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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
