Aspects of Meditation

This article is an overview of my most current views on meditation. Detailed instructions on how to meditate can be found on my meditation web page.

It can be helpful to be aware of these aspects of meditation:

• Relaxation - Letting go of stress and unpleasant emotions.
• Concentration - Staying lucid.
• Half-smile - Relaxing meditation may feel so pleasant it makes you want to meditate with a half-smile. Smiling can unleash your natural state of happiness.
• Surrender - When you stop fighting against your emotions you may feel a new sense of freedom.
• Practice in Daily Life - Practice in daily life to reinforce and maintain the benefits of meditation throughout the day.
• Diet - Meditation depends on the brain. The brain has to have the right nutrients to function well.

Relaxation

You can get a lot more out of a meditation session if you do relaxation exercises before you meditate. Below are some relaxation exercises that are very effective when done in combination. These relaxation exercises can help you become very relaxed and put you in a pleasant relaxed mood. They can turn off the body's response to stress. When you deeply relax, you may find that unpleasant emotions disappear.

1. Progressive muscular relaxation - Move each part of the body five or ten times. This can be done, standing, sitting, or lying down depending on the movements you use.

2. Hypnotic induction - Mentally relax each part of the body making it feel "relaxed and heavy".

3. Visualize each color of the spectrum Visualization produces theta brainwaves. You may feel yourself becoming more and more relaxed with each visualization.

Do these exercises in order. Exercises #2 and #3 can be done sitting but are most effective if done lying down. After #3, count ten breaths and repeat from #2.

When you are deeply relaxed and feel like you are floating or are in the hypnogoic state (experiencing vivid imagery and it is hard to concentrate for more than a few seconds),  you may feel yourself shift into a pleasant mood and find that unpleasant emotions have disappeared. Sometimes this happens automatically - you may feel a wave of relaxation flowing through you. Other times if you open your eyes and look around noticing the pleasant feeling of relaxation as you breathe in a relaxing way, and half-smile, focusing on the pleasant feeling may shift you into a pleasant relaxed mood.

Spend a few minutes letting the pleasant relaxed mood stabilize.

• Relaxation can cause you to let go of unpleasant emotions. Relaxation puts your mind and body in a suitable condition for the next steps.

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Concentration

Count the breath. The right level of concentration is important. Too much interferes with relaxation, too little and the wandering mind will prevent relaxation and everything else about meditation. When your mind is very quiet, you may stop counting and just notice the breath if you prefer. Concentration helps you to stay lucid.

• Concentration quiets a turbulent mind and produces a state of peace, non-attachment and equanimity.

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Half-smile

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, "... practice breathing with a half-smile. You will feel great joy.". If you don't understand this, try it and see what happens. But too much joy can be tedious. You can learn to adjust it to just "pleasant". Smiling in meditation is not a forced smile, the feeling of relaxation during meditation is pleasant and should make you want to smile - like resting in a hammock on a warm summer's day, or slipping into a warm jacuzzi.

Smiling releases pleasant feelings, observing them produces a feedback loop in the brain generating more pleasant feelings. At first it may be interesting to experience a high intensity of these feelings. In time that may become tedious and you can learn to tone them down to a relaxed pleasant mood by balancing (reducing them not eliminating them) them with more relaxation and concentration.

In fact, intense states of bliss not really necessary, simply practicing this relaxing meditation can produce the same pleasant relaxed state. By practicing getting into and maintaining this state during meditation, you can learn to maintain this relaxed pleasant state during daily life when you are not meditating.

• Relaxing meditation produces a pleasant relaxed mood characterized by feelings of compassion, good will, aversion to harming other people or other living things, and an absence of ill will.

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Surrender

Surrender is a way to let go of unpleasant emotions. Surrender is the feeling you get when you realize you are trying to ignore or suppress an unpleasant thought or emotion and you relax and stop resisting it. You stop fighting it.

• Underneath most unpleasant emotions that arise is a fact or thought that you don't want to acknowledge or accept. Surrender means acknowledging and accepting this fact or thought. Doing so takes away the force of the emotion. Frequently the fact or thought is related to our sense of self. Examples of things you might resist acknowledging include: failing, losing, being wrong, being a victim, losing social status, being insulted, aging, illness, incompetence etc. etc. Your unconscious mind may be hiding these thoughts from you and you might have to dig through layers to root them out.

• You let yourself feel the emotion. You let it express itself in your body without letting it take over your mind. You observe the sensations in the body that comprise it.

• You allow your conscious mind to recognize the emotion. You acknowledge unpleasant truths and let yourself think the thoughts you have been trying to ignore.

• You understand that you can't control everything in life and you accept with equanimity that things you don't like will happen.

• You use other aspects of meditation: relaxation, concentration, half-smile, practice in daily life, etc., to produce and maintain a pleasant relaxed state of mind which makes it easier to release unpleasant emotions by counterbalancing some of the unpleasant feelings that may occur when releasing emotions.

Surrender means you are lucid with respect to your emotional state. When you are angry, you know "This is anger, this is what it feels like, this is how it affects my mind." The same is true for other emotions, anxiety, sadness, etc. Being conscious of emotions helps to prevent them from taking over your mind. From repeated observations, you learn what emotions are and how they come and go and this helps to make it easier to let go of them.

If surrender does not eliminate an emotion entirely, it may change the emotion from an unpleasant experience to a neutral sensation in the body.

Surrender is not just a thing to do, it is an attitude for daily life. By surrendering to unpleasant emotions that may arise, you can also learn to keep the surrender attitude even if you are not feeling anything unpleasant.

The attitude of surrender is letting go of identity view. Surrender means you relinquish the need to defend your ego (your "self"). Unpleasant emotions occur when an ego attachment is threatened. An ego attachment is something you consider you or yours. It can be something close to you like your beliefs, or it can be something somewhat distant like your favorite rock band. Not defending your ego does not mean you ignore problems. It is not referring to physical action it is referring to psychological defense against unpleasant emotions. It means that if you stop fighting against emotional pain, if you do not need to defend your ego, you can decide what to do about problems using logic and compassion without selfish emotions clouding your judgment.

Surrender also means you don't have to be perfect. This includes being perfect at spiritual practices. Having an attitude of surrender means you don't have to perfect at surrendering. It means you don't have to be perfectly non-attached. You don't have to have perfect concentration. You don't have to be perfectly relaxed. You don't have to filled with joy all the time. It means you don't have to have perfect equanimity. You will actually increase your equanimity by allowing yourself to have imperfect equanimity.

The pleasant mental state and feelings of compassion, non-attachment, happiness, and good will produced by relaxation, concentration, and a half-smile help you to surrender. When you are happy, you don't want anything. You are self sufficient. You are strong. You don't need to hide from anything. You are emotionally resilient so you don't need to defend yourself emotionally. You can accept reality as it is.

If you practice keeping the attitude of surrender during and after meditation sessions, you will get better and better at it.

It feels very nice to have the heavy responsibility of defending your ego lifted off your shoulders. You do not need to defend your ego.

• The attitude of surrender is letting go of identity view.

After a session of meditation try to continue doing this practice mindfully during daily activities. If you find life's stresses disturb the pleasant relaxed mood, you can try to meditate to get back into it as soon a it is practical to do so.

One thing nice thing about this practice is that you get benefits (relaxation, elevated mood) from the first time you try it, and over time you get benefits (increased equanimity and compassion) in proportion to the effort you put in.

This practice will cause increases in equanimity, compassion, non-attachment and reduce self-centeredness (freedom from identity-view). These factors may lead to gradual enlightenment.

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Practice in Daily Life

Finding ways to practicing meditation and mindfulness in daily life can help you to reinforce and maintain the benefits of meditation throughout the day: the pleasant relaxed state and feelings of compassion, good-will, non-attachment, and surrender produced by meditation.

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Diet

Meditation depends on the brain. The brain has to have the right nutrients to function well. Metabolism varies from person to person so it is not necessarily possible to describe a diet that will work for everyone. What I say on this subject is not meant to be definate truth, but more of a suggestion for readers to consider if they are experiencing problems. ...

• It is my opinion (and it is just an opinion - other people may have different experiences that lead to different opinions) that for optimal meditation one should refrain from anything that can affect consciousness: recreational drugs, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine.

• Sugar and carbohydrates can also be problematical. Too much or too little may result in problems. Different types of carbohydrates (different foods) may have different effects that would vary among individuals. For more information, look into the effects of carbohydrates and protein in the diet on serotonin levels in the brain.

• I also do not advocate a vegetarian diet - again that is my opinion, others may have a different opinion, but in my experience it does not lead to optimal brain function. I don't mean to imply anyone should stop being a vegetarian, only that I don't advise it or believe it helps meditation or is necessary for spirituality.

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

Surrender

UPDATE: An enhanced explanation of surrender can be found here:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2019/09/aspects-of-meditation.html#asp_med_surrender

Surrender is an aspect of letting go of unpleasant emotions. Surrender is the feeling you get when you realize you are trying to ignore or suppress an unpleasant emotion and you relax and stop resisting it. You stop fighting it. You let yourself feel it. You let it express itself in your body without letting it take over your mind. You observe the sensations in the body that comprise it. Surrender often changes the emotion from an unpleasant experience to a neutral sensation in the body.

Surrender is not just a thing to do, it is an attitude for daily life. By surrendering to unpleasant emotions that may arise, you can also learn to keep the surrender attitude even if you are not feeling anything unpleasant. The attitude of surrender is letting go of identity view. Surrender means you relinquish the need to defend your ego (your "self"). If you practice keeping that attitude during and after meditation sessions, you will get better and better at it.

It feels very nice to have the heavy responsibility of defending your ego lifted off your shoulders.

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

Gradual Enlightenment

In The Science of Enlightenment, a book written by Shinzen Young, Shinzen says that people can become enlightened gradually without knowing it.

He writes:

... in my experience as a teacher, enlightenment usually sneaks up on people. Sometimes they don't quite realize how enlightened they've become over time because they have gradually acclimatized to it.

This intrigued me so I searched for more information on it. I found a file on the Shinheads facebook group, (Shinzen Enlightenment Interview.pdf) that discussed this in greater detail and I have quoted the relevant excerpt below.

What Shinzen describes seems to be that the effects of meditating regularly over a long period of time produce the changes in a person that constitute enlightenment, whether you know it or not, whether or not you have the insight reported by people who experience sudden enlightenment.

Shinzen says that gradual enlightenment occurs when someone "gradually works through the things that get in the way of enlightenment" and "over a period of years, and indeed decades, within that person the craving, aversion and unconsciousness - the mula kleshas (the fundamental “impurities”), get worked through. This means that if you learn to let go attachments and aversions, then over time you will awaken gradually.

If this is the case, then one can simply meditate and not worry about having any particular insight or crossing any particular milestone.

You can judge your progress and the effectiveness of your meditation practice by your own observation as to how it helps you to live with increasing equanimity and compassion. If you find your equanimity and compassion are increasing over time, then you are probably doing it right.

Here is the excerpt from Shinzen Enlightenment Interview.pdf

However, for most people who’ve studied with me it doesn’t happen that way. Not suddenly. What does happen is that the person gradually works through the things that get in the way of enlightenment, but so gradually that they might not notice.

You remember that I said in traditional Buddhism it’s very significant that it’s formulated that something passes away and it’s not something that you get? So what typically happens is that over a period of years, and indeed decades, within that person the craving, aversion and unconsciousness -­-the mula kleshas (the fundamental “impurities”), get worked through. Because it’s gradual, they may not realize how much they’ve changed. As the mula kleshas get worked through they suffer less and the fundamental alienation between inside and outside diminishes. But because all this is happening gradually they’re acclimatizing as it’s occurring.

In acclimatizing they may not realize how far they’ve come. However, they often do notice it when “the doo doo hits the fan”. Like a major bereavement, a major illness like cancer, a serious injury, or their life is somehow threatened. Then they notice how everyone around them is freaking out and how much less they’re freaking out. Then the contrast becomes suddenly very evident. That’s when they would tend to notice it. That’s why I like telling the story about the samurai.

“This samurai went to the Zen temple on the mountain and lived there for many years. He didn’t seem to be getting anything out of the practice. So he said to the Master, ‘I think I need to leave. Nothing’s happening as a result of this practice’. So the master said ‘Okay. Go.’

As he was coming down the hill one of his former comrades, a fellow samurai, saw him in the tattered robes of a Buddhist monk –which is equivalent to a glorified beggar from a samurai’s point of view –and he said ‘how could you be so undignified to join the counter-­-culture of Buddhist beggars?’ and he spit on him. Now in the old days the samurais were extremely proud. Any insult to their personal dignity meant a fight to the death. So the monk who had formerly been a samurai just walked on and after he’d walked a certain distance, it occurred to him that not only did he not need to kill this guy, he wasn’t even angry.

As the story goes he turned around and bowed towards the mountain three times where he had practiced. He bowed in his recognition of all that he had worked through. He recognized he no longer needed to kill someone that had offended his dignity. He noticed how fundamentally he had changed as a human being.”

Of course, it’s not just samurai in 16th century Japan. The same things apply to 21st century North Americans. Maybe they’ve been practicing for 10, 20, or 30 years and it doesn’t seem that much has changed. And then something big happens and then they realize how different they’ve become compared to ordinary people. I’ll give you an example that happened just a few weeks ago. Someone who has been coming to retreats for quite a while went to have a biopsy to determine whether they had a serious cancer or not. While waiting for the results this person noticed they weren’t worried. Anyway, it turned out that the biopsy was negative. So all the unnecessary suffering that would’ve happened but didn’t, that was the effect of that person’s years and years of practice. It’s my impression that many more people have that gradual unfolding than have the sudden...

The Buddha himself said that awakening is a gradual process in the Uposatha Sutta:

Even so, bhikshus, just as the great ocean slopes gradually, slides gradually, inclines gradually, not abruptly like a precipice — so, too, in this Dharma-Vinaya, penetration into final knowledge occurs by gradual training, not abruptly.

Here are some excerpts from an article on gradual enlightenment written by Sensei Herb Deer who teaches at the Sweetwater Zen Center.

July 20, 2013

Gradual Enlightenment is Better. ~ Herb Deer

First of all, let’s define enlightenment as being selfless, compassionate, wise and present and throw in for good measure the realization that everyone and everything is connected in oneness. This should mean, for example, that an enlightened person puts the care of others before satisfying selfish desires and is able to communicate with honesty and integrity about any struggles with this.

...

Sudden enlightenment is a spontaneous awakening to our oneness with all things and the perfection of our life, such as the Buddha had when he saw the morning star under the Bodhi tree.

...

This sudden awakening experience is described in every spiritual tradition in one way or another. In Zen, it is emphasized especially in the Rinzai lineage as crucial for spiritual enlightenment.

...

Gradual enlightenment, on the other hand, is the slow and patient process of growing and maturing in our practice through consistent discipline and progress. The consistent and persistent practice of being mindful of our activities leads us to progressively refine our experience of emptiness and oneness in our daily life.

The Soto Zen School tends to embrace this more.

Maybe we can all agree that manifesting enlightenment in daily activities is the most profound expression?

But I say that the gradual process of awakening is more important to embrace in a spiritual path for several reasons.

First of all, the sudden kensho experience is like grace in that it cannot be guaranteed as a result of practice. Some people have a better chance at it if they practice with more effort and determination. But ultimately we could never judge the merit of anyone’s practice by using kensho as a measuring stick.

Second, kensho isn’t meant to take care of long-term emotional and behavioral patterns, and it doesn’t. This has been proven over again by ‘enlightened’ charismatic Zen teachers exposed to be abusive to their students in many ways.

Having a kensho experience may help us to see our karma more clearly, but it will not change our long-term patterns of emotions, behaviors and addictions.

Related Articles

My Views on Gradual Awakening

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Coming and Going

When you meditate and observe the activity of your mind, you see that thoughts, emotions, and impulses arise from the unconscious unasked for, uninvited, they aren't yours. They exist for a time and fade away. They have no substantial existence. They aren't real, they aren't reality. They are illusions.

It can seem like you are just awareness observing.

But you can observe yourself observing.

Then you realize the observer is an illusion too just like any other thought, emotion, or impulse. There is observing but no observer.

When you are trying to solve a problem, figuring something out, it can feel like you are in control of your mind. You are using it intentionally.

But when you observe yourself trying to solve a problem, you see that your intentions are no different from any other thought, emotion, impulse, or "observer". They are not yours, they are illusions too. The feeling of control over your mind is an illusion. There is thinking but no thinker.

The same is true when you are speaking, you feel like you are thinking of what to say, like you are in control of your mind. But when you observe yourself speaking, you see your intentions are illusions too.

The same is true for any intentional activity. There is doing but no doer.

When you are immersed in experience and feeling emotional pain or other discomfort, the unpleasantness seems real. But when you observe yourself having that experience, you see the emotional pain or discomfort and the experiencer are illusions too, just like any thought, emotion, impulse, "observer" or "controlling self" you might observe. There is experiencing but no experiencer.

When you are focused in meditation, you are observing something. When you get distracted and find yourself lost in thought, you are "immersed" in your thoughts. They seem real. The same is true of emotions. You can be immersed in them and they seem real or you can observe them and see they are not yours, not real. The same is true of self. Where ever you find a self, an observer, an entity controlling the mind, a doer, an experiencer, if you observe it, if you understand how all other thoughts emotions and impulses are illusions, you can see that self is an illusion too.

And you can see how the mind creates this illusion, alternating at will between immersion and observation you can create and evaporate the self as you choose.

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