Right Mindfulness
When we develop the prior steps on the Noble Eightfold Path, there is now a method to look clearer into this human experience. Mindfulness illuminates how reactivity works in the mind and the body, and it reminds us what we are supposed to be doing with the Eightfold Path: To find the Supreme Happiness of Peace. In regards to reactivity Rob Burbea notes that “it completely grips us. We keel over…Praise…Blame…Success…Failure…Gain…Loss…Pleasure…Pain…The state of mind can be event based.” The antidote to this event based happiness is prescribed by Buddhism to develop Equanimity, but the word equanimity sounds as dry as cardboard. Why would that be interesting? “True equanimity has a quality of juiciness. It’s very alive…Spaciousness and equanimity go together.” Equanimity really means filling the attention span with much more detail coming from sensation, including thoughts as a sensation, because thinking always has a feeling tone. This means that we can be mindful and equanimous to a lot of different flavors of experiences. The flavor is still there. The rain and the lightning are the passing events that the mindfulness is present for, but the counterintuitive pleasantness in these bad weather events is that they are moving on, which makes way for better weather. Hence the saying that it’s always “the darkest before the dawn.” Equanimity becomes interesting when waves and vibrations are looked at more closely, and getting caught is being in a mental rain cloud when it’s sunny out, or focusing on the rain when the sun will come back sooner or later. Equanimity can see the different shades of light in the clouds and enjoy the rays that sneak in here and there.
Rain – Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFd4zozNl9I
The Lightning I, II – The Arcade Fire: https://youtu.be/qJiALpiqpk8
The Eight Worldly Winds – Daniel Ingram: https://vimeo.com/562014179
Starting off meditation as a brand new practice usually means starting off as a decapitated person who is disconnected from the body and thoughts. With ever more equanimity, the constricted tightness can loosen and open up a new world of integration. Mindfulness and equanimity help the mind remember how cause and effect work, which is why Right Mindfulness is so important to all the other arenas of the Eightfold Path. Sometimes just steadiness with the breath brings a juicy insight of how cause and effect can be manipulated to provide Flow states in the form of Jhanas. As mindfulness develops, there’s really no demarcation between mindfulness and concentration, or the other factors of the Eightfold Path. Insight is essentially learning how pain and pleasure work in the mind-body and developing skills to reduces stress. Whether it’s done through pleasurable concentration, or mindful insight, they both have the same goal. For example, an early insight for people is staying with the breath when there’s physical pain, which is training the mind to avoid “making the pain go away,” so to say, which does the opposite by piling aversion on top of physical pain. Having enough concentration to find gaps in the pain, or less solidity to the pain, and to have mindful insight to not add psychological pain to the physical pain, is a way that both concentration and mindfulness can work together.
Having an equanimous view towards impulses, including long lasting ones, shows that without the fuel of reactivity, impulses eventually run out of steam on their own. Even some of the physical pain can diminish. Bad things arise and go away in their own time like a vibration or a wave. It’s an attentiveness and a silent recognition of what’s vibrating, manifesting, and withdrawing on its own. The narrative mind that is about self-measurement, territoriality, envy, power, and the need to control these vibrations, can relax for as long as you can maintain those conditions.
The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html
Flow: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
Thought and Meditation – Rob Burbea: https://rumble.com/v1gqufd-thought-and-meditation-rob-burbea.html
Instead of being like a wave, the narrative mind compulsively freezes things like a photograph, and then eventually a video that can be replayed endlessly. Training the mind to allow the movement of taking things in, which can open the sense of heart and emotion, meaning the equanimity has a melting quality that isn’t so dead and dry, allows the tension of those frozen narratives and identities to melt. It’s a process that’s shows how much pain there is buried in all the habitual tensions that were always there, but ignored. There can be a lot of pleasure, but there’s also a lot of pain in this process. That holding that one discovers can be like a tight fist that is held for so long and when opened up, is now throbbing. This is a signal that a new baseline of equanimity has been achieved.
The Buddhist Three Characteristics of life are what train the mind about certain patterns that were ignored before. Seeing those patterns and learning to let go brings some equanimity for someone just starting the practice. The first characteristic is impermanence. “The Pali word for impermanence is Anicca. And another meaning, another translation of that word is ‘uncertain.’ So it’s impermanence and uncertainty. To tune into this aspect of life. It’s incredibly uncertain where the next piece, or moment of praise and blame is going to come – when and where and how it’s going to be, praise and blame, success/failure; what will happen in the life of the body, the next accident, the next illness; when death comes. Conditions by their very nature are uncertain. To tune the mind into this level, this uncertainty of things.”
Equanimity – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/12307/
This impermanence and spaciousness can also move into a more equanimous eternity. Rob studied with Thanissaro Bhikkhu who suggested to “contemplate infinity every day.” The life span of a normal human is miniscule compared to the currently known age of the universe. Like with the Buddhist Right View, Rob was sensitive to how we view things and how a view causally adds momentum and manifests a mood. Because of a limited attention bandwidth we have to select views with a better result. Contemplating the nothingness of reactivity before we were born and the non-reactivity after death, as a particular view of things, tends to shrink the importance of daily dramas. In a Buddhist belief in rebirth, infinity looks like torture where one is reborn into a life that has pleasure, pain, gain, loss, and death, over and over again. The seeking mind is quite painful and these practices of the Three Characteristics help to remind the instincts that there’s really no permanent comfortable place in the world. Even if a lot of comfort is found in life, there is the inevitability of disease, ill health, reduced function, and death. Part of the mind is VERY resistant to that reality. The survival instinct will constantly move, but there’s a lot of drained energy with each movement, and a gradual appreciation for mental quiescence, trains the instincts beyond what a regular animal would be able to do. A lot of our desires are very animalistic and the human side of us wants to train it because of this foresight of death. The animal is less bothered by self-consciousness, but it just distracts itself by moving onto the next meal, the fight, the next mate, and the next place to sleep. Death is a surprise and you fight until the end.
An Infinite Perspective – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2018/180506_An_Infinite_Perspective.mp3
The second characteristic is dissatisfaction, which reminds the instincts that it hasn’t found a permanent home anywhere and there needs to be a foresight that it won’t ultimately find a location without a need to move somewhere else. Some decisions to increase comfort and reduce pain are practical, but there’s always a leaning or expectation that one has to rely on conditions remaining the same or advancing. Even worse, there’s boredom so that what was comfortable in the past is now taken for granted. The sensitivity to boredom seems to not want one to stay still, which is a way to increase survivability. That pressure can lead to healthy challenges, but it can also lead to over-striving and self-created problems where one’s thriving or survival has to encroach on others. One may move away from what is actually quite good for some hoped for place that’s more challenging than expected. One can ironically “over-survive” to the point that war and strife ends survival.
Each of the Three Characteristics can be a practice in of themselves, and for dissatisfaction, the method is to see the thought as it is and ask honestly, “does it hurt?” Leela Sarti had a conversation with a guest teacher that goes into these psychological knots we can get into. It’s sometimes good to really reflect on the little knots that add up to the overall mood and stress, and a reflection like this is kind of like a retroactive-mindfulness that creates this inventory of one’s personal hang ups. Through understanding of the different mental movements that cause pain, the ambivalence decreases and it’s easier to let go and not tie those knots in the first place. “We are trying to be something, to behave the right way, to be loved, to be included. We are effort-ing to keep our work, to get better, to improve, to make wonderful careers, to be a good mother and father. It creates a lot of contraction. It’s limiting our freedom. We are easily caught in our survival drive. We may not be aware of it, but it’s driving us…We lose our connection to our feelings, including the feeling of being tired…It’s like being on the bus. You can’t get off. It’s driving. You are not driving the bus…The social drive is connected with the survival drive as well…We are looking for warm eyes.” Leela responds with the understanding of the need to control in the survival drive. “I think that pattern of control, of pushing along, and pushing ahead, and planning ahead, it really needs our respect, but control always feels like a contraction, when we get hard-headed, and we get tight and we become willful. When it comes to control it brings a kind of tunnel vision like ‘this is the way to go about it.’ It can be really painful in meditation practice. We know better, yet there we are, and we get this tunnel vision and it just has to be one way…The instincts can bring so much fuel into this. We have this sense that ‘I really need this experience.’ Whether it’s an experience in meditation or an experience in life…’I really need this or I will not survive.’ Our survival drive can take us through tremendous ordeals, and it’s really good when something important is at stake, like we need all that energy to pull someone out of a burning building, but [shopping for tiles]?” “We have to be aware of what’s going on before we start changing anything…We have a lot ideas and beliefs, what is right…We can see through our beliefs by allowing the sensing and the bodily experience to arise.” Now this may be different for these two individuals, or the same, but you can ask the question, how does dissatisfaction appear in my mind, and when things hurt, to actually pay attention to the necessity. Is that muscle tension in the mind-body really necessary? You don’t need to remember a huge list of codified situations where dissatisfaction arises. You can train the brain to let go of rumination whenever it arises when the pain is too large for the problem at hand.
Effortlessness – Leela Sarti: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/player/59944.html
Not-self is the third characteristic and it’s making the instincts realize that the prior two characteristics prove that there’s no permanent ownership. Life is borrowed and given back. Also, all the characteristics are together in each experience. Each experience is impermanent, can turn into stress or boredom, and can’t be permanently owned. All these preliminary practices increase equanimity at a more basic level where craving and clinging can be seen to be a self-made trap. Mindfulness is a skill of reflecting what’s there so that the mind can learn more about its inner contents and how they react to experience. A practice like this is essentially to look at where the instincts bend the attention span, and refusing to ignore the twisting and needless pain that is present if one is willing to look at the myriad identities. The old way was exactly that, to ignore and continue searching for paradise somewhere else, only to find a growing tension and resentment build as those unexpected negative events bound into life nonetheless. Vocation ideas, business ideas, and relationship scenarios, all bend or break at varying levels under the stress of powerful events. Some people are great at laying down plans, extending them far into the future, and apply a flexibility to adjust those plans in ingenious ways, so I’m not saying success isn’t possible in a conventional way, but that uncertainty remains nonetheless. Successful business people often had many failures before their success and we only see the end product. The success was never guaranteed. Even if you work for a business or government, there’s plenty of shifting and change as processes refine from bouts of negative feedback, and most people are not working at the same place in their 40s as when they started in their teens or 20s, and in most cases they wouldn’t even want to. Some people were able to have long lasting intimate partners through their life, but for many people, that wasn’t the case. Those three characteristics appear there too and one of the big pressures is realizing that one has to deal with expectations that we are able to provide endless love, productivity, excitement, novelty, and entertainment on tap for the said partner. That’s a HUGE burden that many fail to reconcile no matter what they do or achieve. YOU are now boring, stressful, dissatisfying, and can’t be owned, despite what any wedding vows would tell you.
Separating from relationships and past projects leaves a frozen narrative behind that can harden into repetitive habits. New relationships and projects can return one to similar patterns regardless of the superficial outward changes. There’s now a desire to move away from those frozen narratives that repeatedly criticize one for a lack of success in those said projects and relationships, but unfortunately it may involve a lot of substances that leave one even more lost. If one is lucky, some substances like LSD and Ayahuasca help the mind temporarily drop that frozen narrative, which is part of the brain’s control function, to allow unconscious wisdom to rewire the brain and sneak in new combinations and ideas. An interest in meditation may arise from that, and any who have meditated for a long time already know that a lot of their best ideas and new synergies came like water that is allowed to pour out of the dam during a meditation session. Unless parents have a Buddhist background, most people encounter this stuff in their late twenties and early thirties when they are independent of parenting and school and can independently assess life experience outside of narrow book suggestions in school, narrow social suggestions, and environmental cues. Most of those suggestions are based on societies institutions and are about how to make the powerful more happy and very little to do with your own happiness.
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
Michael Pollan and Chris Bache – Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIjZypJKSFM
This basic practice has a lot of pleasure, but also a lot of pain. Seeing things arise and pass away without incident can be pleasurable at first, but the impermanence of everything can be a downer as well. It depends on where the attention span is focused. If the practice is too dry, and putting the attention on how everything turns to fertilizer, animals eating other animals, and seeing religion as a parking spot for saffron bags of bones who meditate until it’s their turn to rejoin the landscape, it is very depressing at times and not very freeing to think about that. Buddhists call this the suffering knowledges, and Christians call this the Dark Night Of the Soul. The practice is a weaning off of needing externalities for emotional regulation. We’re addicted to any conditions we like. There’s a lot of resistance and doubt that these practices are the way to follow and they manifest in withdrawal symptoms of shaking, sweating, despondency, nihilism, and even excruciating mental and physical pain as a conceptual self begins to die. Like losing belief in Pagan Gods, the narrative self is beginning to seem superfluous. This is where many people are turned off the practice and why there’s a resurgence to emphasize the pleasure in concentration practices as a sustainable way of weaning, where one always has a source of pleasure to turn to when nihilism and depression manifest. On top of that pressure, the instincts constantly try to co-opt the meditation practice and create false attainments in the mind, and then return to old habits as before. The survival instinct has an agenda, and it’s a unruly student. This is in fact par for the course and the “Do-er” meditator self-concept is constantly manipulating the practice if you are careful enough to notice the striving, but if there’s any progress to measure, it’s that the instincts are manipulating less, leading one to an increasing baseline of equanimity in daily life experience. Yet there’s still a lot of goal orientation remaining in the meditation practice itself.
The Anapanasati Sutta: 4 stages of meditation: https://rumble.com/v1gon6r-the-anapanasati-sutta-4-stages-of-meditation.html
Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html
“The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn’t cut itself, fire doesn’t burn itself, light doesn’t illuminate itself. It’s always an endless mystery to itself.”– Alan Watts
That dry crimp of “I’m over here spiritually and I need to be over there,” is just another crimp like any other in goal orientation, and after years of practice it manifests as a boredom with the practice, just like boredom with other activities and people. Practice again can end, but there’s still a nagging feeling that something is missing. Sometimes people need a direct pointing, and even a cessation experience of closing down consciousness into Nirvana doesn’t provide what people need for their daily lives. Teachers like Rob had to deal with powerful goal orientation in students. “If I talk about or we read about an experience of the Unfabricated, if we use that language, it’s very easy at a certain point for a practitioner to start chasing that experience, especially if one’s quite used to a lot of fading, and this fades and that fades, and then one gets the sense, ‘I can sniff it, and it’s right there!’ And one, almost without exception, starts gunning for it, pushing, pushing for it. Very natural, very normal – put it that way. Shooting oneself in the foot to chase the experience. And it’s something that, you know, even me saying it, I would need to repeat it to a practitioner. Very strong tendency to go into that relationship to it. What’s much more important is the understanding, and the understanding of emptiness and dependent arising. So that’s what’s coming out of all this fading business. It’s not about a particular experience so much, although I wouldn’t throw out the experience, but it’s much more about the understanding, and particularly about dependent arising and dependent cessation. So hopefully, the experience brings more understanding, and hopefully, the understanding leads towards the experience.” The sense of do-ing the meditation will pollute the experience all the way to the edge of cessation and Nirvana, and there can be limited understanding that comes with the cessation attainment, because of the difficulty integrating that non-experience into waking life.
This is talked about in Dzogchen and Advaita style at a conversation with Loch Kelly and Stephan Bodian. Meditation involves a lot of the same conditioning we developed in life unfortunately, and the practice becomes boring, dry and crimped. We can feel the meditation to be like the Flow system where well trodden meditation paths are dry and dusty and you have to keep developing ever more skills to find a new lake of peace that’s better than the last one. People get stuck in bored practices and wonder “what’s up?” Stephan worked with the Advaita teacher Jean Klein and said that “meditation conditions the mind and what we are looking for is to discover the Unconditioned Mind.” Typical meditations condition the subject of “I’m the subject and I’m meditating/massaging/savoring this object, space, or stillness over there.” The sense of the subject-meditator that can rate itself with self-measurement, is still activated and rating what is good and bad about one’s skills and assessing what a good meditation is, which is just like being a food critic. The reality is that awareness is vibrating already, in all the senses, and thoughts are released from the unconscious effortlessly. Realizing this, the searching mind can just relax in vibration, instead of crimping into striving thoughts of “I’m here…I need to go there” for hours, weeks, months, years and decades.
The searching itself has to go through a flip. Dzogchen teacher Jackson Peterson reminds his students that Rigpa, which is a Tibetan translation of this awareness we are all talking about, that “it’s not something you own. It’s not something that has a me or a my or a mine and it’s not a personal entity. It’s like you want to attain Rigpa, and then you want to stabilize Rigpa, for you…It’s like your moments of Rigpa. This is the complete reverse. What you are is always Rigpa having moments of a personality arising. You’re not a person who is being visited with Rigpa…How do you stabilize Rigpa? How do you not have a stable Rigpa?…Rigpa is always manifesting with a texture…Every moment of experience has a quality to it…It’s not that textures are occurring in Rigpa…Rigpa is appearing textured…A lot of people get a dualistic idea that there are appearances, phenomena, thoughts, feelings, perceptions occurring to this witnessing consciousness…Consciousness is appearing as those perceptions, thoughts, and textures. There’s no two parts.” Part of the practice is to conceptually look for a border between consciousness and object and of course there is a border: Tension. Outside of that, consciousness can’t be separated from experience. Rigpa is in the tension, the stillness, and any other experience because you wouldn’t be having an experience without it. This allows tension, which is being targeted to relax, to not be split off and excluded from Rigpa, because a dualistic dislike of tension would be tension tensing against tension. Over-processing again. Rigpa is the experience and nothing needs to be split off from it, whether good or bad. “One [situation] is not more Rigpa than another.” This way tension is a function for survival reasons, but can relax when unnecessary. This is a theme throughout, which is to balance cultivation where it’s needed without relying too much on it.
Dzogchen South Africa Full Explanation of Rigpa with Jackson Peterson: https://youtu.be/Wt5-upLlGWw
It eventually dawns on the mind that awareness is already aware of itself. The push and pull needs to relax so what’s already there shines forth. A bigger surrender, or as Stephan notes that you’re realizing that you’re “shining a flashlight in midday…What’s the point?” Loch says that he likes the direct approach because “it’s direct.” It’s a dry crimp with the idea that a subject needs to DO something when vibration is already manifesting and you’re alive biologically. The manifestation is always more fresh than the idea of it. Jean Klein said “Forget the ideas and keep the perfume.” Like going in and out of a door from a desert to a lush forest the mind can go back and forth with “The Meditator” concept and compare that to resting “The-Do-er” in a rejuvenating surrender. The awareness is already vibrating, and letting go of clinging to The Meditator-subject-do’er, brings further release. Certainly one needs to cultivate in the early stages, but at some point, often years later, the practitioner is finding the Meditator-subject has turned into a dry burnt out piece of toast. Awareness is that with which experience could not take place and is the non-personality that is aware the attention span is moving to and fro. There’s a little bit of stress that can be detected with moving the attention span, like a do-er, that is overdoing it. The quick tension of “I need to do something from this vantage point to objects of meditation over there” has to be caught with mindfulness to the see the extra layer of unnecessary crimping. Even the words “caught by mindfulness” misses the point, since all that doing can just drop into the already vibrating experience. Instructions, like “nipping it in the bud” are useful to a certain extent, but now have to be discarded. The reality is that the Do-er is also a controller that tenses between good and bad and is trying to filter experience through that lens. It’s a useful filter when you have a negative stimulus to deal with, but it’s detrimental when the perfume is also filtered. The grasping concept grasps an experience, gets bored with trying to hold it and then has to move onto the next one. Letting one experience replace another, unfiltered by over-criticism and grasping, returns the freshness. Impermanence has a freshness to it because old narratives are stale from years of repeated viewing.
That to and fro of the attention span, moving through memory, is the imitative self co-opting the practice. Many of the reasons as to why the imitative ego has to be involved is that the regular meditation practice tires out the Do-er so that it surrenders on its own accord. Thanissaro Bhikkhu believes in a more traditional method which is to exhaust the jhanas, which also helps to remove addictiveness towards externalities, which can be more toxic depending on what they are, and then to discard concentration as a priority for Nirvana. The practice is the “raft” that can be discarded when you get to the other island. Though, you sometimes hear that even an Arhat, which is supposed to be without craving, that they still need concentration practice in daily life. This sows doubt that craving can be let go of completely while alive, so in reality, craving is only reduced to a lower level. There are full emotions, but maybe the less desirous ones are reduced. Ideally in SN 1:25 an Arahant is “effluent-free” and “for one whose conceit is abandoned, whose knot of conceit is dispersed, no knots exist at all.” When the knot is released one is able to let go of the conceptual self while still being able to use conventional language to communicate.
Certainly one wonders when listening to a dharma talk and how a hot mic catches a monk with a stomach growling, that there has to be SOME craving left. This is a long process because it’s likely that few people have bored all the Jhanas in their lifetime and there are debates on how much concentration is needed for the simulative ego to relax into nirvana. The Mahayana tradition is a little different where the focus is on our how the mind makes experience solidified with clinging. What is aimed at is this Subject > Object > Time conceptual knot, or frozen narrative identity. It’s always there, even in stillness with the present moment. In reality, you want to defend a body, not a concept, because the self-concept isn’t needed to control your decision making.
SN 1:25: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/SN/SN1_25.html
Dropping the “do-er” for naked vibration, and dropping the blame for unwanted thoughts, makes natural thinking smoother and the meditator-knot can relax. Stephan says that “when we generate states it has a quality of suppressing innate aliveness, particularly emotional expression.” Problem solving, achievement, and pressured ambition is still there in meditation despite valuable experiences. For Loch Kelly, he wants students to drop the “Do-er” and ask “what’s here now when there’s no problem to solve?” I would probably instead say to “tune into vibrating manifestation without forceful manipulation of your body or objects.” This is difficult because words involve concrete nouns for subjects and objects and confuse the reader. It’s unmanipulated vibration, because vibration is already happening without a “do-er” and manipulating objects in perception already has a sense of conditioned aversion to circumstances. The sense of self in brain studies is a tired problem solver, including a problem solver regarding meditation and spirituality, and it brings the same lack of freshness. The ego, from the Buddhist standpoint, is an attention span that moves and it controls and represses quite a lot. Similar to Rob Burbea’s “ways of looking” the subtle shift even in mindfulness to the different sense doors, like hearing, seeing, touch, smell, taste, or vibrations in general, has a subtle effort in each shift while you are doing mindfulness. It’s more restful than other states, but there’s always a “trying to figure out a problem” quality, or a sense of needing escape, that’s under the radar, and seeing it can help one rest it. The attention span can move, because you couldn’t function as a human, but adding that extra impulse of stress to begin a search is superfluous.
The Not-Knowing That Knows – Loch Kelly: https://youtu.be/FW33mNmcG14
Vipassana – Daniel Ingram: https://player.vimeo.com/video/250616410?h=b374ebf8e4
The stress with the push and pull at the level of the attention span is of course still clinging, or Stephan and Loch like to call it fixation, and Rob calls it a contraction. Basically, all three are involved with the sense of distance. Loch suggests that asking “where is the awareness aware from?” to relax fixation on distance, subject, and object, while resting as awareness. Stephan reminds that objects and awareness are not separated. From the conceptual understanding of Buddhist enlightenment the mind is taking in information with the senses and those senses and brain structures are filtering details into a human experience, and like a snowy village, so the mind is recreating experience, mapping out locations, and the Management in the mind is contracting or fixating in different ways and moving the attention span around to match up daydreams with satisfaction in the senses. A negative satisfaction to push something away and a positive satisfaction to bring something attractive closer, including trying to be in stillness and to escape to a mental construct of an awareness that’s behind and to stay away from irritating objects in front, for example. Awareness and substance are the same and they need to allow regular experiences that are in front of us, behind us, above, and below. Everything 3D is vibrating, including the Subject > Object > Time construct, except that construct can be seen to take vibration and tighten it up, along with a heightening of the perception of objects, along with contraction, and fixation. Awareness includes anything we see, taste, touch, smell, and hear. Thinking, and the sense of self with it, are sensations of mental processing and the effort required to work and manage things, but it also needs rest and relief from activity, including from the manager that is stuck in perception and manipulating shapes and experiences into something pleasing. If manipulation leads to a dry crimp of tedium in daily life, then the dry result will be predictable in meditation. That narrative construct is manipulating as if those automatic functions and habitual skills have no intelligence. To avoid confusion, we are not letting go of activity completely, but letting go of unnecessary manipulation.
For Loch, attention is a subtle trap because it creates the sense of subject and object duality from the get go. The smaller self can’t look for awareness. It has to relax into it, or another way of looking at it, awareness has to relax the contracted thinking, and the searching for a special location. The two modes are searching and resting searching. The vibrating awareness is a knowing that bypasses objectification. Both Stephan and Loch sound like Marion Milner with her “Wide Focus” in A Life Of One’s Own, where one thinks with the entire body, relaxes the tensions in the body, and the location of awareness doesn’t have to be contracted and located in the skull. Bodily intelligence can be included in awareness and not cut off. The way Loch puts it, awareness is “non-symbolic and non-conceptual,” yet because we have to think, there is a dance between symbolic labeling and objectification in order to function in the world. Yet there’s an automatic quality of habit formations that make up a skill and they are able to skillfully respond and manage the environment and there’s no requirement for a micro-manager in familiar environments. That’s when Flow states are likely to happen because a certain amount of self-measurement towards progress is needed for conventional satisfaction, but one can over measure to the point that activity becomes painstaking and over-regulated. Instead of being fearful of failure, you develop the skills in a more relaxed way and realize that if the skill is there in habits, they will respond. It doesn’t need more dry crimping to “make it go!” The mind integrates this knowledge slowly because of how strong the habit of forced initiative is.
Eckhart Tolle expertly explains what this transformation is, which is to include more of the formerly repressed thinking, wisdom, and knowledge. This is how people get stuck and can’t develop into their full personality, when they over-regulate for decades. “Gradually as your essence identity merges more, it uses your body and mind to manifest in this world and to bring about change too. First you just emanate presence, it begins to use your mind, your speech becomes less repetitive, more interesting, more creative. Probably you speak less than one used to, but what you say has significance and power to it, and it changes the way you think, because it shines into your mind and shines through all destructive, dysfunctional, and repetitive, compulsive, unconscious movements and thought patterns. It is the emergence of who you essentially are. Who you are is not a separate autonomous entity. Who you essentially are is deeply connected with the nature and the identity of the universe itself.” The Ego can’t cleanse itself and awareness is not stained. Even thoughts themselves don’t need to be totally obliterated because they are empty of permanence and they can just be and pass away. They are self-cleansing.
There are a lot of questions of course, and many Advaita Vedanta, or Buddhist books, are Q & A’s that try to get the conceptual to the non-conceptual. Jean Klein’s work is no different. The reality is that all these teachings have a sense of fraud when they go to extremes of oneness and renunciation. You really have to be an unknown monk dropping everything. You can’t be in bars, restaurants, enjoying travel, drugs, sex and pretend there’s no clinging. Deep down, most gurus are allowing plenty of money and success, plenty of consumption, and plenty of social goodies. As long as there is craving in the realm of bodily functions, there’s a certain amount of urgency and hunger, but these practices still reduce extreme amounts of urgency that aren’t helpful, and that in itself is a value. Subject > Object > Time, usually isn’t a problem until there’s a sense of emotional emptiness, ennui, or panic. Lack and temporary satiation is the typical conditioned existence. “At certain moments, when alone, we feel a great lack deep within ourselves. This lack is the central one giving rise to all the others. The need to fill this lack, quench this thirst, urges us to think and act. Without even questioning it, we run away from this insufficiency. We try to fill it first with one object then with another, then, disappointed, we go from one compensation to another, from failure to failure, from one source of suffering to another, from one war to another. This is the destiny to which a large part of humanity devotes itself. Some resign themselves to this state of being which they judge to be inevitable. Others at first deluded by the satisfaction brought about by these objects come to realize that they give rise to a surfeit and even to indifference. Some are brought to take a closer look. The object fully satisfies us for a short time during which we are back in our intrinsic nature, fulfillment. At the moment of fullness there is no awareness of an object.”
The way to relax the nerves, outside of completing goals is to move into equanimity towards objects. We are relaxing objectification, utility, trances, contraction, fixation, and manipulation with a sense of hurry and panic. [Subject > Object > Time] “The idea of being a person, an ego, is nothing other than an image held together by memory…Simply be aware of it. Observe how you function without the slightest idea of changing anything. Vigilance purifies the mind and sooner or later will place you knowingly beyond it. You encounter ups and downs in your search for the Self because you do not yet see things in their true perspective— as a whole. This instability will continue just as long as you consider yourself as the body and mind…In reality, you are looking for objectless love. Do not fall into the trap of loving objects. Then you are bitten by the poisonous snake.”
A good example to look at would be when people rest in regular city life. One could enjoy a sunny day and decide to bask. In order to make that easier, one could go to a bar, sit out on a sunny deck, enjoy the smells of sunbaked wood, and down a cold pint. If one has gotten a little bored of that, they can have a 2nd one, or more. One rests in a buzz of being with that bored narrative being relaxed. A sense of freshness and appreciation for being arises. Eventually that buzz wears out, if one drank enough, there’s inebriation and eventually a hangover. The narrative returns and so does the lack. The reality is that one could just rest in vibrations and let go of manipulating objects in perception and find refreshment without the beer. What is wanted internally is a rest from conditioning, like a cat purring in a sunbeam.
This deals with a lot of the questions which come from the conceptual mind that wants to understand or grasp, which all sound like some form of intellectual possession. Jean replies to a student as to how this practice will turn out for him and humanity in general. “I cannot give you a certificate.” Part of the confusion, is that there are so many disclaimers and exceptions that are brushed aside, but are really important. People need to know how to act in the world and conceptuality is going to be involved regardless of what Jean Klein says and he does know this as most gurus do. There is craving, intention, and action, but there are certain types that Jean Klein is not too worried about. This also includes what are obviously healthy forms of activity that are similar to Jhanas where a goal is aimed at, but because the results aren’t all or nothing, one can concentrate with a certain amount of ease. When skills are habitual, there’s also less of a need to grind that Subject, which is skilled, towards, the Object, which is under control, and Time, where habitual skills operate with deft and quickness. As momentum of the skill is attained, the need to control the outcome and worry about the goal is naturally dropped. When the skill isn’t there, this is not likely to happen. Habitual thoughts, and accurate intention, will naturally flow out and influence action. Jean Klein criticizes memory, but it’s a too general thing because memory is obviously operating in skills and it’s really only the self-consciousness that is let go of. Intuitive thoughts, actions, and impactful execution will create Flow and Joy.
“The musician who plays, who composes eight hours without stopping, may, from the outside, seem disciplined. But he enjoys his attention. The painter is not disciplined. When you enjoy what you are doing, spontaneously, there is attention…Attention is consciousness; discipline is mind…In the absence of yourself there is spontaneity. This presence is not objective. We can only be it, we can never think of it…Look around you with your own light, not from memory, not from the past. Inquire in you what is the most joyful for you; be one with it, and face all your surroundings, all your fellowships with this joyful feeling. Then life is joyful…When there is need to walk, you use your legs. When there are moments when you have nothing to think, why think?…Nirvana is the absence of the absence. When there is no one to attain and nothing to attain, there is paradise…”
Yet one can see that there’s a certain amount of tension in Flow, but purposeful and not frustrated. This tension of course can increase and spill into the activity, polluting the enjoyment with self-consciousness. There is also a need for rest, which Jean Klein recommends, and that is when there’s enough time to allow the restful meditative purposelessness, and it can replace the usual distractions people go for. You drain the conditioning when you rest the goal orientation. Just Be-ing is its own reward. “When you have understood, through your own experience, that the experiencer, as subject, keeps the object alive, then the observer becomes completely innocent and there is no goal or purpose. Then there is a fusion, I would say, between the observer and what you observe. This means that the observer has disappeared and the observed has disappeared also. What remains is only observing…” The relief creates a sense of appreciation for existence. “Not only this world, the stars, the moon, the whole universe has given us the opportunity to be. So this universe asks for—I would not say, for recognition, but for thanking…” When there’s subtle tension arising, just a reminder of interdependence of the self with the environment can bring back that sense of wholeness that conceptual separation normally splits off. “Follow the discovery in the same way you would follow a shadow to its substance. It will bring you to the most enjoyable. Do this with love every day, then all your activity will become enjoyable.”
Yet with activity, one is not without purpose and there are intentional goals, and it would be stupid to assert otherwise, and many Advaita books are so poorly written as to be totally misread where people think they have to be inert, or a reactive psychopath with no moral compass whatsoever. The reality is that spontaneous thinking and action in mentally healthy people tends to be more trustworthy, and the need for control is much less. Those who have poor habits would be better served with foresight, images of consequences, and cultivation. Someone who is over-cultivated, which I think is less rare, would require this practice of freshness and intuition much more, but a person who has cultivated a new skill would also have freshness in being able to engage with more arenas in the world. The joy of Flow would also increase in areas where new skills match new challenges. “This object feels warm and this feeling of warmth removes the jacket, a completely spontaneous action, but there is no one who acts…You defend your image, nothing else. You habitually objectify yourself…[But] why are we always asking for something? When you take yourself for a personal entity, you live in restriction. In this restriction, there is insecurity. So in this insecurity you feel the need to constantly demand, search. In our society there is only asking…You must first discover this unconditioned listening before any activity. Then you will see that every activity comes directly out of listening and vanishes in listening, and finally you will become established in this listening even during activity…[Listening] can never become an object. And, of course, there is no place for an independent entity…Perception, that is cognition, and naming, recognition, are natural functions which happen spontaneously without the need for a center of reference, an I, a propagator of opinion. But we go away from these immediate functions, we don’t wait for the unfolding of the perception, we don’t welcome what our surroundings offer us. When we live in memory we cut ourselves off from the universe, we live in isolation. This is the root of all suffering…You abide in the seeing and the rest takes care of itself just as eighty percent of our functioning takes charge of itself… [It’s] function without a doer…Function and non-function belong to the mind but they appear and disappear in stillness which is not a function…When the intellect has really understood it knows that it has no more role to play and spontaneously eliminates itself. Then you live in open light…Once all the elements of the situation are welcomed in our acceptance free from qualifying, the situation itself calls for action…We cannot act rightly or accurately from memory because no situation ever repeats. Every [activity], every meeting is new. Right acting comes out of the moment itself…”
Of course, when there’s spontaneous bad action, poor habits, and instinctual aggression, there’s suddenly a need for discipline. “Right social behavior calls for sensitivity but when there is no sensitivity we need rules…” The rules and regulations can also become a source of bad action in the sense that contexts and situations may call for ingenuity, not dogma. Just following rules may lead to unforeseen damage. “Codified action is never moral…[With] learned action there are moments of wrong emphasis which do not come from the flow of spontaneity. Only someone in the light can see this clearly.”
Ingenuity can arise from spontaneous thought that work things out automatically for most people. As anyone who’s ever meditated for any length of time, there are plenty thoughts that spontaneously arise, and many of them are reasonable and quite creative. Despite the poor descriptions in some of these meditation books, there are plenty of goals and intentions with these spontaneous thoughts, but they are devoid of excessive self-consciousness. There are of course goals with a normal sense of lack, because craving is operating constantly, though some cravings are less intense. It’s the creativity and ingenuity that can be crushed by the self-consciousness. “Right thinking is silent observation where thought comes up spontaneously…Spontaneity comes only when there is a total absence of yourself. You know, perfectly well, moments of spontaneity where there is no you and no other, where there is only acting. In the absence of you, of the ego, of calculative thinking, your acting is according to the situation, appropriate to the circumstances. When you keep your self-image, you can never be spontaneous. You can never think spontaneity, you can never try to be spontaneous. When there is observation without any intention, observation such as you find in a child, then you act according to the situation. When your body asks for food, you give your body food; when you are thirsty, you take water. It is not a problem because it does not go through the discriminating mind. When you are free from the self-image, you know it more and more, because you simply take note of the facts of how you function.” The only way through the contradictions in those statements is to accept a certain amount of functioning, which includes lack, craving, and action for satiation, especially with food and water. The difference is that dwelling and vibrating in freshness and Be-ing, may start to replace other conspicuous forms of consumption and certain activities are dropped because they aren’t as refreshing or restful. A relaxation of over-processing and excessive manipulation. Awareness always has wind in its sails. You let the meditation, meditate itself. Let the learning learn. Let the practicing practice itself. Let the working work, etc. There’s no need to tense the vibrations. The Morse code survival stress beeps slowly or quickly depending on the level of tension. By trusting your habits and senses to work properly on their own, one can save the fight or flight response for when needed.
These approaches help to bridge that problem of over-thinking in my Trap Doors episode, and one doesn’t have to abandon thinking completely and live without self-care. It allows more mental processing than a straight concentration practice would allow, and is aware that when a skill is a habit, it was never a stressful thing. The mind just felt that way because of the habit to over manage with a “do-er,” and the reality is that people can work with more effortlessness, though not complete effortlessness, and feel a more normal sense of tiredness. Daniel Kahneman does provide a sense of limit on mental processing and stress, but when presented with work, one just lets the habit skills activate normally, and you don’t need that dry crimp to pretend to turn the crank of a skill. It’s just there because it was practiced in the past. Only more practice will make skills more or less ready for challenges. Esther Hicks calls this the receptive mode, but it’s really exploring what is passively already there and working with that, and then adding skills and practices where needed.
When the do-er is not connected with the sense of success and failure, then that extra bit of energy can be saved. One can ask, “how much natural vibration and habit skill can get things done without a mental manager?” In a Freudian sense, it’s like an overactive Super-ego that’s micro-managing the Ego and depleting its energy. For Freud, all that spontaneous action is included in the Ego and the Reality Principle where the present moment is dealt with practically. The Super-ego is a conscience, but it can be overactive in certain people. A psychopath doesn’t have an effective Super-ego, or not enough to take note of. These practices won’t cure them. But for the general population, habits work automatically and automatic regulation of the body doesn’t require a micro-manager. It was over-exertion through and through. As Daniel Ingram points out “each of the qualities intrinsically know themselves,” and a Super-Knower that micro-manages after the experience has already happened is a self-conscious waste of processing power.
Starting As Awareness – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/R1MUMJfLdjY
As the mind prefers rest there is an integration that takes places where new activities can be contemplated and they don’t have that micro-manager leaping out, and there’s no need to try and “stop” those dangerous new ideas either. Those thoughts disappear on their own, and with an Ego that can sift reward and consequence, there’s less need for a panicked manager to block new ideas off. The mind and body feel more interconnected, less repressed, less disconnected, and there’s less splitting. Mind and body work together more seamlessly until there’s a need for a new skill to be developed. Unfamiliar locations can lead to mistakes, missteps, and are dangerous if one is absent minded. This is why cultivation is so important for a sense of balance.
There is a sense of ambivalence when skills and knowledge are not developed and one will find a full range of emotion because of that, including anger. The initial “hooray!” that is well deserved when this transformation happens yields a disclaimer. “You thought you would get away without more cultivation didn’t you?” No. Cultivation is forever, and all these authors do great pointing but buried later in their books are disclaimers like “cultivation is a lifetime process.” “Self-development lasts for a lifetime.” The difference is that you don’t have that monkey on your back like you used to and there’s a return to a sense of normal that you remembered from childhood and adolescence when the dry crimp wasn’t fully developed. You were only laying down an early mental script at that time. The Super-ego is still there but it manifests more like a consultant with suggestions that pop out, but the manager doesn’t need the Ego employee to be micromanaged, and there’s confidence that the Ego can compare positive and negative qualities and make its own decisions. The Id will still want instincts to be satisfied, but it’s now aware that there’s a thing called death and satisfaction is temporary. The instincts were a poor animal in the rain looking for a home, but now through all the meditative insights, it can reluctantly accept that life is a shimmering flash. All three Freudian constructs work together like a well practiced team, and all team members respect each other.
Beyond Mindfulness to Effortless Mindfulness: https://youtu.be/NqUXVRbsKo0
Adyashanti & Loch Kelly – The Journey After Awakening: https://youtu.be/MsVImg6imX8
A Life Of One’s Own – Marion Milner: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415550659/
Attention and Effort – Daniel Kahneman: https://rumble.com/v1gpl0j-attention-and-effort-daniel-kahneman.html
Esther Hicks – The Receptive Mode: https://youtu.be/LUdti3B3fLM
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
Knowing from personal experience of Flow states, no matter what, there will still be a need for rest. Certainly when people are tired after a interesting activity it’s not as contracted and strained as how you feel after an emotionally grinding activity with an over-active Super-ego, and much of the relief has to do with limiting focus to less objects of endeavour as well as slotting time in for resting. Marion Milner recounted that “I had found that there was a perpetual self-centred chatter which came between me and my surroundings, and me and myself, and till I had learnt how to silence it I was liable to live in a world of distorted make-believe, cut off from any vital contact between my real needs and my real circumstances. When I could break through it, and only then, was I able to see clearly enough to choose those circumstances under which happiness could grow; to learn, for instance, to limit my activities, not to run after every new thing, not to expend all my energies on the effort to keep up with what other people did just because they did it, so that I had no vitality left for needs that were personal to me.” There’s room for the contracted thinking but contraction is let go of more often and there is now rest from conditioning that can accompany rest in sleep, and it can also be included in pockets of activities adding to the flow state, because these are learning goals, and those goals are less pressured when the micro-manager takes a permanent vacation. Thinking creates a momentum, but momentum is rationed for areas of satisfaction that are accessible. Drop the inaccessible and take on the accessible. More skills make more things accessible.
With freedom comes the opening of a Pandora’s Box that Stephan describes, and the reality is that the Dark Night of the Soul is really just shadow work on weak skills and the acknowledgement of repressed pain. “People dealing with these unacknowledged parts may feel quite awakened, spacious, and free in most of their being most of the time but have pockets of dissociation and fixation that have never seen the light and are still seething with unexpressed emotion.” Because of his background in therapy Stephan recommends the usual expressing and acknowledging of those voices that want to be heard. Whether it’s breathing in the suffering of the self and breathing out Metta, or many other psychotherapeutic modalities, those deeply wired traumas have voices that want to be heard, acknowledged, listened to, and loved.
As the mind disentangles from over-conceptualizing there’s a possibility of connecting with people from different backgrounds who have the same awareness. “That movement from inner peace or a meditation state, you start to realize ‘Oh! This person is the same as me.’ There’s a brightness. When you see that light shining bright there is a relief and connection that is seeing from open hearted awareness.” Work becomes more like a “trusting. A continuous intuition,” like a readiness for a Flow state, or Wu Wei, Effortless Action, where Flow is still based on skill, but habitual skills arise of their own accord without a manager, and failure is just a learning opportunity, not a total and complete permanent shame for this conceptual identity. The hyper-vigilance of the conceptual self can be put down.
Loch Kelly, Author, “Shift Into Freedom,” on the Path of Awakening: https://youtu.be/LGXmM8cO1b8
Wake Up Now – Stephan Bodian: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780071742221/
Shift Into Freedom – Loch Kelly: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781622033508/
Beyond Mindfulness – Stephan Bodian: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781626259720/
The Way of Effortless Mindfulness – Loch Kelly: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781683642329/
The Unconditioned – Adyashanti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22LUSgtIt8c
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/
There can be a remorse with past practice, like it was a waste of time, but this isn’t the case. Remembering how bad concentration was when first starting meditation, a direct path could easily have been misunderstood, over-conceptualized, and lead to no perceivable benefit. The mind needs to gain a Flow state, like the 1st jhana, to feel how the striving mind can create balanced effort, create momentum, and then dive down and surrender that very striving mind to let the momentum take over, which leads to Flow pleasure in the traditional sense. That up and down of tension and release is necessary because the Super-ego uses subterfuge to co-opt the meditation practice and concentration can pierce through that façade towards stillness with a bullet of momentum. Dropping all the doing is safer when there’s so much good conditioning from past practice. When people feel they need to make big changes, which some times are needed, there’s now a new practice that can refresh the mind from conditioning outside of sleep. With excessive boredom, the mind can be pushed into a corner where there are few options for engagement, and people can masochistically go for goals that teeter into over-striving and burnout, because the mind is restless and bored with what is. Meditation helps to refresh from crumpled boredom and what was boring starts to look fresh with vibrations working on their own and self-releasing. A good way to simplify the practice is to reflect on how much relaxation is passively allowed while doing what is outwardly seen as a form of assertive activity. This is a practice each person will work on in their own way because everyone has different goals and different skills to attain.
From a Theravadin perspective, this is a danger where temptation can take over and those lower vibrations can come back if cultivation is poor. The Eightfold Path needs to be looked at so that people at a minimum are able to keep hold of Right Action, because there’s really no healing if more damage is done. If meditators aren’t careful, they can go unconscious and realize that things aren’t completely integrated and a painful realization is that cultivation is still needed, even if a lot of the old illusion and pointless striving is seen through. An even worse realization is that some people are so personality disordered that no modality truly cures. This can be seen with monks who smoke, drink, have sex with their students and engage in violence. There are also disturbing political movements that can come out of these practices. People look at the unenlightened world as broken and it needs a complete over haul. Whether it’s the environment, social justice, or health initiatives, one can turn into a weird guru or political leader that engages in all kinds of Wrong Action in order to force change on society. A lot of personal Freudian displacement can manifest and scapegoating can arise where personal failures can be blamed on others. There is blame in the world, but people have to be so careful not to project their own blame onto others. This blind area forgets that when rock climbing, I would rather be the skilled rock climber than an enlightened person who’s attempting advanced rock climbing because he or she has their head up their ass with Enlightenment. Weak skills are still weak when Enlightened.
Many scandals have come to light over the years, like with Sogyal Rinpoche who also taught a direct path to Enlightenment. If it’s clear that empathy is not going to be developed in this lifetime for an individual, what happens if they are the one preaching an easy path for others? What if a person has little cultivation? The reality is that there’s really no development for them, other than skillful uses of false narratives to justify their exploitation. A lot of what manifests as “Crazy Wisdom” is the underlying dysfunctional crazy personality. That personality can be a turd with no conscience whatsoever. A lot of people are meditating to get rid of an excessive conscience, but what if there isn’t any conscience to begin with? Alan Watts said of neurotic man that “this is the problem of all self-conscious beings. They feel responsibility. Then they feel responsibility for being responsible, and responsible for being responsible. There’s no end to it.” For someone who doesn’t have a conscience, they don’t need to subtract anything, they need to increase a conscience, if that’s even possible.
Stop Chasing What You Think Will Make You Happy – Alan Watts: https://youtu.be/1TbfkTJTmxo
Sogyal Rinpoche Allegations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogyal_Rinpoche#Abuse_allegations
There’s a lot of sensitivity related to mental illness and Cluster B personality disorders, like Anti-social, Narcissistic, Borderline, and Histrionic, which are quite aggressive to put it lightly. Their illness can create mental illness in you through repeated trauma. You want to treat their disorders with some delicacy, but at some point boundaries are required, and there has to be an acceptance that meditation is not a cure all. This example of Sogyal has to be couched in alleged-ness of course, but it serves as an example for many other real situations of the cycle of abuse regardless if one accusation or another is true or not. A good portion of them probably are. Yet, it should be easy to see that enlightenment isn’t blind obedience, submission to beatings, and forced sexual encounters. The Out Of The Fog website, that has a section of statistics on the prevalence of personality disorders, at the height of 8.2% on one study for Cluster B, one has to wonder how many more have an impaired Super-ego very close to that level. It’s one thing when you’re hurting yourself with your personality defects, but it’s another when most of the damage is reserved for the victim. One has to be skeptical of claims that Enlightenment is for everyone, or that we are all ONE consciousness, and if you can access that consciousness, you are tapping into something that is in common with others. That’s true but only to an extent, and only for some people. It can be a projection where the victim is filling in the gaps of empathy that only reside in themselves. Some people have completely different phenomenological experiences and different levels of awareness. It’s a different world for each individual. Certain things will definitely be the same, but there are always different ways of perceiving reality and different levels of development.
When people exhibit behaviors that are so far from what an enlightened master is supposed to inhabit, there’s nothing intelligent about ignoring those signals. In fact many practitioners who move from teacher to teacher are exactly those types who are disappointed again and again, and will then explain, “but this one teacher was different. They actually were enlightened in their private behavior and I learned the most from them.” You are essentially shopping for teachers. These stories of disappointment unfortunately are common. When looking over Stephan Bodian’s practice history, Renata McNay from Conscious TV was asking about Stephan’s “Zen teacher who was an alcoholic…” Ian McNay interviewed Paul Holman who explained that he “realized that some of these teachers didn’t have basic human values. Usually it was men with a wonderful intellectual grasp, no doubt some extra-ordinary experiences and insights, but Boy, some of the values, they haven’t gotten to pre-school…You have to go through that whole process of submitting to a teacher and sometimes getting disillusioned.” These are important warnings for the uninitiated, because the naïve are the main target because their ignorance allows this abuse and sometimes justifies it when they believe in “crazy wisdom” or other excuses.
Sogyal Rinpoche scandal: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6539099/dark-behind-the-mindfulness-how-a-buddhist-guru-abused-followers-on-the-hunters-doorstep/
Divine Madness – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_madness
Sogyal Rinpoche and the Crazy Wisdom tradition: https://tzal.org/sogyal-rinpoche-and-the-crazy-wisdom-tradition/
Crazy Wisdom, or just Crazy?: https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/rigpa-abuse/
Trap Doors: https://rumble.com/v1grer7-meditation-trap-doors.html
Saints and Psychopaths by William L. Hamilton: https://rumble.com/v1gosbb-saints-and-psychopaths-by-william-l.-hamilton.html
Out Of The Fog: https://outofthefog.website/personality-disorder-statistics#pd1
Wright, Dale S. (2010), Humanizing the Image of a Zen master: Taizan Maezumi Roshi. In: Zen Masters, edited by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 245
When the student becomes more skilled, and whether they’ve learned about transference or not, the illusion that the guru is better than oneself can be shattered. They may even be worse. Like realizing you’re in a Cult, one was putting oneself down and giving Prestige to essentially a complete stranger. It’s not just gurus who can do this, but intimate partners, employers, professionals, and experts learn quickly that people with low self-esteem are easy to control and exploit. They use malicious criticism to make you project Prestige on them and they can control you. If you make a mistake at work, everything you do is a mistake, if you fail to complete a responsibility, you are always irresponsible, if you are missing some knowledge, you need to be completely dependent on the professional for all choices. Alan Watts describes this game really well. “You are aware of yourself in terms of experience, because there isn’t any difference, but that always escapes people. So long as you don’t understand that, you can be talked into going into all kinds of weird excursions, and just so long as you believe it, you’re a sucker. It takes a tremendous confidence and nerve finally to say ‘don’t pull that stunt on me any more. I see through your game.’ Gurus are very clever at putting you down, but they are just trying to see how strong you are, testing you out, see if they can hoodwink you. So long as they can, they are going to go on doing it, they are going to get you to the point where they can’t do it to you anymore…When you can’t be fooled, you don’t ask the question anymore…If you go to a teacher, and ask for spiritual instruction, you are by doing that confusing yourself, because you are looking for what you are asking for outside, as if someone else could give it to you, as if you didn’t have it. The teacher knows that as long as you do that, you haven’t understood. [Though] he doesn’t just tell you to go away. He tries to give them a put down, as if to say ‘you have a great long distance to go yet. Your attainment is not at all perfect.’ They are always talking about other sects and other schools and they ‘haven’t really gotten the point,’ so that you keep losing faith in yourself and feeling ‘my goodness I haven’t yet attained this thing.’ That keeps you working. It’s like a pickpocket who stole your watch and is selling it to you. So long as you can be talked out of yourself, you deserve to be. You become aware of this tremendous gamesmanship…and you realize that the state of development that you are in now is no better than anyone else’s state.”
We have a feeding part of the mind and a vibratory part that shines consciousness very much like anyone else, regardless of whether they are wearing robes, nice suits, have an expensive watch, or drive a nice car. It’s just colors and shapes, sounds, and sensations. The intellectual side can develop more skills than others, but a lot of that knowledge is simply unavailable because people don’t want to ‘give away the farm,’ so you have to discover it for yourself to stake a claim in the economy. You almost have to have a contempt for the psychologist that knows less than you, or the guru, who is really a bum and a grifter, to get a more realistic view of the human condition. There are good teachers, but it’s quite likely you will get scammed along the way.
The reality is that any human who has desire has a part of their brain that wants to hump and screw, drink and smoke, and enjoys power dramas. Expectations have to greatly reduce in order to be a compass for reality for oneself and others. When looking at deeper forms of enlightenment, when that personality shines out in absurd or awkward ways, there’s still more work to do, even for the so called Master Guru. For Rob Burbea, the mind needs to look at perception itself and how we look at solidity, shapes, and colors. What makes this awareness conscious of objects is the feeding mechanism itself. The mind takes in reality through the senses and makes a recreation in the mind that tenses, fixates, and trances over shapes and colors with survival stress. The entire fabrication of experience has to be seen through so that the reason we can notice anything in the senses is because we need to feed on something, and recognizing shapes and objects is a prerequisite for survival. This isn’t to say that the world is The Matrix, and we are seeing an illusion and fall into solipsism, but that the mind is really looking to lean on these shapes and memories for satiation. Relaxing our fixation on shapes helps them to fade and also some of the underlying stress and conditioning that was ignored and treated like an Ananda, or the Great I, and fooling ourselves. “As the push and pull and the reactivity begins to die down, our perceptions begin to change. Our push and pull to experience influences perception…Experience begins to fade…No objects no problem…The immeasurability of all things.” So the size of the drama depends on the push and pull and the push and pull learns to do that less and less as it sees the instability manifest in perception itself. All our concepts, no matter how refined, don’t contain ultimate reality. There’s always something that we can’t measure, and hence unreliability, uncertainty, and frustration is possible. The process of contracting the mind and narrowing focus with fixation and going in a trance, can be seen to be relying on what’s unreliable. Even more under the radar is “identifying with more subtle phenomena, such as consciousness, is a more subtle form of clinging.” This is often with the sense of direction with the subject moving around and landing on consciousness and splitting objects to be “over there” in a location.
We are animals, and like animals, we have perception for a particular purpose, which is to exploit the environment for our survival. To return to the suchness of interdependence, like in the example in my video Nirvana, to pull back fixation on those shapes, and to see their interdependence, relaxes that sense of the feeding self at the same time, with a wider panoramic view of things, with an understanding that feeding and fixation has to be more sparing in order to maintain that sense of freedom. You can aim attention at sensation and perception, see how it’s built up and exposed to entropy, and gently relax the need to use stress to cling and control what is unreliable. It’s okay to let contraction happen, because you need to feel into it, and then relax those muscles. The mental processing can be felt and then it can naturally relax when the depleting energy and pain are seen clearly. The updated view is that the clinging isn’t worth it because those particles move and shift and therefore are unreliable. There may be situations where clinging is worth it, but each person has to decide for themselves how much to let go. The imitative Super-ego is quite manipulative and will adjust itself into different roles via simulation and be whatever “Enlightened” person you want it to be. Adyashanti said “awareness really isn’t being The Watcher, and it’s not really being The Witness. Both of those are what Egos do…Resting as awareness isn’t a state of doing it’s a state of being. You can’t really do resting-as-awareness…Awareness is already present…You relinquish the Do-er, that thing inside of you that’s made up in your mind that’s always trying to get something right, understand it, do it correctly….Just rest…Awareness is letting be everything right now…Letting go of the neurotic need to understand and the neurotic need to do…and then there can be a resting.” The mind of course creates lots of temptation to go back to more understanding and more doing but resting can be compared to those activities so that resting is preferred naturally. Resting will be with less conceptualization, symbolizing, strategizing, planning, and more suchness, which was always vibrating under those layers of conceptualizing. For Adyashanti, it’s the consistency of resting that’s difficult for most because the doing mind becomes insecure and the impulse peaks towards action, but if you wait long enough it then settles down. Just a non-judgmental look at the pain of the lack, and a patience, to wait, is enough for most situations.
Rest As Awareness – Adyashanti: https://youtu.be/hIX_zk5NN6g
It’s the search for independent entities, and not finding them, that makes the mind let go of the clinging more deeply at the level of perception. This is especially so when the searching is understood to a be search for a permanent place to feed, but if all that is found are vibrating particles that shift, decay, and change in unpleasant ways, then progressively the searching rests more and more. With the melting away of clinging to perceptions, including the sense of the body, subject-object, and consciousness, which takes a lot of subtlety, perception itself fades. “It is clinging that is actually a doing. Less clinging is less doing.” From Rob’s Mahayana perspective, it’s the belief in a permanent solid reality that is independent of cause and effect that creates structures for the mind to create a subject around, or a perch to lay claim to as an independent spot for feeding. Subject > Wanting To > Exploit > An Object > Through Time-Space-Memory. “The experience, the perception of a phenomenon, depends on clinging. For a thing to appear as that thing for consciousness, to be consolidated into an experience, it needs a certain amount of clinging.” The ignorance of entropy in all experiences and the craving to maintain consciousness allows experience and a sense of time. “We may be tempted to answer that an absence of craving, identification, and delusion will reveal the world ‘as it is’. But equanimity – the dying down of the mind’s push and pull with respect to phenomena – does not reveal a world of things, in their pristine ‘bare actuality’, ‘just as they are’, stripped only of the distortions of ego projections and gross [thought proliferation]. Rather, as meditative skill develops, we see that without clinging, phenomena do not appear at all. Not only how they appear, but that they appear, is dependent on the fabricating conditions of clinging…Aware of the clarity and the immensity of this empty space, notice how every thing that arises is held within it effortlessly.”
Then to let go of a separation between awareness and contents, Rob asks “is it possible to see all phenomena as having the same ‘substance’ as awareness?…With practice, as we concentrate on it, the sense of separation between the mind or awareness, on the one hand, and the vacuity, on the other, naturally begins to gradually fade, and they move toward fusion. As they do so, the sense and appreciation of emptiness become more direct and involve less and less conceptualization…Rather than trying to find emptiness or a vacuity, the practice is best conceived of as a search for the inherently existing self – and then the realization that it cannot be found, because it does not exist. This realization is what is fundamental.” We have to use concept to search and not find…or find vibrations of structures made up of an undefinable smaller number of parts. That’s how concept helps with the non-conceptual. Concepts have the problem of Reliability. The concepts can’t hold all the detail of reality so the addictive thinking on what reality is becomes less necessary and the world appears to be less safe and unreliable as it always was. Some opinions will feel more wise and reliable, and others are abandoned. Wherever the mind bends, is that a reliable form of pleasure? If what I’m relying on for happiness is long lasting enough for my lifespan, then it IS more reliable for happiness, but if I look at weaknesses in joints in structures or building blocks, then I can see its contingency and let go of the need for conditions to remain the same. The reaching out with desire starts to relax spontaneously. “…It is an almost purely meditative examination of phenomena as they present themselves, and it deliberately tries to leave aside any further assumptions or speculations about them…The conjecture that there are fundamental building blocks of experience which exist independently and at which we could finally arrive in some mode of objective perception is not tenable. It is not borne out by any more thorough investigation of experience. ‘Clearer’ and ‘deeper’ seeing reveals only that what is perceived is dependent on the way of looking.”
I cannot find myself – Adyashanti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke76fK-Jcis
For a lot of people, awareness is where to plant the flag and that’s all one wants from the path. “But without more careful investigation, this will often merely amount to a refusal to pick up more unfamiliar concepts, and a temporary quieting of thought. Without something more powerful to undermine them, attachment to habitual views and concepts – such as of a subtle sense of self, of objects, of the present moment, and of awareness – will typically return unabated…Over and over, watching phenomena emerge from and then melt back into the space, see if you can practise letting all phenomena belong to this space of awareness…Notice that the awareness itself does not struggle or become entangled with what appears within it. As you sense the arising of any impulses to control or interfere with phenomena, let the undisturbed nature of the space support a relinquishing of that craving…Even as an object fades, experiment with sustaining the way of looking unremittingly on whatever more refined perception replaces the initial one.”
Using concept and searching to find its validity in experience, is a powerful method but it still requires a lot of practice to create that peace of not-knowing, uncertainty, and not putting emotional investment in what is empty, which deep down is the value of these practices. With the ability to see Chandrakirti’s 7 fold reasoning, the search for a permanent shape of oneness or permanent smaller objects in phenomenological reality or seeing that conceptual time, measured in units as an agreed upon convention, that it’s really only movement and vibration, this all helps to teach the clinging potential to start to mistrust theory and it’s excitements. Rob said, “…knowing, pointing away from [some kind of consciousness noun entity] with an ethereal substance that ‘does’ the knowing, or is ‘aware’….[The reality is that] knowing needs a known. Thus awareness is awareness of an appearance, a perception. No matter how subtle or seemingly all-inclusive the perception, and object known, ‘knowing’ is meaningless…Consciousness and its object depend on each other. Such contingency cannot ultimately be one of cause and effect though. Being mutually dependent, each would have to precede the other in order to be a cause for the other, which is clearly impossible. Rather, they always arise together. Arising simultaneously, there is no time for either to cause the other.”
Time is basically a video, a photograph snapshot, a grasping of conscious experience. “Knowing and known, awareness and perception, always go together. They cannot be separated so that we have one without the other. They are not truly separate phenomena; yet they cannot be said to be ‘one’ either…Both consciousness and perception are thus empty.” So there is a conventional cause and effect but it requires memory, similar to how photos and videos capture images, which means the time has already passed, which allows present moment reflection, and one realizes that the present moment is short-term memory. Similar to how people view dependent co-arising, where there’s a linear development from craving to clinging, with fictional time gaps and spaces in between, in reality, everything is a support for everything else, and reducing the support of clinging, gradually weakens the support for craving. The conceptual mind tries to conceptualize cause and effect with consciousness “screens,” “containers” of varying sizes, and sub-atomic particle “containers” can betray the same kind of irritation because the interdependence is through and through, and we are still stuck with provisional “containers” in our paradigms, and finally time can now be seen through. Time is just vibration and movement with imperceptible supports beyond trillions of movements. It’s ungraspable. The containers of conception tighten the vibrations in the attempt to understand, control, and exploit. Searching for a concrete block of 3:17 in the afternoon just points to vibratory movement. The “do-er” in the meditation was also playing with small units of time that we call the present moment and navigating to the “earlier” part or the “later” part, but those are just containers that burst into endlessly completed vibration. The cause and effect vibrations are actually moving so fast so as to be really just supports, and instead of trying to endlessly parse out smaller symbolic perceptions of particles, the exhaustion of looking for an ultimate unit of time gives way to surrender in that arena too. The Subject > Object > Time crimp is becoming boring and the mind starts to relinquish that dried up burnt piece of toast that is the repetitive hypervigilant control center of the brain. “Push and Pull depends on object, object depends on push and pull. An object for consciousness depends on attention. Attention needs an object…Root delusion is believing in that trinity of subject, object, and time.” Right at the level of perception, subtle intention is rummaging through shapes and forms in perception looking for scraps to eat. “Maybe there’s some burnt toast over here…”
The Subtlety of Dependent Origination – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/9553/
Boredom of conditioning is the conceptual brain trying to sample the environment, and conversely, resting in vibration brings counterintuitive refreshment in the relaxation of conditioning. You are enjoying Being just as it is. The freshness continues because the searching mind feels the dry burnt toast of worn out conditioning right at the beginning of excitement to do this or that thing, and the searching realizes that the refreshing spring is within. This is what gurus are talking about when they say, “what you are looking for is yourself…what you are searching for is inside.” Again, I can drain hankering in the nervous system by giving it want it wants temporarily, or I can drain the push and pull of the nervous system and find freshness without typical objects. This is a world with more choice.
Excursions that are accessible are great, and they will add zest, Flow, and novelty, but refreshment is still there, and there’s now the ability to enjoy being while you’re on the trip, when you reach the destination, and when you go home. It clicks in the mind because instead of tightening the vibrations this way or that way, it’s just letting the vibrations be that will bring back the refreshment from conditioning, and the confusion ends. Even the trap of “I’ve got it! I figured it out! AHHHHH!” is just more burnt pieces of toast and the searching can sit down in its rocking chair and vibrate in a sunbeam. Trying to point at vibrations, and me telling you about vibration, and to search for them like an explorer, is just more tightening of those vibrations and frying. The mad proselyte inside each of us that is yelling about Jesus at the street corner can smile and stop bothering people about dogma and go somewhere else and enjoy more vibrations.
With the relief there can be a mixture of fear and terror from time to time when the mind realizes these vibrations will vibrate in different, and possibly non-sentient ways with entropy, decrepitude, and death. With the healing there’s a sickness-throbbing where the old conditioning is starting to look sick to the mind which leads to a further reorganization where the mind doesn’t want to go back. The conceptual mind needs to believe based on concrete evidence and when evidence fails to materialize in the meditation scanning practice, it lets go of its own accord. Vibrations are vibrating out of ego control whether egos like this or not. Ego constructs go into weird territory where they try to imagine consciousness without life which is a barrier that egos can’t go beyond and they slowly begin to accept this. Images of voids, being incased in coffins, or trying to imagine what it’s like to be cremated, deposited into an urn, and scattered in the ocean, and eaten by fish, and reabsorbed by the planet, and hoping that the planet harbors a nice place to vibrate for eternity, and maybe another person will eat the fish that ate part of you and you reincarnate into them, are more images and imaginations that limited egos do, which is to find a way to escape. The food chain continues and what consciousness will exist that knows “what it feels like” after death is totally unknowable at this time in your life and may always remain a not-knowing. The not-knowing is here now, and doesn’t arise or vanish. The not-knowing was quite peaceful before you were born, is so now, and will be so again after you die. This is why the conceptual brain needs to feed on the pleasure of concentration which helps with the depression and despair.
How vibrations free is that it brings one to perception and lets go of searching through memory and manipulating memories, but of course, it’s a balancing act where practicality and relief are continually readjusting. One can feel a lot of reorganization in the brain like Eckhart Tolle describes above, and Jung’s Individuation, where unintegrated intuitive materials can rise up, reengage, and collaborate with the tense solidified dominant parts of the mind, now that vibrations aren’t dammed up and water is allow to move. Suchness in the present moment with less conceptualization is the compromise for daily life functioning. Resting in perception as the only reality, after long practice, betrays consciousness as a stable perch to cling to because there is an act of manipulating short-term memory to create a present moment and a location for “awareness” is a tense and tightly packed Subject at this point in time looking for dense “Objects” in the future. All conceptualization and manipulation of memory is connected with conditioned pain at more subtle levels. Loch and Stephan call this resting in the don’t-know-mind and resting fixation. Burbea suggests relaxing the reactive push and pull towards anything, including consciousness, and Shunryu Suzuki calls it Beginner’s Mind, which points to the mental processing of tired fried narratives as being the problem. The searching may want to leave the sunbeam and get out of the rocking chair, but finds that it’s just fine with sitting down for a little bit longer. Maybe you’ve had enough sun and now it’s good to move into the shade. The reintegration continues between activity and resting. One is trying into integrate real life and normal functioning with these insights.
Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind – Shunryu Suzuki: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781590302675/
Seeing That Frees – Rob Burbea: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780992848910/
Seeing That Frees Edits: http://www.robburbea.com/teachings/seeing-that-frees-edits/
Rob Burbea Transcripts: https://airtable.com/shr9OS6jqmWvWTG5g/tblHlCKWIIhZzEFMk/viw3k0IfSo0Dve9ZJ
Introduction to The Middle Way – Chandrakirti: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781570629426/
Nagarjuna’s Precious Garland – Jeffrey Hopkins: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781559392747/
Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html
Richard Hayes summarizes the Dignaga and the importance to understand reality better so as to live accordingly to it. “While for many of the later Buddhist epistemologists the task of the philosopher was to arrive at correct understanding, for the skeptical tradition of earlier Buddhism the task of the philosopher was more to remove all forms of false security that blind one to one’s own unimportance and fragility. Among the most insidious forms of false security, according to the skeptic, is the confidence that arises from believing that one understands. This undeserved self-confidence, seen as the source of arrogance and lack of humility, could also be seen as fundamentally incompatible with the pervasive spirit of compassion within Buddhism. Compassion, the ability to be responsive to the pains and tolerant of the weaknesses of others, is most easily cultivated by those who are acutely aware of their own pains, for if one does not know one’s own pain then one does not know pain at all, and if one cannot tolerate one’s own weaknesses then one cannot tolerate weaknesses in others… The only realities to which we have any access at all are the realities of our own private experiences, about which we can know only that when analysed they are full of internal inconsistencies and can therefore not correspond to things as they are independent of our experiences of them.” This is the real learning orientation. One is humble and bows towards uncertainty where dogma, paradigms, and theories, as useful as they are, can periodically melt into not knowing. It’s the image of the conceptual snake as an infinity symbol devouring it’s own tail into non-conceptuality. The emotion released from these exercises is Pathos.
Dignaga on the Interpretation of Signs – Richard Hayes: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9789401078061/
Thought and Meditation – Rob Burbea: https://rumble.com/v1gqufd-thought-and-meditation-rob-burbea.html
These skills as you practice them can provide a lot to work with when facing pain and dying. Imagery, focusing on the vibratory quality of the pain, which reduces the amplification, and focusing on areas that feel better, makes the present moment less fearful. The mind usually wants to run away, but all those old pleasures and entertainments will at some point fail to provide solace when injury or disease is much more chronic or severe. The skill to be able to relax perception becomes important. The opposite of running away is actually to go forward to examine the pain vibrations. Just the examination of the pain reduces the amplification emotionally, and what openings are created can reduce the sense of overwhelm. Listening to the pain, parenting it, enjoying the gaps in the vibrations of the pain, and also being curious and examining the pain with a sense of wonder, all reduce the amplification and sense of overwhelm. Trungpa Rinpoche summarized it as a way to not respond to aversion by searching for external comfort, and temporarily making a home for oneself there. It’s that internal running away that becomes problematic when you are forced into a position where running away is not possible. “A complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people, experiencing everything totally without reservations or blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.” This is idealistic of course, but even approaching death with these abilities is a lot better than the version of you before meditation where the damming and tightening was so tight as to decapitate oneself into split off egos looking for control. Any sense of density in perception has some element of Buddhist fabrication and clinging to hold perceptions together.
The emotional emptiness and lack that is embedded in the control mechanism, may lead to many great achievements and accomplishments, but it can build a sense of emptiness when people feel they have to generate a deep sense of lack first as a motivator to get satisfaction elsewhere. There can be an exciting zest with some activities, but as time passes with the practice, one decides that trips should be enjoyed from beginning to end. Enjoying vibration as it is and finding a home wherever your vibrations are, can drop the Sisyphusian project of pushing the rock up the hill with the hope that this time, lack will disappear permanently. It can’t, and conditioning will make the lack return again and again. Many projects will start to lose their luster with that understanding.
People with intractable shame connected to a hypervigilant Super-ego start to realize that as long as their Ego can learn, their shame can be excessive and counterproductive. Identities surrounding shame, which are commonly studied in psychology, may actually solidify old habits and repeat them in order to keep the false identity intact. It’s as if the survival mechanism prefers the false identity, because seeing through the illusion is a scary form of ego death. Authority figures, including mischievous Gurus, medical professionals, coaches, psychologists, and other so called “experts” use repeated subtle put downs to solidify your Super-ego and take your independence away from you. In extreme cases, thoughts of suicide are entertained as the only way out because rigid, solid, permanent identities look incurable to oneself and to judgmental others outside oneself, who also confirm that “yeahhh you ARE a contemptable piece of shit!” Those put downs make them feel better, and it’s an easy layup if people consistently pass the ball of their self-esteem to them. You stop giving transference to others. One’s work is really between the information given and the practice itself. The fear vanishes when a deeper rest is found in vibration, movement, learning, cultivation, and the living proof of change.
Guided Meditation on Chronic Pain: https://rumble.com/v1goucj-meditation-and-chronic-pain-various-authors.html
How do I stay in the present moment when it feels unbearable? – Thich Nhat Hanh: https://youtu.be/t5Ka2RS0UC4
The Wisdom of No Escape – Pema Chödron: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781590307939/
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/