Anti-meditation, psychotherapy and physics · 21 July 2009
There’s a swimming hole up the Matilija river in the mountains above Ojai. The last time I went in was January, 2008, and the cold was a vibrating silver shockwave; on a 95 degree day it was not so enlivening but at least but at least I could stay in long enough to notice something other than my own nervous system freaking out. What I noticed was the light from the water rippling through the trees.
In that context, light waves that move exactly like water across tree leaves is sense pleasure. Undulation, beautiful shapes, colors. The senses mix with emotions and thoughts: delight in body and company, plus a knowledge that all this is special in time and place: the experience is historically unique, so I mark it as precious. An aesthetically perfect moment, a collector’s item.
A week earlier, there were light waves in oak tree leaves, reflected off a pond in the mountains north of LA. Equally if not more beautiful, but the consciousness of that moment was nothing like my Matilija reverie. I was at the end of silent retreat, with a slowed-down mind and abundant strength and clarity for working in the different spaces of consciousness.
Doing “spacious awareness,” then, was letting the observer step out. Or rather, acknowledging that the observer wasn’t located in my body per se, and certainly was outside of time and space. It was an observing without categories—difficult but not impossible to outline in words. Light was a wave, the branches and leaves were a wave, and so were my seeing eyes for that matter.
Nondual awareness—what’s called mahamudra, dzochen, anti-meditation, oneness consciousness, “calling off the search,” spacious awareness, nondual mind, whatever—is a primordial soup. Undifferentiated peace. It’s not a high “knowing” consciousness: when I’m in mahamudra, my brain stem is turned all the way on. I’m in the awareness of a lizard recently crawled up out of the sea, of an infant recently forced in to the world. David Malouf wrote of a feral child who would say in a thunderstorm not it is raining, but I am raining. Mahamudra is that: consciousness observing itself.
I must say it is utter bliss. My first experience of it years ago changed my understanding of what was possible with human consciousness, what depths of joy we could reach as humans, what the world is and what I am. And up until last week, I thought I had to do three or four days of retreat to go that deep. I now realize that after so much damn yoga and some sheltered mahamudra practice in the past, my mind is strong enough to go in to nondual consciousness somewhat easily. I am guessing that some focused instruction and heartfelt practice is all it would take for any ashtangi to touch in to this practice.
More interesting is what I learned last week on the way down to anti-meditation. In past retreats, I’ve used those days to just watch the thoughts as they slow down and gain some “insights” on their content, though admittedly my main reason for going on retreat wasn’t self-analysis but just the delight of mahamudra. My insights were on a level of: Oh, I have these specific emotions, they circulate in these patterns. My planning mind works like this. Blah, blah, blah.
Seriously: blah.
What I have not understood before is that there’s the possibility of watching thoughts like a physicist, not like a psychoanalyst. Who cares about the content of thought? If I want to psychoanalyze myself, probably the least effective way to do it is when I’m all slowed down in a quasi bliss state. Last week, I finally learned that there is the option of looking at thoughts as things and breaking them in to component parts. (For example, on Shinzen’s model, subjectivity comprises thoughts that are visual, emotional and verbal. But there are a lot of physical models.)
This week, this understanding has impacted my practice strongly. We have so many options for how to relate to discursive thoughts as they come up in practice. Some people bash them down sort of violently; others ignore them or let them fade to the background; still others surrender to them and go for a ride. Here’s Daniel Ingram’s Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book:
If people start with “just open to it” and yet don't develop strong mindfulness… then their practice may be less like meditation and a lot more like psychotherapy, day dreaming, or even self-absorbed, spiritually-rationalized, neurotic indulgence in mind noise. It was noticing the high prevalence of this activity and the pervasive and absurd notion that there was no point in trying to get enlightened that largely demolished my vision of being a happy meditation teacher in some mainstream meditation center somewhere.
Psychotherapy, on the other hand, can be a fine undertaking, but it is a completely different endeavor from meditation…. When purposefully training in concentration, we decide to be mindful of a limited and specific concentration object, such as the breath or even a rarified state of consciousness. We do not, however, investigate the individual sensations that make up that state, as it would break apart under that investigation and produce insights. If we are not looking for ultimate insights at that point in time, then we should avoid investigating that state. However, we do apply energy to stabilize our concentration, and this produces rapture, a characteristic of the early concentration states.
As I’ve said, I follow the breath. There is some bandha in there—especially kechari mudra—and some simply resting in the energy of the room when I’m with a group, but what I try to do is just breathe. In the past, when thoughts could not be pushed to the background and demanded some attention amid my simpleminded, workaday concentration practice, I would look at them directly and see what they told me about myself. Usually this was, “Wow, I still feel really threatened when Betty stares at me… isn’t it interesting how I want to scream at her right now?” or “I’m pretty unnerved by how hard this guy is pushing next to me… why can’t I just allow that he’s going to have to do it this way for a while until the receiving/inhaling half of practice kicks in?” Blah, blah, blah.
This week, I took less of an interest in my little psyche. Thoughts of this nature came up, and instead of taking them as an opportunity to analyze myself, I broke them into pieces and scattered them to the air. Is this an image, an emotion or a verbal thought? Where did it start… in judging, in visualizing, in some part of my body? When I recognize it as a thought, then what form did it take? Poof. Inhaaaleee, exhaaale, etc.
The first obvious effect is that practice becomes less about me and “the way I am.” It gives far, far less fuel for the story of myself that I’m constantly telling and takes some air out of the idea that practice is a personal project. For a while, there has been a sense of momentum, a sense that I’m being carried along by a routine that is taken for granted and not really subject to my own doubts or negotiations. But smuggling psychoanalysis in to practice at the interstices has always been sort of fun, a way of enabling practice to still be all about my unique personality. The mat was just a bit of a sofa, and every sofa’s a stage.
And to the degree that mat became sofa, the momentum was interrupted. Moving back to discursive mind always re-introduces for me the problem of effort. The problem of the doer and the difficulty of the thing to be done. When discursive mind is not active, I experience practice as pretty fluid, sort of hooking in to some high-tech massage machine.
I’m not sure how well the physicist’s method of relating to thought will work as it becomes more subtle—I probably won’t know for months. But I have a sense that it’ll actually increase my joy on the mat. Physics is simply less interesting to me than psychotherapy, so if thoughts pulverize more quickly, it may just be that much easier to stay quiet.
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Pulverizing thoughts . . . I like this. I look forward to hearing/seeing where this takes you.
Posted by: RE · Jul 21, 10:26 PM · #
I thought the point of Vipassana was to notice the nature of the thought but not get drawn into the content anyway. Hate any form of psychoanalysis (of course I do I’m English) if I thought that was what Vipassana was about I wouldn’t be doing it. I don’t know, looking at the physics of the thought is interesting but seems more of an interesting excercise and the whole Jhana thing merely a tool (though I’ve just bought the books you mentioned and planning on focussing on it for a couple of months). Not particularly interested in the whole bliss thing. Just a few first reactions to your post, need to come back to this and read it again, loving this series of posts, very interesting and making me think and question what the hell I’m doing in my meditation practice. So thanks for these.
Posted by: Grimmly · Jul 22, 12:15 AM · #
I think my favorite is when practice is still and then blogging throws an “I” into it retroactively.
Like waking from a dream and writing it down. You can feel it crystallize (and be irrevocably altered) by the application of words.
Posted by: karen · Jul 22, 04:22 AM · #
I love this post. After listening to that Shaila Catherine speech you linked to the other day, it all starts to makes some sense to me. I too have ordered 2 books that you mentioned the other day (they should arrive just in time to take them to my Greek island retreat :-) and maybe then I will really understand what you are talking about. ( And unlike Grimmly, I love the comparison to psychotherapy.)
Posted by: Fatou · Jul 22, 08:31 AM · #
Sorry, my comment was pretty incoherent this morning, was running late for work but wanted to respond to the post. In lue of an apology I found this while googling InsideOwl this afternoon ‘Man Found Dead Inside Owl Cage’.
Anyway I was referring to where you wrote
‘What I have not understood before is that there’s the possibility of watching thoughts like a physicist, not like a psychoanalyst. Who cares about the content of thought? ‘
What I liked/like about Vipassana was that it seemed to work as a kind of Phenomenology rather than a psychology and was wondering how this ties in with the experience your having now, would you say your finding it more phenomenological than psychoanalytic or is that not it. You used ‘ like a physicist’ earlier.
Posted by: Grimmly · Jul 22, 10:19 AM · #
Oh yeah, the dead guy inside owl cage was Zee. Unfortunately he made repeated attempts to come back to life. No more.
RE, thanks. Don’t worry, I won’t lose my shit this time. Thought-pulverization is not at all trippy.
More later on technicalities (working with mind is technical, right? at least, until it’s not…. like asana). Got to work now.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 22, 10:30 AM · #
I wonder if the analytical fixation on the “psyche” is the psyche itself, which maybe is just our emotional layer. The objective internal observer must be the next layer within that, but maybe that’s not the extent of what’s there. The yoga lit doesn’t say much on the idea, but some Taoist lit does suggest how things go even deeper and lighter. I wonder if it would be marked by dispersal of the feeling of self-entertainment. But that’s just more analysis.
Posted by: Carl · Jul 22, 11:55 AM · #
This made me think of the whole process vs content debate in psychotherapy, an idea of multiple layers, in that case in a interaction, in the same way the content of a therapy (ie. the subject of what is talked about rather than the way it is used and how it makes the client and therapist feel) is very beguiling making access beyond it hard. – just a passing thought.
Posted by: Openingslowly · Jul 23, 01:14 AM · #
OS, hi! Good to have a new visitor. I don’t know about the process versus content debate, but your comment reminded me about all the problems that behaviorism has generated for social theory. There’s this compelling just-so story that Alan Wallace tells about the repressed history of process and fragmentary views of self in the discipline of psychology (the repressor being the black box school)... I’ll append it to the next post.
Grim, that is exactly what I am saying. Phenomenon, though, can still be apprehended in terms of resonance or content. I’m talking about raw physical components.
So for example. Yesterday my friend Betty was checking me out in practice, again. She was having a particularly challenging day, right in front of me. While she was peeking through her legs in pada hastasana, I noticed. Instantly emotion, talk and image arose: anger multiplied by the text of my scolding, multiplied by the image of the look on her face as we talked. Then I stopped. I could have stepped back to reflect that this is my projection (of issues around invasion of privacy or inability to focus on practice), or that I have particular issues around introversion or am a driste fundamentalist. That’s the sort of “self aware” approach that seems to be thought of as yogic, but it’s actually just pedestrian psychotherapy, right? In my view, that form of reflection is super useful and central to my self-understanding, but it’s not the way I’m working during practice.
Rather, I ask, what is the actual substance of this visual thought , this emotion, this inner talk? I investigate that, as long as it’s happening. And then it goes poof and I don’t fuckin’ ponder on it any more.
:-)
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 24, 11:07 AM · #
Oh well yes, I do like to think of myself as a kind of scientist but not the type that wears dreadful spectacles, threadbare jocks of indeterminate hue and a simpering smile of some supposed ‘bhakti’ to the glowing nerd-orb of peer reviewed, ‘perverted rationalism’ (as the Kowshika curmudgeon called it). Nor am I a ‘watchmaker’ – oh far too redolent of the artisan, that. I like to think I’m more like Jesus, the old ‘Christ the Scientist’ model, but with far superior backbends and a far, far more extensive wardrobe. Or perhaps like Mr Hubbard but with wicked intercostals and a considerably less ridiculous name.
But I’m more of a mover than than a dull introvert with a slide rule. True,all these cortex carousing coefficents can generate lovely-cheeky-spiky spreadsheets but can make one’s personal affairs susceptible to that supraconcious swindle known as ‘mind-mapping’. Actually, I employ a kind of neural nanny (NOT a shrink) to look after all my flighty higher functioning whilst I roll aound on the latex lab in my MIT sponsored nuthuggers.
But look, as a mover I am far from unmoved by your plight, so…contrary to the distasteful notion propounded by the less than svelte Herr Schiffman, yoga is all about what you do, not how you feel. What’s needed is action, not vapid indulgence of the inner cripple. It’s possible to measure the depth of a given Kapotasana and the distance between vrittis x1, x2, x3 such that a reduction (or magnification) of amplitude can be correlated with the significant coordinates of a given mat space in relation to the feet of teacher Y, with celebrity of >18 feature articles in a leading scientific organ, such as Yoga Journal.
You are not ‘Moving In stillness’, you’re just being lazy. As young Kenneth is apt to say ‘Some of us are just much better at yoga than others’ . Feels good, don’t it?
That said, the path of pure math is not for everyone, even some of the greatest yogis can be samskara side-foot swept by computation bitch kickers. I have observed that Duncan does not share the default arithmetical aptitude of his felow asiatics. Why, only the other day he was telling me how hard it is to get a handle on Madge’s root polynomials! Well, it wasn’t hard to measure my behavioural reaction to that one. Yum.
Posted by: catygay · Jul 24, 01:07 PM · #
Oh no CATYGAY, have you been reading Sex, Ecology, Spirituality again? And really, how do you know about Jesus H. Christ’s backbends?
While my friend Duncan is busy waxing his moustache and sewing bindis on your newest nut-huggers, why don’t you astralplane right over Jordan and confirm? Nothing like a 40-day detox in the desert to loosen up the psoas, you know?
Here at INSIDEOWL we are devoted to precision and footnotes, so please my dear, do not be more vague about your sources than you are about your, um, sensations.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 24, 01:36 PM · #
Unfortunately, you’ve acquired the wit of a physical scientist rather more quickly than one would have anticipated.
Pass me a cocktail sausage.
Posted by: catygay · Jul 24, 02:53 PM · #
Is that a penis joke, m’Lord?
No physical humor around here, no no.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 24, 05:12 PM · #