Preliminaries
When people are called to a goal, including something rarified like Nirvana, it’s often a curiosity that is humbly set aside as too unrealistic. Living in cities with modern access to addictive substances, or entertainment on tap, is a challenging environment to be practicing meditation in. Yet the people who yearn for more peace are most often the ones who are drowning in these modern environments. There’s a temptation to dabble in meditation practices to take control of one’s stress when it seems to be uncontrollable. Yet, nirvana is waaaaaay over there, and preliminary practices of concentration leading to Jhanic flow-states and insights leading to that early feeling of control, provide low hanging fruit that convinces that there is something to these practices.
As people get better at the Three characteristics (3Cs) of Buddhism, the mind can begin to enjoy staying in the present moment. Paying attention to the 1st characteristic, vibrating impermanence, especially looking back at past situations you worried about, how sometimes those strong emotions evaporated, and how periods of zeal and interest turned into boredom and stress, can hit home that anything you pursue will have a predictable outcome of dissatisfaction at some point or another. Much of these Buddhist contemplations originally took place at a time when people had shorter lifespans, non-existent healthcare, as we understand it, so death was much more of a present atmosphere for people even in their 20s. When impermanence hits home it can throw you into a vantage point of someone who is looking over their life and trivial things get put in their place and are easier to let go of.
The 2nd characteristic of dissatisfaction is seeing how draining a lot of our thinking and intentions are. Meditation is primarily a way to scan emotional and physical pain to see how optional a lot of it is. Thinking habits can be looked into and interrupted with attention to the breath. Paying attention to the breath with as few gaps as possible helps to squeeze out and highlight what slips through. One can see “I’m doing that to myself. I should stop.” Strong concentration feels good and the mind becomes stronger with it. Past desires can now bring a sense of dullness instead of the interest and passion they used to have. This is because the mind is becoming more sensitive and is not looking away from drawbacks. Therefore, we can infer that insensitivity is the ignoring of drawbacks to prevent pleasure from being spoiled; a kind of self-hype.
The 3rd characteristic of not-self is seeing how impersonal impermanence can make anything in our experience. Desire has a sense of ownership because of the clinging to keep what we like is located in our bodies. Contemplating impermanence teaches people how much stress they will have if they extend their sense of self, clinging, to vast numbers of objects and relationships. Think of it this way. Even a rich person may do a typical thing which is to buy an expensive boat or a house. The upkeep is expensive and stressful in that high income must continue to maintain it. Many find they can only enjoy these luxuries for a period of time, and in reality, for all people, we can only enjoy our possessions and relationships for so long. We either have to die and let go of them or many of them will be taken away before we even get to death. Part of what Martin Heidegger saw in his studies of Authenticity is that people often look for escapes from authenticity because facing reality, priorities, and such, have a pang in the chest anticipating death because life is just one thing after another until death. You’re facing death and not trying to escape, and this repeats every time we get our life together. We can oscillate between the urgency to get things done and escapism when it’s too stressful. When the sense of not-self hits strongly, people usually make an inventory of what they have and find that they are weighed down. They may sell, discard objects, and discontinue from relationships that have lost meaning. Life becomes lighter. One can become a minimalist.
A day in the life of a Minimalist – Matt D’Avella: https://youtu.be/tG2GJZcBKOE
Avoid the trap of materialism if you want to succeed – Gary Vaynerchuk: https://youtu.be/-ZKQ5XYtHpA
Being and Time – Martin Heidegger: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781438432762/
In agreement with looking at drawbacks, Jeffrey Hopkins’s Meditation on Emptiness reminds us that there are a lot of distractions to help us ignore the pain, especially in the modern world, and “one must turn the mind away from these through contemplating their faults and reflecting on impermanence.” Both looking at drawbacks and seeing that what we like can be taken away from us is a great beginning that leads one on a path that is counter-intuitive happiness. Most distractions fill up your time making it near impossible to develop a meditation practice until they are let go of. There’s also more time to clean things you still have, repair and take care of them, and choices become more narrow or pre-decided. Choices can become healthier without needing someone to police you. The prior practices have narrowed your choices based on drawbacks so what’s left is most often healthier. If people look at desires and can’t see any drawbacks, it’s very unlikely they can enter nirvana because lower levels of practice require at least that.
Decluttering for messy people – Matt D’Avella: https://youtu.be/LAtHvlPViJo
Trading Up – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/shorttalks/y2020/201017(short)_Trading_Up.mp3
Addictions can be the usual, like the ones mentioned in my Letting Go review, but there are also counterintuitive ones where people realize, for example, they are addicted to validation from other people. Like with Freud’s transference, we are looking for parental figures in the wrong place. Even when looking for love, our mind can be so deluded that we feel that we have found a great soul-mate only to realize we knew so little. For example, you could be married to a psychologist, a social worker, or a life coach. You might think, “this is a people person. They must be great people to live with,” only to find that the person is a narcissist or a psychopath. Then the mind has trouble connecting the dots between the earlier person you fell in love with and the person you see now with all their drawbacks: A Hannibal Psychologist.
The Advaita master Rupert Spira talks about this conundrum in a general sense of our beliefs about happiness. Many of these goals we have taken in by parents, advertising, and role-models we worship. Each new attainment leads to disillusionment because our self-esteem is tied to external unstable sources, sources that may require more skill than we have, and positive self-narratives that can quickly turn negative with any new obstacle.
“If you knew that your next intimate relationship would cause you misery, would you still want it? If you knew that having more money would make you miserable would you still desire it? If you knew that enlightenment would make you miserable, would you desire it? Everyone would, of course, say no…What we really want is not an intimate relationship, better health, more money, knowledge of God, or Enlightenment. What we truly seek is the happiness we believe will be derived from them…See that the one thing everyone truly longs for is happiness…In each of these cases, the experience of happiness itself was always the same experience…Whatever makes us happy doesn’t always make us happy. It sometimes makes us miserable. If that were not the case, we would all be happily married to the 1st person we ever fell in love with. The same relationship can produce the greatest happiness and the greatest misery we have ever experienced. If the happiness was really caused by the object, the activity, or the relationship, then as long as that relationship was present happiness would be present. Simply the fact an object, an activity, a relationship can make us happy one day, and miserable the next should be all the information we need to be able for us to see clearly that happiness can never be derived from an object, a substance, an activity, or a relationship…If we say yes to it we experience happiness and if we say no to it we experience misery. The happiness has got nothing to do with the object, activity or the relationship. It has everything to do with what takes place in our mind and our heart…It might seem that happiness is an intermittent experience that fluctuates with all other experiences and as such, it is something that is experienced from time to time. That is like imagining that a little patch of blue sky that opens up in the cloud cover is a localized, temporary appearance of the sky. The patch of blue sky is not a local temporary appearance of the sky. It is simply an opening in the clouds onto the ever-present reality of the sky. Happiness is like that. Every moment of happiness is a little window in our experience of the ever-present background of our essential being whose nature is happiness itself. What is it that causes this opening of the cloud cover? Simply our saying yes to the current situation. If we say no to the current situation, that is the closing of the clouds and the obscuring of the ever-present background of happiness.” The Advaita underlying awareness is a major improvement from regular consciousness, though, from a Buddhist perspective, they would take the blue sky simile and mention that it’s good but one can find an outer space beyond it. Also, Rupert has to remind audiences that there are always some concessions with these practices. I’m sure readers can think of situations where saying no to certain experiences might actually be happier than saying yes. Or more sophisticated, saying yes to your responsibility to say no.
This is especially true for those of you who already mastered what I reviewed in Letting Go. Despite all the non-dual rhetoric of meditation practices, if you’ve mastered how to dualistically contemplate drawbacks then you’re addiction free. It’s okay to take credit for that. You did that! If you’re addiction-free for one day, 1 week, 1 month, etc., you’ve laid a foundation where letting go is not so scary and all the below practices will become much easier to achieve. Congratulations! Also congratulations on being brave with other people. Where there are addictions there are enablers that are jealous of your new potential and bright future. If you got rid of an addiction, most likely you had to move a lot of people and social networks curbside to achieve it. That’s not easy. Also, don’t feel bad if you’re in a hole, it gets better and better as you maintain what you have already achieved. Remember what kind of parenting you had, the schools you went to, the advertising you consumed, and all the influences you took in before you learned any meditation skills or psychology. It’s like an imitated karma. You’re free to imitate in a different way though. There’s no rule that you have to do the same thing for the rest of your life.
Letting Go: https://rumble.com/v1grbjr-mindfulness-letting-go.html
Where your mind gravitates – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2020/201019_Where_Your_Mind_Gravitates.mp3
Sir Anthony Hopkins listens to thrash metal: https://youtu.be/3g_xTAwxaKQ
Anthony Hopkins Reveals Why He Didn’t Blink While Playing Hannibal | The Dick Cavett Show: https://youtu.be/rkh-bOujn40
Meditation: Nothing can make you happy – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/tYGK_sFIqdI
Cycle of Hurt – Doves: https://youtu.be/g-eW37F8-2o
Broken Eyes – Doves: https://youtu.be/ia97itNNyCY
Prisoners – Doves: https://youtu.be/Q02PXRTMus4
There’s no home for you here – The White Stripes: https://youtu.be/8ahICj_vEZ4
Social influences and Metta
Dropping these bad relationships, objects, or activities can coincide with a new search for replacements. We often replace them with other socially sanctioned activities, and again find them wanting. This is due to the competition over scarcity, and how we bump into rivals when we imitate the same desires. The Buddha described it in a similar manner to Rupert. “Wanting a haven for myself, I saw nothing that wasn’t laid claim to. Seeing nothing in the end but competition, I felt discontent. And then I saw an arrow here, so very hard to see, embedded in the heart. Overcome by this arrow you run in all directions. But simply on pulling it out you don’t run, you don’t sink.” We can take out the arrow and continue to learn. The Girardian, Jean-Michel Oughourlian talked about imitated desires. We see people savoring in different ways, and craving makes a choice for you by welling up when it witnesses others momentarily enjoying themselves. These are the typical imitated suggestions. The perception quickly detects luxuriating, basking, boasting, and a variety of forms of savoring. The craving moves to action and we imitate our role-model. When we were born we were innocent, inexperienced, and everything was new. As the years go by we take on many modes of being through imitation of savoring. It’s like putting on different clothes of personalities we imitated. The rewards those role models gained condition in us as well, so we literally are conditioning ourselves to be like them, or feed emotionally like them, even if it wasn’t intentional. This is how we start leaning towards conflict, often unawares.
Attadanda Sutta: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/snp/snp.4.15.than.html
With meditation, you can catch the imitation. There are times that you might notice that you are starting to develop someone else’s body language, or you see an image of how somebody says something in their particular way, and how you now sound the same. Culture is essentially this: imitation and inspiration. In Oughourlian’s Puppet of Desire, our imitations can be dangerous. Like in a trance, our actions go from the innocent baby and grow into many templates of desire based on our environment, level of technology, and economic circumstances. The most typical result is eventual rivalry, where what is mutually desired cannot be shared. The more desirable the object, situation, or position a role-model possesses, the harder it is to attain. It’s well protected or requires talents we don’t have. The role-model may be bored with the object, situation, or position, but they very quickly become passionate when a rival tries to pursue it. The masochist rival keeps “looking for an impossible victory,” because they want what someone else has, and when you want something from someone they begin to have a Freudian Prestige for you, meaning you want something from them.
Group Psychology – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html
When people have Prestige for you, and you feel more and more that you will never get what they have, enmity, and especially indignation appear. Part of this is the inner sense of self and the outer circumstances that are craved. Jean-Michel takes an angle different from Kierkegaard, but there’s more unpacking that can be done when both angles are viewed together. For Jean-Michel, an onlooker sees a role-model savoring, but the craving does something interesting for him. It views the savoring as a suggestion, but not for very long. The sense of lack leads to a sense of entitlement, partially because a sense of lack has a survival urgency to it. “This lack wants satisfaction!” Jean-Michel sees that this “requirement” distorts psychological time. The entitlement makes a rival feel that whatever they see is “MINE.” This possessiveness comes from the fact that the imagery is located inside the mind or sense of self, and also the image-created feelings. As described in Otto Fenichel’s Narcissistic Supply, our conceptual ego expands beyond the physical body, and also the same sense of urgency for self-protection. The sense of lack also can lead to a sense of self-punishment for not being good enough to achieve the savoring. Low self-esteem and entitlement lead to a feeling that there’s an injustice and time gets warped. “[Imitative] rivalry is always rooted in one of the two following claims: the claim of the self for the [originality] of its own desire; and the claim of desire [to be prior], [and have precedence] over the other’s desire, the [suggestion] that has generated it, on which it is modeled.” The problem of suggestion is the hype that is connected with it and the exaggerated panic. The hype has a lot to do with the need for social approval and to measure oneself against an impressive other to get social rewards. Social rewards can add spice to what would be a boring object in a world where you were the only one there with no one to compare against. This is reflected in one of the instructions in the tetrad meditation practice which is the prescription to concentrate and let go of worldly concerns. Those worlds of course are inhabited by role-models. Those worlds are also abstractions distorted by hype, and therefore misleading, and stressful, as will be detailed below.
The Anapanasati Sutta: https://youtu.be/RM69VCeECWA
How Soon Is Now? – The Smiths: https://youtu.be/4PIi1LWkfDE
The Universal Want – Doves: https://youtu.be/_HVI9A60sLI
One of the funny stories from the behaviorist B.F. Skinner outlined in, Theories of Personality, illustrates the trap of needing social approval. People who have Prestige for us have the power to shake us like a rag doll if they want. After so much conditioning with parents, it’s inevitable that all of us have to grapple with that influence as adults dealing with powerful Others. We want people to be our friends and to like us, even if it’s not good for us. “A somewhat humourous example of both unconscious behavior and social control involved Skinner and Erich Fromm, one of Skinner’s harshest critics. At a professional meeting attended by both men, Fromm argued that people are not pigeons and cannot be controlled through operant conditioning techniques. While seated across a table from Fromm and while listening to this tirade, Skinner decided to reinforce Fromm’s arm-waving behavior. He passed a note to one of his friends that read: ‘Watch Fromm’s left hand. I am going to shape a chopping motion.’ Whenever Fromm raised his left hand, Skinner would look directly at him. If Fromm’s left arm came down in a chopping motion, Skinner would smile and nod approvingly. If Fromm held his arm relatively still, Skinner would look away or appear to be bored with Fromm’s talk. After 5 minutes of such selective reinforcement, Fromm unknowingly began to flail his arm so vigorously that his wristwatch kept slipping over his hand.” Social conditioning is operating all the time, and by the way, psychologists read these stories, like the one above, and practice these manipulations on others. In Freudian lingo, it’s manipulating transference, or in some cases yanking on transference, and we all should be aware of how we can be influenced in the wrong way. That’s part of the reason why manipulators love this information. But for any serious meditator the takeaway would instead be that a basic practice that involves being present with the breath while around people, instead of looking for pleasure in unstable sources of social approval, can be a relief and can be helpful for negotiating. Practice around people can be a whole new avenue to explore. Instead of shaping people to get off on manipulation, one can project internal peace so that others can imitate, and also relax. Isn’t that nicer?
Why Caring What Others Think Breeds Mental Illness – Academy of Ideas: https://youtu.be/A4jzzDYLgro
Now, because craving works so quickly, it’s hard to blame people for their mistakes, conflicts, and unconscious digressions. This is especially true since psychology is not widely taught in society. People just accept unhinged behavior. Of course, we should care, because of how the rivalry can be contagious and lead to overthrowing governments, genocide, and miserable psychologies. Society is based on exchanges to mutually satisfy cravings. It falls apart if most people can’t achieve that for long periods of time. There’s difficulty being on top in that you have to fight to protect what you’ve achieved, and those with a sense of lack can drift into finding the only solution left for them: Tearing down the role-model. Some narcissists are even perceptive enough in tearing down people before they even get close to their potential. A pre-emptive strike. Kierkegaard said that “neither does [ressentiment] understand itself by recognizing distinction…but wants to drag it down, wants to belittle it so that it really ceases to be distinguished. And ressentiment not only defends itself against all existing forms of distinction but against that which is still to come…”
Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
One pro-social method to reject ressentiment in oneself is to trace your imitative desires to their sources. If we are fast enough, we can catch the entitlement and time-reversal that Jean-Michel talks about. Another way is a classic Buddhist method which is to pay attention to the three characteristics and drawbacks of desires, as described above. One can actually look at the role-model and say that “I’m so glad I don’t have their high maintenance lifestyles.” Another Buddhist method to deal with envy is contemplating impermanence where you wish everyone the best precisely because anything anyone gets is impermanent for them too. The wealthy don’t escape death and loss. They even have more to lose. The goal for stable societies is to provide as many varieties of occupations for people as possible while allowing them to trade with each other. The threat for any society is when large sections of the population find themselves left out and they purposefully act to destroy other people’s exchanges out of desperation and revenge.
This kind of hatred makes achieving happiness, let alone nirvana, next to impossible. One of the main practices for dealing with negative energy is Metta, a well-wishing practice. Some forms of cultivation and attachment aid in letting go. The Buddha himself wanted well-wishing to expand everywhere “omitting none,” and this is made easier “by not holding to fixed views,” and “being freed from all sense desires.” This might seem like an enjoyable practice but it can trigger internal conflict, especially when one has been abused in the past. Daniel J. Siegel in The Mindful Brain talked about how moving the metta practice was for him, but also how difficult it was for many others. “I personally found [this practice] deeply moving, but several in the group during evening lectures expressed difficulty forgiving those who’d done them harm. For others, this entire ‘metta’ or loving-kindness practice was uncomfortable, and some even stopped coming when this was the guided-meditation topic of the session. A number of people later would say that they had a hard time forgiving someone who’d wronged them and hadn’t apologized for the transgressions.”
The typical list for Buddhist well-wishing includes:
Loving-kindness (metta) -> Counters ill-will
Compassion (karuna) -> Counters cruelty
Sympathetic Joy (mudita) -> Counters envy
Equanimity (upekkha) -> Counters self-belief
Thanissaro Bhikkhu on many talks I could see found that it was difficult for him as well to convince people to really let go. He would even joke about allowing violence to oneself as a reminder that this world allows such things, but in seeing the resistance in the audience, he would laugh and concede defeat. From what I could see from his intentions was that many times we think we need to defend ourselves but we are striding into paranoia, yet there are also real victims who’ve been in dangerous situations. One of the keys Thanissaro found was to develop equanimity out of the list above. Equanimity allows people to handle suffering much better. Understanding that bad behaviour is not coming from a self per se, but instead, natural causes and conditions animating a self, and this helps to forgive much easier. There are violent conditions and there might be some causes we should look into. I would also say that if one wanted to keep out of harm’s way, due to an understanding of cause and effect, equanimity should help people to pick and choose who to help so that if there is too much danger, the kind of danger most people would find incredibly stupid, one could aim their target where there might be more of an effect, especially when we are talking about cause and effect. Why stroll into a burning house? Equanimity allows one to accept that some people will benefit from help and others won’t. We don’t always know who will benefit. Equanimity also helps with reminding ourselves of past good deeds and that we can still do more. We don’t have to have perfect Metta results. We can search for better opportunities instead of giving up if a Metta practice fails at one time or another. The mind likes to cling to excuses to go back into ill-will, cruelty, envy, and self-belief, so equanimity helps to see where there might be some clinging hanging around where we are overly for or against something.
Karaniya Metta Sutta: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/snp/snp.1.08.amar.html
The Four Sublime States: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nyanaponika/wheel006.html
In the pandemic we are in, as expected, there’s not too much Metta, and peaceful economic exchanges are being targeted. In the end it still all comes down to clinging. There are threats of political power grabs, hypocrisy, endless lockdowns, irritation, frustration, repression, hopelessness, addiction, and a desire for revenge. Thanissaro Bhikkhu talks about identity building, and how threatened those identities become when there’s hardship. “The fact that we are beings means we have to eat, both physical food and mental food. We’re taking things in to sustain our identity as a being that we have created through our attachments…Unbinding, or Nirvana is a place where there’s no feeding at all…For a lot of us, that’s our pleasure in life: taking things in…You’re looking for pleasure and then you excrete what? Greed, aversion, delusion…The path requires that you feed, but feed in a skillful way. You are feeding on the goodness that comes back when you are radiating goodness out…”
This sets up the fact that even if there is a political move for a quick economic recovery ahead, we also can face dissatisfaction with our own spoiling if that succeeds, though it’s a much better problem to have. Thanissaro asks us to “imagine what it’s like living in a land where there’s nothing but pleasure all the time. Everything you would think of, everything you would want keeps coming back right there when you want it. You get spoiled, and when the good karma finally wears out then you fall. When you fall it hurts…The factor of Right Concentration, that becomes your new food on the path…It’s the pleasure of form which doesn’t have the drawbacks of the pleasures of sensation…You look at the difficulties the world is going through and a lot of people are desperate. We’ve had a healthy economy and it’s crashed. People have been used to feeding well…When they don’t feed well, they get frustrated. So a lot of the turmoil we are seeing right now from the top on down is basically frustrated feeding. The question is, do you want to join in on that feeding frenzy, or do you want to step out? Think of the Buddha’s vision before he gained awakening. The world was like a ‘dwindling stream’ and there are fish in the stream fighting one another over the water.”
One thing clear through – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2020/200804_One_Thing_Clear_Through.mp3
Stigma
Another great thing about meditation practices is that they make the requirement that you get to work being peaceful now, instead of waiting for huge outcomes. The late Rob Burbea, and Martin Heidegger before, found some low hanging fruit by looking at the questioning mind itself and asked practitioners to sense the experience of questioning. “When you ask that, how does that feel?” You see, it makes sense to look at our mind if we want to really learn about happiness. Whether you use psychology, meditation, or other practices of contemplation, there’s a lot of detail to explore, including well-grooved habits related to past and future. Jordan Peterson said “if you’re thinking about your past, it means you haven’t analyzed the causal chains…There’s only one reason you remember the past, and that’s to be prepared for the future. What you’re supposed to do is…to know what, why [that thing] happened, and how you could react differently in that situation. As soon as you do that, your brain will leave it alone…A lot of situations are dangerous or not dangerous depending on your level of mastery. A negative emotion that is associated with a memory is crying out for mastery, and writing can really help with that. You are reorganizing your brain when you write autobiographically…You want to take everything that is negative and emotional and transform it into a fully articulated vision for your future, and that frees you of your past…If most of the time you are thinking about your past, it’s like your soul is trapped back there and you need to free it through investigation.”
How to let go of your past – Jordan Peterson: https://youtu.be/U_tJTAgHiPo
Studies in Hysteria – Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer: https://rumble.com/v1gtdvl-studies-in-hysteria-sigmund-freud-and-josef-breuer.html
This is part of the answer, but many things may not be possible to master, obstacles are too big, or what one did was so bad that an element of past regret remains throughout life. A perfect example is a stigma. Maybe you get to the point where you can move on from your past, but others cannot. They won’t give you a pat on the back if you escaped an addiction, or if you reformed after a prison sentence. You might even be innocent but you remind people of others who weren’t. A typical transference found in bigotry. If people with Prestige for you, meaning you need attention and resources from them, reject you, a wounding can happen again and again. Coping behaviors can include more addictions, violence, and debasement. In Stigma and Group Inequality, the physiological feelings that stigmatized groups go through, especially those who are incompetent at something at this point in time, or associated with individuals who have been labeled as incompetent, can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. “Repeated negative experiences with stigma can lead members of stigmatized groups to anxiously anticipate similar treatment in future situations, straining cognitive resources that would otherwise be devoted to other tasks.” The importance of leadership that mixes compassion with fairness can have a big effect on outsiders who have the potential to make contributions. “…Self-expansion through relations with higher status outgroup members is especially important for members of stigmatized groups, as such relations provide access to the physical and social resources of the higher status group.” Part of the reason for the wave of hypersensitivity to stigma today is that a lot of people are in precarious scenarios in their lives and they need social resources desperately. Jokes and perceived slights become survival threats all of a sudden. People also get tired of being inauthentic in order to get attention from powerful people who care nothing for them. “As a result of interactions with others who are perceived to hold negative stereotypes about their group, members of stigmatized groups may perceive themselves in ways that are consistent with these stereotypes in an effort to socially tune and maintain relationships with them.”
Case studies: Dora and Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu2dt-case-studies-dora-and-freud.html
Heat – Neil recruits a new driver: https://youtu.be/7QhttjrOg5A
There is also self-stigma when stigmatized groups internalize hatred, like in my review of Freud’s Dora and the Jewish experience in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. The self is about labels and imitated, internalized labels can lead to masochism, and addictions again. One of the difficulties with finding happiness and success in the workplace is how the self can be pulled in so many directions. It can attack itself, strive painfully to improve, scapegoat others, look for escapes and distractions, and then one is supposed to sit down and work uninterruptedly for long periods of time. Being pulled by both self-stigma and addictions drastically reduces the speed of learning, which leads to more rejection and failure, which in turn create lower self-esteem in a loop. If mapping out a past history as Peterson prescribes is not efficacious enough, people can be left with few choices, but thankfully developing the skill of concentration is available. Some people get this even if they are not into meditation at all. They may bump into it unintentionally. For example, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about acquiring assets for their own sake and to avoid consumerism. This right here would reduce a lot of distractions. If you don’t think you need to be somewhere else more fun than where you are working now, there should be no resistance to concentration. A lot of being able to concentrate is about liking your job enough so that there aren’t too many competing desires pulling your mind away. You are more likely to get into Flow because that is also one of its precursors: to control distractions. One can also infer that intrinsic motivation is present if you’re not being pulled elsewhere. Attachments drain energy. If the mind doesn’t want to be anywhere else than here, then concentration naturally happens.
How to get into Flow: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
A lot of the meditation practice is precisely these small insights that build over time, even while you’re in daily life. For example, noticing when you’re concentrating on an activity and how that feels when you are interrupted. This can predict how you will feel in many other situations, ones where you are prepared or unprepared for distractions. Most people describe so many influences that lead to some skill or attainment, and this is no different for meditative skills. Through trial and error, any procedures that are taught in meditation will necessarily have holes in them, and we each have to fill in those gaps of knowledge with our own experience. In a great interview with Deconstructing Yourself, Rob Burbea explained his experience of searching for insights from others and the need to experiment. “I certainly felt helped by a lot of the teachings that were out there. Certainly, as I mentioned, Ajahn Geoff, and Christopher Titmuss, and Christina Feldman – actually lots of teachings. But I also felt, somehow, nothing fully satisfied me. There were lots of questions that I couldn’t really find answers to or people with the same degree of burning interest in them. So I had a lot of time on retreat – years, in fact. And I was, to a certain extent, it was a natural kind of move for me to just begin experimenting and seeing what happened and getting super interested in stuff, with this burning curiosity about it…I was just struck by, again, how unsatisfactory I found the answers about the relationship of awareness and the Deathless and the Unfabricated, et cetera. There were a lot of different answers, all of which, I felt, for me at that time, were not satisfactory. What I also encountered in some of the people that I talked to was just – it was clear that it really wasn’t an interesting question to them, or that level of meditative territory or inquiry or that level of liberation just wasn’t that interesting. I think it was more those signals of lack of interest – and also the absence of answers that were satisfying – that kind of made me just tip ever-so-slightly off an edge that I was already on…”
What is Emptiness? – Deconstructing yourself: https://deconstructingyourself.com/what-is-emptiness-an-interview-with-rob-burbea.html
Insight practice
A lot of modern practitioners are interesting to study, and their methods of practice often involve all three general categories of Buddhism: Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. It also supports this idea that learning happens in small bits and is not always linear. Rob Burbea, for example, studied briefly with Thanissaro Bhikkhu, a Theravadan monk from the Thai Forest tradition. Learning from him he got the benefit of understanding Buddhist fabrication. Fabrication here is the way the mind can relax and build tension on a spectrum. The tension can also start increasing with our habitual thoughts. They can sneak through gaps in mindfulness and build worlds of fantasy, and all of those worlds are more or less painful. Fabrication is tension arising from built-up psychological worlds we can like or dislike. “The mind has a basic habit which is to create things.” Watching and understanding this tension, or dissatisfaction is a key for Thanissaro all the way up to Nirvana, but this activity is hard to see. Thanissaro says that the mind’s ability to put things together happens “before sensory experience.” Essentially it’s unconscious.
“Look for that issue of inconstancy and stress…leading the mind to release.” Blogs like this and any written material are good pointers, but we have to go to experience. If not, then “…abstractions pull us away from where we need to be…There’s a lot of self-delusion and lying to yourself.” Ironically less abstraction allows us to see more detail in sensation, but the instructions are more simple. “The breath comes in, we know it’s coming in. The breath goes out, you know it’s going out. There’s pain, you know there’s pain. There’s no pain, you know there’s no pain.”
Consistency – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2003/0304n5a1%20Consistency.mp3
Keeping things at the level of sensation, and letting sensation guide the meditation, allows a meditator to extend their concentration for longer periods of time. Insights can be written down in a journal later if need be. When the mind wanders we can ask “where are you going? What are you going for?” See the drawbacks of what the mind is wandering for and let disenchantment bring you back naturally. “I don’t need that in my life. I’ve had enough of that…Everything you need is right here…Other times you consciously ignore the distraction. There’s a little world in your mind, and you don’t want to enter it, but for some reason it doesn’t go away. You realize the reason it’s not going away is because you are paying attention to it. Even if you don’t like it, paying attention to it is often enough to keep these things going…After a while from a lack of attention, it just dies out. [Another] way of pulling yourself back is to notice how when there is this process of creation, of these little worlds that you create in your mind, there’s a certain level of tension that goes with it, and it’s a lot easier to not create. You just relax whatever tension there is. It’s kind of a physical and mental tension around these things. Once you can look at it, just relax it…When none of these other methods work you say ‘I’m going to clench my teeth, press my tongue against the palette and not think about that thing. Through the force of your will you force it out of your mind. That’s the method of last resort.”
Anatta (Not Self): https://rumble.com/v1gr0w5-mindfulness-how-to-avoid-intellectualizing-your-practice.-anatta.html
Dukkha (Dissatisfaction): https://rumble.com/v1gr1it-mindfulness-how-to-meditate-for-longer.-dukkha.html
Anicca (Impermanence): https://rumble.com/v1gr219-mindfulness-gone.-anicca.html
Sensitivity and Skill – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2020/201014_Sensitivity_&_Skill.mp3
Now, the process of creation is involved in meditation, but it’s considered a more skillful fabrication, or tension, that is created to offset worse tensions, and increases clarity of the creation process in the mind. Like a raft, it can guide you to the other shore. As you go through the levels of concentration, as described in my review of the Jhanas, the brain continues its more subtle labeling process, “rapture”, “bliss”, “happiness”, “equanimity”, “space”, “consciousness”, “nothingness”, “neither perception, nor non-perception”, or “oneness.” You get attached via the label to each level you reach, but Thanissaro calls it a “good attachment” compared to the other “worlds” you can drift into. These practices can seem quite complicated, but Thanissaro wants meditators to keep it basic: “Where is there stress here? See what you’re doing to keep the stress here and let go. Ultimately you open up to something that is totally unfabricated.” Essentially people have to become bored of these concentration states by marinating in the pleasure of the different attainments towards fulfillment. It’s like a kid playing with a toy, getting bored, and moving onto something else.
Unraveling the present – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2000/001101%20Unraveling%20the%20Present.mp3
Fabrication – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2001/0103n2a1%20Fabrication.mp3
The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html
Daniel Ingram is another Theravadan practitioner, though like many other modern meditators he’s studied other traditions as well, but he’s most well known for teaching the Mahasi Sayadaw noting method. Noting is a difficult practice at the beginning because the mind is also difficult to control when skills have yet to be developed. The danger of course is overusing the judgment faculty, which works with labels used in noting, and is connected with the stress that often spoils meditation. As Rob Burbea warned, “any input has an effect.” Yet noting is all for the benefit of increased skillfulness in the realm of direct experience. Abstraction, like this post, is just pointing at sensations, and as Thanissaro pointed out, abstraction has to take a backseat to sensation, and especially when things begin to fade into higher jhanas. The labels are more subtle there, and as we will see below, the Unconditioned, or Nirvana can’t be labeled and is not an experience because of its timelessness. The refreshment coming out of Nirvana is an afterglow. Yet the noting practice can be used for long periods of time as one tries to get to know experience during early stages of development when being lost in thoughts is the norm.
- When beginning you can follow whatever meditation practice you like, just to get concentrated and settled. Enjoying concentration practices and doing a kindness practice of well-wishing for oneself and others will always be a part of your practice. During the more difficult withdrawal symptoms from a noting insight practice, you will need those practices to bring stability back to your meditation again. Well-wishing for oneself, the Metta practice, also helps with self-esteem. Feeding yourself with kindness is a form of emotionally feeding, and in turn, you can find it easier to be nicer to others when you’re not hungry.
- When you are prepared to note, the speed doesn’t matter as much as the acknowledgment of actual experience, followed by the label. To avoid getting stuck with the wrong label, use simple labels like “seeing” instead of “seeing the wall.” This way you can avoid being distracted with the all-important noticing of what’s actually happening. It’s the sensation of knowing or acknowledgment of what’s happening you want to get to, before the label. This prevents you from being overly conceptual with the noting practice. Another advantage of noting is that labeling improves your concentration because it prevents narratives from sprouting. You’re filling in some of the bandwidth that being lost in thought exploits.
- Using the Satipatthana Sutta, you have a framework of what to note, which are the 4 foundations of mindfulness. You can practice them 1 layer at a time, or note whatever is most prominent.
- The 1st foundation is the body. You can note what is happening in the 5 senses: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. You can add things like hot, and cold but we are getting closer to the next foundation which is how we feel about what is happening in our senses.
- The 2nd foundation is feelings. Ask yourself, is the experience pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? Are the feelings from the meditation itself or feelings related to worldly thoughts?
- The 3rd foundation is the state of your consciousness. Is it in lust, aversion, or delusion? You can label any sensual thoughts, aversive thoughts, and any thoughts that appear to be a fixed identity. The key to identity is self-measuring, which can also interfere with meditative progress. Here is where I would emphasize, and you’ll see more emphasis below, that equanimity is important to have when noting. Noting with judgment is dangerous because it releases cortisol, which can be toxic when it’s too much. Non-judgmental noting works best so that you’re noting, not suppressing, or getting lost in narratives.
- The 4th foundation is for mental objects. These include the 5 hindrances of desire for what you don’t have, hatred, sluggishness, restlessness, and doubt. You know it’s a good note when you essentially snap out of the mind-state you were noting, and it wasn’t out of suppression, just non-judgmental awareness. Why people like noting in the early stages of practice is that it can save you when you are drifting. It becomes a hindrance later when you get more sensitive and skilled. You eventually have no need for confirmation of what you’re witnessing.
The 7 factors of enlightenment are a guide to how you are balancing your meditation. When your mind is really dull you want to reengage your 1. Mindfulness to dip into the object, then 2. Investigate the impermanence of your experience, and then you use an adequate amount of 3. Effort that keeps you from dullness but isn’t too much effort that you become restless. As the practice gets effortless then there is a 4 & 5 delight and calm that arises. To keep from being too restless one must slow down the noting enough so that you are 6. concentrating on noting your object and really seeing it’s characteristics of impermanence, dissatisfaction, and non-identity. If necessary, I would add imagery practices to notice drawbacks to your thoughts. This leads to 7., an equanimity towards your experiences. For people who are already very experienced, equanimity is actually a great starting point for meditation. I like Adyashanti’s description of not being for or against anything that arises in your mind. But again, if you’re not very familiar with equanimity, you’ll naturally get there with noting momentum.
Within this foundation there are two more sets of instructions making the 4th foundation quite large. You need to be able to notice how consciousness (knowing) is interdependent to the objects known. This means eye and form, ear and sound, nose and odor, tongue and flavour, body and touch, mind and idea, are interdependent. Consciousness or knowing must always be of something. This is tapping into that sense of knowing that has to be with the object. This way the non-identity of your experience is palpable. You will see other Mahayana practices later that point to how the self is always involved in the activity of labeling. The skillfulness is being able to use labeling to understand the Self-label we are trying to get to know. The self is describing itself as it’s labeling, and self-measuring, and labels are abstract models, meaning that they lack the detail of cause and effect that becomes more apparent with strong concentration.
To go deeper, mental contact cannot happen without [1] the feeling of the experience, [2] the recognition of what the experience is, [3] your volition, which is your movement of the attention span toward or away from an object, and [4] your consciousness or knowing of the experience. In other words, you are reacting to your environment all the time and finding it impossible to corner a separate identity that is independent of these experiences. Unfindability is integral to relief from the self. Being able to note your attention span moving with intention to go towards something attractive and move away from what is not attractive takes away a lot of the feeling of your attention span being the locus of a permanent self. The brain is always weighing pros and cons based on memory, intelligence, and skill. This is often where a lot of meditators get stuck. The attention span is still moving with intention as if it is the “strategizer”, “analyzer”, or “problem-solver.” Siegel reminds us that “…the mind is never ’empty.’ Filled with continually generated images and thoughts, feelings and perceptions, the mind is abuzz with activity that never ceases.” Noting strategizing, analyzing, and intending alleviates clinging in these hard to see phenomenon. There’s always a little stress in the intention (or movement) to pay attention to something. Searching always involves subtle stress. The key is that the labeling is taking experiences in the mind and placing self-labels on them. Labels as you’ll see below have a concrete quality about them because they’re abstract, or over-simplified. So for example, you can put a lot of attention on any tension or movements of the mind, without labeling so heavily. You want to notice a “me” label show up with subtle phenomena like the intention to pay attention. Labels appear as if they float with separate-existence, involving no cause and effect, and that includes who we think we are.
The mind can go in circular directions looking for a self and all it finds is causes and effects, and reactivity to control what is happening. Because we are often unconscious of subtle causes and effects in the environment, we can conceptualize a self-identity that is in control. But this identity can be proven that it is only conceptual, when we see people identify with family, cultures, nations, or even sports teams. There are multiple self-concepts. These concepts are simplified symbolic thoughts built up from the sub-atomic complexity that we are. Even sub-atomic entities are conceptual constructs that are likely to give way to smaller phenomena as physics advances.
Now as we move through these complicated causes and effects, seeing the impermanence, dissatisfaction, and when we fail to see a permanent identity controlling as an independent agency, the progress of insight deepens, and relief happens every time this permanent self is not found. Because we are addicted to our solid conceptual personal narratives, we are going to have to go through withdrawal symptoms, as we wean our attachments, and find mental peace. Both Daniel and Mahasi Sayadaw go through these stages in great detail. To simplify, we start our meditation with seeing the arising and passing away of phenomenon and get excited and feel pleasure from the reduced stress. This is kind of like enjoying a personal narrative of success on the way up. As we focus more on the passing away of experience, the dissatisfaction arises causing a lot of suffering in the meditator. This is like grieving for a personal narrative of failure. For many people, a pleasurable concentration practice and a kindness practice can help to relieve the stridency of the weaning process. As the brain gets used to the emotional distancing of the practice of acknowledging sensation, including the sensation of thoughts, an equanimity occurs. You get used to the bumpy waves and they become less scary, so you lose the feeling of being for or against the waves. Unfindability becomes less scary and more peaceful. This leads eventually to a surrender of our intentions toward objects and a softening related to dissatisfaction. Therefore relief cannot be willed, because willing reinforces the label of “I.” Any anticipation, analyzing, strategizing, and impatience towards the goal of nirvana has to be noticed for their dissatisfaction. We will see below why goal striving is a major obstacle.
Bhikkhu Analayo provides a lot of advice for people stuck in striving and a lack of patience. This practice, as in my Jhanas review, also requires a lot of time commitment. Whether you go on retreat or do this at home, a gradual increase in practice time, including experiments with mindful walking, or mindful work, will be aided if you can find 4 hours of meditation a day eventually. I think this is part of the reason why Rob Burbea didn’t always find people so interested in these subjects. They really would rather do something else. It’s extremely rare for people to achieve high levels of attainment without periods of specialization. Siegel quoted a study that looked at highly trained meditators who achieve “Ipseity – our essential way of being beneath the layers of thought and reaction, identity and adaptation.”
“Finally, at the highest level of practice, what we have described as a ‘de-emphasis’ of both object and subject moves, at least theoretically, to a point where no elements of objectivity or subjectivity – whether in the form of conceptual structures, categories of time and space, or some other feature – remain in the experience…Traditions recognize only a small number of practitioners as having truly reached this level of practice.”
Analayo describes this gradual development towards Nirvana, which ties craving to the sense of self, and in it becomes extinguished, like a burning candle being blown out. “As our craving and attachments fade away through dispassion, we become increasingly able to be at peace with the ending of things; we are willing to allow things to cease. This serves to go beyond the average unbalanced attitude of only wanting what is young and new, ignoring what is old and decaying. By attending to the cessation of phenomena, to their ending, we arrive at a more balanced vision. It becomes more and more clear that cessation is not frightening, but actually peaceful. This becomes a practical implementation of insight into emptiness. As identifications lessen, it becomes increasingly easy to allow things to cease. This understanding spurs us onwards on the path to supreme cessation of [dissatisfaction]…The more we are able to allow things to end, to be at ease with cessation and recognize its peacefulness, the better we will be at letting go. Gradually letting go of all remaining attachments prepares us for supreme letting go, the plunge into the deathless, the realization of Nibbana…Needless to say, bringing these meditative themes into actual practice is not meant to encourage a tendency to fabricate experience. The proper use of these tools for progress in insight could be compared to a ray of the morning sun that touches a flower, causing it to open. The touch by the ray of the sun is like the skillful use of these themes; what follows is a natural development leading to the flowering of insight…[Another] simile…describes a hen sitting on her eggs. Due to her unrelenting sitting on the eggs, eventually the chicks will break the eggshells and hatch. In the same way, due to our unrelenting sitting on the meditation seat, eventually we will break the shell of ignorance and awakening will take place. It will occur in its own time. Our job is simply to make sure the appropriate conditions are in place. But the experience itself cannot be made or forced to happen. To try to do so would have the opposite result, as it would be directly contrary to what is most needed for awakening to take place: letting go.” Here a key I can see is the role of sensation. By persevering with sensations, and treating them like the ray of light on the flower, it can be easier to avoid abstracting the process.
“In a way all of these meditative themes of seclusion, dispassion, cessation, and letting go point to Nibbana. Each does so in a way that is a bit more pronounced or clearer than the previous one…Proceeding through these meditative themes is quite different from a self-centered attempt to attain a certain experience. There is nothing to be acquired here. Rather, all and everything is to be let go of. Instead of reaching out to gain something, we allow the mind to resonate ever more strongly with profound peace of Nibbana. This is the peak of dwelling independently without clinging to anything in the world.”
“The basic dynamics involved…could be visualized with the idea of a tiny slot between what is happening now and what happens next. Now our basic meditative task is to avoid being drawn into past and future. Instead, with mindfulness well established we learn to remain in the present. Once we are well-established in the present moment, however, there remains a tendency of the mind to reach out for what comes next. This is like wanting to get the next spoonful of experience before having properly chewed the present one. By cultivating dispassion, we learn to let go of this reaching out for what is next and come to be at ease in just being with what is now. By moving on to cessation, the ending part of the present moment becomes fully clear to our meditative vision. Earlier this ending part was not properly noticed, due to the tendency to reach out for what comes next. As the ending of the present moment fully emerges, it becomes possible to let go into a tiny slot between what is now and what comes next. By letting go into that very slot, the breakthrough to Nibbana can take place and timelessness can be experienced.” It’s important here to emphasize that letting go is not a forceful movement or a negative marching towards a disconcerting emptiness. It’s relaxation, an easing, and it’s why nirvana catches people off guard. The relief has to be more than what was preceding it, not less.
“Both the objects and the noting mind were abruptly cut off and stopped.”
“I saw the objects and the noting mind drop away, like a heavy burden being dumped.” ~ Student’s experiences
“While early Buddhism does not deny the distinction between subject and object, it does not treat this distinction as particularly important. Both are insubstantial, the subject being nothing other than a complex of interactions with the world…” I can see here a possibility of falling into the trap of trying to tense muscles and force attention towards this “tiny slot between what is now and what comes next.” This is more of a relaxing into that slot. Peacefulness and relaxation will make that “slot” less scary and more inviting. A way to notice if you’ve been in nirvana or not, after having an amazing experience in meditation, is partially a lack of time because the present moment is short-term memory, and nirvana is a non-experience, timeless, and not abstract. So many practitioners ask “I had an amazing experience! Is this Nirvana?” If it’s an experience, then it’s not. Most experiences that are awesome are still awesome but they involve some feeling of non-duality. Concentration by itself can create a lot of great experiences, including this feeling of unity, but at the highest levels of Buddhism, they want to go beyond an experience that’s labeled “awesome unity!”
“Unity, in terms of subjective experience, entails a merging of the subject with the object. Experiences of this kind are often the outcome of deep levels of concentration. Nibbana, on the other hand, entails a complete giving up of both subject and object, not a merger of the two. Such an experience constitutes an ‘escape’ from the entire field of cognition. Although Nibbana partakes of non-duality in so far as it has no counterpart, its implications nevertheless go far beyond experiences of oneness or unity.”
One of the final stumbling blocks to awakening is conceptualizing a negative self or to do away with the self. “According to the Buddha’s penetrating analysis the attempt to annihilate self still revolves around a sense of selfhood, though being motivated by disgust with this self. In this way annihilationism is still in bondage to a sense of self, comparable to a dog moving circles around a post to which it is bound. Such craving for non-existence forms indeed an obstacle to the realization of Nibbana…To think in terms of ‘I shall not be’ is a form of conceiving as much as the thought: ‘I shall be’. Both are left behind in order to proceed to awakening.”
Satipatthana – Bhikkhu Analayo: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781909314030/
Intellectual practice
Later forms of meditation practice have the ability to look at how people can be stuck in one practice or another. For many people a sense of oneness with concentration and the practice of scanning the body, looking for the self, and not finding it, it can feel like a place to “pitch a tent and stay there.” Even with eyes open a person can follow the breath, scan for a self, and the sticky sense of self retreats, though these practices have to repeat because the stickiness of self-stress returns again and again. Some people stay in bare attention and try to meet everything with bare attention, which is quite difficult. Others try to maintain consistent attention to impermanence. All these put one closer to that sense of the watcher or the greater I. This continues into Mahayana practices, but some masters wanted to keep a high standard for the goal. Burbea called these earlier attainments an inferential realization. It is temporary relief, but any relief is better than nothing.
Zen Teacher Huang Po was very forceful in calling out people away from the great “I” and people’s resting in awareness. For him, Nirvana is beyond bare awareness and is even void of time. “This mind, which is without beginning, is [uncaused] and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces, and comparisons…Begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.” Like with the three characteristics, those practices can still admit a sense of objects moving through time and many practitioners stay stuck thinking they’ve found IT, when they simply found non-dual concentration. “By their very seeking they lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the Buddha.” All the questioning can become a habit and mislead a practitioner who ends up externally seeking just like with many other things. Certainly, insights during the practice can energize people away from sleepiness, but it can also distract from concentration by falling into the trap of abstraction. “Just as apes spend their time throwing things away and picking them up unceasingly, so it is with you and your learning…Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.”
“The first step is to refrain from knowledge-based concepts. This implies that if you were to follow the empirical method to the utmost limit, on reaching that limit you would still be unable to locate Mind.” Even with modern day thoughts about physics and particles, Rob echoes Huang Po about the danger of abstraction. “See, what usually happens is people engage in some degree of deconstruction. Some degree of deconstruction any human being is going to agree on. But when I was talking about fabrication, it’s a similar thing – it’s like, where am I going to stop? Are there any basic building blocks? You could say, ‘Yeah, there are quarks.’ My question would be, ‘Is a quark empty or not?’ In my view, a quark is thoroughly empty. It’s not that the world is made of building blocks and we just, ‘Oh, now we’ve got a smaller building block’…None of these are independently existing structures from a perspective on quantum mechanics, the typical perspective at present.”
Going from one conceptual reification to a smaller one doesn’t provide enough relief. Huang Po again hints at the value of equanimity in his very spare practice. “First, learn how to be entirely unreceptive to sensations arising from external forms, thereby purging your bodies of receptivity to externals. Second, learn not to pay attention to any distinctions between this and that arising from your sensations, thereby purging your bodies of useless discernments between one phenomenon and another. Third, take great care to avoid discriminating in terms of pleasant and unpleasant sensations, thereby purging your bodies of vain discriminations. Fourth, avoid pondering things in your mind, thereby purging your bodies of discriminatory cognition.”
Rob further explained, and much like Thanissaro did, that there’s a partially unconscious activity in the mind, and in some Mahayana circles, Ignorance is the ignorance of how the mind builds experience unknowingly. A subtle label, and sensation, of subject and object is there unless we practice seeing the emptiness of labels, or their lack of inherent existence. Inherent existence is how perception labels things in a Gestalt like image that is useful for us or dangerous. How we perceive things is as if objects always existed in their final form. It’s what allows us to be very surprised when natural changes occur. At some point, we have to take experience of Nirvana and apply it to our perceptual life so that knowledge of emptiness can be used in daily life. It has to be portable. The typical Mahayana expression Form = Emptiness | Emptiness = Form hints at a skillful use of perception. Many theorists have their idea of what it means, but to me rational thought has to be applied in daily life in order to function properly. To see the usefulness of what we perceive and think has to give way to an equanimity, or a reduction of being for or against, or the tightening and constriction of clinging, so that we can understand form without over-reacting to the changes and interdependence that was there all along. We can logically be for or against something while relaxing the tightening. Like in Willoughby Britton’s study of excessive meditation practices, it’s good to drain excessive judgment but we need enough discernment so that we can follow important signs that protect our lives.
Improving concentration: https://rumble.com/v1gqxct-improving-concentration.html
Rob Burbea enjoyed playing with practices that he learned from other teachers and put together a tripod of investigations to help students. He was influenced by later masters Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti and Mipham Rinpoche to name a few. Rob found that fading of senses could happen when emptiness of self, object and time were realized. Whether senses faded completely or not, practitioners can get a lot of stress relief in waking life. The difficulty with investigating self and object is noticing, as described above, that self and object are not separate. The act of investigating can reify a sense of self searching for an object and label itself, or measure how it’s doing. They are more like a mutually arising self-object. Using Nagarjuna’s Diamond Slivers, his extensive analyses of conceptual categorization and their emptiness could be summarized in a helpful way in the quote below:
Things do not arise from themselves. They do not arise from another. They do not arise from both
themselves and other, or causelessly [from nothing]. ~ Nagarjuna
These reasonings help to take the world of perception we live in and use it. We usually follow the pleasure principle and look for goodies in perception and avoid danger. The searching itself looks for comparable perceptions, differences, and then locks in for the kill. When the mind does this it has certain beliefs based on perceptions and conceptions. Overlaying concepts appear to us as permanent, unchanging, and indestructible. What their impermanence demonstrates for us is that there is stress because impermanence sooner or later interferes with our feeding goals. A basic example that would be easy to practice would be in a park or a forest. A tree could be analyzed and what the searching self usually doesn’t look at, because it just wants utility, is how interdependent objects are. A tree and soil are separate concepts for what we can perceive with our senses. Yet the tree could not exist without the soil, rain, carbon dioxide, and sunlight. The conceptions of tree, soil, sun, CO2, and rain dissipate because we haven’t created a global term “tree-CO2-sun-rain-soil.” The conception doesn’t exist because that’s all it is, an idea. Looking at how the soil connects with the tree, the rays of light to the leaves, and the moistness of the soil helps to drop the conception to a more primordial experience that does not conform to rigid categories. What is interesting is how the sense of self also relaxes at the same time as those concepts do. The sense of self is measuring and labeling how it’s doing with any activity or searching. The self-conception of a searcher investigating a forest has a certain stress too, because it’s trying to justify itself.
Ajahn Maha Boowa intuited a helpful insight that “When there is a center to the knowing, there’s dukkha [dissatisfaction.]” When analyzing in this way, object conception is abolished, the self-conception, and along with them, stress collapses. Again it will return, and Theravadan practitioners like Thanissaro would warn against too much analyses of inherent self, due to the dangers of developing a nihilistic attitude and a feeding frenzy that usually comes afterward. This is because practitioners can’t forget that craving and a need to feed always return, and so does that sense of spatial distance and stress between subject and object. Certainly, if we look for a self that is independent of an object, the sense of stress and distance collapses again and again, because even a body sweep looking for an inherent, solid, indestructible, self-sensation, is another practice that finds relief in unfindability. There is always a flitting attention span moving in perception, and the self just ends up being a stressful concept that motivates, and is motivated to search for something to feed on, or to justify itself. All these practices are about renunciation, and renunciation slowly dissipates craving with time. Even people who don’t meditate can practice this abstinence with the activity of measuring self-esteem with each day of abstinence. “I did it again today! I’ve been sober for 3 years!”
Emotional Feeding – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://rumble.com/v1gqvl1-emotional-feeding-thanissaro-bhikkhu.html
So concepts are static and unreal, but these practices are not trying to pretend that there is no reality. Our sense of ignorance is down to unconsciousness. The unconscious recreates the world in our minds, with clear perceptions, and then we make concepts out of the different sensations, which are basically measurements. We are basically measuring how good we are at survival. For those who are confused, Douglas Harding provides a good pointing meditation to see what this recreation is. Our mind takes in information from the world, simplifies it, possibly in the hippocampus and other brain structures, abstracting what is capable in our minds, and like a snowy village, inside the Void, a recreation of our senses appears in its limited capacity. Through body vibrations, we can sense a body. Through two eyes we have 3D vision. We have sensations specifically for the ears, nose, and tongue. The brain transfers that data, and like a hologram, recreates our abstracted perceptual world. Then a lot of our future conceptions and memories predict spatial and event expectations through thinking. For example, the eyes can’t really see the complete head because of where they are situated, but through physical sensation, we can touch the backs of our heads and infer realistic conclusions without direct vision. Because the mind needs utility and usefulness, we depend emotionally on those facts being reliable and true. Tragically as we age, the body gradually loses the abilities it once had further aggravating our immutable self-conceptions. These concepts are so immutable at times that even amputees can still sense their old limb. Impermanence, instability, and insecurity disturb our minds greatly, and hence the reason for meditation.
What not to forget is that these practices are targeting the concepts we use all the time and especially react to. Perceptions register a certain level of detail of change, but our rigid theories are solidified by feeding, habituation, and attach to circumstances not changing. This means that stress in waking life is partially based on these rigid judgmental concepts when they fail to materialize in our expectations in perception and thinking. This is how scientists can also fight over abstract theories. There’s a lot at stake for their future feeding, and the brain is conditioned to react to surprises and hairpin turns in self-narratives. Siegel describes it this way. “When the mind grasps onto preconceived ideas it creates a tension within the mind between what is and what ‘should be.’ This tension creates stress and leads to suffering.” This is why the inherent existence exercises can create little blips of healing with each reasoning while still being in our normal awareness. With repetition, and also concentration, the mind can learn to relax more habitually. It’s also a good gauge of stress and the sense of self. If stress returns, then so do the effects of those rigid judgments and the sense of distance from subject to object. When I look at an object, there’s an overlay of the concept or theory, but now I can play with the Diamond Slivers and relax those constructions.
Since concepts are so static as to be a noun, treating them like verbs can help to alleviate stress in real-time, by paying attention to actual movement more than the projected concept. To go further you can look for joints between perceptions and labels where there are causes and effects. Of course, they can’t be found except in our impressions. So we can ask if the shape or concept of the tree that I overlay on perception, does it arise from itself? No. Does it arise from the separate delineated concept of the soil? No. Do they arise together? No. Or do they just arise from nothing? No. Since the interdependence of soil and tree is so interdependent that zooming in on their interdependence can zoom in all the way to the limits of biology and physics, then we can see that these concepts are only useful, but not real. When the concept bubble pops, notice the stress reduction and the thinning of the self. Again, the cause and effect can be expanded to include as many things as possible, including the universe. Sub-atomic theories may also breakdown endlessly so as to be completely empty in terms of rigid concepts that never change.
Laraaji – Flow Goes the Universe: https://youtu.be/bzvFL-_fzZ0
Laraaji Boiler Room London – Deep Listening Session: https://youtu.be/hIvP2otHGiw
Nirvana
One of the preliminary emptiness practices in Vajrayana is to help people detect the sense of pain that naturally happens with a sense of self, as we did before. Since self-concepts hurt, the concept of a self being accused is a great way to bring the feeling of the gross sense of “I,” especially for those just beginning the practice and don’t know what to look for. Jeffrey Hopkins says, “one could…imagine that one is being accused, even falsely, and watch the sense of I. One could remember an incident of false accusation, during which one thought, ‘I did not do this, I am being wrongly accused.’ By watching the ‘I’ who is accused, a firm sense of the way that the non-analytical intellect apprehends ‘I’ can be ascertained.” In a way, this practice would expose defense mechanisms from the Psychoanalytic point of view. As students practice with inherent existence, and concentration, periods of stress relief are attained. With concentration, students can also gain many experiences of oneness as well. Equanimity can begin to dismantle the pain found in the sense of self. These thought exercises keep creating that unfindability that makes the “subject become like water poured into water.”
Rob provides a good example of how to dissolve the persistent self. “The Buddha, when he talked about these four foundations of mindfulness, he keeps using these strange phrases. He says… he talks about the body, and he says, ‘See the body in the body.’ He talks about feelings, and he says, ‘See the feelings in the feelings.’ And he talks about the mind, and he says, ‘See the mind in the mind.’ And what on earth does that mean, ‘seeing the mind in the mind’? What it means is exactly this: don’t see self-belief in the mind. The mind is depressed, it means what? It means the mind is depressed. It doesn’t mean, ‘I’m a failure.’ It doesn’t mean, ‘I’m a loser.’ It doesn’t mean, ‘I’m a completely depressed person.’ See the mind in the mind; don’t see self in the mind. And to be very careful with that, and don’t see other assumptions in the mind. It’s just that’s what the mind is doing. That’s how it is right now. It’s just the mind in the mind. Similarly, with the body, instead of thinking about the body in terms of the sense of self-worth: ‘It’s attractive’ or ‘It’s not attractive’ or ‘It’s aging’ or ‘It’s not aging’ or ‘I’m healthy’ or ‘not’–it’s just the body in the body. It takes away so much of the unnecessary suffering that we dump on top of body and mind. So just see the mind in the mind. It doesn’t mean anything about ourselves.”
Bahiya Sutta: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/KN/Ud/ud1_10.html
A way I could help to explain deeper what Rob was saying here is to look at being lost in thoughts as already the mind vibrating with a little stress looking to identify, judge, and feed on something, e.g “I’m a completely depressed person.” Seeing thoughts as thoughts relaxes the feeding right at an early stage with emotional distancing, or equanimity. You can also look at perception. The mind is able to look at changes in perception and use it to think about ways to feed. It is kind of like “this color is different from that color and maybe that’s because there’s something scrumptious here.” Deep down in perception is the sense of self looking for differences in the senses to find something delicious to detect. What you learn, as you go about your day, is when you catch a feeding start up in a feeding thought, which is often an exciting anticipation thought like “oh that might be delicious,” you can pop back into awareness, without any judgment, because judgments are also a form of feeding, and just see the thought as it is and notice the stress that comes with excitement, and start to relax. This can provide an extra element of choice where you don’t have to feel guilty about appetites, but you can now bring some calming awareness to it instead of dogmatic stressful bashing with a Super-ego. “You’re not supposed to want that!” Some things are delicious and it’s okay to be excited and interested, because we don’t want to be too dull, but you can add a comparison of pleasure with pain to see if it’s worth it right at the moment the decision-making is happening by impulses on the self’s behalf, much to the chagrin of the controlling sense of self. Desire is no longer buried in the pre-conscious where it can get carried away or defended by excuses. Again, it’s a portable way of working, and many will say “that’s just fine and dandy” for the limit of their practice. But if you just rest in bare awareness, the vibrations have a potential to be stressful because a vibrating consciousness, with these changing perceptions, is also inconstant.
Saruman’s Storeroom – Lord of the Rings: https://youtu.be/01fpQP1v5ZY
As practitioners practice, often for years, enjoying the sense of oneness, the resting in just bare awareness, perception, the “snowy-village” of the perceptual world, the perception becomes so polished that colors, vibrancy, sounds, smells, and tastes become vivid and delightful, like Haiku poetry. Memories of childhood return of that polished perception when there was less conditioning, but this time one benefits from adult discernment learned thus far. Again, for many, the tent is pitched, the home is built, and it’s time to say we’re finished and let’s party!
4K – A Tropical Day – Silentwatcher: https://youtu.be/f94ebvGISMw
4K – The Golden Fields – Silentwatcher: https://youtu.be/I4o87O4Pd_k
Sonata for 2 Pianos K 448 – II Andante – Murray Perahia – Radu Lupu – Mozart: https://youtu.be/zr59kJXVKQM
Abundance – Aphex Twin: https://youtu.be/zrWTZk0sMS4
Sloth – Aphex Twin: https://youtu.be/5QdzolPpo_A
Green – Hiroshi Yoshimura: https://youtu.be/Q-k9Xu5O7AY
Joanna Brouk – The Space Between: https://youtu.be/gxI3t67cspw
Forest Bathing – Dr. Qi Ling: https://rumble.com/v1graqv-forest-bathing-dr.-qing-li.html
In this situation, Analayo prescribes continuing the practice, but we can also enjoy it, so we don’t force too much. As the mind begins to sensitize enough to notice a little boredom with bare awareness, or maybe the subtle pushes and pulls, in awareness itself, become detected, and then dissatisfaction with even oneness can manifest. Like the burning candle, human perception has subtle stress to it. A lot of it has to do with the dimension of time which connects with death, and how perception is already subtlety striving towards targets. One of the Tibetan practices is to look for inherent existence in time, to play with the concept of one or many when investigating what a “present moment” is. Is the present moment one or many moments? Again it’s a concept overlaid onto short-term memory, as another description of the present moment. If you divide the present moment into smaller slices, you can do that indefinitely and not find a solid, indestructible present moment. The bubble of the concept of the present moment pops and we’re back to a “tiny slot between what is happening now and what happens next,” just like Analayo described earlier.
To Escape the Prison of Time – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2020/200928_To_Escape_the_Prison_of_Time.mp3
Christopher Titmuss lays out the final bit that has to be let go of, which is subtle labeling and time. “To counteract this pursuit of a fruition in life, of some end which is the answer to all the varying conditions of life, much emphasis is rightly placed on not being attached to a goal, not being attached to ideas of enlightenment, not identifying oneself with trying to get on to a nirvana experience, or whatever. And how quickly the mind in any form of experience, especially experience which is strange or difficult or mystical, how easy you want to identify, put a label to it. And by putting a label to it, subtly or grossly imply ‘this I have had,’ so that the self-idea can get a reinforcement through an experience, get a sense of an assertion of itself that it actually has achieved something special, and it wants that, and it wants that for its own confirmation. It wants it as a proof that all of this is really worthwhile because it has brought me that. And the idea of, not only having to give up the greed, the aggression, the despair, the confusion, the anger, but to actually give up the promised land that goes with it, the mind doesn’t want to know. This movement of this process and the evolution that goes with it may require the genuine renunciation and letting go. And even then when one says ‘ahh if I renounce and let go then it will come through the backdoor,’ one is still faced with the difficulty within this situation because it seems that the texts, that the scripture and the whole sense of path and goal in fact gives this promise, and the way that it is spelled out, in the form of the language, seems to spell this out in some way or other, but that’s because the investigation and the seeing into nature of things, there’s still obscurations there…So one finds that one is faced with a difficulty which says that ‘continuity is the key to practice, therefore time is indispensable’ and the sense that time and the continuing of time and that relationship to time, which says that it might be in a subtle and pure way that ‘I am doing this for that. I am meditating in order to be free from…I am observing in order to be able to let go of…’ Our relationship is that the present is a means to come to a certain end, and because we experience this because this does actually happen, we carry it to the degree that somehow or other that this is related to a transcendent understanding. We forget that the Buddha has spoken of the Unconditioned, therefore no process, no conditioning has any bearing on the unconditioned…Is there any connection? It comes back to the old self-idea. The self-idea is the key…in that, anything which is pointed to is self…It has through the pinpointing a separateness, a sense of it’s own-ness, that it belongs to itself…[Self-Object-Time]. What if in the deeper layers of meditative observation there is not that kind of movement of mind, that kind of interpretation in any way at all which is involved in the question of something being self or not-self or no self? What if there is no kind of way of taking a hold of any aspect of all of it or some of it, of any kind of condition, so there’s no pinpointing happening, there’s no conclusion its all diverse and different, or that it’s all one and unity, and that one’s being is not drawing that kind of conclusion in any way that it’s not all separate nor that it’s interdependent. It’s simply not seeing like that. All of that is reliant on a certain, if it’s not an abstract theory, on a certain experience to see in that particular way, but one is not seeing with one’s head, therefore it’s not abstract, one is not seeing through the limited reference of a personal experience, so there is not the head, and there’s not the thinker. There is not the experience or the experiencer who will see in a particular way. Where is an ‘it’ in reference to another ‘it,’ or to ‘itself?’ In that emptiness, in that fullness, in that unconditioned, the response of the human being is compassion.”
The Unconditioned – Christopher Titmuss: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/45/talk/5054/
When the mind relaxes it’s moving attention span, the intention to pay attention, seeking experiences in time, and the pinpointing with labels, it becomes ripe and finally tastes of timeless nirvana. Rob describes how some people find it a “laugh out loud” moment to see how everything in experience, including the self, is built up from tension, but I also think that nirvana sneaks up on people precisely because it’s only when there’s the ability to enjoy when things are gone, the searching and labeling relax, and this happens even in lower stages of Jhanas, and the remaining tension finally falls into nirvana on its own relaxation inertia. For Thanissaro Bhikkhu, a lot of our past desires now appear ridiculous or just plain stupid. The refreshment of nirvana seems as far as one can go in a body that is alive. To move further one has to die first. For the Buddha and others of high attainment, one still has to trust in concentration while we’re still alive and it continues to be a safe place to dwell. This is good news for most of those who don’t make it this far. Concentration is valuable as long as you are alive. There may be errors in labeling emptiness and pinpointing nirvana and subtle stress attached and related to concepts of what is non-conceptual, but one can dip into refreshment again and again in compensation, while at the same time reduce addictiveness further and further. For those more skeptical, who wonder about Dharma teachers who have a stomach growling into their microphones while they talk, there probably is a certain amount of craving left, but much less than what the person had when they first started the practice. The answer still is continued interest in concentration as a form of protection. Like in my Jhanas review, what a person did in the past, and looping on that incessantly, doesn’t protect one’s future behavior. It’s better to drop it and enjoy concentration. Concentration is also a necessity for developing skills which nirvana can’t discount. You can’t live in a nirvana state and engage in conscious life. Rob Burbea, for example, developed imagery practices. Many others develop all the Jhanic attainments and learn how to go into them at will. Some study sciences and learn even more about the brain. Concentration is also needed because having meditation skills doesn’t eliminate mistakes you can still make. The Buddhist expectation that praise and blame will continue means that you can handle it better, but nirvana is about stress relief and letting go of conceptuality, not learning new skills.
Despite nirvana being non-conceptual, the book The Island provides lots of Buddhist descriptions of nirvana for whatever they are worth.
Hunger is the most severe bodily disease.
Conditioned things are the worst calamity.
When we see this clearly,
we achieve Nibbana, the ultimate bliss.
~ Dhp 202-4
It is the Unformed, the Unconditioned, the End,
the Truth, the Other Shore, the Subtle,
the Everlasting, the Invisible, the Undiversified,
Peace, the Deathless, the Blest, Safety,
the Wonderful, the Marvellous,
Nibbana, Purity, Freedom,
the Island,
the Refuge, the Beyond.
~ S 43.1-44
Having nothing,
clinging to nothing:
that is the Island,
there is no other;
that is Nibbana, I tell you,
the total ending of ageing and death.
~ SN 1094
When one finally has to face death, the sense of perception has changed quite a bit. Daily life is less mired in panic and rumination because the mind naturally prefers nirvana and inclines towards relaxation and letting go of rumination. Stigmatizing labels, and their sore spots, can be ignored and proven false with better behavior. As time passes stigmatized complexes fade. Physical pain is still the same, but if one has practiced a lot, the sense of self doesn’t entirely shrink at the end of life as it does for many people. Touching the timeless and exploring the recreated world of our perceptions creates a cocoon of interdependence where death isn’t something to run away from with a sense of loneliness and separation, and ultimately none of us can. To face a timeless void while you’re alive helps to prepare for the permanent timeless void we all have to face. The gamble is that when we actually face our own imminent deaths, this preparation is good enough to ease the panic of having to permanently let go. Rob’s recent passing was a reminder of consistent practice and that we don’t know when it will happen. In one of his talks he recounted how people he knew that died, woke up the morning before their death, and had no inkling that this would be their last day.
Guided Meditation for Chronic Pain: https://rumble.com/v1goucj-meditation-and-chronic-pain-various-authors.html
A short time before his death he posted what it can feel like when you have practiced a lot beforehand, and how you have to rely on past cultivation. “Yet even now, mostly I do not feel as if the horizons of my existence have shrunken. What calls me deeply calls me still in its beauty, with its intimacies and its distances, and that seems to keep the mind and heart, and the sense of existence and its scope, open, endless even. But all this has definitely been challenging. My mind is affected by the low energy, and that makes a big difference. And it is hard to exercise a fully helpful relationship with the pain and at the same time try to do something else – work or whatever; too often then the pain will cumulatively over time become quite enervating and even agitating. It is (or at least was, before the mind-wrecking drugs) easier to access some ease and peace with the pain in meditation, when giving it or something else full attention. But that resource has become less and less available. Mostly now I have to rely, I think, on whatever fruits there are from past practice, immensely grateful for those gardens, that orchard.”
Lifelines – Doves: https://youtu.be/9UAy1UGNRPc
Manual of Insight by Mahasi Sayadaw: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781614292913/
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha(2nd Edition) An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book (Second Edition Revised and Expanded) by Daniel M. Ingram: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781911597100/ Free version: https://mctb.org/
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book (1st Edition) by Daniel M. Ingram: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781904658405/
Daniel Ingram’s website: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/home
Daniel on Vimeo – Vipassana, The Six Sense Doors, and The Three Characteristics: https://vimeo.com/250616410
Satipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide – Bhikkhu Analayo: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781911407102/
The Direct Path to Realization – Bhikkhu Analayo: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781899579549/
Seeing that Frees – Rob Burbea: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780992848910/
Meditation on Emptiness – Jeffrey Hopkins: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780861717057/
Desire is Mimetic: A Clinical Approach Jean-Michel Oughourlian Université de Besançon, American Hospital of Paris
Puppet of Desire – Jean-Michel Oughourlian: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780804718233/
The Nature of Consciousness – Rupert Spira: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781684030002/
Gil Fronsdal’s noting tips: http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/articles/mental-noting/
Steps to Liberation – Gil Fronsdal: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780989833493/
A Head off Stress – D.E. Harding: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780953425525/
On having no head – D.E. Harding: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781908774064/
Rob Burbea’s talks and transcriptions: https://airtable.com/shr9OS6jqmWvWTG5g/tblHlCKWIIhZzEFMk/viw3k0IfSo0Dve9ZJ?blocks=hide
Rob’s site: http://www.robburbea.com/
Light on Enlightenment – Christopher Titmuss: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781570625145/
Christopher Titmuss Talks – Dharma Seed: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/45/
Theories of Personality – Jess Feist: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780077861926/
The Island – Ajahn Amaro: https://amzn.to/3m34qVo
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice