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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

What Enlightenment is Not

Many people have a misunderstanding of what Buddhist awakening is. They think an awakened person is always nice, is always ethical, is always moral, is always happy, is always perfect, is never afraid or angry or jealous, loves everyone unconditionally, etc. etc. Actually, awakening does not necessarily make a person any of those things.

On a discussion forum I tried to point out that Buddhist awakening does not necessarily make someone a nice person and I expanded on that point:

A lot of personality is deeply ingrained in the brain: word selection, tone of voice, personal habits, sensitivity to others etc etc. Noticing something about how the mind works can change your perception of your "self", but it doesn't completely rewire the brain you have been training all your life to the extent that it erases your personality. If you were hard to get along with before awakening, you will be hard to get along with after awakening.

I would go further and say Buddhist awakening doesn't make you a nice person and it is not about happiness.

It is about eliminating a certain subset of unpleasant emotions.

Some emotions are caused by purely physiological factors for example some forms of anxiety and depression. Buddhist awakening does not address those emotions in cases where they are caused by purely biochemical factors.

Some emotions are caused by thinking. These are what Buddhist awakening addresses. Unpleasant emotions caused by thoughts disappear when the thoughts disappear. They are illusions produced by the mind. By quieting the mind with meditation and observing the activity of the mind one learns the truth of this and learns to see through the illusions. This is really the main point. There is another side issue which gets a lot of attention because it sounds mystical. That is when the mind is quiet, one may notice that in the absence of much of the usual mental activity, the feeling of self may disappear too. (The feeling of self is actually produced by mental chatter.) This experience has the advantage of making it easier to let go of some types of emotions that are based on ego like pride or status or selfishness. If you don't feel like you have a self it is easier to let go of egotistical attachments and aversions.

But the patterns of thinking one engages in over a long period of time become habitual and ingrained, probably wired into the brain. It takes a lot of work to unlearn long practiced modes of thinking. So Buddhist awakening is divided into stages. That is why you often hear that after an enlightenment experience, a person has to learn to integrate the insight into daily life. It means they recognized how their thinking is causing a problem but they can't just think differently, they have to learn to think differently and undo all the damage a lifetime's worth of delusions have done to their thought patterns.

So Buddhist awakening doesn't even rid you of unpleasant emotions it only helps understand how your thinking is causing them which allows you to begin to change your thinking - still a long and laborious process.

Many people have a misunderstanding of what Buddhist awakening is, They think an awakened person is always nice, is always ethical, is always moral, is always happy, is always perfect, is never afraid or angry or jealous etc. etc. Actually, awakening does not make a person any of those things. Unfortunately almost no one has any interest in addressing this misunderstanding and it leads people to trust spiritual teachers in ways they should not be trusted.

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

The Ultimate Reward from Meditation

When the mind is focused in a relaxed way so that you have very few thoughts about liking and disliking, winning or losing, good and bad, you are not suffering. If you can experience this, you have a great way to practice. You get positive feedback (lack of "suffering") from doing the right thing (focusing the mind).

Quoting myself...

In the morning I was walking home with a heavy pack, the sun was up already and it was hot. I tried to meditate as I walked. I noticed that when I thought, "It's hot", or "My pack is heavy", or "How much further?" or "This sucks" I was suffering. But when I concentrated in meditation, as I tried to relax my whole body with each inhalation and exhalation, as I observed with a pleasant open attitude the pleasant feeling of relaxation in my body as I inhaled and exhaled, my mind was occupied with all of this so I didn't think, "It's hot, or "My pack is heavy", or "How much further?", or "This sucks." and I didn't suffer. Even though it was hot and my pack was heavy, and I had a long way to go, it didn't suck. I had a situation where I could really see the source of suffering is the mind and I had a system where I received positive feedback, less suffering, for doing the right thing with my mind. So I think that is a good principle for effective practice. When you can clearly see the purpose of the practice (keep the mind focused), the principle that it is based on (suffering is caused by the mind), and you get positive feedback (less suffering) for doing the right thing. And I can practice this way in daily life, as I have various thoughts I can see how they cause suffering and that keeping my mind focused on some type of mindfulness practice will prevent suffering.

That is the ultimate reward from meditation: Seeing that it is the mind that creates suffering, and that by calming the mind, suffering ceases, then understanding that suffering was never anything but an illusion created by the mind.

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

No One to be Offended

When the mind is made quiet by meditation and the internal dialog is greatly diminished, thoughts of "I want this ..." or "I don't like that ..." are greatly diminished too.

And when the body is very relaxed, there is very little tension or tensing in response to unpleasant thoughts or to the emotions they produce.

And when you sit watching the mind, waiting for the next thought or emotion to arise, you see there are hardly any thoughts or emotions arising.

You feel the absence of these thoughts and emotions, something is missing, it feels like an emptiness. At first it might be just a faint glimmer of a feeling, but in time, with attention and repetition, you become more aware of the feeling. It's like someone is away. If another person said something unpleasant, there would be no one in that emptiness to take offense.

At first this feeling might be uncomfortable because it is strange. But in time, through repetition, as you become more and more aware of this feeling, it becomes stronger as it fills your sense of existence more and more. It becomes familiar and you notice it is associated with the absence of unpleasant thoughts and emotions so you see that it is pleasant and you meditate to deepen and enhance this new state of consciousness.

When people try to explain this feeling, they can only do it with words. Using words makes it sound like they are using logic to explain an objective fact. But it is not a logical proposition that is true or false. It is just a feeling.

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

Books, TV, Movies, News Media and Social Media Could be Making You Depressed

A constant barrage of unpleasant emotions such as anger, disappointment, and fear produced by entertainment, news, and social media can make you depressed.

When you read a novel where the characters experience adversity, you feel emotions such as anger, disappointment, and fear. A little bit of this can spoil a good mood, and a lot of it can cause depression.

But it is not just novels. Other types of books, TV programs, movies, the news media, and social media that manipulate your emotions can do it to you too. What they all have in common is that the more they manipulate your emotions, the more you become addicted to their products, and the more money they make.

If you read a little, watch a bit of TV, see a movie, follow the news, and use social media, you might not be getting a large dose from any one source, but in combination, you might be getting a large enough dose to have a harmful effect on your psychological well-being.

The effect can be subtle, people might not realize the harm they are experiencing. This harm has become obvious to me because I use meditation to generate a very pleasant, happy mood in myself and I have made a habit of trying to notice what disrupts this good mood. From making those observations in myself, I have become concerned about what is happening in the rest of society where people don't realize they could be exposed to multiple factors in their environment that might combine to cause psychological harm.

Not all media are harmful. Subjects such as nature, travel, spirituality, and others can be relaxing rather than depressing and can be beneficial. Try to notice how media make you feel. Do you notice them producing unpleasant emotions like anger, outrage, fear, hate, disappointment? Or do they make you feel content and relaxed?

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

The goal of meditation is not to stop the mind, it is to see that experience is an illusion produced by the mind.

WARNING this article is for advanced meditators. Please read The Dangers of Meditation before you read this article. The meditation practice in this article can cause mental illness and can be harmful to those who are suffering from mental illness or other psychological difficulties. If you are a beginner it would be better to meditate according to the technique explained in Serenity Meditation.

The purpose of some forms of meditation is to help the practitioner learn to see that much of his mental experience is an illusion. When the mind is in a pleasant quiet state during meditation and you notice a thought arise and produce an emotion, you may also notice that after the thought passes the emotion passes and you return to the pleasant quiet state. If you observe this enough times and are paying attention, you begin to see that thoughts and emotions and other kinds of feelings, sensations, and perceptions are just illusions produced by the mind. (You see they are elusive, uninvited, and sometimes unpleasant.) The point is not to control (stop, let go of) these emotions and feelings, the point is to see they are illusions (which naturally leads to letting go).

The result of observing this is not nihilism, the result is compassion and good will which arise naturally as your own attachments and selfishness diminish. It doesn't mean you no longer enjoy pleasant feelings, it means you are not attached to pleasant feelings.

While you are meditating, you may consider certain thoughts and feelings and inwardly remind yourself they are illusions produced by the mind. As you think of a feeling, notice the feeling arise and pass as the thought arises and passes. This observation is necessary to deeply understand from your own experience the illusory nature of these feelings. You must observe that these feelings are illusions because they arise and pass away and have no permanent existence. During daily life, when you feel emotions you can also remind yourself they are illusions produced by the mind.

While noticing the feelings that are produced by thoughts, also notice how the thoughts arise. They arise seemingly by themselves, unasked for, uninvited. Where do they come from? Why do we feel like they are ours when they appear without our seeking them, and without our feeling like we are intentionally constructing them?

Notice that the pleasant quiet state produced by meditation acts like a background, like a movie screen that is constant, while different thoughts and feelings appear and disappear like a movie, which is not real, which is just pictures of things not real things themselves.

Some strong emotions might not pass away quickly. In that case, work with lesser emotions. Also meditating more can help to weaken strong emotions by putting you in a pleasant quiet state of mind. Also, some emotions are produced by biochemical factors rather than thoughts. For example sometimes anxiety or depression is not caused by thoughts but by biochemistry. In these cases, the feelings will not pass when a thought passes because they are not produced by a thought. In this situation, one should just be aware that the feeling of dislike for depression or anxiety is an illusion produced by the mind.

Try not to become attached to doing this perfectly, or to always maintaining a pleasant quiet state in meditation, or to always completely letting go of feelings. These attachments themselves are feelings you should notice just like any other feeling.

Here are some feelings (and also sensations, which are treated as feelings) you may want to consider:

• The feeling, "I like this thing," is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling, "I don't like this thing," is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling, "I want this thing," is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling, "I don't want this thing," is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• A feeling, if it unpleasant or painful, is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• A feeling, if it pleasant, is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of anguish is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of happiness is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of anger is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of hate is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of envy is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of jealousy is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of winning is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of losing is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of being a winner is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of being a loser is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of being inferior in status is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of being superior in status is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of being better at something or in some way is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of being worse at something or in some way is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of pride is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of guilt is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The quality of color, which cannot be explained to someone who is color blind, is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• Sound, which cannot be explained to someone who is deaf is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• Seeing, which cannot be explained to someone who is blind is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• Hearing, which cannot be explained to someone who is deaf is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of warmth or heat is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of coolness or cold is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The sensation of taste is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The sensation of smell is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• Sensations perceived through the senses are illusions produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of being smart is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of being stupid is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of being right is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of being wrong is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling, "my body is me" is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling, "my body is mine" is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling, "my thoughts are me" is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling, "my thoughts are mine" is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling, "my emotions are me" is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling, "my emotions are mine" is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of self is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of not wanting to have unpleasant feelings is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of wanting to be perfect is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of wanting to maintain perfect equanimity is an illusion produce by the mind.
  
• The feeling of wanting to get enlightenment is an illusion produced by the mind.
  
• The feeling of wanting to be enlightened is an illusion produced by the mind.
  

The word "feeling" is used repeatedly for a distinct purpose. It is to help you keep in mind that you should be considering feelings. For example, anger can be thought of as a feeling, but it can also be thought of as a behavior. The feeling of anger is the aspect one should notice in this practice.

As you practice this way, you may begin to see that all feelings are produced by the mind and thus illusions. For example, the feelings of warmth and coolness do not exist as part of the physical universe. Those feelings only exist in the mind of a conscious being. Those feelings are produced by the mind, they are illusions like a movie on a screen. This is true of everything you can perceive. Colors, sounds, textures, everything. Even the feeling of self is also an illusion.

Perceptions such as vision are illusions. With vision, the images produced are generated by the mind (the brain). What we see is not an objective representation of the physical world around us. It is only a representation produced by reflected, emitted or transmitted light. The limits of our eyes to detect certain wavelengths of light, to focus light, to perceive small amounts of light, and to function under excessive light, all constrain what we perceive. What we see is no more real than a photograph. Analogous situations exist for all the senses. All of the reality we perceive inside and outside us is an illusion produced by the mind.

As I wrote above, the result of observing this is not nihilism, the result is compassion and good will which arise naturally as your own attachments and selfishness (attachment to self) diminish. It doesn't mean you no longer enjoy pleasant feelings, it means you are not attached to pleasant feelings. Also, learning to notice and be aware of your feelings and to consciously name them can help you improve your understanding of our own psychology and can help you let go of previously suppressed emotions.

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