Deep conditioning
Studying Freudian psychoanalysis, while also reading Buddhism, has been a fun experience for me. Many ideas dovetail, even if they appear to go in different directions. The struggle we all have in dealing with our conditioning is the same. Like with the Buddha, all of us gain experience over time and begin to learn what works and what doesn’t. Even with the Buddha, there was always room for improvement. Developing the Jhanas wasn’t the end for him. In an interview, with S.N. Goenka, the instructor who became popular for his ‘sweeping’ method, he said “First [The Buddha] had tried eight jhanas, which had purified his mind, but not to the depth. Deep inside there was what the Buddha called ‘sleeping impurities,’ meaning that the roots of the impurities were still there. He realized that these could be taken out only through the practice of vipassana, through awareness of sensations.”
As valuable as the Jhanas are for developing healing Flow states, all practitioners return to their conditioning. There is a painful tendency in the mind to emotionally bite, gnaw, or eat at life circumstances. Like in my review of Narcissistic Supply, the conceptual ego has been developing since childhood. The mind becomes conditioned to measure itself as separate from the environment with stress triggers. Part of the nostalgia for childhood is the lost sense of wonder when there was less conditioning. Adult life is full of dull, repetitive self-concept stories. Numbing the pain with substances and distractions has been the typical way most people have dealt with the problem. These methods all work to a certain extent, but they usually have side effects. But what exactly is this feeling we have to numb?
Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
Mindfulness
The ego is a concept or multiple concepts, as Freud and Fenichel described. Furthermore, these concepts have feelings embedded in them, including feelings of tension that need release. Our psycho-physical experience is a conceptual map of preferences. If we don’t like what’s there, there is a temptation to numb the sensations or to avoid them with repression or distraction. Pema Chödron recommends that we welcome those sensations instead. “…Send any fearful, grasping, self-protective feelings your unconditional warmth…The main point is to reverse the ancient human tendency to avoid and reject pain. Instead you move toward it with heart.”
The Two-Step Process For Dealing with Suffering – Pema Chödron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrS1bvW8OWA
The Origin of the Sense of Boredom – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/7O937dHmNxE
What makes our sense of self seem real is the pain that follows it. Most of us know that concepts are fake abstractions, but we fail to apply that reasoning to our self-concepts. A powerful method to deal with these self-concepts, is to gradually expose their lack of concrete reality. Goenka says that “the ultimate truth of mind and body is nothing but vibration…” To actively seek the reality of the self, by scanning the body, and the environment, and to only find vibration, liberates that sense of emotional feeding, biting, and gnawing, so we have no pain to numb. If you ask “Is this _________?” and fill in your name, but instead of finding a core self, you find vibrations and paradoxically, liberation.
Seeing that frees [Seven fold reasoning] – Rob Burbea: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780992848910/
Emptiness of Self
The practice is to actively find concrete evidence of a True Self, and to fail every time. What is found instead is an emptiness of self-preoccupation. You fall into Flow states and well-being. Bhikkhu Analayo says that “…to the extent to which we are able to let go of the burden of ego and self-reference, to that extent we become more functional and better at doing what we have to do.” With the Jhanas, this can be developed with a lot of effort, but even a subtle self-measuring continues with the practice of trying to gain attainments in each sitting. There is a subtle avoiding still involved, and plenty of story-making about how well one is doing with the practice. It’s the stories that become dull, boring, and painful. Disbelieving those stories brings back presence and fresh perceptions.
Still, the conditioning will return, but one now has found an easier way to deal with conditioning that can be done with eyes open and even when dealing with many activities in life. When there’s reactivity, like reacting to a bad smell, one can ask “is that reactivity me, or just vibrations?” Of course, reactivity can be felt in the body and is experienced as unpleasant vibrations and contraction. Negative emotions can now be integrated in experience without too much clinging and obsession. This can also help people living with stigma and low self-esteem. With enough repetition, and gaps of relief, one can begin to disbelieve in the negative stories, and be less driven by old conditioning. Our stories have more flexibility and we can change.
Desire
Daniel Siegel in The Mindful Brain says that “the issue does not involve the removal of an individual’s life story or identity, but rather creates a coherent life story that enables him or her to become free of constraints from the past rather than devoid of access to memories of who that person has been…When the mind grasps onto preconceived ideas it creates a tension within the mind between what is and what ‘should be.'” Most of our questions about our self, or even about meditation, or other practices, can now be seen as having a biting and gnawing quality that grates on the psyche.
How we fall out of mindfulness has to do with a particular quality that we miss. For Analayo we need a “presence of mindfulness [that] enhances and strengthens memory.” When we search for a concrete self, as if we are trying to pay attention with the intention of remembering, for example, what if you actually found a concrete self? That would be memorable and something to share with others. That level of attention to vibrations, mixed with not finding a concrete self, leads one to drop self-preoccupation or identification. How this can become a long-term practice, doesn’t come from too much force.
Springtime Meditation for Happiness and Positivity ~ 1 hr – Temple Sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TPC_ChU1YE
For Mooji, long-term practice comes from desire. “We have to grow into that. How? The more deeply you want it or desire it, and you have to desire it intensely, to reach this level of completeness.” The relief that comes from the unfindability of the self is what has to be desired. A negative image of traditional desire. Goenka says, “if you are equanimous with the sensations, then you are also equanimous with the craving, and in this way, layer after layer of that particular [reaction] in your mind will be erased automatically.”
Beauty
Mooji also describes this life with a relaxed ego as one that is beautiful, or “beauty-full.” In my experience I feel I know what he means. Similar to what Haiku poetry points to, the mind is able to enjoy the senses just as they are without force or manipulation. The world, without a veil of self-preoccupation, looks vivid, like a primordial dinosaur planet. Even the vision changes so that height and depth is more pronounced. We don’t have to be in a beautiful national park. Even when walking in a city, colours are interesting and wonderful. For example, the way that low light in mornings or evenings shines on buildings, almost like a flashlight, creates a wonder of existence. For me, the Winslow Homer painting Promenade on the Beach captures that best. It’s amazing that anything exists!
Living without Ego – Mooji: https://youtu.be/tAHwjJzstIk
Satchitananda, the Joy of Being – Rupert Spira: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKjHRQOJG4M
Concept and experience
Old childhood memories of green, blue and yellow landscapes return to adult consciousness when we stay mindful for long periods of time. Smells and flavours don’t have to be hyped. They are just what they are. If an extraordinary flavour appears in experience, the labels are often simple. “Artisan coffee. Unexpected raspberry flavour.” Jon Kabat-Zinn quotes Thoreau, “Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!” It’s simplicity of ego, but complexity in the senses. So much of what makes these teachings difficult is how the ego intellectualizes them to death.
Adyashanti recently said “the story…is meant to evoke some actual lived real experience of being. As soon as we turn it into dogma or theology and we start philosophizing about it, we’ve just bumped it up to the rational realm. Then we become disconnected from what it’s really meant to evoke because it’s meant to evoke all that stuff below your consciousness. When we bring it all up and make it conceptual, right into this little 3 or 4% of what we are conscious of, then we’re…misusing these stories. We’re turning them into intellectual toys, and they become the means we disconnect. [Spiritual concepts] need us to let them do their work on us. If we keep dragging them up and making them just into so much rational philosophy, it can’t work.”
Adyashanti talk – May 13, 2020: https://youtu.be/BavJI6tKLko
One has to follow the vibrations, not the ideas, precisely because these experiences cannot be grasped, even in this article.
Satipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide – Analayo: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781911407102/
Welcoming the unwelcome – Pema Chödron: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781611808681/
Interview with S.N. Goenka: https://www.inquiringmind.com/article/3001_w_goenka/
The Mindful Brain by Daniel J. Siegel: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393704709/
Wherever you go, there you are – Jon Kabat-Zinn: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781401307783/
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/