The Second Noble Truth

Like many, I spend a lot of my time and energy preparing for the future. I work for the success of my employer and myself. I plan and work toward outcomes that I hope will make me happy later. I think about trips I’ll take, or gadgets I’ll buy or build, or photos I’ll take or things I’ll write, or courses I’ll take. I imagine future interactions with people and how I think those will make me feel.

Planning and working for the future is good and necessary. When I reach the future I’ve built, the fruits of my work will appear as phenomena arising in the present moment. If I lack a capacity to enjoy them, all that effort will have been wasted. Appreciation of the present moment is a skill to be cultivated, with dividends that last throughout one's life.

It's not too hard to find enjoyable experiences in the present moment. Some are results of past preparations but mostly it’s just what’s around anyway. There’s a trick of distinguishing the raw experience of the present moment from the jungle of thoughts and stories and hopes and fears that swirl around my brain most of the time. I keep an eye out for practices that help with that.

Sit quietly for a time and whenever a thought appears in the mind, silently acknowledge to yourself that a thought has been identified. Don’t try to make the thought go away, just identify it and then ignore it so you'll be ready for the next one. Maybe it will go away by itself, maybe not, it doesn't matter.

Remain aware of raw sensory data: colors and shapes seen, sounds heard, smells, tactile sensations. I like to think of these as the fundamental particles of experience, indivisible and atomic. These can help you to stay in the present moment. The thoughts are trying to drag you away, telling you the present moment is sad or lonely or scary or boring. But "sad" and "lonely" and "scary" and "boring" don't exist in the raw data of the present moment. Those exist only in the domain of thoughts and stories.

Scott Kiloby noticed something fascinating that he named the "velcro effect", where thoughts and body sensations become commingled and seem to appear in our experience as a unified object. Our most distressing, horrible, and terrifying experiences are like this. As the thoughts spin on about how terrible things are, we notice more and more unpleasant feelings in our bodies, which lend more validity to those horrible thoughts, and the whole thing spins faster and faster and more and more violently. What can we do to disrupt this ugly feedback loop?

When you're terribly upset, you won't have the composure to do anything. Start with smaller challenges that you can manage now. Next time you're stuck in traffic or sitting in a boring meeting, take a look at your body sensations. Take some time to take a good close look at the visceral experience, without any labels or descriptions or explanations. Next, look at all the thoughts that want to connect themselves to that visceral experience. They want to use the body sensation to convince you of their importance and veracity. You can start to see how these thoughts are like a washed-up writer who will do anything to get his career back on track. They are not the shining beacons of Truth that they would seem to be on first glance.

          "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
                    -- Hamlet, by Shakespeare; Act II, scene ii

As you get more practice in seeing through these thought processes, you can work with more challenging experiences. You can start to see how this pattern has repeated over and over and over, for your entire life, and the lives of everyone around you.

Sam Harris and the modern atheists

I once watched a very interesting talk given by Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. Harris is one of these modern atheists who mostly strike me as a force for good in a world where organized religion and violence too often go hand-in-hand. But I've always had some ambivalence about their agenda, and before watching this I wasn't sure exactly why. Harris discusses some of their public relations bloopers, one being that they label themselves (nobody in the Civil Rights movement ever adopted the label of "non-racist") and another being that they allow the religionists to frame the arguments and assign to them the most easily attacked position. He also points out the benefit of claiming intellectual honesty as their first priority, even above atheism itself. I think I had a gut sense that they had played a little fast and loose with genuinely important things, and I hadn't managed to articulate it to myself as clearly as he has done here.

One thing I found enormously appealing in this talk is the thoughtful and sympathetic treatment that Harris gives to contemplative traditions, starting around the 23:22 mark in the video. Starting out almost apologetically to his fellow atheists, he goes on to note that in every culture there are people perceptive enough to realize that the conventional basis for happiness is little more than the attempt to repeat past pleasant experiences: to have continued access to good health, good weather, good friends, good food, good books, in order to hold one's boredom and dissatisfaction at bay forever. Harris uses the wonderful phrase "to keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road".

Meanwhile, even in times of peace and prosperity, loved ones die and we know we'll die too, and we get sick from time to time, and there are many other threats to our hopes for perpetual happiness. So these perceptive people begin to wonder whether there is some form of happiness that does not depend upon repeated pleasures or the satisfaction of all one's desires, and they set off in search. Sometimes an initial direction may be suggested by a contemplative tradition within one religion or another.

Such people, if they discover anything at all, consistently discover that the source of their suffering is discursive thought misapplied, the same insight that informed the development of cognitive therapy. Our moods are mercilessly batted around by a more-or-less random sequence of thoughts, and we suffer because of "our habitual failure to recognize thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought... and when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available".

There is a second part to this video, the Q-and-A session following his talk, and two questions expand on this theme in interesting directions, starting at 10:00 and at 17:50, the latter in response to a question from Dan Dennett.

I'm approaching the age at which people typically retire, and I have a pretty long list of things I had hoped to accomplish and have not. In my remaining time, I expect more and larger disappointments on the way. Keeping my foot on the gas until I run out of road is not looking like an ideal strategy.

Bandwidth as a spiritual term

I trained as an electrical engineer (long long ago in a galaxy far far away). Some of my favorite courses were in signal processing. So I find it natural to think in engineering terms like bandwidth and sampling rate, and to apply these to meditative practice and the study of mind.

The concept of bandwidth is relevant to the mind's tendency to objectify. Let me explain what I mean. The bandwidth of a signal is the width of the range of frequencies present in the signal. If your voice has pitches that go down to 200 Hz and up to 800 Hz, that's a bandwidth of 600 Hz. Another definition of bandwidth, applicable for computer applications, is the number of ones and zeroes per second being sent over a wire or a light beam or a radio signal. Either way, we're talking about how much information we can cram in per second.

When you tell a story about some experience you had, an interesting thing happens with bandwidths. First there is the reality that you were in at that time, with astronomical numbers of protons, electrons, photons, sound waves, light waves, smells, sights, sounds, tastes, and other stuff. Your eyes, ears, and other senses registered some very small fraction of all that as raw sense data. Immediately, a huge reduction in bandwidth in the simple act of perceiving the reality around you.

You didn't consciously experience everything your senses received. The brain can't handle that volume of information. The data had already been sorted and prioritized and mostly discarded before you became aware of it. Your conscious experience was another big reduction in bandwidth from the raw sense data.

Next you stored the experience in your short-term memory and later long-term memory. Again your brain sorted and prioritized. Which aspects are most important? Which would make a good story? Which are worth learning from? As the experience is committed to memory, another reduction in bandwidth.

Finally it's two weeks later, and time to tell your friends about your experience. Now you take this thing from long-term memory, a teeny teeny fraction of that original reality, and you need to express it in words. You might recall the striking redness of an apple, or the peculiar smell of some car's exhaust, but even if you mention those details, they can't really be rendered into language. Another reduction in bandwidth, and more information lost.

Finally, the point of all this. Your mind thinks all that lost information didn't really matter. After all, you are obviously an educated competent adult functioning in a complex fast-paced world full of technology and commerce and art and social relationships. Whatever gets dropped along the way is acceptable collateral damage. One can't stop the whole world to weep for a few forgotten insignificant details.

Kurt Vonnegut once said:

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

More precisely, minds that work exactly like yours are running the country.

Scott Kiloby's Boston visit

When I started reading present-day reports of spiritual awakenings, Scott Kiloby’s book Love’s Quiet Revolution was the first thing I came across. He came to the Boston area in May 2011 and spent a few hours talking about this stuff. I took a few notes as he talked. He offered a great little exercise.

Stop your thoughts and be silent for a few seconds, and look to see, are you OK, even though you haven’t fulfilled all the goals and desires and ambitions that crowd your thoughts and your conversations? There is a space of completeness or contentment there, where it isn’t a problem that these things aren’t yet accomplished. If you do this repeatedly, you’ll find that this contentment is constantly available, all day and night, throughout your entire life. Access to the space is neither helped nor hindered by your thoughts or your life circumstances. In the space there is no work to do, nothing to acquire or become. You can visit the space when the world around is noisy and distracting.

Your sense of yourself is a construction of thoughts. Many are the stuff of unhappy childhoods: I’m not lovable, I'm not attractive, I’m not good enough, I’m bad at sports, I'm bad at math, people will abandon me, etc. This construction is responsible for all your problems, worries, concerns, frustrations, issues, etc. Briefly stopping all those thoughts will bring a moment of freedom from all those problems.

The space of contentment is the same awareness that underpins your subjective experience of life. If you’re able to ask the question “does awareness exist right now?” then it does, because you can’t ask questions without it.

As you visit the space more often, it will eventually spontaneously occur that the thoughts and concerns and issues will be seen to be empty. They will begin to lose their emotional hold on you. As they do, your constructed self will gradually (or maybe not so gradually) unravel.

The mind objectifies: it classifies reality into objects, each described as tersely as possible. This is great for survival and for accomplishing goals, but it's a hindrance to happiness. It becomes impossible to see life in all its richness, and easy to fall into oversimplified ideas about your relationships to the people and things around you. Very early in life we learn that objects are constant over time, so you get a rude shock every time your body doesn't function as smoothly as it did when you were younger.

Arguing with reality

Recently I got together with some folks and we watched an Adyashanti video called "Freedom from Separation". It helped me with some parts of the non-duality message that I've found difficult.

My first "spiritual experience" was a course of cognitive therapy to address a depression I suffered in the 1980s. It didn't simply reverse my depression, it left me with the certainty that I would never be seriously depressed again. I had peered deeply into the fundamental machinery of human suffering and felt compassion for everybody.

The idea behind cognitive therapy is that depression is the result of particular thoughts which contain glaring logical errors. You learn to notice and transcribe the thoughts, find the logical errors, and propose to yourself more reasonable alternatives. I wonder if something similar could be helpful for those seeking spiritual awakening.

Some of the language used by modern non-duality teachers has been elusive for me. Talk about a "sense of separation" leaves me scratching my head. I can see that we're all the same down deep inside, but we're still different people. Bill Clinton aside, I do not literally feel your pain.

Adyashanti asked "how would you feel if the sun disappeared? what kind of day would you have if the atmosphere were replaced by vacuum?" OK, I can get that. I interact with the air and the sun and the grass and trees and people and my cat. Is it separation when I forget about these connections? Maybe, but there is a deeper, more interesting take on it.

Like everybody, I have thoughts that cause me to suffer. I worry about my health or my bank account or my relationships with others, or a million other things. Each thought has two facts about it:

• This thought is in conflict with reality.
• I am emotionally invested in this thought.

The biggest example is thoughts with the word "should" in them. Every "should" thought implies that reality isn't good enough, that it can somehow be improved. The reality of this present moment cannot be changed, I can only accept it or reject it. If I reject it, I suffer. (Skillful actions can cause desired outcomes in the future, but that's another matter.)

To connect this back to separation, whenever I engage with a thought conflicting with reality, I am distancing myself from reality, and from everything in it: the people, the animals, the cars and planes and trains, the grass and trees and rocks. I'm disappearing into a fantasy world of "things would be better if only X were true". If I can disengage from all those argument-with-reality thoughts, I can return to the real world where everybody else is hanging out. Maybe that's what these guys are talking about with the "sense of separation" thing.

One person mentioned some related videos (five of them, starting here) that Scott Kiloby has done, something he calls an Unfindable Objects inquiry. Very interesting stuff.

What's this blog about?

My intention with this blog is to look at a phenomenon that has come to my attention within the past 18 months. Several people (alive today, not thousands of years ago) have described an experience that they variously call "enlightenment", "spiritual awakening", "non-dual realization", and other names. Most come from religious traditions and lineages, predominantly Buddhist and Hindu, and others seem to have stumbled across this thing through their own effort, study, or luck. All the descriptions are remarkably consistent across lineages.

I'm tempted to define or explain the phenomenon but I don't think I could do a good job, particularly when I haven't experienced it myself. It's helpful to refer to the awakening experiences of people like Ramana Maharshi, Eckhart Tolle, or the Buddha. Nevertheless I'll give it a shot.

• These people all experience complete or nearly complete elimination of fear and suffering, including fear of death.
• They feel an all-encompassing love for everybody and everything around them.
• They cease to identify themselves as individuals separate from their society or surroundings.
• They perceive the universe as a benign non-threatening place.
• They are exceptionally clear in an area where most people are very muddy: distinguishing between what is real (external to their minds) and what exists only in thinking, concepts, or narrative.
• They no longer feel any temptation to be "spiritual seekers". They are content with whatever they've learned.

The first few people I became aware of were Scott Kiloby, Jan Frazier, and Adyashanti. While Frazier is an excellent writer, I never connected with her work as I did with Kiloby and Adyashanti. As time went by I learned about others, and have met a few in person. It seems that these people are actually rather numerous, which I would never have guessed a couple of years ago.

What's been a real pleasure for me has been to become aware that there are people alive today, actually in pretty large numbers, who've had this experience, and who are blogging and writing books and giving public talks. For anybody interested in having this experience themselves, I think it's helpful, perhaps essential, to spend time with such people.

Here are a few interesting related URLs.

• Urban Guru Magazine
• Conscious TV: video interviews with awakened people
• StillnessSpeaks: Chris Hebard's website including many fantastic interview videos
• There's a yearly Science and Non-Duality Conference.
• Scott Kiloby has posted numerous Youtube videos.
• So has Adyashanti.