Philip Seymour Hoffman on happiness

This is a snippet of an interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman wherein he touches briefly on pleasure, noting that anything can be overdone and then ceases to be pleasurable, and goes on to discuss happiness at more length.

He talks about how the biggest interruption to his happiness comes from thoughts rooted in the past. That leaves him wondering (and what follows is my paraphrase):

Have I ever been happy in my life? How would I know? What is the indicator for that?

He goes on to talk about how pervasive and sticky are the thoughts of the past that continue to haunt him, an observation clarified by meditation.

I'm an enthusiast of the Living Inquiries, developed by Scott Kiloby and colleagues. In the past I had worked with cognitive therapy and the programs of Landmark Education, but for my money, the Inquiries go deeper and are more effective as a technique for uprooting the painful influences of the past.

These are all good ways to explore the negative space of things that aren't happiness. What I've seen with people involved in each of these is that when painful influences are absent, happiness seems to just pop up out of nowhere, like some sort of underground spring that previously went unnoticed amid the distractions of misery.

I can talk a lot about what gets in the way of happiness. But I don't really have a clue about what happiness actually is, and my best guess is that nobody else does either. Hoffman's uncertainty about whether he had ever really been happy makes sense to me. Interestingly and perhaps unfortunately, the place he looked for an answer was in his memory of the past. I find myself hoping that this uncertainty wasn't troubling him when he died.

When I started this blog, it began as an exercise in reading the writings of people who'd claimed to have experiences of "spiritual awakening", whatever that might be. Experiences, however, come and go, even those that seem extraordinary in the moment, and all these people return to "normal" afterwards. The only difference then is their interpretation of "normal" experience.

I've sometimes felt that spiritual awakening ought to be bigger and more impersonal than the happiness or misery of any particular individual, something like the discovery of a new law of physics. I have no idea where to look for such a thing, and the happiness of individuals is prominently visible and actionable. These days, the closest thing to "spiritual awakening" that I can identify is recognizing the behaviors of the mind that are obstructions to happiness, and for human beings at least, there is a definite universality to those.

No Views is Good Views

There's a great old story where George Berkeley has claimed the non-existence of matter, and Samuel Johnson and James Boswell are thinking about how to refute the claim, and Johnson's idea is to find a large rock and kick it, an appeal to the empirical that would make any heavy-metal fan proud. Now his toe hurts, and we'll come back to that. Meanwhile what about the existence of things?

A Brahman approaches the Buddha and asks, “Venerable Gautama, do all things exist?”
The Buddha replies, “The view that all things exist is one extreme materialistic view.”
“Then all things do not exist?”
“The view that all things do not exist is the second materialistic view.”
“Are all things, then, one?”
“The view that all things are one is the third materialistic view.”
“Are all things, then, a plurality?”
“The view that all things are a plurality is the fourth materialistic view. The Tathagata proclaims a teaching that is balanced, avoiding these extremes, thus, ‘With ignorance as condition there are volitional impulses; with volitional impulses as condition, consciousness . . . with the complete abandoning of ignorance, volitional impulses cease; with the cessation of volitional impulses, consciousness ceases.’”

Smith, Rodney (2011-07-22). Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self (p. 38). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.

In the time I've been working with Scott Kiloby's velcro effect (page 2) and related inquiries, I feel that I've seen much more deeply into the Buddha's teachings. Here the Buddha refutes not just the view that things exist, but pretty much all possible views one could adopt on the question. What's the deal? Is the Buddha having some fun at the expense of the poor reader?

Interpretation #1: Adoption of any of those possible views leads to suffering, and the Buddha's teachings lead away from suffering, so the Buddha declines to endorse any of them.
Interpretation #2: As limited beings, we can't really know with 100% certainty which of those views is correct, and we should admit to ourselves that we don't know, otherwise we'll suffer.
Interpretation #3: The correctness of any view about anything is not 100% knowable, and holding any view on anything leads to suffering.

I have come to favor the last interpretation. One could say "ah, but that is just another view, with the same failings as any other view". And quite frankly I don't have a good answer to that objection.

Discarding views about anything has interesting implications.

If the Buddha proclaims the existence of Nirvana, we might conclude it's this THING that we might not have, and if we don't have it, maybe we're supposed to go FIND it. And people sometimes spend decades trying, and fail, and THAT is big-time suffering. Whatever else we may be ignorant about, we don't like suffering (until we so thoroughly deconstruct it that it no longer exists).

When we left Samuel Johnson, he'd gotten a sore toe from kicking a big rock. He still thinks the rock is irrefutably real. If he looks carefully, he'll see that his belief in the reality of the rock comes from a collection of experiences that aren't fundamentally connected: in his visual field the "rock" is a bunch of shapes and colors, in his toe the "rock" is actually an experience of pain, if he sits on it the "rock" is sensations in his butt, and if he drops another rock on it then it's an experience of a sound that he'll call a collision. Plenty of sensations and an appearance of consistency between them, but no ACTUAL ROCK matching the one in his imagination.

More about working with pain

In an earlier posting I dealt with pain, and I'd like to revisit the subject here. I'll discuss it in terms of what Scott Kiloby calls the velcro effect (1, 2), where something takes on the appearance of a permanent object because thoughts (in the forms of words and pictures) have become commingled with body sensations. The thoughts claim the body sensations as proof that the thoughts must be taken seriously. If we notice that body sensations don't prove anything (the notion of "proof" exists only in thought and language), then the claim made by the thoughts can be ignored.

I've worked with several of the people Scott has trained to facilitate the inquiries he's developed. Yesterday was the first session where I've been facilitated by Scott himself. We worked on some chronic pain in my left calf.

One can easily imagine working with thoughts-as-words. That's what people do in therapy, and we've all seen therapy sessions on TV and in the movies if we haven't been in therapy ourselves. The inquiries carefully skirt the question of whether verbal thoughts are true or false, since that can lead to an endless morasse of analysis piled on top of analysis, and indeed, people sometimes spend years (and fortunes) in therapy doing exactly that. For pain, verbal thoughts (this shouldn't be happening, this is unbearable, this will get worse) are worth noticing for the purposes of distinguishing them from the body sensations they claim to describe. Those thoughts and body sensations are distinct.

But what was really useful in my session with Scott was working with thoughts-as-pictures. When I experience pain, usually it is associated with an idea of where the pain resides in my body. For me this generally takes the form of a 3D anatomical drawing, usually colorless like a model done in transparent plastic. I don't have medical training so it's not very detailed. The pictures do not include tissues or blood vessels or nerve ganglia. Nor do they include bones except in those instances where I have a good idea of the shapes of the bones in the region.

Scott asked me to look at the shape and color of the picture of pain in my calf. The shape resembled a bent thin strip of wood that a sailor might call a batten. The color seemed to be yellow. Scott was using the Anxiety Inquiry so he asked whether either that picture, or the raw sensation, represented a threat or danger of any kind. That question guided the process. I studied that picture apart from the direct sensation for a few minutes, and then I studied the direct sensation apart from the picture for a few minutes. I went back and forth. As I did, both the picture and the direct sensation changed over time. The picture would fade from my imagination and be replaced by a different shape and different color. The sensation seemed to move and change in intensity. After going back and forth about four times, I found the sensation had diminished to the point where I just didn't care about it any more.

Some lovely non-dual poetry

This exquisite little poem popped up on a Facebook page where I probably spend too much time. The poet is Julie Klopp, who acknowledges the influences of Edgar Allen Poe and Dr. Seuss. She expressed a little worry that "spiritual" poems should look a particular way and this one doesn't, but I think it's fantastic.

Sucked into the vortex

of my cerebral cortex,
I live for that which comes next,
caught in a web of time.

I think I am a person
who must strive and push and try,
because things can only worsen,
and someday I will die.

So I decide I need analysis
to find the place beyond my mess,
to transcend myself and make progress,
and find my pure Consciousness,
my link to the Divine.

I think that others have It,
I search from place to place,
even as they tell me
there's nothing there to chase.

From time to time I stop to look
and realize it hasn't worked.
Perhaps I'll read another book...
and get it right next time.

Eventually I've failed enough,
tired of looking for other stuff,
it really shouldn't be this tough,
this quest of mine.

What is there to do now?
Perhaps I'm getting wise.
Stop worshipping some sacred cow,
it's time to realize...

That there's no past to work through,
no self to understand,
not a single thought is truthful
when it comes to What I Am.

There is no "me" appearing,
no person that needs steering,
no karma that needs clearing,
without a thought of "mine".

There is no trick to figure out,
no veil to penetrate,
no reason I must doubt,
no reason I must wait.

The secret I've been keeping
is I am what I've been seeking.
I need no further tweaking,
everything is fine.

There is no somewhere else,
there is no other time,
there are no other selves,
there's not even a Divine.

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.

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.