not knowing

I was reminded the other day of something my teacher said recently. He reminded me that we cannot know what the next moment will bring, and that that can be fun (rather than scary). I was telling someone about it and they said "yes, there's no way to know what next year will hold." I said "No, I mean the very next second. I cannot know what it will bring." *That* makes it a little more hard hitting. We discussed it a bit, and some of the things that came up: If you do allow that without resistance, it can be fun, and it also feels like a big burden put down. We are so caught up in thinking we need to plan for and control the next moment, it is like a huge responsibility we shoulder.

Thoughts?

This is the sort of wisdom that lets people finally chill out and have fun... or drives them to desparately max out their credit cards!
But more seriously, there was one point where I realized how stupid I was and it was really deeply rewarding. I said something out loud about it and my brother, looking out for my mental well being, tried to disuade me that I was stupid. But I let him know, no it was great being stupid, I'm so glad I realized it. And I know he got it. It's great having no idea what is going on.

I was reminded the other day of something my teacher said recently. He reminded me that we cannot know what the next moment will bring, and that that can be fun (rather than scary). I was telling someone about it and they said "yes, there's no way to know what next year will hold." I said "No, I mean the very next second. I cannot know what it will bring." *That* makes it a little more hard hitting. We discussed it a bit, and some of the things that came up: If you do allow that without resistance, it can be fun, and it also feels like a big burden put down. We are so caught up in thinking we need to plan for and control the next moment, it is like a huge responsibility we shoulder. Thoughts?

-ona

Fun and/or scary, yes. Even more importantly though, this "not-knowing" practice compels us to actually pay attention to what is happening in every moment without preconceptions and thought-overlays (when we do the practice fully).

This is a kind of letting go that allows the body and mind and emotion processes to sort of "re-normalize" or balance themselves. Which can seem quite chaotic and even disturbing at times. All kinds of sh!+ may come up. Worst fears. Most delectable desires. Gotta let that river flow, though, without getting "carried away" by our own preferences.

Fun and/or scary, yes. Even more importantly though, this "not-knowing" practice compels us to actually pay attention to what is happening in every moment without preconceptions and thought-overlays (when we do the practice fully).
This is a kind of letting go that allows the body and mind and emotion processes to sort of "re-normalize" or balance themselves. Which can seem quite chaotic and even disturbing at times. All kinds of sh!+ may come up. Worst fears. Most delectable desires. Gotta let that river flow, though, without getting "carried away" by our own preferences.


-mlatorra

I should be more sensitive to the scary part.

What do you mean by "re-normalize" though? Are you implying that when a person does let go they return to some natural state of balance? I guess that might be true, but it's such a rare thing it seems hard to call it "normal" in any sense. Interesting ponder. I'll have to think more on it. Tell me more of what you meant?

Not to answer for Michael, but to give my own thoughts:

I do think when one really dives into "not knowing" and tries to live in the place just before thoughts take over that it does seem at least feel like one is in a more "natural" and balanced place. And, as well, this makes room for stuff to come up that habitual thought patterns had been keeping at bay -- maybe for years or a lifetime. But, if those things are approached with the "not knowing" attitude it all works out and can produce insights that last.

There is a really great Norman Fischer talk on this that I've posted here in the past, all about the zen quote: "Not knowing is most intimate." This talk kind of changed my life because at some point (and I don't really remember the exact context) he said that such a practice could make us "get rid of that ridiculous notion that we need to somehow change and improve ourselves" -- and this really struck me hard.

I think one can take this pretty far. For example, let's say one "knows" the three characteristics through some insight and subsequent conceptual thinking about the insight. One knows the truth of no self, suffering, impermanence. However, to then approach the rest of life, the next moments, "knowing" these things somehow, can really be a handicap to continued clear seeing of things, of life, and of being intimate. Does that make sense? Not knowing really means "not knowing" -- NOW. Meaning that all the stuff you think you figured out and know is just old and dead and has no place in present experience. Which keeps insights fresh and new all the time and leaves room for more originality.

I think I understand that, Mike - that's what I love about the phrase "this moment has never been experienced before" - it reminds me that this moment is totally fresh and new, right now.

I think I understand that, Mike - that's what I love about the phrase "this moment has never been experienced before" - it reminds me that this moment is totally fresh and new, right now.

-ona

I hope I wasn't being patronizing. The whole time I was writing it I was hoping you wouldn't think I was telling you something I thought you didn't know rather than just riffing on my own thoughts sparked by the discussion.

Never! Just riffing back.

"Balance" works like this [when it REALLY works]

Riffing off of what Mike and Mike were saying...

Yeah, it definitely seems that this not knowing and the way that body, energy, mind and life unfold spontaneously whenever held in this not-knowing are the heart of practice for me. As for the re-normalization, my take is similar to yours Mike Monson We have such deep habits of not experiencing certain thoughts, feelings and sensations... or of not living some aspects of our life... that all sorts of things start to percolate up when the constraint of "knowledge" is lifted and things are allowed to flow.

To me it feels like there are different kinds of "normality" which hold sway in different phases of human development. Early on, instinctual norms drive experience and activity, and we seem to start life with a sort of authentic ignorance. Attempts to change things are directed at the environment and express desire, aversion, all those instinctual preferences, directly and without shame. But in that process we are always encountering other humans who are laying another level of "normal" on us... all the expectations of culture, society, family, school, etc. The trick here is that we often shift the emphasis from trying to control our environment from a more or less authentic animal-child-wild-human instinctive point of view, to trying to control our experience in order to be the people our caregivers and peers want us to be, by trying to re-arrange our inner landscape, controlling thoughts, feelings and perceptions in order to fit with others' expectations. (Most adults seem more or less stuck here.)

And there's a third kind of "normal", the normality of experience itself as it unfolds, phenomena arising, functioning, dissolving without leaving a trace, an effortless natural awareness experiencing each arising completely without compulsively expressing, rejecting, replacing, or even purifying any of those mental-emotional arisings. When not driven unconsciously by instinctive urges to control our environment or social conditioning urges to control and edit our own impulses, a different order can arise, which is a natural state of experiencing, which has its own intentionality and purposiveness (compassion?). A sense of relaxation with experience becomes increasingly the norm, and freedom begins to arise in the face of long-time habits of experiencing, interpreting and acting. In my experience, this freedom and relaxation don't come from manipulating experience, but rather, being intimate with it exactly as it unfolds.

A 20-month old baby boy just moved into our house (temporarily). His is walking, talking, grabbing at everthing and is all over the place. One thing he does a lot that is really striking - when he is slightly frustrated or wants something right now he will just stand up real tall and chant at the top of his lungs: "ME ME ME ME ME!!!"

Ha, that sounds familiar Mike Although Ivan tends to chant "me" when he's happy and getting what he wants, and it's pretty hilarious. He usually tries to keep things he doesn't like as far from that "me" energy as possible-- "don't like that!". Anything he dislikes is a "that" and anything he likes is either "me" or "mine". Pretty funny stuff.

On a related note, I remember a dharma talk... can't recall by whom... in which the question about children's supposed purity came up. The teacher had a great response. He acknowledged that kids are in many ways much more directly connected to what's going on in the present moment, while adults are typically absorbed in their reflections, assumptions, and strategies for controlling the environment and experience, involving many thoughts about past and future. He acknowledged that part of the point of practice is to come into contact with the present flow of experiences, but pointed out that kids generally lack a deep capacity for letting go, and get really painfully stuck in their reactions, very very embedded in present circumstances with little perspective. He said that practice could be looked at as regaining the freshness, embodiment, and emotional/instinctual/experiential authenticity of childhood, but with the learned skills of letting go and openness to what comes and goes as it comes and goes, as well as what I'd call an ontological authenticity, and fidelity to the nature of the moments of experience as well as to their content.

Chris:

Mike: Wow, you're witnessing something really cool. I think it's usually around 18 months that tiny humans first wake up to their individuality (the self/other dichotomy) in a profound and transformative way.

"ME ME ME ME ME ME!!!" is exactly what I would expect to hear.

What a strange game our development plays. We can't grow and mature without reaching certain landmarks, but some of those landmarks are maintained even when it would be better to let them go. Letting go hurts, though, and our evolutionary "programming" (for lack of a better word) conditions us to avoid pain, and with gusto.

And I'll ending the rambling there...

Jackson

Ha, that sounds familiar Mike Although Ivan tends to chant "me" when he's happy and getting what he wants, and it's pretty hilarious. He usually tries to keep things he doesn't like as far from that "me" energy as possible-- "don't like that!". Anything he dislikes is a "that" and anything he likes is either "me" or "mine". Pretty funny stuff.

-jake

Whoa, that description smacks of early Freudian thought.

As you probably already know, Freud didn't originally use Latin terms for Id, Ego, and Super Ego.

The "Id" was simply "It", and the "Ego" was simply "I".

He noticed that the mind tends to identify with what it likes, and not dis-identify with what it doens't like.

I don't like that, so it's not "me". It's just "It" over there. It's just "That" thing.

Again, this process isn't fundamentally unhelpful. It just sometimes goes overboard, and has a tendency of sticking around when it no longer serves a helpful purpose.

Fun!

I don't remember either of my kids doing anything quite like this little guy (his name is Ezra), displaying their developing MEness so vividly. It's interesting to watch my reactions to watching how Ezra's parents behave toward him -- they pretty much do everything completely opposite of how I did or would do things.

Yeah Jackson, I've noticed very clear examples of classical defenses as well in the process of ego-formation. For example: Ivan often cries when Caroline leaves, as is understandable. One day we were sitting on the porch just after she left for work and he had just finished his crying.

We sat in silence for a few minutes watching a blue jay, when he suddenly looked thoughtful, cocked his head to the side as if listening to something in the distance, and said: "Dad... I hear something... a baby, crying... he's crying for my mommy!" I said: "Well, I don't hear that, but a little while ago you were crying about your mommy, remember?" ... "Yeah, daddy."

Then a few minutes later: "Daddy, remember when that baby was crying for my mommy?" Me: "Um, I remember when you were crying for your mommy a few minutes ago..."

I reflected for a few moments and it occurred to me to wonder how much of our personality formation occurs happens under conditions in which our caregivers kind of wish we weren't feeling or perceiving what we naturally feel and perceive. For instance, I always tried to distract him or soothe him whenever Caroline would leave, and I think the message (that he received at least) was "There is something wrong with crying when your mother leaves, and you shouldn't do it, or else I wouldn't be intervening to try to get you to stop crying."

So from then on I've tried to just verbalize what I notice, i.e., "Wow, sounds like you're really upset that your mom left for work. It makes sense because when things happen that I don't like, or when things that I do like go away, I get upset too." Sometimes he chills out when I say that, and sometimes he cries for a few minutes, but either way I figure this is a better way of approaching this situation.

Hopefully it will allow him to grow up without losing his connection to "negative" emotions like grief and anger and such, which I see adults often try to encourage kids to put in the "that" category, as if things like love and affection and obedience are "normal" and "who we are" and anger, stubbornness, or sadness are anomalies that happen TO us!

That's very interesting, Jake. Thank you for sharing! I don't have kids yet, but I hope to one day.



It must be tricky to balance both responding to natural queues from children who need comforting, while also not sending a message that being upset is somehow "bad".



Perhaps what makes it "bad" is when the message being sent is, "Don't do that, because mommy/daddy doesn't like it."



If the message is, "Oh, you look so upset. Do you want to sit with mommy/daddy and (read, cuddle, etc.)?"



Somehow it seems like one of the best messages to send someone, whether overtly or covertly, is that you accept them regardless of whether they're happy or sad, noisy or quiet. Holding child while they cry with the intent to comfort them must look and feel different than holding a child just to get them to stop doing something the parent finds aversive.



Do you think that's right? I don't kow, because my experience with children is very limited. :-/



I think it's great that you thoughtful about how you interact with your kids, Jake. I'm sure it makes a huge difference in their lives!

Thanks, Jackson.

From my (adult) point of view I'm inclined to agree with you. However, in discussing this with someone who was studying Stephen Levine's very interesting work on trauma processing, I was given another perspective.

Levine's basic thesis is that wild animals rarely suffer ptsd, even though they encounter very traumatic circumstances, while humans and other domesticated animals DO seem quite prone to ptsd and other forms of distress which result from a failure to fully experience and metabolize trauma when it happens.

My acquaintance used the example of how we comfort a child who's fallen from their bike and skinned their knee, and she expressed Levine's basic idea that the natural progression is fall-and skin knee, cry it out, get over it. If I understood her paraphrase of his position and if her understanding was accurate, he was basically saying that nearly ANY intervention at the crying it out phase will basically be targeted at accelerating that phase and getting the kid to the over-it phase, and that kids will perceive this as a suppression of their distress, their process will be interrupted, and they end up with a tiny residual unprocessed trauma.

On the one hand this sounds really theoretical, but on the other, it actually isn't (from a father's perspective anyway). It's a common experience of mine and of other dads I interact with that kids who fall in front of their dads often barely register a bruise or scrape at all, or relate to it in a more easy going, wow-isn't-that-interesting breezy way, while the same kid will have a much less serious fall the next day in front of mom and run to her crying.

Now, it's pretty obvious to us that this reflects a difference in cultural norms governing how moms and dads tend to respond to these situations. I think it's fair to say that moms and dads will tend in any culture to have certain sets of situations in which they are respectively more or less prone to interfere with a child's own resolution of difficult experiences, and for various reasons from the altruistic side of the spectrum to the selfish in terms of exhaustion or exasperation

But it's interesting to consider Levine's premise, and I mention the physical accident thing as an example of a situation that I am 99.999999% convinced that the non-intervention or laid back, more cool response ("Hmm, you're okay. Carry on.") is of immediate and lasting benefit to the kids, who get a much better practical sense of how pain is different from damage, not necessarily a bad thing in either case (within reasonable limits), and frankly a normal part of exploring your bodily limits while running, climbing, and so on, and not a big deal or anything to be afraid of.

You see, in this example, I have no doubt that the more interventionist approach definitely gives the message that there is something to be afraid of in painful sensations which exacerbates the distress. It is quite evident to me that kids have such different responses in the contexts of their moms and dads because when they perceive that their moms are concerned, they become afraid in response to that, even though the mom sees the crying as related to the bonked head, at that point it's more related to the sense that mom is showing grave concern so there must be something wrong. This is an example, admittedly from my own gender/culture POV, of how kids make very logical interpretations of adult responses which may nevertheless be quite disconnected from adults' intentions.

So long story short, I'm not sure. I think that it is a very tricky thing, and over thinking it is definitely not productive. However, being sensitive and reflective and experimental IS a good thing, I think. With kids, it seems generally wise to let them sort things out for themselves as much as possible, with any interventions directed at correcting misperceptions (like, "oh yeah, you skinned your knee, actually, you didn't break it, that's two different kinds of injury.") or behaviors ("acting like that will result in loss of privilege/time out/whatever") but to leave their interpretations and feelings as-is with reflective listening and paraphrasing, just letting them know that you hear them.

"On the one hand this sounds really theoretical, but on the other, it
actually isn't (from a father's perspective anyway). It's a common
experience of mine and of other dads I interact with that kids who fall
in front of their dads often barely register a bruise or scrape at all,
or relate to it in a more easy going, wow-isn't-that-interesting breezy
way, while the same kid will have a much less serious fall the next day
in front of mom and run to her crying."

There's an interesting parallel in horse training. Many people bring horses to the trainer I've worked with for years because the horse is prone to panic or run at small distractions (trash blowing, a hose on the ground, a dog, bicycle, etc.), making it dangerous to ride. Invariably this behavior stops in just a few weeks at the trainer's. The main reason for it is that the horse naturally startles slightly at something unexpected, and the handler/rider then panics, anticipating the worst, and to the horse this confirms there is indeed something worth panicking over, and it escalates into a mess. Or the handler starts removing all possible scary items from the horse's environment and never riding him outside of very limited controlled situations like an indoor arena with total silence, which makes anything out of the ordinary become a very big deal.

Handled by someone with the self-control to "say" "yep, hose on the ground, no big deal" or "yep, trash, but we're busy right now and don't have time to pay attention to such insignificant things" and just keep going like nothing happened...the horse gains tons of confidence and stops panicking. The "terrified" horse that came in last month was "helping" us fix the fence the other day, poking the scary tractor with his nose, following us around as we dragged panels through the pasture, etc. - nothing like his untrusting, fearful behavior when he arrived.

The method even works with teenagers who get into big troubles such as pregnancies, arrests, car accidents, school expulsions and drug and alcohol problems

The method even works with teenagers who get into big troubles such as pregnancies, arrests, car accidents, school expulsions and drug and alcohol problems


-michaelmonson

I'll keep that in mind

This makes me think: people often live up (and down) to expectations; people tend to do things that get them attention from people they want attention from (sometimes good or bad makes no difference, as long as they get attention of some kind).

Now as this applies to dharma practice and teaching - when we are working with a teacher (or using a pool of colleagues on a forum as our teacher), we will often try to do what we can to please the teacher. So if we report on our practice and everyone gives us good feedback and gets excited about what we are doing, we do more of that. And if we get criticism or ignored, we wonder if we should do something different. This can be good, if we are getting wise feedback from a good teacher or pool of colleagues. It can be farcical if we are relying on a bad teacher or colleagues who are not very wise.

One solution is to be aware of our tendency to wish to please. Another is to be careful who we ask for advice.

Just some random thoughts...

This makes me think: people often live up (and down) to expectations; people tend to do things that get them attention from people they want attention from (sometimes good or bad makes no difference, as long as they get attention of some kind). Now as this applies to dharma practice and teaching - when we are working with a teacher (or using a pool of colleagues on a forum as our teacher), we will often try to do what we can to please the teacher. So if we report on our practice and everyone gives us good feedback and gets excited about what we are doing, we do more of that. And if we get criticism or ignored, we wonder if we should do something different. This can be good, if we are getting wise feedback from a good teacher or pool of colleagues. It can be farcical if we are relying on a bad teacher or colleagues who are not very wise.One solution is to be aware of our tendency to wish to please. Another is to be careful who we ask for advice.Just some random thoughts...

-ona

The "placebo effect," I think, is a big factor in spiritual communities. If a teacher and/or a bunch of peers tell someone they are doing well and making progress then that person will think they are making progress in what they are doing whether it is true or not. And, if teachers and peers like you said criticize or ignore a student even if he is doing quite well, they can become discouraged and lose momentum.

I think in communities a lot of what passes for "progress" is actually just an indication of whoever is winning the current popularity contest and has nothing to do with actual insights or attainments gained. (I bet there are social psychology studies to back this up!)

I am very skeptical of teachers and spiritual communities and gurus and such.

Duh.

My ideal would be that a person is always acting as a light unto his or her self. Always. And, perhaps, from that position seek a teacher to learn a specific technique or skill all the while striving to maintain their independence and ability to know for themselves whether or not they are getting what they need.

I think that is what the buddha would do.