Category: Meditation Page 1 of 3

Here’s the thing, everything you experience is your consciousness. When you see or hear another person or any object, what you’re experiencing is a representation.

Again, what you’re experiencing is yourself;  your consciousness. This the heart of all of the “I am everything” spiritual forms. You have never known anything directly except yourself and you never will.

This is one reason why most spiritual systems emphasize positive emotions towards even difficult people and situations. “Love thy enemy” is about loving yourself, and it is intensely protective. When the Buddha said that a monk being sawed in half by bandits should feel love towards the bandits, that wasn’t to protect the bandits (who in Buddhist metaphysics, will get theirs eventually due to karma), it’s because if you’re feeling love, you don’t feel much in the way of fear: the two emotions are opposed.

(Relatedly, if you get rid of background fear and tension, what happens is you start feeling love all the time, though the feel is somewhat different from romantic love: it is not needy (this is not theoretical, I’ve experienced it, though I don’t live there right now.)

With something like Metta you start by sending out love to people you already love, move to neutral people and then move to people you hate. It’s the last step which is most important, though it is last for a reason: it’s hard.

What stops most people is the fear that if they don’t hate those who are dangerous or immoral, they won’t protect themselves or be considered part of the tribe. The key to dealing with this is having standards: not needing emotions to tell you when someone is acting badly. IF you don’t have those standards, then you can indeed get into trouble, and this is a problem in some spiritual communities, especially when people try to act as if they have attainments they don’t have and suppress negative emotions. You aren’t suppressing if you do loving-kindness or other emotion correctly: if you have the attainment, the emotions either don’t come up or they come up briefly.

Loving-kindness, compassion and so on are also useful because when something negative does happen, or does come up from your memory, the positive emotion is protective. Traumatic formations reduce over time, negative conditioning and fears reduce and if something new bad happens you are far less likely to wind up with a new trauma.

There are a lot of benefits to other people from being around someone who is constantly loving, but the Buddha and many other spiritual teachers didn’t suggest love just because of that: they did so because being loving is good for the person who is loving.

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For most of my life I was pretty miserable. There were good reasons for that: alcoholic parents, serious illness and rather a lot of poverty, among other things.

So I started meditating. That helped, after a while (quite a while, though many people get faster results.)

One of the things that came up is that bad emotions are, well, bad. By “bad” I mean, emotions that are unpleasant. There’s a lot of advice around emotions, and negative emotions aren’t 100% evil or anything. Anger tells you something is unacceptable; hatred that someone is a long term threat and so on. Now emotions aren’t always right, you can be angry inappropriately. You can hate people who aren’t a threat (Nazis hating Jews) or who are only a threat because of how you treat them (Israeli Zionists and Palestinians), and so on.

Still, a negative emotion in the affective sense; in the unpleasant sense is bad in the same way that pain is bad. Sometimes pain is useful because it tells you to do something or stop doing something, and sometimes it’s just pain: there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it and it’s pointless.

This realization, really grinding it in, is important. That the emotion itself is unpleasant and, as importantly, that you don’t want to have it.

Most of us wander around thinking “I should be angry”, “I should be sad”, “I should hate”, under certain circumstances. Someone said something mean or cut us off in traffic or hurt us and we are angry. But if the emotion of being angry is unpleasant, all we’re doing is compounding our suffering.

But then the next thought comes up, “if I don’t get mad, I won’t protect myself.”

And this can be true. Sometimes we need the unpleasantness to spur us to action, to tell someone they shouldn’t hurt us, or to remove ourselves from a bad situation.

But it doesn’t have to be. The old saying “I don’t get mad, I get even” rather covers it. If you’ll take action to fix the problem without the emotion, then at most you need the emotion briefly to tell you something is wrong, and then you don’t need it any more.

And if you have firm rules about what is acceptable or not, you may not even need the emotion. “My boss made me work overtime then didn’t pay me, that’s unacceptable and I will find a way to stop it.”

Much of why we have certain emotions is because we think we should have them. If you think  you should be angry or sad or scared or whatever, it’s very hard not to be.

One way to get past this is pure self-concern. Just look at the emotion, and realize “this emotion is unpleasant. I don’t like feeling this way.” Do that often enough, and you’ll start feeling the emotion less often, and it will go away sooner when it does arise.

But to do this you have to believe the emotion isn’t necessary for your well-being, because if you feel it is, your mind will keep bringing it up.

You aren’t here to suffer, whatever some religions may say, and it’s OK to do what you can to suffer less.

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Words are always a problem, and never more so when discussing spirituality/meditation/cultivation.

There are many, many different types of meditation, designed to do very different things. There are forms of breath meditation whose primary purpose is to calm the body. When you do so, you may notice certain things about reality/yourself, but knowing “how to meditate” doesn’t mean you have achieved any level of insight or awakening; it’s just a technical skill.

But almost all of what I would consider real spirituality is about “knowing thyself.” This is primarily about observation; about noticing facts about yourself that you hadn’t before, and then noticing them over and over until something clicks and you start perceiving your existence in different ways than the norm.

When teaching “meditation” one of the main questions is how much to signpost; how much to point. If you tell people what they’re looking for, they’re more likely to see it, but the power of the insight is weaker than when it takes them by surprise.

That said, I’m going to “point” to something: almost nothing exists.

If you either calm the chatter of your mind or learn to disregard it (it doesn’t matter much which) and rest your awareness lightly over the sensations you’re feeling, what you may notice is that there isn’t a lot there. Mostly there’s a lot of nothing, with some sensations floating in space (which is also a construct, but that’s a later thing).

It’s an odd thing to notice, that you aren’t solid. You think of  yourself as solid: a body, but the actual experience isn’t that and that you believe it is is because you’re filling in what you “know” is there, stitching together a reality which doesn’t actually exist.

Try it sometime. Just be still, calm the mind or ignore the chatter, close your eyes, and see what’s actually there. (You can do this with eyes open, but it’s easier with eyes closed.)

You may be surprised.

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Jiddu Krishnamurti was a lecturer and teacher for almost 50 years. He was famous, there are a lot of books transcribing his talks, and he maybe got one person enlightened.

Jiddu was the anti-guru, guru. He didn’t want to give concrete instructions, because when people follow concrete instructions they aren’t free: they’ve got a system and they’re just enacting the system.

Reading him is frustrating. I’ve read his lectures multiple times over the years, and each time understood a bit more of what he was saying.

One main point is that everyone is acting according to conditioning: religious, social, family, school, philosophical, etc… They’re in chains, and they regard those chains as themselves.

But none of that conditioning is you. You aren’t your personality, and beliefs you got from you religion, nation, schooling, family, etc… are not your beliefs.

Krishnamurti is famous for “choiceless awareness”: his only real recommendation was to watch the movement of one’s mind (which includes impulses to do things, emotions and what your body is doing) without judgment. Don’t think “I shouldn’t be like this” or “this is how things are” or “this is how it should be.”

No judgment.

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His point was that if you are tying to change, if you want be kinder, or richer or less greedy or anything, you’re acting because of conditioning. You’re pushing one set of conditioning, say Christianity, against another, say “get rich because only people with money are worthwhile”. (Or maybe you think money is bad, it doesn’t matter: that didn’t originate with you.)

You push two sets of conditioning against each other, and even if you change it’s not real, there’s usually still conflicting sets of conditioning and in any case, you were acting out of conditioning, which is not something you chose.

All of this sounds very nice, but if you don’t do the work, you don’t get it. What works is actually looking at your conditioning, which comes up as thoughts, feelings, impulses and actions. Every time you feel resistance, every time you want to do something and also don’t want to do something; every time you feel something and believe you should feel something else, you’ve two sets of conditioning in conflict.

You can feel this, and you need to feel it and, often, repeatedly perceive it happening. If you do so with judgment, say, being angry or guilty because you’re angry then you’re just adding to the conditioning and it’s just conditioning fighting against each other.

If you do it without judgment, however, what often happens is a release of the conditioning. This isn’t a theoretical release, conditioning in conflict will make your muscles tight. When release happens you will feel it: muscles will relax. In some cases you’ll be shocked, you didn’t even relize they were tight, and had been tight for years or decades.

Krishnamurti was concerned with real freedom: he wanted you to become free. You don’t have to, you can eliminate all conditioning except one set, the way certain fanatics and true-believers do, and give everything to that set, and you’ll release a ton of the tension and feel better and a lot more peaceful.

You won’t be free, though.

Find the conditioning, feel it, watch it without judgment. When I say this works, I am not speaking theoretically: it does work.

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There are hundreds of types of meditation — maybe thousands. But most of them have a simple pattern.

1) Do something.

2) When you notice you aren’t doing that thing, go back to doing it.

Breath meditation:

1. Follow the sensations of your breath.
2. When you notice you aren’t paying attention to your breath, go back to paying attention to your breath.

All types of concentration meditation are similar. Here’s mantra meditation:

1. Say a mantra (a series of words) over and over again, either out loud or mentally.
2. When you notice you aren’t saying the mantra, or aren’t paying attention to it, go back to the mantra.

Discursive meditation (beloved by Western ritual mages, but not exclusively):

1. Pick something to think about.
2. When you notice you aren’t thinking about it, go back to the last thought you had that was on topic and continue.

Vipassana:

1. Sense a feeling in the body. Mentally say what it is: “itch, pressure, warmth, happy, love, fear, hatred.” Go on to the next sensation you notice.
2. Notice you are no longer doing the above, go back to it.

Loving-Kindness:

1. Find or generate a loving feeling.
2. Concentrate on that loving feeling.
3. If you notice you aren’t concentrating on it go back to it. If you notice it’s gone away, generate it again.

Do-nothing meditation (just sitting, Mahamudra, etc…):

• Don’t try to control your attention.
• Notice when you are are controlling or intend to control attention. Don’t.

Of course there are details, and techniques and subtleties, but if you just remember “do something, notice I’m not doing it, go back to it” and stick to it you can make a lot of progress. This also means that you shouldn’t switch meditation types mid-season — that would break the “go back to it” part.

Notice here that the important part is “notice when I’m not doing it.” This develops “meta-attention” which is the ability to know what you’re doing. It may seem like you know what you’re doing all the time, but a few minutes of attempting to concentrate on your breath or an object should convince you otherwise.

This also develops your ability follow your intention; it trains your mind to do what you want it to do. All we really have is our intentions, but, as we know from when we decide to do something and fail, it isn’t actually easy.

Now, of course, what you intend to do and do matters. Different types of meditation have different effects. But most types of meditation have a loop which is, at its heart, really this simple even if you intend to do multiple things, like sit in a specific way, or have the tip of your tongue touching the roof of your mouth and have your hands resting on your knees with forefinger and thumb touching while doing nothing else, or concentrating on your breath or whatever.

The basics really are this simple, though the permutations are vast.

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One of the common pitfalls of “mindfulness” meditation is that practitioners become very good at noticing sense objects in their body. (More simply: feelings.) Now, if those feelings are negative, that can lead to more anxiety and fear, and if you contact the emotions around a traumatic experience, you can be re-traumatized; the trauma can become worse.

Understand how the mind works. When something bad happens, the mind brings it up again and again as a warning; “This was bad, you should watch out for it.” The mind is trying to be helpful (our minds/brains are not that smart, but they are trying to help).

If, when a negative feeling comes up, you don’t react to it, or you react with warmth/love/security, it weakens. If, on the other hand, you are upset, and you add an additional negative load to it, your mind thinks, “Oh my, this is still a danger, I should bring it up more often and stronger.”

So the key to using meditation to help with trauma and anxiety is to not react, or to react with warmth, love, or indifference.

This means that mindfulness and Vipassana meditation styles should not be used alone. A concentrated mind (from shamatha: concentration on an object like the breath or meditation, or a loving mind, from Metta or something like puppy meditation will react more calmly or even with warmth.

When that happens, the underlying anxiety or trauma weakens. Repeated applications will reduce it a great deal.

This means that you should always do more concentration and loving kindness meditation than Vipassana or mindfulness — at least a 2/1 ratio, and do shamatha and loving-kindness before you do vipassana. I suggest concentration first (breath or mantra are easiest for most people), then do mindfulness or vipassana.

If you contact an emotion you can’t deal with, immediately switch over to concentration, then after a few minutes, go to loving-kindness.

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