Autumn Ramble
One of the thoughts that occurred to me about year or two into the practice was that it was really about disassociating ourselves from the very things that give a sense of me, myself and I.
The Buddha in his discourses returned again and again to the question of what is real vs. impermanent. Is our body real? It feels solid and we identify very closely with it. Take it away and you take away ourselves. The thought of a losing an eye or a limb, of being decrepit are all unsettling and if dwelt upon, can go a long way in reinforcing the notion of a real self.
But on another level, thought feels like it precedes the body. Our beliefs about right and wrong, our family and friends and ideological stances seem to be the real end of all that is physical. The body is a tool to higher ends related to thought, virtue and compassion. A thought can quickly make our blood boil and our heart race. Thinking thoughts along the wide spectrum of human mental states can induce physical changes in ourselves which escape our notice. In the West, thinking is praised ("follow the science", "everyone should go to college") and is even associated vaguely with mind or consciousness.
Early meditation teaches one just how unaware of the body we are most of the time. When we are hungry, tired or in pain, the body intrudes into the stream of mental chatter as another louder, insistent voice. It has to be kept and when the tasks essential to its maintenance are done, the mental activity returns to the fore and the body fades back into the background.
We begin unconsciously to carry around things around in our body like tension and spasms. One of the ways I judge the quality of my own awareness is by checking in with my left foot. I have a tendency to keep it clenched and tense even when nothing is going on. By directing compassion, warmth and ease towards it, I'm able to open up a bit. Lately, as mindfulness slips away, I've noticed the right foot becoming the clincher.
In meditation, we begin to focus on bodily sensation, finding tight spots and blocked areas where breath has a hard time passing. (If you are a Western materialist reading this, you are invited to think poetically here; imagination in the cause of relaxing and refocusing is a helpful thing and metaphors and analogies are used as an aid only. These are not scientific statements about human physiology but diplomatic overtures aimed at reestablishing contact with our physical selves.)
While meditation teaches us about our disconnection from our body – and yet mind asserts forcefully that our body is the most important thing at every moment of the day – it also teaches us about the place of emotions, ideas, beliefs and opinions in constructing our sense of a self. Note here that while body is easily forgotten unless it demands something, the idea of the body is crucial to everything we do. Our other ideas about sports, politics, economics, our neighbors way of setting out the trash cans by the curb are the real playground of identity in my opinion. This is where ego goes about constructing, reconstructing, deconstructing reality at cycles beyond what even modern computer chips can do. Humans are tool builders and we are also unrepentant fabricators even in our default mental posture. We fabricate all sorts of mental objects long before we begin doing it in our environment.
We work to support and maintain our body; if you get a pink slip at the office, you feel the loss of employment as a physical threat to your survival because it is. No food, no shelter, no social standing and you are looking at homelessness and a harsh life out on the streets of a vibrant city if you live in America.
This sets up of course a kind of tyranny of the body. The body's something we almost gladly, instinctively forget about as soon as conditions permit, but the respite is only brief. How many times a day do you have to pee? To stretch? To get up and move around? To eat...
We love the body though, especially nice food and sex with attractive people. We are slaves to it but we feel at our core that without it, we would cease to exist since it is the foundation of our being, of the mental processes which carry on even in sleep. I've often wondered whether meditators and mindfulness practitioners are given to more vivid dreaming; it seems from my own experience to be the case. Once you begin examining your own mind's operations, it becomes evident that the fabrication that takes place in dreams – hey, who's making up this ridiculous scenario? – isn't all that much different from the kind we do during our waking hours.
Have you ever constructed elaborate theories about what other people think about you?
In monotheistic societies, the fear of death is admitted. Claim an immortal soul that lives once, dies once before going to its eternal destiny, but the death fear is inescapable even for saintly people.
For me personally, the body has been something of a prison until my plunge into dhamma. In Christianity, most of the various sects teach that the resurrection of the body is something to look forward to for the just. We were intended to be embodied according to some thinkers in order to enjoy the many good things provided by deity when the next world opens up to us. Conversely, the unrepentant are embodied rather than annihilated on the day of judgment so that they may still participate in the chain of being and know through unending torment that god is just. Being burned alive in an everlasting lava pit is still better than non-being.
The body though in this life tells a different story. It's a chore to have a physical body and contrary to Western theology, there are sublime states available here and now in which the body actually disappears from the mind in a way categorically different than the usual unmindful awareness spoken of earlier. The mind can be brought to a point of stillness in which the body is blotted out in a good way and whole new vistas open up. These are the grounds in which investigation and analysis takes place. Here, apart from the incessant background noise of the body, it's easier to ask questions about what is real and what isn't. Ultimately, I think the activity of the brain itself is distinct from what is called samadhi even though there are likely correlates to be found.
Some of the Theravada talks I've seen on YouTube indicate that the focus of most lay meditation practice should be in samadhi rather than jhana. The two can sound like distinctions in aims, but since both involve achieving a state of collectedness, it's to me at least a case of one being a foundation for progress in the other. Someone who reaches samadhi and becomes familiar with its contours will be well positioned to reach jhana by applying the same focus and intution. This has been my subjective experience and your mileage will vary.
The collectedness found in meditation is a little island away from the thoughts which we keep turning over and over again and which usually involve us acting as embodied beings needing to do bodily stuff. The repertoire of human thought is pretty limited and when you begin breaking down the elements of our mental life, the topics are very few and very dull in nature. Sure there are savants who do interesting things, but these are rarities and they don't do these things all the time. Mozart wrote music in his head, but just a few times relatively speaking. The more ordinary intelligence of people, even the educated ones, tends to be handicapped by neuroses, preoccupations and rumination.
The dullness of existence is always there but the mind is usually racing forward to some future imaginary point where a savory dopamine hit can be found. One teacher described humans as beings who live desperate lives seeking out brief, scarce orts of happiness before dying again. These forays carry in their wake all sorts of disappointments, stresses and worries.
Whether someone follows the path or not, age brings with it an understanding that the decades of highs obtained through drugs, alcohol, retail therapy, sex, overeating and so on are incredibly short lived and easily forgotten. Evolutionists explain that we are just wired to seek out these things because they help the genes replicate and at the end of the day, all life is just proteins looking for a way to keep themselves going. Sex is especially desired for its intense pleasures with the side effect that it creates new life. It's the carrot and the stick. Spend a few minutes in coitus, spend a couple of decades taking care of the resulting child.
The human life has been defined by some as a canvas for new experiences through shared relationships, good and bad, with others. Whereas some people use their disposable income to accumulate and store objects, others use it to take exotic vacations, go sky diving or partake in expeditions. The thought is that the quality of a unique experience, while fleeting, leaves behind a lasting impression that shapes one's character and outlook on life. Perhaps you have looked at all the globe trotting politicians and wondered if all their travels have made them into better people and maybe doubted... surely these folks will have accumulated a richer set of experiences with which to relate to the human condition. Nope. Wherever you go, there you are.
The cynical me who has done a bit of traveling in different places says it's really just different shades of dukkha. Chewing and grinding animal flesh with your teeth in Europe is not different than in America. The experience seekers are looking for something that will add a bit of zing to an otherwise inconstant, stressful and unsatisfactory existence. The hunter-gatherer genes are biological drivers for the folks who are looking for the next new experience out there in the physical world, so we can blame them as the immediate cause for many endeavors. On a macro level though, it's the case that our minds are easily enthralled by sensual reality.
Meditation, absorption and concentration are another way of being very much at odds with the default grasping, bored, inattentive, etc. mental posture which plagues us all. Some people go on vacations to strange places and eat strange food to have the new experience that makes them and their lives interesting, more distinguished and more worthy of our consideration. The Western mind in particular has a romantic passion for exotic brown people from desperately poor countries and easily constructs all kinds of narratives, good and bad, about them.
For those who accept rebirth as a reasonable hypothesis for conducting and understanding ourselves, we on some level carry around a lot of experiences in the form of locked away memories which never or very seldom break the surface of consciousness. We can observe in ourselves and in others unique fascinations with a period, place or activity which defies our socio-economic background. We feel strong connections to things remote from us in time and place and evolutionists will struggle to explain satisfactorily why Eugene moved to an island in the Pacific to live for years with a tribe of indigenous people, compiling a dictionary of their unwritten language and experiencing all the while various threats, discomforts and privations.
As a child, I had a very pointed image of a village that was very peaceful and tropical which would pop up from time. Unlike most memories, this one was particularly potent emotionally; it was like I had been separated from this place and while the recollection was wonderful, it was also unpleasant because that place was way better than this one. Why a child of five would have these is inexplicable from a purely materialistic point of view.
In middle age, in the past couple of years, it has popped up once or twice, same as before – numinous, expansive, real. Something that had been forgotten for decades returned to remind me of this other place, but also of what childhood was like. Try as I might, both as a child and as an adult, I like to visit the image of the image so to speak for a respite from my current state. This is low fidelity however and can in no way compare to the raw image which popped up more frequently in childhood. All thoughts, memories, reflections fade so quickly and turn into echoes which eventually disappear. Some mental experiences are of such a luminous quality that they can feel more real than reality.
