perhaps think just a few helpful thoughts, don’t get carried away

Radiance of rigpa?

Stopping once in a while, turning mind in

No big deal

Yet I don't add my crazies to my ongoing crazies for Big Crazies….

Less samsara in my day…..

Elaborating….

Samsara:  Buddhist term for ordinary consciousness, which is seen as a badly distorted form of consciousness.  Our perception of world and self is badly distorted by the three main driving forces of greed/attraction, aversion/rejection and ignorance (of reality and of one's true Buddha nature).

Sixth Consciousness:  Traditionally each of the main five senses is considered a kind of consciousness, and (ordinary) mind is considered the sixth kind of consciousness, a consciousness which takes the input of the senses at any one time and simply and objectively names their object and perhaps brings up some immediately relevant, objective information about them.  Right now, my sixth consciousness says "computer screen" as I look straight ahead, "coffee cup" as I look to my left, "bookcase" as I look to my right.

Seventh Consciousness: This is an almost completely conditioned, automatic elaboration of the simple perceptions of sixth consciousness into our personal "stories," our hopes, fears, etc.  So there is a feeling as I notice the computer screen in front of me of satisfaction, of pride, I'm a writer, I'm good at it, and an undercurrent of anxiety – this monitor has been acting a little flaky lately, suppose it breaks, it will be expensive to replace it…..That coffee cup, I need to take it to the kitchen and wash it, I'm so tired of washing out coffee cups, maybe it I just leave it out my wife will wash it for me, oh damn, how can I think that, I'm a lazy person, why can't I be more responsible?  Ah, the bookcase, look at all those books!  I'm so smart to read so many books, I'm happier thinking about how smart I am rather than how lazy I am…..

According to Buddhism, greatly supported by the discoveries of modern psychology, we almost never stay with simple sixth consciousness perception, automatic seventh consciousness reactions take over almost instantly and can be strong enough to effectively blot out or distort simple, objective perceptions.  I've used mild illustrations of this here, but the emotional dynamics and psychological defenses of our individual selves can have us dwelling in our "stories," our dramas, most of the time.

I like, I dislike, which reminds me, which I like or dislike which reminds me….

On and on and on.

A perception, my like or dislike, which triggers associated likes and dislikes, which triggers more, on and on and on, the original sixth consciousness perception lost in the drama.  New events, new stimuli which are strong enough to get our attention are often almost instantly distorted by the seventh consciousness to fit right into our ongoing story…..And our illusory existence, samsara, continues and builds…..

Many brief moments: In Dzogchen turning the mind inward to notice what's there, in Gurdjieffian terms self-observation or self-remembering.  Succinctly expressed in Buddhism as samsara is the mind turned outward, lost in its projections.  Enlightenment is mind turned inward, directly seeing its own true nature.  Rigpa is one of the names for the true nature of our minds, our Buddha nature.

So I'm in samsara, then I turn mind inward for a moment.  A sensory event, a stimulus comes along then and it's just sixth consciousness perception, it's just a bookcase, no activation of my personal "story" about how wonderful I am, how much I know.  I glance at the bookcase again, notice a book sticking out, close to falling off the shelf, I'll push it in next time I go over that way, back to the moment.  Here's my mind, here, now, nothing "special" about it, just calmly here – but that's pretty special compared to the usual ongoing, self-stimulating drama of ME!

Radiance of rigpa:  It's not that the goal of Buddhism is to stay forever in a state of mind that's absolutely calm, where nothing ever happens.  That's not our nature.  Our nature of mind, our rigpa, moves, thinks, creates, like the sun radiating light and heat.  But to have it stay close to sixth consciousness perception, not get twisted into my story…..that's something!

I called this a small song of small realization, question mark.  No big deal, yet very fundamental.  Coming back to the moment every once in a while during my day, I don't get so carried away, I don't have fantasy building on fantasy, amplifying samsara.  Perhaps not a big deal insight, but I like it….

So once again:

Small Song of Small Realization?

Ordinary samsara.

A moments stimulus, sixth consciousness

Fast reaction, seventh consciousness

I like, I dislike, which reminds me, which I like or dislike which reminds me….

On and on and on.

My endless story of ME, MY FEELINGS

New stimulus

Not noticed much or clearly

I'm busy with my story…..

New stimulus: added into my Story, twisted to fit,

Seventh rules sixth, believing is seeing…..

I think I'm aware, but

Just deeper into samsara, moment after moment, hour after hour.

Many brief moments through the day

A few seconds of just being here, noticing what's happening

Nothing special, just here, now

My story is interrupted, I'm calm, present

Stimulus comes along, sixth consciousness

I notice it

Perhaps think no further about it

Perhaps think just a few helpful thoughts, don’t get carried away

Radiance of rigpa?

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The first level, what we might call the level of not particularly dealing with an emotion, is the ordinary level of simply and automatically identifying with the emotion as it occurs.  This is the automatization of ordinary consciousness.  The emotion then mobilizes most or all of your consciousness to fit in with it, brings up related material like memories and similar emotions, and creates a "story" centered around the emotion that can take you far from reality, and that can goad you into doing things which will create a lot of karma, which you will later regret.  An emotional "storm" may go on for minutes or hours after the original stimulus arousing it has ended.

The next level of dealing with emotions would be trying to detect them as they happen but then keep them from rising to a strong level, where they take you over.  This could be done by concentrating on something else, by deliberately pushing the emotion down, by getting involved in some other activity to take your awareness energy away from the emotions.  This is useful if it keeps you from acting on emotions in a way which would get you into trouble or create bad karma, and/or reinforcing particular emotional triggers and reactions.

The next level of dealing with emotions, which I have heard Sogyal Rinpoche  stress the last couple of years, is when you realize that emotions are rising, direct your attention to the qualities, the nature of the emotion itself, rather than to the object the emotion has been aroused by.  If a person makes you angry, for example, stop focusing on that person, and try to note the qualities of anger itself.  From my own experience with Gurdjieff type work, I would say that means paying a lot of attention to body sensations, and, from Shinzen Young's vipassana work, paying attention to the internal talk or internal imagery that's associated with the emotion.  The big emphasis is on the ongoing, moment-by-moment qualities of the emotion, not the object of the emotion.  If Bob Smith, e.g., says something that gets me angry and I let the anger take me over, I will be focused on my negative perceptions and on that bastard Bob Smith, the anger will continue to run in an automatic way, etc.  Focusing on the qualities of the emotion itself will keep the story from developing and take the wind out of the sails of the emotion.

The highest level, what I think of as the Dzogchen level, will involve looking inward to try to perceive "who" is feeling the emotion.  This strikes me as the ultimate way of transcending the emotion, and I have some experiential feel what it is like, although it's difficult to describe.

All of these ways of dealing with emotion strike me as useful, at a minimal level as tending to inhibit the expression of negative emotions which will probably generate negative karma, reactive consequences, and, at a deeper level, of cutting down identification with emotions and stories that are associated with various emotions.

What I find missing from Buddhist approaches, as I have been exposed to them to date, is Gurdjieff's idea of emotional intelligence.  Gurdjieff taught that emotions, properly trained, are forms of intelligence.  They alert you to possible realities in your ongoing situation that may require your attention and action.  An intelligent, well functioning emotion then would grab your attention with its quality and power, you would then look more closely at various aspects of reality to see if there is something you need to do.  What you need to do might be take some external action or investigate some specific aspect of the workings of your mind.  Having alerted you, the emotion quickly dies away.  That is intelligent emotions, according to Gurdjieff, are very brief, rather than starting stories which go on for minutes or hours after the event that stimulated them.

I don't think I've been exposed to teachings in a Buddhist framework which talk about making emotions more intelligent.  Rather the general attitude that I think has been there is that emotions are a source of suffering, they drive our samsaric existence, and so we want to disempower these motions.   Compassion is the big exception, as the development of it is an essential part of enlightenment.

As usual, I qualify the above thoughts my noting that I'm not a Buddhist scholar, so I'm sure there are some forms of Buddhism that are different from what I've said above.

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My style of learning is generally to think about things, talk about them with others, get their feedback on what they think of my ideas, hear what their understanding is, etc.  It's probably a very Western way, as compared to that of many traditional cultures where you try to learn what the Masters have to say and put it into practice, with what often seems to me (I may be prejudiced here) an emphasis on rote learning rather than thinking about.

Recently some of us older students or Rinpoche have finally started having an email discussion about some aspects of what "enlightenment" or spiritual progress is from the Buddhist perspective and our own perspectives, and I thought it might be useful to share some of my comments on this here.  Perhaps this is an example of what a modern, Western, transpersonal psychologist thinks.

The discussion started around an idea in Buddhist teachings that our unenlightened, ordinary state involves being too much lost in infinite complexities of deluded, samsaric existence.  As a beautiful translation of a traditional Tibetan text by Sogyal Rinpoche puts it,

Ho!  Mesmerized by the sheer varieties of perception,

Which are like the reflections of the moon in water,

Beings wander endlessly astray in samsara's vicious cycle…..

My wife Judy noted that a reason for complexity is

>Why do we want to see what's beyond the "sheer variety"?  For me anyway, it's to answer those old questions – Where do we come from?  What's REALLY going on here?  How is it that I exist?<

I'm completely with her (makes for a good marriage).  Yes, I don't want me or other people to suffer, and clearly we can get distracted by all that complexity so we don't learn the Buddhist procedures that would reduce our suffering, but that's not enough for me.  I'm curious!  And I think my curiosity, my interest in knowing more, is one of my best features.

At my current level of (mis?)understanding, I know that many Buddhist practices will reduce my suffering, make me more effective at helping others, and also allow me much more innate contentment:  just happy being, not needing constant entertainment and distraction.  There's also, I think, a promise in the teachings that if I ever got really really enlightened I would, like the Buddha, know everything, like he supposedly did.  I know for sure the techniques and practices help a lot here-and-now, but I don't really know about this way-down-the-road promise.  I don't actively deny the possibility, but I put it on "hold," I know what results in ordinary life are, I don't know about this.

So I hope to keep up a sensible level – respect the relative, as ordinary existence is called – of interest in and curiosity about, and attempts to improve the ordinary, the relative, but hopefully my meditations and other practices keep me reminded that this isn't the absolute, the highest possible, stay open to the …. I was going to say "the More," but this sounds greedy, I don't know how to express the whatever is is/isn’t. But maybe some of you know what I mean.

Making this more concrete: the classic Buddhist teaching example of how our perception is distorted is about walking down a jungle path at twilight and mistaking a rope lying beside the path for a deadly snake.  It's a great illustration of how consciousness is constructed, biased, not just a high fidelity perception of what's really there.  The lesson, for me at least, being don't automatically take everything you see and experience as necessarily true, it may be a little or a lot illusory and distorted.  Learn to experience more of what's called the 6th consciousness, simple sensory perception, not be always stuck in 7th consciousness, the automatic, biased elaborations and story that substitute almost instantly for actual perceptions..

On the other hand, as a being incarnated in a vulnerable physical body, the world, especially hot places like India, is full of dangerous things like snakes.  I'm likely to survive much longer if my automatic processes (I think of this one as an ancient program hardwired into the human brain, human karma) scream "Snake, stop moving forward, jump back!!!," I stop, then I'll be happy to be embarrassed afterwards for being mistaken.  Embarrassment is much lighter suffering than snake bite and dead…..

Again, just my personal opinion, but Buddhist teachings in general often seem to put too much emphasis on getting on to the Absolute compared to practical teachings for getting along better in the Relative.  Not that there isn't a lot of practical advice in Buddhism as I know it, but the balance doesn't seem right to me.

Some of my friends, continuing our discussion, seemed to be a little embarrassed at wondering/speculating what more enlightenment would be like.  I understand the need for knowing what various teaching say if you're going to practice Buddhism, but I worry that too much humility, too much "Just quote what the Buddha or one of the enlightened Masters said" is not adaptive in our culture, so I wanted to encourage people to relax and think.  Thus:

Can I encourage you, my friends, to stop apologizing for thinking about the teachings and their application to life?  There is no problem with thinking, with "risings" per se, as I understand it (oh, oh, that's coming close to an apology….), it's the inappropriate and habitual attachments to thoughts that leads to problems.  I've heard Sogyal Rinpoche teach that, and it's certainly my own best understanding to date.  It's not thoughts (or feelings) that are a problem, it's the following after them, the way they automatically carry us away into our fantasies and stories.

When I/we discuss our understandings of the teachings, I try to remember that we are like first graders having a discussion about what you will learn in college or graduate school.  We probably have some little but correct  understandings, but may be way off on others.  So, in our Western intellectual culture at least, do we beat little kids when they think and talk about things they don't understand?

I know, there are some very repressive parents and sub-cultures that do, but I never did.  If I spoke up at all to kids I tried to encourage them to learn more things and think things through – and be prepared to learn more and think more as time went on, rather than think they had The Final Answer right now.

Gosh, as I write that I think I must have been an ideal parent—and I'm sure I was never that good, but that was my guiding ideal.  Same thing with students in my undergraduate and graduate classes nowadays – if they can repeat the "facts" I've taught them correctly, that's good, but if that's all they do, I'm sad.  I'm delighted when they think about and extend what they've been taught, when they don't childishly stay in a "They are children, I am the grown up who must be right" stance, but think about, explore things beyond my initial teaching and stimulation.

One of the things that really attracted me to the Buddha as a teacher is his Sutta to the Kalamas.  Here's a translation I have:

-Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.

-Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.

-Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumored by many.

-Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.

-Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.

-But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

My personal understanding of this, fueled by ego and cultural conditioning, of course, as well as, hopefully, by common sense and genuine understanding, is don't freeze your ideas and ideals at any point, keep open to the moment, to learning.

But there are many strains of Buddhism, and while I'm not a Buddhist scholar, I've gotten the impression in looking at some teachings that this sutta has been interpreted (arising in much more authoritarian cultures than ours?) as think until you reach the same conclusion the Buddha is supposed to have reached about things, and then you can or should stop thinking…..Sadly this approach can reinforce the tribal mentality that is part of being human, so we feel threatened by people who don't fully conform to the approved interpretation and reject them (Me?  Now?  Sorry, I'm a thinker, even thought I try not to get too attached by my thoughts).

So in our culture, at least in my idealized understanding of it, we encourage our kids to think.  So keep thinking, kids, and don't apologize for it!  Share your thinking, and the thoughts you get from us other kids may help you correct misunderstandings or understand better.  And don't be mean to yourself or others because they are thinking!

And maybe some day when we're in graduate school and know so much much more, we'll look back fondly on our little kids selves….."They had some weird ideas, but they were good kids, had their hearts in the right places, and learned a lot…."

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Let's start with that word "miracle."  The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary's first definition is:

miracle /0ˈmɪrək(ə)l/ noun & verb. ME.

[ORIGIN Old French & Modern French from Latin miraculum object of wonder, from mirari, -are look at, wonder, from mirus wonderful.]

1 A marvellous event not ascribable to human or natural agency, and therefore attributed to the intervention of a supernatural agent, esp. (in Christian belief) God; spec. an act demonstrating control over nature, serving as evidence that the agent is either divine or divinely favoured.

I believe this is the way most people use the word "miracle," a supernatural agent has demonstrated His/Her/Its control over nature, and it makes no sense given what we humans understand about nature and nature's laws.

Let's consider something very simple which I think we all believe science has established beyond any reasonable doubt.  If you take two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen and heat them enough, they turn into water.  Always.

A "miracle" would then be that you repeat the above and it doesn't turn into water, as such an outcome is not ascribable to what we know on "natural agency."  If someone credits God or the gods with fixing it so no water is formed, that's the basic stuff of a "miracle."

Putting such a result into more neutral language, you have some observations, in this case a zillion of them, that two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, heated to some specified temperature, always turns into the stuff we call water.  We have also developed a conceptual system, chemistry, which makes this observation logically plausible and fits it in with a much wider collection of observations, the body of chemistry.

Ideal Science and Scientists and Reality:

Now I could describe the "ideal" scientist as always curious and not overly attached to any concepts, and to some degree some scientists tend to be like that (I hope I'm that way).  But coming back to ordinary human reality, we all tend to get attached to things that work practically and to things that make sense and so make us feel smart.  Who doesn't like to feel that they are smart, understand how the world works, and can control it at least fairly well?

So probably most actual human scientists, faced with the observation of no water formed when there should have been water formed, jump to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the experiment, not that what they believe are basic laws of chemistry were violated, that there was a "miracle."  And since we humans do make mistakes, it's not a bad first conclusion, we could indeed have screwed up the experiment.

So we do the experiment over and over and the "miraculous outcome" keeps happening, no water, even though we've carefully examined our apparatus, etc.

Well a lot of scientist will simply dismiss the anomalous results at this point rather than question their knowledge: it still must be some error even if they can't figure out what that error is yet.  We will figure it out some day, of course.  This someday belief, applied to being unable to come up with a convincing physical explanation for something, is what philosophers long ago named "promissory materialism."  Someday we will understand this and everything else in proper material terms.  The problem is that this is not science, this is "faith," in the worst connotation of "faith."  A principal requirement for something to be a scientific theory, according to many philosophers of science, is that a theory must be capable of being disproven.  Well you can never prove that X won't be proven in the terms you prefer – chemistry, God, devils, little green UFOs, what have you – someday.

A practical example of this is the evidence for ESP.  Hundreds and hundreds of experiments show ESP manifesting, so the pseudo-skeptics then claim that ESP really means Error Some Place rather than Extrasensory Perception.

A very few scientists will find the failure of an experiment to conform to what we think are the laws to be really exciting and want to research it – like us parapsychologists.  After all, any parapsychology experiment comes down to setting up a situation where, given what we think we know about the physical world, nothing can happen.  Put two people in isolated rooms miles apart, have one look at a randomized deck of cards every minute while the person in the other writes down what she thinks the card is each time.  Given all we know about the physical world, you'll get chance level scores, say 50% correct if the task is to guess red or black with ordinary playing cards.  Then some people average more than that, say 53%, long enough to be statistically significant, and we have evidence for ESP.  Yes, 50% of the time the receiving person is just guessing, but every once in a while they know what the correct card is…..very interesting.

Now if you call this a "miracle" in the sense of "A marvellous event not ascribable to human or natural agency, and therefore attributed to the intervention of a supernatural agent," you've brought your attempts to understand what's happening to an end, you've defined it as something beyond human understanding, so what's the point of trying?  And by not trying to understand further, you don't understand further….

But if you don't use that word "miracle," with it's implication that we humans can't understand, but describe it as an anomalous event, simply something that doesn't make sense in terms of what we already know, that doesn't say it didn't happen, and it invites us to try to expand our understanding.  So for a few scientists like me, "miracles" are an incentive to look deeper and further.  Indeed things that we're sure happen but don't make sense in terms of conventional knowledge might mean an error some place, but might very well mean the next major breakthrough in science if we apply ourselves.

How Far Can We Understand?

Now it could turn out that no matter how much further and deeper we look, we never get beyond verifying that these things occur, but just won't make sense to us.  I'm willing to consider that outcome as possibility, although my preference is for it to make sense, and I am confident that, with further study, these kinds of events will indeed make a lot more sense than they do now.  Whether they will make any kind of "ultimate sense," I don't know.

But Miracles Prove My Religion is the True One!

I also have no objection to religious and spiritual people pointing to apparent miracles – paranormal phenomena in my more neutral description – as evidence that there is a reality to the spiritual.  Indeed that's the whole thrust of my "The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together" book.  Many, many people have had their spiritual and religious lives inhibited or squelched by followers of Scientism (Materialism pretending to be all of science) claiming that all spirituality is unreal, nonsense, imaginary, and who wants to be thought dumb and deluded?   The overview of evidence for the paranormal – for "miracles" if we were forced to use that terminology – that I give in the book is to support my conclusion that the followers of Scientism who have told spiritual people they are stupid are not only harming those people, they are misleading them, because real science, actually working with all the data of parapsychology, shows that humans sometimes show the kinds of qualities we would expect spiritual beings to have.  So it's reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in ones approach to life.

On the other hand, I think one of the reasons for irrational opposition to parapsychological research from religious people is that the evidence is now clear that no particular religion can claim superiority over any other because it can point to paranormal events, "miracles" among its followers.  Looking at the catalogs of these events in various religions they all have pretty much the same basic parapsychological phenomena occurring.

I personally take that as a sign that God/Spirit, whatever you want to call it, is happy to give such little boosts to people's faith as long as it's any faith that helps people become wiser and more compassionate.  I can't "prove" that incidentally, I can't point to extensive surveys that show, e.g., that "nice" religions have more paranormal events happen that "not nice" religions, this is just my personal feeling, my best guess at this early stage of our knowledge. And perhaps my bias that I may need to overcome some day.

It would be very interesting to catalog the kinds of "miracles," paranormal events reported in various spiritual traditions though.  At first glance they are all pretty much the same, but differences might be very revealing.  For example, in Tibetan Buddhism there is a tradition, based on reports of people who claim to have witnessed this, of very spiritually advanced people passing into "rainbow body" when they die.  These are people who ask that their body be undisturbed, in a closed room, after they die.  Observers report seeing all sorts of rainbow like light leaking out of the room, and when it is opened at the end of the traditional seven days there is no body left in the room except for fingernails, hair, and clothing.  Or in some cases a very shrunken body.  I've never heard of anything similar in other traditions.

Do Miracles Destroy Science?

Coming back to the central issue, yes, I think considering any events as "miracles" does tend to destroy science.  There's little point in doing science if some supernatural being suddenly and inexplicably changes the way the world works.  My belief – can't prove it, but it's what I operate from – is that Spirit or God or whatever is basically benign and won't sabotage our intelligence this way.  But in terms of the way most scientists feel, yes, the possibility of supernatural beings arbitrarily changing reality does gut science.  A simple way to not worry about that is to deny all spiritual reality…..No non-physical, "supernatural" (another word that causes a lot of trouble), then nobody to mess up our experiments and undermine the advance of our knowledge.  No "miracles," no worry.

Lots of interesting psychological questions developing from all this speculation, no time to go into it now….

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Mindfulness

Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 5, Part 1 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: Any kind of habit you can set up at the early learning stages of becoming more mindful is a good habit. Do watch for the point where it starts to become just a stimulus to trigger off the fantasy of being mindful, though, instead of actually doing it.

I don’t know how many times I remembered that I wanted to come to the present and be mindful, and so I thought about it, and fantasized about it, but I didn’t make the shift of attention to notice what was actually happening now. I got caught up in my thoughts about the now instead.

Ouspensky recommends changing “alarm clocks” when an alarm clock gets like that. Find something different that will trigger you off. So, for instance, you could set up a kind of conditioned response that every time you touch a doorknob, you’ll come to the present; and that might work for hours, days, maybe even weeks. But when you find yourself having fantasies about being mindful when you take a doorknob in your hand, it’s time to drop it because we don’t need to learn how to condition ourselves further. We’re already very good at that!

Now since I feel like you’re all being very mindful, I’m going to do a little review here at a conceptual level, but I ask that you try to keep some touch with the present while I get intellectual this way. You can do it by keeping some attention in your arms and legs; by looking around some, rather than staring fixedly at any one thing for too long a time; by noticing the quality of sounds as well as understanding the content of the particular words I’m saying; and in each of your individual cases, there may be some other particular kinds of sensations or actions which will help you be mindful, too. Experiment. What works for you?

The little sheet I’ve passed out – everybody got one? – has four drawings on it. If we were going to look at these, we’d say the order is upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right. I’m just going to review these. You’ve seen the first three before, and then I’ve added a new one that I created a couple of days ago when I sat down to do a formal meditation session.

My meditation went “poorly.” Instead of having any luck at all coming to the present, the goal of my meditation, I kept having the idea for this diagram that would help you guys understand something. So I decided that maybe my higher self is telling me the good outcome of this meditation will be a diagram. Or maybe it was just an excuse for not being able to concentrate….

The upper left corner diagram [figures presented separately here] – I told you this is my representation of one of the ways Shinzen Young talks about ordinary consciousness, or living in samsara, living in a state of illusion. You’ll remember I said that while some spiritual schools take an extreme position that the world really is an illusion, what the emphasis really is in most spiritual schools, as far as I can tell, is not that the world is illusory, unreal – that’s a metaphysical position, you can believe what you’d like to on that, but be careful about stepping out in front of cars! – but that the point is that we distort our perceptions of the world and ourselves so much that we effectively live in an illusion.

So on the left hand side here, you’ve got primary simple perception. Right now, for example, it’s bright. It’s warm. It’s quiet. You feel the chair pressing up against your butt and your back – very simple, primary sorts of things. Maybe the movement of your clothes against your skin as you move, the sensation of breathing – simple, primary sorts of things. What the Tibetans call Sixth Consciousness.

But we almost never spend much time in focusing on those simple, primary perceptions. When we do Vipassana meditation, we do something like that. But that’s not our ordinary way at all. Instead, we get into all sorts of processing of the perceptions that involves, on the one hand, elaboration of them into various thoughts and feelings and memories and hopes and fears and plans; and on the other hand, abstraction – that, insofar as you maintain some kind of contact with the world around you, it’s with higher level abstractions about the world where you “perceive” – quote, unquote around perceive – that we’re sitting here in a classroom. Classroom is an abstraction. It doesn’t begin to take in the details of this actual particular classroom at this particular point in time.

So we have an enormous amount of automatic processing. Generally, we have no control over whether it’s going to happen or not. We’ve been conditioned to have it happen. It happens. It runs automatically. And this automated process is working over your primary simple perceptions in both abstracting them and elaborating them.

One analogy we might use is that you’re the CEO of a major manufacturing company. You get some reports passed up to you, but you don’t keep track of every little widget, and where it is on the production line, and whether shipping has got so many boxed up and all that. You look at more abstract kinds of things like profits over the past month, or something like that. You have hopes and fears about growing the company, or avoiding a downturn. You don’t stay very much with the manifold actual details. That’s not a terribly good example, but it will do.

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Dear Shinzen,

Here's an opening/interesting thought.  I've always cited the Sutta to the Kalamas (a translation I use is below for convenience) as showing that the Buddha was basically scientific in his attitude.  Don't take anything on Authority or apparent logic, keep testing it against experience, only adopt it (subject to change later if the right data comes along) if the ideas/concepts keep agreeing with reality/experience.  It's my idea of how basic science is done, data first, always, theory second.

Mentioned it on one of my discussion lists a couple of days ago, with the addendum that while lip service was paid to it, Buddhism as I had come across it, often didn't seem to honor it.  The actual rule seemed to be think about something until you come to the same conclusions the Buddha is reputed to have come to, then you can stop thinking.  Since the Buddha knew everything, now you are right.  Authority Forever!!!

A Buddhist scholar on the list complimented me on my attitude, it was certainly me, but perhaps I had it wrong, perhaps Gautama Buddha's actual intention, and/or the intention of later Buddhists, might indeed have been to get you thinking only until you agreed with the Buddha.  Thus your faith was strengthened, etc.  Wow!  The Buddha doing a little mind fucking, even if for my and everybody's good?  Well maybe…..I did tell my kids about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, with the best of intentions and it worked out pretty well…..

So my mind is more open, but not comfortable, it's a slippery slope misleading people for their own good…..I generally don't want to start down that slope at all since it's so tricky……And absolute honesty is essential to doing real science…..

I touched on this some in an interview with Vince Horne of the Buddhist Geeks program last week.  Vipassana, I opined (following your ideas), is a great invention, it's a microscope you can use to discover the fine and otherwise implicit structure of your own mind, then maybe change it intelligently.  But if you get a microscope, you don't just wave it around at random, you may be given certain slides (and not others) to look at, and those slides have been prepared in certain ways, selecting materials, stains, etc.  Nothing wrong with this tool as long as you realize you're using it within certain limits and you constantly seek to understand these limits and how they might slant your observations.  If you forget these limits and think you're seeing Unlimited Truth, though, you may get quite deluded….

Any thoughts?

Charley, who might be a little less deluded because he now knows another way in which he might be deluded about being deluded…..     

Gautama Buddha's Sutta to the Kalamas

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.

Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.

Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumored by many.

Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.

Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.

But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

(from Gates, 1989).

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Mindfulness

Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 13 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I was thinking about something. I guess it actually ties in all the stuff we’ve been talking about in states of being, and I have an interesting problem along these lines. I remember you mentioned that when you started reading Gurdjieff, that you had a process of waking up that was brief, and then afterwards you went around talking about it for a long time, but you weren’t really awake.

CTT: That’s right.

Student: I had something like that, I guess. I mean, I’ve been having little sort of mini-satoris recently, but in the morning, on Saturday, the very early morning – I had a very strong sort of mystical union experience. And afterwards, I’m now feeling as though I should be able to constantly involve everything within my self-concept and feel at peace with it. I realize that the expectation is overlapping that of my actual experience, and so it’s causing some sort of dissonance.

CTT: I think the Tibetan Buddhists have a nice attitude toward this. They say about all experiences – whether they’re wonderful, mystical experiences or not – they’re just experiences. The Tibetan term for these nice experiences is nyams. If they happen and they’re nice, that’s nice. Now get on with the real work of whatever it is we’re doing in life.

And that’s a way of advising non-attachment to particular experiences. I think I warned you when I first talked to you about sensing, looking, and listening – if I didn’t, I should have – that sometimes, by the time you find your arms and legs and then begin sensing, looking, and listening, sometimes it’s going to be very nice. You’re really going to feel like, “Wow, I’m here.”

That’s great — but don’t hold onto it. Don’t hold onto it in the sense of, “From now on, when you do the procedure, you want to recreate that particular feeling.” Because then you’re no longer opening yourself to the now, while based in your body. You’re trying to recreate a particular feeling. Getting caught up in trying to recreate particular feelings is where we’re stuck in the first place.

We’re going around trying to make things nice all the time, and a lot of that is done by basically cutting ourselves off from actual reality and filling it in with fantasy of one sort or another. Like making our vision of the whole world appear smooth, even though really there’s only a little section in the center of our vision that we see in any detail. We need to not do that, okay?

Student: It’s been my experience, though, that –

CTT: Oh, and if you catch yourself doing it, that’s all right. Just go back to sensing, looking, and listening. Guilt is optional.

(Laughter)

I’m sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to get that in.

Student: I mean, I can see the value in not holding onto experiences. But at the same time, one of the things we’re here to study is peak experiences. And it’s been my experience that after a peak experience, you learn more from that experience in retrospect by reliving it. So how do you hold onto the fruits of the experience and get more out of reflecting on this experience without holding onto the experience?

CTT: You experiment. You experiment and find out what works for you. Okay? I mean, you want to avoid the extreme on the one hand of, “My precious experience. No one must question my precious experience.…” – I’m grasping my ring.

(Laughter)

The Gollum complex is coming out! My precious!

[reference to character Gollum in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series]

(Laughter)

You don’t want to grab like that and put so much sacredness and depth on it that basically everything that might threaten it in any way becomes the enemy. Okay? That’s way in the wrong direction. Nor, on the other hand, do you want to just forget it.

So while the Tibetan approach of regarding it as “just experience” is a way of not getting overly attached, you do have a chance to learn from it. And I say a chance, because there will be some unusual experiences that you’ll have, and they’ll really clarify things for you. They’ll move you around a little in life where you’ll be able to see things in a different way from that point on. And there will be other unusual experiences you have where probably the main thing you learn from it is, “Gosh, it’s strange. I don’t know what the hell that meant!”

So you experiment in between somewhere of how to learn from an experience without glomming onto it too much. And it is very individual how you do that.

So for example, I find – and some people find – there’s some experiences where you don’t want to tell people about it because something is still happening as a result of that experience. If you tell people about it, you kind of use up the energy and end the process prematurely.

But then there may be a time when it’s fine. You can talk about the process. It’s done. And others where you don’t need to hold things like that in the first place, and others where you really need to share it because you need other people’s perspectives on it to help you work with it more effectively. It’s very individual.

A very good dissertation topic for someone would be to start making a wide scale collection of how do people hold sacred experiences in ways that let them continue to work their magic, and how do they do it in ways that screw up. Ways to try and ways that you should generally avoid.

I love suggesting dissertation topics.

(Laughter)

Like you guys don’t have enough to do!

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I found this fascinating, as I see "personality" – we'll define it in a minute – as a primary user of our psychological and spiritual energies, and a shaper of our perceptions, thoughts and feelings.  My own special area in graduate school half a century ago was called Personality.  What is this "personality?"  There are many definitions, but I think we can stay with the common sense idea, namely "The assemblage of qualities or characteristics which makes a person a distinctive individual; the (esp. notable or appealing) distinctive character of a person." (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)  Clearly one could have personality characteristics that make life generally easier for you and others, such as being friendly, helpful, courteous (my old Boy Scout oath is coming back to me!) or habitual personality characteristics that create suffering for you and others, such as being temperamental, moody, unpredictable, aggressive, etc.  I would call the suffering that results from these kinds of personality characteristics as "unnecessary" or "useless," since if you didn't exhibit them life would flow more smoothly.  We all know people whose personality, whose habits of perceiving, thinking, feeling and expression create a lot of trouble in their lives.

The insights of Gautama Buddha (insofar as I understand them) were at a more basic level than personality, though.  Liberation from unnecessary suffering comes from learning to observe three basic, fundamental forces controlling us, namely Attraction, Aversion, and Ignorance.  I agree.  From my personal observations, as well as scientific and scholarly knowledge, these are fundamental driving us.  "Personality," by contrast, is a more emergent level of these forces, it's a systems emergent.  (A systems emergent can sometimes be seen as an obvious result of combining more basic factors, but sometimes it's a complex emergent, what emerges has properties that don't obviously follow from the components – this gets complex and we won't follow this further here.)  By analogy, personality is like knowing how to use Word, the word processing program I'm using right now to express myself, but underneath is a more basic programming language running the computer, MS-DOS, and underneath that is a binary programming language actually running the computer.  These more basic languages are normally completely invisible to me.  Word is taking over my screen/consciousness.  Personality normally grabs up all our consciousness and makes it difficult to see more fundamental processes underneath…..

Now all my life I've been curious about how the way my mind and emotions work, and I had made a zillion miscellaneous observations and theories about it.  But, as I could see in retrospect, I was caught up practically all the time in the systems emergent, my personality, which in turn affected the kinds of observations I was likely to make and the way I would think about them.

Discovering back in the 70s that I was a type Seven on the Enneagram of Personality (you can find lots about this system on the web or in Helen Palmer's books) was an incredible shock and liberation.  A friend (another Seven) described psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo's psychologized enneagram system to me and when he got to type Seven it all resonated.  Of course!  This was the pattern that bound all those miscellaneous observations together!  And this pattern had a "taste" to it, it was something I could learn to sense in operation and, eventually, exercise some control over.  Years of self-observation and other work helped me work toward the particular virtue for type Sevens, the virtue of Sobriety, and I finally felt I had developed a fair amount of it.  I've reached a point in life where I know I'm still basically a Seven, but that's more a style now than an automated compulsion, and I can, when needed, put it aside.

Is it any coincidence that before discovering my personality type I was lousy at attempting "meditation?"  Just speculating here, I don't have enough data to push the idea, but it may well be that enough of my attention became liberated from compulsive Sevenish patterns that now I could observe myself at that more fundamental level of sensation and feeling, and more clearly see the basic Buddhist forces of Attraction, Aversion and Ignorance……

I'm cautious about sweeping generalizations, but there must be at least some other people like me who would really benefit from working at the personality level first, then be able to go on to the more fundamental forces level…..One of the jobs of the field of Transpersonal Psychology, as I envision it, is to learn to tell when, e.g., a person would be better off working at the personality level than at a classical meditation level.

In the bits of Buddhism I've been exposed to – Sogyal Rinpoche, Tsoknye Rinpoche, Shinzen Young primarily, and assorted vipassana teachers – I haven't seen any real grappling with this personality issue.  But then I'm learning in speaking and writing to always qualify anything I say about Buddhism as just my limited exposure and take on it,  as somewhere and somewhen there will be some "Buddhists" who do the opposite or something different….   

Incidentally I appreciate the wisdom of Buddhism in ignoring and subrating personality as a strategy for not being so caught up in our personality, our "story," but we shouldn't confuse learning strategies and realities…..

So an interesting direction to go in…..

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I’m not good at math, but sometimes I think some psychological truths can be expressed nicely as simple equations.  A prime example that inspired me this way was Shinzen Young’s equation

S = P * R

Suffering, S, what you experience, is a product of P, the actual physical intensity of a pain multiplied by R, your psychological resistance to this kind of experience.  It shows how with a highly resistant attitude, even a little physical (or emotional) pain can produce enormous suffering, whereas with an open, equanimous meditative attitude (which can be learned), pain can not only be no greater than it’s actual physical value, if R is less than one it can even be reduced.  At the extreme, meditative equanimity can be such that even though you’re in great physical pain, your suffering is tiny or non-existent.  I know this works for me, at least for low to moderate levels of physical pain – I don’t really want to test the relationship with high levels of physical pain if I can avoid it, thank you….   

I’ve written more about this in an earlier blog post (“Pain versus Suffering,” July 27, 2009) and Shinzen’s recent book discusses the theory and practice in detail (Young, Shinzen, 2009, Break Through Pain: A Step-by-Step Mindfulness Meditation Program for Transforming Chronic and Acute Pain. Boulder, CO: Sounds True).

On a recent Dzogchen retreat with Tsoknyi Rinpoche, I came up with the following.  This clarifies some things about the Buddhist idea that we live in “illusion,” samsara for me, perhaps it will for some others.   So, starting with the assumptions I make:

Assumption # 1:  Western psychotherapy tends to deal mainly with maladaptive, complex psychological structures.  Some are successfully dealt with in therapy, others are hard to deal with because the component parts from which they are built are hard to discern and so deal with effectively.  A particular flavor of emotion, e.g., may actually hide several sub-flavors, depression hiding covert anger, as one example.

Assumption # 2:  Classical Buddhist meditation tends to deal mainly with very basic, more “micro” processes that complex, psychological processes are built from, and, by progressively freeing one from attachment, aversion and ignorance (“purification”), tends to reduce or dissolve the suffering caused by complex psychological processes.

Assumption # 3: It is useful at times to talk about specific items/processes of ongoing experience, even though flow and morphing can also connect in causal ways what might be separated out as relatively discrete events.

So, my math-like formulation:

Let T = Tangledness, the degree to which specific items/processes of experience combine with, interact with other items/processes of experience.  Rough synonyms would be viscosity, density, charge, stickiness.

For a relatively discrete event at time 1, then,

T₁ = R₁ / f(S₁, C₁, Q₁)

where

T₁ = degree of Tangledness at time₁

R = real properties of event at time₁

C = mental clarity at time₁

S = mental Spaciousness at time₁

Q = Equanimity at time₁

Verbally, Tangledness is a function of the real properties of a particular event/process.  Strong physical or emotional pain, e.g., is more likely to cause that event to entangle with others than, say, a mild feeling of warmth, or thoughts of what kind of bread to buy at the grocery store.  There are probably important differences among individuals as to the R properties of what might appear to be identical events to an outsider.

The Tangledness of an event/process is reduced/divided to varying degrees by three variables (which I separate conceptually here, but which may be interrelated in reality), the mental/emotional/physical Spaciousness of the experiencer during the event/process, the Clarity of mental/emotional/perceptual functioning, and the experiencer’s Equanimity (Q) at that time.

If one is spacious at the time of an event, experiencing “oneself” as very large and open, “empty” in Buddhist terms, the disturbance possibilities, entanglement possibilities of an event/process are only a small part of “you,” so of less importance, and may be swept away by the continuing flow of events/processes.  This is, I believe, what Dzogchen refers to as “aimless self-liberation” when one is “resting in” “rigpa.”  Clarity and Equanimity (Q) have a similar effects, but I’m distinguishing them from Spaciousness in that there may be a more forceful, willed quality to clarity and equanimity, a deliberate focusing, calming and non-reacting rather than just resting in Spaciousness.  The distinction can be illustrated by willfully relaxing one’s muscles as you feel them beginning to tighten up in reaction to an event, e.g., or using a little “willpower” to keep perception clear, as compared to just being spacious, “empty” and open, so events/processes just flow through freely without effort on your part to make that happen.

Assumption # 4:  Now relax Assumption # 3 above and assume that most events at particular times are not fully independent on one another, but interact in ways that entangle them and produce higher and higher degrees of Tangledness in consciousness overall.  This interaction may be linear and/or non-linear and/or non-linearly emergent.  Thus the overall Tangledness (“samsaricness”) (lost in one’s internal “story”), (ΣT) of consciousness over time may be represented as a function of addition and interactiveness of individual event/process entanglements:

ΣT = f(T₁, T₂,  …   T_n)

Analogy: Picture hair balls clogging water pipes, producing turbulence, reducing flow.  The more tangled the hair balls, the less likely one can take them apart, distinguish individual hairs and pull them free, or straighten them so they don’t hook other hairs….  The more and the bigger the hair balls (karmic lumps?) the more they interact and make bigger tangles…..Bigger tangles are more likely to ensnare and tangle new experiences as they come along, etc.

Specifics needed.  For particular Ts, we need to find if the function is, e.g.,

ΣT = T_{1 +} T_{2 +} …   T_n

or, analogously with your pain and suffering equation,

ΣT = T_{1 *} T_{2 *} …   T_n

Or, a third possibility, emergents may occur.  I don’t know how to symbolize in standard math form that idea that some of the effects of the various T_ns may result in higher level emergents, qualitatively different outcomes.

Anyway, for me this is a useful and fun way of thinking about how vipassana (as Shinzen Young teaches it) and/or the spaciousness cultivated in Dzogchen (insofar as I understand it, from the teachings of lamas Sogyal Rinpoche or Tsoknyi Rinpoche and their teachers) leads to purification…..

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