Thought and meditation - Rob Burbea

A lot of the following material comes from one of my favourite masters Rob Burbea, so I would like to let the audience know, if they don’t know already, that he’s fighting pancreatic cancer. Yet despite that he’s still has the fortitude to teach, for example his new retreat teachings have been uploaded about Imaginal practice, and there are links below. Rob like the rest of us is impermanent and the gifts he provides and are not guaranteed. If you are in the position to do so you can donate via this link to help with his expenses: See: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html

Harassed by thinking

Instructions for dealing with thought and meditation can be confusing. Are we supposed to stop thinking? It’s an important question. Thinking in a painful way, for some people, can lead to suicide. With misunderstandings and poor instruction, the practitioner of meditation has some hurdles to overcome. When the practitioner tries to stop thinking, they will find that the results are only temporary, and they’ve suffered a lot of strain in the attempt. At other times the practitioner gives up development and surfs on interesting thoughts and concepts. If thinking is allowed in meditation, what kind of thinking is good thinking?

Working with thought and meditation

For the meditator the first obstacle to get through is to think that enlightenment is about getting rid of thought. Any prior instructions, mistranslations in books that demonize thought, have to abandoned to develop further. Rob’s argument for this is that the 2nd jhana is a concentration state where thoughts begin to drop away, yet there is so much more to Buddhism than two concentration states. Stopping thought permanently for Rob is like “amputating our humanity.”

His goals for his students are that we should be able:

“To be free with thought.”
“To discern and let go of unhelpful types of thinking.”
“To develop the ability to think well, and be bold thinkers.”

Experimentation

This problem can be approached with an experimental attitude of the practitioner. If the meditator notices, certain types of thinking are actually harmless and others are extremely draining. One method to do this is to develop types of thinking that lead to calmness, love, and wisdom, and abandoning thoughts that relate to greed, ill will, and harmfulness. Purposeful, fair thinking and actions lead to less worry and strain, than those other types of thinking and actions.

Rob’s test to see if we are thinking properly is to see if we are embroiled in thinking and have trouble stopping, versus thinking that allows us to stop at any time. Another method of thinking is to develop calm first. Our thoughts are different in a calm mind than in an agitated mind. For Rob these skills are just as important as mindfulness skills. At lot of why we are afraid of death is really the emotional death. The physical pain will always be scary but the emotional pain is something we can work with, and emotional pain is connected with thinking. By developing habits to keep coming back to the breath, it becomes easier to interrupt our thoughts when they are embroiled. When those thoughts subside we can then choose to use skillful thinking instead.

Ouroboros

Alchemy snake — Snake eating its own tail

Buddhism is taught via concepts, because no one can abide in another person’s reality and show us. How it works is like the ouroboros, or the snake eating its tail. When the practitioner sees their own mental movements and is able to find the label that it corresponds to and understand how it works, then the concept is finally internalized. This is true of all knowledge that requires us to learn by doing. The concepts are just pointers to the non-conceptual. Then the concept can be put to the side to let the real experience inform. This is how the practitioner who reads too much can prioritize their first hand experience so the benefits they read about can be enjoyed.

Papañca

Rob’s talks have a plethora of pointers that can help us get back to the non-conceptual knowledge. One way is sweeping the body and noticing how obsessive thinking narrows attention, and sometimes tightens and contracts areas of the body. By sweeping and relaxing the tension in the body, the attention is freed up. The practitioner can then “relax, and allow the turmoil” of obsessive thoughts. Seeing how the damage can happen quickly lets the meditator know that certain types of thoughts are unhelpful. These unhelpful types of thoughts have certain patterns and characteristics that most people are aware of. They are called Papañca in Pali, which complicates thinking into emotionally charged guesses and exaggerations of the situation thought about. It torments the subject when they want to change something and cannot, or they want to control their uncertain future. It’s a type of belief where people skip any need for evidence and jump to the catastrophic conclusions. An example Rob uses is of how people can take personal how a person looks at them. Internally the subject can think, “why did they look at me like that? Maybe it means this about me? That reminds me of my mother, and what she used to say about me.” A single detail in the experience is taken out of context and then generalized. The subject can then take what the mother said about them and use the person who looked at him or her as a confirmation of how bad they are.

Complication

Rob list’s the sequence of Papañca, but the steps must be thought of as non-linear, because each step can feed each other. Usually there is a thought of what we don’t like, at the same time there is a feeling in the body that goes with the thought. Afterwards there is an aversion to those thoughts that leads to more thoughts of planning and worrying to try and get rid of something. This is non-linear in that planning and worrying thoughts have feelings in the background that tend to build as the thoughts get more complicated when the thoughts run up to obstacles with no solution. The thoughts get more complicated from early thoughts of negative preferences, and build towards plans and worries about what to do about the situation.

Cutting thought

Here Rob points out his favourite target to cut off or let go of those thoughts. Because of the emotional investment, the farther out one waits to cut the thought the more resistance there will be. At the level of feeling in the body (a felt like or dislike) it’s easiest to let go of the early thoughts, that a situation is not likeable, than to let go in the planning and worrying stages. Of course we can ruminate about meditation and start to attack ourselves when we fail to catch the right moment to let go, so Rob assures the practitioner that they can let go at any time because it’s non-linear. The feelings in the body are still there when there’s planning and worrying. It may be harder to let go, but you can check into the body with the feeling and start to let go of the thoughts related to the feelings. Because thoughts condition with repetition, it’s important to not make excuses for not letting go of unhelpful obsessive thoughts.

Allowing

There is often a lot of resistance with obsessive thought, and cutting it isn’t always successful. Another way of being with the thoughts is to again go back into the body, and keep allowing those unpleasant sensations that are there. Fighting too much with the thoughts can make you go back into mental complication again. Just feel the push and pull in the body and allow it and relax it. With practice, the muscle builds and then it can be easier to cut thoughts. The art of meditation is to see how much effort is needed. Sometimes you need more effort and sometimes not. Rob assures us that effort never gets settled in one’s practice, it only gets more subtle. For a lot of meditators this can be seen in their concentration practice. Often practitioners are at a certain level of absorption, then the mind wanders from the breath and with a sense of surrendering effort, the attention goes back to the object and gets absorbed at a deeper level, like the surrendering of effort was what was needed. Again this is all adjusting effort based on what is needed to develop calm.

Rewards

The consequence of being down on thinking in meditation is the papañca caused by guilt for being lost in thoughts. Simple instructions from Thanissaro Bhikkhu involve rewarding oneself with a delicious breath to incline the thinking habits to naturally return to the breath. Andrea Fella also likes to remind meditators that when you know that you are lost in thoughts, you are already back. Being lost in thoughts means you are not aware this is happening. When you are aware then take pleasure that you are back and continue practicing.

Thinking with calm

When there is calm in the meditation, the practitioner can explore the papañca to see how it works by letting it back in again with this calm mind. Seeing how it works helps to make it less alluring to fall into. One method is assessing the helpfulness of the thoughts. When caught in obsessive thinking one can compare the calm mind to the agitated ruminating mind. “Is this helpful, or not helpful? Let go of what’s not helpful.” One can also ask “will I be happy if I keep thinking these thoughts?”

Sometimes there can be an important choice in one’s life, and the mind goes back and forth and can’t decide. In some situations it really matters what is decided, but with a calm mind it’s possible to bring in a consideration that either choice will make no difference, and if that’s the case, it’s easier to give up those obsessive thoughts. An example would be having difficulty choosing a menu item at a restaurant. In the end you’ll be fed with either choice.

Labeling

When there is ruminating some practitioners like to label some of the complex thoughts, with labels like “planning”, “remembering.” This can create emotional distance that is helpful, but the danger with labeling is it can also make those thoughts have more concreteness and reality, which may add to the papañca. Rob says, “nothing is without effect.”

With enough calmness the meditator can see some of the fuel for these types of thoughts and why labeling can work in some situations and in others it’s better to explore underlying motivations. Because meditation teachers witness so many examples with their students that are similar, certain patterns start to appear.

“I” as the source of papañca

For Rob, papañca in students involves certain beliefs and assumptions about “what is needed for my happiness.” A lot of these assumptions underneath, “what I need to be happy”, can be challenged by bringing them into consciousness and assessing them with normal logic. An even deeper motivation still for papañca is self-labels. A lot of students have devastating stress that involves narratives such as “I believe it means this about ‘me’ if this or that happens.” Rob turns it around in a droll way by saying, “if it is true, is it really so bad?” This isn’t to diminish the shame that people feel when they have hurt others or committed crimes, or if they have been victimized again and again. Serious negative self-labels that involve real world rejection, post-traumatic stress, and stigma will be harder to shake off, and require a lot of letting go and time to heal.

After any healing or atonement, the suffering student can bring to their actions, for example, a criteria of helpfulness to understand that they can’t change the past, but they can focus on what they do now in terms of skillful thoughts and actions. If a person is capable of good actions, then all they can do is to repeat them for the rest of their lives. Rob suggests what I think is a very skillful use of learning orientation to help dis-embed from the shaming, judging, painful “I.” He says that the practitioner can instead, “be more interested in the process of thinking instead of the content of thinking.” With the spacious awareness in the prior body scanning practice described above, a mode of witnessing thoughts can be imitated from the skills we are used to using with mindfulness of the senses.

Only impressions in awareness

For example, sound. Listening to ambient sounds and letting them arise and pass can be applied to thinking, and this has more reality than practitioners think. Thoughts are just like sounds in how they arise and pass. They are ephemeral and insubstantial. They are also unpredictable, because they are unwilled. They just appear in awareness without permission to later pass away, if we don’t cling to them. It’s not you. It’s not yours, because you cannot will them to stop. Habits keep coming back. At best we can let them go and cultivate skillful thoughts to change the habits of what comes up in thinking. What is let go of weakens and what is cultivated strengthens. This helps to reduce the emotional significance of habitual thoughts. They are just old habits, and by letting them go the practitioner can take solace that these thoughts, that are let go of, can get weaker. They don’t have to command any action on the meditator’s part. The space of awareness, which is the ‘knowing’ faculty of the mind, that just witnesses what is there, is undisturbed and provides no authority to the thoughts. Just by witnessing them without blame or judgment and letting them drop helps to reduce the emotional significance those thoughts have, and reduce our identification with them. Rob says, “we choose to give power to thought.” By choosing to obsess extremely about what we think we need to be happy, and by desiring to change the labels others have for us, we stay stuck in rumination. Again we can’t change what people think of us, and what we think we need to be happy, beyond our necessities, is open to debate.

Anger

Rob says, “sometimes the emotion [we feel] just needs to be recognized and held, and sometimes there needs to be an action.” Anger is often a difficult emotion, but we can hold anger in the body until it naturally dissolves. Sometimes we need to act on the anger, but as you can read in the link below, this anger has to be devoid of hatred. Anger is not hostility, or aggression. It’s an engagement that includes care for others, and acceptance with how the world is. It is also a way to analyze the self that is in anger and to train responsibility to prevent endless papañca caused by passive submission, or to prevent aggressive outbursts that will cause regret and more reasons for papañca.

Time and the emptiness of time

A lot of our thinking involves time. Shame involves the past. In the present we sometimes want tiring things to end, or we feel we don’t have enough time for something. The future may hold for us things we don’t want. We may want to preserve things in time. A lot of suffering involves time. Rob likes the Mahayana tradition that uses Nagarjuna’s work on inherent existence. Nothing is inherent, meaning, nothing is permanently solid. Rob uses the term reification, or to make real, but I feel solidity is a better term, so we do not get into mind-only attitudes about reality, which are not practical. Things are real but our mind filters reality, simplifies it, and gets caught up emotionally to control what is ultimately not completely solid. Some things are more solid than others, but our concerns for past, present and future, view them as separate solid periods of time that are disembodied from our lives, when in fact time is a conceptual construct, and heavily involves human memory. The way in is to see the papañca, or the stressful over-complication of thinking, as something that makes time more solid than it is. By meditating and letting go of stressful thinking, and the need to control what is uncontrollable, the time solidity starts to weaken. Essentially what we are experiencing has already happened micro-seconds ago, and we are reacting to our short-term and long-term memories. The past is gone and cannot be changed regardless of how many times we rehearse what we should have done.

Deeper than thinking

As we gain facility with meditation and thinking, Rob cautions us into thinking that we’ve gotten enlightenment with consistent mindfulness in daily life, or what people call bare attention. Our entire ability to be conscious, and even the witness that observes experience is built up on unconscious thinking that can include “interpretations, beliefs, assumptions, views, and conceptions. They can shape, colour, and build our experience of awareness.” In a way, the unconscious thinking affects what details we focus on and habitual perceptions will make our focus different from others who have different perceiving habits.

Deeper than all of that is what Rob translates as measurement. All of our experiences includes measurement, and comparison, even when there is no overt thinking. It’s the ability to compare that allows us to have perceptions or the ability to recognize what is in the environment. Rob says, “when we recognize something we can only do this with a comparison of something different.” Insightfully, those measurements are either appealing or unappealing.

For example, we can measure ourselves to others by noticing differences and have feelings of dissatisfaction arise if we come up short. Even more buried, we can have a sense of subject and object as a distance measurement in our meditation or daily life. Yet what we are experiencing is a reconstruction of reality. These measurements we make feed the clinging to people and objects, based on their appeal, and in turn the clinging can feed more detailed measurements of appeal, leading to papañca about how to control the environment and engage with what is appealing or to repel was is not appealing. The term Clinging here is connected with the effort of targeting an object to control for the purpose of satisfying cravings. There is a push to get rid of what is unpleasant and a pull to bring in what is pleasant, which can be felt in the body.

Three characteristics

Rob now explains how the three characteristics can help us see through the inherent existence, or solidity of objects, and become disenchanted. By seeing experiences and their impermanence, stress, and non-willed aspects, the practitioner finds “another quality that shines through experience that is not so dependent on whether [they] like it or not.” With less emotional investment, or an equanimity, the stress starts to bleed out of experience. By having good concentration, and an alive presence, the practitioner can relax the push and pull caused by the measurement of experience. The brain is trained to see that the suffering connected with excessive control is not worth it and it lets go. When suffering decreases, the practitioner knows they are on the right track. As the senses fade, the awareness also fades, and the entire reconstruction of reality by the brain is revealed.

Rob Burbea

Working with thought in meditation: http://www.dharmaseed.org/talks/audio_player/210/10835.html

Thoughts and Images in Meditation: http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/17963/

Approaching the Dharma: Part One – Unbinding the World: http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/17960/

Approaching the Dharma: Part Two – Liberating ways of looking: http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/17961/

Only impressions in awareness: http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/9820/

Time and the emptiness of time: http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/11929/

Maya and Nirvana (Beyond the Measure of Mind): http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/10832/

Seeing that Frees: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780992848910/

Other resources:

Compassionate Wrath – Robert Augustus Masters: https://www.atpweb.org/pdf/masters.pdf

Dependent Co-arising – Various Authors: https://psychreviews.org/dependent-co-arising-various-authors/

Contemplative practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/