Enlightenment: What is it? And What Causes It?

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

Based on those discussions I have put together the following:

Enlightenment Is Giving Up Your Concept of Self

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

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

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

  
  

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

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

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

  
  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Three aspects you shoulder consider are:
  

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

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

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

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

    • Relaxation helps prevent overreactions to emotional pain.
      

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Is equivalent to letting go of attachments and aversions.
      

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Untethered Soul" by Michael Singer

Contents

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Contents

What You Are

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Awakening

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

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

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

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

Contents

Keep Your Heart Open

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

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

Contents

Letting Go of Emotional Pain

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

Remember:

• You are just awareness observing thoughts and emotions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Meditation

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

Contents

Surrender

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

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

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

Contents

The Untethered Soul

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

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

Contents

Further Reading

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

Contents

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

The Relationship of Serenity and Insight

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

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

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

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

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

Related Reading

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

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

Self-Enquiry II

Someone asked about self-enquiry. I answered this:

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

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

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

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

When asked for clarification, I wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote about this quotation on another forum:

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

Solutions to Spiritual Problems

It is very common for people to have spiritual problems that they can't seem to find satisfying answers to. For example, someone who is afraid of death may want to know what the evidence for the afterlife is. Other common problems are, "What is the purpose of life?" and "Why is there so much suffering in the world?" There are very good answers to these questions but this article is about a different aspect to these problems.

These questions are often verbal expressions that are caused by feelings. When a person has a feeling and tries to put it into words, it can seem like something that needs to be solved through reason and information. However, when the question is really an expression of a feeling, reason and information may not influence the feeling and so the person is perpetually unsatisfied with whatever answer he may encounter.

This is because feelings are sometimes caused by the levels of various chemicals in the brain. Information may not alter the levels of these chemicals and so information may not change the feeling and therefore no answer is ever found satisfactory.

However, it may be possible to eliminate the feeling by changing the chemistry in the brain through some combination of diet, meditation, and exercise. When that happens the question disappears and in that way the problem is solved. I have written another post about methods that may be used to change brain chemistry in my article: A System for Spiritual Development: Hacking Your Brain Chemistry Without Drugs.

Altering your brain chemistry can help you understand many spiritual truths that you might have read about. This is because many spiritual truths are feelings put into words. They have to be felt to be understood.

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Copyright © 2018 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Relaxation and Enlightenment

Contents

Introduction
How I Practice Buddhism
Further Reading
Try it Yourself

Introduction

On an internet forum I participate in, someone asked "Can Enlightenment be taught?". My thoughts on this subject are influenced by my understanding of Buddhism and my own experiences meditating. In Buddhism, the term in the language of the sutras is better translated as "awakening" than enlightenment. There are stages of awakening and the final goal of spiritual practice is to end suffering for the practitioner. (In Buddhism, pain is considered different from suffering. Pain is a physical sensation, suffering is mental anguish. When I write about suffering here I am referring to mental anguish, ie unpleasant emotions.)

My own meditation practice has evolved over time and it has become something very different from what is typically taught by Buddhist teachers. So much so that I posted on the Dharma Overground, a forum for Buddhist practitioners, and asked if what I was doing was even Buddhism. I found out that what I was doing is Buddhism but Buddhist practice is not typically explained in the way I did. It seems to me that my approach is easier to learn and to practice than the traditional methods of teaching. It doesn't involve any abstruse philosophical concepts, the practices are easy to do, they don't require intense concentration, and there are a huge variety that you can choose from.

Buddhist practice centers around learning to let go of attachments and aversion because these mental constructs are the source of mental anguish which constitutes suffering. The key question of Buddhist practice is: How does one learn to let go of attachments and aversions? Different schools offer different solutions. They are based on traditional methods and often involve abstruse philosophical concepts.

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How I Practice Buddhism

My answer to the question uses modern knowledge of how the nervous system works. To understand this, consider what it would be like to not experience suffering. Nothing could cause you mental anguish. Anything could happen, and you would be serene and relaxed.

The term for "suffering" in the language of the sutras is "dukkha" and if you google "dukkha = stress", you will find that stress is sometimes used as a translation for dukkha. So one way to understand Buddhism is that the end result of the practice is to end stress. If you look carefully within when you experience any type of unpleasant emotion you will see that it is a form of stress. If you can relax deeply, the emotion, the mental anguish, will dissipate. Maybe you have noticed that sometimes when you wake up from sleep you feel good and it takes a few seconds to remember a big problem you are in the middle of and then you feel unhappy or stressed again? That is because deep relaxation causes unpleasant emotions to dissipate. When you are having a big problem do you ever just want to lie down in bed? That is because when you are deeply relaxed, on the edge of sleep, you don't feel unpleasant emotions as strongly.

So if you could understand how the body switches from "stress" to "relaxation" and learn how to control that switch, you could develop a system where you could cultivate your ability to turn the switch to "relaxation" and keep it there even when you are in normal waking consciousness.

Because of this, I would say that yes, enlightenment can be taught, because people can learn to control the neurological switch between stress and relaxation. In modern society people experience a lot of stress. The nervous system becomes better at what it does more often, so people become unbalanced, they become stressed very easily and find it hard to relax. This process can be reversed. By practicing meditation and other relaxation techniques, a person can learn to relax very easily and over time become more and more resistant to stress.

However, I don't really think the terms "enlightenment" or "awakening" are useful or helpful. I use these words here because other people use them and if I want to communicate I have to use the terms they do. But in Buddhism, the end goal is the end of suffering (nirvana), awakening is a description of some of the states that precede it. My opinion is that recognizing enlightenment in a system of development is counterproductive because people become distracted by and it interferes with the practice. So I don't use the term in my own system of practice. Each person can tell if they are stressed or suffering and they understand their own ability to relax and stay relaxed.

The advantage of looking at Buddhist practice from the perspective of relaxation is that it is easy to understand. There are no complicated philosophical concepts like non-self, dependent origination, non-symbolic consciousness, or Buddha nature. And it is easy to measure your progress, you know at anytime if you are feeling stress. You can tell if a practice is helping you immediately. You don't have to hope that something mystical will happen years in the future. And you can use many different relaxation techniques developed by other traditions or modern doctors and scientists. You can use the techniques that work best for you.

(It is also important to understand that sometimes emotions are produced by biological processes. For example, in some cases depression or anxiety is caused by abnormal brain chemistry and a purely mental technique will not cure it. However, any secondary emotional reactions like anger at being depressed, can be helped by relaxation.)

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Further Reading

I have several articles on my blog and web site that describe the practices I have found to be helpful:

• "Turning Off Stress: The Parasympathetic Nervous System And Spiritual Development"
  http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-parasympathetic-nervous-system-and.html
  This article is about the neurological switch between stress and relaxation. It offers many suggestions for relaxation exercises.
  

  
  

• "Serenity Meditation"
  https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/meditation-1#meditation_serenity
  This article provides instructions for the type of meditation I practice. The technique is very relaxing.
  

  
  

• "Focusing the Mind Can Help You Relax"
  http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2018/05/focusing-mind-can-help-you-relax.html
  

  
  

• "Diet Exercise and Serotonin"
  http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/occasionally-i-post-something-to.html#misc_diet_mood
  Meditation and relaxation exercises rely on a properly functioning nervous system to be optimally effective. Diet and exercise are important factors in keeping your nervous system functioning well. This article has a couple of sugestion on diet and exercise that may improve the results you get from meditation and relaxation exercises.
  

  
  

• My posts on this topic at Dharma Overground:
  

  https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/8317313#_19_message_8317313
  

  https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/8317313#_19_message_8322964
  

  https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/8317313#_19_message_8334612
  

  https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/8317313#_19_message_8335074
  

Back to Contents

Try it Yourself

If you want to try this type of practice, start meditating or doing relaxation exercises. The articles above offer many techniques to choose from. Find the ones that work best for you. Some may work best when you are highly stressed, other may be best when you are only slightly stressed.

The key to this practice is to experience how relaxing makes you feel better. Notice your emotional state after you do the relaxation exercises. Once you see that relaxing reduces unpleasant emotions and makes you feel better, you will naturally turn to relaxation when you are suffering. It doesn't take will power any more than taking aspirin for a headache does. You do it because you know from experience that it offers relief.

Develop the habit of meditating or doing some type of relaxation exercise every day. It doesn't have to be the same technique every time. Just lean how to relax, get to know what it feels like to be relaxed, see if you can stay relaxed. Noticing what causes you to stop being relaxed will help you learn how to stay relaxed. In time your ability to relax and stay relaxed will improve. You will experience fewer unpleasant emotions, less mental anguish, and less suffering.

Back to Contents

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Copyright © 2018 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Focusing the Mind Can Help You Relax

There is an article at artofmanliness.com which describes a method they claim will allow you to fall asleep in 2 minutes or less. I can't verify that it works in 2 minutes or less, but it is very similar to a technique I use to help myself get to sleep. What is interesting about this technique is that it can also be used to help you reach deeper states of relaxation during meditation. By practicing the technique as you are going to sleep, you can learn to recognize how it helps you reach deep states of relaxation and experiencing how that works can help you do something similar during meditation.

Here is an excerpt from the article which explains the technique:

The course also aimed to teach “combat aviators to be able to go to sleep in two minutes any time, day or night, under any and all conditions”; instruction in this skill was included to ensure that pilots got adequate sleep, and could sneak in extra shuteye whenever possible.

To accomplish the first goal, Winter taught the men how to physically relax. To accomplish the second, he taught them how to mentally relax. In fact, he essentially defined sleep as the state of being both physically and mentally relaxed.

...

The key to falling asleep quick is thus to stop the train of thoughts that is usually rumbling through your head. You have to stop ruminating on the regrets, worries, and problems of the day.

...

So, when you’re looking to nod off, you just want to fill your head with the stillest, calmest of contemplations. Winter suggests three good ones to use, though you don’t have to use all three; just pick one, and if it doesn’t work, try another:

“First, we want you to fantasize that it is a warm spring day and you are lying in the bottom of a canoe on a very serene lake. You are looking up at a blue sky with lazy, floating clouds. Do not allow any other thought to creep in. Just concentrate on this picture and keep foreign thoughts out, particularly thoughts with any movement or motion involved. Hold this picture and enjoy it for ten seconds.

...

In the second sleep-producing fantasy, imagine that you are in a big, black, velvet hammock and everywhere you look is black. You must also hold this picture for ten seconds.

...

The third trick is to say the words ‘don’t think . . . don’t think . . . don’t think,’ etc. Hold this, blanking out other thoughts for at least ten seconds.”

The article gives more details of the technique and references a book that explains it even more fully. I haven't read the book so I can't verify if the claims of "two minutes or less" and "ten seconds" are true. But when you are going to sleep it can be very instructive if you try meditate by counting the breath and notice that if you focus your mind on thinking the numbers, you will find yourself becoming more and more relaxed, but if your mind wanders onto the problems of the day, you don't. If you can notice that phenomenon as you are falling asleep, try to achieve a similar effect as you meditate to get to a relaxed state in meditation. When you notice that maintaining concentration during meditation helps you relax, you have a system of feedback that will help you to learn to relax more effectively during meditation.

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Copyright © 2018 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Many Emotions are Like Hallucinations

In a previous post, I wrote, Your logical mind is an illusion. In this post I explain why many emotions are like hallucinations. Taken together, the two posts explain why some people say that the reality created by ordinary consciousness is an illusion.

If you practice meditation, you may become familiar with the difference between ordinary consciousness and mindfulness. (One definition of mindfulness is dwelling in the present moment, in a relaxed state, with your awareness on your sense perceptions, and not thinking about the past or the future or trying to solve a problem. A simpler definition is being aware of what you are doing as you are doing it.) You may notice that many emotions arise from thoughts that distract your attention away from a state of mindfulness. As you learn to dwell in mindfulness, you realize many emotions are like dreams or hallucinations. Maintaining mindfulness does not feel like repressing a thought or feeling, it feels like waking up from a dream.

When you think of a person, you might visualize what they look like, but you know the difference between a mental visualization and really seeing someone. If you really saw someone who wasn't there every time you thought of them, you would be hallucinating. Emotions are like that. If you think of an experience that causes an emotion, you may really feel the emotion just like if you were having the experience. Emotions are a lot like hallucinations.

There is a well known sutra, The Heart Sutra, which says, "When the mind is no hinderance, no fears exist". When you are able to dwell firmly in mindfulness, without being dragged back into ordinary consciousness by distracting thoughts, you are not troubled by emotional hallucinations.

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Copyright © 2018 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

A System for Spiritual Development: Hacking Your Brain Chemistry Without Drugs

Below are links to, and excerpts from, four related articles on my blog and website which together describe a set of practices that can produce positive feelings and reduce stress. This can help you live according to spiritual values such as love, kindness, forgiveness, and tolerance.

The subjects covered in the articles include:

1. How to use meditation to set up a feedback loop in the brain that increases production of dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins and reduces levels of cortisol.
   

   A meditation technique is described that produces a relaxed mental state and a pleasant contented mood. Taken further, it can produce intense positive emotions and spiritual experiences. However, the main purpose of the meditation is to give you the skills you can use in daily life to maintain a pleasant relaxed mental state and contented mood between meditation sessions.
   

2. What it is like.
   

   This is a description of extreme spiritual experiences that can be produced by the meditation technique described in the first article.
   

3. How to increase serotonin production in the brain through diet and nutrition.
   

   This article explains how eating carbohydrates and protein in the right sequence and at the right times can help increase serotonin production in the brain. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that is involved in how the brain produces pleasant feelings. This can be helpful in producing the experiences described in the first two articles.
   

4. How to turn off the body's reaction to stress.
   

   This article tells you how to turn off the body's reaction to stress naturally by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. This is helpful in learning to breathe in a relaxing way and can help you make more progress faster using the meditation technique described in the first article.
   

Links and Excerpts

1. How to use meditation to produce spiritual experiences by setting up a feedback loop in the brain that increases production of dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins and reduces levels of cortisol:
   https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/meditation-1#meditation_serenity
   

   Simplified Instructions
   

   Sit comfortably in whatever way you prefer, in a chair or on the floor. No special meditation posture is needed. Close your eyes. Notice how you feel throughout your body. Do you feel anxious or tense? Try to relax your whole body. Take a deep breath and relax your whole body as you exhale. Notice the pleasant feeling of relaxation? Now breathe normally and relax your whole body as you exhale. Notice the same feeling of relaxation. Relax your whole body as you inhale and notice a similar feeling of relaxation. It might help you to relax if you slow down your breathing somewhat. Continue to relax your whole body as you inhale and exhale and notice the pleasant feelings of relaxation. Your whole body may begin feel heavy as you become more and more relaxed. While you meditate this way, also say to yourself, (inwardly not aloud) "in" as you inhale, and "out" as you exhale. Notice the absence of mental chatter as you focus your attention on the words "in" an "out". Meditate this way with the understanding that you are trying to have a pleasant, relaxing, calming meditation session. After a while, observing the pleasant feeling of relaxation as you inhale and exhale might make you want to smile.
   

   If you feel like it, go ahead and smile, even if it's just a little bit, and notice the pleasant emotions that accompany smiling as you continue to meditate
   

   ...

   Smiling causes the brain to release dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin, which are molecules that will elevate your mood. Smiling also reduces levels of the anxiety causing stress hormone cortisol. These chemical changes will produce a pleasant effect and may make you want to smile even more. This can result in a feedback loop that produces intense feelings of feelings of happiness, loving kindness, and connectedness.
   

2. What it is like:
   http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2015/02/joy-during-meditation.html#joy_trip
   

   But this type of serenity meditation creates a feedback loop causing the brain to release endorphins, serotonin and dopamine.
   

   It really is like a drug trip, maybe not a psychedelic trip but it's not normal meditation. Every breath you take is like a hit from a bong, but there's no bong. And it is hugely spiritual. It doesn't require super intense concentration so I think most people could learn to do it. I had to stop the other day because it was so intense I was getting nervous. How many people do you know who were feeling so happy, and connected to all things and feeling such intense metta that they were worried they might never get back to normal? And I felt the presence of non-physical entities too.
   

   It also creates a kind of synesthesia where everything I see and hear I also feel in my body as if they are part of me. There is an effect like the brain is a virtual reality machine and what I see is really a movie inside my head projected on the unchanging screen of pure awareness, like my mind contains the whole universe including me walking around inside it. Other times I feel like my self and its boundaries are dissolving and I am expanding to merge into infinite space. It's not scary, it's like coming home.
   

   This meditation changes the "energy" of your surroundings too. You could go to the filthiest shack in the poorest slum in the most miserable godforsaken corner of nowhere and meditating this way would make it a place of beauty and joy. These effects are not gross like a psychedelic trip they are subtle like a change in understanding. And these experiences are not restricted to sitting meditation, you can have them walking around town or out in nature. When you do this, you see it transforms reality because when you walk around smiling, people smile back. In that way, it doesn't just change you, it changes the people around you. It doesn't just make you happy, it makes the world friendly.
   

   It also produces a state of mind where nothing can upset you because you find something within you which you can relax, and when you do, any unpleasant emotions flow away as soon as they arise. It's as if relaxing opens a door and unpleasant emotions go out through the door as soon as they appear. They just appear and go. Not just during meditation but during daily life.
   

   It's not nirvana, I still experience some worries, annoyances, and emotional ups and downs, but this type of meditation showed me that happiness is a choice.
   

   The best thing about this type of meditation is not the intense experiences, the best thing is that between meditation sessions I'm happier and I worry less.
   

   And it doesn't cause vomiting or diarrhea like Ayahuasca does. It's 100% free. And as far as I know it's legal everywhere.
   

3. How to increase serotonin production in the brain through diet and nutrition:
   http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/occasionally-i-post-something-to.html#misc_diet_mood
   

   It is possible to increase serotonin production in the brain by eating protein 20 to 40 minutes after eating carbohydrates. Eat at least 25-35 grams (about 120 calories) of carbohydrates, wait 20 to 40 minutes, and then eat protein. (The source of carbohydrates should be low in protein and fat.) A simple way to do this is to eat the carbohydrate portion of your meal first then wait 20 minutes before eating the protein portion...
   

4. How to turn off the body's reaction to stress:
   http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-parasympathetic-nervous-system-and.html
   

   The sympathetic nervous system is involved in producing the body's response to stress. The parasympathetic nervous system is involved in turning off the body's response to stress.
   

   Anything that activates the parasympathetic nervous system suppresses the sympathetic nervous system and helps you to relax.
   

   There are many undesirable effects of stress on physical and mental health so learning to turn off stress can make your life better in many, many ways.
   

   Learning to turn off stress is also helpful in spiritual development because when you are stressed, you are more likely to be thinking about yourself and your problems ie. being egocentric. But when you are relaxed, you are less likely to be thinking about yourself and more likely to be in harmony with spiritual values like love, kindness, forgiveness, tolerance etc.
   

   ...

   The best way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and turn off stress that I know of is to do exercises which involve gently moving or stretching your muscles while exhaling slowly as you count to ten. This technique is extremely effective because it combines four separate methods for activating the parasympathetic nervous system in one technique...
   

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Copyright © 2018 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Turning Off Stress: The Parasympathetic Nervous System And Spiritual Development

Contents
Introduction
Turning off Stress
How to do the Exercises
Simplified Instructions
Anaerobic Exercises
Related Articles

Introduction

Your sympathetic nervous system produces your body's response to stress. Your parasympathetic nervous system turns off your body's response to stress.

The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems work in opposition. Anything that activates the parasympathetic nervous system suppresses the sympathetic nervous system and helps you to relax, to turn off stress. In this article I will describe easy exercises you can do that will activate the parasympathetic nervous system, help you to develop it, and teach you how to turn off stress.

The opposite effects of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are similar to the way the analytical neural network in the brain and the empathic-intuitive network cannot both be in use at the same time (which I have written about on my web site). In our modern civilization, many people become unbalanced with their analytical network being overdeveloped and their empathic network underdeveloped. This can make them callous. Meditation helps to develop the empathic network bringing the analytical and empathic networks into balance. This is one reason meditation can be a helpful practice in spiritual development and psychic development.

Learning to turn off stress is also helpful in spiritual development because when you are stressed, you are more likely to be thinking about yourself and your problems ie. being egocentric. But when you are relaxed, you are less likely to be thinking about yourself and more likely to be in harmony with spiritual values like love, kindness, forgiveness, tolerance etc. And just like with the analytical and empathic networks in the brain, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems can get out of balance. In our busy modern society people experience a lot of stress and their sympathetic nervous system can become overdeveloped and their parasympathetic nervous system can become underdeveloped. Doing exercises like those described below can help you to develop your parasympathetic nervous system and bring it into balance with your sympathetic nervous system.

There are also many undesirable effects of stress on physical and mental health so developing the parasympathetic nervous system, learning to turn off stress, can make your life better in many ways.

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Turning off Stress

The best way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and turn off stress that I know of is to do exercises which involve gently moving or stretching your muscles while exhaling slowly as you count to ten. This technique is extremely effective because it combines four separate methods for activating the parasympathetic nervous system in one technique:

• Deep Breathing
  
• Muscle relaxation
  
• Body Awareness
  
• Meditation
  

Some other relaxation techniques such as guided meditations, visualizations, hypnotic inductions, etc. work by making you sleepy or putting you in an altered state of consciousness, and when you return to normal consciousness, the stress comes back. This technique works by turning off the body's stress response, and the effect stays with you long after you are done. When practiced over a period of weeks or months it can strengthen your parasympathetic nervous system improving your ability to turn off stress and keep it turned off.

The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems work in opposition. Anything that counters the sympathetic nervous system's stress response activates the parasympathetic nervous system and helps turn off stress. The stress response involves increased muscle tension, mental fixation on the source of the stress, and shallow rapid breathing. By moving slowly and gently and or stretching your muscles, you counter muscle tension. By meditating, ie. focusing your attention on your breathing, body movements, and counting, you counter mental fixation. By breathing slowly and deeply, you counter shallow rapid breathing. Deep breathing and meditation alone can be relaxing but when you combine them and add stretches or gentle slow movements you counter the stress response on multiple levels and together they form a powerful way to turn off stress.

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How to do the Exercises

Here are a few pointers on doing this type of exercise.

• If you have back trouble or any other type of physical ailment, don't do anything that would be bad for your condition. Consult with a doctor if necessary.
  
• You can use any combination of:
  
  • Yoga postures
    
  • Stretches recommended for use before a workout
    
  • Tai Chi movements
    
  • Qi Gong movements - For example, 8 Brocades or Ba Duan Jin (Baduanjin) can be done sitting or standing. There is a diagram at Tai Chi Village that is useful as a memory aid and Wikipedia has a brief description of each movement.
    
  • Progressive muscular relaxation - This can be particularly helpful when you are tense or worried and you feel tension throughout your entire body which is hard to relax.
    
  • Isometric exercises (Allow several seconds between exercises to let your muscles relax).
    
• The type of movements and stretches should not be strenuous, they should be relaxing, and you should not stretch beyond what is comfortable, the purpose is to relax.
  
• Remember to exhale slowly counting to ten as you do each posture or movement, or for simple movements such as those used in progressive muscular relaxation, exhale slowly counting five to ten repetitions of the movement. You don't have to count exactly to ten while exhaling - do whatever number feels most relaxing. If you find yourself counting too high, count more slowly. Or you can just say to yourself, "in" as you inhale, and "out" as you exhale.
  
• Try to relax your whole body as you exhale and try to notice the feeling of relaxation in your whole body as you relax. Do the same as you inhale, try to relax your whole body and notice the feeling of relaxation in your whole body. This will help make turning off stress a conscious process. It can also be helpful to practice sitting in a chair, relaxing your whole body as you inhale, relaxing your whole body as you exhale and noticing the feeling of relaxation in your whole body.
  
• Ten to twenty minutes of gentle stretches and/or slow gentle movements is an appropriate length for a session.
  
• You can do longer sessions or multiple sessions per day if you want to.
  
• If you practice the form of Serenity Meditation I describe on my web site, you can try to notice the pleasant feeling of relaxation as you inhale and exhale, and if that makes you want to smile go ahead and smile and notice the pleasant feelings that are released when you smile.
  
• You can do some or all of the session sitting in a chair if you use postures and movements that can be done while sitting.
  
• You can also use this technique during daily activities. Breathe slowly, move in a relaxed way, and notice the feeling of relaxation while you do daily activities like washing the dishes, walking, taking a shower, etc. It is commonly believed that people are tense and hurried because they are stressed. But if you put what you learn from these exercises into practice in daily life, you might see that it is also true that people are stressed because they are tense and hurried. When you relax and slow down you feel less stressed. This is because the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems work in opposition. Anything that reduces the effects of one system does it by activating the other system.
  

These kinds of exercises together with Meditation make up a very powerful system for spiritual development.

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Simplified Instructions

Here is a simplified form of his technique that is very easy to do: Sit comfortably the way you normally do, for example, when watching TV or eating dinner. Try to relax your whole body. Notice if there is any tension in your body such as in your jaw, or shoulders and try to relax it. Then hold your hands in front of your abdomen with your palms facing each other a few inches apart. As you inhale, slowly separate your hands by moving them apart a foot or two while slowly saying to yourself, "in". Then slowly bring the hands back together until they are a few inches apart while slowly saying to yourself, "out". Repeat this for ten to twenty minutes. Feel free to make slight variations in the movements of the hands or arms to produce a more graceful flowing movement.

You can do this lying down with a slight modification: Instead of moving your hands apart, keep your hands at your sides and gently and slowly open and close your hands as you slowly inhale and exhale. Any simple movement will work because the parasympathetic nervous system acts in opposition to the sympathetic nervous system. Any slow gentle movement in one part of the body activates the parasympathetic nervous system and helps to counteract muscle tension and other effects of stress throughout the mind and body.

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Anaerobic Exercises

Doing a few minutes of vigorous anaerobic exercises such as calisthenics (push-ups, pull-ups, squats, etc.), weight lifting, or sprinting can also be used to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This is because these kinds of exercises create stress and when you stop this type of activity, the the body's mechanism for recovering from stress, the parasympathetic nervous system, is activated.

A few minutes of Anaerobic exercise may also increase serotonin levels in the brain.

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Related articles from my blog:

Spiritual Living: Hacking Your Brain Chemistry Without Drugs

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Copyright © 2018 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.