On May 7, 2009, at 8:55 AM, TurquoiseB wrote:
But it's *limited*, because if your "training
myths" contain only characters who are "all
good" and "all bad," there is no way to teach
*compassion*, because there is never any need
for it. You don't try to understand and feel
compassion for one of the Kauravas or for a
rakshasa -- you just kill them.
And sometimes I think that this simplistic
tendency to reduce all things to "all good"
and "all bad" is one of the factors that leads
people to become paranoid and fearful. Imprinted
to believe that everything is "all good" or
"all bad," they have no mechanism for under-
standing that a person who believes something
different than they do isn't "all bad." They
can't conceive of them being good, or even
partly good, and not believing the "right"
dogma.
Anyway...interesting rap, Vaj. Thanks for throw-
ing it out there...
I always like Aleister Crowley's observation of humanities past being
these various mythologies and collective mindsets of matriarchal or
patriarchal domination which were imbalanced by their very nature,
but perhaps suited to the survival memes of those epochs--the present
and future we are moving into will be the mythology of the child
(what some call the Childe or Star Child a la 2001 A Space Odyssey)
where instead of being a mythology of polarity, we create a mythology
of a child which partakes of All and is more representative of
nuturing, synthesis, growth and unfeigned innocence.
Well and of course, black-and-white perspective keeps our emotional
intelligence really low and our hearts closed. Too much limbic system
mythology. I think Jung was right in one sense that if we don't
integrate the shadow, the shadow either controls us (consciously or
subconsciously) or takes over. It's interesting following the results
of these new long-term Shamatha retreatants and how they were
feeling as if this limbic system shadow material was "dredged" out of
their psyches over the first month of retreat. One retreatant
described the process, called "nyams" in Tibetan, in some detail:
"Michelle did make one comment, that people were experiencing what in
Tibetan are called nyam (in Pali: sankharas) – crazy psycho-
physiological experiences considered to be a rebalancing of your
neuro-muscular system and possibly a flushing out of your deepest
mental complexes. I’m obviously no psychologist, but my layman’s
interpretation of these nyam is that when you meditate, you trick the
brain, in some sense, into behaving as if you’re dreaming, and it
starts to flush out all kinds of crazy fears, memories and desires
from the limbic system (i.e. the primal brain). Here are some
examples of nyam, (taken from various sources, including The Vajra
Esssence, a seminal text on the practice) to give you a feel for what
Michelle might be going through:
· The impression that all your thoughts are wreaking havoc in your
body and mind, like boulders rolling down a steep mountain, crushing
and destroying everything in their path;
· An ecstatic, pleasant feeling, as if your entire body has dissolved
into microscopic bubbles and you experience everything with complete
equanimity and clarity, as if you had been viewing the world through
frosted glass previously, and now someone has pulled the frosted
glass away;
· A sense of panic flowing through you as if from without, combined
with dramatically increased heart rate and sweating and muscle
twitching;
· The experience of visions, which you know to be hallucinations, but
which are as vivid in the mind’s eye as if they were real. Often
these visions take on frightening forms, such as skeletons, giant
spiders or venomous snakes;
· The sensation of external sounds and voices of humans, dogs, birds,
and so on all piercing your heart like thorns;
· Unbearable anger due to the paranoia of thinking that everyone
around you is gossiping about you and putting you down;
· The perception of all phenemona as brilliant, colored particles;
· Such unbearable misery that you think your heart will burst."
All for what (hopefully this answers some of Grate Swan's
questions!)? What it sounds like a transition from black/white to
gray to Technicolor.
Another retreatant shares his experience:
I started off practicing about six hours a day, and built to ten-plus
by the end, which was about average, I think. There were many days
in the first month that were very, very hard for me. These practices
are notorious for dredging the psyche, and they lived up to their
reputation. All kinds of nasty gunk comes up, and, even though you
(mostly) know that the gunk is just part of the practice, and that
hardship is a sign that you’re flushing the gunk out, it still feels
pretty awful, like going through a high fever (in Tibetan, this gunk
goes by the technical name of nyam. More about nyam in this post).
After I got through the surf of the first month, things were
significantly less difficult. Most of all, the practice transforms
the color of day-to-day experience. Your whole palette shifts
dramatically towards feelings of well-being: wonder, gratitude,
interconnectedness, lovingkindness, joy, equanimity, meaning. It’s
pretty amazing, a much deeper, and less coarse feeling than the
pleasure-driven happiness that comes from external stimuli. Hard to
describe the experience, but I felt it. Michelle felt it. And you
could see it blossoming all around the lodge – people’s faces opening
up, brows unfurrowing, movements slowing down and softening. And so
much kindness! We were blessed with an extraordinary “sangha” (a
community of practitioners) – I’ve never experienced anything quite
like the graciousness, humility, wisdom and lovingkindness that
permeated the lodge.
(...)
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF THE PRACTICE? In short: these practices
reduce the influence of afflictive impulses (anger, fear, jealousy,
resentment, depression, low self-esteem, vanity, etc.). In normal
life, we’re most aware of these impulses when they burst through the
surface, and often only after they’ve caused regrettable behavior.
More often, however, they lurk under the surface, roiling away, and
causing us to fall into traps like the subtle and pervasive form of
confusion that psychologists term cognitive bias. As these obscuring
impulses fade, it’s a bit like clouds giving way to a blue skies – an
exceptional feeling of well-being arises, one that includes elements
like heightened empathy, a sense of wonder and beauty, clarity of
perception and heightened sensory experience, physical bouyancy, a
deep calm, fearlessness, joy, equanimity, ability to focus. What are
the practical implications? Here are some:
Increased productivity. this is the obvious one – if you can focus
more effectively, you can be more efficient. For example, we took
reading comprehension tests before and after the retreat, using
really long, really boring stories. My ability to “stay on task” went
up significantly. Man, could I have used this skill in college,
where, typically, I’d sit down with a dry seventeenth century text,
and within ten minutes, one of two things’d happen: I’d fall asleep,
or my mind would go wandering off to a million places.
Increased emotional intelligence (self). The practice heightens your
awareness of your own emotions, while simultaneous reducing the
extent to which you need to react to them. You see them as if from
above, and you don’t have to fall into them.
Increased emotional intelligence (others). The practice also
heightens your ability to read other people’s emotions (see this
article – we did these Paul Ekman tests, too).
Changes to the physical structure of the brain. Attention has been
shown to be a kind of magic spotlight – turn the spotlight on a part
of the brain, and you can actually change its physical structure. If
you rehearse piano scales, and your attention is tuned in, you’re
actually recruiting neurons to the motor cortex. If you perform the
same exercise while distracted, there are no changes to the motor
cortex. And what’s even more interesting is the fact that people who
close their eyes and visualize practicing these scales change the
shape of their brain as if they’d actually been moving their fingers
across the keyboard.
Opens the heart. Attention, while useful in and of itself, is most
effective as a tool to cultivate other faculties, including those of
the heart. Four classic meditation practices for the cultivation of
the heart are lovingkindness, empathetic joy, compassion and
equanimity. Once you’ve enhanced your attention, you can turn it to
the cultivation of these virtues and literally grow the brain in the
areas that generate these qualities. It’s pretty amazing to feel in
yourself – and see in others around you – how the heart begins to
open up.
Health benefits. Western medicine is just beginning to understand
the physiological benefits of the practice. Early studies show,
among other things, that these practices lower levels of stress
hormones (like cortisol), increase immune response levels, lower
blood pressure, and improve healing processes, as suggested in this
study. The scientists took blood and saliva samples regularly
throughout the study, and they'll be measuring a number of elements,
including an indicator that might suggest that meditation slows down
the aging process. Anecdotally, I can say that before I started
practicing, I used to get three colds a winter, like clockwork. In
the last five years, I've gotten no full blown colds, and once I felt
like my body might be fighting a cold, but it wasn't bad and passed
in a couple of days (granted, there've been a lot of other changes,
too -- fewer airplane flights, better diet, more exercise, less
stress -- but I suspect that the practice has something to do with
it). Also, I used to get some sort of stress related affliction
every eighteen months or so -- a slipped disk, a pinched nerve in the
neck, etc. -- and in the past five years, that's disappeared, too.
Also, once I started practicing, I found myself effortlessly
gravitating towards a more wholesome diet, a phenomenon I know others
have experienced. I suspect that there's a positive relationship
between the practice and food cravings (in fact, cravings of all kinds).
Enhances free will. One the first things you realize when you begin
the practice is, well, that you’re nuts. You realize how automatic
mental processes are. They’re a bit like the breath: we can
influence them by volition, but most of the time, they operate as if
on their own (Thoughts without a Thinker is the title of a well-known
book on Buddhist psychology). The other thing you realize is how
primal and irrational and selfish most of these impulses are. And
through these realizations, you begin to understand how little free
will we actually exercise in our day-to-day experience. Mental
impulses, of course, generate words and actions. If impulses run
wild, behavior reflects them. One of the faculties that this
practice enhances is what psychologists call meta-cognition –
heightened awareness of one’s mental/emotional states and the
efficient use of this awareness to self regulate. Three things happen
to the mind’s ceaseless whir. First, it calms down. Afflictive
impulses are fewer, and weaker. Second, even if they arise, we’re
able, in many cases, to watch them without reacting. Third, they
fade away more quickly. Something that would’ve made you irritable
for hours now may fade in minutes. The net of all this: day-to-day
experience changes, and behavior changes. All of a sudden, you’re
working with a degree of freedom you didn’t know possible. When an
irritable loved one snaps at you, or someone thinks you’re going to
cut them off in line and hurls a racial slur at you, instead of
reacting impulsively, like an animal, there’s a brief “time-out”
built into the system, a gap that allows you to bring in wisdom and
compassion. I think of the movie Crash. What if, in those moments
where two people collide, act badly, and send agitation out into the
system, they acted instead with grace? How would these moments of
grace ripple outwards? (granted, you wouldn’t be left with much of a
movie, but L.A.’d be a much nicer place to live).
Correlates with genius and creativity. Unfortunately, I’m not a
creative genius yet. But there’ve been studies, going back over a
hundred years, on the faculties that correlate with genius, and
creative genius in particular. The faculty that keeps turning up is
… you guessed it. Sustained voluntary attention. Not only for
reasons of productivity, but also because, with that faculty strong,
the mind’s better able to tap into deeper levels of consciousness,
where that creativity lies. Gladwell’s Blink explores this notion of
unconscious knowing. Einstein used to say that his breakthrough
ideas came first as intuitions, ineffable knowings – then, his
cognitive function would digest this strange knowing and turn it into
logic, articulate it in German. If you think about geniuses you’ve
seen in the media – Federer or Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods come to
mind – they seem to have an aura about them, an exceptional
presence. I suspect that this presence is closely related to the two
key elements of attention: stability of focus, and vividness of
awareness.
Cultivates exceptional memory. Apparently, people who have acheived
Shamatha (i.e. realized the tenth stage in these practices) develop
uncanny memories. You can say to them: "December 13, 1994, 3:45" and
they can call up exactly where they were, and describe it in vivid
detail. And they can do this with any time and date, going all the
way back to ... the womb (interestingly, given point #8 above, Samuel
Beckett claimed that he had memories from the womb).
Tool for wisdom practices. The whole Shamatha track, as mentioned,
is about the cultivation of an attention that is exceptionally stable
(think: a telescope that can stay on its chosen object for hours on
end – effortlessly) and vivid (think: a telescope with super-high
resolution, and an ability to pick up super-quick events). Within
the Buddhist framework, the purpose for building this telescope is to
then turn it inwards (via “Wisdom practices”), to use it as insight
into the deepest levels of consciousness/reality (closely intertwined
in Buddhism). These later stage wisdom practices, including
Vipassana (“seeing the world as it really is”) and Dzogchen (“The
Great Perfection”) are (again, within the Buddhist framework), the
path to enlightenment – where, apparently, the benefits dwarf the
ones I’ve listed here.
Promotes virtue. I realize as I keep talking about “well-being,”
“joy,” “benefits”, etc., that the obvious question might be: “Isn’t
this just a way of making yourself feel better? Just another me-
culture tool for self-improvement?” I think the answer is yes to
both questions, except for the “just” part. The true goal with these
practices is to benefit others. And what’s so interesting here is
that this isn’t just a nice, empty aspiration. It’s built into the
practices themselves. They don’t work without ethics. If Shamatha
is building a high-powered telescope, then ethics are the clean room
without which you can’t build the telescope. Every experienced
meditator begins to see first hand that selfish behavior leads to an
agitated mind (and vice-versa), which harms the practice. I think all
of us in the retreat saw, first hand, how behavior that comes from an
open heart correlates with the ability to sustain attention – and how
the ability to sustain attention cultivates an open heart. A pretty
interesting, virtuous (literally) circle.
