Stability
As people go from an intermediate level in their meditation practice and hit a brick wall at the advanced levels, frustration builds. Many give up and continue doing the same things they normally like to do, which isn’t all bad, but there’s a niggling in the mind on what may be missing. Maybe one has mastered a lot of Jhanic Flow States or one has developed a very strong equanimity with an insight practice, but most practitioners know something is missing.
What separates those who want to meditate just for rest, which is not a bad goal at all, from those who want to “EXPERIENCE” Nirvana, is to investigate what the mind has wanted all along, eternal stability SOMEWHERE.
What some people find so quizzical about Buddhists and their psychological knot of having a desire to have no desire, is that the process of pursuing desire is what informs how stress works in the mind. You have to explore it on purpose and feel the pain as a contrast to learn from. The endless pain of lack, pleasures that fly to the wind, the boredom of what was once exciting, and the struggle with others to get as much as possible while fighting against scarcity, is a nightmare for sensitive people. In a lot of ways we are still in the jungle, albeit a concrete one, and the natural human desire to transcend circumstances has lead to our current civilization. With civilization, the same ancient impulses are there and communities continue to try to find ways for happiness to increase, and of course to attain stability.
The hunting mind, that is always looking for a trophy, also seeks trophies in meditation, to feed off of pride. It is not much different from killing an animal for food and bringing it back to the tribe. Social rewards are powerful and provide access to sex, connection, procreation, and also entertainment for those wealthy enough. That mind is operating when you meditate. Just accepting that will help to explain some of the great experiences in meditation and the social aspects of being in a Sangha, a Temple, a Mosque or a Church for example.
Being able to feed and eat on religious mana can provide temporary emotional stability, but impermanence always comes back. This is why rituals are so disappointing to so many people. Beyond the false hope that Freud talked about with rituals, in Totem and Taboo, and the false happenstance associations that are made between engaging in the ritual and receiving gratification, both the gratification and the ritual are impermanent. If the superstition lines up once in a while, sooner or later the ritual will not line up with gratification, and if that happens often enough, faith is broken. Even if one is lucky, and gratification is readily available, the need to feed physically and emotionally always returns in another bout of craving, and one has to hunt again, or reengage with a ritual.
Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html
Now, I believe that healthy people can find hobbies, interests, and meaningful activities throughout their lives, but many people are bereft of that kind of creativity and get stuck in addictions, find themselves in conflict because of competition, or bump into despair because there has been no contemplation of impermanence. It can be a phase in one’s life, or the entirety of it. For meditators, these things are predictable and as one gets to know one’s psyche better, clarity and understanding increases.
So these are the trap doors, which are many different types of the same trap: Looking for eternal stability in an experience. From the Freudian standpoint, meditation is just looking for an “oceanic experience” trying to crawl back into the womb to reexperience a world of stability and gratification on tap. Part of this is true, but some of it is disingenuous. Why it’s important what elderly people say, since they actually did survive a long time so far, is that stress has to be controlled, and regardless of rituals people put themselves through, it’s not a shame that people are attempting to find solutions in arcane places. If it works, try it.
As one practices over time, the hunting mind is sensed with more and more sensitivity, and many of the rituals become less and less needed. There’s a stress in the ritual, partially because of a healthy doubt, and partially because of what Daniel Kahneman emphasized, which is that computation in the mind drains energy and eventually gets tapped dry. A more simple way to explain computation is to look at how there is always some stress in imagination. Certainly stress increases the more fearful the imagination is, but there is still a little bit in positive imagination, because of boredom with repetition, or natural instability and impermanence. We also have patterns that are reoccurring that completely demolish meditative advancement. We get stuck. Adyashanti says that “what bumps up against at some point is the limitation of the way that our egos operate, and don’t think that your ego doesn’t operate after awakening. The ego can still be there, usually transformed at various extents. It’s much more transparent…[but] nobody likes to run up against their limitations. We tend to have built in avoidance mechanisms and resistance mechanisms [when] running up against our own limitations.”
Getting Stuck On The Spiritual Journey – Adyashanti: https://youtu.be/RAHGUGT0ULM
Attention and Effort – Daniel Kahneman: https://rumble.com/v1gpl0j-attention-and-effort-daniel-kahneman.html
Trap Doors
“Subdue greed for sensual pleasures, & see renunciation as rest. Let there be nothing grasped or rejected by you…” ~ SN 1098
This is a very big question as to whether one person or another can get enlightened. Is it possible that some people will never get enlightenment no matter what they do? Certainly, if there’s not enough sensitivity to notice subtle levels of stress, or if patterns are so strong, and repeat with considerable regularity, there may be biological differences in people, just like how medicines can have different levels of efficacy for individuals, or life circumstances that constantly interfere with practice, to prevent greater depth.
In Notes On The End of The Game, by Stephen H. Wolinsky, Ph.D, he explains well this spiritual drifting that people inevitably go through. “The search for enlightenment is an appearance which appears to appear within the dream-illusion-mirage.” We chase our own tails by over-conceptualizing our practice, and even worse, what we call phenomenological experiences, which are also conceptual, or idea based, it eventually becomes apparent that our sense of self is always tied up with experiences.
Again, throughout the book, Stephen asks different formulations of the question “to what appearance [the conceptual self observing] does the appearance that appears, appear to appear to?” This is a restyled “who am I?” question that tries to get the mind to see that there’s always a conceptual self that is witnessing any experience, and so one is locked into a duality constantly. That sense of self gains temporary gratification with each new meditative trophy as skills improve. One can see that the gratification itself can be a barrier based on temporary satisfaction. This is partly why many teachers want students to explore meditative pleasure to such a level that they are capable of boredom and dissatisfaction. Until you actually experience these Jhanas, Love experiences, or experiences of smooth equanimity, it’s hard for the mind to let go. It’s so curious. There are also psychological problems that can’t be bridged solely with meditation, and in those situations, one has to be realistic with those limitations and apply regular psychological solutions, or to accept the limitation if it’s something incurable.
For most of us, the mind is trying to coopt the meditation practice, and has always been coopting it since one has started practicing. “If I tell you my experience, I’ll think I had it. Experiences are ego…Anything you experience or understand cannot be you therefore discard it.” Here I would change discard, which for most people, is not how you deal with meditative mistakes. It’s better to recognize non-verbally and to wait for those labels and concepts to dissipate on their own, instead of imputing some kind of unnecessary pressure to discard something, because that would again be more ego. This is also part of the difficulty of explaining meditation with words that presume solidity, urgency, and pressure.
When Shade Was Born – Eno and Harmonia: https://youtu.be/h6rzV1Vu8Tw
“Often times, the Appearance of a Portal, which is a State requiring a Knower, is a Phenomenological Appearance. Any Portal can be mistakenly confused as being the Absolute.” Because no appearance is permanent, no stability can be found in any experience. For advanced meditators, they can even become trapped by strange void experiences where there’s still a witness observing a void. These knots can appear as “the No-Self Identity, the No-Position Position, the No-Point Point of View, the Vortex appearing on the Ocean of Existence, The Witness, The Being(ness).” Like other Buddhists, “the Nameless Absolute…that which is prior to and without consciousness, awareness, knowingness, being-ness, form or emptiness,” is not an appearance or an experience. “The perceiver, knower, aware-er, witness, observer, etc., is a part of the appearance…They arise and subside together.”
The mind leaps at each concentration attainment with a mental reward of “I got it! This is it! Eternal stability and happiness!” In reality, there’s no “it” to be gotten, which is extremely counterintuitive. There’s always a conceptual self, which is the imitation part of the mind that parrots and learns from others, that creates a “witness” or an identity of a “meditator” or “Buddhist,” etc. It is a chameleon that coopts all identities possible in order to find gratification repeatedly in succession. If one meditates and catches these twists and turns of identity, one can see how repetitive conditioning can turn into a new identity simply because one resorts to new substitutes and repeats them into habit. The identities are psychological rigidities simply because they’ve been repeated so often, and the associated withdrawal symptoms always make one feel uncomfortable, to push one for just one more hit of gratification. You can list any number of addictions, pleasures, or sources of advantage in society, like a high-powered job, as an identity, or a replacement identity, when ideal sources are unavailable. Seeing that fluidity helps a lot of meditators come to the conclusion that not everything they do is authentic and is really only an acquired habit through imitation and repetition. An intelligent Freudian approach would be to accept desire and to target desires that have less remorse or consequences, at least until a person can find more ideal objects. This is true as well for many spiritual trap doors, which have less consequences than worldly ones. Some spots one can rest in are more stable than others, and provide longer lasting relief.
Like in my review of Ikigai, Esther Hick’s view of unconscious desire is that it doesn’t say NO. It always looks for a YES wherever you aim your attention, and she jokes, but very accurately, that this is why therapy takes people so long. It’s often faster to bring images to the mind that are worthy, and then what happens for most people, those images motivate emotions, and actions follow that imagery and thinking. It puts wind in your sails. This connects with Buddhist views of Right Energy, where you put effort into moving your mental state into something more skillful when you catch it on a negative track. Esther calls it a disc that you’re playing when stuck in a rumination. Wolinsky calls it a Trance. Even the Bible advises that “whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things. Philippians 4:8.”
Momentum in thinking and why Therapy takes so long – Esther Hicks: https://youtu.be/1Isz3J1q5SY
You can see this in music that is happy or the exact opposite. The unconscious imitates with a mind of its own and takes on the projection of the emotion of the music, art, advertising, or suggestion. A grey sky can look dystopian, dull, depressing, and a confirmation of how drab life is, or a grey sky can be calm, relaxing, like a blanket, soothing, and peaceful. It depends which disc your unconscious is on. Relationships can take on the color of joy, bliss, connectedness, or look like a train wreck. The momentum of the disc, track, and storyline, has a beginning middle and end, and the momentum wants to push you through the story to the end for some form of satisfaction, grotesque or sublime. These discs can be habitual and transfer from generation to generation as imitated identities and probably meld into the biology and become resistant to change over many generations. Making change starts with “nipping it in the bud” and catching the momentum early and using imagery to guide you to calmer shores, but to also have places to look forward to to bring back zest and happiness. When you are in one track it’s not easy to shift gears into another one. There’s a need to calm down with meditation, taking a deep breath, and waiting for the momentum to slowdown, but if you switch the train track early enough to go to a warm and sunny location, then that adult version of a “timeout” isn’t required. In a way, Esther is not fond of venting and prefers people move onto the right train track in the beginning and keep threading the tracks in those dangerous moments in-between activities where habitual roads can takeover and send you to a psychological hell instead. She calls this Segment Intending.
Marilyn Manson – Sweet Dreams: https://youtu.be/QUvVdTlA23w
Mr. Mister live 1985 – Broken Wings: https://youtu.be/XgA4qiW5ncM
Doves – Cycle of Hurt: https://youtu.be/w4-3U_cPlUM
One of the benefits of putting yourself in a positive track is that it also repels people intent on a negative track, and it helps to separate your emotions from those of others. It does occasion some conflict but people eventually move onto their own track of attraction and go in different directions. Following desires that are good for you provides a form of psychological boundary where you don’t always have to take on the emotions of others. For example: Do old friends who like a mutual addiction like alcohol or smoking want to be around you when you are sober or you become a non-smoker? People need a downward comparison, or a sense of equality. Upward comparisons hurt pride. Another example relates to how negative news affects emotions. When you are on a positive track, and try to protect it, you’re more likely to segment intend away from news stories that ultimately you can’t do much about anyways. You’ll dis-identify from sad music, and negative forms of entertainment.
The main area that connects one positive track to another for Esther is appreciation. Here appreciation would be to focus on the utility of things and people around you, and to recognize how things work and fit together nicely. The way to do this more subtly is to learn from advertising. Instead of striving with a sense of “I’M GOING TO APPRECIATE NOW!”, you would instead flick your attention gently to an object of appreciation and daydream a story of why something inspires appreciation in the first place, so you direct it. Esther emphasizes, what Buddhists call Becoming, with a future orientation of Self. You want to see what you want to see in things so there’s a future orientation, which is what we call “looking forward to something.” Most salesmen do this, like describing all the positive attributes of a product, like they want to marry it, and we get hooked easily and want to make the activity a reality, but it’s safer to be able to choose our own objects. With practice the muscle gets stronger.
Esther also slips in a tidbit in one of her videos that is of greater importance. Like in advertising, and the occasional disappointment we feel when a product lets us down, there’s a problem with time. When you daydream about objects, they are all ultimately temporal, so in reality everything you daydream about is an activity. With activities, there’s a tendency, probably from consumer conditioning throughout life, to focus on just the beginning of an activity, or the best part of it. For example, when a relationship ends, a person may focus on the beginning, like a honeymoon, or as is common, the wedding ceremony and reception. The marriage is an afterthought. Thanissaro Bhikkhu dovetails this by pointing out how consequences and drawbacks are blotted out and people motivate themselves to action with only partial detail. Since emotional feeding points to our identities, like a “person who only likes this type of food, or that type of sport,” etc., even if you try to break activities into beginning, middle, end, and a long-term end, the mind is so conditioned to stop the daydream at the highpoint of the activity that it never stretches the daydream far enough to realistic consequences and drawbacks. Like in advertising, the drawbacks have to be covered up to intensify desire, to avoid being a spoil sport. Yet if consequences are significant, spoiling desire is just the ticket. For Esther, you’re authenticity is greater when you can like all 4 stages of an activity, or at least 3 out of 4 stages. Esther parts with Buddhists by looking at loss as a new opportunity to gain something better. She tries to point this out to her audience members in the hot seat. “I recently got out of a relationship…” “Like getting out of jail?…I recently escaped from a relationship.” One has to learn from the painful contrast and go for more of what one really wants and to use what you don’t want to inform you of what you really want.
His relationship ended – Esther Hicks: https://youtu.be/yEPizaFK0dY
Ikigai: https://rumble.com/v1gvo41-ikigai.html
If we get better at this practice of choosing better substitute desires, ones that are more comprehensively enjoyable, the impermanence in the 4th stage will always be there. For many people they don’t care. For the regular person, just the imagery and learning to control motivation is good enough, but for more sensitive people, there will always be a nagging dissatisfaction and another spiritual search for something even more comprehensive.
The typical, and very understandable attitude towards desire, leads to worldly traps and spiritual ones that meet certain patterns, and Stephen lists most of them, and I paraphrase them here:
- Believing in inherent existence in an experience, meaning that you believe the experience exists independently from other causes and effects.
- Believing in permanent places with permanent mass, energy, space, time, distance and location.
- Believing you found The Source or Origin of existence.
- Attributing a God or intelligence at a source or origin, which is often anthropomorphic.
- Finding an ultimate meaning and purpose for life, or learning a lesson that allows one to “be more, do more, have more, or create more…etc.”
- Finding an ultimate duality where pleasant and unpleasant narratives guide one to a hierarchy of holy thoughts and narratives to follow. Essentially starting a religion.
- Searching for stable appearances behind an appearance.
- Unlocking a secret code of stillness and peace behind an appearance if one can only figure out the logic or code.
- Believing that everything is consciousness and nothing exists outside of consciousness. Solipsism.
- Believing there is an underlying permanent non-dual state.
- Believing that everything is made of energy or vibration.
- Believing that everything is NOW.
- Believing you are exploring dimensions, universes, multiverses, parallel universes, membrane realms, lokas, space, or hyperspace.
- Believing in separation or distances in space like inside or outside.
- Believing in Oneness.
- Belief in Something.
- Belief in Nothing.
I would also add a typical Buddhist trap:
- Believing in pure demarcated causes and effects because one doesn’t trace cause and effect long enough to see that there’s no ultimate demarcation between cause and effect, and therefore Time is a mental construct as well. If you zoom into cause and effect, you’ll always find more complex causes and effects endlessly, like in Physics. This is exclusively explored by Nagarjuna. You can also find practices on how to use this in my video Nirvana: https://youtu.be/zDWIoYQunvQ Briefly, how you would practice this would be to consistently look at cause and effect in real time, and notice a weakening of the sense of self blame, and omnipotence, and hopefully a reduction of stress in day to day life experience.
Beliefs in Stability as a Foundation for Social Organization
The unavoidable trap in all of these explorations is incomplete exploration, leading to an early celebration, finding a permanent stability somewhere. “Buddhists organize around emptiness, space; Yogis, consciousness or energy or shakti; other systems (maybe light or vibration or a deity.) All portals are appearances, states or stations, and contain within them a bullshit logic and made-up story which justifies their existence…Realizing this leads to the appreciation you can deconstruct appearances ad nauseum and still end up continuing to deconstruct appearances. In other words, there’s no way out of the loop, without the evaporation of the perceiver, know-er, aware-er aka no-self identity etc., which is experienced as stillness, peacefulness, presence or I am etc…You actually never experience emptiness or consciousness or awareness or light or vibration or energy, BUT rather, you experience your perception through a position in space-time of emptiness, consciousness awareness, light or energy.” Essentially appearances are connected with a perceiver or a container of awareness, but those can all be seen as just more appearances, and the identity can get caught up imitating the activity of the experience. The self becomes bright with light, or it vibrates with vibration, or it’s empty as space itself, etc.
Whenever there’s an interesting appearance or experience “there is an automatic shrinking of the focus of attention on the part of the experience-er, perceive-er, know-er, aware-er, witness, observer, etc., which gives the appearance of the illusion of beingness, isness, and existence.”
Once the trappings of a personal religion are created, and you can also see this in any other social movements and in any power differentials, it can easily turn into narcissism, which is excellently explained in Stephen’s book when the temptation of becoming a teacher arises, or to create a new school, religion, and Freudian transference begins its influence. When a new school is created, it naturally can be molded by experience into groups and hierarchies who guard special knowledge. Narcissists love to keep people out of an inner circle and bash people for incorrect performances of a ritual, and can feel jealous with a smart student who periodically shows up the teacher. Power struggles and insecurity can brew very easily. Some students can become teacher’s pets that mimic family relationships. Then the group may start to lose their standards and lower attainments are praised more highly than they should be, in order to maintain smooth relationships with no criticism. If the cult grows into a religion, the religion turns into an economic hierarchy in order to fund itself and eventually the followers rely more on donations and devotional practices.
“In this situation transference can be spelled trance-ference because the students appear to go into a child-like or age regressed trance like state whereby the student projects onto the Teacher, or Guru. This can lead to magical mommy, or magical daddy, being projected onto the guru or teacher imbuing them with super human qualities and attributes, like they know what I need…they are trying to teach me something, etc. For Guru’s or teachers the most common appearance is a state of counter transference. In counter trance-ference, which is also a trance, the teacher or Guru falls into the trap that they are a magical mommy or magical daddy. These two states are holographic in nature and are linked and looped, (i.e. you cannot have one without the other) and therefore the trances feed into and re-enforce one another. The student flows an age regressed adulation enabling the teacher and the teacher becomes more and more addicted to the students’ adulation and flows back what is perceived as love. By the teacher enabling the student’s age regression for what becomes an addicted flow of attention from the student to the teacher keeping both the student and the teacher or Guru stuck in a spiritualized infantile trance. The teacher gets stuck in the student’s adulation. In this way the teacher gets stuck both being viewed as and treated as a deity, as well as addicted to the students infantile flow which the teacher views as love and devotion.”
It’s easy to call meditators Space Cadets, but again we have to realize that people have stress and they are looking for solutions, and even if there’s no permanent place for consciousness to rest, most of these trap doors can be very restful regardless, and therefore they have their own value. It’s true that Nirvana is labelled as more restful, but it also purports to wean people further from conditioned identities that produce stress, or even those that produce only minor amounts of stress. In the Path system, the typically sinful feelings of sensual desire and ill will are supposed to be weaning to lower and lower levels as one dips into Nirvana repeatedly. Some also claim they can dip into this unconscious state like in a biological clock and return to consciousness when they feel like it. The problem is that anyone who hasn’t been in Nirvana can only label things in a positive concrete way and those labels are misleading as described above.
The key that all these writers mention is to point out what Nirvana is not. “The Absolute prior or without the label or word or experience of the Absolute…is not know-able or aware-able or be-able because there is no vehicle i.e. knowingness or awareness or consciousness to know it or be it or be aware of it…The movement even on a phenomenological level occurs prior to the formation of the I-dentity you call you…These subtle appearances can have side effects of peace or stillness however they are an I-dentity.” We are creating concepts, labels, and imagined copies of experience and overlaying them on top of what is working automatically. “You can never experience consciousness or awareness…You can only experience your perception of consciousness or awareness.”
Nirvana
“With great resolution there is the contemplation of impermanence; this leads to liberation through signlessness (animittā-vimokkhā). With great tranquility there is the contemplation of unsatisfactoriness; this leads to liberation through desirelessness (appaṇihita-vimokkhā). With great wisdom there is the contemplation of selflessness; this leads to liberation through emptiness (suññatā-vimokkhā).” ~ Vsm 21.70
As mentioned in a prior episode: Nirvana, it is not an experience of any kind. You are unconscious from relaxing even subtle clinging, therefore one comes back from unconsciousness with more rest than with other rest based on experiences, including the Jhanas. But how does one get there? Almost all the books point to equanimity towards all experiences. Where I disagree with the author a little bit on is his insistence that “if it requires effort, or if you have to work at it to maintain, to protect it, get it built up, or are afraid of losing it…it’s not you…You cannot add or take away from that which you already are.” This ignores that fact that people often have to fall into these portals in order to gain equanimity, or disenchantment. Without having those experiences and getting bored of them, it’s not likely that a person will control excitement when there’s a new portal to experience. By exhausting meditative experiences, which requires a lot of work in concentration, one can naturally ease into equanimity with less force or manipulation. Essentially, everything in meditation while you are conscious is some form of experience and your triumphant story about it.
Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html
In some ways Stephen points at this indirectly. “Stay in awareness or consciousness without their associations and knowingness or what you know or know about awareness and awareness and consciousness both naturally evaporate.” Thinking and labeling what’s there will get people stuck, but without some skill and prior enjoyment with practice, one will fall into these portals because of how irresistible they are. It’s also hard to dislike a nice experience, and repressing it is just another ego suppression. Experiences, like Jhanas, also develop over time and you can eventually run out of interesting places to go which triggers the disenchantment and equanimity until the brain relaxes into unconsciousness, or the Unconditioned. This is what these practices are dealing with, which is to thoroughly understand one’s own conditioning. Conditioning is about feeling a craving, pressure, hankering, and thinking that the ego needs to do something about it, and the usual response is to cave into that impulse, only to have those hankerings come back endlessly. Deconditioning is welcoming impulses, not acting on them and waiting for them to naturally go away. You don’t need to do anything about these impulses except to recognize them and wait, without going into more stories that eventually lead to action, and more conditioning to repeat.
The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html
For Daniel Ingram, in Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha, a meditation retreat of some length is very helpful and equanimity is ideally developed until you get a paradoxical non-glimpse of Nirvana. He does dovetail with Stephen and they bridge the gap by looking at effort being modulated so as to not being too much effort. What works best is consistent practice, but with not too much striving.
“If on retreat, or the next time you can go on retreat, just keep practicing as consistently and accurately as you can and avoid indulging in the content of your stuff at all costs. Put worldly concerns behind you for that period and investigate bare sensations with acceptance and courage. Practice equanimity regarding whatever arises, but be wary of indifference or apathy. This is not always as easy as it sounds, but for some it could be strangely easy nonetheless. Once the weight lifts, just keep sitting or walking or whatever, with no sense of special effort, but keep up gentle, ordinary, and consistent attention to the open, flowing field of awareness, with gentle emphasis on the three characteristics of the full field of experience, of space and what is in it. After really getting into High Equanimity, stream entry should arise soon enough; if it doesn’t, repeat the above until it does.”
I have a summary of the Three Characteristics in this playlist, if you want to learn more about them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrNBLR4djB7F5k-hRZGS3oQr2OvVqVyut
For this review, in summary, I would say that the three characteristics create equanimity because 1. everything is an impermanent experience, 2. you can’t permanently own those experiences, so they can’t be a permanent identity for you, and 3. it really hurts when you try to make experiences permanent when experiences resist your control. The understanding is to see desire from the angle of what is raucous and noisy, and to let go of desire in order to preserve mental peace, so it shouldn’t be seen as an emotional self-mortification. Seeing Nirvana as restful is what happens after the fear of letting go wears off. Even earlier than this stage, you can notice what it’s like when sticky thought is let go of. It’s recognized for what it is, “my stuff about family members, old relationships, and occupations.” You recognize it and then drop the story, which drops the velcro of the clinging in the story, and each time you pull back the velcro, you are training how to be relax peaceably without the story. You can live without the story, and without the clinging. Eventually the mind can live with shallow breathing, because there isn’t much effort being required, and even perception can have a sense of impingement, leading to a feeling that letting go of perception would be restful, when one is sensitive enough.
“’Nothing is fit to be clung to.’ If a monk has learnt that nothing is fit to be clung to, he directly knows everything; by directly knowing everything, he fully understands everything; when he fully understands everything, whatever feeling he experiences, be it pleasant, painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, in regard to those same feelings he dwells contemplating impermanence, contemplating dispassion, contemplating cessation, contemplating relinquishment. When he thus abides contemplating impermanence, dispassion, cessation, and relinquishment in regard to those feelings, he does not cling to anything in the world; without clinging he is not agitated; being unagitated, he personally attains Nibbāna.” ~ A 7.58
There are some caveats to the rule that “nothing is fit to be clung to,” when it comes to common sense behaviors, but the target is how we “take delight” in things that are impermanent. This includes things, situations, and views on how the world works and how things should be. We have to include in our daydreams the reactions we will have when we have to let go of those things, situations, rituals, or views. Now, some people are fine with falling in love and then grieving when they lose those who they love. There is a relishing in having been with this person and the happiness and memories we can cherish. Yet we are very aware of those who don’t take to loss that easily. In the same example, losing a loved one, there are those who are suicidal, don’t take care of themselves, and are self-sabotaging when their partner dies. They lose their will to live so to speak. The Buddha wants people to think about consequences along with our daydreams to assess what we think we can handle. It’s up to each person to decide how much letting go they are willing to accept, and how much clinging they feel is necessary to hold on to a feeling of cherishing, or appreciation. This is a very individual thing. When people appreciate a lot in their life, they can grieve and recover without a sense of entitlement, and be happy that they felt this pain. The pain helps with the memory and sense of humanity. For others, the pain is debilitating to the point of pathology, and death is a relief from pain, and like Freud’s death drive, permanent unconsciousness is a portal to permanent relief. Each person has to weigh their emotions and make their own choice, including choices of other religions where one actively believes in a stable environment in the afterlife, and then that comfort creates a delicious anticipation towards death where death is only a portal to some place better and one will be reunited with loved ones and strife is eliminated.
Captain Kirk: “I NEED MY PAIN!”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLzJAebfEIg
These levels of letting go are an array of choices that Ajahn Chah weighs in on. “If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will know complete peace and freedom.” This is literally the decision practitioners make in the end. Certainly, those who use their imagination in art and those who do a lot of work and want to leave a legacy, they will most likely opt for the first relief. Minimalists opt for the second relief, and monks opt for the total relief.
Ajhan Chah views the path for monks in how much letting go there can be when we scan for pain and keep finding ever more refined forms of it to let go of. “To put it another way, going forward is suffering, retreating is suffering, and stopping is suffering. Not going forward, not retreating, and not stopping… When that happens, is anything left? Body and mind cease here. This is the cessation of suffering. Hard to understand, isn’t it?” You are avoiding manipulating your experience and your breath, but you are also paying attention to total sensorial experience, and at the same time, when the thought impulses arise, you are equanimous towards all of that and letting those thoughts pass away on their own with gradually less and less manipulation. The senses remind the thoughts that what’s happening now doesn’t match where the thoughts are going or where they came from. As the present becomes more preferred, fear has to give way to peace. One of the tactics people use to find some easy gains is to notice any mental trances of any kind and to let them go. “Here is this abiding discovered by the Tathāgata: to enter and abide in voidness internally by giving no attention to all signs.”
The difficulty is seeing the more refined forms of pain. This has to do with our general passions and interests. We see them arising and they are very exciting and make you look forward to things. This is why it’s hard to see and many people will understandably say “I don’t need to let go of these impulses. I never had a problem with them in the first place.” If you feel a nice desire to create something, then that arising is very enjoyable and quite healthy, but all things cease nonetheless, and for those interested in more depth, it requires attention towards the passing away of phenomena more than the exciting arising of phenomena. This is especially helpful when we realize that what is arising is at the same time passing away and there’s really no demarcation. “‘Whatever is experienced as arising, is experienced as ceasing’; or ‘Any experience of arising is an experience of ceasing…When we realize things as this one Dhamma, all being of the same nature, we relax our grip, we put things down. We see they are empty, and we don’t have love and hate for them; we have peace. It is said, ‘Nibbāna is the supreme happiness; Nibbāna is the supreme emptiness’…Please listen to this carefully. Happiness in the world is not supreme ultimate happiness. What we conceive of as emptiness is not supreme emptiness. If it is supreme emptiness, there is an end of grasping and attachment. If it is supreme happiness, there is peace. But the peace we know is still not supreme. The happiness we know is not supreme. If we reach Nibbāna, then emptiness is supreme. Happiness is supreme. There is a transformation. The character of happiness is transformed into peace. There is happiness, but we don’t give it any special meaning. There is suffering also. When these occur, we see them as equal. Their value is the same.”
With all these maps of insight, it’s easy to get lost in collecting knowledge about Enlightenment, and then to regurgitate it in the meditation. To go deeper there is a need for longer sittings but the length of time also allows people get beyond their baggage to develop momentum. Thanissaro Bhikkhu reminds that “that’s how you use maps. When you’re driving you don’t keep your nose in the map all the time. You look at the map just enough to know where you’re going. Then you focus your attention on the road.”
Put Your Knowledge Away – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2021/211010_Put_Your_Knowledge_Away.mp3
Letting go and living life
For those who are all in, and want to devote their life to Nirvana, or even other spiritual experiences, there are some quotes from one of my favorite channels Conscious TV, where a lot of reality is broached in an odd tid-bit here or there. As you find people talking about their experiences, it’s pretty clear that spiritual realizations are just the beginning. They’ve meditated, often for decades, and they have to make a determination as to whether they really want to retire from society or reengage with their newfound knowledge of stress. Iain McNay interviewed Jonathan Donahue and they talked about their favorite teachers. Iain described U.G. Krishnamurti. “When he talked about what happened to him, his ‘Enlightenment,’ he calls it his calamity, because after that for 2 years…he was homeless. He had no money. He lost his perspective in life…He was a beggar on the streets…He was a great example of complete-letting-go. There’s no structure holding you together.” That uncompromising method, to see ego in all goal setting leads to a dropping of the left brain and a prioritization of the right brain. Many realized teachers then have to live off of donations and usually don’t have a regular job. Part of the problem is that these realizations go over the head of most people, so the natural commonality where people mirror each other, imitate each other, and bond, can easily turn practitioners into a misfits in society. Misfits are ostracized due to fear of how incomprehensible a person like that is, a fear that one might imitate them when they don’t want to simply because they are regularly in the environment, and they can be also a threat in that most human relationships revolve around utility. “What are you good for?” Many of our inherited names are based on ancestors and their utility. The problem with utilitarianism is that when the utility ends, so most often does the relationship.
The Lamp Went On – Conscious TV: https://youtu.be/c4su1612yZY
Conscious TV transcripts: https://conscious.tv/text/transcripts.php
This struggle finds a lot of practitioners and teachers making compromises in order to stay connected to the regular world. In order to do long meditation retreats for months or even longer than that, there has to be a financial cushion that allows for it. Tina Rasmussen describes an Enlightenment Drive that pushed past those concerns for her. “There’s a deep spiritual longing to return to what is home. Where do we come from? What happens when we die? What is beyond the sense of the personality and the body? There’s this ground that we really are at our depth.” For Tina, her year long retreat “could have been up to 12 hours a day…I wasn’t reading. I wasn’t watching TV. I wasn’t talking on the phone other than the times when I surfaced to get groceries, and pay bills, and call my parents and do those things.”
When there are great realizations there’s still some stress in trying to integrate both brain hemispheres and to function in jobs. If one doesn’t live off of donations, one has to be able to retire while still young, which is not a luxury for most. When Tina didn’t have the ability either, she read the advice to “just get the most easy job you can get, so it doesn’t take much [mental effort]…I had a longing to create a life situation where I could spend more time in just abiding and enjoying the realization that was present…There came a point where as much as I wanted to do that, there was a calling to be in the world and to not turn away from the world and to bring to the extent I could the realization I had into just my everyday functioning. That was hard. As I was in more and more active situations, a relationship, and work, that pristine awareness, I could feel the places where my ego structure would activate, and it was actually quite painful. It was sort of a fall from grace. I never went back to how it was before, but…seeing where personality material hadn’t been digested was excruciating…There was still something in me that didn’t want to turn away from the world…As hard as that was I felt that this lifetime is about being in the world and dealing with all of the messes that get created when you are in relationships, when you deal with money and sex, jobs and bosses, and all the struggles we have in daily life and I wanted to see how much of that personality material could be digested…”
For me, a word like digested, is often not explained, so I would suggest that to be able to digest something has to do with challenges and developing skills to handle those challenges, including skills that are regularly taught in psychology. When skills are developed, the panic related to the associated challenges relax. Even without meditation as a priority, one could easily be isolated in the same way if one doesn’t have the skills to meet common challenges in life. For example, learning disabilities, addictions, or dealing with impulses that lead to criminality.
This was a long interview but there were many important takeaways about the reality of seeking Enlightenment. Some of them are:
- One may have a lot of psychological baggage and trauma that has to be worked on in counselling before more development in the practice can progress.
- People who can do smaller retreats tend to be able to have enough of an ego-structure to tolerate longer retreats.
- Insight practices that are overdone need to be rounded out with different practices to balance the human psychology. (Eg. Concentration & Metta/Heart practices).
Tina followed the Diamond Approach where Buddhism could be reconciled with modern psychological life. People follow realized teachers and gurus but fail to see what that can entail in the extremes when one is specializing. “Right, so this, this is one of the things about this practice is that it’s really about turning towards the mystery. This needs to be supplemented with practices where we’re opening to physical reality as a human, embodied, and then bringing that to, as best is possible, using those structures of the personality in order to function as a human. And so really the questions, like some people when they do these practices, they go so far out they can’t function that well as a human. Like, look at Ramana Maharshi…I mean, he’s a beautiful example of enlightenment. But he couldn’t function as a human, hardly at all. He didn’t even care about surviving.”
Tina Rasmussen – Conscious TV: https://youtu.be/1BbUVzmantU
Tina’s teaching partner Stephen Snyder talks about his Zen experience and the reality of the psychological and how it can’t be ignored. Realized practitioners have to figure out how to function in a modern complex world, and for Stephen, having direct knowledge of these meditation circles dispelled a lot of illusions for him. “I think in Buddhism we have a theory that if one has a, let’s say large enough realization, that it will in some serendipitous way blow out the personality to where at least the awkward aspects of the personality, the undigested material will get blown out. And in my personal experience and my observation with the teachers I have been around I have never met anyone where I felt like that happened. So I knew that was a nice idea but probably wasn’t a reality. And I also witnessed being an attorney for a number of Zen masters and groups, I saw a lot of the bad behaviour that was going on in terms of their, basically acting out of their dysfunction around their families and students and the problems that caused. So I could see that [continuing] the Zen path, it wasn’t going to help me integrate and live from it in a way that didn’t cause more harm.”
In a modern world, more technology, more demands on the psyche with work and relationships, poses a challenge that ancient masters didn’t have to deal with. Stephen’s research in excessive thinking found that “the modern person has about 35,000 thoughts a day. And most of those thoughts, like 90% are the same as the ones we had the day before and the day before. When they measured the thoughts of some of these indigenous groups that are tucked away, away from civilization, they have between 800 and 900 thoughts a day. So that goes to your point that probably that’s what we need to function on, but we use these repetitive thoughts again and again each day that really don’t get us anywhere…[and] with all the electronics we have today and the fast pace, were constantly [thinking] and being disturbed by it…In the Buddhist world it was viewed people would move into being monastics. So they wouldn’t have to function with spouses and children and mortgages and cars and all the rest. This world is mostly lay people now. So how do we live from that is really the big question.”
Stephen Snyder – Conscious TV: https://youtu.be/FXfycMZcEaw
The irony is that one could ask “why bother?” If one can’t function in the absolute then just drop this spiritual quest. But the journey to meditate started with the complexity of the world and those problems are still there for those who ignore spirituality and focus more on threading one satisfaction to another and to just suck up the depression that happens when things don’t go smoothly. The interviewer Iain McNay brought it back again from the outside to the inside, and hinted that there needs to be a better balance between the inner and outer world, which is a sublimation via internal satisfaction to subvert societal demands to live large as the ultimate goal. “The problem is as well that’s almost the consensus thinking of western society. Spend more and more. And want more and more to try and find the illusive happiness which is looked for outside. When you and I know that the key is somehow inside.”
Notes On The End of the Game – Deconstructing the Portals to the Absolute 2nd edition – Stephen H. Wolinsky: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HGHGL68
Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha – Revised and Expanded Edition: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781911597100/
The Island: An Anthology of the Buddha’s Teachings on Nibbana/Nirvana: https://cdn.amaravati.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/20/The-Island-Web.pdf
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/