Scott is back in town and spoke this evening in Newton, a suburb
of Boston. His work has been evolving in interesting directions over the
last six or seven months since his last Boston area visit, and now focuses on a set of inquiries that he has developed from his experience working with hundreds of people. Here's a nice video by Fiona Robertson, one of the people who has trained with Scott to facilitate the inquiries for people.
This blog post would be remiss not to mention the inquiries but I'd like to move on to some other stuff. One of the ideas mentioned in an earlier post is what Scott calls the "velcro effect", where thoughts (words and pictures) become entangled with body sensations, and hard to pick apart. An example would be if you're in pain, and simultaneously with the physical sensations of pain, there are thoughts rapidly flitting through your consciousness like "this is unbearable" or "I'm afraid this is going to get much worse" or "I shouldn't have to deal with this". If I can notice those thoughts and sensations and keep them separate, the entire situation becomes much more tolerable. And in general, the velcro-ing together of thoughts and body sensations is responsible for a lot of avoidable suffering.
This evening Scott expanded on that and some related ideas. Looking at the notes I scribbled, here's what I found particularly compelling.
Often we seek or crave something (a fast car, a romantic partner, a donut, enlightenment) and that seeking can become a source of suffering. The act of seeking is the indulgence of the velcro effect applied to the thing in question, how it feels to lack it and wish we had it. So it obstructs direct experience in the present of what is going on in our body and mind. If we allow ourselves to experience those directly, our craving diminishes in intensity and can even turn to indifference. The seeking unwinds. Whenever we find ourselves emotionally triggered by the people or events around us, it's helpful to take a moment to pick apart the thoughts from the body sensations and experience each directly. Doing this repeatedly, we find that our capacity to cope with life's variations is much greater than we believed.
Awakening is simply being here without seeking awakening.
Connecting back to the inquiries mentioned above, one of the recent and more effective inquiries is the Compulsion Inquiry. It sometimes seems we are driven or compelled to do something, sometimes even something we don't want to do. When I drive past a Dunkin Donuts, there is often a strong urge to stop and get a Boston Creme donut. In the Compulsion Inquiry, we sniff around among our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations, to see if we can find a very literal command like "You must eat a donut". As we look around, un-velcroing as necessary, we find that the command does not exist anywhere. That might seem obvious enough -- how could a "command" appear in a collection of only words and pictures and feelings and body sensations? -- but actually going through the process has a very liberating effect.
Since there is a Dunkin Donuts on the route that I was driving home, I decided to give it a try. I parked in the parking lot and started thinking about getting a donut. I could visualize the process of buying it. No particular charge there, a set of mental pictures not velcroed to any feeling or body sensation. I could visualize holding the donut, and I'm starting to get a visceral reaction. Biting into the donut, tasting it, imagining the texture and sensation of swallowing it. Now there are body sensations and feelings, so separate them from the words and pictures and dig into the raw sensations. Experience them and look for a command anywhere among them. Nope, no command, so go back to the words and pictures. Plenty of descriptions of donuts and donut-buying and donut-eating scenarios, in both pictures and words, but no actual command. If I had found something, like an emotionally charged thought of "I want a donut", I would have un-velcroed the feelings and body sensations that gave it the emotional charge and looked just at the letters "I w a n t a d o n u t" or the phonemes "Aye uu aa nn tt uh d oh n uh t", looking to see which letter or which phoneme was where the command actually resided. Again that might seem silly, but going through the exercise, you're left with a big freedom around donut eating. And by the end of the exercise, I was utterly indifferent about whether or not to eat a donut, and I continued driving home.
This blog post would be remiss not to mention the inquiries but I'd like to move on to some other stuff. One of the ideas mentioned in an earlier post is what Scott calls the "velcro effect", where thoughts (words and pictures) become entangled with body sensations, and hard to pick apart. An example would be if you're in pain, and simultaneously with the physical sensations of pain, there are thoughts rapidly flitting through your consciousness like "this is unbearable" or "I'm afraid this is going to get much worse" or "I shouldn't have to deal with this". If I can notice those thoughts and sensations and keep them separate, the entire situation becomes much more tolerable. And in general, the velcro-ing together of thoughts and body sensations is responsible for a lot of avoidable suffering.
This evening Scott expanded on that and some related ideas. Looking at the notes I scribbled, here's what I found particularly compelling.
Often we seek or crave something (a fast car, a romantic partner, a donut, enlightenment) and that seeking can become a source of suffering. The act of seeking is the indulgence of the velcro effect applied to the thing in question, how it feels to lack it and wish we had it. So it obstructs direct experience in the present of what is going on in our body and mind. If we allow ourselves to experience those directly, our craving diminishes in intensity and can even turn to indifference. The seeking unwinds. Whenever we find ourselves emotionally triggered by the people or events around us, it's helpful to take a moment to pick apart the thoughts from the body sensations and experience each directly. Doing this repeatedly, we find that our capacity to cope with life's variations is much greater than we believed.
Awakening is simply being here without seeking awakening.
Connecting back to the inquiries mentioned above, one of the recent and more effective inquiries is the Compulsion Inquiry. It sometimes seems we are driven or compelled to do something, sometimes even something we don't want to do. When I drive past a Dunkin Donuts, there is often a strong urge to stop and get a Boston Creme donut. In the Compulsion Inquiry, we sniff around among our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations, to see if we can find a very literal command like "You must eat a donut". As we look around, un-velcroing as necessary, we find that the command does not exist anywhere. That might seem obvious enough -- how could a "command" appear in a collection of only words and pictures and feelings and body sensations? -- but actually going through the process has a very liberating effect.
Since there is a Dunkin Donuts on the route that I was driving home, I decided to give it a try. I parked in the parking lot and started thinking about getting a donut. I could visualize the process of buying it. No particular charge there, a set of mental pictures not velcroed to any feeling or body sensation. I could visualize holding the donut, and I'm starting to get a visceral reaction. Biting into the donut, tasting it, imagining the texture and sensation of swallowing it. Now there are body sensations and feelings, so separate them from the words and pictures and dig into the raw sensations. Experience them and look for a command anywhere among them. Nope, no command, so go back to the words and pictures. Plenty of descriptions of donuts and donut-buying and donut-eating scenarios, in both pictures and words, but no actual command. If I had found something, like an emotionally charged thought of "I want a donut", I would have un-velcroed the feelings and body sensations that gave it the emotional charge and looked just at the letters "I w a n t a d o n u t" or the phonemes "Aye uu aa nn tt uh d oh n uh t", looking to see which letter or which phoneme was where the command actually resided. Again that might seem silly, but going through the exercise, you're left with a big freedom around donut eating. And by the end of the exercise, I was utterly indifferent about whether or not to eat a donut, and I continued driving home.
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