Doubt

I was thinking about that phase in practice where one isn't really buying in yet. Where one's reading this, reading that, experimenting with different groups or teachers or techniques. One gets curious about random stuff. Like what exactly do people mean when they use the word God/karma/self/whatever, and how does that compare to this other school of thought, and so if I might lose "my self" does that mean this or does it mean that?

It's like planning for an expedition into unknown territory. You research different kinds of gear. You might even go into gear-hound mode for a good long while and stall the trip so you can spend more time buying gear. You look at maps. You read old sea captain's accounts, you meet up with other guys who claim to have made the trip and talk a lot. You can't really know how it's going to be, so you wonder if you're prepared enough.

And in a way none of that is stalling - it's part of getting the trip underway. How long it takes depends on how courageous you're feeling about finally setting forth - trusting enough to just throw your heart into it and go for it, 120% all day every day, as if nothing else matters, no matter what happens.

Perhaps a really cheesy way of trying to express this idea, but thoughts on the stalling/getting underway game? I know some people who've really spent a good 2-5 years in the "preparing to practice" phase (not including their whole life, just since they verbally began to declare an interest in having a meditation practice) before they finally got a practice actually underway. Others seem happy to jump in right from the first twinge of interest.

And ironically your name is Tom? (Doubting Thomas...)

Hi Ona, that's a great analogy. I'd have to concur with Tom also.

In my own experience, the 'journey' has had many stretches where I feel I'm on the right road going in the right direction and things are progressing nicely. At other times, it feels as if I've somehow missed a turn and ended up off track, in a bog, with no compass (no bearing) of which direction to turn. This would be when I start looking about for help - who can I ask, what does the travel guide (books) say, where does the map say I should be, have I overstretched or not gone far enough?

I agree it can take someone years before they feel they are ready to take the journey in the first place, and I'd also say the periods of 'doubt' do not stop once on the adventure. Which is stating the obvious, I know.

Hi Ona and All,
Yes I agree - after early forays into meditation and then freaking myself out with what turned out to be pretty harmless experiences, it took 20 years of reading buddhist books (armchair warrior) and generally admiring and aspiring to those on a path but not really prepared to take a step. Its really been interesting learning what awakening is and what it isn't! I was sucked into the mystical and enigmatic comments from enlightened folks leading me to believe it was unattainable and amounted to a bunch of superpowers involving halos and love beyond description. It was a little fantasy parking space that I could go when wanting to believe there was something that I hadn't been able to discredit but yet not confident enough to take it up. Alot of that time was spent remotely/safely sizing up impressions and testing to see how they would hold under scrutiny. Doubt is a funny thing - from a worldly perspective I have made far more 'risky' decisions in life in far less time than its taken me to take up practice

I have found that in my own and friends' experiences, the early doubts (and some of the later recurring ones) come down to:

1) It might work:
in which case: I might not like how I change
(Answer: you will change. Because that's the point. And you will like it, because the "you" you are attached to now will simply not be very relevant anymore. Just like the "you" you were at age five who wanted to be a fireman and wouldn't eat peas just isn't relevant anymore when you are 30 and working in IT.)

2) It might not work:
in which case I'll feel like a failure
(Answer: it doesn't work if you don't commit 100% to practice)

3) I might do it wrong:
and then I'll end up some weird fucked up babbling idiot etc (see #1)
(Answer: many many methods are perfectly fine; many many people start as Tibetan Buddhists and then switch to Zen and later to Christianity or whatever. You can't "break yourself" the way you imagine. People who end up babbling idiots had other problems, like mental illness, that were not dealt with.)

The thing is, and this to Tom particularly and others in that boat - you keep coming back. You don't just say "eh, sounds weird, not interested" and go collect stamps instead.

Ona, how do you think of 'committing 100% to practice'? I ask because, pre-awakening, obviously we all go through periods where we do more and less practice. On the one hand, it doesn't seem like you need to commit anything like the majority of one's time to formal practice in order to keep heading down the path, but on the other, it has seemed for me that on the one hand I have 'made progress' when spending more time practicing, and on the other it seems like there might be a baseline threshold as well (I'm thinking about this at the moment because in the past I've had time to do long retreats, periods at monasteries, and two hours or so of formal practice a day whereas it looks like I may not have that anymore as things are presently shaping up...)

Obviously time is far from the only way in which one commits to practice, which is also part of my question.

In relation to your part 3, I'm not sure whether this was what you were thinking of as well as 'breaking oneself,' but there's the doubt 'I'll do a practice that leads nowhere' (maybe related to 'it won't work') and I wonder what your take is on this. I guess when DI started out he was very critical of a lot of practices that he thought were aligned with various 'mushroom cultures,' and since, that's been re-evaluated by a lot of practitioners in places like here. But at the same time there do seem to be practitioners who diligently applied themselves to one technique for a long time, without getting, for want of a better term, 'hardcore' outcomes, then found those outcomes when they moved to another (of course those earlier ones would've prepared the ground, so one could argue the evolution was meant to happen in this way...) In other words it does seem to be possible for people to do fairly dedicated practices of certain kinds for lengthy amounts of time without those outcomes and for me this has sometimes and continues to give rise to periodic doubt about particular practices.

Re: 100% commitment, Mike Ramos said on Rod's thread something I think addresses this really well:

"It's the repeated seeing which conditions insight, not the kind of doing which induces sweat and what we normally think of as effort. Effort is satisfied by just showing up, by one's intention to awaken. The kind of effort I'm talking about is leavened with a large dose of patience, unflinching honesty and interest in what's happening. We have to want to know. ...

So you [say you] cannot “meditate properly” - paying attention is proper meditation. ... You don't have to be in jhanic levels of concentration all the time to practice properly. That has its place and comes when we're ready and when we need it. No matter how tired, confused or unfocused you are, is there is a knowing of that?"

This bit in particular: "Effort is satisfied by just showing up, by one's intention to awaken." - in a sense, practice is every time we are "showing up" to what's present, to the best of our abilities, and remembering our intention, to the best of our abilities.

Regarding 3, I tend to agree with your parentheses. Dan Ingram didn't just start doing Mahasi noting out of the blue. He had decades of life experience and training in other traditions. The time had come for a shift in practice, and he took it. You cannot discount whatever one pursues and engages with and all of the meoments of ones entire life as having a profound impact on ones "progress". Why did he never do that practice before? Surely it had crossed his path, but never caught his attention. I had heard of Buddhism when I was in college, but had no interest. My husband attended a school where Bhante G was teaching regularly, and never went to a single teaching. One can only engage with what "clicks" at a given moment, what strikes a nerve, because everything has been building and developing for all the time it takes. Put 40 people in the same monastery and some will wake up and some won't. Why? Mystery. That's my take on it.

I would add that there does seem to be a contributing factor to intention in knowing and being around people who are awake (and open about it) - it hits that "my God, it's really possible" button. It may be that some people in mushroomy traditions never have that button pushed. But some wake up anyway! And some who are immersed in pragmatic dharma culture don't wake up... so what's the answer?

Most awakening traditions teach very useful techniques for seeing clearly. Many people don't apply them. A guy (Shinzen?) talked about sweeping in a Zen monastery, and thinking it was such a waste of time for ages, until it dawned on him that it was practice. Being in the sweeping, seeing clearly in the sweeping, just sweeping. Instead of sweeping while thinking about other stuff.... We often don't really hear what people are telling us until we are really ready to hear it, and then it's a big "duh!"

Tom-- there IS an irreversible change: in perception. What does not change, as far as I can see, is the spectrum of your responses to that change; so that if you're not a narcissistic abusive ashheap now, seeing the invisible connective interdependent web in which you move-- can't possibly turn you into one. Hope that helps...

Do you think that someone who could qualify for DSM-level categories - like personality disorder, autistic, schizophrenic, bi-polar etc, , that it's possible for such people to reach a degree of awakening? And if they did, I wonder if that perceptual change would have much impact on their experience and understanding of their pathologies, and behavior.

I wish I could find a now-lost document written by a guy who had crippling levels of depression and woke up. The website it was on was taken down and I never saved a copy. What I recall is he said that he did not stop suffering depression, but it became an accepted part of how he was, rather than something he felt a victim of or dragged around by.

Awakening won't (significantly) change ones biology or chemistry. But it can change the relationship to it? It would have to. That's what awakening does. That's what PRACTICE does. That ongoing process is really more important than any specific transformative experience along the way.

Just practicing lets us become more and more able to be with our quirks and infirmities, limitations and problems with less and less resentment, fear, shame, etc. and more and more embrace, acceptance and peace. One can gradually find a kind of gentle humor and tolerance, compassion, even enjoyment in the foibles, difficulties, messiness, unexpected things, etc.

The fear usually runs the other way - I remember a guy saying "I just don't want to ever turn into one of those love and peace hippie types!". A few years later we had a good laugh about it, because he certainly has been finding a lot of love and peace, but he's still got the same haircut, clothing preferences, diet, friends, family and job...

Mark Peacock wrote: Do you think that someone who could qualify for DSM-level categories - like personality disorder, autistic, schizophrenic, bi-polar etc, , that it's possible for such people to reach a degree of awakening? And if they did, I wonder if that perceptual change would have much impact on their experience and understanding of their pathologies, and behavior.

This is only an intuition, and from a person constitutionally unimpressed by the "mental health industry" as we know it-- but I'd guess it would depend a lot on the accuracy of the diagnosis, for starters; the degree of chemical disruption involved in the imbalance; and how capable a person is, of independence from the tyranny of the majority. One of the things I consistently notice is that our society is inhumane, appallingly ignorant of the basic requirements for healthy, happy, human cohabitation with the other life on the planet, and accepts an incredible level of exposure to toxics of all kinds as normal, necessary, and-- for some in-toxic-ants-- "fun." There's a tremendous Babel of voices saying, "If you are not within the norm, if things hit you harder than the current standard-- we need to find a way to numb you out. Fitting in is the ultimate value."

Walking the line between seeing reality and neither freaking out nor falling into the lemming line trudging toward the horizon... well, that's what I do while I search out the fulcrum where leverage can be applied.

My take on doubt is somewhat darker... There was something that very strongly connected me to Christianity, but before I hit puberty it was clear that what I could see of it was about socialization/authority/power, in and out groups, and adults having rather amazing fantasies. Later I connected with the words of Lao Tzu and zen stuff while a teen ager... but it was all either "be natural" (essentially unapproachable) mixed in with people chopping off their arms (pretty extreme). Then it was tibet-american awakened folks mostly in trungpa's tradition... and that was a pretty flawed community. Then it was some of the very early Aro stuff, but the seemingly required costumes and hobbies (bow/horse etc.) seemed a bit like dungeons and dragons. Then it was martial arts guys who packaged martial abilities with enlightenment, but really those are two things, not one thing. Then it was the satsang crowd that had something, but seemed to dogmatically fall short of something that looked like freedom. Then even into MTCB and KFD, which was great because things got normalized in some sense, but it was packaged with either overly zealous hair-on-fire noting or side diversions into developmental maps and claims of attainments that kept changing...

In all of this, there is some basic truth or wisdom or wise practice method(s) that seems to get lumped in with other stuff. For me, I saw all of this as tainted authority, with pretty extensive real world consequences (lies, wasted time, ruined lives). There was no way I was going to go all-in.

It really wasn't until the early stages of KFD when Jackson, Chris and Ron started popping, and also when Alan and Duncan and Alex woke up that I saw something that was clean enough to say "I'm in".

I'm convinced there is a better way to present this material without tainting it, without laying a bunch of other trips on people. And absent that kind of plain-jane understanding of meditation and subject-object insights... I'm not surprised people have doubts.

Now of course, I can almost always see where teachers and groups zigged when they should have zagged. I'm a little better of reading texts and saying "oh they're talking about omnipotentence but really that means complete awareness in the moment" etc. But it's taken me over three decades and I'm personally still not quite done "figuring it out", so to speak.

"I'm convinced there is a better way to present this material without tainting it, without laying a bunch of other trips on people. And absent that kind of plain-jane understanding of meditation and subject-object insights... I'm not surprised people have doubts."

I like what you say in your post Shargrol. But yet in the quote above, I can't help but wonder: how? We are human beings. No one can explain anything without it being wrapped in their own life experience, world view, etc. Even a "plain jane" version is also wrapped in a particular trip, or view, or personality. You can make it cave-man-stupid-simple and it will still go in one ear and out the other of a given person who isn't attuned to that approach, or isn't ready to grok that teaching, or will misinterpret it to work with their own needs.

I don't think we can extricate a process that is deeply about being human and human experience from the very stuff that makes up human experience. It will always be flawed. We can (and should) be in a process of constantly bringing that up - it's not helpful to pretend it's perfect. But we also can't actually make it perfect.

Hmm... I'm not quite convinced your critique hits home. Yes, it's possible to not resonate or misinterpret, I don't think that's avoidable. And I'm not talking about perfection. Anything claiming perfection casts a pretty huge shadow, that should be pretty obvious.

No, I haven't figured it out, but I think there is a way of talking about meditation practice that isn't fantastic or devisive. Something much cleaner.

I agree, Shargrol-- there's got to be something equivalent to "the basic physiology of metabolism" for awareness practice; something that doesn't default into either psychology or some form of religion. The extra ornament is great for those who are interested; but I'm not really among them.

It would help beginners keep focused on fundamentals first; it would make a way to translate between those who ARE deep into one of the various later elaborations and us minimalists.

Thanks everyone, I'm finding this thread very useful to untangle some of the knots I've acquired.
Although my experience and questing has not been as rich as Shargrol's, I have had the experience of doubt manifested due to following a tradition which (in my view) just didn't add up properly in the end.

• We were told a Buddha has access to all knowledge (including people's karma) and ultimately skilful in their ability to bring people onto and along the path...
• They also told us that by viewing our teacher as a Buddha we could receive the blessings of the Buddha through that person.

I can see how the latter attitude may be able to function in some mystical way, so I was OK with that. The problem arose when people would become sycophantic about their teacher and say they ARE a Buddha. So when this teacher did something UN-skilful, then everywhere one turned you would get the same answer "since the teacher is a Buddha then anything they do/say MUST be for your benefit, so maybe they are trying to teach you patience, etc." If that didn't work then the student was asked to look at their "pride".

The problem for me (and my judgemental mind full of pride), was I could see too many un-skilful actions perpetrated by too many of the people who were reported to be a Buddha, therefore I could not see an enlightened person and this then created doubts about the potential of the path.

In fact, while still clinging on to the teachings I had been given, I concluded "since Buddhas have ultimate skilful means to lead people along the path, and have full knowledge of my karma (therefore would know my reaction to the actions toward me by this teacher), my only conclusion can be they do not feel it is right for me to be in this Buddhist tradition."

Although I have a better perspective of the past, I'm still feeling a bit lost about the path but getting closer to having an idea of what the path entails.

Colin, sometimes there's truth in those things you heard. But they can also be excuses for bullshit. Having a teacher disappoint us is good for us when it helps us break out of our own fantasies or dependencies; when it helps us identify our own tendency to try to act out our daddy issues or attention seeking needs with the teacher; or it knocks down our sense of being special because we have a better teacher, and so on. These tendencies are normal. A good teacher will not play into your games and flatter you. A good student will see those lessons unfolding and grow from them. Of course there are all sorts of ways that can not work very well.

Traditions that use the guru as a sort of deity figure are complex and don't always work well for everyone, but they can. Depends on a lot of factors: I have a friend who came from a tradition where the guru was considered divine. She spent several years working in the administration of the ashram, and discovered that as divine as the guru might be, she was shit at managing money, for example. But that did not make her less of a guru. For my friend, the divine guru was not just the human being in the robes at the front of the temple, but a mystical force that lived inside each worshipper (like a spiritual form of the flesh guru). That inner guru was always there to guide her and be part of her devotions. For her, that the human guru had difficulty with finances or communicating in board meetings didn't make the divine aspect of the guru more or less special. That way of relating was considered how it should be, not a work-around.

Buddha picked his nose. True story.

Chris Marti wrote: I hope I never actually meet a Buddha. I'm afraid it would ruin all my preconceptions about them

How do you know you didn't already?