meditation

The Thoughts You Think Become Unthunk

By in foolosophy, juxtapositions, meditation No Comments

People do not simply take it into their heads to walk into some house if the owner is present. But if a house is empty, passers-by will casually come in, the lack of human presence will encourage foxes and owls to make themselves at home there, and tree spirits and suchlike bizarre creatures will even appear.

Likewise, since a mirror has no inherent shape or color, everything can appear reflected in it. If it had its own color and shape, it wouldn’t reflect other things.

The emptiness of space allows it to contain things. The fact that thoughts can come crowding into our mind at will must mean that “mind” is actually an empty space too. If someone were really in residence there, it would surely not be invaded by all these thoughts.

— Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness

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We are no more responsible for the evil thoughts that pass through our minds, than a scarecrow for the birds which fly over the seedplot he has to guard; the sole responsibility in each case is to prevent them from settling.

— Churton Collins, aphorisms in the English Review, 1914

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This part of the practice should be handled carefully. The fact is that none of your thoughts are “you.” The filters are not necessary. They’re useful sometimes, but not really necessary. Any thought at all can come through your mind and have no effect on it. But the problem is that the ego might decide to try to hang on to those forbidden thoughts and this could cause trouble. That’s why the filters exist in the first place — to keep you from acting on some of those thoughts.

But you can also just let those thoughts come into the conscious mind and still not act on them. That’s harder for most people to do. It takes practice and discipline. But if you can learn to do it you’ll be able to handle a lot of stuff that most people can’t handle very well. You’ll be less likely to be overwhelmed by strong or difficult emotions, for example.

The most useful lesson zazen ever taught me was that my thoughts are just thoughts. All of them. No matter what they are. They’re all just thoughts. No big deal.

— Brad Warner, “Thought Filters“

Even On the Highest Throne In the World

By in meditation, the statusphere, walking No Comments

John Kaag and Susan Froderberg:

The discipline of walking as it relates to art should not be mistaken for a leisure activity. Take, for example, walking as a flâneur or as a pilgrim, or going out for a promenade, for in each of these pursuits there are goals: the flâneur sets out into the city streets to investigate or procrastinate; the pilgrim ambles toward the holy land for the sake of a blessing; an evening stroller seeks digestive benefits as well as social interaction, whether walking with a companion or encountering neighbours along the road. In all cases, there are ends to be gained.

You thought you’d mastered this “walking” thing way back in your toddler years, did you? Well, yes, it’s once again time for professional thinkers to tell you how you’re making a complete mess of things.

Regular readers know that I’m a bit of a connoisseur of this genre. For nearly a decade now, I’ve been taking note of essays which turn the basic act of putting one foot in front of another into yet another status-seeking activity. At this point, I feel like a veteran teacher of middle-school social studies bracing myself for another year’s crop of derivative essays about the importance of MLK, Jr. There’s hardly any new ways to make fun of this silly conceit, let alone write about it. In this case, I will just note that Kaag and Froderberg’s attempt to infuse walking with a Kantian sensibility comes up against the same problem that students of Buddhist meditation encounter: Who is it that desires to stop desiring? Isn’t the effort to empty the mind and purify the soul still a goal-oriented activity? Isn’t this just another attempt to elevate oneself above the humdrum world and all the benighted cretins that populate it? You don’t need to walk in the right location at the right pace with the right frame of mind to realize the absurd egotism of this pursuit; in fact, as those meditation students know, you can realize it while sitting on your ass.

The Thoughts You Think Become Unthunk

By in foolosophy, meditation No Comments

Brad Warner:

Let me see if I can describe what I actually do each day. I’ll be sitting there, trying to do good Shikantaza for quite literally the 723rd time that year alone. And some thought comes along. And I get interested in that thought. What if I wrote a rock musical based on the life of Buddha? Maybe it would be as big as Jesus Christ Superstar! I could get Zero Defex to play it live at the Highland Theater in Akron.

Shit. OK. Shikantaza. Leave that thought. Check the posture. Yup. I’m slumping forward. OK. Shoulders back. Chest open. Spine balanced on hips. Zhweeeeeeeeeee.

No thoughts intrude for a while. Nice. Nice word, that. Nice. So many ways you can say it. Noice! Or maybe Cockney. Naaaaice, guv’na! Or Nice, France. That’s spelled like nice but pronounced Nice. If I wrote that in a blog how would I make it clear…

Shit! OK. Shikantaza. Put away that thought. Check the posture. Yup. I’m slumping to the left. OK. Shoulders back. Chest open. Spine balanced on hips. Zhweeeeeeeeeee.

What’s that smell? Should I tell someone about that smell? How can I tell someone about that smell without making any noise? Noise annoys! I love the Buzzcocks. So sad Pete Shelly died.

And so on.

That’s the way Shikantaza goes for me and I’ve been doing it roughly two times a day since the Autumn of 1983.

In a letter to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, C.S. Lewis noticed his own attempts at meditation bedeviled by a more consistent, but still maddening, form of “monkey mind”:

During my afternoon “meditations,” — which I at least attempt quite regularly now — I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to know the sorts of thoughts that do come. And, will you believe it, one of every three is a thought of self-admiration: when everything else fails, having had its neck broken, up comes the thought “What an admirable fellow I am to have broken their necks!” I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day long. I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then suddenly realise I am really thinking how frightfully clever I’m going to be and how he will admire me….And then when you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing that. It is like fighting the hydra….There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depth of self-love and self-admiration.

Blaise Pascal famously said that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Like many great aphorisms, this has two sharp edges to it. For many people, this intuitively seems like an endorsement of introversion; quoting it can be a way of feeling superior to the madding crowd’s ignoble strife. I haven’t checked, but I’d be willing to bet that there exists a Caspar David Friedrich image with the Pascal aphorism atop it decorating some disaffected adolescent’s Pinterest page. In context, though, Pascal seems to be describing what Warner, Lewis, and countless other meditators have all discovered — the tragedy of the human condition is present in the microcosm of one person’s mind no less than the grand scheme of world events. There is no escape from it, not even by “thinking the right thoughts.” As Warner says in another post, meditation practice is not trivial. Far from being just another productivity enhancer, stress reliever, or “lifehack” {shudder}, being alone with your thoughts for long enough will bring you face to face with the grinning unknown.

Little Do We Really Know the River Ego, Deep and Wide

By in foolosophy, identity, meditation, psychology No Comments

Brad Warner:

To be fair, the article also contains a quote that refutes Washam’s position entirely. Jesee Vega Frey, a teacher at Vipassana Hawaii says, “It is the wanting of things to be other than they are that is the heart of our imprisonment. Changing the colors, textures, and flavors of the prison doesn’t lead to freedom.” Unfortunately, this quote is buried in an article filled with rah-rah hype for the use of drugs.

…Why do we want things to be other than they are? Why do we feel we have plateaued? We long for fundamental change, but what is it we most need to fundamentally change? Could it be that our desire for something else is the root of our problem? Could it be that satisfying that desire with something that looks like spiritual progress is the very worst thing we could possibly do — not just to ourselves but to everyone around us?

Rather than running off to find new experiences to relieve the boredom of meditation, maybe it would be better to dive deeply into that boredom and find out where it comes from and whether it really needs relieving.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been attempting to do some self-improvement. I decided that I got stressed and lost my temper too easily, and that I should work on being more sanguine and unruffled, possibly even cheerful. My primary inspiration in this was the Lady of the House’s example. She exudes a confident, buoyant, patient optimism to a degree I’ve never seen in anyone else. Time and time again, I’ve felt foolish for having watched her straightforwardly solve a problem that I had abandoned in frustration or anger. The philosopher and relationship counselor Rocky Balboa famously discussed his “gaps” theory of a successful relationship: “She’s got gaps, I got gaps; together, we fill gaps, I dunno.” Likewise, the Lady filled this particular gap in my character, and for that, I’ve tried to show my gratitude by striving to give her less work to do in that regard. A reliable teammate should inspire you to strive harder to be worthy of them, not to ride on their coattails.

Now, I want to make clear that it’s not like I had a serious problem or anything. I wasn’t getting into fights or screaming matches or putting my fist through walls and windows. I was just tired of allowing petty irritations to live rent-free in my head and thought a little Stoic equanimity would be a good thing to strive for. It was only a little tinkering, not a major renovation.

And yet, and yet. It turns out that even this minor adjustment is hard. At first it was flabbergasting, then slightly dismaying, to see how often I slipped right back into old habits of getting too easily frustrated. I would reflect at the end of another less-than-stellar day on how, once again, everything turned out all right after all, how getting angry didn’t help at all, and how I could do better the next time. And when the red mist would descend the next time, I would struggle mightily to remember: what was I supposed to do again to calm down here? Why am I not supposed to curse or otherwise betray my irritation? All my careful philosophical preparation was nowhere to be found when a stormy mood arrived.

Eventually, you start to notice other things beside your immediate failures: the ways in which your parents influenced you much more than you ever thought; the ways in which old coping behaviors from a poisonous relationship hardened into regular practices before calcifying into unconscious habits; the mystifying sense of near-powerlessness, like a rider on a bucking bronco, which comes as an unpleasant shock to the ego. What begins as a project of willpower seeking to assert itself becomes a realization of how deluded we often are in imagining that we can shape life to our liking. As Brad has said many times about Buddhist meditation, strange, unnerving things happen when you refuse to allow your mind its usual escape routes and insist on paying bare attention to what is. All I wanted was a minor upgrade on my temperament! I didn’t ask to have the wind knocked out of me by the realization of how much time I wasted thoughtlessly acting out old, lazy patterns of behavior!

The ability to envision and move toward alternative ways of being is both the blessing and the curse of the human experience. It’s made us the amazing, dynamic species we are, and it’s also left us unable to rest content with whatever actually exists. There’s always something better somewhere else, we think. Whatever is is never enough. As W.H. Auden said, “With envy, terror, rage, regret/we anticipate or remember but never are.”

The Tide Is High

By in meditation, panta rheism, religion, the statusphere, unintended consequences No Comments

Brad Warner:

Someone meditates for a long time and has a profound insight into the nature of reality. He or she then decides to try and teach that insight and how to reach it to others. This goes fine for a little while, but then an institution is established to try and make the lessons more standardized, efficient and accessible. At this point certain people notice that there are opportunities for power, authority and money to be had within that institution so they get involved. Once these weasels start running things the original purpose is lost. Then someone else has to come along, call bullshit on the institution and start the whole thing up again as an outsider. The same pattern occurs with predictable regularity.

Right now in the West, we are in one of these transitional periods. Back in Japan, Zen has become an orthodox institution that offers its members opportunities for power, authority and sometimes even money. Disgusted with this situation, a few sincere practitioners packed up and moved to America and Europe. They found some genuine students and started a few temples. But now those temples are growing in stature and importance, and ambitious people are starting to see that they might be able to climb their institutional ladders and become powerful. The rot is setting in.

This process is still in its infancy, so things haven’t gotten too bad just yet. Whenever I complain about the organizations who are trying to standardize the Zen curriculum into mind-numbing uselessness I’m always told something like, “Aw, but these guys aren’t a giant evil institution! They’re just a nice group of low-key people who want to do good things.” Which I’m sure is more-or-less true. But you don’t have to be a genius to see where things are heading.

Brad is, of course, paraphrasing a famous passage from The Book of Panta Rheism, which says, “All philosophical systems of men are mere castles of sand before the ancient wisdom of the ocean; bow ye before the power of the moon’s gravitational pull and be sore afraid.” Man-made religions arise and fall, ossify and regenerate, until the sacred waters tire of their foolishness and wash them all away. Incidentally, this explains the omnipresence of great flood myths in cultures around the world.

Trickle-Down

By in identity, meditation, panta rheism, spiritual-not-religious No Comments

Jacob Rubin:

One might also claim that Harris’s watered-down vision of Buddhism, with its emphasis on career advancement, will encourage misuse. This may be fair enough, but it’s not an especially revealing criticism. After all, one of the first things that people do with any tool or philosophy is misuse it. A history of Christianity is largely a history of the abuse of Jesus Christ’s teachings; Buddhism is not exempt from such misprision. On the spectrum of misappropriation, using self-advancement as a lure seems forgivable enough if it leads people to try a technique as subtly transformative as mindfulness. (Indeed, if personal betterment is America’s religion, such an approach might be seen as syncretic.) What can be lost by broadening access to a philosophy of liberation, even if a majority of people conflate it with the more vulgar priorities of our culture?

What can be lost? Well, nothing, unless you count the opportunity to radically change your life, to allow yourself to be overwhelmed by a new perspective, rather than merely reinforcing whatever narcissism already exists. In the same way, nothing is “lost” when spiritual-not-religious types employ the cafeteria approach when deciding which parts of various religious traditions to incorporate into their already-existing identities as suburban American consumers. However, a person in search of self-knowledge and deeply-rooted contentment, as opposed to trendy metaphysical fashion accessories, will probably want to delve a little more deeply into that suburban consumer identity and question the role it might play in their dissatisfaction.

So, no, this isn’t really anything but an argument over terminology. A lot of devoted Buddhists will look at what Harris is selling and say, “Eh, whatever; that’s not real meditation.” Maybe some people will never use it as anything other than yet another optimization technique for maximum efficiency and wealth accumulation. Maybe some of those people will eventually feel dissatisfied with that lifestyle and wonder if there’s anything more to this existence. Buddhist traditions, on the other hand, have been evolving and adapting for more than two thousand years; they certainly won’t be diminished by yet another passing trend promising yet another way for you to “have it all”. The fact is, you can’t, but some people aren’t ready to accept that yet. So it goes.

Also: “watered-down Buddhism”? How ironic! As we well know, Buddhism is just another solidification of the pure, liquid source of all religion.

Shut Up, Shuttin’ Up

By in language, meditation No Comments

Charlie Brooker:

But then right now I don’t “get” most forms of communication. There’s just so much of it. Everybody talking at once and all over each other; everyone on the planet typing words into their computers, for ever, like I’m doing now. I fail to see the point of roughly 98% of human communication at the moment, which indicates I need to stroll around somewhere quiet for a bit.

Tim Parks:

The words we constantly use and the narratives we write reinforce a drama of selfhood that we in the West complacently celebrate. There is also much consolation taken in the way in which writing and narrative can transform emotional pain into a form of entertainment, wise and poignant in its vision of our passage through the world, intense and thrilled by its own intensity. Narrative is so often the narrative of misery and of the passage through misery.

What silence and meditation leaves us wondering, after we stand up, unexpectedly refreshed and well-disposed after an hour of stillness and silence, is whether there isn’t something deeply perverse in this culture of ours, even in its greatest achievements in narrative and art. So much of what we read, even when it is great entertainment, is deeply unhelpful.

Being naturally inclined to relaxed daydreaming, I tend to feel much more substantial and whole as a result of making the effort to write regularly. It would be too easy otherwise to indifferently let my word balloons float away before I’d had a chance to tie them around my wrist and fully appreciate them. Perhaps writing is a form of self-medicating, helping me to focus without the help of doctor-prescribed speed. But sometimes I too wonder if I’m alert enough to the danger of becoming just one more babbling twit on the Internet whose rickety mental well-being depends on never shutting up, or if I’d recognize it happening to me in time to prevent it.

Commerce Claws

By in getting and spending, meditation, panta rheism, spiritual-not-religious 3 Comments

Kenneth Folk:

“Mindfulness” is poised to become the Next Big Thing. Here is the likely trajectory of the movement: “mindfulness” will be thoroughly co-opted by corporate interests, embraced as a fad by the public at large, discredited through its association with corporate power, and then rejected as cynically manipulative bullshit, all within ten or twenty years. In the short term, the credibility of all contemplative practice will suffer as a result. A shame, that. I wonder what will replace it?

Meh. There will always be trend-chasing dabblers, there will always be dedicated practitioners, and there will always be those completely uninterested. Those demographics might fluctuate, but I don’t see any reason to fear wholesale changes. Contemplative practice in all its forms is far too widespread and deeply-rooted around the world to worry about temporary dips in quarterly performance in the American market. “Mindfulness” will make a quiet difference in the lives of many who practice it, just as “spirituality” has. Marketers will no doubt invent a new term in order to sell people the same old contemplation in a redesigned box or bottle, but nothing’s really being “replaced”, except in the most superficial sense. As panta rheism teaches, the current stays in endless motion, but the form of the river endures.

For more of my thoughts on this topic, be sure to pick up a copy of my book, Water, Water Everywhere: The Alluvial Wisdom Contained Within the Neo-Ancient Principles of Panta Rheism, or visit my website for other fine products to assist you in your journey to the Sea of Enlightenment.

Dream Dream, Filling Up an Idle Hour

By in alan watts, foolosophy, meditation No Comments

David Cain:

A few weeks ago, as I was turning on the dishwasher before we left my place, she said something like, “Dishwashers are what’s wrong with the world.” Something about that sounded right. I asked her to explain.

“Life is composed of primarily mundane moments,” she says. “If we don’t learn to love these moments, we live a life of frustration and avoidance, always seeking ways to escape the mundane. Washing the dishes with patience and attention is a perfect opportunity to develop a love affair with simply existing. You might say it is the perfect mindfulness practice. To me, the dishwasher is the embodiment of our insatiable need, as a culture, to keep on running, running, running, trying to find something that was inside of us all along.”

We used to have to spend a lot more time and attention maintaining our basic possessions. Dishes had to be washed by hand, stoves had to be stoked, clothes had to be mended, and meals had to be prepared from scratch.

Little was automated or outsourced. All of these routine labors demanded our time, and also our presence and attention. It was normal to have to zoom in and slow down for much of our waking day. We had no choice but to respect that certain daily tasks could not be done without a willing, real-time investment of attention.

There’s some truth in that. Much of life is insignificant mundanity. I certainly prefer a life of relaxed, calm focus to one of frantic busy-ness. But still, I say — and not just because last month’s experience is still fresh in my mind — this strikes me as someone trying too hard. If you were inclined to be uncharitable, you could say it sounds a bit like spiritual one-upsmanship: “I appreciate housework on a deeper level than you do.” It sounds like what Alan Watts described, a hyper-conscious attempt to scrutinize every moment so as not to miss…some vague transcendant something-or-other.

In fact, I say that because I used to be the exact same way. I never had a dishwasher until I moved into this house several years ago. Back in my days of renting a house in the country, I stood at the sink thousands of times with my hands soaking in soap suds and my brain soaking in ideas from books about Buddhism and voluntary simplicity, taking quiet pride in how “mindful” I was being. Watching over my own shoulder, essentially, as if something profound would be revealed in how I scrubbed hardened pasta off a plate.

Like any activity performed deliberately and attentively, it could have a grounding, calming effect, sure. But that could apply to eating a bag of potato chips or picking your nose, too; there’s nothing sacred about chores, unless you’re still harboring the cobwebs of a Protestant work ethic in the corners of your psyche. And it could be argued that the most profound effect washing the dishes had on me was to fulfill my slightly control-freakish need to assert myself as master of my domain and put things in clean, efficient order, thus contributing to further alienation from the natural, messy, chaotic flow of life.

Humans seek out meta-levels of reality. It’s what we do. Perhaps it’s the definition of what it means to be human, to treat every action, every object, as a symbol of something else, as a link in an endless chain of contingent meaning. Seeking “deeper” meaning is an expression of that. Imagining a ceaseless state of love and acceptance which can be attained by concentrating one’s focus and will like a laser to burn through the veil of maya and perceive the pure truth behind is another expression of that. But there’s nothing more true or authentic about washing mass-produced utensils and plates in a sink with store-bought detergent and running water, as opposed to loading them up in the dishwasher, or lugging them down to the creek in a hand-built cart to scrub them with pine needles.

It may have particular benefits. It may contribute to you being a kinder, more thoughtful person. It may help you calm down after a stressful day. But if it doesn’t, you’re not necessarily doing it wrong, either. I don’t doubt that there are many people who feel most alive and perform at their optimal level in a frenetic environment and feel irritation and frustration when forced to move ponderously. I don’t relate to them, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of them, but I wouldn’t imply that they’re lacking some integral part of human nature, either. The contemplative sage is just one of many possible human permutations, by no means the ne plus ultra.

And daydreaming is just as integral a part of what it means to be human as anything else.

Waldeinsamkeit

By in environment, foolosophy, meditation, santutthi, work No Comments

Florence Williams:

The kale analogy is pretty apt, because it turns out that even when we don’t enjoy spending time in nature, like during lousy winter conditions, we benefit from it just the same. At least that’s what Toronto’s Berman found when research subjects took walks in an arboretum on a blustery winter day. The walkers didn’t really enjoy themselves, but they still performed much better on tests measuring short-term memory and attention.

Japanese researchers understand our draw to nature, but American researchers understand our pull away from it—our distractions, inertia, and addictions. They want to help motivate us, to make our doses of nature so palatable and efficient that we hardly notice them. This is the next frontier in forest-therapy science, all aided by brain imaging.

Berman, for example, wants to figure out exactly which features (ponds, trees, biodiversity) yield the biggest bang in the brain. The idea is that once researchers know more about what makes our brains happy, that information can be fed into public-policy decisions, urban planning, and architectural design. The research has profound implications for schools, hospitals, prisons, and public housing. Imagine bigger windows, more trees in cities, and mandatory lie-on-the-grass breaks.

This approach, of course, is classically Western. Manipulate the environment; feel nature without even trying. As for me, I’m going to be looking for a more East-meets-West approach. I’ll try harder to quit checking my text messages and instead watch for rock bass jumping in the C&O Canal. Scratch and sniff some pine cones. Run my hands through the moss. Maybe even drink a little bark tea.

My memories of winter break from my school days largely revolve around wandering through the woods for miles. Some of the best hours of my life have been passed among coniferous companions. Some of the most useful thinking I’ve done has been while wedged in a seat among the branches. So I have no trouble accepting that there’s some kind of primal attraction there. But as with meditation, I hate to see the pleasure of the experience being jostled aside to make room for considerations like improved efficiency and increased white blood cell count. Not every experience needs to be justified in terms of making you a more productive worker-drone with a greatly-extended warranty. True mental health, to me, needs to make room for precisely such “useless” activity. I don’t wander in the woods or listen to music to become more accomplished in my career; rather, I perform my job in order to fulfill my societal obligations and thus be granted the leisure to do what really matters. As far as I’m concerned, every event in my life exists to make my wanderings among the trees more satisfying. That’s the purpose of it all. That’s why I was “put” here. To be all the woods-moseyer I can be.

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