Enlightenment: What is it? And What Causes It?

I have been having discussions on an internet forum where enlightened people hang out, discussing what enlightenment is, the process by which it happens, the effects of awakening, and how awakening produces those effects. With that knowledge, it is possible to understand how different meditation and spiritual practices help cause enlightenment. With the knowledge of how different practices cause enlightenment, each person can choose or develop a practice that works for them - a practice they think they will be able to stick with because it is congenial and meaningful to them.

Based on those discussions I have put together the following:

Enlightenment Is Giving Up Your Concept of Self

• The source of unenlightenment is a person's mental model of self that develops in stages from infancy to adulthood. At a certain age an infant develops the ability to recognize objects, later it understands the objects continue to exist even if they are out of sight, later it learns to recognize itself in a mirror - it understands itself as an object, at a later age it understands it can influence the environment around it. Step by step the concept of self is constructed.
  

  Meditation and Spiritual Practices Help You To Give Up Your Concept of Self

• Meditation and spiritual practices help produce awakening by helping a person to realize their mental model of self is constructed.
  

  
  

  When You Give Up Your Concept of Self, You Realize You are Just Awareness Observing, You Stop Distinguishing between Self and Not-Self, and You Stop Overreacting to Emotions That have Ego at Their Root.

• When a person sees how their mental model of self is constructed, it no longer filters their view of reality. They realize they are just awareness observing events in the environment around them and thoughts, emotions, and impulses that arise spontaneously in their mind. And they no longer make a distinction between self and non-self, they feel that there is no distinction between them and the universe and everyone and every creature in it.
  

  Like the optical illusion below which can be seen as a duck or a rabbit, the new way of seeing reality was there all along, it is just a different way of seeing the same thing.
  

  
  

• The "suffering" that awakening "cures" is our overreaction to emotions. Awakening does not end emotions it changes our understanding of them in a way that stops us from overreacting to them. We see that emotions arise from the unconscious unasked for, uninvited, they exist for a time and fade away. They have no permanent existence. They are not true, or real or reality. They are subjective, they are illusions.
  

• When the mental filter of self is removed, "suffering" is also diminished because the roots of all that overreacting are perceived threats to the self (to the ego) such as being insulted, losing, being embarrassed, not having what someone else has, someone else having what you think should be yours, etc. etc. When the filter of self is absent, there is no ego to react emotionally. The result is a profound equanimity.
  

  How Meditation and Spiritual Practices Help Free a Person From Their Concept of Self:

• Practices can help a person to give up their constructed filter of self in various ways:
  

  • Allowing yourself to feel emotional pain is the way to let go of it and that weakens the ego (the feeling of self). For example, if someone says something nasty and a person relaxes and observes the emotional pain, letting themselves feel all of it without looking the other way, the pain lasts a short time and is gone and they don't feel any need to react defensively or vengefully because their feelings are not hurting them. Like if a child having a temper tantrum says "I hate you", the parent laughs it off. If there is no emotional pain, there is no ego.
    

    The same applies if you lose in a game or in some competition, if someone makes you feel inferior, if you are embarrassed, in any situation where ego is normally involved. Ego is really a reaction to hurt feelings. If your emotions are not a problem for you, there will be no ego arising.
    

    When you observe the activity of the mind you are "lucid". Like in a lucid dream where you know you are dreaming, and in a regular dream you think it is real, when you observe the activity of the mind you know you are just observing the activity of the mind, otherwise you are immersed in your thoughts, emotions, and impulses and you think they are real. You can learn to be lucid when ever possible (through sitting meditation and mindfulness in daily life) so that you do not become immersed in thoughts, emotions, and impulses, so that they do not take over your mind. When you are immersed in emotions and they take over your mind, you think the problem is what caused the emotion and you focus on that as a problem needing a solution. When you are lucid, you realize the problem is your overreaction. You can let yourself feel emotional pain (which is how you let go of it) without overreacting or becoming fixated on the external cause of the emotion.
    

  • Practices that quiet the mind slow down the mental processes and make it possible to see more clearly what is happening in the mind.
    

  • Practices that induce relaxation can help you let go of emotional pain. When we feel emotional pain, we become tense as the body reacts to stress. Relaxation turns off the body's response to stress reversing one of the effects of emotional pain helping us to let it go.
    

  • Types of meditation that produce pleasant emotions can help you let go of emotional pain. Pleasant emotions produced by meditation can alleviate emotional pain making you more willing to allow yourself to experience it.
    

  • Observing the activity of the mind:
    
    • Can help you notice when emotions are produced by thoughts and that these emotions are accompanied by sensations in the body - tensions which if relaxed helps you to let go of emotions.
      

    • Helps you see that emotional upsets have ego at their root.
      

    • Allows you to see that you are just awareness observing thoughts, emotions, and impulses, and events around you. Ordinarily you are immersed in your thoughts, emotions, and impulses. They seem to be reality. Immersion creates an illusion that they are yours, that they are part of you. Particularly if you are thinking - trying to solve a problem, it seems like you are intentionally producing thoughts. But if you observe your mind so that you are not immersed in thoughts, emotions, and impulses, and observe the thoughts, emotions, impulses arising in your mind, you see that they arise from the unconscious, exist for a time and pass away. They are not really you or yours. You are just awareness observing.
      

    • When you observe everything that appears to your consciousness: sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions, various other kinds of feelings, impulses, and intentions, you may also notice the cause and effect relationships: sense perception - recognition - thought - emotion - impulse - intention - action. If you are immersed in this process, it seems like you are in control. But if you step back and just observe this process, it seems like it goes by itself. You see that when you are immersed, the "self" exists, but when you are just observing, there is no feeling of self. This is how the sense of self is produced and how, by observing the activity of he mind, you can learn to see reality without the filter of self. From this you realize that your inner reality is a creation of the mind and you are no longer attached to your emotions, you see they are not you or yours, and you no longer overreact to them.
      

    • Shows a person that if they look closely they cannot find a self anywhere they look for it.
      

    • Helps a person to get closer to a state of consciousness without the mental filter of self.
      

  • When mental activity is greatly reduced during some types of meditation (for example: concentration meditation, or self-enquiry) , the action of the filter is also greatly reduced and it can help you to see through the filter of self.
    

• Each person should choose the type of practice they feel is most congenial and meaningful to them.
  

  Three aspects you shoulder consider are:
  

  • Relax. You can meditate in a way that is relaxing.
    
  • Stay lucid.
    
  • Allow yourself to feel emotional pain.
    

  (These ways of being are not just for meditation sessions but for daily life as well.)

  • Relaxation:
    
    • Turns off the body's response to stress, the fight or flight response. This prevents some unpleasant emotions like fear and anger from arising.
      

    • One of the effects of emotional pain is stress. Turning off stress helps us to reverse the effects of emotional pain which helps us to let go of it.
      

    • Relaxation helps prevent overreactions to emotional pain.
      

    • Relaxation helps to prevent you from suppressing thoughts and emotions. Suppressing usually involves some type of tension. Relaxing prevents this.
      

    • The importance of learning to relax should not be overlooked. No practice can guarantee that any particular person will become enlightened, but almost everyone can learn relaxation and experience great benefits from it.
      

  • When you are lucid:
    
    • You can relax and allow yourself to feel emotional pain (which is how you let go of it) without overreacting and without becoming distracted by fixation on the external cause of the emotion as a problem needing a solution. Being lucid reduces "suffering" by eliminating emotional overreactions, and it weakens the ego by allowing you to let go of emotional pain.
      

    • When you are lucid, you are not immersed in thoughts, emotions, and impulses, they do not take over your mind, you do not feel like thoughts emotions and impulses are you or yours, you see reality without the filter of self.
      

    • By contrast you also see when you are immersed in thoughts, emotions, and impulses, the belief that they are reality, that they are you or yours, is how the mind produces the feeling of self.
      

    • When you are lucid, you can see that sense perception, recognition, thought, emotions, impulse, intention, and action and the cause and effect relationships between them are a product of the mind. You see that your inner reality is a creation of the mind. When you see this, you are not attached to emotions and you do not overreact to them.
      

  • Allowing yourself to feel emotional pain is how you let go of it. As explained above here and here, letting go of emotional pain:
    
    • Reduces suffering by reducing your overreactions to unpleasant emotions.
      

    • Is equivalent to letting go of attachments and aversions.
      

    • Helps to reduce the ego because most emotional pain has ego at its root.
      

• You can understand the reason awakening is so difficult to achieve by considering what it would take for you to respond with equanimity to assaults to your ego - to react with equanimity to losing your job, breaking up a relationship, being embarrassed, etc. etc.
  

  Fear can also be an obstacle to awakening. The thought of really experiencing oneness, of not making any distinction between self and not-self, of not making any distinction between yourself and other people, can be frightening.
  

• After a person first sees that the filter of self is constructed (the first stage of awakening in Buddhism), the effects are large and permanent even though the person still has a lot of work to do to stabilize that view to make it a persistent state of consciousness. This process has different names in different traditions, Buddhists may call it awakening or enlightenment, in yoga it is called self-realization, in Zen Buddhism it is called understanding your true nature.
  

(I would like to thank those enlightened beings who so kindly answered my questions. If I have accidentally misrepresented anything they have said the fault is entirely my own.)

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Copyright © 2019 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

"The Untethered Soul" by Michael Singer

Contents

• Introduction
• What You Are
• Awakening
• Keep Your Heart Open
• Letting Go of Emotional Pain
• Meditation
• Surrender
• The Untetherd Soul
• Further Reading

Introduction

I highly recommend the The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. In his book, Singer offers a somewhat different perspective on certain ideas that students of Buddhism may be interested in. Singer's background is in yoga and he writes about many of the more esoteric and mystical aspects of the mind in a way that is much easier to understand than the way they are presented in Buddhism.

Singer cuts through a lot of the obscure verbal gymnastics you find in Buddhism and explains very clearly how understanding the mind can cause awakening. He does not give any specific meditation instructions in the book, but if you are already meditating, the information in the book can help you understand how meditation and mindfulness practices should work and how to do them correctly. What Singer is saying is not much different in essence from my own practice (observe the mind, relax, let go of unpleasant emotions) but Singer gives a clear explanation of the nature of the mind and how to use that understanding in combination with letting go of emotions to achieve awakening.

Singer's approach is somewhat different from Buddhism's. In Buddhism you are told to meditate and someday if you are lucky something magical will happen and you will get enlightenment and your suffering will end. Singer says you have to confront unpleasant emotions to let go of them and that process leads to enlightenment.

According to his biography "He had a deep inner awakening in 1971 while working on his doctorate in economics and went into seclusion to focus on yoga and meditation."

Contents

What You Are

In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer explains that you are awareness. Thoughts and emotions are not you, they are things you observe.

Singer uses the analogy of a lucid dream to explain how to experience yourself as awareness.

In a lucid dream you know you are dreaming. In a regular dream you are immersed in the dream, you think it is real.

When you meditate or practice mindfulness, you know you are observing thoughts and emotions, like you are watching a movie, you are mindful, you are lucid. But if you get distracted by thoughts and emotions and get carried away by them, you become immersed in them, you might notice after a while that you are thinking about something and not meditating, you were not lucid. It is like when you are watching a move and you become so caught up in it you forget your surroundings. The thoughts and emotions have taken over your mind.

By practicing meditation and mindfulness you can learn to be lucid during daily life. In an interview with Yoga Journal Singer describes this process. He does not suppress thoughts he observes them, "I just allowed whatever thoughts needed to arise, to arise, and simply tried to relax instead of engaging with them. No struggle, just deep relaxation..." By learning to be lucid, you can be what you are: awareness observing.

Contents

Awakening

If you allow yourself to experience emotional pain (Buddhists say "suffering") you will learn to let go of it and that leads to awakening: the end of suffering. But you have to confront your emotions from a lucid state of mind or you will not be able to let go. When you experience emotions and you are not lucid, you are immersed in the emotions, they will take over your mind, like distracting thoughts during meditation. You will see the event that caused the emotion as a problem needing a solution and you will be focused on that. But when you experience emotions while you are lucid, you are not immersed in them, you see an emotion as something you are observing, not necessarily as a problem that has to be solved. Because you are detached, because the emotion has not taken over your mind, you can just relax and allow it to exist until it naturally ends which is the way to let go of emotions - relax and allow them to exist until they cease naturally. When you are lucid, if there is a problem that needs to be dealt with, you will be able to do so without emotions clouding your judgement.

Allowing yourself to feel emotional pain can be difficult, but understanding that the process is beneficial can change your attitude and motivate you to embrace it so you can reap the benefits of letting go. You also quickly learn that most daily upsets are not too bad and that you can endure them quite easily. And if you observe the emotional pain from a lucid state you see emotions as something you are observing rather than a problem.

Being lucid during daily life is useful because we are bombarded with stresses that can cause emotional upsets all day long. In order to be able to let go of unpleasant emotions as you encounter them, you have to be lucid all the time.

Letting go of emotional pain does not just free us from suffering, it changes our basic understanding of who and what we are. Over a lifetime we have built up a "reality" in our mind with thoughts about who we are, what we are, how we relate to the world, how other people should act, what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad etc. etc. But this is not reality. It is just thought. And it limits us. To escape beyond our self constructed boundaries we have to disassemble our mental prison. Allowing ourselves to experience emotional pain can help us disassemble this illusory reality. When things in our experience don't match our expectations, we feel threatened, we feel emotional pain. We protect our mental model of reality by pushing away pain or by clinging to our ideas, Every time we feel emotional pain it is telling us about a flaw in our model of reality. Emotional pain can help us to deconstruct the illusion of reality if we allow ourselves to experience the pain and let go of it because by doing that we are accepting that our mental model of reality is flawed and in time it will be so weakened by so many accumulated flaws that we will be able to see through it. That is awakening.

Contents

Keep Your Heart Open

Singer frequently says you should always keep your heart open. Never let it close. When he refers to the heart closing I believe he is referring to the feeling one gets when one feels an unpleasant emotion arising and feels anger, resentment or something that puts an emotional barrier between the person and something or someone else. It is possible to be mindful and notice when you are putting up emotional barriers and in some cases you can decide not to do it.

Singer is not advocating suppressing unpleasant emotions. In The Untethered Soul he frequently says you should observe emotions from a lucid state so they do not take control over you, but you should allow them flow freely. Don't try to stop them or distract yourself so you don't feel them. Always just let emotions flow in meditation and in daily activities. It should become a way of life. If you do this, emotions arise and pass away and you don't bottle them up or put up defense mechanisms. This is a central theme in the book. The numerous times Singer discusses the subject shows how important he feels it is.

Contents

Letting Go of Emotional Pain

Singer says you should try to let go of emotional pain during meditation and in daily life. If you want to try it, here are a few reminders that may help you to stay lucid and let go.

Remember:

• You are just awareness observing thoughts and emotions.

• Stay lucid - don't let emotions, thoughts or impulses take over your mind. Do this by observing them, not by suppressing them.

• Start with small things. Once you see that emotional pain will cease naturally if you just allow yourself to feel it, you will come to understand and trust the process and it will become easier to tackle the more difficult issues.

• Try to be relaxed as much as you can. If the situation permits do relaxation exercises or a relaxing form of meditation to enter a deep state of relaxation.

• If possible allow yourself to feel the emotional pain until it naturally ceases. Depending on the situation it might be more appropriate to do this later in private. Feeling emotional pain until it ceases naturally is how we let go of it. and doing that frees us from the delusions that separate us from enlightenment.

• Unpleasant emotions are not "true", or "real", or "reality". They are illusions. They arise, exist for a time, and fade away - they have no permanent existence. One person may feel an unpleasant emotion, but another person in the same situation might not. You might notice that when you are lucid you do not have the same intense emotions that you do when you are not lucid and thoughts and emotions have taken over your mind. Unpleasant emotions can be eased by relaxing types of meditation. Unpleasant emotions are temporary, and subjective, they are not true, or real, or reality. They are illusions.

• If your mind becomes turbulent, just relax and watch your mind be turbulent, watch it go round and round trying to figure out what to do, but stay lucid, don't let thoughts, emotions, and impulses take over your mind.

• If it is too much, take a break and do a relaxing form of meditation.

• It may also help to develop a daily meditation practice that helps you to relax and lifts your mood which may counterbalance the emotional pain to some extent.

Contents

Meditation

In this interview in Yoga Journal, Michael Singer explains a little bit about how he would meditate, it involved deep relaxation:
https://www.yogajournal.com/meditation/surrender-experiment

YJ: How did meditation quiet the voice for you? Singer: When I first started to meditate, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just wanted to shut up that incessant chatter in my head. So I took the time each day to sit by myself in a meditation posture and use my will to either push away the thoughts or struggle to turn my attention onto something else -- like a mantra or visualization. That created some quiet, but it didn’t last, and it was a struggle to get into a really quiet state.

As I matured in my spiritual practices, I began to surrender inside, just like I was doing in my outer life. I just allowed whatever thoughts needed to arise, to arise, and simply tried to relax instead of engaging with them. No struggle, just deep relaxation -- regardless of what the voice was saying. Over time, like magic, my awareness lost interest in the thoughts and ceased to become distracted by them. If I walk into a room with a television on, I can notice it is there, but I don’t have to actually watch it. Likewise, I can notice that the voice is saying something, but I don’t have to actually listen to it. That became my meditation: deeply relaxing and not engaging in anything the voice of the mind was saying. Over time, as I let go of the chattering mind, I began to fall into beautiful states within, like deep peace or waves of joy and love. This began happening both during meditation and during daily activities. Interestingly, when the inner state becomes beautiful, the voice of the mind has much less to say. It’s as though the vast majority of its talking was about how to be OK. If you are already OK, both the heart and the mind become still and melt into the beauty of the moment. That is the gift of yoga.

...

Though I have consistently maintained daily practices, my true practice of yoga is done inside at all times. It is this internal practice of constantly letting go of whatever disturbance arises within that has allowed me to stay centered through these amazing situations life has presented to me. Yoga is like a fine wine that becomes better over time. You start by letting go of the little things that irritate you for no reason, like the weather, or someone else’s attitude. Of what purpose is it to get disturbed by things that are just passing by and are pretty much out of your control? So you begin the practice of allowing the shifts in your inner energy to just pass through internally. You do this by deeply relaxing and giving them the space they need to pass. It is very much like relaxing into an asana. The more you relax, the easier it becomes, until at some point it becomes an enjoyable experience. It can be the same inside if you begin relaxing and releasing early enough in the process. Then something bigger happens in life that challenges your willingness to relax and let the reactionary disturbance pass by within. Your tendency is to resist the uncomfortable feeling and control your environment so that you don’t have to deal with the inner disturbance. But your commitment to yoga demands that you let go and use each situation life puts you in to go beyond your comfort zone. This is the true practice of yoga, and it becomes your way of life.

A more clearly defined form of meditation that would also be a good compliment to the book is this:
https://www.lionsroar.com/how-to-meditate-dzogchen-ponlop-rinpoche-on-mahamudra/

In this type of meditation you first sit quietly and relax for a little while. Then begin to notice any thoughts that arise. Observe a thought but do not continue along in a train of thoughts. If there are no thoughts, just sit being aware of awareness. If you are not sure what "being aware of awareness" means, think any random word for example "automobile", when you are thinking it, you are observing a thought, when the thought is over, you are left being aware of awareness. If any unpleasant feelings arise, go back to relaxing for a while and return to observing thoughts and awareness when you feel more at ease.

Contents

Surrender

Singer also discusses the subject of surrender. That subject can be best understood by reading another book by Singer, The Surrender Experiment. What Singer means by surrender is that you should not resist what life brings you. The Surrender Experiment is an autobiography of Singer's life in which he decided early on to always take the path that life presented to him without regard to his personal likes or dislikes. The result was that he started out meditating in the woods and step by step, trying to help people who came to him, he ended up the CEO of a billion dollar company and the director of a spiritual temple where yoga and meditation were practiced and taught.

Singer had bought a parcel of land in the woods in which he planned to mediate in seclusion. After he built a house for himself on his property, someone in his community asked him to do some construction work. That led to more requests from others and Singer eventually formed a construction company. Singer funneled the proceeds into building a temple on his property where people from the community met to practice yoga and meditate.

When Singer bought one of the first models of personal computer on the market, he wrote programs for himself until the owner of the store where he bought it asked if he could refer clients to Singer. That eventually led Singer to form a software company. The software company grew and grew and merged and merged until Singer was CEO of a billion dollar company.

Contents

The Untethered Soul

The Untethered Soul web site is here:
https://untetheredsoul.com

If you are interested in the book and have access to e-books from your library, you might be able to borrow a copy. I borrowed the e-book through hoopla (hoopladigital.com). It is also available to borrow from overdrive.com but there was a waiting list when I checked there.

Contents

Further Reading

• Enlightenment: What is it? And What Causes It?

Contents

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Copyright © 2019 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

The Relationship of Serenity and Insight

The type of meditation I recommend can help you to be more relaxed and produce a pleasant, serene, contented mood. Developing this skill can improve the quality of your life. This type of meditation is sometimes called serenity meditation.

You can experience further improvement in your quality of life by taking your meditation practice one step further: by developing insight.

The pleasant state produced by meditation can be used to practice another type of meditation called insight meditation. One way to define insight meditation is that it is the process of observing the source of unpleasant emotions. Unpleasant emotions are often accompanied by physical sensations within the body. Noticing these sensations will help you to become aware of changes in your emotional state. When the mind is quiet and unpleasant emotions arise, the mind will also notice what caused the unpleasant emotions to arise. In many cases the mind will observe that the mind itself is the source of thoughts that caused the unpleasant emotions.

(Some unpleasant emotions might be caused by innate biochemical factors and not thoughts - I am not referring to those type of emotions here).

When you are in a relaxed, quiet, pleasant mood, any type of unpleasant mental state that arises and disturbs your pleasant mood will be very obvious to you. The pleasant state produced by meditation provides a background against which unpleasant emotions are readily noticeable. Being observant while meditating and throughout the day of what disturbs the pleasant mood produced by meditation will cause the mind to learn how it causes unpleasant emotions and it will learn to change the way it thinks in order to stop creating unpleasant emotions.

Related Reading

• One Tool Among Many: The Place of Vipassana in Buddhist Practice by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
  
  

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Copyright © 2019 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Self-Enquiry II

Someone asked about self-enquiry. I answered this:

When you meditate by asking "who am I", you will draw a blank. Ask the question intently and that blankness will drive out all illusions and you will see things as they really are. When the mind is still, it is not producing illusions. Illusions of liking and disliking. Illusions of wanting and not wanting. Notice that attachments and aversions depend on thought for their existence - they do not have any independent existence without thought - they are illusions.

When you ask "who am I", look intently into the emptiness of no answer, and experience reality without illusions. In that instant, are you suffering?

If there is no one home when you ask "who am I", then who wants? Who doesn't want? Who likes? Who dislikes? No one wants. No one doesn't want. No one likes. No one dislikes. Then why should anything ever upset you?

To make this second nature, you have to practice, practice, practice. Practice when you are sitting, lying down, standing up, walking (watch where you are going), washing the dishes doing laundry. Repetition will set you free.

When asked for clarification, I wrote:

You ask the question and then since you don't know the answer, notice the feeling of not knowing. Focus your attention on that, the quiet emptiness in your mind of not having an answer. Then repeat the question to refresh the experience.

Like if someone asked you how many monkeys you have in your upper left molar (or what is the sound of one hand clapping, or what is your face before your parents were born), you would be speechless. Your mind would be speechless, your mind would be empty because you are stumped. Look into that emptiness in your mind, focus your attention on the feeling of being stumped, of being struck speechless, of not having an answer. Practice having that clear (empty of illusions) mind.

It works best when the question is meaningful to you. If "who am I" doesn't grab you, you could try a different question. If you have a problem that is annoying you, you could ask "who is annoyed". You'll see there is no one there to be annoyed. If there is a situation that is troubling you, and if displacing the troubled state of mind with the clearness of not knowing would be a relief, use that situation. Who is angry? Who wants xyz? Who is worried? When you feel the relief of a clear mind in contrast to a troubled mind for that second of introspection, it will show you the power of this method and it will motivate you to prolong it, and become proficient at it.

I make it sound like it is an intense practice, but you have to do it in a relaxed way. You don't want to drive away thoughts and feelings in a way that would cause them to be suppressed or repressed. The way to avoid that is to only be relaxed as you do it. If you feel yourself getting tense or irritable, don't continue in that way try a relaxing form of meditation instead.

And if you really practice as much as I say, you might feel a little muddle headed or numb. If you don't like that, practice less.

If you are mindful, you can work with this technique anytime in daily life you experience an unpleasant emotion. For example, if something annoys you, ask yourself, "Who is annoyed?", then focus your attention on the feeling of not having an answer. Notice how you feel before and after. Does the technique displace annoyance with something neutral? If the annoyance comes back right away or at a later time, use the technique again.

If you do this in a relaxed way you can train yourself to respond to stress (unpleasant situations) by relaxing. What would it be like to have the ability to be relaxed in any situation? Working mindfully in daily life can help you to make progress much faster than if you just do sitting meditation alone.

The following quotation is from Dropping Ashes on the Buddha The teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn.

Sitting is only a small part of practicing Zen. The true meaning of sitting Zen is to cut off all thinking and to keep not-moving mind. So I ask you: What are you? You don't know; there is only "I don't know." Always keep this don't-know mind. When this don't-know mind becomes clear, then you will understand. So if you keep don't-know mind when you are driving, this is driving Zen. If you keep it when you are talking, this is talking Zen. If you keep it when you are watching television, this is television Zen. You must keep don't-know mind always and everywhere. This is the true practice of Zen.

The Great Way is not difficult
if you do not make distinctions.
Only throw away likes and dislikes,
and everything will be perfectly clear.

So throw away all opinions, all likes and dislikes, and only keep the mind that doesn't know. This is very important. Don't-know mind is the mind that cuts off all thinking. When all thinking has been cut off, you become empty mind.

I wrote about this quotation on another forum:

My understanding of this view is that thinking causes suffering. When the mind is quiet, it does not react with unpleasant emotions. When I feel an emotion begin to arise, if I remember that thinking causes suffering, the emotion does not come into being. At first it is possible to experience this for a brief time but it can be developed as a skill.

Try it yourself, it is extremely powerful. It is a bit tricky to get this right, it is not suppressing (refusing to look at) thoughts and feelings by forcing yourself to ignore them or by focusing intently on something else (which it is possible to do by mistake and results in feeling tense and irritable). The way to do it is to (practice samatha and insight together). Quiet the mind with meditation and then notice when an unpleasant emotions arises it is first noticeable as faint tensions arising in the body. Relax those tensions when you notice them. Also notice the thought that caused the emotion (sometimes thoughts that produce unpleasant emotions are very faint) and move the mind to a neutral thought and a neutral feeling such as the thought "What am I?" and the feeling of "I don't know.", or awareness of breathing and the feeling of relaxation. With practice, over time you begin rewire your nervous system not to react so strongly.

Further Reading

• Enlightenment: What is it? And What Causes It?
  

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Copyright © 2019 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.