Dukkha [Dissatisfaction]
Part of the reason why intellectualizing the meditation practice can be too much, is the sense of pain that arises when we believe in a concrete self. The feeling of a concrete self comes from narratives, including narratives related to Buddhist practice. It only feels concrete because of the pain. It’s a discontent, preference, or setup, that wants to manipulate the environment to provide a release, satisfaction, or payoff. Many of these setups and payoffs are just fine. Yet many are unnecessary. They can spin around in wasted effort. The pain we feel has a personality. It constitutes multiple imitated selves that the mind has copied from suggestions of others who found different ways to gain pleasure. When we have enough of them in our unconscious, it’s like special interest groups fighting for control of your consciousness.
Once one of these characters gets a hold of consciousness, they can motivate action. Each dreamy character in the mind is like an angry person that is demanding satisfaction by increasing our pain. One of the best instructors to explain how pain factors into our practice is Thanissaro Bhikkhu, from the Thai forest tradition.
He reminds us what we are dealing with. For example, when you pay attention to something, these distracting characters want to divide your attention in fractions wasting your energy. This limits our ability to give our whole attention to our work. We have multiple preferences residing in the unconscious and they pull us in different directions, creating inner conflict and distraction. We also have distractions based on the level of physical pain we have to deal with. To see more on that subject I would direct you to an older video of mine on Chronic Pain.
Guided Meditation for Chronic Pain: https://rumble.com/v1goucj-meditation-and-chronic-pain-various-authors.html
Worlds
Why it’s so difficult to meditate for long periods of time is because this pain so convincingly feels like it won’t end unless we act. This is made even easier by the fact that there are many places we have already found that provide satisfaction. The ease of access helps to motivate that feeling of not being able to wait. From a Freudian point of view, you would just go for the satisfaction, especially if it satisfies an instinct in a socially acceptable way. For Thanissaro, he would focus more on vetting these dissatisfactions and making them compete with just one voice of peace created by the breath.
To catch more influences that show up in the body, including very unconscious ones, Thanissaro instructs. “Don’t let the awareness go outside the skin.” Staying in the body helps the mind to know when it’s veered off the path. The mind can easily move into concepts of people, places, and different periods of time. Worlds. Once we are there, there’s always some resistance preventing a return to the present moment and it becomes hard to get disentangled.
Taking charge of your happiness
Since it’s easy to pay attention to these “Worlds” for long periods of time, due to the pleasure they promise, for Thanissaro, you have to fight fire with fire, or fight pleasure with a better pleasure. The pleasure we are training is the ability to enjoy peace. To do this, we have to catch the interruptions at their inception. Continuity of the breath, following it all the way in, including the gap inbetween, and all the way out, makes us more aware of our unconscious distractions. When interruptions inevitably occur, one can see an early form of stress escalating, and we can relax the body instead. Your moods are mirrored by the breath.
By comparing the desire, with mental peace, one can feel almost a metallic biting and gnawing retracting back into a sense of peace. In this case you’ve just successfully avoided unnecessary preoccupation. Tests keep coming back, and you’ll fail some, but because more tests will come, you will have more opportunities to succeed. You can reorient yourself and ask “What breath would feel really good right now?”
How to meditate for longer
Naturally, we can become preoccupied with our practice, so analyzing how we are moving the breath is the next step. We have to let the breath do its own thing, and the monitoring function is just there to keep track of how peaceful the breath is and to make it comfortable. Imagination can be used to spread well-being by bringing up the idea of nerves throughout the body and associating those images to your body scanning, relaxing and pleasure.
When we are able to loosen the tension in the body, that satisfaction can now compete with other pleasures, so you end up meditating for longer. The mind may interrupt with an interesting idea, but if your practice is good, you’ll just sink back into your meditation. You’re so absorbed in peace that you don’t have to force yourself, because you actually want to stay here. Thanissaro asks “do you really want to trash this to go some place else?” His response is that it’s better to focus on the meditation object than even listening to his dharma talks. We can feed on insights, and that does have it’s place, but it can never replace your practice.
Use your Illusion
Another way of dealing with impulses, is to embrace imagery, but to learn to develop the skill and use it for liberation. Most of our images are imitated from culture and introjected without any assessment from our part. We gobble it up and act on it. We can interact with our imagery much more than we usually do. Like I posted before on Narcissistic Supply, our imagery can often satisfy itself. Thanissaro talks about the allure we have embedded in our images, but we usually avoid analyzing the drawbacks. If you follow the imagery you’ll find that it will move towards pleasure-procedures, a how-to for pleasure, and then we are motivated for action.
Try to push the imagery a little farther, with lots of warmth and love towards yourself, and continue the narrative to what happens after the pleasure is over. Are there any pains? Is there boredom? Is there a significant cost? Do people, who provide you with what you want, respect you? If a person is more audio or kinesthetic, then create those stories with sound and sensation, but continue to the drawbacks that are usually ignored. You’ll find resistance to let go of those things, but letting go becomes authentic when the dissatisfaction aids the letting go by “looking at the parts you don’t want to look at.” The paradoxical pleasure here is in avoiding unnecessary pain and karma. You walk around in an aura of peace that you can protect wherever you go. The great thing is that you have a choice. You can act or not act because the pleasures can be compared. You hold the reins.
Ironically, with less self-preoccupation, you can find more energy to wait for better choices to satisfy your self-priorities.
Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
Dhammatalks – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/
Continuity – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2015/150620_Continuity.mp3
The Allure of Sensuality – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2018/180719_The_Allure_of_Sensuality.mp3
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/