Ornoth

As it spread across Asia and the rest of the globe, Buddhism changed and adapted to the local cultures it encountered; however, Buddhism’s core goal—freedom from suffering—and its core method—contemplative meditation—have perforce remained constant… until recently.

Thus it’s understandable that the 20th Century Westerners who went to Asia would come back with a unique version of Buddhist practice that ought to work better for those of us brought up in the West than the original article. The hybrid Buddhism that we inherited from them had been distilled down to the essentials that would most appeal to educated middle class White people like themselves.

That meant discarding inconvenient concepts and practices such as reincarnation, myths & deities, miracles & supernatural powers, ritual & chanting, merit-making, the more esoteric states of concentration practice, karma, renunciation, non-duality, and non-self. That’s how American Buddhism became divorced from Asian, and enabled a diminished “secular meditation” with all the uncomfortable bits filed off.

That decision made some sense, as several parts of devotional Buddhism are at odds with our Christian heritage or directly contradict universally-accepted scientific laws. But the stylized meditation techniques that have gained such popularity in the American mainstream have also lost sight of the actual purpose and point of meditation practice.

The most facile example of the trendy “Mindfulness Movement” is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. Obviously, learning tools to cope with stress is a Good Thing, but I can’t help but be saddened by how much got lost when the goal of meditation was reduced from the “eradication of the root cause of human suffering” to “just help me get through my day”.

It’s as if everyone in Asia had been inoculated with a one-time permanent cure for diabetes, but we Americans have shortsightedly continued carrying blood testing kits and syringes filled with insulin, only treating the symptoms of the chronic disease as they arise day after day.

Another painful example is how big business and professional sports have co-opted meditation as a cheap tactic for “guaranteed career success” and “enhancing peak performance”, promoted by well-heeled management consultants and wealthy athletes like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Derek Jeter.

I’ve participated in several sittings and talks run by prominent performance-oriented meditation gurus, and always felt deeply uncomfortable. Because at their core, these programs and prescriptions are diametrically opposed to what Buddhist meditation is all about. Whether it’s vanquishing your business or athletic rivals, these techniques are designed to promote selfish desires and goals which reinforce the ego.

In contrast, Buddhism guides the meditator toward the understanding that no worldly attainments can ever provide deep or lasting satisfaction; toward relinquishment of personal desires; and toward freedom from our unexamined enslavement to the insecure demands of the ego.

All too frequently, I hear proclamations from people publicly known as meditation experts that completely set my nerves on edge. In their own literal words, meditation can: lower stress levels, help you drop all distractions that may interfere with winning, enhance peak performance, aid in the reduction of how chronic pain affects the mind, help you cope with the aftermath of a disappointing performance, strengthen your drive, boost your belief in yourself and your ability, build your athletic identity, improve sleep patterns, speed recovery time, enhance endurance, aid in proper fueling, and help control oxygen.

I’m sorry George, but the Buddha had a far more important and fulfilling goal than “speeding recovery time”, “building his athletic identity”, and “controlling oxygen”.

Through tireless self-aggrandizement and promotion, many of these business and sports meditation gurus have grown rich and famous as a result of dispensing their advice. I’m going to leave that contradiction aside however, as it’s too obviously hypocritical to waste time discussing.

Attending these completely secularized meditative self-gratification programs is kind of like taking classes at a prestigious cooking school, but disregarding everything except how to microwave a frozen burrito. It’s such a waste! Buddhism has a larger mission and so much more to offer than empty self-affirmations and greed-reinforcing self-talk.

I’ve also observed that when teachers introduce meditation practices to naïve Westerners, most of the reported short-term benefit is due to peer pressure or the placebo effect. For the practitioners I’ve known, their initial months of meditation were uncomfortable and challenging before things settled down and the practice started producing its slow, gentle results. But Americans have been sold a persistent fable that meditation will produce immediate and noticeable relief; so that’s what people report, after just a few minutes alone with their unruly internal dialogue.

For all these reasons, the majority of Americans think of—and relate to—meditation as if it were just another self-improvement project: a way to be a far more powerful, unshakeable, invincible you.

While there are undeniable positive side effects of long-term meditation practice, it’s not about building up, improving, or perfecting the self; it’s about letting go of the self, and liberation from the tyranny of the ego.

And the ultimate goal of Buddhist meditation—which the Western mindfulness movement has completely forgotten—is the freedom and well-being that results from the eradication of suffering in our lives: something many self-proclaimed “meditation experts” have a vested interest in perpetuating and profiting from.

I recently completed my sixth “sandwich” retreat at CIMC: a nine-day non-residential meditation retreat that starts with all-day sittings on Saturday and Sunday, then evening sittings all week long, followed by another weekend of all-day sittings. All told, it adds up to about 50 hours on the cushion and a lot of sleep deprivation.

First let me relate some of the odd circumstances of the retreat.

Four days before the retreat, I had just begun my regular Tuesday night sitting at CIMC when we felt an earthquake shake the building. That was interesting.

Then, two days into the retreat we began feeling the effects of Hurricane Sandy, which caused them to cancel Monday night’s sitting. It also canceled my planned trip to Foxwoods, and delayed the delivery of my new laptop for two days.

And then on Saturday, one of the cooks came in early that morning and fired up the stove and filled the building with natural gas, such that once everyone arrived at the center, the teachers chose to evacuate the building until the gas company gave an “all clear”.

So it was an interesting week. Combine all that with the usual sleep deprivation, a birthday, a doctor’s appointment, and my mother’s shoulder replacement surgery, it was pretty stressful.

Another interesting bit happened when I was outside, doing walking meditation in a local park. I looked down and saw the shackle of a padlock on the ground. Someone had used bolt cutters and cut the lock. When I’m on retreat, I’m always on the lookout for stuff like this; the obvious symbolism being unlocking one’s heart. It was only later that I read the word stamped onto the shackle: HARDENED… A very nice addition to the symbolism.

I really wasn’t expecting any major revelations. After all, this was my sixth sandwich retreat, and I knew what to expect: a whole lot of sitting and walking. But I actually came back with four major insights, which I’ll share in abbreviated fashion here.

One thing I’d been kicking around before the retreat was how much of our suffering is purely a fabrication of the mind. For the most part, when we’re suffering it’s because of an image of what things were like in the past, or how they are going to be in the future. If you stop and look at your real, present-moment experience, we’re almost never actually experiencing painful circumstances. It’s all just our minds telling us how bad things will be once we get to some future time. It’s like being afraid of shadows on a scrim.

Another item. I have a longstanding story that I’m different because when I meditate, no big emotional traumas come up. But this time I suddenly remembered something that does come up for me that doesn’t bother most people: physical discomfort! But how to work with it? It didn’t seem to me like there was much wisdom to be gained in just watching your own pain…

Well, I asked Michael in my teacher interview, and he had some great observations. He agreed that relaxing into the pain was a pretty useless pursuit. He also said that one could watch one’s relationship to pain, but that too wasn’t all that fruitful.

Instead, he recommended whole-body awareness as something that he’d found useful from his Chan practice, and that was later reinforced when I talked to Narayan. So I guess I’ll be trying a little of that, although I find it a challenge not to narrow the field of attention down to a specific part of the body.

Another thing that came up during a group discussion with Michael was the idea of continuity of mindfulness. He was of the opinion that it would be freeing and effortless, while I challenged him by asserting that it would be tiring and require continuous mental effort not to get distracted.

After talking it over with Narayan, I think the difference is between concentration practice and wisdom practice. In concentration practice (samatha), one must exert effort to continually bring the mind back from any distractions to the object of concentration (usually the breath); whereas wisdom practice (vipassana) is more relaxed, focusing on accepting present-moment life as it is. The only mental effort involved in wisdom practice is in staying in the present moment by steering clear of thoughts of the past or projections and planning about the future.

So in that sense, I’ve been spending a lot of time on concentration practice, and not so much on wisdom.

One final revelation actually related to the “homework” that usually accompanies the sandwich retreat. This year we were to observe when resistance arose and how we could detect it. I was pretty interested, because I tend to be a resistant type, and that resistance manifests as frustration, which then can sometimes escalate into anger.

For me, it was pretty easy to spot, because in most instances I started swearing to myself. Once was when I learned that a package I was expecting (my new laptop) hadn’t been delivered; another was when a magnetic card reader failed to read my card on the first swipe.

The connection between the triggers I observed was immediately apparent to me. In each case, I had an expectation that something would transpire in a way that was beneficial to me, and that expectation hadn’t been met. Even though they were minor things, they were upsetting because they impacted me. In other words, it was clear that the problem was that I was living from a place where my ego was dominant.

From there, I started playing with the idea of living from a place where ego wasn’t so central, relaxing my grip on my “self” (or its grip on me). I found that really interesting. Narayan cautioned me not to take the ego as a concrete thing; by viewing it as just a passing sense of self, I could avoid setting up a futile battle royal between my “self” and myself. Good advice.

So although I didn’t expect it, I came away with a number of things to work with, so it was a surprisingly productive retreat.

I think I'd really be attracted to myself, if I wasn't so self-absorbed...