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Since ancient times, mankind has been preoccupied by a quest for “freedom”. Even in today’s somewhat enlightened society, safeguarding our “freedom” is an almost daily topic of conversation.

But I wonder how many of us have ever made the effort to formulate in words exactly what that term means to us. And if you don’t know what freedom means, how can you possibly successfully attain it?

Freedom!

For me, freedom has three main components: choice, independence, and ethics.

First is the freedom to choose between alternatives. Where a man has no choice to make, there is no freedom.

And to be truly free, that choice must be largely independent of external influence or coercion. A man who is coerced or misinformed is not able to freely choose.

And finally, “freedom” has no meaning unless a person can make decisions based upon the values and beliefs that he holds as the product of his upbringing, education, life experiences, emotional makeup, and philosophy.

As a bonus aside, I’ll assert here that a person’s values are most often a uniquely individual balance between benefit to oneself and benefit to others, where the latter category might be further subdivided into one’s “in-group/family” and “outsiders/others”, however broadly or narrowly one chooses to make that distinction.

So that’s my operative definition of personal freedom; now let’s consider whether we do a good job attaining it…

We humans like to think of ourselves as complex, multifaceted, and diverse, as the pinnacle of evolution, and imbued unique capacities of intellect, free will, discretion, morality, and freedom of choice.

How ironic then that, across all cultures and times, the overwhelming majority of human behavior can be reduced to two very simple principles:

Get more of the sensations that we perceive as pleasurable, and
Get rid of the sensations that we perceive as unpleasant.

This two-line algorithm is not only sufficient to describe almost all human behavior, but that of nearly all animal life, down the simplest amoebae and paramecia. If it’s pleasant, move toward it; if it’s unpleasant, run away from it. It’s poignantly emblematic that the Declaration of Independence, one of mankind’s most cherished documents, proclaims “the pursuit of happiness” as a vital and basic “unalienable right” of all men.

What does it say about our vaunted sense of freedom and individuality if 99% of all human thought, feelings, and behavior can be boiled down to a ludicrously simple two-line program, the exact same one used by the most tiny, primitive unicellular organisms? Where is freedom to be found in slavishly obeying that biological imperative?

Here is where the Buddhist in the audience has something to contribute.

Without judging anyone’s individual spiritual practices, I would assert that Buddhism is not fundamentally about stress relief, quiescing our thinking, blissing out, self-improvement, earning merit for future lives, extraordinary experiences, psychic abilities, or deconstructing the self. Those things may or may not happen along the way, but I think that the core goal of the Buddhist path is breaking free of our instinctual programming by first understanding that we habitually live under a false illusion of freedom, then gradually learning how to find genuine freedom by ensuring that our thoughts, speech, and actions are driven by conscious, values-driven choices, rather than never-questioned blind reactivity and maladaptive habit patterns.

Realizing that pleasure and discomfort are the central drivers of our biological programming, the principal line of inquiry for Buddhists has been cultivating a more skillful and beneficial relationship to these influences. A key tenet is the principle of dependent arising, which describes the chain of cause and effect that explains how our relationship to desire creates our experience of dissatisfaction. My distillation of it goes:

Because we are alive, we have senses.
Because we have senses, we experience contact with sensory objects.
Because we experience contact with sensory objects, we experience sensations. These sensations are immediately perceived as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral at a pre-verbal, instinctual level. Let’s call that the sensations’ “feeling tone”.
Because our perceptions produce these low-level feeling tones, we instinctually relate to the pleasant ones with desire, the unpleasant ones with aversion, and are mostly disinterested in the neutral ones.
When our desires and aversions arise, we react with craving and need, becoming entangled and increasingly attached to having things be a certain way in order for us to be happy.
Because of our attachment to things being a particular way, in a world where we control very little and where change is inevitable, we suffer when our needs and desires are not met, and even when our desires are fulfilled, we become anxious knowing that it’s only temporarily.

This is the sequence of events that leads to our experience of dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, suffering, and unhappiness.

Of course, if dependent arising were an immutable progression, it wouldn’t be of any practical value in our quest for freedom. But there’s one key step where — with sufficient mindfulness, wise intentions, and skill built up through patient practice – we can pry open a tiny window in this sequence of events and grasp our one opportunity to consciously choose a different response.

And that window of opportunity presents itself in how we relate to our sensations. It’s telling that, looking back on what I’ve written above, aside from “pleasure”, the other word that appears in both my two-statement definition of human behavior and the Buddhist principle of dependent arising is “sensations”.

A Buddhist would say that the only place where we have the opportunity to influence our unrealistic expectations is found in how we relate to our sensations. If we can see our perceptions clearly and in real-time, as well as the pleasant/unpleasant/neutral feeling tones that they evoke, we can wake up from our unexamined habit of letting those feeling tones blossom into the reactive craving and aversion that drives most of our subsequent thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. In each moment, if we can bring mindfulness to our sensations and our reactions to them, we can consciously choose to respond in a way that is less compulsive, less harmful to ourselves and others, and better informed by our values.

When it doesn’t harm ourselves or others, pleasure is a vital part of living a fulfilling life. However, our dysfunctional habit of blindly following pleasure and running away from discomfort needs to be balanced by wise intentions like purpose, mission, and ethical values that are more complex but also more advanced in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In this sense, the traditional Buddhist monastic way of life may go a bit too far in its inclination toward banishing or vilifying pleasure, rather than seeking a middle way that allows one to wisely examine, engage, practice with, and potentially master one’s relationship to pleasure and aversion.

Note that this isn’t the same as saying that “life is just suffering” or that one has to avoid pleasure and resign oneself to pain. What I’m saying is that we can learn how to relate to our desires and aversions more skillfully, rather than being mindlessly led around by them. And that is the only path to true freedom and living a fulfilling life of integrity, wisdom, and joy, and a life that is in alignment with our innermost and highest values.

Rhonda, one of my meditation teachers back in Pittsburgh, used to liken it to commuting on a familiar route. Taking the main highway might require the least mental effort, but it might not be the best, fastest, safest, or most pleasant route. The only way to know is to cultivate the ability to choose something different: something other than what comes to mind automatically.

Then she would describe her commute home on Ohio River Boulevard. She could stay on the highway, but the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation had thoughtfully placed a big traffic sign indicating (the town of) “Freedom” with an arrow indicating the off-ramp (that’s it, above). True freedom is exactly that kind of off-ramp, giving us an opportunity to get off the limited access highway of compulsive reactivity and mindless habit.

If you want to be truly free – not satisfied with the mere illusion of freedom and the suffering that it entails — you need to be able to see beyond desire and aversion, beyond reactivity and habit. Freedom means being fully awake in every single moment, willing and able to make real, meaningful choices that are informed by one’s ethical values.

The key to success is developing the skill to be awake enough in each moment to avail ourselves of that little window in the chain of dependent arising, where our perceptions of pleasure and discomfort, if unexamined, can blossom into untempered desire and aversion. If you will excuse me hyper-extending an apocryphal truth: in terms of manifesting wisdom and living an ethical life, the price of freedom is eternal mindfulness.

Or so it seems to me.

Major milestones don’t come as frequently after 18 years of meditation practice, but this month provided a big one in my burgeoning role as a teacher: my first time having the honor of offering the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts.

Taking the Refuges & Precepts is the most fundamental Buddhist ceremony, and is frequently offered at meditation retreats.

Bikkhu Bodhi: Going for Refuge & Taking the Precepts

The Three Refuges are a public statement of confidence in the historical Buddha as a regular human who came to a profound and useful understanding of how the human mind works; the Dhamma, or teachings he gave based on that understanding; and the Sangha, the community of like-minded practitioners. It’s helpful for meditators to relate to these vows as more descriptive of how one feels and where they are currently at in their practice, rather than something proscriptive that someone else is imposing upon them.

How important these vows are in the context of your practice, the specific technicals details of what they mean, and the consequences of breaking them are entirely up to the individual. You can view these as a solemn public statement that you are “A Buddhist”, or you can simply consider them an unnecessary holdover from uncomfortably devotional Asian Buddhist practices, or anything in-between. The Refuges & Precepts are only as solemn as you want them to be.

The Five Precepts are voluntary ethical practices that prompt the practitioner to increase our awareness of the skillfulness of our thoughts, speech, and actions, and to reflect on their impact upon our inner wellbeing.

The Precepts in particular can be uncomfortable for meditators brought up in the Abrahamic religions, where they can come across sounding like the Ten Commandments. However, the similarity is very shallow. A practitioner can adopt all, some, or none of the Precepts. In modern formulations, each Precept not only includes refraining from a particular unskillful action, but also cultivating a corresponding beneficial one.

In addition, taking the Precepts is completely voluntary, and there’s no requirement or pressure involved. They aren’t an edict imposed by some arbitrary external authority, but something one chooses for oneself because of the value and benefit one expects to receive by working with them. And there’s no one handing out punishments for failing to keep the Precepts.

Finally, the Precepts are vague, and (I believe) intentionally so. They’re meant to urge practitioners to look inside themselves and explore the subtleties of what their heart tells them is ethical and skillful. You would think that the precept to refrain from killing living creatures would be pretty straightforward, but our modern society raises complex questions in the ethical grey area that we must all face. Does that mean you can’t kill troublesome insects? Even accidentally? Does it rule out compassionate euthanasia or assisted suicide or abortion? Does it mean we cannot eat meat? And isn’t killing plants still killing a living being? And it’s the same with all the other Precepts; they encourage us to explore our own internal values and how well our real-world actions conform with them.

So that’s what the Refuges & Precepts are. Let’s get back to me…

I first took the Refuges & Precepts in April 2006 at Cambridge Insight, two years into my practice. I’d devoted enough time and study to be confident that I’d found a good home base for exploring how to live my life in accord with my inner values. When I took the Refuges & Precepts, it was deeply meaningful for me.

Over the years I gained knowledge and experience as a practitioner, then began slowly moving into teaching. The Refuges & Precepts were always in the back of my mind, and I hoped that someday I would be able to offer the ceremony to others. But I didn’t feel confident enough to volunteer until recently, now that I’ve got five years of regular teaching under my belt.

But it was the timing that forced my hand. I’ve always felt that the Refuges & Precepts should be offered in May, on the holiday of Vesak, which Buddhists observe as the day of the Buddha’s birth, his enlightenment, and his passing. When my Monday meditation group started lining up our May teaching schedule, they granted my request to take two consecutive weeks — May 9 and 16 – to offer the ceremony.

As the date approached, I sent out an introductory email to the group. After all, this would be very different from our usual sitting and dhamma talks, so I gave people fair warning and set expectations, and sent along the translation we’d be using. It’s worth noting that following the Covid-19 pandemic, the Monday group is still meeting in an online videoconference.

I think people heeded my warning, because only six people attended the first session, about half our usual size. My goal for the evening was to go over what the Refuges & Precepts are – the information I covered above – leaving plenty of time to answer questions. The explanation seemed sufficient, as there were only a couple questions.

The second session had seven people, as we lost one of the previous week’s attendees but gained two new ones. After a quick recap for the new people, I took a couple more questions, then segued into the actual ceremony.

In short, we read the Homage to the Buddha, the Refuges, and the Precepts. For each, I encouraged people to recite them with me in English, then I chanted the Pali version (and anyone who wanted to join in was welcome to), and rang the meditation bell. Because doing this online would have otherwise been a mess, I asked everyone to keep their microphones muted. It seemed to work out fine.

I wanted to follow CIMC’s custom of following the ceremony with a shared social celebration, and I’m really glad I did, because it helped me convey my joy and how special an event it was. For some people it was their first time ever taking the Refuges & Precepts; it was the first time the Monday group had offered them; it was, of course, also my first time offering them; it was the day of Vesak, the most important Buddhist holiday, observing the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and passing; and the Monday group’s fifth anniversary is close at hand. And talk about auspicious: there was even a lunar eclipse! It was a wonderful opportunity to share with each other the joy of our practice together, and seeing it bearing fruit.

I probably don’t need to repeat how pleased and honored I feel at being able to offer this ceremony for the first time to a dedicated group of friends and practitioners of varying levels of experience. For me, it was a resounding success, and a huge milestone in my meditation practice and my growth as a teacher.

Now I just have to turn around and teach Dependent Origination two days later to the other group I sometimes lead!

New meditators often struggle with the idea of sitting still. One of the inevitable first questions asked at a beginners’ sitting is whether one must remain 100% perfectly still, or whether it’s okay to shift, scratch, and so forth.

While some traditions like zen are fairly strict in this regard, vipassana is less rigid: one should make a reasonable effort to remain still, bringing such impulses to conscious awareness, then making a considered decision about whether the movement is necessary or not.

But whether it is strictly enforced or not, the underlying rationale is the same in both schools of thought.

In our daily lives, the overwhelming majority of our actions are ruled by habit: if your nose itches, you scratch it; your knee hurts, you change your position. This is a great evolutionary advantage, because it frees your conscious mind from spending time thinking about trivial matters, so that you can pay attention to more important things.

But nature applies this ability too broadly, and acting unthinkingly out of habit also causes harm and gets us into unexpected trouble. Habit isn’t guided by wisdom or compassion or empathy, and it negates our freedom to react to the events of our lives in a well-considered way.

In meditation, one of the benefits of sitting still is gradually developing the ability to insert a little wedge of time between itch and scratch, between ache and move, or in general between any stimulus and our habitual response. By simply watching the itch rather than scratching it, we become a little less reactionary; we regain the freedom to choose how we respond and the opportunity to choose actions which are more wise, compassionate, and beneficial.

At first, this requires spending a lot of time in your head, and lots of effort trying to observe, interrupt, and override your previously unexamined habits. But you begin to see real-world benefits, and with practice you gradually become less reactionary by default… and also a kinder, wiser, and more compassionate person.

At some point you realize that being vigilant about your habitual behaviors is less effort now than when you first started. It no longer feels like you’re overriding your natural habits; it feels like you’re simply responding naturally. You’ve developed the skill, seen the real-world benefits, and broken the yoke of your old habits, at the low cost of some hours spent sitting around not scratching yourself!

This is one of the benefits of meditation, and why most schools of Buddhism emphasize being physically still while meditating.

Sitting still can also relate to an even more fundamental Buddhist idea: how much of our behavior is driven by desire and aversion.

During sitting meditation, the impulse to move is generally a manifestation of aversion. We perceive a sensation in the body such as an itch or an ache, and we want that sensation to stop.

But Buddhists see desire and aversion as the ultimate causes of human suffering. We want the world—and our experience of it—to be something other than how it is, which makes us dissatisfied and unhappy. Ultimately, the Buddhist philosophy addresses how to acknowledge, accept, and embrace this disconnect between what we want and what the world can provide.

Part of that is learning how to accept conditions we don’t want, but are powerless to change. This is where sitting still comes in: by not scratching that itchy nose—no matter how badly we want to—we are practicing and building up the patience, forbearance, and equanimity that will be needed when we face much greater challenges, such as our own aging, sickness, and unavoidable death.

It was in the midst of this aspect of sitting still that I began considering one particular insight that I’d like to share.

If one takes this orientation toward accepting the world as it is to an extreme, Buddhist philosophy might imply a kind of universal acceptance of life’s conditions, even to the extent of complete passivity: “This is how things are, and any attempt to change things is an act of aversion that ultimately leads to suffering.”

While that’s not really the Buddhist mindset, I found it an interesting object for consideration. And when I applied it to sitting practice, I came upon the idea that all volitional movement of the body must be a manifestation of dissatisfaction. Because if there is no desire or aversion, there is no need to change one’s circumstances, no motivation to move. What reason would there be for a being—freed of all desire and aversion—to move in any way?

Obviously, that’s a theoretical question, since no one is truly free of aversion; we all have itches, get hungry, go to the toilet, and fear aging, sickness, and death. But the idea that dissatisfaction underlies all movement has been a fruitful idea to turn over in my head, and has provided a new way to consider my bodily movements and the motivations behind them.

Playing with that concept has made sitting still during meditation a more active and engaging activity. It has also made it much easier to be physically still during sits!

Over the solstice, I attended an 8-day silent meditation retreat with Bhante Gunaratana at his Bhavana Society retreat center in West Virginia.

Buddha in Bhavana's main hall

Bhavana Buddies

Is this a dhamma talk?

My Kuti

What Eighth Precept?

Bhante G. is a well-known Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, the author of the widely-read manual “Mindfulness in Plain English”. To be honest, I didn’t know he was located so close. When I learned that Bhavana is a three and a half hour drive from Pittsburgh, I was immediately motivated to go do a retreat, especially since I wouldn’t be inconveniencing Inna, who has been out of town for months on business. And at 90 years old, Bhante G.’s advancing age gave me an added sense of urgency.

Last spring, when I looked at the Bhavana Society’s schedule, one event immediately stood out: a jhana retreat planned for the end of June.

What’s “jhana”? Jhana is an intensive concentration meditation practice which predated the Buddha, which presumably leads to four increasingly subtle and esoteric mental states.

The jhanas comprise Right Concentration: the eighth component of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path leading toward the ultimate goal of practice: the cessation of suffering. Once you have developed a high degree of equanimity through the jhanic concentration practice, you can use it (and the impermanence of those states) as a tool in Vipassana practice: the development of insight/wisdom through the internalization of the Three Characteristics of Existence (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self).

That sequence—practice concentration, then use it to develop wisdom—is one of two ways that people approach Buddhist practice. The other approach, called “dry” or “pure” Vipassana practice, does it the other way around: meditators work directly to realize the Three Characteristics, and let their concentration skills develop as needed. Meditating on the Three Characteristics through Vipassana meditation comprises the seventh element of the Noble Eightfold Path: Right Mindfulness.

Virtually all modern western Insight Meditation centers go the latter route, teaching Vipassana meditation exclusively. They rarely talk about the jhanas, and often discourage jhana practice, believing that the preoccupation with mental attainments is an unnecessary diversion from the development of wisdom… if those presumed attainments even exist at all! Having “grown up” in that Insight tradition, I dismissed jhana practice for years as little more than legacy Asian mysticism.

But ten years ago I decided to read some of the original Buddhist suttas, specifically the Majjhima Nikaya: the Middle-Length Discourses (my 2007 blogpost). There I discovered that there’s a passage describing how a skilled meditator enters the jhanas as a preliminary part of practice. Moreover, that standardized passage is repeated in a lot of suttas: about 30 percent of them, IIRC. Appearing so frequently, it was clearly something the Buddha considered extremely important. From then on, I knew I couldn’t simply dismiss jhana practice; I needed to give it a fair and openminded trial.

I bought books and did online research, but couldn’t get past my confusion. On one hand, the “jhana factors” that arise are familiar to me: applied thought, sustained thought, single-pointedness, happiness, bliss, and equanimity. But on the other hand, the four jhanic states are subtle and difficult to judge, and I certainly hadn’t experienced any of the mental imagery (nimitta) or magical powers that supposedly precede them. Were they merely metaphorical? As an avowed empiricist, I had difficulty reconciling the presumed importance of these concentration practices with the mystical bullshit that accompanied them.

As a followup to his best seller, Bhante G. also wrote a book about the jhanas called “Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English: An Introductory Guide to Deeper States of Meditation”, which I also read. So when I learned his center was nearby and that he’d be leading a jhana retreat, I figured the time was right to go and try to resolve my longstanding confusion. That’s why—due to an unfortunate scheduling coincidence—I decided to stay home at our Tuscan villa on the day the Giro d’Italia bike race came by: so that I could guarantee my spot in Bhante G.’s jhana retreat as soon as they opened online registration.

To conserve Bhante G.’s strength, activities like dhamma talks, Q&A, and teacher interviews were shared, with three different monks taking responsibility for two days each. As a result, my understanding of the jhanas changed and evolved over the course of the week.

The first two days we were in the care of Bhante Jayasara, a young American novice. He addressed the groundwork for jhana practice: specifically, suppressing the negative mental states called the Five Hindrances: a straightforward and familiar practice.

During his Q&A, he shared his personal experience of a nimitta: a sign of deep concentration that’s often perceived as a bright light. I found his sharing informative and inspiring, especially his confirmation that the nimitta is not a visual perception, but a purely mental one.

Interestingly, he could only share this with us because he’s not yet a fully-ordained monk, since the Vinaya—the Buddhist monastic rules—forbids monks from contradicting the canon or discussing their own personal experiences and attainments. So if you’re looking for practical advice based on personal experience, don’t bother asking a monastic!

During his Q&A, I asked which of the Five Hindrances compulsive planning fell under and how to practice with it. Of course, the answer was somewhat nuanced. Planning is often useful, but could also be an expression of anxiety and discomfort with uncertainty. In the moment when the compulsion comes up, one should consider three things: what is the appeal of planning, how it might be problematic, and how to reframe one’s habits of mind to avoid following that pattern out of compulsion. As Bhante Jay summarized: “The gratification, the danger, and the escape.”

After that, the middle two days were handled by Bhante Seelananda, a middle-aged monk who was born in Sri Lanka and became a monk at age eleven. As a lifelong academic scholar, he has exceptional knowledge of the Pali canon (the Buddhist scriptures).

His talks covered Buddhist academic theory relating to the jhanas in unrestrained detail, reciting a litany of passages in Pali and lists of theoretical esoteric mental states. Less of a dhamma talk and more of a collegiate lecture, it was the first dhamma talk I’ve ever attended that included a slide deck presented with an overhead projector and laser pointer!

With a straight face, he reported the magical powers the canon associates with the jhanas: the abilities to fly, read minds, recall past lives, and clairaudience.

At no time did he share any personal reflections or practical advice, limiting himself to reporting the content of the Pali canon as if it were literal truth. I’m not sure whether that was because the monastic rules prohibited him from contradicting the Buddhist writings, or whether his childhood upbringing within the monastic community rendered him an indoctrinated faith believer incapable of critical thought.

In either case, he had zero practical advice to share that would have benefited his audience of lay practitioners. As you might imagine, his circular reasoning and arguments from false authority didn’t sit well with an objective materialist like me.

After coming into the retreat with an open mind and specifically looking for practical help, I was getting discouraged and felt that I was wasting my time. I was ready to conclude that the jhanas are simply not a useful concept. Sure, concentration practice is important in habituating oneself to meta-thinking; the Five Hindrances are things we can all relate to; even the “jhana factors” I listed earlier make sense in the context of quiescing the discursive mind. But the four jhana states themselves sound like abstract, magical mumbo-jumbo.

And even if they are real, someone has got to find a better way to teach them. One doesn’t learn how to whistle by being told “Just blow long enough, and it’ll happen”; and one doesn’t learn how to swim by being told “Keep splashing around on your own and one day you’ll magically become a master swimmer”. You need someone to directly show you the techniques of how to whistle, how to swim… and how to meditate, achieve, and recognize these abstract, theoretical mental states.

For me, no matter how much of the official doctrine Bhante Seela cited, the jhanas simply don’t pass the Kalama test. In the Pali canon’s Kalama Sutta, the Buddha tells the Kalama tribe to accept as true only those teachings that one has personally verified are skillful, blameless, praiseworthy, and conducive to happiness; and to expressly reject teachings that derive from blind faith, dogmatism, and belief spawned from specious reasoning. And the jhanas demand a whole lot of the latter.

After Bhante Seela’s academic theorizing, the final two days’ talks were given by Bhante G., and I was eager to hear how he would follow up. Thankfully, as a non-academic, Bhante G. is more personable and more encouraging than Bhante Seela, which was reassuring in itself.

In the meditations he led, he ended each sitting by reciting verse 372 of the Dhammapada, one of the earliest Buddhist texts:

There is no concentration without wisdom,
Nor wisdom without concentration.
One who has both wisdom and concentration
Is close to peace and emancipation.

This is the central theme of his teaching. Here “concentration” is a reference to jhana practice, and “wisdom” is shorthand for Insight or Vipassana practice. While the two are often considered completely separate practices, Bhante G. says they are parallel roads, different but complementary ways of reaching the same destination. After all, Vipassana constitutes Right Mindfulness, the seventh element of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, while Right Concentration (the jhanas) comprises the eighth. That helped me put concentration practice into a better perspective.

But where I most benefited from Bhante G.’s wisdom was in the group interview I attended, where I was able to ask “How can you tell you’ve reached a jhana state if you don’t experience something as unmistakable as those bright-light nimittas?” His answer was packed with insightful nuggets.

First, one should look at those factors that co-arise with jhana: applied thought, sustained thought, single-pointedness, happiness, bliss, and equanimity. Those are a lot more concrete than the four abstract jhana levels. He said that entering the first jhana isn’t that hard to do for an experienced practitioner, but it’s a subtle and difficult thing to see. He said I might have achieved it many times, but who can say? You just have to judge for yourself. The important thing is to just practice. Concern yourself with your own mind, not the esoteric theories about signs and levels.

His advice was personal, immediate, practical, and encouraging… way more useful than any of the infographics Bhante Seela had presented. I’m so glad that I got into this retreat and had the opportunity to have an exchange with him, while he is still well enough to teach. It was touching when, on the last day of the retreat, I ran into him on his daily walk and we exchanged smiles.

So where did I wind up as far as jhana practice? While I didn’t get confirmation that jhanas exist or not, I did get a degree of practical clarity. Taking Bhante G.’s words to heart, I’m not going to pay a lot of attention to the jhanas. I’ll continue to practice meditation of various flavors (Vipassana/Insight, concentration, and samatha/calmness), with the main focus on evolving my relationship to desire, aversion, impermanence, ethics, and renunciation.

With that, let’s dump all this philosophy. “How was it?” I hear you asking. Well, lemme tellya…

Long retreats hurt. Despite their obvious benefit, I dread them. Even though I use a meditation bench, long periods of sitting hurt both my knees and back, and my knee pain turned severe this time. On top of that, my yogi job was washing dishes, and their sinks are definitely not at a height for normal-sized humans.

There’s also an odd kind of discomfort associated with heightened mindfulness. I would spend all day building up my mindfulness, only to find it difficult to relax and fall asleep at night, because I was so busy noticing and observing everything. Once you’re in that mental state, you can’t simply shut it off, which in my experience leads to a particular kind of retreat fatigue. I find that far more uncomfortable than the more-frequently reported discomfort returning to mainstream society following a long retreat.

Rather than being put up in a dormatory, for the first time ever I got my very own kuti, a tiny one-person cabin off on its own, used as a living space by monastics. It was little more than an uninsulated wooden shed, with a twin mattress and just enough space to squeeze around it on three sides. No electricity, but two windows. I guess it fit the modern idea of a “tiny house”. Thankfully, there weren’t too many insects inside, though I was still glad to have brought bug repellent. I was assigned the cabin named “Panna”, which is Pali for “wisdom”.

The weather. The first three days were hot and sunny, which I enjoyed, despite the lack of aircon. Although the heat was supposed to hold all week, the weather turned very rainy and cold from Wednesday through Sunday. Several times so much rain fell that the short, grassy downhill path to my kuti spontaneously turned into a rushing brook!

Flora and fauna everywhere. Poison ivy. Fireflies. A deer outside my kuti one morning. Termites or something loudly trying to bore into the kuti all day and night long until the rains came and drove them off. Ridiculously loud and annoying tree frogs that trilled back and forth to one another from 8pm to 11pm, sounding for all the world like dueling car alarms. Great for practicing equanimity, but not so great for actually sleeping.

And Buddy. We were told that we’d see Buddy, their tabby cat, who might come and sit in your lap. Monday evening, during a ten-minute break between sittings, I ran into him outside the main building, introduced myself, and made friends. I sat cross-legged in the driveway, and he climbed into my lap and promptly fell asleep. I saw him a couple more times, but he too disappeared once the rain started. I mused that although I hadn’t experienced the Buddhist concept of “no-self”, I did understand “no-Buddy” (nobody).

Other oddities, for your amusement…

Bhavana’s retreat FAQ suggests bringing earplugs, and those were key! I’ve already mentioned the nightly amphibian car alarm chorus and the termites or whatever was chewing its way into my shack. On top of that, the kuti came with a battery-powered clock whose second hand ticked louder than its built-in alarm; I yanked its batteries on the second day. Then the pounding rain on the kuti’s roof topped it all off. Without my earplugs I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep at all.

There’s always one… Normally people claim a spot in the meditation hall and have one zabuton (mat) and one zafu (a tall cushion) or meditation bench. One guy sitting a couple rows in front of me built and sat atop a ziggurat composed of no less than three zabutons, a square cushion, two zafus, and another square cushion, with a bench nearby, just in case. He was perched more than two feet off the floor! Which I think is a violation of the vow we took on the first day to uphold the Eight Precepts, specifically the vow to refrain from using high or luxurious beds and seats. Ridiculous!

The food. Normal people always crow about how great retreat food is; I’m too finicky for that, but I found everything surprisingly palatable. Plus there were a couple treats, such as Nutella, Gatorade, and one day we got orange juice. They also provided Sriracha sauce, which I found helped many dishes, except loading up on it wasn’t always the best idea, since I usually didn’t fetch anything to drink with my meal! Still, when the retreat ended, I made a quick stop at Dairy Queen for a Dilly Bar, then grabbed a cola and potato chips to enjoy on the drive home.

My yogi job washing dishes provided some entertainment. I’m used to turning dishwashing gloves inside-out to dry, which is difficult to do unless you know this secret: blow into them like a balloon to reverse the fingers. But somehow I managed to explode two gloves by blowing too hard into them! They blew up with impressively loud bangs during an otherwise silent retreat!

At one point (for some unknown reason) the cook pulled me aside to tell me he thought I looked like Frank Zappa. “Maybe it’s the ponytail?” That’s a new one on me. In the past I’ve drawn comparisons to David Beckham, Steven Seagal, Fabio Lanzoni, and (in a swipe from the ex-wife) Star Trek’s emotionless Mr. Spock.

Even with all this zaniness, it was a good and productive retreat, although three weeks later my knees are still recovering. I was able to meet and practice with Bhante Gunaratana, a cherished teacher whose career is nearing its conclusion; and I gained some clarity about how to practice with and relate to the jhanas (or not). It gave me what my practice needed, and was quite a memorable experience.

Upon coming home, I felt a huge sense of relief. Not because of the retreat, but because I had concluded four months of frequent travel: two weeks gallivanting around Asia in March, a week in Italy in May, and another week on retreat in West Virginia in June. It’s nice to visit new places, but home will always be home, and I was eager to hole up for a while in a familiar place. I wouldn’t mind if there were a few less-eventful weeks in store for me now!

These days, it’s not so outré to live without a car, or a television, or to not bother going to the movies. But tell people that you’re giving up music, and you’ll be surprised at how strongly people react.

Music obviously has a great rep. It’s the stuff of life, it’s how you share emotions, it’s something you need in order to get through the day.

Meditation is all about watching your mind, and after seven years of practice, it’s pretty obvious to me that in addition to all that, music also has some negative aspects.

One is obvious to anyone who has taken mass transit or visited a school in the past five years: for most people, music is how they escape the unbearable tedium of whatever’s happening right now. All they need to do is stuff a pair of ear buds in, and they can avoid interacting with other people, escape being alone with their thoughts, and avert their attention from the present.

As you can infer from my language, I don’t consider those positive attributes. Without social interaction, life is bland and featureless. Without solitude and introspection, life lacks depth and self-knowledge. And living for some other moment than the present is an outright denial of life itself.

“But,” you say, “not everyone’s so desperately trying to avoid life. It’s possible for me to enjoy music in moderation, right?” Let me tell you what I’ve observed.

We’ve all experienced the phenomenon known as an “ear-worm”, a song you can’t get out of your head. Sometimes it’s a song you really like; sometimes it’s a song you really hate. But there’s a reason why we say some songs are “catchy” and have “a hook”.

What I’ve observed is that after you listen to it, every song echoes inside your head for a while, bouncing around at random. In addition to this short-term resonance, a verse can lie forgotten for decades, but has the power to interrupt your thoughts, leaping into the present from some vaguely-remembered childhood exposure. From Barney the Dinosaur to Pink Floyd, from Bach’s Brandenburg concertos to Einstürzende Neubauten, and from ABBA to ZZ Top, music resonates in our minds like nothing else.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing until you look at it with the perspective of a meditator. Meditation is about developing sufficient concentration to examine one’s sensory input and thought processes in detail, and the steadiness and equanimity to accept everything that this process of self-examination unearths. Meditators value attributes like stillness, calmness, and peacefulness of mind, and they seek to avoid mental states of agitation and distraction.

I’ve gone through long periods of my life that were filled with music and equally long spaces when it just wasn’t important to me. In my meditation practice, I’ve taken the time to examine my mind and how it operates when I’ve been exposed to music and when I’ve gone without, and the difference is clear. Music agitates the mind, interrupts concentration, and causes one’s thought patterns to return to the tune over and over again. But one doesn’t need to be a yogi to understand that an ear-worm interferes with calmness and steadiness of mind.

Interestingly, music never got much attention in the Buddhist literature I’ve read. However, I was intrigued to find the following passage while reading Bhante G’s “Mindfulness in Plain English”. While he is discussing storytelling, music clearly produces the same kind of energy for similar reasons.

Mental images are powerful entities. They can remain in the mind for long periods. All of the storytelling arts are direct manipulation of such material, and if the writer has done his job well, the characters and images presented will have a powerful and lingering effect on the mind. If you have been to the best movie of the year, the meditation that follows is going to be full of those images. If you are halfway through the scariest horror novel you ever read, your meditation is going to be full of monsters. So switch the order of events. Do your meditation first. Then read or go to the movies.

So I’ve gradually reduced the amount of music I am exposed to, and for me it has been a net positive. Naturally, there’s both benefits and drawbacks to this approach, and there’s clearly a middle way: a path of wisdom and balance to be found that allows one to integrate music into one’s life in a way that doesn’t agitate the mind nor encourage withdrawal from the real world.

Although I don’t consider myself particularly deprived by this action, I’ve been surprised by the visceral reactions people have when I mention it, as if music were the absolute last thing they would consider letting go.

Time for a grab bag of Buddhisty observations based on some recent readings, dharma talks, and workshops.

At a recent talk, Ajahn Geoff was asked about the Buddhist concept of Right Effort: specifically, how to cultivate the discipline to perform actions you don’t want to do, but which you know will have positive results. To my surprise, he responded by outlining my longstanding belief that you must be guided by how you will feel on your deathbed about the choice you made. I’ve mentioned this guiding view of mine in blog posts from 2005 here and 2003 here.

My belief that the brahmaviharas of metta (lovingkindness) and karuna (compassion) are very similar was confirmed by Narayan at a recent CIMC workshop. The main difference is that compassion is more specifically targeted at suffering, whereas metta is a more general friendliness toward all, irrespective of the conditions of their life.

The phrases Narayan uses for compassion practice are “May I care for your [physical] pain” and “May I care for your [emotional] sorrow”. I feel that “May I” is semantically much weaker than “I do”, and “care for” is weaker and more vague than “care about”. So the phrases that speak to me most compellingly are “I care about your pain” and “I care about your sorrow”.

While on the topic of the compassion workshop, I should mention the following. Although I am currently halfway through my intended year of intensive metta practice, my current intention is to follow that up with a year of intensive karuna practice. That’ll cover the first two brahmaviharas, but I do not plan on devoting the same time and energy to the remaining brahmaviharas of equanimity and sympathetic joy.

When someone expresses dismay with the phrase “It’s not fair!”, I have always taken glee in pointing out that “Life isn’t fair, and you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed if you expect it to be”. I have recently begun to appreciate that although life indeed isn’t fair, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have compassion for those who suffer from life’s injustices, and take action to remedy them.

The two figures on the table behind the teachers’ platform at CIMC are Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion (aka Guan Yin, Chenrezig), and Manjusri, the bodhisattva of transcendent wisdom. It seems a bit odd to have them so honored in a Theravadin meditation center, but it does underscore how relaxed CIMC is about borrowing from other Buddhist lineages.

We are often so preoccupied with planning about the future or reminiscing about the past that we aren’t paying any attention to the present moment. We must be present for our minds to process the sensory input we receive in each moment. If we are absent, one might say that we are “Out of our minds”. Are you “out of your mind”?

One of the observations in the Pali Canon is that our egos exhibit certain seemingly contradictory impulses: the desire to exist, and the desire to not exist. These can be seen, of example, in the desire to “leave one’s mark on the world”, or the parental impulse to live solely for one’s offspring’s benefit, losing oneself in something other than one’s own life. The Buddha stated quite clearly that these are not helpful preoccupations. However, many Buddhists also espouse the idea of cosmic unity: the view that we are all one entity, one living expression of universe, rather than many unique and separate individuals. To me, this seems to be just another, more politically correct manifestation of the desire to not exist. Submersion in some anonymous universal being is just as much a manifestation of the ego’s desire to find oblivion as any other human activity.

One of the ways that karma works is by one action setting up the conditions that influence one’s future state. For example, if we choose not to pay back a debt, we have created the conditions that cause others to mistrust us. Thus our bad acts indeed precipitate negative reactions from others, which impinge upon our future lives.

In “Walden”, Thoreau writes about mankind’s advancement of science and contrasting lack of progress in the ethical sphere thus: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.” Technology is a tool that multiplies our capabilities, but it’s up to man to create something meaningful with that enhanced capability, and our philosophies haven’t advanced in any meaningful sense in the past 2000 years.

One way of looking at mindfulness is being mentally and physically present and open to the beauty in each instant of life in its fullness. If there is so much beauty and joy to be experienced in this world (and I believe there is), that raises the question of how to avoid being overwhelmed by it. At any given instant, I am presented with all kinds of sensory input and myriad potential objects of attention; so if I am to appreciate any of it fully, how do I choose what part of that experience to focus my attention on? This difficulty is compounded by the Buddhist affinity for what is called “choiceless awareness”.

One of the reasons western society is so focused on acquisition as a method of seeking happiness is the very affluence we have achieved. Consider the experience of a child going through a mega-warehouse toy store. The child is presented with thousands of wonderful things that create and fortify his sense desire. But even though his parents might give him numerous toys that far exceed what children in most other cultures would have, no parent can buy everything in the store, so the overwhelming majority of that child’s experience is being repeatedly told that they cannot have what they want. This cultivates an incessant feeling of lack, which over time solidifies into a longlasting sense of dissatisfaction, with a particular focus on acquisitiveness as the solution to life’s inherent disappointments. The scenario of a child surrounded by toys—seeking happiness from material objects they cannot have—is played out throughout adulthood as we are enslaved by our compulsive desire for the newest electronic gadgets, a sleek car, a wonderful home with the nicest television and kitchen appliances, and a trophy spouse. But ultimately it is the very profusion of consumer goods available to us that makes us feel deprived, impoverished, and unloved.

Most American adults suffer from some form of self-esteem issues. As a result, our childcare and education systems have changed to place an immense emphasis on cultivating self-esteem in our children. Today’s youth have grown up in an environment where they are not criticized, they are not disciplined, and they never face emotional hurt. However, since they have rarely if ever seen one of their peers suffering and in emotional pain, they have also never learned the skill of compassion. And even if they do see another person hurting, their own lack of trauma means they haven’t developed the ability to empathize with another person. To one who has never been hurt, the sight of another person’s suffering brings up feelings of aversion and disgust and fear rather than compassion; others’ suffering becomes something that divides and separates people rather than unites them in sympathy. By putting so much effort into raising children with a strong sense of self-esteem, we have accidentally raised a generation of youth who are self-absorbed and stunningly lacking in the virtues of empathy and compassion.

Last Saturday our dharma book club discussed a book I recommended. This post captures some of that discussion, and why I chose the book I did.

When I was first asked to pick our next book, it was pretty obvious to me what my selection would be: Alan Watts’ “Wisdom of Insecurity”. Written in 1951 by a British scholar in comparative religions, it was one of the first books in English that brought Buddhism to an American audience, including the Beat Generation. More recently, it also played a pivotal role in my own movement toward Buddhism.

Back in 2002, I decided to review my existing philosophical beliefs. In high school, I’d adopted Existentialism after reading Sartre and Camus and Ionesco in French. It had appealed to me as a typically angst-ridden adolescent, but did it still serve me as I approached 40?

Coincidentally, I had just begun blogging here on LiveJournal, so as I spent the next year plowing through Nietzsche and Sartre, I was able to document many of my thoughts along the way. One of the most important of those thoughts came from the following passage in William Barrett’s 1958 book “Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy”, a book I read in January of 2003.

The Self, indeed, is in Sartre’s treatment, as in Buddhism, a bubble, and a bubble has nothing at its center. But neither in Buddhism nor in Sartre is the Self riddled with negations to the end that we should, humanly speaking, collapse into the negative, into a purely passive nihilism. In Buddhism the recognition of the nothingness of ourselves is intended to lead into a striving for holiness and compassion—the recognition that in the end there is nothing that sustains us should lead us to love one another, as survivors on a life raft, at the moment they grasp that the ocean is shoreless and that no rescue ship is coming, can only have compassion on one another.

That one somewhat convoluted reference was the first I’d heard of any commonality between Buddhism and Existentialism. Apparently, although the two philosophies began with similar assumptions—that there is no paternal creator god, that there is no inherent meaning in life, and that man has no permanent essence that survives his corporeal body—Buddhism offered something that I never got from Existentialism: a positive and ethical way of living one’s life based on those assumptions. That was the seed that got me thinking about looking into Buddhism. You can read my original comments on Barrett’s book here.

Just a few days later, I found myself browsing at a local Barnes & Noble. I’d scanned the entire Buddhist section and gotten nearly to the end of the alphabet without seeing anything that called out to me. Then I saw this tiny little paperback with an eye-searing lime green spine and the words “THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY - ALAN W. WATTS”. The cover blurbs seemed to intuit exactly what I’d spent the previous year looking for, so I immediately picked it up and blew through it.

Watts was the first author I’d read who, rather than restating the existential problem and wringing his hands, provided a rational and fulfilling way to respond to those conditions, without resorting to the self-delusion of unproven faith or its opposite extreme of pessimism and despair.

Even today, I’m stunned by the serendipity and good fortune I had to happen upon that exact book, because it was the perfect gateway to all the wisdom, development, and fulfillment that has followed. You can read my original reaction to the book here.

So that’s why I selected that particular book. It has an immense amount of personal meaning for me.

As you might expect, I was a little anxious about sharing something that personal with others, even my fellow meditators. That feeling was compounded by the long wait: three months passed between when I was asked to select a book and our discussion of it!

However, it didn’t take long to get a reaction. As soon as he learned of my selection, one of the attendees emailed back: “AMAZING selection!!!!!!! I will definately [sic] be there. I cannot express how amazing this book is to read.” Okay, that’s one solid vote of confidence!

Another one came a few weeks later. Socializing after a sitting at CIMC, one of the attendees showed me her copy of the book and mentioned that she was enjoying it. That’s two!

But as she flashed the book, its amazingly ugly lime green and purple patterned cover caught the eye of the woman who had officiated at the evening’s meditation. She recognized it immediately and also effused about it, indicating that, like me, it had played a big part in her coming to Buddhism. That really made me much more confident about the selection, since she’s a longtime practitioner who is known for managing CIMC’s “sandwich retreat”.

By the time our book club discussion came around, even the woman who hosts the group made a point of letting me know that she was enjoying the book. So I was able to go into the meeting without too much self-consciousness about it.

That’s not to say that the book received unalloyed praise. Watts’ language was both commended (in his choice of metaphors and images) and critiqued (in his tangential rants and sometimes inaccessibly complex sentence structure).

Eleven people attended the meeting, and about half had read the book, which is a bit better than normal. Let me gloss over a few of the topics that came up during the discussion.

One comment that was repeatedly made was how pertinent Watts’ words are today, even sixty years after he wrote them. He wrote about consumerism and how everyone was chasing the newest, best television. It stunned us that in 2010, we’re still being sold new and supposedly much better televisions, just as was the case back in 1951! He also anticipated our need for ever more rapid and imposing forms of entertainment. He could surely have been talking about last week in this passage:

There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down—traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.

We spent some time talking about how religious faith can be a comfort, but once it has been pierced by skepticism, you can’t ever restore that belief. That harkens back to my own feeling that you cannot simply decide what you believe; belief is not an object to be so simply controlled, and you can do little more than discover and perhaps indirectly influence what you believe. As one attendee put it: the challenge of Watts’ book is how to stay connected with modern reality in the absence of mollifying religious faith, without being scared.

Another big theme that people pulled out was that our feelings of insecurity are the direct result of the fact that we want security. If you want something, by definition it is something that you feel you do not have now, so the more desperately we seek security, the more insecure we feel. This was likened to the concept of the “power of attraction”, where one must be careful to cultivate the vision of having what one wants, not the wanting itself, because focusing your energy on the wanting presumably reinforces your yearning and the absence of the thing you’re after.

Our discussions also circled around the Buddhist concept of conditioned behavior, and the large degree to which our actions can be reduced to a response to the situation we are in, based on patterns of behavior that have been successful for us in the past. Where this got interesting was our realization that as dharma friends, we are each providing conditioning factors for one another, and hopefully influencing one another such that we will all make wiser, compassionate, and more fulfilling decisions in the future.

Another amusing tangent had us discussing the idea that on average, your friends are more popular than you are. This is mathematically true, because we all tend to be friends with outgoing people who are already very popular.

Obviously, the discussion was much broader than those few items, but I wanted to capture those in particular, and they’ll also give you a flavor for where we went with it. Overall, the discussion stayed pretty well on-topic, and people kept returning to the book and reading key passages aloud, since Watts’ prose is eminently quotable.

In preparation for the book club, I re-read “Wisdom of Insecurity” myself last week. After three readings, almost every single page has something highlighted on it. It’s an extremely dense book in terms of the profundity of its concepts, and I feel that although it’s only a thin 150-page paperback, one could easily base a semester’s study around it.

I wanted to highlight a few things that I got from this most recent reading that I didn’t mention in the book club discussion.

Here’s a great passage, where Watts begins by commenting on our impossible and irrational desire for permanence:

For it would seem that, in man, life is in hopeless conflict with itself. To be happy, we must have what we cannot have. In man, nature has conceived desires which it is impossible to satisfy. To drink more fully of the fountain of pleasure, it has brought forth capacities which make man more susceptible to pain. It has given us the power to control the future but a little—the price of which is the frustration of knowing that we must at last go down in defeat. If we find this absurd, this is only to say that nature has conceived intelligence in us to berate itself for absurdity. Consciousness seems to be nature’s ingenious mode of self-torture.

In other words, if we’re intelligent enough to realize the futility of our plight, we must then be nature’s way of mocking itself! When I read this section about the basic absurdity of humanity’s quest for meaning, seeking pleasure, and avoiding pain, I realized that the best way to think about life is as a Zen koan. There is no answer! And any attempt to arrive at one rationally is bound to fail. Life is a paradox; accept it and move on!

Another passage:

To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being which we call “I”.

What leaps out at me from this section is the absurdity (again) of feeling that one has to prop up or defend something that we’ve defined as eternal and immutable. How ridiculous! If there is some permanent “I” within us, then what need does it have for defense? If such a thing existed, it would persist irrespective of anything we did or did not do.

Watts spends a great deal of time on the importance of living the present moment fully, and not letting desired future states obscure our ability to enjoy and be fully present with what is. The difference between someone who perpetually looks for fulfillment in the future and someone who lives for the present couldn’t be more poignant than in this passage about death:

When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectation must come to an end. While there is life there is hope—and if one lives on hope, death is indeed the end. But to the undivided mind, death is another moment, complete like every moment, and cannot yield its secret unless lived to the full.

This passage shows how the fear of death is mostly rooted in the fact that it signals the end of our ability to expect a better, more pleasant future. It shows that by a simple change of mindset, we can begin to leave this fear behind. Imagine having a relationship with death that wasn’t dominated by fear!

Then there’s this little zinger. Compare the following passages:

If it is true that man is necessarily motivated by the pleasure-pain principle, there is no point whatsoever in discussing human conduct. Motivated conduct is determined conduct; it will be what it will be, no matter what anyone has to say about it. There can be no creative morality unless man has the possibility of freedom.

That citation, which says that ethics and morality make no sense if man doesn’t have the freedom to make choices, is from “Wisdom of Insecurity”. Then:

You are deluded to assume that you are reading this of your own free will. My friend, you had no choice but to read this! Will is not the action of a being; it is the end product of a process. […] Whatever you do is just a result of complex programming.

This counterpoint is from Ajahn Brahm’s book on jhana practice, “Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond”, which I reviewed here. Ajahn Brahm subscribes to the view that free will is an illusion, and that our behavior and apparent choices are indeed fully determined by present conditions and our past conditioning. I’d love to get these two in a room and ask them to debate the topic of choice. Or maybe not…

Finally, consider Watts’ description of hell:

Hell, or “everlasting damnation” is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained.

I might clarify this definition of hell as threefold, comprised of seeking for pleasure but remaining unfulfilled, running from pain but never being able to avoid it, and looking to the future for fulfillment without ever being present at that future. As such, I think this is a perfectly apt description of many people’s lives, and a good way to understand why a lot of people find themselves frustrated, angry, self-absorbed, and suffering from existential angst.

In conclusion, I have to once again say how delighted I am with “Wisdom of Insecurity”, and how heartily I recommend it to others. It’s amusing, quotable, succinct, and very deeply profound. It impresses me as much today, after seven years of Buddhist study and practice, as it did on day one.

I am truly amazed that it was written sixty years ago, by someone who was only 36 years old. It contains an amazing amount of wisdom in a very tidy little package. Well, except for the single ugliest cover ever created by man.

Ironically, one final surprise is that all that wisdom didn’t necessarily help its author. In the ’60s, long after this book was published, Alan Watts experimented with mescaline and LSD, and became something of an advocate of marijuana. He became an alcoholic, went through three marriages, and died of heart failure at 58 years of age.

But then it is the nature of all things to change, isn’t it?

I recently finished reading Ajahn Brahm’s book “Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator’s Handbook”. I’ve got a lot to say about it.

The book is intended to be an accessible description of the jhanas, the most advanced states of concentration practice that Buddhists cultivate.

The jhanas are also somewhat controversial. Since they involve complete dissociation with the senses, the physical body, and the concept of self, many folks question whether the jhanas are real. The center where I practice goes to some lengths to direct students away from this kind of intense concentration practice, known as samadhi. But at the same time, the jhana states are repeatedly and persistently emphasized as the path to awakening throughout the Buddhist suttas of the Pali canon, which is why I was interested in learning more about them.

One of the most rewarding aspects of the book for me is the run-up; Ajahn Brahm spends seven chapters describing the path of practice that leads to the jhanas in a very progressive, step-by-step way. It’s really the first time I’ve seen meditation described as a linear process, rather than a bunch of diverse but unrelated practices to use at your own discretion. It’s nice to see what steps occur in what sequence along the path of increasing insight and wisdom.

And he hits it all. There’s detailed descriptions of the five hindrances, the sixteen steps of mindfulness of breathing from the Anapanasati Sutta, the four foundations of mindfulness from the Satipatthana Sutta, the feelings tones (vedena), the cycle of dependent origination, and the techniques of walking practice, lovingkindness (metta), and open awareness. He doesn’t even shy away from providing a description of what enlightenment (nibbana) is like once you get there! And all of it is related to specific steps along a documented path of developing one’s practice.

Ajahn Brahm divides that path into seven major steps.

The first step is simply to focus on the present moment, letting go of all thoughts about the past and the future. Step two is silencing the mind, letting go of thinking and the perpetual inner dialog that most people live with. The third step is to narrow one’s attention to the breath, which means giving up the awareness of input from the physical body and the five senses.

The fourth step is simply sustaining that degree of attention on the breath for a long period of time. Gradually, the doer—the person who intervenes and causes action to occur—fades into the background, allowing the knower to come to the forefront. Rather than living in a state of reacting to stimuli or being on the verge of doing something, the practitioner rests in the state of simple awareness. These first four steps are the easiest ones, and what most meditators focus on. And that’s probably as far as most practitioners take their practice.

Step five is where concentration really takes hold, and things start getting a bit farther from our normal experience, as even the awareness of the breath itself disappears.

Step six is the manifestation of the nimitta, a vision usually described as an unstable mental image of light. It’s unstable because meditators usually respond to its manifestation with either fear or excitement, which destroy the stillness of the mind the nimitta occupies. Eventually, one can resist this inclination and manifest a stable vision. Ajahn Brahm describes the nimitta as a reflection of the knower, an image of the mind itself. This is the doorstep of the jhana states.

The jhanas are the final, seventh step. When one enters the jhanas, one is no longer letting go of some thing or any mental object, but of the person doing the thinking: the observer, the knower. The doer is completely gone. That eventually includes the dissolution of the ego and an accompanying loss of control, will, sense input, thought, decisionmaking, and time. The first-person perspective falls away in favor of a broader sense of unity.

Ajahn Brahm gives such central importance to the jhanas that he describes them as the true meaning of the final step in the Buddhist Eightfold Path: right mindfulness. He also cites an example of a man who, while in a jhana state, was so unresponsive that he was rushed to the hospital and evaluated as having no brain activity and no pulse until he came out of the meditation. See what I mean about things getting a bit esoteric?

It’s no coincidence that in each of those steps I describe the meditator as letting go of something. Ajahn Brahm asserts that the whole Buddhist path is one of renunciation, culminating in letting go of everything. That process begins with a simple practice of generosity, then giving up harmful actions and speech through the training precepts; relinquishing thought, the physical body, and the five senses; then finally banishing both the doer and the knower and any sense of a separate, eternal self.

As such, he describes the main barrier to enlightenment as attachment to the body, the five senses, one’s thoughts, and the will to act; in short, the doer and the knower. These are what block access to the jhanas. While it’s easy to believe one is free of those attachments, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Concentration practice—the jhana states—are there to get you close enough to see the ultimate reality, at which point insight practice is what brings the final understanding that there is no eternal self—nor any self at all as we conceive of it—and what the implications of that realization are.

So, as you can see, after humble, mundane beginnings, Ajahn Brahm does indeed get way out there. Yet his is the most down to earth explanation of jhana practice that I’ve come across. That doesn’t make it any easier to swallow, though.

Along the way, Ajahn Brahm drops some pretty good bombshells in his prose, too. He asserts that belief in rebirth is an absolute requirement. He believes that our actions are purely the result of the conditions that preceded them, and therefore there is no such thing as free will or choice. He asserts that one of the first experiences one has as a result of jhana practice is the ability to remember past lives. He says that celibacy comes naturally, as one gradually lets go of desire. He goes so far as to say that psychic powers often come with enlightenment. Although at the same time, he points out that it is against the Vinaya, the Buddhist monastic code, to claim any particular level of enlightenment to laypeople (and that it’s also against the rules for monks to run).

On the other hand, he also provides some great suggestions and observations, as well. These include:

He advises against the common meditation practice of mental noting of what is arising, because it puts one clearly in one’s head and reinforces the knower.
He warns about how easy it is to overestimate one’s level of attainment along the path. Such overconfidence leads to more difficulties down the road, and that focus on achievements reinforces the very ego that one is trying to overcome.
He suggests that one defer all judgment of a meditation until after the meditation period, at which point it is wise to review the session and examine what came up and what one can learn from it.
He stated that restlessness arises primarily because one is not finding enough joy in the present moment. It’s a way of avoiding being present, and his prescription is to find the joy that is happening right now.
Finally, he also suggests that meditators examine their state of mind at the start of a sitting. He indicates that advanced practitioners are perfectly wise in selecting the particular meditation technique that is best suited to address their present experience.

So in the end, I have mixed feelings about the book. The introductory chapters are incredibly useful in terms of revealing the progressive nature of practice, and relating all the individual techniques to one linear path. For that reason alone, I would suggest it to longtime meditators. But while I have great faith in Ajahn Brahm’s ability to represent the jhanic states as described in the Pali canon, I retain a healthy dose of skepticism, and I will continue to be challenged to believe and have confidence in all the aspects of jhana practice that he describes.

And I have one final thought to share. Although it wasn’t brought up by the book, I did experience one revelatory insight around the same time.

Typically, we are taught that an ethical way to live is to look at other people and realize that they are just like you, with the same kind of thoughts, emotions, hardships, and aspirations. That is, they’re not just animate objects you manipulate to obtain your desired outcomes. You are supposed to cultivate compassion and empathy by realizing that everyone else you meet is just as deep and genuine and vulnerable as you are. In short, they’re as “real” as you are.

But a Buddhist might say that’s the exact reverse of the truth. The reality is that you are just as shallow, surfacy, and impersonal as everyone else appears to be. You are just an automaton, responding mechanically or instinctually to the stimuli you encounter, even though you’re convinced you’re “real”. If you look at yourself in this way, I think you’ll be much closer to the Buddhist point of view than if you force yourself to see everyone else as deep and complex.

Interesting thoughts.

This is a continuation of this post, where I brought your attention to the fact that when we focus on the moving things that automatically attract our eyes, we lose sight of the richness of the things around us that aren’t moving.

It’s also true that the same could be said for our sense of hearing. Our ears are attracted by whatever is loudest around us, rather than the things which are quiet. But unlike our vision, which only required us to look at something else, listening may require us to do two different things.

We often intentionally fill our ears with sound in an effort to keep ourselves from hearing anything unpleasant, or just to keep our ears from getting bored. It should be obvious that if you want to hear the breath of the world, the first thing you need to do it turn off the television, hang up the phone, switch off the radio, and put down the iPoo. You need to stop intentionally blocking your ears with aural fluff.

The other thing we need to do is what we did with our vision: stop following your body’s natural impulse to pay attention to what’s loudest. Hear the ventilation equipment and the key-clicks in your office, not the voices around you. Hear the birds and the wind in the trees, rather than passing automobile engines. Hear your cat’s footfalls as he comes to greet you at the door.

If you stop and listen to the silence behind all the noise of our daily lives, you may find those sounds much richer and more satisfying than you’d ever considered before.

Of course, this practice can also be extended to the other senses. What would you find if you really paid attention to the subtler scents your nose comes across each day, rather than simply ignoring your nose all day?

On the other hand, we’re pretty well attuned to subtlety of taste and touch. We have our favorite foods and have created a very complex set of meanings for all kinds of human touch. But that’s not to say that there isn’t more depth to experience by focusing on those sensations and taking the time to explore them more fully.

In Buddhist philosophy, thought represents a sixth sense. Thoughts are things that come and go, and we sense their passage. In fact, much of Buddhism and meditation centers around the idea of taking the time to stop and look at the thoughts that arise in our minds, and whether they’re actually beneficial or not. Do you allow your mind to be continually distracted by whatever exerts a momentary attraction, the way you allow you eyes to flicker from thing to thing, without ever staying on one subject long enough to fully experience and appreciate it? Or do you observe your thoughts and consciously direct them in more productive directions?

We spend so much of our lives unconsciously, not seeing deeply, not hearing anything and completely out of touch with one another and the miraculous world around us. Even our thoughts, the thing we most associate with our “self”, usually operate in a purely reactive way. We wander around this world, seeing little, hearing little, tasting little, mostly unconscious except for an overriding sense that we’re not happy.

The Buddha was right about the secret of happiness being found in deeply experiencing the present moment. By activating all our physical senses, as well as thought, we transform the world around us into something wondrous and vivid that we’d never see otherwise.

Now—and everything it encompasses—is truly a holy thing, to be honored and cherished above all else. I invite you to open your eyes to it. Your world will never be the same.

The human organism has been designed with particularly good eyesight. We’re especially attuned to detect and focus on any movement in our field of vision, which was a significant evolutionary advantage for an opportunistic species that might equally find itself as predator or as prey. If something moves, we want to know about it, what it is, where it is, where it’s going, and whether it’s something to eat, run away from, or have sex with.

The counter side of that is that we’re exceptionally good at ignoring things that don’t move, because they don’t warrant our attention. In our daily lives, we don’t notice the sky, the grass, or rocks. They’re background, not foreground. It’s really hard to spend any time looking deeply at something that doesn’t move or change. Have you ever tried? We’ve even honored the phenomenon with a derogatory cliche: “about as exciting as watching paint dry”.

Media companies have known this for decades, as you can see from the ever-increasing pace of cuts and context switches. The sudden movements and changes of color capture your attention because we’re hardwired to give top priority to the most rapid movements we see. I’m sure everyone’s had the experience of eating at a restaurant or pub with someone who is constantly distracted by something on the television, even when they’re not interested in the content of the program. Or the experience of being that person!

The price of this evolutionary advantage is a very real kind of shallowness. No matter what we are doing, we are continually distracted by whatever’s moving around us. Our attention jumps from subject to subject with the rapidity of a hyperactive hummingbird.

I noticed this walking to work this morning. It was a wonderful day, and I began looking at the nature around me: granite boulders, gently swaying trees, green lawns, and a cloud-spotted blue sky. But I kept finding my eyes drawn away: to a splashing fountain in the middle of a pond; to the cars passing by; to the maintenance guy painting a fire hydrant; to the men playing golf at the course next door.

And, of course, I began to wonder.

As I looked at all those things, I was just letting my eyes dart around, never resting on any one thing for very long. I wasn’t deeply experiencing the cars or the golfers or the fountain; my eyes were just registering them and moving on. I may have seen a lot, but I didn’t see anything very deeply or with any sense of richness or connection.

So I decided to “see different”. I concentrated fully on looking at the things in my field of vision that didn’t move: the trees, those boulders, the grass, and the road beside me.

The first thing I noticed was that it was really difficult not to let my eyes dart away. We’re so used to the quick cut and context shift that our attention is always fragmented. People no longer have the ability to actually concentrate on one thing for more than a moment.

The second thing I noticed was that once I did look at the things that didn’t move, my experience of the world around me gained tremendous depth and richness. There’s more visual depth in a bare stone than there is in any fast-paced car chase scene. And a single tree has more elegance and a more complex story to tell than any feature film.

By looking at the things that don’t move, I literally began to see the world anew, with wonder and awe, and a very deep sense of being present in the moment I was living. There’s beauty all around us, even in the most decayed urban wasteland, if only we made better, conscious decisions about how to use the amazing gift of our vision.

So my challenge to you is to try it. Stop letting your eyes mindlessly jerk your attention around. Take the time to actually look at the things that aren’t moving, that have always been background but never received your full attention and appreciation.

Take a good, long look at the things that aren’t moving. See the world for what it is, not for what it is doing.

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