Right Effort
Right Action connects with Right Effort, because when there is a solid understanding of what good actions are for oneself, there’s a desire to alter thinking to motivate Right Action. Because effort is a triggering word that exhausted people would least want to hear, that the path requires more effort, Right Effort can be underrated, or overrated. Instead of being too lazy, people may think the path is supposed to be an Olympic effort, which can be a mistake that lasts for years. But the irony is that over-striving has a potential for insight and knowledge and in fact it’s a knowledge that continues as you refine your practice further. It’s a lesson in learning what NOT to do. As time passes you are able to see that right effort does not require you to blow up the train tracks of your thinking but instead to use the railroad switch. Instead of being a striving ambition, Right Effort is more about cause and effect and altering the causes so as to move towards the right effects. Looking back over your life, you will likely find times where a small change you made manifested a completely different lifestyle. Correspondingly, if that small change didn’t happen, your current life would be unrecognizable.
This path involves the exploration of effort and learning what is too much or too little. Rob Burbea said that “to develop skill, I have to know what it is to make too much effort and be too active and know what that feels like.” The great thing is we can compare more pain to less pain before acting, as a form of reflection. So much of the path is exactly this. “Oh, I don’t need to create this sense of grind to accomplish the exact same action.” Meditation insights involve layers and layers of this, and part of the practice can be a feeling of “is this thought satisfying? Is this train of thought superfluous? Why? What for? Is that paranoid? Is that REALLY going to happen? Is this worth daydreaming about?” If modern humans have 30,000 thoughts a day, as some studies show, and many of them are totally superfluous, then activating better ones while dropping needless ones, is a way to save energy. Right Effort is often translated as a Right use of Energy, and the simile of the lute is used in Buddhism to illustrate this balance between two extremes. It’s not too tight that it breaks and it’s not too loose that it’s out of tune. “Oh, when I really overshoot, I get a headache in between my eyes, and…when I undershoot, I fall asleep.” Right Effort is most important when dealing with the typical Buddhist hindrances that derail meditation practices. It’s very easy to meditate for 10 seconds, but after an hour one can be totally lost by the end.
Meditation – Trap Doors: https://rumble.com/v1grdgd-meditation-taking-stock-wnaad.html
Practicing The Jhanas – Q & A – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/60874/
In SN 46:51, the way to starve hindrances is to take up mental real estate with positive mind states and to look at drawbacks to different forms of lust and ill will. When one uses imagery of consequences, but also of rewards, it can generate healthy forms of desire and aversion. If you can learn from prediction, you save the effort of having to go through trial and error in real action and real consequences. Energy also needs balancing in the body. Sometimes people need to open their eyes, adjust their posture, and exercise with walking meditation to increase wakefulness. At other times, there’s over striving which is frying the practice in the mind. Recognizing the sense of self being a “meditator” and doing the practice to the point of grind can be an insight. Asking yourself how much push and pull do you really need to watch the breath, helps to dial down the unnecessary effort. In reality breathing happens on its own when you pay attention to other things, but the Super-ego can criticize and micro-manage the breath into a grind if one is not careful when putting attention on the abdomen or chest. Even the sense of WATCHING the breath can have a grind to it. Eg. Trying to do it right, to perfect it, and to get angry with failure. Awareness of the breath is already operating. Even the need to look at the belly isn’t required to feel the abdomen move, and it moves on its own. Wherever you put your attention span, that push and pull grind is operating on anything we are looking at and creating a projection and mood on what are really inanimate objects or independent subjects moving with their own intentions. Our expectations affect how we value what’s in the world and having this understanding can make Right Effort appear more like Right Inspiration as well. Those same locations and scenarios take on a different mood and color when you feel great. Inclining the mind towards what is positive, joyful, and interesting, tends to make what seems a problem evaporate, which is true for small irritations and problems that don’t amount to much. Small problems and irritations need a negative mood to escalate to something bigger in the psyche. Cause and effect. Directing attention towards what is positive and peaceful doesn’t mean that negative things don’t happen, but it helps to make clear what is one’s own business and what is someone else’s. People are dying everyday, but to stop what you are doing to give a minute of silence for each statistical death prevents any happiness from manifesting, and one is going to die anyways and the rest of the population must move on if they intend to function.
How To Walk – Thich Nhat Hanh: https://rumble.com/v1gphuh-how-to-walk-thich-nhat-hanh.html
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
There are plenty of times where we have created great mind states and I assert that those legitimate ways are just fine. Esther Hicks likes small goals with each transition between activities, which are targeted by many self-help gurus and it involves some premeditation and visualization. You look at a transition between activities and you imagine how you can contribute to positive mind states with oneself and those around. People imitate and if you have a positive mind set, and of course not a fake one, because people can see through that, but a legitimate zest, it can bleed into others as they imitate your countenance. Esther calls it Segment Intending, but it’s really creating small positive goals that build momentum to better days, weeks, and months. Things won’t go well all the time, but realizing that the attention span is limited and that you have to pick and choose between dwelling on the negative you can’t control or focusing on what you would like to manifest in the next segment, the latter option is healthier. What you pay attention to grows, and like in the Flow system, there is pleasure in closing the gap between now and the small goal. Smaller goals are easier to deal with in the mind because it’s controls overwhelm that usually happens when people think of outsized goals that are more distant. Small goals add up to bigger ones and dropping the big goal, which is really just a way to thread small goals together, can release tension in the moment. These kind of daydreams are more about what you would like to manifest in the morning, afternoon or evening. They naturally move to distant goals as a way to line up the smaller goals, but momentum can only happen when smaller daydreams are matched up with smaller manifestations in reality. Like a rangefinder camera, it’s like the focusing prism where two images have to match up to focus, except in this case the reality matches up or is even better than the daydream. Then when adding Buddhism to this sense of Becoming, there is also a clean feeling from activities that have little to no wear and tear to them. Whether one got some good exercise in, or found some lasting quiescence from a meditation session, there isn’t even a faintest hit of remorse. Right Effort connects with blameless activities that support Right View, Right Resolve, Right Speech, and Right Action. A clear conscience is enjoyable. It also creates a sense of a new identity or Becoming that is possible. Whatever past history a person has had, if they can get a taste of that mana, a sense of freedom from conditioned identities can peek through the clouds. An enjoyment of Being without having to DO.
Ask and It Is Given – Esther and Jerry Hicks: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781401904593/
This ability to admire objects and activities leads to admiring existence. The Advaita teacher Jean Klein said “attune yourself to this admiring state where there is no admirer and nothing admired.” He continually noticed that admired objects point to oneself if one looks carefully. “The flower points directly to your looking, a looking where there’s no looker, no seer. There is only seeing, only looking. Yes, the aesthetic joy is after the looking, after the seeing.” A lot of these books can seem abstract, but my review of Parmenides, which includes a lot of Heidegger, points to the uncanny astonishment of existence. The pleasure in being is admiring that anything exists at all. You may include objects with the admiring, but it’s the totality that these collections of objects are in, the admiration of possibility, and finally the admiration that there is any manifestation AT ALL. So much works without a need for a conceptual controller. There’s a craving leading to one plot point of the personal story after another. A person makes a purchase, and temporarily there’s an enjoyment of being, then a sense of lack in the storyline and a pursuit for another satisfaction, which brings one to just vibrating in Being again, but then lack returns, and so on. The conditioned personality then asserts itself as if that is the only operation working with repetitive memory covering over new experiences.
Parmenides: https://rumble.com/v1gsvkl-the-presocratics-parmenides.html
“To identify yourself with your car or your house seems unacceptable. Yet you do not clearly see the unacceptability of identifying with the personality. This identification goes very deep because you spend all your efforts trying to be free from it in one way or another. One day you will see that the one who tries to free himself from the prison of this identification, the ‘liberator,’ also belongs to the prison. When you see you are in a prison, that the prisoner, in all his efforts to escape, belongs to the prison, in this moment you are out of the process, free from the prison. And then I would say: Be it, be the freedom. You will realize that in reality you were never in prison and so there is no meaning in trying to get out. When you need the personality, it comes to you. It is the situation which asks for it. But it is a completely transparent personality. You need it, you use it, and you forget it. There is no memory in it. Identifying with the personality must come to an end, and in this absence there is presence. The personality is psychological memory. How can you face life through memory? Life never repeats; it is always new. It is only psychological memory that maintains the ‘I-concept.’ In living free from memory there is spontaneity, and in this spontaneity you are completely adequate to every situation.” One could quibble with this because memory is involved in skills and habitual skills are what is adequate to a situation, but even the learning of new skills to be more adequate is a process of learning by doing, and over-conceptualizing isn’t necessary. This is why book knowledge can often fail, because the freshness of experiences includes unique features each time that can’t be all predicted by any book.
Like in my Nirvana review, seeing interconnectedness in vivo relaxes the feeding utility part of the mind, that needs to see parts, or what Jean Klein calls “Fractioning,” but the appreciation of totality can dawn on the conceptual self by seeing the supports that make up any fraction. The flower needs the soil, sun, rain, and the vantage point to be seen. A wordless wonder of totality that Safranski finds in Heidegger’s work. “This primal experience of astonishment…as if one had just been born into this world…Astonishment at the mysterious ‘that something is there at all’ contains a question that cannot be satisfied by any possible answer. because any answer that explains that ‘That’ with a ‘why’ finds itself in infinite regression–each why can be followed by another why. And because no answer is possible, it is not even possible to formulate what exactly is being asked when we ask about the mystery of the That.” Right Effort has to orient itself back at itself to avoid getting into spiritual goal-setting and the same kind of emptiness that can occur with worldly pursuits. The totality is still lost by spiritual fractioning of Subject > Object > Time, and the typical grinding sense of lack to pollute the present moment urging some forced action to make the lack go away.
Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html
Be Who You Are – Jean Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780955176258/
Beyond Knowledge – Jean Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780955176289/
The Book of Listening – Jean Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780955399947/
The Ease of Being – Jean Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781684034987/
I AM – Jean Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781838383695/
Even if people say, “well I have to get back to utility and get on with my life,” and they apply just endless methods of closing gaps between oneself and goals, it’s infinitely better than staring at negative events and ruminating. That is a massive form of over-processing, that only confirms again and again that a negative event occurred, but nothing more is achieved, except a depletion of batteries, and therefore a depletion of energy you ironically need to close the gap between oneself and new goals. That is why having small goals, and even having a limited number of goals per day, conserves your energy. Slowing down helps to reduce mistakes, which is in the end ironically faster, and of course there’s less opportunity to ruminate. The other problem is the negative energy of others who don’t know how to do anything of these things, have no intention of learning, and feel that happiness is better when they can close the gap between themselves and others through sabotage and destruction. It’s like a mining project for those types and they are drilling through people. This is the reason why we have military, police, and security guards. The world of legitimate success involves work and trade through contracts, and contracts have to be upheld by the rule of law or else they are meaningless. Many people don’t believe in that and will just take what they want and live in a world of gangsterism. Positive intentions will have a limited effect in environments dominated by cynicism and predation. A Subject > Object > Time self-narrative also drains energy in that people have to defend these identities from ridicule when it’s just a fictional construct, but one that veils consciousness nonetheless. Consciousness conversely saves energy in what automatically is. It’s Be-ing vs. Do-ing. Be-ing points to what is effortless in our skills and habits and doesn’t discount their contributions. Be-ing saves energy in that it satisfies the nervous system by going in the opposite direction by letting go of the object, and then counterintuitively, the tension of Subject and Time also weakens. You either get relief by closing the gap on goals or dropping goals. If you need some exercise and sunlight, just go outside and do nothing but look at interconnectedness and symbiosis by seeing objects and joints between recognitions so that concept bubbles pop into each other and expand to the mysterious totality. Feed on wordless astonishment for a little bit.
Be-ing can be self-satisfying because one is resting in what works automatically, which means the “Do-er” can relax, and this can be partially seen with day-to-day habitual skills which feel comfortable and demonstrate this to us readily. Allowing automatic functions to vibrate without manipulation, just as they are, will complete a lot of the stress relief that people are looking for. From that vantage point, there’s less of a need to have a “Do-er” grinding-self-concept forcefully trying to meditate or to feel better. Consciousness is already manifesting this. Yet, most of us are very good at feeling better through distraction, but aiming the limited attention bandwidth to the places that save energy, which is present moment sensation, is more skillful. With Right View, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood contemplated, so by checking those areas for weaknesses, and not trying to change the past with draining rumination, the foundation for Right Effort, or Energy, is strengthened. That kind of contemplation aims you in the direction of activities and interests that have a blameless quality to them, which saves energy further. Those activities have a clean aftertaste and are refreshing. Just as in the same way that automatic sensation is working effortlessly, our skills can do the same. We rely on habits to work automatically to help us in our waking states, through repeated cultivation. The mind needs reminders with directed attention until the skill is automatic, but once it’s automatic, there’s no need for a do-er to pretend to turn a crank to get the skill working. Imperfections and mistakes are dealt with by cultivation and learning, but once those new skills are automatic, life seems easier. Repeatedly developing Right View, etc., down the list, eventually manifests a clearer and clearer conscience effortlessly. If one returns habitually to desires that lead to conflict, mental and physical wear and tear, then the clinging and tethering of those habits will pull the mind towards anticipatory stress in spite of Right Effort, meaning it will require A LOT more one-pointedness and sustaining of concentration to get into a positive mindset, though it is possible if one keeps at it. Developing skillful supports makes Right Effort a breeze.
To keep instructions simple on how to develop a positive mind state, like appreciation for example, you would scan your environment and look for utility and what IS working. You would admire what works by paying attention to HOW it works. With consistency and momentum, the mind goes into appreciation, and the momentum can even accept what is faulty and imperfect by enjoying the pity of endeavor and the failed intention to help that so many devices provide for us. This can be as simple as looking at seams in walls and appreciating the fact that the ceiling is not caving in, and how you are protected from the bad weather outside. Wordless attention is all that is needed towards technology and marveling at how it works, and the fact that it is still working after long periods of use. Appreciation creates fascination, which is a better way of being in the conventional sense. One can look into the body and notice what is still working well and enjoy sensation on the skin, enjoy how comfortable furniture is, enjoying nature and seeing how it works, enjoying fresh air, all that and more, which provides another sense of wonder. Esther Hicks calls this an Appreciation Rampage, but terms like Rampage are problematic because of that forceful grinding conceptual “Do-er” that is trying to force appreciation through an angry rampage. There’s also a subtle sense of contempt towards Esther’s audience and their endless burdening questions looking for her to be a pseudo-parent to solve all their problems. I almost want her to say “just fuck off and appreciate your themed cruise you stupid idiot!” Momentum is a more truthful description than rampage. Any appreciation will be dampened by causes and effects that don’t work out, or are vexing and frustrating, but the appreciation of fixing things, replacing them, and enjoying renewed abilities to function regenerates that appreciation again. Better mind states are generated by tending to causes and effects, not by a fake “Do-er” personality. Right Effort is returning to causes and effects and tending to them again and again when things go wrong. Unless one is a casualty in a war zone, there’s usually something to appreciate, skills to learn, or opportunities to rebuild and renew.
Mindfulness – Letting Go: https://rumble.com/v1grbjr-mindfulness-letting-go.html
Appreciation Rampage – Esther Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKdtVHYPICg
Flow: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
Anatta (Not Self): https://rumble.com/v1gr0w5-mindfulness-how-to-avoid-intellectualizing-your-practice.-anatta.html
Dukkha (Dissatisfaction): https://rumble.com/v1gr1it-mindfulness-how-to-meditate-for-longer.-dukkha.html
Anicca (Impermanence): https://rumble.com/v1gr219-mindfulness-gone.-anicca.html
This is NOT the Actualism method: https://psychreviews.org/this-is-not-the-actualism-method/
New Year’s Day Guided Meditation: https://rumble.com/v1gvmab-new-years-day-guided-meditation.html
Now this isn’t to say that every person is in the same boat. Many people have had enormous damage done to their sense of freedom to explore and create self-satisfaction, or they’ve gone through extraordinary trauma, so a practice like this is more about improving things as best as one can do with the understanding that trauma damages nerves and recovery can only accumulate. It’s really hard for some people to enjoy Be-ing in any shape or form. Paul Holman in an interview with Conscious TV’s Iain McNay, describes what he sees in therapeutic environments and reminds that “some people have been so damaged by their lives that they are coming for years, and I still see people I’ve seen for the last 25 years, and that’s okay too. There are many people who live in horrible circumstances, who have had terrible lives, and their nervous systems have been absolutely fried by trauma and difficulty…Some people’s nervous systems have been damaged irreparably, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do things.” The difficulty is accepting that there is no one shot solution and we have to tend to very many causes and effects to gain a therapeutic result that matters FOR THAT PARTICULAR INDIVIDUAL.
Paul Holman ‘Freedom Through Spatial Awareness’- Conscious TV: https://youtu.be/iplp0jBbIpI
Causes and effects include separate skills, that when trained to work automatically, can now work in conjunction. Furthering this understanding that this process takes time helps to reduce impatience. For example Daniel Ingram talked about his appreciation practice via Actualism, and being a doctor, repetition and habit is described by him as a dosage. “…Do it all day long for a year or two and see what it is does to you: taken to that dose and degree of dedication, you would be surprised at what can occur.” Dedication here again would be a light redirecting of the attention span to what you are developing to avoid unnecessary grinding effort with Subject-Object-Time narrative impatience.
My Experiments in Actualism – Daniel Ingram: https://www.integrateddaniel.info/my-experiments-in-actualism
Understanding human bandwidth limitations for the attention span and limited energy, means that one is patient with Right Effort and one treats it like laying a foundation for future Being. Each successful momentum of appreciation becomes a conditioning to make it easier to incline the mind more effortlessly in the future. The mind thinks “I remember how to do that.” In fact, a huge part of any appreciation practice is to be able to recall successful past highlights in one’s life and that can prime the mind to begin another appreciation-momentum with less force and one-pointedness. The habitual mind will start popping out suggestions for appreciation simply out of repeated doses of Right Effort. One can’t expect an occasional intention towards well-wishing to make a big difference, but singling out areas of great weakness with large doses of skill development will eventually make those skills habitual and there’s less need to go back there to deal with a leaky foundation. When reinforced really well one doesn’t have to worry about a flooded basement. One can then tend to the roof or maybe a window needs fixing now. Maybe well-wishing for others is so strong now a person should develop equanimity. Skills are endless and each person will find development non-linear in the sense that it’s better to look at skills as foundational instead. You build on them.
Learning about limited bandwidth also helps to understand how the mind works with time. All these skills have to be tended to one at a time and one can overextend with too much multi-tasking, and distraction can easily take over. With mindfulness, you realize your mind can be pulled by the peak of pleasure and swirl around there to motivate action. It ignores drawbacks that happen later in the time continuum. When drawbacks are brought in vividly, before taking action, the excitement and momentum decreases at the right time. Desires are results focused and they look at drawbacks as something to get over or ignore, as a way to enhance pleasure, but when drawbacks are salient, then desire decreases, and a new kind of pleasure, the peace of renunciation, can now be sensed. You can see how dualism can connect fractionally with the whole by taking in more data than what the desire was hung up on on. Our attention span has limited bandwidth to incapsulate a full experience of pros and cons. It needs to oscillate between the two to get a fuller picture, and this skill can enhance self-esteem and create a healthy robust sense of agency and choice. Without consideration of pros and cons, the mind will feel less like it has choice and become fatalistic and dependent on authority figures, who could be dangerous.
It’s true of determinism that there are many things that our agency isn’t in control of, especially when we were younger. The increasing ability to compare and discriminate qualities and experiences, increases the sense of agency over time. Purposeful non-judgmental intentions to imagine realistic drawbacks, reduces the need for repression and dogma. It’s a personally attained lesson, and the more keenly the drawbacks are imagined and felt, the less repression is needed to change a behavior. It’s self-policing because it goes into the habits more deeply than an inauthentic repression, or restraining oneself because authority figures tell you to. You change because you WANT to, not because you HAVE to. Real learning involves emotions, and not knowing that leads to situations where desires increase in pressure and unconscious discharges happen without a sense of control. Desire gets fixated on points in time where pleasure is most heightened, to feed and make the pleasure last longer, and that creates pressure to release tension in action, which may be fine in certain situations, but in others it would better to consider consequences and to let them sink in. This desire trap is kind of like what you see in photography, art, and advertising. It’s a subtractive skill, which is about disguising totality into fractionation to manage impressions and to increase desire.
A great example is the Cycle of Abuse, when victims strangely return to abusers because of their ambivalence over them. Toxic people play on distraction. Unless the victim repeatedly brings back the drawbacks of an abuser, and examples from the past, they may sell themselves short and return to abusive relationships, like they don’t have a choice, when really it’s because their attention span is stuck with the perceived allure. This is why controlling the attention span, through Right Effort, or Right Energy, or Right Emotion, can authentically develop an individual’s character despite social influences. SN 12:52 advises that, “…in one who keeps focusing on the allure of clingable phenomena, craving develops…In one who keeps focusing on the drawbacks of clingable phenomena, craving ceases.” The limited bandwidth needs to sample more before making a decision. When the drawbacks manifest emotions that are stronger than the desire, then the desire naturally relaxes without a need for a fake personality to put effort towards repression. When the consequences are minimal, or the risks are acceptable for the individual, then it’s easier to navigate through life. One can even attempt difficult things when one has deliberated enough and is happy with the cost.
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtl55-the-psychopathology-of-everyday-life-sigmund-freud.html
SN 12:52: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/SN/SN12_52.html
Right Effort in SN 45:8 simplifies the above endeavors by classifying these efforts, choices, and deliberations in a neat heuristic to abandon unskillful qualities that have arisen, prevent unskillful qualities, generate skillful qualities, and to maintain skillful qualities. Whether one has to put more or less effort in each scenario depends on the strength of habits at any one time. It’s not the same kind of effort in every situation. It may involve just the lightest intention to change the subject in the attention span to something more blameless. What also makes this less stressful is to have no judgment about what is in the mind, since it’s cause and effect anyways, but also because thinking is not something that is supposed to stop and it doesn’t require bashing and self-flagellation. Not all impulses are of equal strength. This becomes easier with mindfulness, but just a recognition that something unskillful is there is plenty in most cases for it to vanish, or one doesn’t have to wait that long for it to vanish. This dire sense of “Oh this means I’m this or that…” is an unnecessary layer of rigid identification. This is a very important point because some people have trouble with suggestibility and those with OCD and Paranoia, can easily soak up every joke, projective identification, and suggestion from the environment with a sense of compulsion, blame and fear. If it can slide off of the subject by them simply waiting, then they can let it roll off. Strong effort IS needed in situations where there’s escalation and a choice is being contemplated to go into something violent or there’s something life changing. Certain choices can’t be undone or forgotten. One may have to use anger, force, and a sense of grinding to avoid unchangeable consequences that are manifesting quickly. For those who live in relatively peaceful environments, less forceful methods are adequate. It’s more like Right Priority or Right Energy. Vīrya is Sanskrit for this factor. It’s an energetic, motivated effort in most cases. The mistake of treating effort as always a grind ignores effort that can feel more effortless where there’s motivation. Rob said it’s “cultivating beautiful mind states…Cultivating what’s beautiful and learning to let go of what’s not so helpful.” “Skillful qualities” can be a very dry description for experiences of rapture, bliss, and peace. The purpose of using the term skillful qualities, is to avoid dogmatic language, because there’s a weakness in having a list of things to NOT do in situations that are complex, and dogmatic rules may not always apply. There is a need for ingenuity when dealing with powerful mental forces.
The most difficult area for beginner meditators, and even sometimes for advanced meditators, are the 5 hindrances and how they destroy the results of Right Effort. They include: Sensual desire, Ill will, Sloth and Torpor, Restlessness or Worry, and Doubt. Jill Shepherd reminds that a simple emotional distancing technique of noting, recognizing, or labeling the mind state that is interfering with the meditation can create a sense of separation, and a recognition of the untainted awareness that’s always there. It helps to keep people from identifying with narratives related to the hindrance and to let go of the content of what’s happening, which is the typical attitude of the Modern Mind, of intellectualizing everything into a Subject noun, and instead to lean towards the sensations that thoughts can create. Like a 6th sense, thoughts have feelings connected with them based on preferences, and this helps to connect the body and mind for beginners who typically feel decapitated from the body. Intermediate and advanced meditators forget how bad it was at the beginning. One can live with complete forgetfulness of the body for huge swathes of time until something finally hurts or there’s a sense that the body is failing in some way. Holistically including the body and thoughts helps to reduce that psychoanalytic problem of splitting, where parts of the psyche are split off as “bad” parts because the mind hasn’t figured out how to develop skills in these areas. Briefly being able to step out of Subject > Object > Time, and to include sensations of the body, is how these practices can seed in the beginner meditator, and glimpses of integration and oneness can be seen.
Mindfulness mixed with Right Effort is also best when it’s curious about the sensations and not trying to push them away with aversion. Rob Burbea said that “when the energy level of attention is more than the energy of the emotion, then that starts liberating things. When the energy of the emotion is more than the energy of the attention, we are sunk.” To make the mindfulness go a little deeper he would look more into the knots of these hindrances. There may be more than one hindrance arising, and by tuning into those vibrations, with the consequent analysis and understanding, there can be a more accurate recognition. When impulses are unconscious, they can easily takeover. When recognizing impulses accurately, and by not forcing impulses away, the mind can learn to relax and wait, and this isn’t an impatient waiting, but a continued awareness of sensations present in the hindrances. This is often enough for the hindrances to vanish in many cases. At other times, a simple concentration practice to distract the limited attention bandwidth, with a consistent returning to the breath, and without aversively reacting to the hindrance, can take the mind off the hindrance and provide enough energy to return to a more pleasant relaxed mind state. The mind has trouble feeling fantastic and horrible at the same time. A small bit of horribleness has trouble manifesting when someone is in deep rapture and bliss with concentration.
The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html
If mindfulness isn’t energetic enough, it can be good to develop opposite mind states to those hindrances to provide a little more help. Sensual desire may not pry loose with mindfulness alone and by connecting deeply with mindfulness, consciousness may just sink into the desire in daydreaming and be stuck in an infatuated cloudiness. Gil Fronsdal asks us to look more realistically at the object of desire, or Thanissaro Bhikkhu recommends looking at drawbacks, like described above, but cause and effect works well when an ignored drawback is brought vividly to consciousness. One example Gil mentions is realizing that you may love a fiction of a person from afar and that they may have a personality that is quite different from your imagination, and a realistic sobering perception can help to snap a person out of it. You can get creative with these skills. For example, transferring knowable bodily functions that all humans have, from the memory of oneself, and transferring it to the other person, who is doing well to hide it, is a way to realize how unfamiliar that person is to you and how distorted and anti-septic your vision is of them. Those distorted visions lack humanity. Even a Hollywood star has to fart. The person may also be in a detrimental power differential from you, and while stuck in the infatuation, you can notice realistic details of rejection that would likely happen if you were to attempt to escalate an interest into something more. Desire knows no propriety and a realistic assessment of oneself can be like sniffing salts. “Really? Will a sexy millionaire fall in love with me?”
Fassbender outs Marion Cotillard’s flatulence: https://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/fassbender-outs-marion-cotillards-flatulence-33357647.html
For Ill will, there is a similar blindness to reality. The mind can go into the strange territory of revenge scenarios, time travel, and paranoia. Any kind of realistic contemplation, and a testing of reality of course, and a questioning of beliefs, can help to find what is distorted, and losing a belief in those scenarios, and how they must or should manifest, can be renounced as an illogical tunnel vision. Thinking that one doesn’t have access to a desire because of an evil gatekeeper may be true some of the time, but it may not be true all of the time. There isn’t always someone trying to stop you, unless you have evidence that they are. Certainly envy, resentment, and rage can decrease when people develop their weak skills so that attainment of those desires becomes a non-issue, and there’s no need to blame someone. Developing a habit to check mental scenarios against actual evidence before getting emotional is a good one for paranoia. Looking at drawbacks over an object of desire that can’t be shared, is another way to create a deflation of ill will because the rival is doing you a favor by fractionating over there with an object while you zoom out and rest in totality instead. In a paradoxical way, you’re getting more relief than they are. Learning to drop toxic people from one’s life is another endeavor that can free up a lot of mind space when one isn’t around negative influences to imitate.
It’s usually a belief that something can’t happen in reality, when a basic investigation shows that it can, has to be let go of at some point to find relief, and pumped up desires to change, correct, rearrange or annihilate people in order for one to feel at peace, has to be seen for its lack of creativity. Aim at areas of accessibility and vacuums of need for a longer lasting sustenance. Finally, frustration can be looked at differently. By actually looking directly at the risk associated with a goal, and how many moving parts can fail, this can help to reduce expectation of success and then failure can now appear as a form of learning instead of appearing “devastating” to the mind.
Many of these feelings can evaporate simply by testing their truth and then one can develop those pleasurable and beautiful meditative mind states as a replacement for rumination. Allowing that one can enjoy the practice is a difficult one in the West. Many people bring their scarcity mindset to these places, yet no pleasure that others have, or one generates, is at the expense of someone else when we are talking about meditation. Some people also are unfamiliar with healthy forms of ill will which relate to boundaries. Certain boundary skills are blameless under the law. You can check that out on the prior installment of Right Action.
Right Action – The Eightfold Path: https://rumble.com/v1grhdd-the-noble-eightfold-path-right-action.html
Sloth and Torpor, or a sleepy laziness, that manages to outlast your mindful recognition, may be a call for sleep that is actually needed. There are those who like to arouse energy in the meditation to the point that they sleep less, but for lay people who work and have vigorous lives, respect for regular sleep can be the refreshment that’s needed. Sloth and torpor can also hide a deep boredom and ennui for some people. Developing interesting goals, including spiritual ones, can increase excitement and dislodge blockages. Practicing with eyes open and adding exercise with walking meditation will also increase energy.
Conversely, Restlessness and Worry can be a situation where there’s a need for more relaxation. A basic concentration practice will reduce the number of thoughts after a period of time. Counting the breath can also give a restless mind something to do along with the breath so that the verbal constructs are WITH the breath instead of pulling away somewhere else. As in the above psychological advice, any practical solutions or actions that need to be taken care of in the world can help to remove the worry. If the problem is actually treated or solved, there’s less need to think about it. Also, checking distorted fantasies against reality helps to remove what underpins unnecessary worry. The mind can drain a lot of energy in “what if” scenarios that are not happening and are so peculiar and unlikely to happen. Scanning the body for tensions related to the thinking is also a sly way of relaxing the restless mind. Like a feedback loop, tension in the mind builds tension in the body, which irritates the mind further, and coaxes it to generate more thoughts about the problem. Sending the feedback loop in the other direction by relaxing tensions in the body can short circuit the momentum. There’s also insight to be had on needless tension because it’s rare that tightening a muscle will actually solve most of these problems that arise in the mind, yet the mind is doing this nonetheless. There’s enjoyment of letting go unnecessary tension, and over the years, the body posture, breathing and gait can improve.
Doubt I found to be one of the easier hindrances to deal with, but is often the most difficult at the beginning of a new practice. All the above practices of emotional distancing with noting what’s there, relaxing the body, and making life improvements, all provide benefits that manifest perceptively in reality. Doubt is hard to maintain when there’s progress. In the beginning it takes some leap of faith to at least try these practices for longer periods of time, and it only takes a 1st Jhana Flow state to arise for doubt to vanish. These small successes stay in memory and remind one of how cause and effect works. With basic concentration practices, you are learning how the mind goes into Flow. You give the “Do-er” part of the mind something to work on, a form of playing, to see if one can stay with the breath consistently. Once the mind lights up with reward and also a small surrender of self-consciousness, the doubt evaporates again and again. People need that experience of “it’s working!” from the part of the mind that monitors success in a conventional way. For more advanced teachers like Jean Klein, he would just call these altered states a compensation or a temporary “sweet.” For beginners, the trail of bread crumbs is necessary until it’s not.
Mindfulness Of Mind States – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/21010/
The Psychodynamics of Meditation – Part 2 – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/11505/
Right Effort – Jill Shepherd: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/68951/
Unhindered – Gil Fronsdal: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780989833400/
Thich Nhat Hanh used the simile of gardening and how meditative development is like a seed that can be watered. It’s about feeding and providing nutrition for what you want to develop and grow and letting lay fallow what is unskillful. When you plant new habits, they begin to squeeze out the old ones. They are tasty herbs and vegetables and much better than eating weeds. The old habits do have some value in that they can be like dormant memories and weak impulses that can’t take over consciousness anymore and they provide a sense of learning without fear. You can’t forget the past and you wouldn’t want to because if you could you wouldn’t be able to learn.
As one moves the mind in better directions, there’s less doubt about continuing the practice. Meditation can infuse new areas of one’s life. Typical of Buddhist practice, or any psychological modality, is the activity of compartmentalization. This happens when we use these practices only on the cushion and only with our eyes closed. That’s very limited. As skill increases, people find the seeds grow and flower into daily life. Watering the plants is a way to make the vegetables juicy, and one can find new plots of land to garden. Also like in the simile of eating, Right Effort involves a savoring of these nice mind states. When the mind is preoccupied with something good to eat in the form of spiritual pleasure it doesn’t need much effort to stay. Right Effort turns into a suggestion to continue to enjoy. Having a juicy practice that’s interesting will always trump a dry grinding over-efforting practice.
Understanding Our Mind – Thich Nhat Hanh: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781888375305/
Savor – Thich Nhat Hanh: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780061697708/
Bhikkhu Bodhi is honest about these differences in the mind of a beginner compared to one that has gone through cultivation. It’s really a monumental conditioning, and de-conditioning program, to change the mind. “The starting point is the defiled mind, afflicted and deluded; the goal is the liberated mind, purified and illuminated by wisdom. What comes in between is the unremitting effort to transform the defiled mind into the liberated mind. The work of self-cultivation is not easy — there is no one who can do it for us but ourselves — but it is not impossible…The first two hindrances, sensual desire and ill will, are the strongest of the set, the most formidable barriers to meditative growth, representing, respectively, the unwholesome roots of greed and aversion.” When a person isn’t trained, desire can unconsciously lead to conflict with others as a way to control what can’t be shared, which is desire falling into greed, and aversion is the unconscious fight or flight response that generates inner and outer conflict. Greed to attain, and Aversion to protect what is attained. With training, the vicious cycle becomes more predictable and it’s easier to pick your battles. A lot of things really are not worth it.
Right Effort is an understanding that you can’t change the past, an understanding that the future is based on what is cultivated now, and that mind states are cultivated by cause and effect, not magic. RIGHT EFFORT is just filling up the attention span and threading one thought or perception at a time in a happy direction.
SN 46:51: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/SN/SN46_51.html
The Noble Eightfold Path – Bhikkhu Bodhi: http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/noble8path6.pdf
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/