Scott Kiloby, Boston & Providence, December 2012

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.

Living without thinking, and a conjecture

I saw this video the other day, wherein Gary Weber described his experience of having his thoughts slow down and stop. At the time he was a high-powered executive and when he went to work in the morning, he expected that the absence of thoughts would be a problem for conducting business. But he found that he was still entirely functional. The absence of thoughts brought him peace and joy, without any apparent downside.

I've once or twice had a similar experience but for me it's not lasted more than five or ten minutes. The onset when it has happened has been astonishing. Thoughts just come to a stop, and whatever I was about to think about, it seems like it can wait until later.

When I look at what prevents this happening more often, it's a couple of things. One is that I suffer from a belief that if I'm thinking about something, it must be important and I'd better be careful not to forget it, so I need to continue thinking about it. Another is a belief that thinking will protect me from harm, because thinking is (allegedly) a good way to anticipate and avoid potential problems. But that's not really borne out by experience: thinking, at least of the gadfly variety, is far more likely to distract me from things of real importance.

I was thinking about Scott Kiloby's exercise of resting in awareness, and thinking that it's a nice way to have this thought-free experience for a few seconds. In those seconds, there is an absence of the usual sorts of suffering that one experiences on a daily basis. One is not concerned about the future of one's career or relationship or health. One does not suffer self-esteem issues or painful memories of childhood or family interactions. One simply experiences what is present in the moment in a peaceful way. And thoughts are conspicuous by their absence.

Having had the experience of thoughtlessness and found it quite pleasant. I'm interested in recapturing it, and I wonder if it might be possible to remain in the resting-in-awareness exercise for a minute, and later an hour, and later an entire day, and eventually all the time. When I try to do this, what comes up to hinder my attempt?

I usually start with my eyes closed, and it's simply not practical to go through my day with my eyes closed. But I can continue with the eyes open, focusing on body sensations like breathing or warmth to avoid getting too engaged in thoughts. Next comes the fear that without thoughts, I will lack ambition, and without ambition, I won't accomplish anything. Rationally I know that my thoughts often get in the way of ambitions more than helping with them. And I know I'll run into the belief that thinking is necessary for safety, and again rationally I know that's not the case. I think this is something to continue tinkering with, and see if I can get anywhere with it.

Greg Goode's book "Standing as Awareness"

I've been reading Standing as Awareness the past few days. Greg Goode addresses questions that might come up for a reader or listener, where other non-duality teachers might just say "Don't over-analyze it" or "You're in your head". A person might indeed be in their head, over-analyzing things, but perhaps they're simply stuck at that place until their questions have been satisfactorily addressed.

On pages 13 through 15, there is a delightfully lucid exploration of how external physical objects can be regarded as awareness. He begins with an examination of vision, and points out that the raw data of vision is nothing more than colors and shapes and the boundaries between shapes. Any sense of distance, size, location, or material properties does not inhere in the visual experience, it is something that you've inferred. Outside of thought, there is no evidence for these additional properties, so if one is to be rigorous, they can be considered inessential to the present-moment experience of the object.

In terms of your experience in the moment, a coffee cup is indistinguishable from the shapes and colors you see. There is no vantage point from which you can see the cup as one thing, and the shapes and colors as another. They are identical in your experience. Likewise, these colors and shapes are indistinguishable from the act of seeing: there is no seeing apart from the shapes and colors seen. Finally, there is no awareness distinguishable from the objects of awareness. There's no vantage point from which you can see awareness over here, and colors and shapes over there. So all these things are identical, and so the coffee cup is a "piece" of awareness.

Within a couple of pages, Goode tackles the objection that will arise in the minds of many people looking at this chain of identity. How can the world's objects not exist physically, outside one's awareness? Is one to believe that objects cease to exist when one stops looking in their direction? Wouldn't we reasonably expect anybody making such a claim to get a clinical diagnosis and a prescription for psych meds? Goode grants that external existence of objects is a possibility but not one that can be irrefutably confirmed in your own direct experience. The apparent persistence of objects is a conclusion drawn from memory, and memory is notoriously fallible.

I once saw a discussion along similar lines between Rupert Spira and Chris Hebard. When I heard these ideas presented, they were so new and so at odds with my notion of an objective reality outside myself that I could barely follow along. I find that when my notion of reality is confronted at such a basic level, I may become sleepy or distracted. Goode's book gave me another angle of attack, with great lucidity and intelligence, and has made this stuff more accessible.

Goode goes on to talk about the recognition of a witnessing awareness once the identity of all things is seen as awareness. The witness arises, then just as suddenly evaporates into pure consciousness. That's what he says, anyway, but I have to admit that at this point I'm well out of my depth. Nevertheless, it's written with clarity and intelligence and accessible discussion of otherwise esoteric topics, and I recommend it. He has another book out, The Direct Path, and I look forward to reading that soon.

Scott Kiloby, Providence RI, April 27-29

As mentioned in my previous post, Scott Kiloby spoke at the Providence Institute this weekend. I always try to make time when Scott's in town because I find him likeable and very accessible. If I get lost, it's always because I've gotten so relaxed that I've fallen asleep, it's never because he's gotten muddy or incomprehensible. Before I forget, I would like to express my gratitude to Julianne Eanniello for the enormous energy she puts into bringing Scott to the Northeast and making his work more available here.

This post is my attempt to summarize the weekend. This is my own memory and understanding (or misunderstanding) of what was said, so take it with a grain of salt because my memory is as bad as anybody else's, and I'll probably give too little emphasis to anything that didn't sound like my own ideas.

As always, Scott emphasized his practice of resting in awareness. It's quick, simple, and easy, and he recommends that people do it repeatedly as they go through their day. It helps to dislodge the hold that your thoughts, opinions, hopes and worries have over your life. It appears throughout his other teachings like a sort of Swiss Army knife of awakening.

Scott talked about his work in designing the Unfindable Object Inquiry. The gist of the inquiry is that often you can suffer due to a belief in something that is really just a fuzzy abstraction that exists only in thought and language. You might suffer if you believe you are unloveable, so the inquiry would be to try to find "unloveable" as a thing that you could directly perceive. Things you can directly perceive include sights, sounds, smells, tastes, body sensations, thoughts, feelings, emotions, etcetera, but none of those things is the object "unloveable".

Frequently the object of the inquiry is a notion of oneself as deficient in some way, "unloveable" being an example. So you go looking for "the person who fails at everything" or "the person people avoid at parties" or "the person whose parents can't stand her". So Scott talks a lot about the "deficient self".

In working with lots of people, Scott has found that when an unfindable object carries an emotional charge, it's because it's difficult to separate the thoughts (words and pictures arising in the mind) from the raw sensation of pain that arises with the thought (such as "I'm unloveable"). The inquiry is designed to pick those apart, and allow you to put aside the thoughts and focus on the feelings.

There are a few habitual strategies that human beings use to deal with painful feelings. We can suppress them, we can try to understand them, we can try to control them, we can distract ourselves, and there might be one or two that I'm forgetting. The point is, we human beings employ thoughts to somehow avoid a direct experience of the painful feelings. But the thoughts cause more suffering than the feelings did.

The direct experience isn't as bad as we fear it will be. Scott's not the first teacher to say this. We should put aside the thoughts and simply feel the feelings, so we can discover that they are tolerable. Then we can forget all those unnecessary complicated thoughts and get on with our lives.

Dealing with physical pain

This weekend, Scott Kiloby gave a seminar at the Providence Institute in Rhode Island, following a talk Thursday night in Lincoln MA. I find his work accessible and interesting, and when he's in town I make an effort to go hear him.

The instructions for the weekend were to treat negative experiences (pain, fear, sadness, etc) by noticing that there are thoughts, and there are body sensations. Scott defines thoughts as words and pictures arising in the mind. Words may appear in the mind in written or spoken form. Pictures in the mind may be 2D or 3D, crude line drawings or complex photo-realistic scenes. Body sensations are just the direct feelings in the body, without any thought attached. If you start to describe a sensation as "sharp" or "throbbing" or "itchy" or "cold", you're mixing it with words and thoughts. Just feel it exactly as it is, without labeling.

I often think of awakening as an abstract and impersonal thing, to which the hassles of my daily life are irrelevant. But many of the tools and techniques for awakening are surprisingly practical, and of course it is ordinary human beings with typically trivial daily hassles in their lives who chase awakening.

For me, one of those trivial daily hassles is pain in my hips and lower back. Over the weekend during some meditative moments I found myself distracted by an itchy restlessness in my thighs and calves. All this pain and restlessness has gone on for a few years now, starting in a time when my job and my relationship were both stressful.

As I continued to try to focus my attention, I decided to apply the instructions to the restlessness I was feeling. I noticed that there was a periodic quick tensing of my leg muscles, and in between those tensings, there was an itchy sensation that would build up, and then the tensing would lower it again. I saw that the tensings were actually intentional at some level, and their purpose was to keep the itchy sensation from getting too pronounced. I saw there was a worry that if allowed to continue, the itchy sensations would turn into a full-scale leg cramp. I'd had leg cramps as a teenager and knew they were very painful. It was not surprising that a phenomenon perpetuated by a certain level of fear would have originated during a stressful period of my life.

I observed all these things Friday night. When I went to bed that night, I drank a half-cup of tonic water because the quinine helps calm muscles, and between that and my new understanding, I was able to keep my worry under control and sleep better than I'd slept in months.

Physical pain seems to be a purely physical phenomenon so it's easy to assume that thinking and emotions play no role. But they definitely can make pain feel much worse. I noticed that I had a mental image of the location and shape of the pain in the body, just a sort of very simplistic anatomical diagram, but nevertheless a picture in the mind, and therefore a thought. With some effort I could discriminate between that picture and the raw sensation of pain. When the thoughts are separated from the sensation, the sensation always (in my limited experience) becomes more bearable. "This sensation is unbearable" is itself a thought.

Starting with this simple mental image gave me an opportunity to dig into the role that thinking and emotions played, and from there I had some really useful insight. It also made me hopeful, and that's important when pain involves an aspect of depression or anxiety because a feeling of hopelessness will make it very hard to do anything with the pain.

As with many of Scott's talks, a fundamental practice was his five-second resting in awareness practice. This is a sort of micro-meditation of putting aside all one's thoughts and opinions and views briefly, and noticing the peace and calm that are available in their absence. When I'm doing this frequently, as he advises, I usually find that I notice all kinds of things that I didn't notice while my thoughts were running the show.

Talks by people studying happiness

The reason for pursuing this stuff is to be happy and to help others become happier. (And a lot of the ideas are interesting.) People who've made a study of happiness are rare, and offer something unusual. Even among gurus and monks and lamas, it's not often you hear one talking much about happiness.

Here is a TED Talk by Matthieu Ricard, a French monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

In another TED Talk, Nic Marks talks about measuring happiness as an alternative to GDP.

Ajahn Brahm talks about happiness and its cause, and how we can become happier. A rosier picture of the Four Noble Truths than the bleak emphasis on suffering.

More of Ajahn Brahm's thoughts on happiness. (The audio is a little too loud on this one.)

Here is a five-part Youtube playlist of a weekend seminar presented by Scott Kiloby and Bentinho Massaro. This was in the Boston area, and I had the good fortune to attend. Though I can't claim not to have nodded off once or twice. Challenging ideas sometimes do that to me.

The subjective orientation

You'll want to read the meditation posting before this one, and maybe do that meditation a few times, before you read this posting. This posting will talk about the things you encountered while trying to hold your attention steady.

To quickly recap: these things (thoughts, images, emotions, sounds, body sensations, etc) arise as phenomena in awareness. Each phenomenon has a beginning and ending. Before it begins, and after it ends, it is not present in awareness. While it is present, it does not remain constant, it is changing (perhaps subtly) all the time. Buddhism calls this anicca or impermanence. No moment of awareness is exactly like any other.

When we attend only to the things that are in awareness right in this precise moment, there are certain items that we do NOT find. We don't find any time except right now. We don't find the past or the future. We don't find any hypotheticals, like what it would be like if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, or you had married that other person. We don't find other planets or galaxies, or even other towns or cities. Everything we encounter is what's in this reality, right here, right now.

The only way the past appears is as memories and the emotions they stir, such as fondness, regret, grief, pride, or loathing. So, thoughts and emotions.

The only way the future appears is as predictions, and emotions such as hope, fear, contentment, eagerness, or despair. More thoughts and emotions.

Ordinarily we view the world in objective terms. There's a reality out there, and we perceive it with our senses, and we have our own thoughts and feelings about what's going on. But the final authority is always out there, not in here.

You can imagine reversing that. Suppose the final authority is in here. Your awareness is primary. Then come the phenomena that you're aware of. Somewhere out there, maybe something is happening that might or might not influence some of those phenomena. But all the interesting stuff is happening in here.

I call this the subjective orientation. It's a very different way to view life. Not too useful for getting to the airport on time or getting a good grade on an exam, but very useful for looking at happiness and suffering.

If you've done some meditation, you've realized that your thoughts are not you. Neither are your emotions or your opinions. In fact they arise unbidden whether you want them or not, as if they were something you stepped in one day by accident.

Anything that can surprise you, that you need to keep an eye on, that might change without your knowing, cannot be you. Start to take an interest in what things are capable of surprising you.

Richard Rohr, interesting guy

I came across a talk given by Richard Rohr at a Science-and-Nonduality conference. He's a Franciscan friar. I'm not very interested in Christian thought, and I wouldn't have expected to be able to find spiritual relevance in what this guy has to say, but I was surprised.

Rohr critiques the imperial influence on early Christianity from the point of view of an insider with deep theological training. He mentions that in addition to the Roman Empire's hijacking of Catholicism, you have the Byzantine Empire simultaneously hijacking Eastern Orthodoxy. Empires, wanting to keep large populations under control, demand that people rely upon external authority. So the Catholic church maintains a big hierarchy that separates the average person from God by several levels in the org chart. The average person's only shot at salvation is to follow a lot of rules and make a lot of heavy donations, and hope the local priest has his story straight.

Catholic monasteries and convents function mostly outside the influence of all that hierarchy. As contemplatives, monks and nuns cultivate inner awareness and inner authority, and they develop a view wherein God is more accessible and more omnipresent. (I'm not a big "God" guy myself, but that seems to me like a way better deal.) So you get anonymous publications like the Cloud of Unknowing and you find people with a very different take on Christ's message than the one known to the masses.

Rohr has a great little discussion about how, as a church progresses away from its initial inspiration and becomes increasingly a tool of the empire, mysticism is replaced by morality. Mysticism makes people smile and relax, morality makes them worry and obey. A population instilled with morality is convenient if you want to assemble an army.

I was particularly fascinated by a passage from an interview on Amazon, where Rohr says

When you're in control, in charge, looking good, building your tower of success -- which is what you expect a young person to be doing into their 30s -- you get so addicted to it that you think it's the only game in town... First half of life preoccupations won't get you into the great picture, the big picture, which Jesus would call the Reign of God. So, necessary suffering is whatever it takes to make your small self fall apart, so you can experience your big self--maybe what Buddhists would say is your Buddha self...

I've entered that later phase of life myself, where things are starting to fall apart and I can't hold it all together. And the work of this phase of life is not to build new stuff, but to learn to be happy and graceful as I watch everything collapse.

Rohr talks about the verb tense of salvation (or awakening or self-realization...) Is it something that will happen in the future if you jump through the right hoops? Or is it something that was granted to everybody long ago regardless of denomination or allegiance? Does it occur at a particular moment fixed in history, or is it always happening in the perpetual present moment?

Sampling rate as a spiritual term

This post continues my attempt to geekify spiritual awakening. The technical term sampling rate describes how often you look at a signal when you're converting it to a sequence of discrete samples. Let's suppose you have a harbor along the sea coast. The most important factor affecting the water's height is the tide, which rises and falls about every 12 hours. It does this in a very predictable way, based upon the very stable movements of the sun and the moon, and very accurate tide charts are published years in advance.

Now a guy comes along who knows nothing about tides and he measures the height of the water, just as the tide is highest. He comes back three days later as the tide is a little past the highest point and measures again. He comes back three days later and measures it a little lower. After collecting data this way for two weeks, he draws a graph of his measurements. His data points descend in a slow curve called a sine wave, starting at the top most point. Over the two weeks, he'll see that he's just reached the bottom point, and he'll conclude that the tide takes four weeks to rise and fall. Subsequent measurements on the same schedule will confirm this mistaken notion.

The tide doesn't take four weeks to rise and fall, it takes about 12 hours. This guy has run into aliasing, where sampling too infrequently makes the frequency look incorrect. This is a well-studied topic in signal processing and the solution is to make measurements much more often. To accurately describe the tide, he needs to make measurements at least every six hours.

Now imagine a cat watching a mouse hole, waiting for a mouse to emerge. The cat crouches motionless, maybe for hours, only his tail very slowly swishing. When the mouse finally comes out, the cat jumps forward faster than you can blink and catches the mouse. The cat is completely attentive and undistracted, every millisecond, until he's caught the mouse.

The sampling rate of the cat's attention is important. A cat who looks at the mouse hole every three days has no chance of catching the mouse.

Thoughts arising in awareness are like the mouse. They're quick. You don't ordinarily notice them until they are already present. When you watch thoughts arising in your awareness, you want to be like the cat, with unbroken attention every millisecond.

When you watch your breathing, check to see if you're attentive the whole time. Do you notice the start of the in-breath and then zone out until the end of the in-breath? If yes, where else does your attention go? What are the mechanics of its going elsewhere? What kinds of things attract it away?

Meditation

There are lots of different kinds of meditation. My own practice draws upon some Eastern traditions and the teachings of some Western non-duality teachers. The closest single reference to what I do is probably Tim Freke's book "Lucid Living".

We all live in the present moment, but frequently pay too little attention to it, busying ourselves with plans, ideas, and worries. We view things and people in terms of greatly oversimplified mental models. We convince ourselves that interacting with these mental constructions is the same as interacting directly with reality. That difference can become a source of suffering.

This meditation works on two things. One, you'll strengthen the muscle of choosing where to put your attention. Two, you'll get a look at the subjective phenomena that arise in your awareness. These phenomena arise all the time but you're usually too busy with other concerns to look at them carefully and consciously.

Sit comfortably. You can close your eyes if you wish. Keeping your back in a relaxed upright position will help to avoid falling asleep.

Notice the sensations in your body. Feel the points of contact of your body with the chair or the floor. Scan your body part by part, and take a quick look at every sensation you find. Start with the soles of your feet and slowly work up to the top of your head.

Listen to the sounds you can hear. If your eyes are open, notice what's in your field of view. Can you smell anything? Feel anything? Notice all those things.

Notice any thoughts, images, emotions, worries, expectations, judgements or hopes that are present. Don't try to get rid of them, just notice they're there.

Notice your breathing. Do not try to control it, just let it happen automatically as it normally does. Watch the process of breathing in, pausing for a moment, and breathing out. Watch the next breath, and the next, and keep going.

Try to keep your attention on your breath for several minutes. If you find yourself distracted by something else, go back to attending to your breath. If thoughts of self-judgement arise (I should do better and not get distracted so much), notice them, and go back to the breath. If any other thoughts, images, or feelings arise, notice them and go back to the breath.

Don't worry if it seems like you're having a "bad" meditation. If your attention is scattered all over the place, that means you're accomplishing a lot in this session, even if it still feels out of control when you finish.

You may be tempted to try to suppress thinking entirely. That's difficult (maybe impossible) and unnecessary. When you notice your attention has drifted away from breathing, just shift your attention and interest back to breathing. Let those thoughts do their thing while you do yours.

All these things you're noticing: breath, thoughts, emotions, sounds, smells, sights, body sensations, all of these are phenomena arising in awareness. These phenomena all have beginnings and endings. While they are present, they are in a state of flux, they are not constant. Once they end, they aren't present any more.

Don't worry about remembering what you noticed. There won't be a quiz afterwards. When a phenomenon ends, allow yourself to forget about it. Stay in the present moment.

Meditation is a fundamental staple of Eastern philosophy. Sometimes a term comes up in Eastern texts that Westerners find confusing, and we might think we've failed to read some important earlier text that defined that term. But sometimes it's just something that you'd recognize right away if you've meditated a lot. Oh, right, that, I've noticed that too myself.

I've provided a lot of instructions and advice in this post, but you should feel free to tinker with meditation, make it your own, and decide on your own priorities. There are some Youtube meditation videos I like, one by Tim Freke, another by Jack Kornfield, and a whole bunch by Jon Kabat-Zinn.