Taking Stock
After completing my diverting and edifying Perversion Series, I started looking back at what this blog/channel has covered over 3 years time and began this summary of Meditation techniques. Typical of my style, I don’t separate psychology from meditation because they are simply different perspectives covering the same subject, psychological reality.
The biggest difficulty for people living in a modern society is to be able to connect all the different disciplines together into a lifestyle that is capable of long lasting forms of happiness. Because it’s so complicated, and even if this inventory of meditation techniques is wonderful, it really just feels like the beginning. The reality is that most of us have gaping holes in our belief systems and are too lopsided in one particular direction or another. This will factor in big with Carl Jung, but is also a signal from Darwinism that communicates the need for balance in life and in one’s personality. Even if this lack of balance shows up in one civilization or another, it doesn’t necessarily mean that humans are about to be selected for extinction, keeping in mind that if you watch politics you may find those thoughts appear frequently, the reality is more likely an underdevelopment in many areas of our lives. Between parenting, schooling, and modern culture, so many important skills are left out, and many think this is done on purpose by those in authority to create their own outcome for our lives. Part of growing up is relinquishing those influences, and even rebelling, in order to begin captaining one’s own ship.
Captaining one’s own ship isn’t easy because we move quickly from school authorities to work authorities with whatever skills we have, or lack thereof. Then it becomes a giant project to become a “Life Designer.” This can lead to bumping into weird coaches where you are essentially asking their permission to do things you are already free to do, gurus who specialize in certain practices to the point of being out of balance, and following rich people, or people who pretend to be rich, to see if they have any answers. Worst of all are narcissistic cultists that make promises to hook you, repeat lies until they are believed, and after the brainwashing is over, exploit you.
Certainly many role models send the exact same message, which is to make a lot of money so you can make your own decisions. There are many meditation instructors that do live a simple lifestyle, but there are also many that are fabulously wealthy that oddly refuse to talk about how their book sales reduced their stress. Why many people don’t have to turn to any of these practices is precisely because they have been able to make enough money that they are the power center of their own lives. To be able to make your own choices is always more healing. Being told what to do all the time is not. There’s a deep seated need in the mind for independence and a hatred for tyranny and slavery. Because people have to earn an income, it can’t be lost on followers that the guru needs to eat to.
From my experience, working for people who have above average money, and who regularly try to virtue-signal that they are happy, and that we should worship them, I found that a meditation practice is still beneficial precisely because of the pitfalls that can happen with an obsession over money. The pitfalls are doing jobs you hate simply because there are a lot of zeros in the paycheck. Another pitfall that often coincides with work are addictions that are used to numb the pain of work, which depletes the resources that the work provides. The most counter-intuitive problem is spoiled-ness and boredom. It’s possible to have so much wealth that boredom becomes a larger part of a person’s psychology. One should always maintain hobbies and interests regardless of the wealth. This means that true wealth has more to do with the psyche and how often a person can give it goals to strive for, meaning, love, pleasure, entertainment, spirituality, philosophy, and ample experiences of peace.
Meditation Summary
Flow: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
One of the pitfalls of concentration is exactly those lapses in focus. That gap between finishing something and moving onto something else requires some regeneration, but old habits can easily carry one away. This is where mindfulness comes in. We covered the Mahasi noting method, but ultimately one has to be able to sit still with those impulses that seep into the concentration and let them be and let them pass away altogether. Noting is treated as a form of training wheels, but eventually you can just gently acknowledge whatever is in the mind and choose to not follow it. By not following it, it is seen as impermanent because impulses go away on their own when we don’t add to them. The mind doesn’t need extra noise and pressure to make it go away. Impulses peak to a certain intensity, and if there’s enough mindfulness, it will learn to withdraw on its own and the habit can slowly weaken without the Ego feeling that it has to do something. Relief can then be had every time thoughts and feelings bubble up and pass away on their own. A big part of the practice is to enjoy the passing away and the rest that is there between impulses.
Where a lot of Mahayana practices shine are how they can simplify Theravadin practices when they are used with too much force. Thoughtlessness and periods of rest are good, but it’s not the end goal for most people. Even if Theravadins would argue that their practice has many more elements, and people aren’t practicing with balance, how it is often taught in the West is with extreme narrowness. It’s like meditation is polishing a thing called “mind” and putting a lot of strenuous effort into it. Seeing that the effort is pointing at “things” that aren’t really concrete, and these efforting activities are often energy draining, is a way to reduce some of the unnecessary tension in practice. If you are already a mind, how can you go searching for it?
Adyashanti helps to explain that balance of cultivation and a regular life. “In the moment when you are available, how deep are you willing to go?…There is something that wants to be recognized right here and right now. The mind says ‘I don’t know who I am’ because when the mind looks into you, it doesn’t find you.” Here I would help translate it better based on common scanning practices I’ve done in the past. If you scan your entire physical and sensorial experience you won’t find a concrete self. It’s just the process of scanning and sensations. Much deeper than this is to see that any movement of scanning or searching also has a sense of self. Nirvana is really the only “place” where there’s no sense of self, and this comes from gradually shedding techniques until the mind finds it peaceful enough to let go of pinpointing and labeling altogether. Even if this is an ultimate form of rest, you still have to get back to your life full of a sense of self, but with more knowledge on how stress works. Many tensions are habitual and trying to feed them less allows for a smoother experience in daily life. Only when those impulses begin to relax in a marked way will the questions subside: “How can I be enlightened? How do I stay mindful all the time?”
How can I stay aware all the time? – Adyashanti: https://youtu.be/tv_McETr_jg
The Immediacy of Being – Adyashanti: https://youtu.be/eXVmCV8PHhk
Meditation in Daily Life: https://psychreviews.org/meditation-in-daily-life/
Similar to Rob Burbea’s training on Welcoming or Allowing thoughts, both teachers point to a deep seated tension in most of us to not welcome and not allow what’s in the mind. To welcome and allow what arises reduces some unnecessary friction, and we don’t have to act on anything that arises. Adyashanti reminds people of a Buddha-nature within, essentially a Nothing where all those problematic thoughts come out of. To think a meditation is going some where is already an ego adventuring to a concrete place where it hopes to find peace. He reminds us that “we don’t have to manufacture the space or silence between words. We don’t have to bring it into being. It’s just there…There’s something about attending to the wordless…In those blips of quiet, in between one wave of emotion and the next, this gives us access to the deepest realms, to the very ground of the psyche…We are not making any attempt to stop thinking, in fact part of the practice is to not try to control your mind. This is not an exercise in manipulation. It’s leaving your thoughts alone, having an attitude as if they are traffic noise, wind through the trees, or the noise of a dog barking, and there happens to be this noise in the mind, thoughts occurring, and also the associated emotions and feelings. Nothing’s meant to just stop. It would not be natural for our mind to stop thinking forever. We are not trying to force anything. Be on the lookout for any form of unnecessary effort…It’s not that we are looking towards the opposite of effort, which is complete effortlessness. There is a kind of effort to attend to the silence. It’s not a striving effort. It’s not a grasping effort. It’s just a kind of intention, a decision you might say, to attend to the space between thoughts. [We are also] not just noticing the space between thoughts, but around thoughts, because when you get the feeling in the body, just a moment of space between one thought and the next you can notice that sense of the field, the kinesthetic sense of the space or the silence, that still maintains itself…The thought doesn’t make the space go away. It actually doesn’t make the silence go away. It’s just a thought or feeling arising within silence. We are not trying to push away thoughts or feelings. We are just leaving them alone for a moment. Not indulging. Not willfully thinking or feeling for a moment, but we are just allowing all of our experience, whatever it may be to have the space to exist in. There’s a strange thing that happens when you grant everything in your experience the right to exist, why?, because it is existing. It’s very simple. That gesture of allowing, allows you to notice the space around what’s happening. Sometimes when people get a little sense of the space or the quiet around things and within things, they try to grasp at it, hold on to it, but you see the grasping becomes more noise. This isn’t a quiet or space you can hold on to. It would be like trying to hold onto the air in the room. When you stop trying to grasp it, well there it is.”
The Way of Effortless Effort – Adyashanti: https://youtu.be/OacbURCmA_k
Essentially, Adyashanti was deeply scanning for a concrete self and finding instead that this regular sense of self is a grasping for a self-concept, and the concrete quality of that was the very grasping and tension itself in the search, or any other search. So you scan the body, including your cranium and your face, and relax any tension found, while realizing that each tension that is found is a form of belief in a concrete self. Of course this is easier said than done because of the multitude of tension-habits that a beginner meditator has. Thanissaro Bhikkhu of the Thai forest tradition often reminds people of how those Mahayana practices can be dangerous. Without a practice of directing the mind towards consequences, disgust, and drawbacks to pleasures, and even if one gets good at watching impulses arise, peak and vanish on their own, most people require much more cultivation. It’s easy to just let what arises come in and get carried away with actions. Part of the mind wanting to attack other parts of the mind is because it has good reason to and unless that negative desire reduces substantially, the mind will go on attacking itself. Thinking of disgust, consequences and drawbacks brings up a lot of resistance in many people precisely because of how desire actually ignores those things in order to make desire and pleasure more possible. The addictive mind looks for an allure, which is how lust works. It looks at sexualized parts, consumption of parts for food, and singles out parts that are pleasant out of the environment. Parts are short-term, provide pleasure in moments, and become exhausted in boredom, or end in displeasure related to consequences. The regular mind, without any training, just starts the process anew, making the same mistakes over and over again, until the pain is too much, or something more interesting comes along.
The survival part of the mind requires constant seeking and dissatisfaction to maintain the organism and resists total satisfaction. In a state of nature this is necessary, but in a state of modern abundance and technology, that mind can get into trouble. It can throw away what still works through boredom and pursue masochistic goals because of their properties of providing the right level of challenge for the seeking part of the mind. Like Sisyphus, the mind naturally wants constant challenges to overcome and gets too stressed if the challenge is too hard and too bored if it’s too easy. Meditation can help in filling in those gaps between goals or when there’s no immediate pleasure, but part of the skill of developing mental peace is being able to appreciate avoiding activities and not just moving onto one after another. A modern perspective on this is not to just avoid activities but choose ones with different intensities that one is capable of sustaining for the whole of one’s life. This way a person can avoid living a life-denying life. This practice can easily be done with visualization of drawbacks and consequences, accompanied with the regular mind which is already adept for most people at visualizing ways to enjoy oneself.
As one becomes adept at killing time with different mindfulness skills, like directing attention towards footfalls, and infusing them with love, to purposefully seek beauty that is taken for granted, to use concentration for pleasure and to get things done, to relax addictive comparison of one thing to another and to instead compare something to nothing, as away to trigger a sense of wonder, to enjoy deep rest, to enjoy the peace of avoiding activities that are traps, and to relish in authentic hobbies and interests, one can notice that a reliance on authority figures begins to reduce to a lower level. There will still be a need for others, but the pathological clinging to people, who can be very dangerous, since they have power over our goals, the need begins to subside. The boundaries between oneself and others begins to become clearer and easier to navigate. If one has to work with others, once can create small personal goals that match up with others to maintain a certain amount of that feeling of independence. We realize that we have more control over our mind than we originally thought.
Narcissism and Woke Ideology
These experiences remind me of Freud’s study of ‘The Wolfman’ and his dependency on Psychoanalysts for his decision making. This dependency can happen in psychology, meditation, religions, or in any other profession. It can happen with our parents, in the marketplace, and with governments. We can now clearly see the web of interdependence with others. Letting go of Prestige for those who we used to depend on, and letting go of blame for others and how they influenced us negatively, can be another form of freedom. Freud called this process of transferring emotions from one person to another, transference. We have imitated and imaginary versions of people in our minds, a natural bonding ability of the mind that psychoanalysts call Objects. They aren’t real people but we rehearse and try to preempt bad things based on these old phantom relationships in the mind, and in extreme cases we can develop preemptive attacks on those we fear because we feel we have to get them before they get us. It just takes another step to make those Objects into stereotypes and bigotry.
‘You’re a murderer’: Officer records verbal attack during traffic stop: https://youtu.be/_THBjQ-uP9A
Lady Gaga, Michael B Jordan, JLo promote creepy new “safety” seal and it is NOT what it seems inside: https://youtu.be/dbxUdTm_VOY
“Look at Me!” Black Mother Takes Blowtorch to Critical Race Theory in Front of School Board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcJS2UJVwMc
Being able to let go of this preemptive blame we give to people, who seem similar to authorities who wronged us in the past, I think is directly connected to the feeling that we gain when can captain our own psyche. Agency. We let go of helplessness. The irony is that what many people were looking for in their meditation practice was not Nirvana, but to find a way to develop a healthy sense of agency. While growing up we have to rely on imitating authority figures and it’s a major feat to move beyond that in adulthood.
The Neo-Freudian René Girard pointed out how our social brain imitates others and if we look closely we can see that our imitations, just like following advertising, lacked that visualization of drawbacks, consequences, and healthy disgust. A lack of agency. A lot of the WOKE mentality of today comes from cycles of blame, including a lot of self-blame for this lack of agency, where there is no mercy, no forgiveness, and no allowing for growth in oneself or others. They break that cardinal rule of left-wing politics and humanist professions that we should only blame behaviors, not identities, and then slap all kinds of people with stigmatizing rigid identities that allow for no growth or individuality. This allows for dehumanization of people into different types of pests, and eventually some kind of final solution that NAZIS and Communists think up. People who have resentment and a common political solution can take over entire institutions and dehumanization allows justification for all kinds of lies and especially fake toxic narratives, that when swallowed, lead to slavery and exploitation for those who go with it. Those who resist get bullied out of their sources of income and power so that they also become helpless. Helpless people then are easier to manipulate, discard, or destroy at some point.
How these woke beliefs become distorted is when the skills required to develop success get denigrated. So not only are identities targeted, the virtues of the targeted are vilified. This is the signal that the criminals and the insane have taken over the asylum of institutions and are now trying to mechanize a form of extermination and replacement in order to usurp power positions to satisfy the their wounded egos, which unfortunately are not capable of full satisfaction as we can see above. These pressures that cause this cycle of scapegoating are common. Today it’s the generational gap. Older generations enjoyed their lives and still need money to retire and they can’t leave their positions. Many people have to work into their retirement. This puts pressure on younger generations to wait their turn, and even wait until they are so much older that none of those goals that young people want can actually be achieved, like having kids, doing well in a high powered job, which is also important for sexuality and looking attractive to prospective partners, and that enjoyable feeling that some milestones have actually been achieved.
The success of modern technology is great in that it allows people to live longer and hypocritically younger generations will want that for themselves too, but the tension remains with younger generations and a desire to find a way up the power hierarchy, leading to all kinds of conflicts and desires for revolution. As we’ve seen before, conflict has to do with people who want the same positions, and those positions are scarce and can’t be shared. If you can’t tell already by now what I think, I think Cluster B types, including Narcissists, are the ones who fall into every hole of resentment and envy and create these frightening political movements. They can be on the left or the right, and they don’t care about labels, but they do care about checks and balances. Those who don’t like checks and balances in a political system are the ones to watch for and we have to watch those tendencies in ourselves. It’s not just Germans and Russians who can have extreme political movements. It can be left-wing activists, or Wall Street manipulators. It can happen anywhere where social strife and oppression reside. The typical method is to gain control of many different organizations by looking at those who hold power and criticizing them to the point that they are removed from power. Some criticisms are accurate, but many are debatable or wholly without merit, and that’s the difficulty in detecting Narcissists. Most of us get caught in political and institutional labels and ignore the actual tactics. The tactics are to demonize and criticize, including adding fake narratives that are dark and terrible about the target. When people surrounding the powerful start believing in those narratives, there’s a change in personnel to accommodate the new dictator. How these demonizing narratives become believable is how Susan Fiske describes it, which is how onlookers imitate the accusations in the brain. It actually takes effort to vet accusations, and on top of that, people have trouble believing in false accusations. “Why would someone do that?”
What is good about meditation is that it allows people to find alternative goals and pleasures so that one doesn’t have to turn into a NAZI or Communist to satisfy desires, and it also helps to reduce the need for addictions which are common solutions when big dreams are not achieved. This is especially true since many of those big desires lose interest in possession and are only interesting when first attained. The mind gets bored and in the end there’s really no permanent satisfaction, even if you get what you always wanted. Desire can be silly and we need to be able to find healthy replacements to counter our societal frustrations. If we can’t do this, then wars and murder are inevitable.
Because we are all human, all of us are capable of bad desires, or bad replacement desires, or Sins if you want to be Judeo-Christian, and once the ability to weigh things becomes individualized and set within, external blame looks more and more like what you see in a court, a fair one of course based on the facts. If there’s an internal police that is welcomed within, there’s less need for an external one. Part of the reason for projection and attacking others is to distract the external and internal authorities to protect self-esteem from one’s own actions. There’s relief when it’s someone else’s fault. There’s also a temptation to accuse others for doing the same things because it’s the “you do it too!” mentality. The reality is that everyone is at fault at least a little bit some of the time, and with self-development, learning, etc., two wrongs don’t make a right and this allows people to grow. For many others, any faults they see provide ample excuse to start scapegoating entire groups and classifications of people.
When Cancel Culture Cancels Everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sKX2Gk7eFY
World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day: https://wnaad.com/
But if one can police oneself, self-esteem naturally increases and there’s no need for all the drama. This process of development also allows for humility in realizing the mistakes most of us are capable of, especially with the wide gulf in parenting styles, and genetic inheritance. You return to looking at people as individuals and no longer as imaginary conformist people with impossibly uniform high standards that no one can meet. This cognitive error is called Splitting. It oscillates between applying impossible standards on someone, which is a type of aggressive demand, and then removing prestige when that God-like person is seen to bleed and be a human. It’s most often aimed at politicians during psychological warfare in news-cycles and campaigns and also aimed at celebrities who are edited to be perfect on TV and the internet, but are undoubtedly human, fart, can have smelly armpits, and bad breath from time to time.
If you don’t like someone, create a toxic narrative, even if the facts don’t support it, and even if the accuser can’t meet any of the standards they demand from others. People are too lazy to vet anything and can run with it, and another livelihood is destroyed.
Celebrities without makeup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoPb8JcPjOE
The River of Dreams
After these understandings dawn on a practitioner there still are a lot of voices within, and when there is no remaining fear of them, because these voices can be weighed against each other with new skills, there’s now a new area that can be developed, depending on how much time one has to live and how old one is when one has learned these things, if ever. Adyashanti reminds me of Carl Jung when he talks about further intelligence in the mind’s unconscious than just impulses that have to be tamed or relaxed.
“Whatever name we want to give our true nature. Whether we give it the name of true nature, or spirit, or soul, Dao, or Buddha Nature, or The Christ, or The Void, or The One Mind, whatever we call it, our true nature is not playing around. There’s something in us, it’s playing for keeps, and the consequences are high. There’s something in each of you that if you do not listen to it, you pay the price for it. In a way we are held accountable to our own depth. So often we are telling our True Nature what we want from it, [but Prayer via the Ego’s desires does not listen to the depth.] Instead we can ask what does my depth actually want from me? This involves listening to the quiet places inside. Listening to your own calling.”
Acknowledging your Depth – Adyashanti: https://youtu.be/26UjjrjAyP8
The River of Dreams – Billy Joel: https://youtu.be/hSq4B_zHqPM
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/