My mental circus, inside and out.

doin' the mind/body splits

Yesterday, Emma did a day-long meditation on the emotions (with time out to take Max to the park).  This was an interesting exercise, but difficult to narrate.   One thing she has been thinking about is how attention to embodied states and their presentism can provide a corrective to mental formations and their wild ability to go galloping off into fantasy.  Buddhist practice is always trying to get you experiencing the constellation of form, feeling, perception, fabrication and consciousness as activities to which you pay close, exacting attention.   The more objective attention you give to these activities (like objectively viewing your emotions without judgment), the more liberated you become.  Who is the "you" engaged in this activity?  Well, no one really knows.  Many cognitive scientists believe that your sense of intention and free will, your sense of a self acting upon the world, comes only after you've acted. So that is like the Buddhist chain: form--feeling--perception--fabrication--consciousness. Supposedly, what the "you" is at the end of this chain is one of the great imponderables that only get answered at enlightenment.  Reading the cognitive scientists' and philosophers' remarks on consciousness, Emma feels they are rather behind Buddha who appears to have figured most of this out 2500 years ago just from peering into himself.   They still haven't figured out consciousness.  (And Buddha never talked about consciousness as a thing by itself anyway.) They are nowhere near it, even for all their elegant arguments and advanced measuring equipment.  They can't, for example, really answer the question of why you experience red as red, why you experience red in the way you do, or whether the way you experience red is like the way anyone else experiences red.  But the things they do seem to know--that consciousness is not like a spectator or puppetmaster in a theater--seems close to Buddhism, in the way that meditation is advised to build up a platform for insight rather than focusing on a mentating subject.  Max Velmans echoes Buddha when he argues that consciousness comes from prior acts of consciousness  (was there a "Big Bang" of consciousness?), and that mental and physical worlds are bound by reflexivity rather than existing as discrete, independent states (inside/outside).  It's not so simple as a "oneness" to the universe, but one way you can get to some truths of the matter is to look into yourself.  The experts, many of them meditators, often agree on that point.  However, if you don't want to turn into the repressed Mr. Spock, you have to work on compassion as fundamental to wisdom.  All of this investigation, without compassion, adds up to nothing.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 30, 2006 19:59 | link | comments

Suffering Fools

Through not seeing fools
constantly, constantly
one would be happy.

For, living with a fool,
one grieves a long time.--Dhammapada

Emma likes this verse.  For one thing, it advises that you're not obligated to hang around with fools too much.  In fact, it might be bad for your happiness and progress.  Better yet, it allows you to name fools--and the Dhammapada is quite clear on the definition of foolish behavior-- though of course you are supposed to recognize fools with utmost compassion, thus saving yourself from the miseries of anger and hatred which will only make you suffer.  So, you feel compassion for fools, knowing they are fools, but you don't have to live with them.   Pondering this verse, Emma has also found it worth acknowledging that it is best not to be a fool, since then you inescapably have to live with yourself, and that can indeed cause you much grief.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 28, 2006 21:02 | link | comments

seeing

In order to keep her practice real, Emma has been reading interviews with scientists and philosophers (many of whom are meditators) speaking on the problem of consciousness.  Fascinating stuff.  For example, did you know that if you look at an image, say of a cat, in one eye, and another image, say of a dog, in the other eye, you'll only register one of the images in your conscious mind?  The other one, according to  theory, goes into your unconscious mind.   The more you think about this problem, the deeper the mystery.

Refining her concentration practice, Emma is memorizing the metta sutta.  The context of this verse is interesting.  Some monks went out to the forest to meditate, and were plagued in various ways by tree deities who wanted the monks out of their territory, since during the rainy season they needed to descend to live on the ground.  So the monks went to Buddha to ask him what to do, and he sent them right back and gave them the metta sutta for their protection.  The more you think about the metaphor of the tree sprites, the more complicated this story becomes.  What are the tree deities? It's easy to just see them as superstition and fantasy, especially since the first advice the Buddha gives is to conduct oneself with straightforwardness.   But he doesn't say, "Don't believe in tree sprites."  Instead he says, "You be real" or rather "capable, upright, and straightforward."  Then he goes on to advise metta, loving-kindness, towards all beings.  The tree sprites, so taken by the monks' loving-kindness, then left them in peace to meditate.  There's something else going on here about nature and animism that Emma is finding a bit more difficult to unpack.

Practicing mindfulness on her way to work, Emma found that she seemed very conscious of smells.  Alan Watts says that this is the great repressed sense, so that seemed pretty interesting too.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 27, 2006 19:38 | link | comments (1)

difficult people

How to deal with difficult people when one is becoming less and less difficult? Take the chair of Emma's department.  It seems that people in power can easily go mad.  And in this case, the madness is a strict demand for loyalty, an unreasonable entrenchment in old systems and patterns, and an extreme defensiveness at the slightest challenge.  The question for Emma seems to be, over the past couple of weeks, what to do with people who hold wrong views?  Let them stumble on, even if their coldness or hostility or intransigence is causing harm to self and others?  Go off and meditate and simply work on one's own liberation and ignore the world?  Wait until one is wiser and then the world, at least in one's own vicinity, will be transformed of its own accord?  Emma has often harmed herself in attempting to speak to others who seemed to be careening off the edge.  But perhaps one just has to let them go.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 26, 2006 19:56 | link | comments (1)

meditation diary

At the risk of being somewhat tedious, Emma is going to start blogging on her meditation now.   Just to see what happens.  So last night, she was meditating, and as it has happened in the past, she felt she was nearly jumping out of her skin.   Just wanting to jump out of concentration and flee, do anything else but meditate.  The goal is to be perfectly concentrated in a single spot, her breath.  And Emma usually feels that this locus is in the middle of her chest, at her diaphragm.  So the idea is to shut off all these chaotic thoughts and go there and stay there.  So why the vague panic? Why the urge to run? 

This did not happen in the morning.  Mornings are nice because she can begin by listening to the birds, all the cars leaving, the hum of the day getting started.  It's especially good when the sun is shining, and she feels like she's dancing with it. She meditated for 25 minutes until she had to cough.  Then she got into a tangle, since ultimately one should be so concentrated that the body is still as well.  But she coughed, and then she was out of it.   She went back in, coughed, snapped out of it again.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 26, 2006 07:59 | link | comments