HOMEGROWN BUDDHA

(Addiction: our basic existential predicament)

 

Chapter One: Our basic existential predicament

 

Chapter Two: Meditation Background

 

Chapter Three: Barebones Meditation Training

 

Chapter Four: Changing Perspectives

 

Chapter Five: Many-cause thinking

 

Chapter Six: Self-will

 

Chapter Seven: Our Patterns/Ourselves: Psychological Karma

 

Chapter Eight: Explaining Creatures

Chapter Nine: The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, The Four Noble Truths and The Eight-fold Path

Chapter Ten: A Program of Progress Not Perfection

 

Preface

 

The reader should understand that this work is not ideological in nature. I do not represent any religion, teacher, lineage, sect, denomination, school or creed. Since I do not represent any specific path, I freely express my insights in the language of my experience which does not include long lists of Sanskrit or Pali terms and does include a mysterious, non-anthropomorphic God.  I draw from the works of many teachers both ancient and modern. I personally have no teacher. In the past, a teacher may have been a spiritual necessity. How could a person living in an isolated time and place find their way without guidance, but in the present context, with the many avenues of communication available to us, guidance is no longer the rare commodity that it once was. I have been given support and direction by some of the greatest spiritual leaders of all time and for that I am eternally grateful.

 

Addiction is not only a malady in need of a remedy, but it is also our basic existential predicament

 

 “so much depends

on a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens”

 

The common wisdom in 12 step programs is that addiction is not ended with the giving up of the object of addiction. Instead, it lays dormant, waiting to strike the unprepared, the unvigilant. Worse, it is like the carnival game of Sock-a-mole. You beat down one object only to be confronted by another.  After the struggle with alcohol and drugs comes the struggle with sex; after the struggle with sex comes the struggle with material success and status; after the struggle with material success and status comes the struggle with sickness, old age and death. We all suffer. Suffering is one of the defining features of humanness. The world we live in is unpredictable and chaotic. Nothing lasts. What we hold dear, like our lives and our health, are purely transient. Much of our energy goes to trying to find ways to achieve security in this insecure world. The way we accomplish this security is fleeting since it cannot hold against the onslaught of perpetual change. Our solution to the insecure world is the development of absolutist habits and patterns. These absolutist habits and patterns are our addictions. They begin with fundamental beliefs that support our attempts at fending off chaos. These beliefs argue that if only we can hold on to these beloved objects everything will be all right. We try our hardest to cling to these fundamentalist positions, but eventually the tremendous forces contained within change take away one beloved object after another. Addiction is not only a malady in need of a remedy, but it is also our basic existential predicament.

 

Addiction can be looked at either as a disease, a disorder or a moral failing. In all three of these perspectives, addiction is not an average condition. In contrast, it is also possible to see addiction on a continuum of experiences ranging from complete freedom to complete enslavement. Using this metric approach, we can describe gradations of addiction. A little addiction can be when a father believes that his son must get A’s. He is addicted to his son’s successful academic performance. A functional addiction might be an executive who gets depressed if he can’t play golf on a weekend. All consuming addiction is the heroin addict who “boosts” merchandise from Home Depot to supply his habit.

 

The biggest barrier to seeing addiction as average is that some of the objects of attachment are culturally perceived as positive, like getting A’s, and others, like heroin, are culturally perceived as negative. The metric approach looks at the idea of addiction without getting stuck on the culturally determined positives or negatives of particular objects.  The metric approach  provides for degrees on a continuum based on a novel premise. It is not what you are clinging to, but the nature of clinging that characterizes addiction.  To be addicted is to cling. We say a person is addicted to chocolate or running. We could also say a person is addicted to having his or her own way. In this continuum view of addiction, addicts are no longer just the unlucky few with bad genes. There is no threshold of pathology that says you are either an addict or you are not! Addiction is the everyday world of average people. In this everyday world of average people, addiction can be looked at as clinging to objects in order to feel secure.

 

Clinging is the root of suffering. To understand how clinging leads to suffering requires an examination of the ideas of pain and pleasure. We cling to an object either because it feels good or because it would hurt us to stop. Missing a soap opera, to which you have a mild attachment, may be a disappointment while the loss of a spouse may be cataclysmic. Whether the objects of attachment are mundane or precious, they will not be ours forever. Sometimes these beloved objects are the things we want, but cannot have. Other times they are unpleasant states that we wish to escape. In either case, we cling to our absolutist positions and we suffer. It was the Buddha’s work to alleviate suffering and teach us how to let go. The Buddha was a spiritual trainer, teaching his followers how to over come self-will. Self-will equals doing what you like, not doing what you don’t like and ignoring everything else. The techniques of meditation or yoga, taught by the Buddha and many other spiritual trainers from almost every religious tradition, provide the path to letting go and acceptance. The path to happiness is to choose to not want what you can’t have. Once the source of suffering is seen, then it can be alleviated. This is the message expounded by the Buddha. The Buddha said shortly before his death when asked by a seeker how to tell the authentic from the false:

“Do not accept any of my words on faith,
Believing them just because I said them.
Be like an analyst buying gold, who cuts, burns,
And critically examines his product for authenticity.
Only accept what passes the test
By proving useful and beneficial in your life.”

Buddha did not invent the way to end suffering; he discovered it, as have many others both before and after him. My contention is that yoga (concentration and mindfulness training) is a gate to a better way of life. My endeavor will be to see if practicing meditation or yoga, with sincere effort, will have a transformative effect. Can the practice of meditation deliver a more serene perspective? Can a regular habit of meditation translate into a reduction of self-will? Can the simple act of sitting silently everyday encourage positive emotions like compassion? Will practice generalize into right actions, speech and works? Is suffering subject to amelioration? 

Can a the practice of Yoga help a person find themselves?  What does it mean to find yourself? The stated desire of many early recovering addicts is to find themselves. They often admit to feeling lost. The search for self identity is almost a cliché in most substance abuse treatment centers. Usually, the quest for self takes us outward into the world. Self is a cultural artifact. That is John's son. She is a doctor. They are married. He is a Christian. An addict, in that case, might have wandered off the path into the forest. Getting back on the path is finding the true self. I'm not supposed to be living in a card board box. I'm supposed to be living in a ranch-type home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The idea that so many people believe that an authentic self is the right job, the right wife, the right social network, the right religion is easy to understand. This picture of self, as the right role, is ubiquitous. What is this self we are so close to but can't seem to find? Perhaps, meditation can help us find this elusive self? Could addiction be a misunderstanding about who we really are?

 

Meditation Background

 

The practice of meditation has roots in many religious and non-religious traditions but it is most often associated with Eastern religions, in particular, Buddhism. Buddhism, in its migrations, has adapted well to indigenous cultures and traditional religions. Meditation can be looked at in at least four different ways e.g. a psycho-behavioral perspective, a traditional religious perspective, a mystical perspective and a non-conceptual perspective. Whichever perspective, meditation remains co-occurring awareness and highly concentrated focus that is the result of practice. The term awareness means to pay close attention to moment to moment experience and the term practice is used in association with meditation to denote a behavior acquired through the repetition of skillful means and effort.

 

 

THE PSYCHO-BEHAVIORAL PERSPECTIVE

 

In the West, the basic elements of meditation, concentration and mindfulness, have found a welcome home in modern psychotherapy. It has been the use of meditation techniques such as progressive relaxation, systematic desensitization and visualization by behaviorists that has placed meditation in the spotlight in psychological research. In concentrative meditation, the meditator forcefully keeps his attention on one object, such as the breath, resulting in a trance and a switching off of the ideational function that is customary to mental processing. In contrast, mindfulness meditation concentrates on the natural stream of consciousness, according to every object of mind a detached, curious openness that is a result of not taking a position on the object either pro or con. The object is just the object.

 

Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the very early proponents of the psycho-behavioral perspective of meditation including Hatha Yoga postures, suggests that increased mindfulness resulting from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight week, structured training experience, leads to an attitude of not taking thoughts to be facts, reducing the need to escape unpleasant thinking. The idea of avoiding unpleasant emotional states by self-regulating attention would be like looking at a scary monster as a passing object without making an appraisal or interpretation that engenders a fearful reaction. The use of MBSR with pre-medical and medical students suggests that overall measures of stress were reduced, including depression and anxiety, and there was an increase in compassion towards patients. Jon Kabat-Zinn found a lessening of stress levels using a variety of measures with chronic pain patients, patients with anxiety disorders and other stress-related maladies such as fibromyalgia and psoriasis. Another researcher found indications of improvement in the quality of life on several instruments resulting from MBSR training with clients suffering from a closed head injury.   

 

In Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression (MBCT), a treatment program that is based on mindfulness meditation, researchers have developed an encouraging direction for relapse prevention in formerly depressed clients. The mechanism by which relapse into depression is avoided is self-regulation of attention rather than the more traditional cognitive approach of restructuring or disputation of unhealthy beliefs. It was determined that beliefs did not change in terms of content from active depression to periods of remission. Instead, researchers identified a downward spiraling cognitive process that, once allowed to take hold, deepens depression. Using MBCT, relapse into depression could be avoided by breaking the cycle before it reaches the point of no return. MBCT reduced the re-occurrence of depression by approximately half in a study of depressive relapse. Mindfulness training has been studied in clients with a tendency towards over-generalization, which can be a component of depression. The present focusing effect of mindfulness training, including mindfulness meditation, indicated a reduction in over-generalization in formerly depressed patients.

 

Researchers found that the MBSR eight-week course, including mindfulness meditation and Hatha Yoga, led to a decrease in the worrying processes associated with depression as well as anxious symptoms, dysfunctional beliefs and need for approval. Kabat-Zinn suggests that MBSR can strengthen mental self-regulation and thus contribute to symptom reduction in Generalized Anxiety Disorder. On the other hand, some caution that the particular focus of mindfulness meditation may contribute to ideas of control as opposed to disconfirmation of catastrophic beliefs. The suggestion is, that if mindfulness is posed as an experiment in not worrying as opposed to a control technique, it will have better results.  

 

Relapse in chemical dependency is often associated with avoiding negative affect, a control technique, as opposed to facing negative affect without using mood-altering chemicals, an acceptance technique. Relapse prevention tactics that encourage thought suppression might contribute to relapse because they are basically escapist in some of the same ways as control techniques such as drug or alcohol use. Tactics that encourage avoidance may confirm that dealing with negative affect can’t be survived without using drugs or alcohol. Mindfulness based relapse prevention however allows the addict to face the unsatisfactory emotions squarely while not seeing the negative emotions as too hot to handle. Instead, the negative emotion is approached as a mental event and then the meditator returns to the breath. The inclusion of the concentrative anchor of the breath in meditation produces relaxation making it an attractive method for stress reduction while desensitizing the meditator to the idea that he or she cannot tolerate negative affect without a drink or a drug. It was noted that the awareness created by mindfulness meditation of cues that activate hidden programs that lead to relapse might make it possible to circumvent those programs before they are activated. Thus mindfulness meditation may replace automaticity with awareness in some key areas responsible for relapse. Separating the relaxation aspects of mindfulness meditation from the mindfulness aspects has been accomplished in a study of prison inmates. In a head to head comparison of progressive relaxation versus mindfulness meditation, mindfulness meditation significantly reduced stress as measured by objective testing. 

 

THE RELIGOUS PERSPECTIVE

 

When considered as a part of a religious perspective, such as in some Zen Buddhist sects, meditation becomes subject to tradition and ritual. The exact posture, hand position, type of accoutrements, chants, and meditation technique (such as in the study of koans) are passed down over the centuries from master to student. Teachers are designated in an exacting procedure prescribed by tradition. This ensures the teacher is properly vetted by his predecessor and is an accurate and reputable representative of the tradition. In Zen, there are many stories of how a master passes the bowl and robe, symbols of the transmission, to his student. The result is a lineage that dates back to the first master-student transfer when the Buddha transmitted his seal of approval to Mahakashyapa’s understanding of the way. Mahakashyapa then transmitted his bowl and robe to Ananda and on through the centuries from teacher to student until a contemporary meditation teacher can account for his or her place in the lineage of teachers. In the religious perspective, there is a right and a wrong way to meditate based on tradition. There is a right object or focus of meditation. There is a right way to sit. There is a right way to hold your hands. A Zen teacher may encourage a student to sit cross-legged, to face the wall, to place his or her hands in the shape of a triangle beneath their abdomen and to follow the breath. Meditation may be done differently depending on the phases of the moon or holidays and even types of clothing may be prescribed. Meditation becomes part of the ritual of worship in the same way that Communion is part of Christian service.

 

A MYSTICAL PERSPECTIVE

 

In a mystical perspective, meditation is a means to an end. It has been said that prayer is talking to God and that meditation is listening for the answer. The meditator might be described as communing with God or even being absorbed in God. In the mystical perspective, the meditator is becoming a perfect vessel. Since any residue left over in the cup would taint the new spiritual wine, a perfect vessel must be empty. To accomplish this, the meditator uses silence because if the body of the meditator is restless and the mind a cacophony of thought, the still-small voice of God would be drowned out in the babble. Jesus tells the rich man to hand his wealth over to the poor and follow him, to surrender his attachments in order to become an open vessel so that Jesus can fill him with love.

 

If God were communicating with a person, why would his communications be limited to human language? In a science fiction movie, after painstaking analysis, the scientists discover that the aliens were not communicating in a linear manner as was first thought. Instead, the aliens, whose intellect was vastly superior to humans, communicated in many dimensions simultaneously. Humans, with their cognitive limitations, would never be able to fully comprehend the alien message. They could only hope to understand a small portion of it. In mindfulness meditation the focus is on the whole stream of experience. If God is a mystery beyond understanding, then might not the entire stream of experience, the whole phenomenological field, be a communication from God. The idea of understanding itself comes into question. If God were beyond understanding, wouldn’t it be something like the problem with the aliens. One would never be able to fully comprehend the message, but maybe listening is good enough.

 

The use of the word God in the mystical perspective might be seen as a useful prompt orienting us towards an unborn, undying, unconditioned, omnipresent and undivided state or mode of being.  Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammad, Nirvana--all are archetypes of ultimate reality. Like fingers pointing at the moon, it is not the fingers you should be looking at. They are the images that we give utterance to when we are trying to conceive the inconceivable. They are representations that help in our struggle to know reality. If God is omnipresent and undivided, then there is nowhere that God is not. This would mean that every aspect of the material world, every person, every object is in God. Due to inherent limitations on our part, it is very hard to see the wholeness that is God all around us. The Buddha is said to have given this example when attempting to point out the problem with describing true reality. Suppose you are a blind person examining an elephant. The elephant at first appears to be like a snake because you have it by the tail. Another fellow examiner believes that the elephant is a huge, rough wall and yet another a hard, bony spike because their points of contact are the elephant’s flank and tusk. None of the examiners understand the elephant. Instead they have confused the parts for the whole. Now imagine that the elephant is infinite in size but now you can see. You cannot get far enough back from the elephant to appreciate its wholeness so you are condemned to see the elephant as tail, flank and tusk. That does not change things; you have still confused the parts for the whole. You have become so lost in the parts that you have forgotten you are dealing with a really big elephant.

"To see the World in a grain of sand,

And Heaven in a wildflower,

To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour."

William Blake

It is our way to disassemble reality into past, present and future so that it is easier to comprehend, but God is without time or space. The eternal now may be an interface between God and humanity, free from the past and undaunted by the future. In that place, fully present in Divine Reality, the lines between God and human disappear. Each momentary face is God’s countenance. The earth is God as the platform of being. Everything that is seen as mundane is holy and worthy of reverence. Each human being is God in skin. Jesus knew this and elevated love, the ultimate expression of reverence, to the upper most place in his Sermon on the Mount. To love your fellow is to love God. To protect the earth is to love God. To heal the sick is to love God. To be a peacemaker is to love God. To make dinner for your friends is to love God. In each and every action you take; love God. The reverse is also true. To commit an act of cruelty, to miss an opportunity to do service, to avert your eyes from suffering, to not resist war, to be greedy at another's expense, is to despise God.

 

THE NON-CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVE

 

In the non-conceptual perspective, the whole way of doing business that is based on conceptualizing is avoided. Normally, I impose (conceptualize) over raw experience, a low-resolution grid of concepts (language matrix) to assist me in comprehending so I can describe and manipulate (translate) my experience into an explanation for myself (a story). I can either increase the resolution and therefore the complexity of the story, resulting in an elaborate version of the experience or I can be more parsimonious and simplify the story. The more complex, the more detail (that the story has) the more accurate the representation but the less understandable and harder to communicate the information. The story meanders with excessive specificity. When the resolution is too low (too simple) the portrayal is more understandable but less accurate, more distant from the reality of the original raw experience. In either case, simple or complex, this is an attempt to capture reality, to hold it still with our words. The same reality may be represented poetically or sparingly, but no matter how reality is portrayed, it is still a representation not the the real deal. Meditation is an attempt to break free from the conceptual mind and conventional reality. It is not the abstract representation that the meditator seeks but instead it is the felt-sense of the lived experience, free of the slicing and dicing mind. It is ceremony without ideology. It is the pure taste of mint before thought or a high mass in an ancient language. It is the place where words end.

 

To say I believe in a proposition is not the same as saying I know that this proposition is true. Imagine I put a cat in a box. I can see the cat so I would say that the cat is in the box not I believe that the cat is in the box. If the lid of the box were closed, I might mistakenly say the cat is in the box but if it was suggested that there could be a false floor beneath the box, I might correct myself and say I believe that the cat is in the box. This is the difference between direct knowledge and inferred knowledge. Belief implies the existence of doubt in regards to the proposition. Along side direct and inferred knowledge there could be a third type of knowledge: constructed knowledge. Constructed knowledge is a mental creation that grows from stored impressions that are made of bits and pieces of direct experiences. The ultimate composition of the mental creation transcends, is greater than, the bits and pieces. In this case, I discover a box and hear scratching sounds. While I did not witness a cat anywhere around the box, images of the unseen cat develop in my mind's eye. Something deep inside me knows it is a cat. 

 

Intellectual knowledge, whether inferred or direct, is a very different kind of knowing than constructed knowledge. If I were to focus on an image of Jesus not as an intellectual proposition held as a belief but as a non-conceptual object of meditation, I may be able to experience a moment of transcendence. The disciples did not drop everything and follow Jesus because of the eloquence of his arguments. Jesus did not present a rational, logical and well-ordered belief system to Peter and James.  Jesus wordlessly transmitted his reality to Peter and James and they directly experienced that reality in one transcendent moment. When non-conceptual experience is the way, such as in meditation, authority is in the knowing. Knowing is between that which knows and the known. If knowing cannot be conceptualized, it cannot be canonized and therefore it cannot serve the ruler. Politically this has not set well with worldly authority which wants control visa a visa rules (canons or creeds) and rulers. Authority that does not derive from them is suspect. 

 

For example, here are three possible ways to approach spirituality. The first is through belief alone. To be a Christian, a belief in Jesus is held as a mental object. A believer must chose whose side she is on. The second approach begins with belief, but adds the component of emotion. The belief is associated with a positive emotion like love. So with the occurrence of the mental object of Jesus comes the emotional reaction of love. A devotee must not only chose whose side she's on but she must be ready to sacrifice for her side. The third possibility does not necessarily require a mental object or belief though it may include it. In this case, an attempt is made to enter a non-conceptual state by letting go of all beliefs (mental objects) and directly experiencing pure awareness without words. Words, the basic currency of any ideology, are mental objects interfering with the transcendent and eternal moment. In this case, God is a verb. It is not believing Thus. It is being Thus.

 

All of the above perspectives, psycho-behavioral, religious, mystical and non-conceptual can reside side by side. Meditation can be a way for a Christian to commune with God. It can be a solution to prevent relapse into drugs or depression. It can be a part of the ceremony in a Zen Buddhist temple or it can be a way to transcend the automaticity of the conventional mind. It is not unreasonable for a non-theist to use meditation to explore his cognitive processes or a  Christian to use it to walk in the ways of Christ. Scientists, Franciscan Monks, Buddhists, nature lovers and members of Alcoholics Anonymous use meditation. The Eleventh Step of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholic’s Anonymous recommends meditation to improve your conscious contact with God.

 

Meditation is less about achieving a goal and more about process. In other activities, we do in order to achieve an end. Meditation or yoga is designed to help a person be present. Your experiencing a moment---patting your dog, then you begin to think about the experience. From that point on you are experiencing yourself thinking about the experience of patting the dog. You are no longer present in the moment of patting the dog. Rather than being present, you have become an interpreter of the experience. You move from being in the experience to moving outside the experience. There are times when it would be a useful to set yourself outside of an experience like the proverbial fly on the wall, but being unable to be in the experience would be like going to the movies with a friend who kept up a continual commentary about the movie while you were trying to suspend disbelief in order to fully enter into the director’s vision.  From his alienated position, your friend would ruin the movie for you.

 

It might be useful to see the project of the meditator as a form of research with the subject of the research being the meditator herself. The method of research would be experimentation. An experiment entails that an observer or witness collect data without prejudice. The researcher, in the act of meditating, would see thought without being caught in thought, resulting in insights into the movements of mind. The ability to observe the self as an object of experience would be the result of the meditative practice and would increase the researcher’s understanding of mental processing. Meditation would be the tool of inner research just as blood work is the tool of outer research. While there are numerous types of meditation, it is possible to characterize all meditative techniques as having essentially the same objective e.g. the production of insight into the nature of mind. Concentration on an object such as the breath resists conventional patterns of thought by constantly coming back to the object of meditation when the mind wanders. The result of this energetic attention can produce insights into cognitive processes that may have otherwise hidden in automaticity.

 

It is easy to see that both concentrative and mindfulness meditation require focus on an object. The idea that mindfulness practice is dependant on the skillful application of concentration leads naturally to the combining of concentrative meditation and mindfulness meditation in a single practice. When the mindfulness meditator gets lost in thought, returning to the concentrative technique of following the breath can have a centering affect. With both strategies working in tandem, concentrative meditation can be seen as a form of thought suppression while mindfulness meditation can be seen as the non-judgmental acceptance of thought or the seeing of thought as a passing object without interpretation. The combination of the two types, concentrative and mindfulness techniques, switching, presents the potential for acceptance of experience. For example, imagine concentrative meditation as focusing your attention on a dripping water faucet. Each drip would be the object of your meditative practice just as following your breath is the object of a meditative practice. Now imagine that you increase the flow of the faucet to a slow but steady stream. Now instead of just concentrating on the breath, you would have added a few other bodily sensations as your objects of meditation. It is not much of a leap from there to see the faucet valve being opened wide so that the flow of water is at a high volume. Now you not only have the breath and bodily sensations as your objects of meditation but also sounds, smells, tastes, thoughts, forms and emotions too. No matter how expanded the object of meditation becomes, the intensity of concentration remains the same. The idea of mindfulness can be seen as both means and ends. Concentrating on the flow of thoughts, feelings and sensations as they occur in a non-judgmental manner is the practice of mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is also a skill that results from this effort or a quality of consciousness itself.

 

It has been suggested that mindfulness, as a meta-cognitive skill, is subject to enhancement by means other than meditation such as Hatha Yoga. It has been asserted that mindfulness can be measured with the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) and can be seen as both a persistent trait of personality and as a state that can fluctuate in any given context. The value of mindfulness may reside in the ability to concentrate on an object that is essentially a moving target, a constantly changing stream of sensations, feelings and thoughts without the anticipatory weighing that is typical of normal mental processing. The resulting meta-cognitive skill, which can be measured as it develops, can lead to an increase in perspective taking, flexibility and self-regulation. Using the MAAS, scientists were able to correlate various measures of well being with increased MAAS scores including inverse correlations with neuroticism, anxiety and depression. A person with a mindful quality of consciousness may be responsive rather than reactive as she flows slowly from moment to moment, effortlessly negotiating the obstacles in her path and yet at the same time very conscious of her impact. In her contacts with others, she is known as a listener. She is precise and, as a result, she makes few apologies. She is never hurried or rash. In the midst of chaos, she has a calming influence. She is able to live in the rarified atmosphere of choice-less awareness. As the volleyball approaches the net, there is no need to think about her response. Her body lifts into the air as naturally as a leaf in the wind but with precise timing and clarity of purpose. She is trained.

 

 

 

BAREBONES MEDITATION TRAINING

 

 As a beginning meditator, I decided to approach the project, the experiment of beginning to meditate, in partial actions. The first step would be to learn to pay attention. My experience suggests that meditation practice is progressive in the same way that weight lifting is progressive. I am an old weight lifter. You don't walk into the gym and bench press a cow. You start with a small dog and progress to a cow. When most people think of meditation, they picture themselves in a calm, peaceful state, but meditation is more than just being relaxed or peaceful. It includes deep concentration. A person who uses depressant chemicals like opiates or tranquilizers has a pretty good idea what it means to be relaxed but while she is relaxed she is very unfocused, in a fog. Stimulant chemicals such as cocaine or speed can produce a sense of being very focused, but you would be jittery as a June bug. Meditation is the combination of deep peace and clear-minded focus. The following is a basic yoga exercise in body awareness or body mindfulness that is used by a lot of meditation approaches.

 

Body Awareness

 

Begin by taking a comfortable position laying on a mat or soft carpet. If it improves the comfort use a pillow or bolster to support your head or neck as you see fit. The goal is comfort with the middle areas of the body free to move so that breathing can proceed naturally. The room should be either dimly lit or dark. First take a deep breath through your nose and notice how your lungs fill with air. Take another deep breath and allow yourself to feel the sensation of your lungs expanding your chest, opening your chest up as it expands, to make room for the incoming air. Now place your fingertips gently on your belly. Let your belly become soft and loose. Now imagine that your belly is like a balloon or beach ball. As you inhale air through your nose, feel the beach ball growing larger as it fills with air. Notice how the air expands and inflates the beach ball. When the beach ball is full of inhaled air, allow the air to move naturally into the lungs. Take four or five breaths in this manner, filling the beach ball, allowing the air to rise up naturally into the lungs and then let go of the air as you exhale through your nose. Keep you attention on the opening up of the belly and lungs as you inhale and the closing up of the beach ball and lungs as you let go of the air through your nose.

 

Now let’s work with concentration. Imagine that your focus or concentration is like a really good flashlight. Where ever you point the beam of the flashlight, in that place you can see very clearly, allowing you to make a close examination of the area in the spot of light. Begin by pointing the flashlight at your eyes and the area around your eyes and even the bridge of your nose. Just see what you find as you examine these areas with the light. Maybe, there is heaviness or scratchiness. Spend a time examining your eyes and the area around your eyes. Then as you inhale through your nose, let your belly fill with air and let the air rise up naturally into your lungs and then breath into and through your eyes and the areas around your eyes before you exhale through your nose. Notice your eyes and the area around your eyes opening up and expanding with your breath. Repeat this breath cycle, inhaling and then exhaling two or three times for each area that is explored. Next point the beam of your flashlight at your forehead. Allow the beam to move from temple to temple, seeing what you find along the way. Maybe you have a headache? Then, as you inhale through your nose, let your belly fill with air and let the air rise up naturally into your lungs and then breath into and through your forehead before you exhale through your nose. Notice your forehead opening up and expanding with your breath. Repeat this breath cycle two or three times. Next point the flashlight at the very top of your head and then make slow concentric circles with the spot starting from the center and moving outward. Just see what you discover as you explore your scalp. Maybe you will feel nothing at all or maybe you can feel your hair. Then, as you inhale through your nose, let your belly fill with air and let the air flow up into your lungs and then breathe into and through the top of your head before you let go the air through your nose. Notice the top of your head opening up and expanding with your breath. As you exhale, let go of the tension that you discovered in your exploration. 

 

Continue the above process moving down to your neck, then to your shoulders and back, first exploring an area with your flashlight and then breathing into and through each area two or three times and releasing the tense energy with the out breath. Pay special attention to the area opening up and expanding with your breath.  Eventually you will develop a pattern of moving around your body. Sometimes you will have enough time to make a very detailed exploration and other times your exploration will be more cursory. You may explore in a predetermined pattern or follow the sensations that seem to call out along your route. As a last cycle, allow the beam to spread out so that it takes in your entire body and then explore what your entire body feels like all at once. Then, as you inhale through your nose and your belly fills with air let the air flow naturally up into your lungs and then breathe into and through your entire body. Feel your entire body as it grows to fill the space around you, as it expands and opens up with your breath. As your body opens up into the space around you, feel the roominess that you have created melting away the old sense of separation between your small self and the world of breath, sounds, smells, sensations, thoughts, pains, restlessness. If you feel yourself, deflating, becoming small and confined, then allow the beam to spread out again so that it takes in your entire body and then explore what your entire body feels like all at once. Then, as you inhale through your nose and your belly fills with air let the air flow naturally up into your lungs and then breathe into and through your entire body. Feel your entire body as it grows to fill the space around you, as it expands and opens up with your breath. We see the world as outside and fragmentary. We try and assemble the fragments into a workable whole by giving each fragment a label that refers to its qualities and categories. Then, we evaluate each fragment as something we like or something we don’t like. Instead, in the meditation experiment, we let the world be whole by creating a space inside big enough to include everything. Normally, we approach our experience, both inside and outside, like a bag of puzzle-pieces. The pieces are spread out and organized into like colors, common characteristics and shapes. If we are painstaking enough, we will eventually get a total picture. In the meditation experiment, experience is an integral whole that exists in the mind of the meditator. Accept the experience as it is rather than sifting through the pieces with your like-it-or-not mind. It is all in me and I in it.

 

Counting the breath

 

The next exercise, labeling the breath with a number, is recommended fairly often and focuses your attention on your breath from the moment you inhale the air through your nose until you exhale the air through your nose. Your Position or posture should be comfortable and capable of being sustained for 15-20 minutes. The most important feature of any position is that the spine should be as straight as it can be without discomfort so that the breath can flow freely. Some suggested examples are a kneeling meditation bench, a kneeling computer chair, laying on your back on a firm surface, sitting on a chair with your back straight without resting against the chair back or if you are able sitting cross-legged on a pillow on the floor, making sure that your buttocks are raised higher than your feet. Make sure that the position allows for you to breath freely and comfortably. Clothing should be loose so that nothing encumbers your stomach area that would interfere with breathing.

 

The following is premeditation warm up to test your position. Are you comfortable? Place the tips of your fingers on your stomach. Feel the natural movement of your stomach as you breath. Separate the breathing in from the breathing out. Feel how as you breath in your stomach rises and as you breath out your stomach descends. Imagine that your stomach is a beach ball. Imagine that as you breath in the beach ball fills with air. Imagine as you breath out that the beach ball empties of air. For a few minutes and without changing your natural pattern of breathing do this beach ball exercise. Notice when the breath is long, it takes longer to fill the beach ball. Notice when the breath is short, it takes less time to fill the ball. Check up. Are you comfortable? Is the breath flowing freely?

 

Place your hands in a natural position. You have noticed the separation of the in and out breath. Your breathing is natural and flows easily. If it is not, make any adjustments necessary to gain a comfortable, natural flow of the breath. The first step in beginning to meditate on the breath is to place your attention on your breathing. Notice the breathing in and the filling of the stomach area (the beach ball). Notice the breathing out and the deflating of the stomach area. Begin to count each successive out breath. As you breath in, notice that you breath in. As you breath out, notice that you breath out and count the out breath as one. As you breath in, notice that you breath in. As you breath out, notice that you breath out and count the out breath as two. As you breath in, notice that you breath in. As you breath out, notice that you breath out and count the out breath as three. As you breath in, notice that you breath in. As you breath out, notice that you breath out and count the out breath as four. Continue to count each successive out breath until you reach the count of ten. On the tenth count of the out breath, start the count over again at one and repeat until you get to ten. Continue counting out breaths to ten for approximately the first half to three quarters of the session. You will get better at figuring out where you are in a session as sessions pass.

 

While counting out breaths there will be a tendency to lose count. When you realize that you have lost count, simply return to counting by starting over at one. Your mind will wander. You will get lost in thought, but when you do very gently and without recriminations return to counting your out breathes. Counting keeps your attention on your breathing, but your mind will want to do what it is used to doing and it will resist. Don’t get frustrated. Just notice that your mind has wandered and bring it back to the breath. Start the count over at one. The idea is to breath naturally. This is not a breathing exercise, but a mind training (strengthening) exercise. You let the breath be itself, but as you breathe in you note that you are inhaling and as you breathe out you note that you are exhaling. After the exhalation is ended, you give it a number and repeat this process until you have counted up to ten. Once you get to ten, you start back at one.

 

Now this sounds pretty easy, but you would be amazed how hard it is to keep your mind on the task. The exercise is designed to help build concentration and the focus is the breath. When you lose count, you return to the breath and begin again. Basically, it is hard to count and think at the same time. Your mind will begin to drift to a thought or a plan and you just pull it gently back to the breath. You would think that the goal was successfully staying concentrated on the breath for prolonged periods of time, but this is deceptive. The activity of coming back to the breath is like weight lifting, the more you do it the stronger you get. It is the process of refocusing that is important not how long you can stop the thought flow. This exercise turns out to be very powerful because as you do it you become more and more concentrated until you can follow the breath without the count.

 

It is a common mistake to believe the point of meditation is to stop thinking or to get calm or highly focused, but while these things may be side-effects of meditative practice, the point of meditation is to do the exercise until you have completed the session or portion of the session. The point of following the breath is to follow the breath. The point of labeling is to label. The point of scanning the body is to scan the body. Again weight lifting can be used as a parallel. The point of doing the bench press is to press the weight for a predetermined number of times. The point of doing the bench press is not to get stronger.  The point of doing the bench press is to do the bench press and if you are focused anywhere else you will miss the point.

 

Labeling the breath

 

At about the half or three quarter point in your session, try to maintain the focus on your breathing without the count. Notice the in-breath. Is it long or short? Notice the out-breath. Is it long or short? Keep your attention on your breathing without counting. Instead of counting, label the in-breath as breathing in or just in and label the out breath as breathing out or just out. If the in-breath is long, label it long. If the in-breath is short, label it short. Do the same for the out-breath. Continue in this manner, labeling in and out breaths, until you become fluid at labeling the breaths.

 

Following the breath without labels

 

Continue to follow the breath as it moves in and out, long and short, but without the labels. When your mind drifts, just like you did while you where labeling or counting, gently bring it back to the breath. If you find that your mind wandering is getting out of control, return to counting the breath as before. Do this for the remainder of the session. Working on all of the above in one session may be too much. Try just doing each part for a couple of weeks instead. Just count the breath until you get really good at counting the breath. Just label the breath in or out or long or short until you get really good at labeling the breath. After awhile, try following the breath without the count or the label.

 

I counted the breath religiously for over a year before I moved to the other labeling techniques. Whenever I would feel my concentration flagging or I lost focus during a session, I always returned to the count even if I was pursuing another meditation technique. While I rarely fall asleep when I meditate, I do become dreamy. Dreamy is inattentive, unfocused and meandering in a mindscape of formless mental objects which evaporate from memory when focus returns. For at least the first few years of my meditation practice, counting the breath was the place I would go to steady myself. At first, counting the breath was tedious. My mind fought against the repetitive, boring nature of the exercise. The mind wanted to be free of the constraints breath counting placed on it. It wanted to chatter, to bounce from thought to thought, to plan and worry. The way I worked with this resistance was to take frequent breaks, counting for a few cycles, then letting the mind return to its habitual ramblings and then returning again to the breath. Instead of forceful, I was patient, gentle and pliant, but steady. Each time I stayed a little longer on the breath.

 

 Another difficulty I encountered is pushing the breath or following it? It is very difficult to discern. Sometimes I would discover I was practically hyperventilating because I was pushing so hard and others times the length of time between breaths seemed excessive. I would discover I wasn’t letting myself breath, resulting in having to gulp air to catch up. The way turned out to be to follow the natural flow of the breath with the count. Just let the breath go and give each breath a number label after it has passed. If it was natural to take a deep breath, I took a deep breath. If it felt natural to take a shallow breath, I took a shallow breath. Placing your attention on a place where the breath is flowing, like the sound or feel of the breath being exhaled through the nose, might make it easier to keep the count. It is not a breathing exercise. Breathing changes with posture. If you are pressed in because you are hunched or your shoulders are pressing inward, this compresses the chest area constricting the breath. A straight spine, belly thrust outward, shoulders back slightly seems to encourage natural breathing as does belly breathing, but still this is not a breathing exercise. It is not unusual to do the counting the breath technique all by itself for years before moving on to other techniques.

 

At first I tried to not completely close my mouth or leave it open very wide. This is maybe because I have a crushed nostril, but it just did not feel right to close my mouth tight. Later, I began to experiment with keeping my mouth closed in order to reduce the accumulation of saliva, which sometimes caused me to have to swallow frequently. Swallowing distracted me from following the breath by interfering with the flow. Placing my tongue on the roof of my mouth behind my teeth helped to reduce the saliva production. The kneeling computer chair seems to maximize natural breath flow, but can be harder on the back. Eventually, as the depth of meditation increased I noticed that my breathing slowed markedly so that I barely breathed compared to the beginning when I seemed to huff and puff. The more relaxed and easy the breathing becomes, the deeper the meditation and the deeper the meditation, the more relaxed and easy the breathing becomes. I have also noticed that the time that it takes to achieve a deep state of meditation is shortening.

 

Labeling thoughts, feelings, sounds

 

  As I moved to the natural next step of following the breath without counting, I became more aware of my whole experience. I found that my mind was pulled by sounds, feelings and thoughts. During one period when I had been involved in a conflict at work with my employer, I got to experiment with the tenacity of my thoughts. The conflict was a blow to my sense of self worth and, since I had been cut off before I could defend my position, I felt an urgency to finish the business of the conflict out in imaginary conversations with my employer. I would drive to school and work with my mind cranking out these conversations practically non-stop. When I came to meditation, I found that the relaxed state seemed to be an ideal time to enter into this imaginary discourse. I would become lost in it and then remember that I was meditating. This went on for weeks. I would go back to counting the breath for a while and that would hold back the flood of self-validating thoughts. Counting the breath was an effective method of temporarily suppressing thought, however, if I let up for any length of time, it was back to the discourse. I decided to add another labeling exercise to my routine as a result of this experience.

 

 Allowing my experience to become an object of meditation was a logical extension of the other labeling techniques I had been using. Counting the breath is a labeling exercise. My next experiment in meditation was to continue following the breath, but when a sound, feeling or thought occurred, I simply noted its appearance with a label like thinking, feeling, or hearing and then returned to the breath. Instead of labeling the breath with numbers, I placed labels on sounds, feelings and thoughts. I should point out that I use the term feeling to mean bodily sensations in contrast to its more common use as being synonymous with emotion. Emotion in this formulation is feeling interacting with thought.  When a thought, sensation, feeling or sound intrudes on your concentration on the breath, just label the thought, sensation, feeling or sound as thought, sensation, feeling or sound without your normal tendency to mull it over and then return to concentrating on the breath.

 

Imagine a body of water with gentle waves. The still water is pure awareness. Following the breath with or without the count would be like following the waves. As a wave rises, you note its rising. As a wave falls, you note it’s falling. Just like following the breath. Now imagine as you have begun to concentrate on the rise and fall of the waves, a brilliant, silver fish breaks the surface of the water and your concentration on the rise and fall of the waves is drawn to the fish. A fish is a mental object. You might even lose count of the waves. The fish is like a thought, feeling, sensation or sound. All are mental objects. You calmly acknowledge the fish with acceptance, even curiosity, and then you return your concentration to the rise and fall of the waves. As the meditation becomes deeper, there is a growing awareness that beneath the surface of the water inscrutable shadows make the water seem murky. Perhaps, the shadows, the subconscious swarm prior to differentiation, are the birthing grounds of pre-intentional mental objects. Note the shadows with acceptance and return concentration to the rise and fall of the waves. 

 

When the discourse with my employer would begin, I would label it a thought and return to the breath. At first, I experimented with just noting sounds, then, in another session, bodily sensations or feelings and then finally thoughts. I would practice labeling each different experiential object until it became comfortable. When I gained some facility with a particular technique, I would move to the next. Finally, I would combine labeling techniques in a single session, responding to each experience with its own appropriate label. When I became comfortable with labeling, using whole word labels like sound, feeling, thought, I began to just use the first letter of the whole words instead of the words. When I heard a sound, I would label it S. When the mental conversation began, I would whisper in my mind, T. Eventually, I could drop the letters too. I would label without words, numbers or letters like I touched the breath, sound, feeling and thought with a silent mental wand. The trajectory of mindfulness training moves from awareness of the breath as an aspect of experience, to awareness of each aspect of experience like sound, thought, sensation and emotion to the totality of experience as a unitary happening. The trajectory moves from the forced confines of the meditation bench to the natural moment to moment flow of everyday life.

 

I changed from experiencing the sounds, smells, plans, worries and irritations as distractions to beginning to see meditation as being with the experience without judging it. I was an observer of experience in the momentary stream. I could really be the scientist studying myself. As I began to observe my own thinking, sensing, feeling system, I could see that when I became aware of a thought, it melted away. I would think about what I needed to do at work and then I would label the work-thought, ‘thinking’. As soon as I would label the work-thought, it would be gone. I would hear my wife rustling around in her office. I would label the sound and return to the breath. Soon the sound of her rustling would cease. Thoughts, feelings and sensations would present themselves to awareness. Sometimes thoughts, feelings and sensations would be persistent and hang around for a while, other times they would come and go. When a sound would persist, I would turn it into an object of meditation and note the sound with a gentle label (sound) and then gradually return to following the breath either with the count or without. If the sound continued to draw my attention, I would repeat the procedure again. Soon, the sounds, sensations, thoughts or whatever distracted me would pass and the impermanence of experience became clear. Experiences would come and experiences would go.

 

 

 

Contemplative analysis

 

“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”

Henry Miller

 

An example of looking in a more mindful way at a familiar thing is the discovery I made about the part time played in my meditation sessions. Early on in my practice, I played music very quietly in the background while I meditated. The music seemed like white noise and when it stopped, I new the meditation session was over. It was kind of a timer. After a long period of playing music in the background, I decided to meditate mindfully without the music as an experiment. I discovered that the music had become a predictable pattern that I used to discriminate time increments. I not only knew when the meditation session should end, but where I was in the meditation session based on the place in the music. The music was like meditating watching a clock. This became apparent when I began to meditate without the music. I discovered that without the music timing the intervals, my sense of time passing seemed to dissolve. The music seems to have distracted me from staying in the moment without my really having noticed it. The music had to be gone for me to really see it. 

 

Meditation allowed me to see time in a new way. The passing of time is dependent on mental objects that behave as markers. When you look at the necessary prerequisites for an experience of time passing, you would need to hold in mind an object like the feeling of pain in an ankle or the expected relief from that pain that will result from the ringing of the gong that marks the end of the meditative session. Without the mental object of music, behaving as a marker, the experience of time passing became much less noticeable. The lack of a sense of time while meditating created the problem of the session lasting longer than I planned. I never expected that to be a problem because with the music I was always ready to quit meditating as the music reached the end. My back would ache and my legs would throb, telling me I had accomplished my work and that my well-deserved break was about to come. Without the music and the cues it presented, I had no sense of when the end was coming and the aching sense of accomplishment disappeared. I eventually started to use a variety of timing devices such as an alarm clock and later a software program that played gongs at various intervals. When the bell rang I was surprised. As a result of this discovery, I began to subject other experiences to analysis. I made it a practice to visualize all of the things that would have to be true for an experience to happen.

 

An exercise in contemplative analysis is the Tree meditation. Visualize a tree. As the picture of the tree forms in your mind, it will be an object separate from all the other surrounding objects. In the tree, there is a bird sitting on a nest and a squirrel leaping from branch to branch. At first, the tree is an individual with unique aspects that differentiates it from all other objects. From this perspective, the tree stands out from the background. It appears to be itself. Now begin to see the tree in your mind's eye with many-cause thinking. What does this separate self need to exist? At one point the tree was a tiny seed. The seed did not contain the tree but flowed from the appearance of a separate self into something that was not itself at all. The seed changed from itself to the tree. This transformation required moisture, a supportive bed of earth, light and space. As the seed sprouted from the ground towards the sky, its roots drew water and minerals into its wood and its leaves basked in the energy of the sun. These connections allowed the tree to convert sunlight to substance. Under the tree, it is cool and wet. Plant and animal life depend on the tree for shade. All around the tree, many layers of compost give life to smaller plants and creatures. A bird uses bits of the trees fallen leaves and seedlings to build itself a nest and squirrels carry piles of leaves high into its branches to make their homes. The process of the tree feeding and growing absorbs carbon dioxide and gives off life giving oxygen. The tree is drawn up towards the light but it is anchored by the earth. The tree is not itself at all. It is sun, rain, earth, space and breath. It could not exist without the ground and the sky. It is necessary to the squirrel and the bird and to the May apple and the Jack-in-the-pulpit. It is shade to the meditating monk who sits between its roots on a pile of freshly cut grass. The tree, in this perspective, is not a separate self since it is dependent on everything else for its existence. Seeing wholeness instead of division is like discovering the missing pieces of a puzzle.  Any object that arises during meditation can become the subject of contemplative analysis. This could include forms like the tree, body sensations, sounds, sights, smells, tastes and emotions. 

 

 

Ritual

 

Rituals can be both helpful and destructive. If a ritual becomes nothing but the mindless repetition of a series of behaviors, it can interfere with the meditative project. If, on the other hand, a ritual serves to set intention to free the mind then the entire meditative project can be energized. I usually begin my sessions by creating a holy space. I light candles and incense. I set my alarm clock. I place my seiza bench and pillow in position and take my seat in the kneeling pose. I begin the sitting by striking a bell gong three times, listening each time until the sound of the gong completely expires. My mind is tuned to the third bell sound and I become still. I hold a mala in my left hand, wrapped around my wrist so that my hands can rest flat against my upper thighs. My intention is to sit still and practice and the smell of the incense, the sound of the bell and the feel of the mala remind me that I am part of a tradition that has been sitting, just like this, for thousands of years. When the alarm rings, I shut it off, bow once and strike the bell gong three more times, listening each time to the whole bell sound. I then unwrap the mala from my wrist and chant the mantra that is traditionally chanted at the end of the Heart Sutra. “Gate Gate Paragate Parasam Gate Bodhi Svaha.” The Heart Sutra is said to be a distillation of the entire Buddhist perspective in a single sutra and the mantra at its end is said to be the crystal of the Heart Sutra. I don’t know if any of that is really true but I like the feel of it anyway. I use the mala to count until I reach a predetermined number of repetitions of “Gate Gate Paragate Parasam Gate Bodhi Svaha.” I then wrap the mala around the bowl gong striker and place the striker back in the bowl. I then return the bowl to its place, blow out the candles and put everything but the bench away. I end the session by performing a number of slow motion bows and finally I stand Mountain Pose while I do a short body-scan. From mountain pose, I step out and begin to walk slowly around the room while following my breath. One final bow ends the session.

 

Slow motion bowing

 

An important principal in mindfulness training is to extend the practice beyond the bench or cushion. After all, what good is mindfulness if it is only applicable to moments of formal meditation? Using the weight lifting comparison again. What good is doing all those military presses if they have no real world application? No, in the real world, the weight lifter can pick up a bag of groceries with ease. In the real world, the mindfully trained person is attuned to both the inner environment of her own mind and the outer environment of the world of people, places and things. Slow motion bowing is a simple exercise in mindfulness. Mindful bowing is a way of respecting meditation as teacher. A slow motion bow does not have to be directed toward anything in particular. It does not have to have an object. I say this because some practitioners are concerned about the Christian prohibition of bowing to an idol. In my practice, I choose to bow to the bench out of gratitude for what I have learned with its assistance. I take the opportunity to thank the air for my connection to the living world. I thank the Earth for being the platform of my efforts. I thank Fire for the energy to strive. I thank Water that sustains my life. I thank Space for the room to move.  I thank Lord Jesus for his compassion and love. I thank Lord Buddha for his wisdom and understanding. I am grateful for Thus that is not born and does not die.

 

I begin slow motion bowing by taking a kneeling position facing the bench and then very slowly bend forward into a bow with the forehead touching the ground. The bow is repeated any number of times very slowly while applying all of the skills acquired from the previous meditation practices. Pay attention to the breath. As your movement flows forward, bending at the waist, notice how your breath is exhaled. Once your forehead is touching the ground notice how you take a breath, filling your empty lungs with air. Feel the energy that you are drawing from the earth and then as you exhale let yourself feel grounded as you let yourself sink even deeper into the earth. Now take a deep breath, again drawing the earth’s energy in. Once your lungs are filled, begin to rise slowly back up towards the erect, kneeling posture while exhaling with a heartfelt smile. In the kneeling position, your lungs are now empty and so you breathe in. As you breathe in, bring your hands together in prayer. Notice the sensation of your core muscles moving you to the full bow and then raising you up to the kneeling position. Slow motion bowing can include counting the breath, labeling sensations, sounds, thoughts and emotions using all of the mindfulness techniques discussed earlier in this chapter.

 

Mountain Pose

 

After doing a number of slow motion bows, stand mindfully up, feet together, hands at your side and explore the feeling of just standing. Perhaps, do a full body scan. Feel yourself waving like pond grass, slowly back and forth. Pay attention, as always, to your breath. The same approach can be used towards any number of daily activities that you usually do robotically. Try walking mindfully. After doing the Mountain pose for a while, very slowly walk in a circle. Pay attention to your breath, but also notice how your feet and legs move as they slowly carry you in a circle. Notice what part of the foot touches the floor first. Maybe feel the toes as they press into the carpet, followed by the ball, then the heel. Notice the slight bend in the knee. Notice the flex in the calf. Try eating mindfully. It is possible and desirable to perform activities like showering, dressing, raking leaves as exercises in mindfulness. Always be attentive towards your breath. The breath is the fuel for the living experience. With an ample fuel supply, you will experience a centered and energized awareness. Deliberate moment-to-moment living conserves energy normally dissipated in useless, empty gestures.  Mindful awareness of what needs to be done next is being economical. Doing the next right thing depends on seeing the next right thing. When I am in tune with reality, it is only natural to smile.

 

Mindful Eating as a form of meditation

 

Prepare a simple bowl of finger food like nuts, pieces of fruit, raisins or bits of bread. Place the bowl within easy reach of your seat. Sit silently for awhile and center yourself by following your breath. Take the bowl in one hand and then take one piece of food from the bowl. Notice how it feels between your fingers. Smell the item or maybe brush it against your lips. Notice the sensations. Place the food in your mouth without chewing. Let the sensations slowly expand on your tongue. Very slowly, chew the item, letting the growing taste unfold. Take your time. Let the experience be as unhurried as you can. Try not to image the next bit of food in your bowl until you have completely experienced all of the last bit of food. Stretch this exercise out so that it lasts for at least 10 minutes.

 

 

Experiments

 

The idea that a meditation practice is a series of experiments seems to be in keeping with the teachings of the Buddha. I have heard that the Buddha suggested that direct experience is the best teacher. The Buddha is reputed to have encouraged his students to test his and anybody else’s teachings out through experimentation. You try an approach and if it seems to work you incorporate it into your practice. It may be practical to have a teacher direct you around failed paths based on his experience, but someone has had to have an experience in the first place in order to see what will work and what will not. A problem might arise if the experience of a teacher, based on his or her direct experience, is so specific to his or her experiential context that it fails to generalize to his students. In that case, the students are taught a failed path which they will eventually have to overcome. Each meditation session is an experiment. Each session is a different experiment because the subject of the experiment changes from day to day. Experimental is the basic theme of the experience. An experiment is at once playful and edgy and at the same time considered and focused. It is the plan to try various experiments just to see how they will turn out.

 

Since my practice included the use of a mala or prayer beads, I discovered that the beads can become an important adjunct to meditation as I go about my everyday affairs. It is the custom to ring a bell or strike a gong in some monasteries in order to remind the monks to pay attention to their breath while they are raking in the garden or sweeping in the dining room. Since I have no bell or gong to remind me to be mindful of my breath, I took to carrying my beads and running them through my fingers while I performed my daily affairs. The beads were associated with the sensations of deep bliss that are often part of meditation and so, like Pavlov's dog hearing the bell, I had a conditioned reflex response to fingering the beads. I was able to use the beads to consciously slow down my mind and follow my breath, depending on how fast or slow I moved the beads between my fingers.  If my mind was racing, rather then trying to bring it under control directly, I focused on moving the beads more slowly as my breath slowed, deepened and smoothed.

 

It is a good idea to vary your routine. Doing the same exercises in the same way, over and over, will get you in a rut. Instead, change it up. Do new exercises or make some changes in an old exercise. Go back to an early set of exercises and see if you don’t have a fresh perspective. As an experiment, I decided to depart from my regular routine and just let whatever happens, happen. I have faith that the correct object of meditation will present itself. I sit following the breath, mindful of the breath, because paying attention to the breath has become second nature to me. The smooth rowing motion of my breath flows without effort. I am caught by a particularly powerful sexual fantasy. The fantasy stirs my mind resulting in a sensational response. I can see that the fantasy is made up of ideas and sensations. I choose the sensations as an object of meditation and allow my focus to bring the breath into and through the areas of the body affected by the fantasy. Breath flows through the sensations like a drop of dye in a beaker of water. There is the breath illuminating the pathways of the sensual energy. The energy fades and is gone. The idea part of the sexual fantasy, since it was not picked as an object of meditation, has disappeared too. My breath flows without effort and I wait for the presentation of the next object to explore. My dog barks.

 

So sitting very still,

Only the breathing in and the breathing out,

Deeply calm, there is the barking of a dog

And then the barking stops,

Birds and then no birds,

Thoughts slow to a trickle, an itch, a tiny point of pain,

Then back to the breath.

An almost imperceptible wave,

Like the mirages on highways caused by heat,

There but not there, still but not still.

And then it is gone.

 

Following the breath, counting the breath, labeling sensations, thoughts, feelings, and contemplative analysis are all doing something. They are preparation for meditation as not doing something. In weight lifting you practice the exercises to be strong. There is a goal. In the above preliminary exercises, you practice to be free of doing something, free of striving for something. With enough practice, you let go of the goal of doing in order to abide in being. Meditation is no thought, desire or striving. The exercises provide a platform upon which you can sit and do nothing and then get up and walk into the momentary mind-stream of everyday existence, flow from choice to choice without thought, desire or striving and do the next right thing because it is natural. This is choiceless awareness. The pitcher throwing his curve does not think now I will place my finger so, now I will twist my wrist. His mind is not focused on the outcome. His mind is free, natural and in the groove he has created by practicing. Sitting in silent meditation is foreplay (preparation) for chanting. Chanting is foreplay for slow bowing. Slow bowing is foreplay for standing mindfully still. Standing mindfully still is foreplay for walking meditation. Walking meditation is foreplay for eating meditation. Eating meditation is foreplay for doing the dishes. Doing the dishes is foreplay for just smiling about nothing in particular.

 

A Program of Progress Not Perfection 

A belief or beliefs about meditation will effect practice. An area of particular interest is beliefs about personal traits or abilities that create a perception that works against practicing meditation. Gauging the strength of these beliefs and whether or not these beliefs are subject to modification will be a necessary preliminary step to establishing a meditation practice. One of the most difficult barriers to beginning a meditation practice is when a person is convinced they can’t meditate before they have even tried. Sometimes a person is identified very early as not being able to sit still for a minute. Repeated inculcation of this observation becomes a life-long identity. When an individual believes they are by nature distractible, they frequently reject meditation. This often occurs because they have had so many failed experiences with activities requiring concentration. Their life-long self image as a person with an attention deficit becomes a deal breaker. Frequently, individuals were labeled ADD by parents and teachers from an early age and have come to identify with the label so completely they will not even consider remediation as a possibility. As a result, they avoid activities that require concentration. They see themselves as nervous, fidgety, and high-strung. Such individuals believe their distractibility is an inherent quality not subject to change through their own effort. In their experience this opinion is reinforced by schools and doctors because nobody says to them, ‘let’s work on this problem, here is an exercise’. Instead, they are offered medication or tracked away from situations where concentration is required. Along with this intransigent distractibility, such individuals often have no confidence in their inner calming ability. They accept the idea that they are predisposed to being high strung and that there is nothing that they can do except live with it or take drugs to deal with it.

 

When a first time weight lifter goes to the gym, she is not going to lie down on the bench and lift 200 pounds. If she tries, she will fail. On the other hand, if a beginning weight lifter started with 50 pounds and lifted that ten times every other day, adding small amounts of weight or doing more repetitions each time, eventually, if she kept up this behavior long enough, she would be able to lift the 200 pounds. This is progressive exercise. You start where you can and gradually increase the level of difficulty of the exercise. Whether the progress is slow or fast, if you are intent on making the effort, you will succeed. When a person is given a large weight and strains to lift it with no result, if he or she thinks this is it, they won’t be back to try again. If a person is given a doable amount of weight and they experience a successful effort, next time they will try something a little harder. The same is true with the meditation experiment. Often, a book or a tape encourages a student to take on more than they can do so they quit. When a student is told that she should sit and count her breaths for 45 minutes and she tries to her utmost, but can’t sit for more than five minutes, the student is likely to see this as a failed attempt. Instead, if she endorsed herself for the monumental effort she made in those five minutes, she would create a foundation for practice and, in the next session, she could add a little time to increase the level of difficulty. It is a program of practice not perfection.

 

Beliefs that interfere with meditation: religious

 

Another barrier to a successful meditation practice is concern with ideas of religious conflict. Meditation has been a part of every religious tradition and is as neutral as the concept of prayer. Terms used to refer to meditation may include contemplation, reflection, communing, stillness, and peacefulness.

 

Beliefs that interfere with meditation: obstacles

 

Discomfort resulting from pain, illness, boredom, distractions, and holding still are seen as negative barriers to practice. Turn-offs include postural discomfort such as stiffness and feeling trapped. These are causes of prematurely ending a session. When your meditation habit is well ingrained, take on challenges like struggling to meditate under less than optimum conditions. Examples of meditating in difficult circumstance are sitting with pain, enduring very prolonged sessions, meditating through illness or sadness. I have had some very interesting sessions in all of these areas, but not in the beginning before my concentration was well established. Once concentration is established increasing the difficulty of the exercise can be accomplished in many ways including lengthening sessions, taking on a more difficult techniques and meditating when circumstance are not ideal. I discovered very early in my practice that meditating through an upper respiratory infection changed the whole way I saw the breath. I have been able to successfully eliminate congestion by breathing around the blockages for sustained periods. Once I had a bronchial spasm from mold while I was raking leaves. As soon as I settled into meditation and slowed my breath rate down, the spasm relented. Imagine you hire a detective to follow a person around and report back to you in a factual and objective manner. You don't ask the detective to try and explain what he sees or what it means. You just want the bare facts. The reports you receive from the detective are pretty similar from day to day until one day you receive a report that's different. On that day, the person departs from their normal routine. You mistakenly took the person for granted. You might have thought there was nothing new to learn. The detective is your focus on the breath, reporting the bare facts. The breath had some tricks up its sleeve you would have missed if you had passed on the opportunity of meditating while sick.

 

Another way to increase the difficulty of meditation is to meditate around circumstances that are distracting. Instead of ending a session because there are noises that cause you to defocus, try and practice despite the distraction by letting the distraction become the object of meditation. Meditating for prolonged periods, as is the custom on Zen retreats, can be very painful, but turning pain into an object of meditation can change your whole perspective on pain. These are considerations for a well-established practice. In the earliest stages, when concentration is fragile, it is better to keep it simple and workable and gradually increase the length of sessions as stamina and concentration improve.

 

Many books and tapes proclaim an arbitrary length of time for a session. A beginning meditator makes an attempt at achieving these arbitrary expectations but discovers he is not able to sit for 30 minutes. The leg pain, the immense energy that it takes to sustain concentration or restlessness rears its ugly head and the beginning meditator feels like a failure. Boredom or restlessness depends on a series of mental objects for its existence. There is the goal to achieve: I have to sit for 30 minutes or this session is a failure. There is the mental object of leg pain: this is agony, I will not be able to stay like this for 30 minutes. There is the mental object that is an expectation: I will feel better if I stop meditating and go for a walk. There is the self-evaluative mental object: I am just not the kind of person that can sit still for very long. The state of boredom is dependent on mental objects for its existence and once it is seen for what it is, it is gone. Again, the weight lifting analogy can be a useful model. A weight lifter starts with a small weight that he can, with significant effort, lift six times. When he is able to lift this weight ten times with decreased effort, he then adds weight to the exercise so that he now can only lift the weight six times and so it goes. This model works well for meditation. Start with a period of time you can tolerate with effort and then gradually, as you grow stronger, add time to the session. The length of the session should present a challenge because it is from the effort that growth derives. If the weight lifter stayed at the same weight, it would get easier and easier to lift and the result would be that he would get no stronger. If the session required no effort, it was too short or too easy, improvements in focus would not occur.

 

Beliefs that interfere with meditation: teachers

 

Many practitioners of meditation feel that having a positive role model or teacher helps their practice. Knowing someone who has benefited from meditation can help to motivate a beginning practice, particularly if the role model is someone that the fledgling meditator can identify with. A teacher is recommended but often hard for a person to find. In a society with as many means of communication as are enjoyed by Americans, teachers can manifest in many forms. There are speeches on tape, books, DVDs, MP3s, cable classes, internet sites, mindfulness training groups in hospitals and of course the more traditional meditation and Yoga centers of hundreds of different traditions. It is often said, when you are ready, the teacher will come.

 

 

Beliefs that interfere with meditation: practicing for others

 

In many respects, meditation is different from most types of self-improvement projects. In our western world, most activities are seen as goal orientated. An activity has an end result and is rated according to the value assigned to that end result. Goal orientated behavior requires that judgments are made about what has value versus what does not. Mindfulness meditation is the cessation of (doing) valuing and is therefore not a means to an end in a traditional sense. This is a foreign concept in a goal-orientated society. The question, “what’s it for,” will be difficult for beginners to answer. When first starting to practice, there is often the need for a sense of purpose. Many want to feel that the energy they are expending is worth it. When a student can arrange to meditate with another meditator, this can energize practice.  Efforts are not just for yourself, but also for your co-meditators. Quitting before the end of the session would be letting your co-meditators down.  Most people do not feel that doing something just because it is good for them is enough to give purpose to their efforts. They are interested in more tangible results such as helping them to stop worrying or sleep well. Vague cosmic rewards in the future do not provide enough purpose. Students often feel that short-term positive outcomes are important to encouraging practice. The most frequently noted short-term rewards are improvements in sleep, reductions in stress levels, and feeling refreshed and invigorated. A feeling of pleasure both during and after meditation is a valuable enticement for coming back to the cushion. Many meditators describe an endorphin induced pleasurable sensation or a marked relaxation response. This includes feeling entranced, letting go, being oblivious and a sense of coming back to the world at the end of a session.

 

Beliefs that interfere with meditation: discomfort

 

The environment where meditation takes place is important for comfort. When the practitioner feels that the space is not conducive to meditation, the space contributes to resistance to practice. Environments that feel overly restrictive, excessively chaotic, distracting, too much caffeine, poor ventilation, do not support a comfortable meditation session. I started by creating a place in my upstairs bedroom that would be set-aside specifically as a sacred space. This space is a pleasant, well-ventilated area, with an altar on which I have placed a variety of ambience creating items. There is a kindly looking Buddha, candles and incense. The objects are not as important as the feelings they create. I picked a place with minimal traffic. In the beginning, it was important that I not be disturbed by household activity. I even took the phone out of the room. The only member of the family I could not convince to stay out of the bedroom during meditation was my dog Iggy. He eventually began to work on his own meditation practice that looked a lot like taking a nap.

 

The next problem I encountered was what would be the most sensible posture for me. I am an arthritic, sixty year old who does not bend well. I tried a cross-legged posture but I could only do it if I propped myself against the wall. If I sat away from the wall my back ached badly. I realized that if I looked forward to pain and unpleasantness I would not last long. I tried sitting in a chair, but while I felt natural, it seemed wrong in some way.  The kneeling position with a pillow between my legs was perfect. My back could be straight without discomfort. I realized that my torso needed to be erect in order to breathe comfortably and when I kneeled, breathing flowed easily. This was not true for me in the cross-legged position no matter how I tried to support myself with pillows. I won’t even go into the leg discomfort that the cross-legged position entailed. Suffice it to say that it is either for a younger yogi or a person with a high tolerance for pain.

 

Eventually, the kneeling position caused a very mild tendonitis because of the weight of my body resting on my ankles. I tried many work a rounds to solve this problem, but to no avail. I finally stumbled upon a seat (seiza meditation bench) that solved the problem. This simple wooden seat allowed me to sit in the kneeling position while it bore my weight thus saving my ankles. My back could be straight on the seat, freeing my breath to flow without too much effort. An equivalent possibility might be a kneeling computer chair. I tried the computer chair as an alternative to the kneeling bench, but while this might be even better for some people, especially if getting up and down are difficult, I found I preferred the simple wooden kneeling bench for comfort. The most persistent problem I faced and still face in the kneeling position is the tendency to sink. Gravity results in sinking into the posture, compressing and shortening so that breathing becomes more labored. When sitting for periods of sixty minutes or more, I found myself folding. The only solution I have come up with is to be very aware (mindful) of my sense of uprightness and to pull myself up if, as a result of lapse in awareness, I sink. 

 

Beliefs that interfere with meditation: commitment

 

Let’s face it. We are busy. The priority setting on meditation determines when and if practice will occur. Putting meditation off till the very last thing or bumping it from the schedule for another more important task is the number one reason for a skipped session or a shortened session. Not practicing when there are more pressures or seeing meditation as an after thought often lead to missed sessions. For some, agreeing to a contract with their teacher to complete a specified number of sessions increases their motivation to practice. Sometimes making a contract to practice can get a beginner into the habit of meditating despite very negative pre-existing beliefs about their abilities, the physical and mental discomfort and a very busy schedule. For many, getting past the first few sessions requires a commitment. 

 

Beliefs that interfere with meditation: yoga

 

Practicing Yoga is a gateway to meditation that starts out being less dependent on mental discipline and more on a willingness to practice a routine of physical postures. For many, a physical practice will be a better fit. A regular yoga practice leads eventually to an increased capacity for mindfulness and concentration. The physical postures in yoga (asanas) are accompanied by focused rhythmic breathing.  One day the yogi discovers he can sit still with focus while maintaining the slow even rhythmic breaths that he is used to in his physical practice. Yoga is a natural trajectory to meditation which is exactly the way its founders intended it to be.

 

 

Beliefs that interfere with meditation: success or failure

 

Often, the concept of stopping thoughts, though not made explicit in most meditation instructions, appears to be the elephant in the room. Beginners usually believe that the goal of meditation is to stop thinking. This creates feelings of frustration since most beginners experience racing thoughts, distractions, losing count, and a general inability to achieve there perceived goal of stopping thoughts. This confirms the feelings of negative self-efficacy. The idea that meditation is a goal-oriented behavior is hard to shake. Not being able to achieve the goal results in negative feedback and a sense of failure. There will be times in meditation when thinking slows or even ceases and there will be times in meditation you suddenly realize you have taken a trip down memory lane, but in either case, the meditator calmly observes the twists and turns of her own mind without rejection or grasping and then returns to following the breath. If there is any goal at all, it is to accept whatever you find with equanimity.

 

Then there is the question of eyes open or eyes closed. I have encountered reasons for both meditating with eyes open and meditating with eyes closed. Initially, I opted for eyes closed since it seemed easier to stay concentrated. If concentration is a problem, then keeping eyes closed and gradually opening them over many sessions, while keeping a soft focus, will allow concentration to strengthen slowly before eyes are routinely kept open.  Some warn that you may encounter visions of an unpleasant or pleasant nature with eyes closed which may distract you. With eyes closed, I did see enso circles when I achieved a deep state of calm, which disappeared the minute I opened my eyes. Enso circles are alternating light and dark smoke-ring like shapes that sort of remind me of a screensaver. I have so far adopted the strategy of keeping my eyes partially open with a soft focus. I tend to just barely open my eyes into slits and focus on the floor several feet ahead of my position.

 

It is harder not to fall asleep with my eyes closed. This is rarely a problem for me unless I am very tired. If I am so tired that I can't stay awake when I am meditating, I either complete the session in a standing posture or just go to bed and call it a day. Normally, I do not fall asleep when I am meditating. Most people have a natural biorhythm that plays a big part in their energy levels and thus the times of the day when they are likely to feel sleepy. I am least sleepy in the morning, assuming I have had a normal nights sleep and more sleepy after lunch and before bedtime. Obviously, the best time to meditate is in the morning for me. This brings up an important issue. In the beginning of attempting to develop the meditation habit feeling successful is going to be important. When you fall asleep instead of meditating, you don’t feel like you have accomplished anything. Engineering the optimum conditions for success is common sense at this stage. Drink tea if that helps sharpen your mind for meditation. This may not be good advice however if you are over stimulated by drinking tea and your mind becomes as hard to hold as a two year old on cola. 

 

 

 

The writer’s outcomes: changing perspectives

 

Since the beginning of my meditation practice, I have kept regular notes on the experience of beginning to meditate. It is generally suggested that as a meditation practice is started that the meditator get in the habit of keeping a journal. It has been the practice of this writer to treat meditation as an experiment. The process of journaling in my case includes records of lengths of sessions, reasons for missed sessions, descriptions of states of mind, insights that resulted either during or after the session and anything else I associated with the experiment of meditation. My approach to meditation was to start at the beginning, like a scientist, letting the data speak for itself. It was my intention to avoid becoming attached to the results or preconceived notions about outcomes. This, it would seem, is in keeping with the basic spirit of the idea of mindfulness or awareness as a metacognitive skill. Each session was treated as a unique experiment and direct experience was the teacher. As a meditator, I became an observer of my own thinking, sensing, feeling system.  

As you sit quietly in meditation imagine that the flood of mental objects cluttering your mind are rubber ducks. As one rubber duck occupies your focus, it encourages others to be created and these new rubber ducks then begin to occupy your focus as well. The result is a jumble of rubber ducks cluttering your mind. The entire phenomenological field is dependent on the existence of this unruly flock of ducks. All the while, there is a constant voice over narrative. An unseen inhabitant of the pond describes what it hears, sees, feels and thinks; just like an announcer at a sports event. As the meditation progresses, the flow of rubber ducks into the pond begins to slow. The constant voice over narrative quiets. Soon the ducks are coming one at a time. A duck now can be seen as a distinct event separate from the other ducks because it is not lost in the pandemonium. You realize that the rubber ducks are impermanent because they are here one minute and gone the next. As you calm your mind further, you witness each duck without encouraging the creation of new ducks. You cease to discriminate the ducks you like from the ducks you don't like. You witness the spaces between ducks as they grow more frequent and persist for longer periods. Finally, one last duck slides across the water. It is what you think of as you. The duck observing the ducks is a duck too. You begin to see clearly the duck-less pond.

Calm: The first noticeable outcome of meditation is a slowing down of the mental processes. With the slowing down of the mind comes a distinct relaxation response. The body-mind connection manifests as a decrease in pulse rate, a slowing of respiration, a reduction in the stress response and a general over-all feeling of well-being. The practice of following the breath allows the mind to achieve states of deep concentration and calm. The serenity and peace that comes from this state is an ideal lab for our research into mind. It is only when we become free from the hubbub of our everyday mentality that the intricacies of the mind become observable. 

 

Thinking is like the flow of water in a millstream. The wheel of life would cease to turn, or so we believe, without it. But if the pressure of the water against the wheel is too much, thoughts seem to race, and then we yearn for respite. We like to vegetate with a good book or an entertaining movie. If the flow of the millstream is too fast and furious, it becomes muddy, unclear and so our mind’s turmoil makes it hard to tell one duck from another. There is confusion. Enduring the constant pressure of rush hour of the mind requires energy, which results in tension that wears you out. Sometimes it feels really good to stop the conversation in your head and lose yourself in a momentary activity that may have unwholesome consequences like drugs, gambling or obsessive sex. In meditation, slowing down and even stopping the flow of thoughts becomes possible. To see what lies beneath the water, the dam weirs must be closed so that the mud can settle, the water can clear and things can be seen for what they are without obfuscation. We realize that thoughts are not facts. They are just passing, mental objects that supplant one another in a steady stream even in our sleep. That is just the way it is.

Observation: Normally, our minds process information at a very high speed. Unless we are making an effort to concentrate, we think in a jumble. We see a car. It reminds us that we need to buy bread. We remember that Joe’s coming to visit tonight. It’s hard to get these socks on. Who invented the sock? Where is the dog going? All the time a voice is saying what we think in a persistent mental whisper. Meditation makes it possible to slow the mental processes down so we can see them more clearly. As the ducks begin to slow down we can act like a naturalist with a set of binoculars. A naturalist watches without getting involved. He is a witness to events as they unfold. If he interacts with the ducks they will not behave normally. Instead they will become wild and chaotic. So the naturalist sits quietly and does not stir the pond so he can see the ducks for what they are. The binoculars allow him to focus his attention and, as a result, he is in a position to be a witness to life in the pond.

 

Mental objects: A sound, smell, feeling, emotion or thought registers as a mental process. Each sense event or ideational occurrence can be seen as a mental object. A mental object is like a package. Normally, when you receive a package, you take off the wrapper to see what is inside. You might say you interpret the contents. Part of the process of interpretation is judging whether the contents are likeable, dislikeable or neutral. In the meditation experiment, the package is not unwrapped. Since there is no interpretation or judgment, there is no reason to see the package as likeable, dislikeable or neutral. The package is just the package. Without deciding the plus or minus value of the contents, there is no fear of losing or desire to gain from the package. There is no response such as clinging or repulsion. There is no real reason to hold on or push away because it is just another package. It is possible to pay attention to your entire experience, but the minute you begin to interpret any part of that experience you will become mindless in relation to the rest of the experience. You will have made a choice. Mindfulness is paying attention to the entire experience without opening the mental objects up to interpretation.

 

I began to see my meditation experience as a series of mental objects. When I hear the bell sound, my idea-mind turns the sound into a mental object so I note, sound, and let go without further penetration. The letting go prevents the mental object from morphing into a hardened, permanent chunk of the world. This does not deny the experience of the sound. On the contrary, the experience is the experience whether I think about it or not. It is like seeing an object in a mirror. Your mind is like the mirror and the mirror reflects objects in the same sense as your mind creates thoughts. When an object is reflected in a mirror, the nature of the mirror determines the quality of the reflection. In a fun house, tall mirrors stretch the reflection while short mirrors shorten the reflection. And so it is with the mind. Instead of being real chunks of the world, form is a container that is filled by the minds projections. In the meditative experiment, when I have love for a friend, my idea-mind turns the emotion of love into a mental object, so I note feeling plus thought. The distortions of the mirror are avoided by not leaning on the mirrors shape shifting interpretation. This does not take away from the experience of warm caring or add to it either. When a dark emotion like hopelessness or futility occurs to me, if I allow idea-mind to have a go at the dark emotion, it will bring me a flood of thoughts of despair. This flood can be the beginning of a low mood that can take on a life of its own. If I were to note it as feeling plus thought and return to the breath, I would have taken a step back as an impartial witness to the mental events that appeared on the otherwise empty stage of consciousness. Rather than doing what has in the past been the habitual thing, I just note the momentary object of mind without making any attempt at penetrating beyond its general label. Penetration turns the reflection of the mind into an apparent fact. In the case of despair, it can lead into a full-blown depressive episode.

 

 

Openness: Openness is the goalless goal. A goal is an object, but openness is the space between objects. As the flow of ducks into the pond slows, empty spaces between ducks become apparent. With the calming of the mind, mental objects come and go like a quiet drive on a Sunday afternoon. It is here that the meditator begins to notice that where no mental object is present; there is empty space. As meditation progresses, the empty spaces between mental objects become as focal as the mental objects themselves. Eventually, the gaps replace the ducks and without the ducks the gaps are wide-open places that give the feeling of mental elbowroom. Sometimes, when the focus on the gaps becomes intense enough, the meditator can witness the birth of a mental object, as it seems to rise from the depths. This shadowy immergence from the interior of consciousness is in contradistinction to the everyday sense that the world exists solely outside our minds. The raw unmoving space between mental objects is pure awareness. Awareness is like oil in a glass bowl. The body is the glass bowl, which is experienced as the edge of awareness or where awareness makes contact with the other. The other is anything that is believed to be non-self. The transparent nature of the glass bowl is eyes, ears, nose and feelings e.g. the senses. There is no real contact between awareness and the other. The body is the membrane between the two and has the quality of being at the edge of the inner at the same time as being other itself, wholly outside awareness. The oil is always background and the foreground, a thought, is like a paper boat floating in the oil. But the paper boat is really a reflection of the projected paper boat that is believed to exist (as other) outside awareness or is believed to have existed (as other) in a memory of a past encounter. Awareness cannot reflect itself because the minute it tries it forms an idea (a paper boat) which is the foreground to the invisible background of awareness.

Clarity: As space between mental objects increases, the space around mental objects increases. When objects are distinct one from the next, there is increased clarity. Seeing is less muddied. Mental objects can be analyzed without unpacking them. Sound is sound as opposed to taste. The sound is long, low, distant or short, high or close. If I were to unpack the mental object of the sound, I would tell a story about the contents that included my interpretation or judgment. The realization of like or dislike (desire) would result in not wanting to let go or feelings of repulsion. I would then be lost in thought or stirred by emotions. As the pond opens up into space without the confusion of so many ducks, I can see ducks I have never noticed before. Over there, behind the blind, there is a duck holding a pair of binoculars. The duck watching the ducks is a duck too. This is an interesting discovery. The voice over narrator is silent. So where am I? I don’t seem to be the announcer since I am here even when he is not. I see the watcher, but when I do not form the mental object of watcher, there is only empty space. Where is the “I” when there is nothing in the pond?

Impermanence: As this object comes into being that object goes. As that object goes, this object comes into being. Nothing stays. If things were permanent, the world would be a frozen place, but instead it is always changing. As a duck enters the pond, the silent observer, without interpretation or judgment, liking or disliking, holding on to or rejecting, becomes a witness to the perpetual movement of reality. The endless sensory input results in another duck and another. Our entire experience is an ever-changing landscape based on the surrounding conditions. The felt-sense of impermanence manifests and individual objects are craved or repelled with less energy. The thrust is not to escape reality, but to accept it. It is as it is. With clarity, the swirl of objects becomes visible. Idea-mind owns what it names. Penetration projects the object back on to the outside world giving one the illusion that thought is real and that the world is a solid place. Once you cease to interpret mental objects of whatever kind, you begin to experience the world as an endless web of causes and effects. A dog barks in the distance. I hear the sound. The dog stops barking and the sounds disappear. Idea-mind believes that if it gives a thing a name that it has distinction. It becomes a fact. The very process of naming causes the thing to become manifest from the shadows of substance. You see the letter A on a page and you name it A, and in so doing, A becomes separate from the white emptiness of the page upon which the A stands. Substance means to stand underneath. Underneath mental objects is emptiness.

 Self-appraisal: The self as a mental object is seen as having the same nature as any other mental object, impermanent and dependent on conditions. The reality of no individual nature is seen. The ego diminishes. If meditation is opening up the space between mental objects resulting in seeing the mental objects with increasing clarity, then when you observe the "I" observing the space between mental objects then the "I" can be seen clearly for what it is: a mental object, impermanent and fleeting like the sound of a bird or the cry of a child. It has no enduring nature. It comes and it goes depending on conditions. As the voice over narrative is quieted and awareness without self is cultivated, natural solutions to problems emerge as if by magic. It becomes possible to live without the fear that is engendered by the perpetual need to choose. With increased mindfulness comes an enhanced capacity to evaluate the inner currents of feeling and to short circuit automatic emotional reactions that could be impediments to happiness. Mindfully checking and then compensating for mood states that hide below the radar can help a person live with fewer regrets. Shining a light on the surprise robotic responses to invisible triggers can prevent a world of irrational automaticity.

Many-cause thinking: Consider the quantum paradox. An electron can be seen as either a wave or a particle, depending on the perspective of the observer. The same is true for reality itself. Depending on the perspective of the observer, reality is either material or spiritual. The electron is the electron and reality is reality. It is as it is. One undivided until we divide it with words. As the many causes and impermanent nature of self are recognized, an increase in perspective taking breeds understanding and compassion. It is possible to shift points of view like putting on and taking off a pair of 3D glasses. As meditation deepens and reality is penetrated by contemplative analysis, it becomes clear that many perspectives can exist side by side as the observer alternates points of view. The "I am me" is one point of view, of the everyday mind, among an infinite number of other points of view. What distinguishes the "I am me" from all the other potential points of view is that we identify with it. We are powerfully attached or addicted to the "I am me" point of view as the center of our experience. Identification with "I am me" results in making distinctions between it and everything else. In the meditation experiment, we begin to see that reality is not simply chains of single causes and single effects. Instead, reality is the endless inter-play of myriad causes and myriad effects. Reality has always appeared to be a concrete truth, but in the meditation experiment objects that appeared as reflections of everyday mind could be seen as the shifting results of very complex sets of conditions. In that case, reality is a point of view on a merry-go-round and everyday mind is doing its best to avoid becoming dizzy.

 

Many-cause thinking

 

As the space between mental objects begins to open up in meditation and an increasing sense of clarity pervades, the fleeting nature of experience is counter posed to the unreal sense that things have an independent and solid nature. The phenomenological field of apparently permanent people, places and things is created inside the mind and then, like a movie projection, is played on the screen of our lives. This does not mean that there is no real world out there. It just means the world out there is not what it seems. Imagine that the mind is a movie. When the projector stops, the scene stops. When the projector is started again, motion returns. The realization that the mind shapes the world allows for the exploration of ideas of cause and effect. We see the world as being made up of chains of single causes resulting in single effects because this is how our mind works. Just like celluloid film stock, passing one frame at a time in front of the light, our mental picture of reality is based on chains of causes and effects cast on the conveyor of linear time. This leads to a secure kind of fundamentalist perspective that is not born out by the meditative experiment.

 

Imagine you are trying to determine the cause of the heat coming from a wooden match. Just prior to the match flaming, it was struck. The sequence of events was first the match was struck and then it flamed. The cause of the heat was the scrapping of the match on the striker. In this example of single-cause thinking, cause precedes effect. It is true that the flame would not have occurred without the match being struck. It is also true that the flame would not have occurred if the wood cutter had not harvested the wood for the match or if the chemical plant had not mixed the chemicals that made the match head flammable. The tree the match came from was only alive because it had adequate sunlight and rain fall. There were many causes that led to the moment that brought about the flame. The person striking the match was taught about wooden matches by his grandfather. It was the habit of the striker to carry wooden matches on camping trips to light fires or lanterns. The woodcutter almost died at birth but because of the sharps eyes of an attending nurse his death was averted. The flame is the result of an endless number of circumstances that needed to be true for the match to light. The actual moment of the flame lies at the center of a web of causes and is dependent on that entire web for its existence.

 

It is possible to see the linear chain of events as being the result of a single cause leading to a single effect. It is also possible to see the endless interconnectedness of things so that it becomes apparent that everything depends on everything else for its existence. Many-cause thinking approaches the world as an organic whole instead of using a cognitive scalpel to slice out one little artifact of experience. Many-cause thinking is simply another way of seeing. A client in a residential substance abuse treatment center admitted he felt very guilty because he had introduced his girlfriend to heroin and now she was prostituting herself to get high. I asked the client to make a list of all the things that would have to be true for his girlfriend to have become addicted to heroin. I encouraged the client to be very exacting and specific. The list included everything from her genetic history to her drug and alcohol use through out her life up to the moment of her encounter with heroin. The client’s guilt was dependent on seeing himself as the prime cause with all the other causes being relatively unimportant. After this exercise, the client admitted that he was one cause among many. He could see he played a part and had to take responsibility for the part he played but so did many others including his girlfriend.

 

In the meditative experiment, this is not the cause of that. Instead, causality is contextual e.g. made up of many factors occurring simultaneously with each other in a fluid environment. The mind then takes this fluidity and reshapes it into a manageable frame-at- a-time sequence of events. Fundamentalism is a form of single-cause thinking as opposed to many-cause thinking. Many-cause thinking is relativistic and recognizes the validity of alternative perspectives. Instead of one true point of view, each projector potentially sees the world in a new light. Reality becomes wide open but much harder to pin down as a simple true or false dichotomy. Single-cause thinking takes one variable and synthetically extracts it from its natural interdependent state. This would be like trying to understand the human body by studying the heart as if it existed on its own instead of being a part of an organic whole. In scientific research a variable is plucked from its natural habitat with the understanding that its separation from the whole is a temporary construct for purposes of examination.  However, if you instead isolate a variable in order to deny that the other variables exist, your vision will become myopic, blinding you to the natural codependence of things. This results in a static perspective and a frozen world-view. All so-called beliefs are really theories that cannot stand up to the test of impermanence.

Single-cause thinking is necessary to the development of absolutist habits and patterns. A drug dependent person believes that he will never be able to have intimate relations without being under the influence of his drug of choice. He believes this whole-heartedly and without the smallest bit of doubt. On those occasions when he has been willing to risk connecting to others without the drug, he has felt numb and useless. Most chemically dependent folk rapidly become accustomed to the services that are provided by their poison of choice and cannot imagine that those services can be reproduced by natural means. The man who depends on a few drinks for the courage to socialize finds it hard to develop a picture of himself being uninhibitedly sober. The father who can’t see his son having a good life without getting into Harvard is every bit as stuck as the shy drunk. Single-perspective thinking is closed and defensive by nature and cannot tolerate contradiction. A fundamentalist has high denial needs. When data does not conform to the chosen construct then the data has to be denied, ignored or obfuscated. In single-cause thinking, there is a rules-based decision making process. In contrast, many-cause thinking is more likely to base conclusions on experimentation and to adapt to changing conditions. The many-cause thinker can try on one hat after another because he has not fixated on a particular hat outcome. The addict discovers that with the right mix of supportive friends, he can actually get up and do karaoke with the best of them.

Consider a continuum with one end being a neutral idea and the other an absolute truth and in between a progression of increasingly strong beliefs. To say you have an idea or theory leaves open the possibility that it (the idea) may be proven wrong, but to say you believe x is true means YOU will be proven wrong if x turns out to be false. Since you, in effect, have taken possession of x, as an attachment, by claiming x as your belief, you will suffer a loss, an ego blow. What will you do to avoid that? Single-cause thinking is egocentric at its core and so serves the interests of the conditioned self. A belief always has two complementary components, subject and object. The object of belief is negatively, positively or neutrally valued which imbues the object with repulsive, attractive or neutral energy. The subject, in seeing herself as separate from the object, is dependent on the division for identity. I am the kind of person who likes to watch sports and eat pizza with my friends. The self identifies with the object in a figure ground relationship. The truth upon which I stake my sense of identity represents me like the knight stands for his king. If you unhorse the knight, the king can not sit safely on his throne. The self is the total constellation of beliefs that make it possible for the king to imagine he rules the world.

A conservative friend tells me that she is convinced that there should never be universal medical care. She is adamant in her belief, even after being asked to consider that if circumstances were different for her, she might wish for universal medical care. She responded by indicating that she was quite sure that she would never be in a position where she would depend on the state for health care. This is an example of single-cause thinking. Let us unpack her current state of affairs to examine how she arrived at her privileged situation. My friend is a married female with three children. She has MS and as a result does not work full time. Her husband has a mid-level executive position for a large insurance company. The company provides health insurance as part of a benefit package. Her husband has also purchased a life insurance policy. They owe a substantial mortgage for their house. Her husband’s job is dependent on economic factors and his performance. My friends MS is, at this point, being treated with medication. She is able to do some work outside of the home and to take care of her family obligations with a great deal of effort. Her medical care is essential for her in order to both relieve acute symptoms and prevent chronic deterioration.

 

My friend’s privileged situation is based on conditions over which she is powerless. Changes in any area could affect her situation. Changes in her marital status, the severity of her MS, her husbands job status, the benefit package that provides her with medical insurance or the economy could negatively effect her ability to access medical care. There are also numerous hidden unknown catastrophes possible. Her current situation exists only because of a juxtaposition of factors all of which are subject to change. Each of these factors is in turn dependent on additional conditions. You can drill down thru any factor such as the economy and discover an endless web of variables that can change her immediate situation. She enjoys security based on a view of a frozen world. The only thing that is for sure is that change is inevitable.

 

A belief system is something we impose on reality. We are intent on forcing the data to conform. An alcoholic wonders why, when she is in a treatment center, her mind appears fixed in its belief that she will never drink again, but when she is back home she thinks she can have just one drink and then stop before she loses control. The belief precedes the actual circumstances. It comes first because there is no evidence one-way or the other. Once the facts are out, we no longer believe; we can see it and hear it. The mental object of using or not has no independent reality and rises and falls based on the conditions in which the alcoholic places herself. A belief can be seen to be subject to an impermanent state of environmental conditions. To maintain a rigid posture towards a belief ignores that it is an ephemeral, internal reflection of an external object. The object is created from the inside out because form is a container that we fill up with our projections. Anything can be seen as something else from a different point of view. To a bird, the seed is food. To the farmer, it is livelihood. To the cook, it is seasoning. A belief can be addressed like a bird in a cage; where you put the seed will determine on which side of the cage the bird roosts.

 

When faced with the prospect of addressing illness, the primary venue is healthcare. The biggest problem with the healthcare system is scarce resources and a basic market economy. The availability of medical services is more than adequate but the ability to access them is dependent on payment. Unless a person is able to pay for a service out of his pocket, payment is going to be gotten either from the taxpayer or the investor. If a suffering person with heroin addiction wants treatment and can’t pay for it, he will be forced to depend on his health insurance or state funding. In both cases, the over-seers are very careful to use the resources wisely. Wise use will be evidence based. When a heroin addict wants help, he or she will be offered services provided by the lowest bidder with the highest likelihood of being successful. Success is defined as resulting in a state of affairs, which cost the taxpayer or the insurance company the least. The measuring sticks for success are the heroin addict no longer has to commit crimes to pay for drugs. He does not present at the emergency room as a result of an over-dose. Since he is healthy and unencumbered by incarceration, he is able to sustain employment. All else being equal if the above facts are true then the heroin addict’s treatment is successful i.e. there is a net savings to society resulting from treatment.

 

Currently, the evidence suggests that the best treatment for the heroin addiction is methadone maintenance. The older models of holistic care are too labor intensive and too expensive. The medical model is quick, cheap and in keeping with societies pop-pop fizz-fizz mentality. Evidence is based on objectivity. The evidence does not support detoxing a heroin addict and then providing him or her with residential holistic care for addiction. Instead, the heroin addict will be treated outpatient with methadone maintenance while counseling services will focus on keeping the client on the methadone. The evidence suggests that once a heroin addict is introduced to methadone, he or she will either be on it for the rest of his or her life or they will return to using heroin. The bottom line for the health care system is control, objectivity and money. The heroin addict is dependent on the methadone maintenance program, which holds the key to his continuing ability to function successfully. The evidence supports methadone maintenance and so the biggest part of the scientific community supports it. It is an economically efficacious treatment when compared to the cost of incarceration, emergency medical care and welfare expenses incurred by actively using heroin addicts.

 What does it mean to be objective? We are really all just street scientists. For instance, a recovering alcoholic tries numerous ways to continue his drinking until he finally surrenders to the fact that he just can’t drink. He switches from whiskey to beer, only drinks after six, eats before he drinks, counts his drinking days versus his non-drinking days. He runs the experiments the same way a scientist does.  Is it possible to examine reality free from prejudice? In research we extract or abstract variables from a whole in order to examine the effect of making changes in one variable to see how these changes affect another variable. Our choice of variables is determined by our socio-cultural priorities. We chose variables like rate of employment in methadone maintenance research because of the cultural importance of work in our society. The whole person who is addicted is too complex for us to accomplish an experiment so we pick from the whole what is important to us. Our choice is subjective and is designed to give us a sense of control over the world.

We begin with the hypothesis: methadone treatment will increase employment in opiate addicted clients. We pick a variable like employment rate because we value employment and if employment rates increase in methadone maintained clients then we determine methadone is good. This sort of process is repeated using other socially constructed variables until the evidence for methadone maintenance appears overwhelming. Another approach would be to collect a large body of data and attempt to tease out from the data variables that we have not up until this moment seen as important because we have not been aware of them. Our personal, socially constructed prejudgments would be avoided by means of the systematically unbiased way in which we approached the body of data. We would not try to impose meaning on the data at this stage.   For instance, first Darwin collects observations about lots of creatures and then he begins to observe trends in the data, then a theory is postulated and then the theory is tested. Despite the overwhelming evidence there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with the use of methadone maintenance. Where does it come from? We are dumfounded. Suppose we did what Darwin did. We collected as many observations as we could first and used a qualitative technique to objectively identify variables such as is accomplished with inductive analysis. Would we have discovered that there are variables that we are not aware of that drive the dissatisfaction? 

In the above example the methadone addict is studied by isolating a part (employment) from the whole. The goal was to make the part independent by turning it into a concept. This made it possible to treat the part as if it were a new whole. This single-cause thinking was at first designed to examine this complicated problem. Where it went wrong was, after the examination resulted in looking at the data in some new ways, the isolated variables were carved into fundamentalist blocks to further investigation. The part was given authority and treated as if it was the whole person. In this way the confounding variables that would interfere with an attempt to understand the part could be ignored. A person has a trait (black). We isolate black so we can talk about a black person. Of course, this is only a way of talking about a part of a complex whole, the person. This person is a father, worker, tall, organized etc, etc. This is a useful strategy so long as you know that what is being done is really artificial, a temporary abstraction. We do this so we can manipulate the part that we have isolated in language, but in the real world there is no black person. This strategy can be used as a basis for racism. There is nothing to hold on to in the complexity so we create a part as a sort of handle that we can use in language, a kind of temporary point of traction. If we value the grip we imbue it with an undeserved reality so we can continue our hold in the face of the ever-shifting plane of the whole. We cut up complexity into parts so we can define which parts we will reject and which we will grasp. 

While methadone maintenance solves many problems, it does not address the basic addictive process. In fact, it discourages confronting the clinging behavior of the addict by substituting an object of addiction under outlaw control for another object of addiction under state control. The first time an addict uses is often described as a crossroads moment. This moment changes the addict’s life forever. It is as if he makes a huge deposit in the First Habit Energy Bank. This account creates a powerful need to make further deposits. The bigger the account gets, the more powerful the need to keep making deposits. This need could be called habit energy. Methadone maintenance is continuing to make deposits in a controlled manner, which actually increases the habit energy of the account. When an addict makes a voluntary withdrawal from this account e.g. when he decides to quit using, this first withdrawal, since it is a Herculean undertaking, is a very large withdrawal, reducing the habit energy of the account significantly. After this first withdrawal, an addict can continue to make regular withdrawals of progressively smaller amounts (he refrains from using day after day) with less effort until the account has only insignificant amounts of habit energy. The methadone maintained addict, very often, looks for alternative means to be intoxicated like mixing tranquilizers with his methadone and if methadone maintenance is stopped, for whatever reason, he returns full steam to heroin.

This brings up an interesting point. Methadone maintenance, if part of a constructive program, can lead to positive outcomes for both the individual addict and the community. It’s biggest plus for the community is that it can be dispensed as a part of an outpatient program and used as a hook to enforce monitoring and make clients accountable for unhealthy behaviors like illicit drug use. When a client violates the program guidelines and uses another substance like marijuana or cocaine, he is penalized. He loses the privilege of being able to take a supply of his methadone home and instead has to come to the clinic daily to get his dose. The client who acquiesces to the structured system of urine drops and therapy appointments receives freedom from having to chase heroin, commit crimes and risk death or injury resulting from an overdose. 

Providing the client with a powerfully addictive substance (the means) is justified because it reduces harm (the ends) for a modest social investment . In single-cause thinking, means and ends are two separate categories. In many-cause thinking, means and ends are part of an integrated whole characterized by reciprocity. This many faceted means has to be looked at as part of complicated matrices, which includes many ends. Methadone maintained clients are shunned by society because the means is perceived as cheating. Perhaps, methadone maintenance is seen as cheating because addiction is conceptualized as poor or mistaken behavior, which requires a punitive response. The addict must pay for his mistake by suffering and since methadone alleviates the suffering, it lets the addict avoid his just deserts. In other words, recovery from heroin addiction has to hurt. The problem is that this punitive approach does not result in a successful outcome. It does not reduce the considerable harm that the heroin addict faces because it does not work. Methadone maintained clients are treated like pariah. It is not that harm-reduction is not a good outcome or not justified given the catastrophic realities of heroin use, but, in this case, the means is stigmatized on every level of our society. The alternative to methadone maintenance, very long, very intensive in-patient therapy is not forthcoming because of the expense.

Fundamentalism is not the exclusive territory of any single ideological group. It is not very difficult to detect fundamentalism in yourself because if you have a fundamentalist perspective a challenge to your beliefs will result in a highly charged defense. Do you dislike the other side? Are they not like you? There are fundamentalist liberals and fundamentalist scientists. Whether you believe you can have just one drink or that universal health care is a socialist conspiracy or that methadone is the devil, the right set of circumstances could change you mind. Minds are like beds. They are made in the morning and unmade at night. In the end, a belief system is just a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. It's not what you believe but how you believe. If an ice fisherman holds a line between his fingers so he can detect a barely perceptible nibble, he can give the line just the right pull to snag the fish. How should he hold the line? Imagine if he held the line too loosely. He might miss the nibble. The line could slip right through his fingers. If he held the line too firmly, his fingers might tire and grow numb. The line should be held so that there is a feel for the moment. If the grip is too tight or too loose, the fish gets away. The same thing might be said for a belief. A belief is just like the ice fisherman’s line. Hold it carefully because it will soon be gone. Nothing stays. Like the ice fisherman, it is in this very moment that you will have to decide to hold on or to let go of what you desire. The idea of one true belief (when life is a moving target) is delusion. It’s not what you believe so much as how you believe. There is a relationship between intensity of belief and hatred. The more strongly held the belief, the more hatred. Attachment is the source of most anger. Opinions are ideas with affect and attitude.

Would you say that holding on to anything is bad? Should you divest yourself of attachment to people, places and things? Are we supposed to become monks? Would it be better to not believe in anything? What about good addictions, healthy attachments? What about virtues like enthusiasm, kindness, and generosity?  An old Zen master referred to his favorite cup as all ready broken. He was in tune with the impermanent nature of the cup. One day you buy a brand new car. It is shiny and cool. It smells special and sounds powerful. While it sits in the driveway, you stare out the window. This car is yours, but it is all ready scrap. Soon, one of your children will spill red cool aid on the seat. There will be an indelible stain, changing perfection into imperfection. You will get used to the stain and the dents from shopping carts pretty quickly but that long, red swash in the slick metallic gray paint will be much harder. This is not the forever car of your imaginings. Everything (people, places, things and beliefs) is impermanent.  You are impermanent. If you want to suffer, hold on tight, but if you want to be happy know the car is scrap and enjoy the ride. An object of desire, no matter how it may appear, contains its opposite. You can be too kind, generous or enthusiastic. It is in the very nature of compassion to set everyone and everything free. There can be no compassion without knowing that we are all just temps. The new car is all ready a rust heap. The cup is broken. You are dead. This is not a depressing fact. It is reality. Face reality and seize the day. It is the fragile nature of our world that makes it so precious. The value of a real rose is that it is not a frozen thing but beauty that can only be glanced out of the corner of your eye. Life is rare.

Self-will

 

 The ultimate fundamentalist belief is that the self is an independent, unique and solid entity separate from everything else. Perhaps, the self is more like a mist. A mist is a temporary collection of vapor droplets creating the impression of solidity but let the sun warm the air and what appears to be substantial and solid is anything but. Have you ever listened to a person tell about themselves by saying, “ I am the kind of person that,” and then they fill in the blank? I am the kind of person that likes walks in the moonlight. I am what I identify with. If I am identifying with my body, I think I am my body, but if I begin to remove parts of my body I can see that these parts are mine, but they are not me. I can methodically subtract aspect after aspect from the I-am-me set (what I identify with) until there is no-thing left at all. I can see myself as a temporary set of conditions that are constantly changing like the mist as opposed to a ghost in a machine. The machine, in this metaphor, is the body. The ghost is a resident, unchanging individual frequently assigned labels like soul, self, ego, psyche or personality. In the meditation experiment, the self is revealed as just another mental object subject to conditions like a mist. In this felt-sense I am an elemental spirit with an infinite number of potential recombination's of conditions. I am not separate from my environment but very much an expression of it. My roots are in the stony soil of the earth and my leaves in the infinite expanses of eternity.

Suppose that the story of the “I-am-me” goes something like this: the “I-am-me” is a complex filtering system surrounding an imagined inner core (the self). This core is a primitive phantasm believed to be so delicate that it needs protection from the world. The complex filtering system is made up of fundamentalist beliefs about what is good or bad for this imagined inner core. The prime directive of the filter is protection. The filter is the conventional mind, idea-mind, that identifies with objects in outer environment. This filter repels information that it deems to be a danger and absorbs information that makes a contribution to keeping the inner core safe. It is a shield. What it sees as neutral, it ignores. In order to control the flow of data the filter will require a rules-based, impermeable boundary to prevent the entry of discrepant information. This might be referred to as denial. It is easy for the filter to make clear standards to measure whether data can be accepted or will need to be rejected. These standards act as rules resulting in a decision process that is authoritarian. The filter is dependent on single-cause thinking for its work because, in many-cause thinking, truth may be seen as metaphorical since many perspectives can be entertained simultaneously. The addict’s perspective will become his gospel and in order to maintain the integrity of that gospel, the addict must limit his sources of information to those who do not question his private truth. When the addict's cannons, creeds or ideologies become the only source of his truth, criteria for membership in his private world must be based on fidelity to that truth. It becomes easy to tell who is inside the circle and who is out. Those who are judged to be outsiders can be depersonalized because they are a threat to the sanctity of the inner core. Empathy becomes selective. Outsiders are not to be trusted. In many-cause thinking, it is easy to switch from perspective to perspective resulting in the ability to identify with the universal other and extend compassion to all. The addict can not see himself because he can not stand in another person's shoes.

The filter constricts around this imagined “I-am-me”, using energy to accomplish it ends. It has to be in a constant state of vigilant, tension to do its job. As it repels and attracts, it creates a self-adjusting system based on rules or beliefs that make decisions about what can be let in and what must be kept out. The impression is that all the rules or beliefs are operating in consort, guided by a master intelligence, when in fact each rule is it's own separate process. Growth, in living systems, is movement from simple to complex. This movement begins with differentiation and then proceeds to integration. First the cell (the new process) divides and then it learns to function as a part of a cooperative collective. Differentiation may also result in disassociation or fusion. When the parts divide, each has a new individual nature. If this nature is not coordinated with the other cells, then each individual cell does it's own thing without regard to the needs of his fellows. Usually, this results in failure of the system. Fusion occurs when differentiation fails. Cells fail to achieve their individual nature and just stick together in a useless glob. A person transforms in a similar manner. From the solidity of infancy comes the different parts: mind, body and other. When integration occurs the person thrives, but if the parts disassociate, the person suffers. In our culture disassociation is the norm. The idea-mind is dominant to the point where body and other are turned into alien objects.

The purpose of all types of Yoga training is the re-integration of mind, body and other. Idea-mind is dominated by the creation of mental objects, thought processing, with particular focus on the delusion of self-permanence. Alienation from the other denies the collective nature, inter-dependence of all beings and things. The result is a person who feels disassociated, disconnected from the world. In the struggle to combat this sense of spiritual desolation, the world of the other is objectified and turned into a drug. We strive bravely for merger with a love object, only to feel smothered. The desire for intimacy is counter posed to the desire for individuality in a serial dance of approach-avoidance. Consider the example of romantic love. Romantic love is an ideal we have all strived for at one time or another. When a lover is exposed to a beloved, the brain’s response is to send dopamine levels sky high at the same time as reducing the supply of serotonin, the brain’s basic mood stabilization system. The result is a powerful flood of pleasure but deprive the lover of the loved and you have grist for a library of baleful poetry and prose. If the lover and loved are separated, they will manifest withdrawal symptoms that compete with the most addictive chemicals. Rejection of a lover is one of the most common causes of violence in our society. In due time, the dopamine surge abates, the relationship becomes claustrophobic and there is need for separation. In about half the cases, the unbearable, so-called, love morphs into out-right hatred. The lone lover, missing the dopamine surge, returns to the quest for love just like the drug addict prowls for his fix.

The way of the addict is based upon the dysfunctional belief that personal liberation is found in an object in the outer environment. The addict’s desire for liberation leads her to merge with the object, which she takes into herself. The object might be an ideology, a lover, or chemicals. It really doesn't matter. The foreign object eventually fails to satisfy. It is just a kind of unprofitable fusion after all. Nothing outside will work. The outside is not the way to real freedom because eventually the outside object changes it relationship to the inside and becomes a poison because the addict believes single-mindedly that he needs the outside object to be whole and fears its loss. The fear is the clinging, consumptive attachment. In the beginning, alcohol seems like the first warm days of spring, but as use becomes excessive there are changes in the alcoholic's biochemistry that cause grave consequences. The desire for separation can become revulsion or even hatred for the unsatisfied self.  There is a hungry ghost that can never get enough. Growth can only occur when the addict realizes that freedom isn’t out there and he turns his attention inward. Growth is the inherent nature of every human being. It has been in us all along. Like the baby, who is an integral part of the mother one minute and a separate entity the next, we are thrust, via the delusion of the conventional mind, into a world of fear. We mistakenly believe we are separate, cut off from the whole, and so the complex filtering system begins to assemble a fortress around our anxiety like a pearl around a bit of grit. The result is that the conventional mind creates a center of it all that is the imaginary self. Everything is perceived in relationship to this center. I am the center of the universe; the ultimate reference point for gauging what is or is not good. Use of mood altering substances, relaxes this barrier system, disinhibiting it and consequently reducing the tension and energy consumption that the system requires to keep itself operational. The reduction of tension is sensed as euphoria. There is a feeling of openness as constriction is reduced that is very pleasurable. This creates an artificial sense of transcendence because the experience simulates the dropping of the barrier that holds closed the doors to the vast reservoir that is God.

Among Twelve Step program advocates, there is a folksy piece of wisdom that goes something like: An addict is simply attempting to arrive at spirituality by knocking at the wrong door. The implication is that the same forces that are generally responsible for the human quest for transcendence may be one of the foundations of addiction. There is implied here the idea that addiction is an attempt to reduce a natural state of tension by allowing a subject to fuse with an object. To understand the fusion with an object model, one must begin by developing a picture of a generalized self. This self construct is, at least in part, a chronic state of tension produced by the endless cognitive task of input processing. The processing is nonstop and goes on even in our sleep. The self construct decides upon which inputs to focus, makes choices between competing inputs, and decides which inputs to set aside for future reference. Wherever a person goes, a decision has to be made like “paper or plastic.” The choice rides on the perception of satisfaction or dissatisfaction e.g. desire. This process of judging, discriminating and choosing creates a chronic state of tension. It is from this chronic state of tension that the self is in search of relief. The freedom from the bondage of self, the transcendence of self, is an urge felt by every man or woman on some level.  The self in its search for relief is paradoxically attempting to escape from itself. 

 

Unskillful escapes take many forms, but the forms that occur with the greatest frequency tend to have a common scheme e.g. the fusion of the imagined inner self with an object. The idea of object here implies an experience of otherness into which the self can be temporarily absorbed. The loss of self into something other than self creates relief from the chronic state of tension. The problem is that the object of attachment is subject to impermanence. It can be benign one minute and metastasize the next. For example, an addicted gambler may report a loss of time while cranking the one armed bandit. The various sensory inputs that allow us to measure time, like muscle fatigue, changes in lighting and the comings and goings of others, seem to go unprocessed in the gambler's trance. There appears to be a very profound reduction in the chronic state of tension, resulting from not processing internal and external cues. The relief from an aversive set of stimuli (the chronic state of self) is rewarding and will produce repetition of behaviors such as pulling the lever. But while the gambler pulls the lever, life passes him by.

Imagine you are wearing a heavy, wet wool coat. You wear it day and night. Only in your dreams is it ever off. Sometimes, if you are very lucky, you have a dream where you can fly free without the coat. Then, one day, you discover that when you use drugs or alcohol, at least for the moment, you can hang the coat up and feel the breeze on your skin. How relieved you would be for that moment. Due to the temporary nature of this relief, you might be tempted to come back to it again and again. Of course, if you over do drugs or alcohol, there would be consequences. You might discover that the more you return to the drugs and alcohol for freedom, the heavier and wetter the coat becomes. Now the question might occur to a person, “why not just take the coat off and never put it back on”? The coat is the mortgage, the marriage, the job and the 339 remaining car payments. You might want to have a little relief but you are not ready to take this coat off. The coat is the set of beliefs about what needs to be kept and what needs to be discarded. The coat is what you identify with. It is the barrier system of attachments. Wearing the coat is a choice. The imaginary self is the sum total of all of the attachments, both tangible and intangible, that have accumulated like deposits of sediment on the empty mirror of original mind. These deposits are the source of the fun house distortion that is the the mirror. 

Imagine finding an old encrusted garden Buddha and deciding to clean it up. The statue is weathered from years of exposure to the elements. Finally, after many hours of work, the true surface of the Buddha is exposed. It is a priceless, solid gold Buddha. Who would have guessed? It is possible with meditation to increase awareness of the barrier of desire and incomprehension, rule upon rule, until the self is seen as one viewpoint among many. There is no coat. There is no fragile, primordial inner self to protect like a bubble filed with air. The self is a construct of the barrier. When the barrier delusion is over come, there is clarity, unity, harmony, and integration. The coat is a phantasm based on attachment.

Individualism

The Buddha appears to have argued against the individual soul or unique self. For an individual soul to be, there must be an individual separate from everything else. If the self, despite it’s appearance of substance, is really a collection of changing conditions like the mist, than the self can be seen as emptiness. Empty does not mean nothingness in this perspective. It means that since all things are without an individual, inherent reality that they are empty of unitary existence. They are dependant instead on conditions of cause and effect e.g. they are a moving target. We create the solid, frozen world of form with our cognitive framework, which results in a closed perspective of things having a fixed, inherent reality. Another perspective might be no thing individual at all. 

A thought experiment: Things are not themselves. Imagine you place a ball in empty space to answer the question is movement real. You push the ball with your mind. Space is completely empty. There are no other objects. Does the ball move? Could you prove it? You would need a stationary object to use as a fixed point to measure the balls movement. There is no movement without the relationship between stationary and moving. Either has no inherent reality without its relationship to the other. So when Descartes says, “ I think therefore I am”, you could say, “ I am in relationship to therefore I am”. If a person drills down through all the things that would have to be true so that there is an “I” to think, they would discover an infinite web of causes and effects making the existence of this “I” possible. This infinite web of causes and effects is the “I” process, which is dependent on conditions. If I begin to subtract these causes and effects from the condition that is “I”, the “I” changes, perhaps ceases to be “I” and becomes a rain drop, a flickering flame, a lump of clay or the blue sky.  

Imagine your experience is like peering down a tube. At the end of the tube you can see only one individual unit or node at a time. The tube is your cognitive framework. Your experience would suggest that things come as separate units since only one unit at a time could be entertained. As you see each unique unit, as a convenience, you provide that unit with a label. This is a ball. That is empty space. Over there is a stationary object. In this way, you organize the world. Now imagine that thru some miracle you are freed from the tube. The limitation caused by the tube gives way to a new perception of your experience. Now you realize that nodes can also be seen as interconnected. In fact, nodes are interdependent. In the absence of this one that one cannot exist. You have to have a ball, a stationary object, space and, of course, an observer for movement to exist. It is a web. We believe that everything is separate from everything else because we cannot see how things are connected, but in the meditative experiment it becomes possible to experience connection as the discriminating mind is relieved of its duties.

If what we are experiencing is not an independent, unique self, then what is it? Is it all the endless connections? Is it a whole made up of parts? It would be easy to think of reality as an interconnected web, but there is still contained in this notion the idea of parts. Maybe, shifting and recombining (impermanent), but parts never the less. Reality, in this story, is a kind of Lego land. But what if there are no parts? What if the idea of parts is our cognitive contribution to reality. Reality is part-less. The concept of a whole includes the concept of individual, unique parts. It takes a collection of trees to make up a forest? You can't have the concept of whole without it's opposite: division. In the meditative experiment, when the pond is free of rubber ducks including the voice over narrator and the witnessing self, there is spaciousness without distinctions. It is not that the parts glob together into an indistinct new assemblage that we call oneness. No all-one combining of many and no-one separate from many. There are no parts. The felt sense is of no- difference. 

In our conventional minds, time is passing moment to moment and in each moment the individual self is presented with choices. It is like a drop of water on the top of your hand, hovering in the moment. Which way will it roll or will it just sit there unmoved. In a sense, there could be any number of out comes, each different from the other. Could be? In reality, there is no difference because there is only one out come. The direction of the roll is all ready decided by the inclination of the hand and the floor, the rotation of the earth, the vibrations and tiny little movements and a myriads of other predetermining factors. There is no difference. A new definition of love might erase the boundary between the object and subject. I love you entails a division and in this new definition of love the subject of love and the object of love are not two or one. They are Thus or they are God. Genuine experience is like a stream. What happens down stream is influenced, determined by what happens up stream. When the flow of water up stream strikes a rock, the course of the water down stream changes. Conversely, if the flow of water is blocked down stream, up stream swells in response. The past determines the future and the future determines the past. The stream is a singular happening of relationships. It is as it is. If you reach anywhere into the stream, you will discover you cannot grab a handful before it is past and gone. Each moment of the water is the result of the up stream and down stream part-less-ness. Each moment of the water is our attempt at stopping that, which cannot be stopped. There are no moments because there is no stopping except when we turn the water, reality, into an idea. Ideas are substance-less ghosts of water. The suffering of one is the suffering of many and the suffering of many is the suffering of one. There is no difference.

Individuality is a delusion. When any object is examined, it’s so called essence; its selfhood can be seen to be a projection of the way the conventional mind sees. The conventional mind takes in raw data from the world through the organs of perception and cognitively processes that data into a temporary hallucination that allows the individual to operate from moment to moment. The hallucination is persistent, giving the individual a sense of permanence that is unreal. The sense of permanence is a practical delusion upon which an individual depends but is not an accurate reflection of what is out there. How many trees does it take to make a forest. Ten? Twenty? A hundred? When does a group of individual trees become a forest? Forest is a concept that we use to describe a large group of trees. It has no independent reality. What if the forest is one tree short? A tree is a concept that we use to describe a group of non-tree elements. There is the trunk, the branches, the twigs and the leaves. A person is a concept we use to describe non-person elements. There are organs, skin, face, feet, hands and torso. None of these parts are the person because when you lay them on the table, there is no person to be found. There is nothing to acquire karma, nothing to be reborn. The conventional conceptual self can act in its delusion and as a result of this action create an effect. The hallucination is all we have to work with since we cannot escape our own mind. Maybe, it is like doing robotic surgery using a television monitor as the interface with the mechanical devices doing the actual cutting. The surgeon watches blood vessels and organs indirectly through the window of the monitor. He cannot really make direct contact with the body of his patient, but he is not deluded into believing the television image is really a living, breathing human being. He just behaves as if it is in order to accomplish his work. In the meditative experiment, it becomes clear that reality is not the limited form that we project on to the screen of our own mind.

Jesus called his disciples to let go of the bondage to selfish, worldly attachments. Addiction is an impediment to spiritual awakening. Spiritual awakening or liberation is not an unnatural state. A person is supposed to progress from infantile selfishness to adult altruism. We expect a child to think mostly of himself while an adult is expected to turn outward as they parent. This is maturity. In addiction, the natural maturational progression is turned on its head. The addict only has eyes for the object of his attachment. Mothers neglect there children and fathers miss work, failing to provide for their families. The lives of addicts de-people as they chase their desires. Human history, as much as it has been successful, has been about relationship. As addicts cut off their links to their fellows, they regress to earlier stages of emotional narcissism. Their contribution to the human project is undone. 

We are living in a period when political camps are forming. One camp of bullies believes that they should do what ever they want without regard to the needs of others while their counterparts recognize their interconnectness with the rest of humanity and operate with compassion and loving kindness towards those less fortunate. In the everyday world of the conventional mind, the individual is the center of modern western culture. The West elevates individuality, as it’s highest core value. The political realm is much more concerned with the rights of individuals than the common good. This rationalizes unbelievable disparities in wealth and status because the efforts of the individual are rewarded as if the actors actually acted alone. The reality is that nothing happens in this world without many causes coming into play. An individual needs connection to even survive. In order to prove this to yourself consider an obvious connection such as the electrical power that lights your house. This power is only possible because miles of wire have been painstakingly laid, the power plant is staffed, the control mechanisms are in place and miners have dug the coal. Each miner is dependent on a network of roads to get to her workplace. These roads were blasted through rocky outcroppings and poured with cement that was born on freighters that came all the way from Northern Michigan. We need each other. In fact, nothing can exist without interdependence. The idea of a rugged individual doing it all by himself is a romantic contrivance of the conventional delusion that we are separate and alone.

Our conventional mind believes that there is a design. A piece of wood has a natural grain so if you work with the grain the wood is smooth. Perhaps, we will say that this directionality is good and to work against the grain is not good. In the world of the conventional mind it is natural to flow in a good orderly direction. An action that is counter to this natural flow is like finger nails on a chalkboard. This is idea-mind imposing a conceptual framework on the wood e.g. seeing the wood as being subject to a design. If there is no idea-mind, then there is no grain. Instead of the notion of design or a central intelligence, we could consider the idea of distributed intelligence. Perhaps we should ask questions like: Is God’s limitlessness distributed around so that she can be every where all at once or is God concentrated in one place? Is God's limitless intelligence emanating from a central location or is it located in each and every thing and expressed from that thing. Could wood have wood mind? Rocks have rock mind? Dogs have dog mind? All these different minds are part of the perspective of the conventional way of seeing, which is, of course, a convenient delusion. 

In the meditative experiment, at first, there is (my) awareness of an object. Awareness appears to emanate from a central location and to be projected on to a specific object such as the breath. With practice, the ownership of awareness and therefore it centrality ceases and instead there is awareness with neither subject nor object. Awareness is not located but appears in all directions at once. The containers of me and mine are supplanted by a sense of limitless spaciousness.  There is the breath breathing. There is the wind winding. Ancient monks would say there is Thus. To live with our hallucination, it is necessary to limit the power of the practical delusion that the world is a permanent set of unique objects, including us, by letting go of past and future. There is this very moment in which we are alive like a rainbow. A rainbow can only exist if all the necessary conditions align perfectly. The sun must shine into the drops of rain at exactly the right angle for the rays to be reflected back as wavelengths of color. A human moment exists with the same sort of rarity. Think of all of the myriad causes that would have to be shining at just the right angle for this very moment to be you. Any variation and it would be different. The delusion of permanence leads to suffering because the whole house of unreal cards is just one moment away from collapsing. No matter how we try and jury-rig this fantasy world we create with our imagining mind, we will face having to let it go. Suffering can be lessened by letting go moment after moment, non-grasping at the temporary hallucinatory appearance of reality. In this moment, there is just Thus! In this moment, there is just God.

Death

In a way, meditation is practicing being dead. It is the fear of death or the end of the unique self or ego that prevents us from being free. All other fears are just supporting actors of the fear of no self. Addiction is a false sense of security that diverts us from the real insecurity that we know is coming. Death is seen in every wrinkle, every slowing down, every failure, every sickness, and every shadow. It has always waited for us just around the next corner like a thief. Death is the unseen hand that brushes us in our nightmares. It is this fear of death that makes it impossible for us to love our neighbor as our selves. How can we even love God when we think it is God that cuts the string? There is no room in a heart that is smothered with the fear of death. 

In meditation, we begin to live without fantasy or illusion. We let ourselves be spacious, open, without the secure projections that keep death out of sight and out of mind. We let ego wither away like an umbilical stub. Sometimes, we have to lose ourselves to find ourselves. The drug addict who crashes and burns before he rises up out of the ashes is genuinely born again. In meditation, you can let go of the ego without freaking-out. It's like being afraid to walk a tightrope. At first, you walk a line that is only inches above the ground and then you gradually raise the rope. Pretty soon, you can dance on the rope high in the sky. There is awareness but the awareness is not you or yours. The awareness is just the awareness. It's like we believe the ego is an invisible flashlight, but when you stop believing in the flashlight, the light still shines. The flashlight was the story you told yourself to explain the light. There never was a flashlight. You made it up. There is a SELF that shines that is not you. The fortress of ego can be dismantled once death is accepted and recognized for what it is. It is just letting go.  All the other anxieties that were standing in for death seem much less formidable now that their boss is exposed as a mirage. This fear of no self is always looking for an object to attach itself to. Worry is the illusion of doing something about this fearful object. But since the real force behind the worry is not seen (fear of no self), it will be only a matter of time before hand wringing starts all over again. Without the fear of death, what is there to fear?

Thus shall ye think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud;
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. 

-Diamond Sutra

You are an air traffic controller, sitting in front of your screen. As you sit scanning the screen there are blips that either you like to see or you do not like to see. There are also blips that don’t matter to you one way or the other. The screen is where the blips are and has no importance beyond that fact. The blips you like to see capture your attention and you gaze at them longingly. You work mightily to make the blips you do not like to see vanish. They bother you. The blips that don’t matter, you mostly ignore. The basis of your valuation of various blips has to do with whether they increase or decrease your sense of mastery. The lower your sense of mastery over the screen-world, the more fearful you become. The higher your sense of mastery, the more satisfied you become. The blips appear in varying degrees of intensity depending on how highly you value them or how much you hate them. The more intense the blip, the deeper the focus. The deeper the focus on one individual blip, the less attention is devoted to the rest of the screen. A very intense blip creates a kind of grappling and clinging to either hold the blip in place for pleasure’s sake or to fight the blip away for security’s sake. 

 

The blips are the result of many, many causes. In truth, the controller is mostly powerless.  His sense of mastery is premised on the delusion of control. The blips are the myriads of mental objects that are cascading into awareness. The controller is master of very little and in order to maintain his sense of mastery, he has given up the experience of everything except the blips, which appear and disappear in an unrelenting, merry-go-round of craving and repulsion. Beyond the excitations created by the blips, there is nothing of interest. The meditator is at first the controller, but as meditation deepens, the grappling and clinging begins to lessen. The space between the blips widens. The blips decrease in intensity, fade and disappear. The boundaries created by the blips melt into the screen. The screen and the not screen merge into pure boundless, awareness. The merry-go-round of craving and repulsion, the state of persistent tension that was the controller, becomes a peaceful light that casts no shadows. It is as if the meditator put the apple back on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In the beginning there was Devine Mind and then the human aspect let itself become individual and in its individuality it saw divisively. Imagine a solar flare separating from the body of the sun. Individual could see itself as separate from the whole of Devine Mind and so the play of opposites gave way to dualities like dark and light, good and evil. Duality resulted in confusion about choice. Choice led to desire, lust and hatred and finally, individual, haunted by the constant battle with his hungry heart, let go.  Imagine the solar flare settling back into the sun.

 

Working with the breath as an object of meditation presents an example of the difference between automaticity and awareness. When following the breath, breathing can be seen as being both intentional and involuntary. As a meditator maintains awareness of the breath, the breath winds along a path that cools the edges of the nostrils, flows into the belly and then rises up naturally into the lungs and back out again through the nostrils. The breath can move along this path either intentionally or automatically. At first a meditator struggles with the breath. Maybe, when he pays attention to the breath, there is a sense of not getting enough air so he intentionally breathes more deeply. Then he becomes aware of the exaggerated breaths he is taking so he intentionally slows his breathing down. There might even be a little panic because he can’t get the breathing to feel natural. The panic causes feelings of claustrophobia, increasing respiration. If the meditator stops paying attention to the breath, loses his focus and starts to daydream, breathing is automatic, requires no intentional adjustments. Automatic breathing is perfect. Here lies the rub. The unpracticed meditator is having a perfect moment only when he is unaware of it. If he pays attention, there is interference. There is good breathing and bad breathing. He clings to what he believes is good and rejects what he believes is faulty. So the experienced meditator learns to follow the natural movement of the breath without losing focus. In each moment, the next right thing, the next breath, occurs because it flows naturally from its predecessor. There is just being aware of the natural perfection of breath. In the Slow Bowing exercise, the next bow flows perfectly from the last. In walking meditation, the next right step is the natural outcome of the last right step. A tiny bit of enlightenment shines through the darkness. Perfection is not  pie-in-the-sky or an impossible dream. Perfection is being aware of the natural flow. In meditation, we learn to let go while we are still paying attention.

 

In the meditation experiment, we live from breath to breath, from moment to moment. Each moment ages and dies and the next moment is born from the last. It is like a path of magical stones. As you place your foot on a stone, it is all ready gone and you have to make for the next stone and then the next. Meditation is not about transcending the world, but being fully awake in the world. In every moment in which the next right step flows from the last, there is a moment of enlightenment. Unlike letting the breath breathe, actions based on self-will and mindlessness result in choices (paper or plastic) and based on the choices we make we get a new set of choices (recycle or not) that must be weighed and measured by the slicing and dicing mind. Everything is contingent on everything else. To say this is good or that is bad is to separate everything from everything else, which is what happens when we reduce the whole to parts. We cut up complexity into parts so we can define which parts we will reject and which we will grasp. Depending on the intensity of the feeling, an attachment is formed. Addiction is attachment.

 

It is possible to live from moment to moment like a robot, driven by unseen programs, which are justified by idea minds interminable rationalizations. It is also possible to choose what you desire over what you hate, to let craving be your compass. Craving, from a conventional perspective, is separate from the object of craving. The object becomes associated with craving because there is a belief about the connection. Craving appears to be an independent phenomenon based on the existence of its associated object but it is actually the shadow of our response to the fear of impermanence. We are always looking for a savior. It is as if we are on a slowly crashing airplane and out of fear we grab on to a stewardess with all our might. Maybe, we think this will protect us from our fate, but the stewardess is crashing too. Better we spend our last moments lovingly carrying the message to the still suffering than insanely clutching at what we can never have. In order to accomplish this liberation, the grasping, hungry ego must lose its narcissistic place to a new kind of right heartedness. This is true regardless of the religion one practices. In fact, religion is like a modern medication. It can be seen as having two parts, a delivery system and a payload.  Religion is like the delivery system. Spirituality is the payload. If you took all religions and subjected them to a factor analysis, you would discover that certain things would be true in every religion. All religions, for instance, ask us to surrender. When the center of the universe stops being the unique self and stretches to include the other, a power greater than our selves becomes our strength and we begin to grow right hearted compassion. We come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. As we let go of our self-will, we discover that we are part of the greater good and the greater good is part of us.

 

Our Patterns/Ourselves: Psychological Karma

The conditioned or conventional mind operates as a complicated set of habitual patterns. The amazing complexity of our lives requires that many of the things we do occur without our conscious attention. You might say we have automated a huge number of tasks so that we can focus on the more immediate concern of fulfilling our desires. We are like recorders. After we have repeated a procedure a number of times, we just hit replay. We shave, wash the dishes, eat, drive, do many of the operations of our jobs, have sex, interact with our children without fully attending. It is such a handy capability that we go through our lives ignoring the button that shuts off autopilot. We forget what it is like to eat, make love, hear a child's words as if we have nothing more important on our minds. We believe we need automaticity in order to juggle so many balls at once but what have we lost in return? If an itch occurs during meditation and you are drifting along instead of maintaining a mindfully aware focus, you may automatically scratch. A habitual pattern starts when it is triggered. Triggers can be signs, images or feelings. A sign is a stored impression or pattern of stored impressions that has stimulus power and can call into action a set of automatic behaviors. These automatic behaviors lurk in the deep recesses of memory until the right set of conditions present, resulting in the their activation. Not only can signs activate or trigger an automatic behavior but so can images, feeling states, sensations or sounds. These habitual patterns can be observed, as the practice of meditation is cultivated, in everyday situations. Have you ever been in a class when one person coughs and this cough is followed by a series of coughs? If you asked each subsequent cougher if they really coughed on their own accord or did they cough because of the triggering effect of the first cougher, they would probably not see themselves as having been triggered. Yet their cough was the result of hearing the sound of someone coughing and not because they suddenly had a need to cough come out of the blue. The first cough was a trigger and the subsequent coughs were the result of automaticity.

 

Automatic behaviors are the result of impressions that have collected under awareness like data on a hard drive. These impressions are difficult to access consciously. They exist at varying depths in the subconscious and unconscious mind. These deep seated mental impressions contain directions for our daily lives like the scripts that tell the actors in a play where to stand, how to feel and what to say. These scripts are the way human information systems store and retrieve data. For instance, your driving your car and you are presented with a stop sign. You don't have to give any thought as to how to proceed because you have had experiences with stop signs, which are stored in your memory as scripts. Scripts run in the background automatically, allowing us to know what to do in a large variety of circumstances. They inform each step of the protocol for approaching a stop sign without us having to analyze every action we take. All that is necessary for a script to run is contact with the appropriate signal. In this case, a stop sign with its six distinctive sides and bright red color, is the script actuator. The signal indicates we are in the drivers seat and the stop sign is present and so we stop automatically. Two people driving different cars have scripts that are pretty similar making coordinated driving possible. There are however small differences in our scripts. There are lines of the code running in the background that give our scripts slightly different flavors. For instance, my personal driving script includes a marked preference for keeping the speed limit while another driver may prefer going faster. I will tell the story of a ticket I got a year ago for going 10 over and how it cost me $85 to explain why I go the speed limit. The story is an explanation for my law-abiding behavior.

 

Beliefs act to rationalize habitual patterns when an explanation is required. Beliefs are as automatic as triggered behaviors, requiring only awareness of aspects of the pattern for their emergence. By reducing the incongruence of a behavior in the light of its context, a belief is rewarding. A state of dissonance is uncomfortable and its reduction reinforces the believing behavior. Attitudes are beliefs accompanied by strong positive or negative feelings. This explanatory material can be contained in various narratives such as scenarios, stories and epics. When a habitual pattern is engaged, becomes visible, a story that contains the beliefs, that makes sense of the habitual pattern, may be elicited. A brief, simple narrative is a scenario. A more complex set of beliefs may be found in a story. A very complex belief system may require an epic tale. Does our lack of awareness render us powerless over these programs? Do we really have the ability to choose not to respond when triggered, to shift into manual mode? As long as we are ignorant of our triggers and automatic responses, aren’t we just robots? With effort, these automatic responses can be observed and restrained. In the light of mindful-awareness, triggers and automatic behaviors can be seen; the layers of conditioning that cloud our will can be lifted. Meditation is like the fire that burns away the dross of automaticity. A by-product of fire is light and so it is with meditation. Often, either during or after meditation, flashes of insight will occur as a direct result of the clearing mind. The mind begins to see right through its fantasies and projections. The scales of mental verbalization are scrapped away, leaving a mind that is free to choose its destiny. 

 

How difficult is it to over come conditioning? Can a deeply ingrained habit be simply discarded? I’ll just quit. Right? For an example of the level of difficulty that can be encountered in attempting to over ride a deeply ingrained habit, try the following experiment. For the next 24 hours do everything with your unaccustomed hand. If you are right handed, you will use your left hand for the next 24 hours. You will be resisting four forces. Handedness is inherited. You were born with a preference. Up until now, you have habitually reinforced that inherent tendency through practice, practice, practice. You identify yourself as a right handed or left handed person. It feels wrong or strange to use the opposite hand. All four of these forces work against you learning how to be other handed. If your regular hand were lost or damaged however you would adapt. It would be exactly the same for an alcoholic who has been drinking for 25 years. He may have an inherited tendency toward addiction. He has practiced. He sees himself as a drinker and it feels very weird not to drink. How would a person switch handedness successfully in the above experiment? First, he would have to be committed to a successful outcome. If he were half hearted about the experiment, his mind would surely drift and he would reach for a doorknob with his normal hand and it would be all over. He would have to be very focused, paying attention to every moment, in order to avoid the conditions that would result in a slip. It would probably be smart to begin to identify in advance the moments when conditions might encourage a slip like planning how to sign a check, shave or adjust a mirror. Being mindful of each moment, stepping yourself slowly through activities that you would normally not give much thought to, a person might be able to prevail. It is the same for a drug addict trying to quit. Exactly the same. He would have to be very determined.

 

 

Explaining Creatures

 

 As language begins to emerge, the rules or beliefs that protect the imagined inner self become complicated and articulate. Humans are explaining creatures. The way they rationalize and organize their experiences is by making them into personal stories. Personal stories are the containers for our beliefs.  It is through story telling that we humans organize our cognitive structures into presentable formats. The construct of self is a collection of personal and communal stories that gravitate around our centers like planets around a sun. They grow from our experience as they shape our experience. Sometimes they are remembered. Sometimes they are told to us by others and swallowed whole. However else we look at stories, they are, first and foremost, inventions designed to harness our mental processes to protect us from anxiety. Insecurity is dissonance made from impermanence and contradiction.  We are looking for the non-stick surface of a dependable world. Since the Teflon world we are craving does not match the unpredictable reality of our experiences, we make it up. We each construct our own stories from our own unique perspective; our viewpoint and all other viewpoints are more fictional then real. The view I have of an event is very different from your view. We may agree to call these very different views the same words, but the events, never the less, remain subjectively determined. The goal of story telling is not to get at the truth but to salve the ego. A story, aside from being a container for our beliefs, is also made up of fabricated parts that we have created to fill in the gaps of memory and to maintain the flow. The main requirement for determining what is an acceptable filler is that it works to maintain the purpose of the story. The factual accuracy is never as important as the purpose the story is intended to fulfill. It is also necessary to evolve the story in the telling. As new situations occur that do not fit the belief system, the story evolves to deal with the discrepancy, to reduce dissonance. The story changes to return reality to a manageable state.

 

A drug-addicted client in a modern American substance abuse treatment center is told the story of her brain to explain why she lacks the self-control to modulate use like other members of society. Elaborate diagrams, with pictures of brain cells tied together by chemical messengers that produce bioelectrical waves, give graphical support to this explanation. The client is relieved of responsibility, to some extent, because her powerlessness is explained scientifically. It’s the brain stupid, not me. Her aberrant brain behavior is a genetic flaw. It is not her parent’s child-rearing failures that are at fault but the roll of the biological dice. It is a disease. I am a victim. Brain activity explains behavior instead of behavior explaining brain activity. The disease concept of addiction helps recovering people feel as if they are not moral lepers so they can move past the shame. This is a happy story because while I am broken I can be fixed.

When a counselor sits with a person, the person narrates his or her story. The counselor’s job is to facilitate the narration. The first step in this facilitation is to listen with mindfulness. As the story unfolds, the counselor begins to realize that the story has characters, plot, and symbols as well as beginning, middle and end. The story contains many of the conventions found in any literary work. Stories may be tragedies, comedies, satires, mysteries, or romances. Each type of genre has it rules based on ideas developed in the field of literary criticism. For instance, in a comedy, the protagonist and antagonist grapple with each other's diametrically opposed natures until an accommodation is arrived at that does not clearly set one nature above the other. Dharma and Greg wrestle with the forces of order and chaos until a happy accommodation leaves us laughing. 

In some therapy settings, a client tells a story at admissions, another story at the first therapy session, again in group therapy and again in 12 step meetings. The story is the primary currency of the treatment process. In each context, there are unique dynamics and so the story changes and at the same time stays the same, responding to many variables both external and internal. There is not really one true story. Usually, the first consideration when we hear someone tell a story is to decide if the story is true. In many treatment environments, the role of the counselor is fact checker, looking for inconsistencies, so the truth can finally be arrived at via confronting the denial being used to resist treatment. A client tells the story of the frequency and amount of his drug and alcohol use. The therapist tries to penetrate the story, which he assumes is a fabrication, because he believes that clients always underestimate use. The therapist will attempt to get an accurate description by breaking through the client’s defenses. A more cogent consideration is to determine the purpose of the story. The client is underestimating his use out of shame. To belly-up to the real facts is to admit his failure to accomplish what the client believes is a reasonable expectation; he should be able to control his drinking.

When a client needs to fill in a piece of the story where there is a memory lapse, the fictional nature of the story makes it possible to maintain flow and plot integrity. The character development and client identity are bound together in a tight loop that holds the client in his current state of affairs. To help the client progress towards a higher state of health, the counselor needs to facilitate the story's unfolding past the point where the storyteller gets stuck. Any personal expression of belief can be seen as metaphorical as opposed to objective. If you watch a television show the scriptwriter does not waste anything in his exposition because the time allotted for plot development is limited. When a person tells a story, there is a great deal that is not included because it does not contribute to the purpose of the story. If the entire experience that the storyteller is describing were included in the telling, there would be elements that would contradict the storyteller's intent. Here is fertile ground for the therapist to dig. Rather than calling the storyteller a liar, the therapist might continue to elicit detail, getting the client to fill in the gaps. The creative elaboration on the teller's part might lead to a change in direction, resulting disconfirmation of the story’s original theme. A female client describes her recent life as a tragedy. She is a helpless victim subject to the whims of a cruel and heartless world. Her story is designed to elicit a white knight response from the listener because she perceives her survival as dependent on being saved. The story is an adaptive strategy that paints a picture of her weak position and a need for a rescue. In this telling, she leaves out details that would highlight her many acts of strength or her heroic struggle to maintain custody of her children despite a mountain of financial hardships. In one telling, she is meat for the dragon but if she is given encouragement to dig deeper; she becomes a princess of power.

Notice the alternating perspective of the following television commercial as the viewer learns more about the characters. A father holding a baby crying inconsolably is trying to find ways to calm the baby. He sits down at his computer and keys up a soothing melody. The baby continues to cry miserably. The father who is in some distress himself continues to search the contents of his computer for a palliative. He try's an animated cartoon of dancing ducks. This has no affect either. Finally, the father hits upon a Super-model swimsuit calendar site. He clearly responds to the beautiful, scantily clad model on the screen of his computer.  Oddly enough, the baby calms too and makes a pleasant burbling sound. What is the reader thinking at this moment? That the father is selfishly indulging himself? The door to the apartment opens and there stands the very same scantily clad model, now dressed in sensible street clothes. She says, "I am home, dear." Obviously, the father and baby had been looking at mom. The perception of the scene shifts. The story is a satirical comedy. The father is the protagonist and the invisible reader is the antagonist. The reader judges the father harshly, using a misguided perspective based on a lack of specificity, which is dissembled by the entrance of the mother. The reader is always a primary character in a story. The story is for the reader and the context in which the reader operates. 

 

In the same sense, the therapist in a treatment center listening to a client’s story becomes a new character in the story because the story is for her. She is the rock in the story-stream around which the story flows anew. The purpose of the story and the belief system that it contains remain constant but elements shift and adjust to make sense of the new context in which the story is being told. The questions of the therapist and the subtle and not so subtle reactions of body language and facial expressions cause the story to amplify parts that on other occasions have remained unfocused or to gloss over parts that have been front and center. The story wants to flow past the places where it usually gets stuck but it needs help. Helping a client make the story flow can bring about changes in the belief system and give the storyteller a new healthier purpose.

 

The purpose of a personal story is like a person rowing a boat toward a destination. We find ourselves in the middle of a vast body of water and the boat has a slight leak. It becomes necessary to bale every so often in order to keep the boat afloat. The problem is that the hole in the boat is growing everyday. The increased flow of water into the boat forces us to bale more often and row less. Eventually, we find ourselves baling more than rowing. It is just a matter of time before rowing, even for a few minutes without baling, will end in an overwhelming flood of water into the boat. The whole point is the destination. We are meant to get to the other side. The other shore, the destination, is the story we tell ourselves that keeps us baling and rowing. It could be heaven, nirvana or striking it rich. The leaky boat is the natural process of entropy. The system gradually loses energy as time passes and the hole keeps getting bigger. The hole is old age, sickness and death.

 

The day will come when we can’t keep up with the flow of water into the boat. The boat will sink. We need the destination story to keep up our courage. Without the other shore, we would have nowhere to row. What would be the point in all this baling? So we have our stories. Someday, we will row right up to the beach and climb out into heaven. Someday, we will become liberated. Liberated from what; all this rowing and baling? Row hard enough, bale your heart out, and you will be rewarded in the great bye and bye. Sit on you cushion and meditate or chant or pray. Work hard. Play fair. Row that boat. All the time that we are rowing, we dream about tomorrow. It is a race between the growing hole and the final destination. Someday, we will not be able to bale fast enough. What will we discover on that day? Maybe, the whole boat thing is a dream. In actual fact, there is no boat. You are dreaming this all up. There is just a wave in the water that is rising and becoming confused. The wave thinks it is unique. It sees itself as separate from the water. It dreams of a conveyance like a boat, but it knows in its heart that what rises must also fall so the boat has to have this fatal flaw. The boat has to have an ever-widening gap. The poor wave does not want to lose it unique, separate self so it contrives a story about the other shore and bales for dear life. The story gives it hope. Instead of death, if it can get to the other side, it will be free. Heaven or nirvana is over the horizon. The day comes when the wave has to let go. It is after all just water. We are like the wave, deluding ourselves, settling for the hallucination, so we bale and row to nowhere like it will change reality. We are all ready home and we don’t even know it. In the present moment, just bale and row like there is no tomorrow. 

It is the story about the past (the point of origin) and the future (the destination) that produces the confusion.  Our story is set in limited time beginning with birth and ending in death. What is the source of happiness? When you closely examine an addict, you can see that she believes most vehemently that happiness is contingent on external conditions. She cannot be happy without the drug. This is not an uncommon template. He cannot be happy without the right job. She requires that her children make top marks in school. They are depending on the adoption. Happiness is out there. Happiness is the destination. Happiness is the right set of external conditions. The wrong set of external conditions results in unhappiness. It is all in the perspective. 

Once, when we were living in a two story apartment complex, I experienced the insanity of this outside-in perspective. The neighbors directly above us had three children, ages two to seven, and we found the noises coming from their apartment to be a constant source of torment. They sounded like they were bowling or playing horse shoes. We complained about the aggravating disturbance but that only resulted in bad feelings all around. Finally, the noise makers moved and another couple with three children took their place. The new woman from upstairs came down while they were moving in to introduce herself and we promptly became great friends. It still sounded like bowling and horse shoes but it was music to our ears because we grew to love the new set of children because of their charming mother. Same noises, different mind. 

When conditions change, there is unhappiness. When they change again, there is happiness. First happiness is born and then it dies. This is like a flag on a pole in the wind, blowing first this way and then that. Have you ever noticed that some people experience unhappy-making external conditions differently then others? They do not seem to be as subject to the whims of external conditions. Their perspective allows for impermanence. When the world moves, they do not. They are still. When conditions are unfavorable, they wisely wait for them to change. A man like this might say, “this too shall pass”. The favorable and the unfavorable will pass like the flag blowing first this way and then that. They don’t grab at the wind and try to hold it still. Instead, they hold themselves still. It is all in the perspective: outside-in or inside-out?

The following story is based on an actual experience that depends entirely on your perspective:

I was at a cross roads in my life. I realize that now, but then, I had an itch, feelings of angst, and a general attitude of un-satisfactoriness. I wanted something more. I hungered for something greater than myself. I wanted to be free of the bondage of ego. I was looking for purpose. I had hints of this transcendental possibility in psychedelic experience, but it was hollow. It did not lead to any real personal transformation. I was fed up with my job. I was a mental health worker in a psyche unit for emotionally impaired adolescents. I was sick of the grind and, at the time, the only way I knew how to cope with life was drugs, alcohol and sex. I got the idea into my head that I needed a quest. I did not have a specific place or goal in mind so I decided to take a 75-mile walk along the Eastern coast of Michigan.

Now I know that what I am about to tell you is going to sound crazy. I know that you are going to think that I am some kind of religious zealot. I was actually far from it in those days. Next your going to assume I was on drugs, but I promise you I was as straight as an arrow the whole 75-mile walk. Let me cut to the chase. On this quest I am now convinced I received a vision in the same sense as the prophets of the Old Testament. Now let me make this as clear as I can, every detail of what I am about to tell you actually physically happened. This was not a dream and I do not believe that it was a hallucination. All the events occurred as I will describe in real time and I believe if there had been another person with me, they would have observed the same things that I observed.

On the quest, I reached a state park that went along Lake Huron for a few miles and I decided to walk along the beach for as far as I could. I came upon a sandy bluff over looking the water facing eastward. I sat on the bluff to rest. It was a perfectly clear day. The sun was high in the sky. I sat my pack in the sand and leaned casually against it. The temperature was in the upper eighties and I was sweating from the effort of walking along in the sand. I felt a cold sensation and, at the same time, I observed a white cloud on my North side, which was moving along the beach toward me. It was not exactly in the sky but rather gliding along the beach about ten feet above my head. The white cloud stopped and it caused the temperature to drop very noticeably where I was sitting. I felt that the cloud was not something you would expect to see on an otherwise cloudless day. It seemed very strange. 

A flashing of luminescence drew my attention to the water directly in front of me about 25 yards away. The water, directly in front of where I was sitting, was boiling like a pot on a stove. Slowly, the boiling began to transform into emerging silver coins that glittered brightly in the sun. The coins looked metallic and you could make out the circular shapes in the water as they appeared in the tumult. Suddenly the coins began to take flight, shooting out of the water into the air and then back into the water again. The coins behaved like this for a few minutes and then it became apparent that the coins were fish because more and more of the coins fell on to the beach and flapped furiously. Soon the beach was littered with flapping fish, hundreds of silver fish reflecting in the sun. That is when I sensed a shadow coming from the South. The shadow turned out to be a very large flock of giant crows, but as the shadow moved toward me there was no cawing. The crows then began to land on the beach, jabbing at the silver fish with their beaks. In minutes, the silver fish were gone. The crows flew away, cawing as they went. I realized that the white cloud was gone. The water was smooth as glass. There was not a cloud or crow any where to be seen. Not a single fish remained in the sand. The morning sun reflected with perfect clarity and I sat silently in peace.

I immediately knew that these events were something out of the ordinary. I told family members and friends and they all agreed that this was some sort of supernatural event. I had no idea what any of this meant at the time, but over the almost 30 years that have passed I have begun to formulate an interpretation of these events. A quest is a journey undertaken for higher purpose. It began with an uneasy feeling of emptiness, as do many spiritual journeys. The bluff faced eastward, the direction of the rising sun. The sun brings clarity and light in the face of that which is hidden. East is often associated with the quest for enlightenment. The bluff faced the lake. Water is the source of life and sometimes seems like a empty expanse teaming with hidden possibility. I sat alone on the beach facing east. It was very quiet and peaceful. I was posing a question. A white cloud is often associated with a message from God. The bible has many references to clouds associated with God speaking directly to a listener. My question was about to be answered. The water, the source, was the blank page upon which the answer would be written. The chill from the cloud was the cool breath of God's voice. The boiling is the ferment, the water turned to life. The coins were the first part of the answer. Coins are objects of value, worldly treasure. They glittered temptingly as if to say, "cling to me, take me". The coins were attractive. I was at a cross roads in my life. I had all ready begun a pathological direction. My drug, alcohol and sex addiction was taking me down a path that would eventually result in extremes in suffering for myself and those I love.

The temptation represented by the coins morphed into the dying of the fish. What looked so desirable at first turned into bitter fruit. The fish flapped desperately on the beach in a premonition of my own desperate, futile self-destruction to come. I was given an image of where I was headed. I was being warned. The dark shadow from the South was death. The crows that cast the shadow are referred to in both the bible and in Indian culture. The crow is the trickster, a practical joker. Death was a real possibility. I had fallen for the deception of the coins. Drugs could not keep their promise. There was no easy way to approach transcendence. The crows were not only hinting at the death of the physical body, but of the spirit in the broadest sense of the word. I could make a different choice, but I had to understand what I was asking in order to interpret the answer. I didn't. The next ten years I descended into hell and I took everybody with me. I was offered a path. The path was in front of me. I was facing east, looking out over the pure smooth expanse of water. The morning sun illuminated the answer. There were no clouds, fish, shadows or crows. It was a perfect, clear moment. I had to realize this perfect clear moment in silence. I was not ready to follow the path that was laid out before me.

The above story could have just been the juxtaposition of a series of natural phenomena. The cloud could have been just a cloud. The fish could have been just fish. It is all in the perspective. We interpret our experience with our idea-mind and the result is experience morphs into a mystical encounter with God. The problem with the statement "God is in the cloud" is that it suffers from some fundamental errors. The first error is that the cloud, that contains God, is outside my mind. No doubt that there is something outside my mind but what form that something takes is determined by my cognitive processes. Another observer might see the white fluffy object as water vapor, floating in the air. The second error is that the observer of the cloud, ME, sees the cloud as a phenomena separate from the act of observation. The third error is a by-product of the second error e.g. that the observer and the observed have permanency as separate, disconnected entities. Would God need to speak to me from limited time and space or can my small mind only conceive of God speaking from limited time and space. In many-cause thinking, the cloud has an infinite number of possible explanations. If you say God is in the cloud, you are both right and wrong and neither right nor wrong. That is the nature of most stories.

 

The typical western view of karma is a story of why bad things happen to good people. This bad thing is happening to me because I was mean in a past life. In order to carry karma from life to life, you have to have reincarnation. This western view of reincarnation looks very much like judgment in Christianity. If the self is a delusion then what carries the karma into the next life? No self, no karma. Karma is action and action is choosing. Here is a story of choice: Imagine you are a miserable, neurotic, drug-addicted, young man in your 30s. You are married to an anxiety-ridden, insecure but beautiful young woman. Your misery and suffering lead you to escape reality whenever possible. Escape is your one true passion. Drugs, sex and fantasy are your chief weapons and you wield them without mercy. One day you come upon a sexy chanteuse in a local bar. She is unobtainable but seductive. She has learned the art of the manipulation of men and you are perfect for her game. She can transform herself into a dream to get what she wants. You are not good with real women, but unobtainable dream women fit you to a tee. You become infatuated with this chanteuse despite the pain and sorrow it causes your wife. The fantasy that you project is better than reality. It is like a drug, intoxicating and euphoric. You realize that soon you will lose your young wife but you cannot let go. You finally summon up the courage and literally tear yourself free from this siren of pain. In order to liberate yourself, you have to give up the fantasy world all together. You put down the escapist playbook (drugs, sex and delusion) to seek a spiritual regeneration and in your renewal there is new love for the real woman you have chosen to share your life. Do you live happily ever after? Thirty years later: you are offered an innocent massage paid for by your wife at a beauty salon. The masseuse is a business-like young girl. You enjoy getting a massage. You begin a weekly habit. The business-like young girl slowly warms to you and you find that with the massage, there is easy company. She is pretty and that diverts you from the slow aging of your old body. It is the residue of the habit energy you mistakenly believed you had left behind until you see the look of pain in your wife’s eyes. It has been a long time, but when you see her hurt, you know what you have done. How could the craving for escape from the painful body of self emerge so easily?

An action begins with an actor making mental discriminations that create the distinctions between the actor and his environment and between different objects in his environment. Next, the actor projects his cognitive perspectives on to the objects in his environment based on the accumulated mentality that is the result of previous actions. Contained in this mentality is the habit energy that drives choice. Choices are made based on ideas of desire or aversion. This will taste good. I hate lima beans. Look at the above story in the light of karma. Karma, in the final analysis, is choice. The choice was made in incomprehension because the actor's projections were not attuned to reality. The mindless activity was repeated day after day. The result of the repetition left a lingering mentality in the form of habit energy, a life long propensity to repeat the mistake. The imaginary projections were based on pleasure so they were craved like drugs. That is karma. You chose in mindlessness because the residue of the past (habit energy) plays itself out in the present. 

Humankind is asleep, unmindful and therefore blind to things as they really are. This disadvantaged state is a reaction to impermanence, which engenders a profound anxiety. It is as if we have intentionally closed our eyes because we are afraid of what we will see if we open them like a child in the scary part of a horror movie. You are walking down a path in darkness. As you step down, you encounter a round, squishy object that rolls under your foot. You believe that what you have your foot on is a snake. You respond by leaping off the path with a loud scream. You have issues with snakes. A fellow hiker walking along side of you has a better view of what you have stepped on and tells you not to worry that it is only a piece of rope. Immediately you become calm because you are not afraid of rope. This is the problem that each and every human faces. Due to our conditioned minds, which blind us to our true nature, we are powerless and afraid. Our spiritual practice must recognize that in every moment of our experience the cycle of birth and death is repeated again and again. We practice in order to be ready. Addiction and suffering stem from incomprehension e.g. not being able to see past our own cognitively created obfuscation. If the young man in the story had been awake, there would have been no discrimination, no desire or aversion, no self-will or accumulation of habit energy, only choiceless awareness. In other words, he was operating in the dark. To be awake is to know no difference, no parts, no subject or object.

The human body is a beautiful, integrated whole when you see it dance, but in the study of anatomy it is thousands of separate parts, each with specific names. What if you could only see it as parts and names? The real world is a web without parts. In the absence of this one that one cannot exist. Imagine you have a dial on the side of your head. In the lowest setting, you see each body part as a separate individual unit with its given label. In the next highest setting, you see the dancer whole, integral and flowing. She is beautiful to behold. Dial up again and you see the dancers intertwining in the choreography of relationships. They are not individuals dancing because they represent more than the sum of their parts. They are the single vision of the choreographer. A few settings higher and the observer and the observed become one. The separation between audience and dance disappears. When a great performance brings about this sort of transcendent state, we are awe-struck. On the first three settings, the observer changes his point of view. On the last setting, the point expands into infinity. No point, just dance. So much beauty is lost to our reductionism.

 

The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, The Four Noble Truths and The Eight-fold Path

 

The 12 Steps of Alcoholic's Anonymous and The Four Nobel Truths of Buddhism are different ways of telling the same story. They both identify the problem and offer the practitioner a solution. The problem is human incomprehension and the solution is understanding. With understanding comes the paradoxical power to let go and surrender. In meditation, there is an experience of profound bliss.  Once this bliss is felt, the meditator tries to grab it and make it his own. How did I get that to happen? Maybe, if I do exactly like I did I can get that feeling back.  Bliss happens because the meditator lets go. It is like a scene from the original Star Trek series. The Captain and Spock are trapped in a force field. The Captain, as is his custom, is using his physical prowess to escape but the force field gets stronger the harder he struggles against it until he is defeated. Spock watches the Captain intently and correctly surmises that the force field  was getting its energy from the Captain's attempts to fight his way free. Spock lets go completely of all resistance and in yielding passes effortlessly thru the now weakened force field to freedom. The bliss is a side effect of letting go.

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

 

An old substance abuse therapist explained that his first real awareness of the depth of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous came as a result of his attempts to teach his clients how the Steps kept people sober. The old substance abuse therapist was only sober himself for about five years when he started working in a treatment center. He thought he understood the Steps well enough but began to realize, as his clients asked questions, that he really only had a superficial understanding. In order to share his knowledge of the Steps, he realized that he needed to find new ways to present them because his clients did not all learn in the same manner. As a result of the needs of his clients, the old substance abuse therapist began to explore the Steps from his new perspective as a teacher.

 

The Third Step of Alcoholics Anonymous asks us to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understand Her or Him or Thus. Now to comprehend the incomprehensible is a koan, is it not? The Third Step does not require a person to have an understanding of the nature of God. It only requires that a person be prepared to surrender or turn his will over to fulfill God’s purpose e.g. make ourselves into instruments of God’s will.  An instrument is a tool. There is no tool that does not have a purpose. In the 12^th Step, a purpose is proposed. The purpose proposed in the 12^th Step is to carry the message to the still suffering. Without even realizing it, the old substance abuse therapist, in turning over his will and making himself into a tool, became the sharp end of a power greater than himself (God). As he honed his skills as a teacher, he became better able to carry the message to the still suffering. The skillfulness that he brought to his work was shaped by the many causes and conditions of the moment-to-moment experience of being in relation to his clients. It is a common practice to meditate or do Yoga for others in order to gain benefit for yourself. From the perspective of the conventional mind, it makes sense that our energy should be devoted to the liberation of all. If your hand hurts, you rub it with ointment. It is a part of you. If your child cries, you soothe her; she is a part of you. If your neighbor falls, you pick him up; he is a part of you. No one enters the kingdom of God alone. It is either all or none. Yes, all for one and one for all. Our vow should be to stay, not turn our backs, until all beings are free. The vow to practice Yoga or meditation is dedicated to the liberation of all sentient beings from addiction just as carrying the message to the still suffering in Alcoholics Anonymous is dedicated to the liberation of all who suffer from addiction.

 

Let’s imagine you are trying to decide whether to purchase a new machine for your company. The 12 steps of AA have a way to approach any kind of problem. The 12 steps are a problem solving strategy. Imagine you are a businessperson. You have to decide whether or not a particular machine would be good for your business.

 

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol (or buying this machine) — that our lives had become unmanageable.

The first step to solving a problem, should you buy this machine or not, is to determine if in fact there is a problem. Does it really matter whether you solve this problem or not? Will the machine you are contemplating be an important issue in the success or failure of your business plan? If it is important and could interfere with your happiness as a businessperson than it is a problem. Also, if you have searched yourself for an answer but your have not been able to resolve this issue using your internal resources than it is not only a problem, but it is a problem you cannot solve. If you could solve this problem on your own, then the problem is solved if you want it to be solved.  If you can’t find a way to solve the question of the machine purchase than you are personally powerless in regards to this decision.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

After you have determined that you have a problem that you cannot solve, then the second step is to begin to search for a solution outside of your personal sphere of control. If you do not have an answer, then it is necessary to find someone who does. A machine consultant (teacher, mentor, sponsor) in the case of your dilemma could provide you with the information you need to make a decision about the purchase. As long as you keep trying to solve the problem yourself and don’t admit that you are stuck, you will go round and round in circles and never get anywhere. The definition of insanity is continuing to repeat the same behavior and expecting a different outcome.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.

Having determined that you cannot solve this problem and having realized that this problem will require outside help, you decide that you will have to take the advice of your consultant (a power greater than yourself) in these matters. This is the third step. It would be insane to return to your past unsatisfactory solutions instead of following the advice of your consultant. It is time to put your pride aside and let go of the power.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

This may take care of the situation with the machine, but what about the future of decision making in your business. The fourth step is to make a moral inventory of the trouble caused by the time you spent unprofitably trying to solve the problem yourself. Did you put off going outside the company for help? Did you take short cuts or compromise in ways that you find difficult to accept after you examine things closely? How will these compromises effect future decision-making situations? How did your procrastination impact other aspects of your company’s operations? Your findings in this moral evaluation should not be swept under the carpet. They should be shared with key members of your company so as to improve accountability in the future and prevent your pride from interfering with your happiness. This would be the fifth step.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

The sixth and seventh step should focus on characteristics that you have as a problem solver that were part of your failure to acquire outside help to begin with. Things like pride and procrastination may become hindrances in your future problem solving endeavors. If you hope to not repeat your failures, character defects and shortcomings should be addressed.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

 

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

The eighth and ninth steps entail determining if your pride and procrastination have caused injury to any others in your company. If so, it would be wise for you to make amends to them to insure your and their future success.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

The tenth step combines all of the previous steps into a daily process of self-review to protect from backsliding.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

 

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

 

The eleventh step replaces the grandiosity of ego with the humility of cooperation with others who can help you even when you cannot help yourself. Learning to ask for help and listen for the answers is a necessary requirement of being a successful problem solver. Now that you have learned to work these eleven steps, you have a responsibility to carry the message of successful problem solving to those who still suffer from self-will.

 

Four Noble Truths

 

The Truth of Suffering

The Cause of Suffering

The Cessation of Suffering

The Path to the Cessation of Suffering

 

Eightfold Path to the Cessation Suffering

 

Right Understanding

Right Thinking

Right Speech

Right Action

Right Livelihood

Right Effort

Right Mindfulness

Right Concentration

 

The Four Noble Truths are based on a medical model. The model begins with signs and symptoms, and then proceeds to mechanisms and causes, then to prognosis and finally the remedy. The Noble Truth of Suffering identifies the signs and symptoms of the malady. Because we refuse to accept that nothing lasts, we suffer. The cause of suffering, the mechanism by which suffering is created, is based on an unrealistic vision of the way the world works. Suffering results from wanting life to be other than it is. We want what we cannot have. The self, in its quest for permanence, projects the world of people, places and things and attaches to them without understanding that it is a wind swept place. What has a beginning will have an end. Nothing stays and everything passes away; to be born is to be impermanent. This is the cause of suffering. The prognosis for the alleviation of suffering is good. Since this disease has a cause (denial) and the cause is known, it is possible to affect a cure. The Third Noble Truth recognizes that to treat the malady, it will be necessary to find relief from wanting what we cannot have.

The remedy to alleviate suffering, The Fourth Noble Truth, the treatment for suffering, is the Eightfold path which is designed to free us from craving, hatred and the desire to be unique. The remedy results in serenity by teaching a means of letting go of what we crave, learning to live with what we hate and recognizing that we are not solid but the changing itself. If you want to carve a Buddha from a block of wood, you remove all the unnecessary material from the wood and what is left is the statue of Buddha. The same is true for me. Remove the unnecessary parts and what remains is Buddha. The Buddha was waiting in the block of wood and the Buddha is waiting in me.

How does the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous track with the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism? First an observation about religion. Religion can be looked at (one possible perspective) like an orange. The outer layer, the peel, might be the political characteristics of the religion. This might include how decisions are made such as who is a member and who is not. It might also include the system of rules that members follow as well as how rules are enforced. Inside the outer layer, under the peel, there is the flesh of the fruit. This might include the rituals, modes of worship such as prayer and meditation, theology, sense of community and other parts that are distinctive expressions of the unique religion. Finally, if you squeeze the flesh, there is the juice, the essence of religion. Generally, the juice is universal, transcending the peel and the flesh. It is the same from one religion to another. The juice tends to be the outcomes of the practice of rituals, modes of worship, study and other distinctive expressions. The outcomes may include surrender of bondage to ego and self-will, faith, acceptance, gratitude, loving-kindness and peacefulness.  Not every religious participant experiences the essence of religious practice. Some never get past the peel. For those who are fixated on the outer layer, religion is politics. Some focus their energy on one aspect of the flesh, such as a sense of community and for them religion is a support group. It is in the nature of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to respect the juice while at the same time leaving the peel and flesh to the individual. So concepts such as “a power greater than yourself” or “God as you understand” (Him, Her or Thus) are open to individual interpretation. Admittedly, it would have been better to leave off a gender designation since this leads to the conclusion that only an anthropomorphized version of a Higher Power is intended, but still the individual is the final arbiter.

In the First Step: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable; the concept of suffering is plainly established. We are sick and tired of being sick and tired. Everything we try turns into more pain. We are powerless. The alcohol and drugs, that gave us temporary solace from the insecurity of life, has turned on us. We are forced to face reality because the false reality created by alcohol and drugs is unsustainable. The result is a kind of madness because we are stuck thinking we can’t live with the world as it is and we can’t keep escaping because escape is it own hell. So here we are, unable to manage the knowledge that we are not in control, that reality reigns supreme. There will be pain, hurt, sickness, old age and finally death and there is nowhere to hide. All the old tricks, the bottle, the needle, the delusions, the lies are laid bare. We can’t pretend anymore. We can divert our attention for a time with material acquisitions, but the new car gets a dent and the beauty wrinkles. We are forced to realize that we are not in possession of the way out of this conundrum. As the Buddha’s First Noble Truth insists, suffering is real.

Powerlessness is paradoxical in the way it is used in the first step of the 12 steps of Alcoholic’s Anonymous. Suppose I see a diamond in a hole in the rock. Everybody would want that diamond, right. So I reach in to get the diamond. I really want it. The only problem is when I close my hand around the diamond; I can't get my fist out of the hole. I am not going to let go. I try and try, but I can't get it out. I'm tired and hungry and I'm late for work, but I'm afraid if I give up somebody else will succeed where I have failed. I am suffering. I hate the way my life is going. I'm stuck in this hole. You might say I am powerless over the diamond in the hole. I can't really get on with my life until I let go. When I let go, I am free. Have you ever seen an addicted gambler playing a slot machine? If you could spy on his brain, it would look just like the brain of a crack addict. It doesn’t matter, hitting the rock or pulling the lever, the same thing. The slot player keeps the inaccessible diamond in his doubled fist and won’t let go for anything. If he has to go to the bathroom, after many hours of cranking the lever, he will ask a neighbor player to save his spot. He believes that the next pull of the lever will be the one. He believes this with all his heart. The odds against the next pull of the lever hitting the jackpot are astronomical, but nothing anyone can say will convince him. He won’t let go of this diamond and he will suffer horribly because of it. We become prisoners of situations that are our own creation. The keys to the door dangle from the lock. All we have to do is see them to free ourselves. No even worse, we are pounding and pounding on the door because we think we are locked in, but when we take the time to look around; we were standing outside all the time.

In the Second Step: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, we realize that the old ways of greedily clinging for dear life will not save us because it is in the nature of our insecurity to keep holding on to objects that are destined to fade away or worse become more pain. In the Second Noble Truth, the problem is rightly identified as grabbing on to impermanent things with the misunderstanding that they will stay the way they are. They won’t and they don’t. The Second Step directs us to look outside of our ego-bound selves for freedom from suffering just as the Second Noble Truth identifies the cause of suffering to be grabbing at straws. As the Stones let us know in no uncertain terms, “you can’t get no satisfaction” at least if you are motivated by self-will and desire.

In the Third Step: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him, Her or Thus, we realize that the answer to suffering is not in holding on to people, places and things at all, but in learning to let go. If suffering is caused by holding on, then to end suffering you let go, but in order to let go you will need to accept things just the way they are. We are only insecure because we believe that reality is wrong. We believe that we should never experience pain, sickness, old age and death. We believe that everything we like should stay the way it is and everything we don’t like should change the way we want.  This is a frail, empty way to live because we are wrapped up in our selves and it will not do. No matter how hard we close are eyes and wish when we open them up again reality is still reality. It is as it is. If we are going to live in this world then we are going to need to learn how it works. Freedom from suffering is the wisdom of letting go. This is the lesson of the Buddha’s Third Noble Truth. We can learn to live in the world. It is a skill. It is a skill that can be cultivated by following the Buddha’s Fourth Noble Truth which asks us to follow the Eightfold path of wisdom, ethical living, and spiritual practice much in the same way that the 12 Steps suggest we trust God (wisdom), clean house (ethical living) and serve others (unselfish spiritual practice).

The first step on the Eight-fold path (Right Understanding) declares that spiritual practice is informed by The Four Noble Truths, which recognize that we are powerless over pain, sickness, old age and death. Until we accept and embrace this reality, we will suffer. Our denial of the way the world really works is the cause of our addictions. Not coming to terms with the reality of impermanence makes our lives unmanageable, but once we know that the cause of suffering is our addictions, then we are in a position to end our suffering by letting go and accepting reality just the way it is. It is not enough for us to feel empathy and compassion for the still suffering. It is also important to respect and accept the right to continue to practice addiction, to be depressed or to be afraid to live life on life’s terms. From this acceptance of the still suffering (just as they are) comes the hope of their ultimate freedom.

As a therapist sits with a client week after week, it becomes apparent that the client could change if he did what the therapist wants him to do. The client however does not do what the therapist wants him to do no matter how the therapist tries to manipulate the situation. The therapist might even get mad and reject the client in some subtle way, damaging the therapeutic compact. Now the therapist in this example has an idea how the client should be and maybe the client might even like to be that way but he is not ready to take whatever steps are required. In the mean time, what should the therapist do? Suppose the therapist uses force, coercion. Imagine the therapist is trying to move the client towards increased independence. The therapist wants the client to begin attending regular 12 step meetings. He thinks it is for the client's own good. The client needs to transfer his need for support from the therapist to a peer support group. The therapist uses the threat of informing the client's probation officer of his non-compliance with therapy if he does not attend the meetings. The therapist wants his client to move towards independence because he does not like the client's dependence on therapy for help. By using force, coercion, the therapist is rejecting the client's dependent self before the independent self has immerged. The client has the right to his state of being regardless of whether that state is active use, depression or fear. At Narcotics Anonymous meetings members often say, “ we all come to the table sick, but we will sit with you until you are well.” Knowing you are accepted, that someone can see the Buddha beneath the skin, has curative power. There are habit energies waiting to be encouraged for both delusion and insight, but it is necessary to charge the appropriate inclination; to carry the message to the still suffering.

How we live our lives begins with the aspiration to be the bearer of Right thinking, the second step of the Eight-fold Path. The aspiration to express right intentions informs how we live in the world. This pursuit of right intentions determines how we speak, act and participate in our communities. Steps three, four, five and six of the Eight-fold Path are Right Speech, Right Actions, Right Livelihood and Right Effort. The words we use and the actions we take have power. Let’s suppose you are interested in changing your current lifestyle. As an example, imagine you are a drug addict trying to recover. In your old life you spent most of your time associating with other drug addicts and talking about matters of mutual interest like where to buy the best drugs and how to tell inferior drugs from superior. In the process of these discussions, specific words would be used that were part of the everyday vocabulary of a group of drug addicts. Pet words would be used to describe the drugs and drug related behaviors such as smack, cop, works, etc. The language would be very identifiable to any drug addict as being average for the drug cultural context. Drug addicts would know each other by the common use of key words if by no other means. Key words would have physical influences on both user and hearer. A drug addict hearing keywords in an appropriate context might actually have a physical reaction because the words have been so often paired with the experience of using the drug over many trials. An addict hearing the pet name of his drug when he was in the right frame of mind might find his tension levels increasing or maybe even an intense physical craving for the drug. These words would also stimulate automaticity, robot like behavioral patterns leading to drug using behavior. A wise recovering person who encounters the use of these words will immediately put some distance between himself and the speakers to avoid being set off. An intentionally recovering drug addict would adopt language in keeping with his desire to remain free from drugs. A person wishing to stay clean on hearing a key word or words relating to the 12-step program would be drawn to the conversation. The people who you attract or repel with your language are up to you. Speech, actions, livelihood and effort are all interconnected.