Brad Warner on depression, zazen, and self

http://suicidegirlsblog.com/blog/brad-warners-hardcore-zen-meditation-depression-and-the-sense-of-self/

This is interesting. Note that it is on the 'safe for work' suicide girls site area.

I love this Mike, thanks for posting.

Brad says "What you can do to circumvent this is to learn to sort of side-step your
thoughts, so that no matter what you’re thinking it has little real
effect. This is what the daily zazen practice has helped me with."

I identify with thoughts inability to effect that which gives rise to thought, but I wonder if "side-step" is the best way to describe the ideal relationship.

Rather than simply let thoughts come and go as they please, I find the examination of thoughts (not the identification with them, just the looking at them) and the stories the thoughts tell, to a beneficial way of learning about what is going on beneath them. This is something I try to do when out in the world though, not on the cushion.

For example, heck, even writing this post, I turn my mind to concentrate on the feelings arising in the body that imply, to my thinking mind, that I have something possibly useful to add here. Holding those sensations in mind seems to incline the mind (so long as I don't try and control it or push it for an outcome) toward perceiving that very information that seems to want to come up.

Or, to go into further detail, I wrote this post, then felt that it would be best to add an example. In this case, sensations in my body, once I admitted to myself that I was feeling them, implied, " an example would be helpful". Then I focus on those sensations and kind of let go/space out, holding onto those feelings as an anchor and letting the mind search on its own for an example. And I came out with the above paragraph, and then this paragraph arose as a follow-up once the first one was written...

But I don't know, perhaps I'm just fooling myself and getting lost in content, perhaps the whole thing works better if thoughts are simply seen, side-stepped, and let go of. Is the process I outline above unnecessary? Too controlling? Too much "thinker" and not enough "thoughts without a thinker"? To me, it seems I am trying to actively chose what information I ingest and what information I filter out. But perhaps this is all delusion.

What do other people think? Do thoughts have any inherent value, or is it best to simply side-step them and admit that they are powerless, a slideshow that you can either tune into and get lost in or ignore?

I am sure there is a third option there, but I'm not quite sure how to put that third option into useful words...?

r.e. thoughts: There seems to be a number of distinct phenomena which are covered by this term. Some seem like direct perceptions; "thought" as a sense field. Seeing mathematical and other abstract patterns for example; they seem to "be" there just like a "physical" percept.

There's also a very distinctly re-presentational form of "thought", usually either a verbal or image-based representation of something else. Now here, is where "thoughts" seem to become a kind of distracting clutter. I'll notice that they are like a secondary echo which purports to be "knowledge" but which actually depends on already knowing in a more direct way first. So I'll see the dirty dishes and immediately know to clean them; then there's a verbal-imaginary thought "oh, there are dirty dishes" and at that point that verbal-imaginary thought can just veer off into so many places. I could rationalize why I should leave the dishes for later, or someone else in the household should do them, or so on and so forth.

So what I find most striking about these re-presentational thoughts is that they

A) purport to be "knowledge", like now that I've re-presented a given situation, "I" "know" "it". But in reality, there is allready a nondual direct and simple cognizance in which the situation presents itself and my whole being begins to respond naturally, since my whole being is always allready engaged in the situation. Only on the level of re-presentation is there an "I" that "knows" the "object", and only through the mediation of these re-presentations can all the distractions and rationalizations arise which block natural function.

and since re-presentation is abstraction, mapping, there is a highlighting of some features of a situation and a downplaying of others. So every act of re-presentation seems to arise based on a criteria for this selection, which implies that before my body-mind can move into re-presenting abstractions, it has to have an "agenda" of some kind in mind in order to determine what to highlight and what to downplay. An example: there is a tree. Whether my agenda is to harvest it, build a treehouse in it, take a photograph of it, or whatever will determine how I re-present it, what kind of map I make. Here I'll note that there are other forms of re-presentation, including proprioceptive mapping.

Given these considerations, it seems to me that most if not all of my re-presentational activity is basically superfluous clutter, even though I believe from my knowledge of developmental psych there are neurological and other developmental reasons for their existence. It's just at some point we see they can be seriously trimmed down, based on re-evaluating what praqmatic agendas we need and what are redundant or atavistic, so that we can spend more time in non-doing, and even re-contextualize "doing" in a sense of deeper "being". There is nothing wrong with it per-se, just that re-presentations have less capacity to carry me away into sidetracks when I remain firmly present here and now. This also automatically cuts down on their arising, since they are redundant if I can rely more on the automatic direct knowing of situations as they present themselves and my whole being natural activity of response, which is by definition (to me in my life anyway) the opposite of depression, which is where I become so cluttered by all the abstract re-presentational descriptive commentary that I become overwhelmed and paralyzed, stifled in the overflowing clutter of secondary experience. Now I'm gonna read the article

I like that, 2 forms of "thinking". I think (ha!) that's a useful distinction to make, though its only recently that I've noticed myself doing the first one. There's a way of "thinking" with reality, instead of "thinking" with thoughts, it's simple and direct, but hard to maintain (I most easily notice this during chi-kung practice, oddly enough). The mind keeps wanting to wander off into other realms, but its never as contented as when it doesn't. I don't sense anything malicious with this, just a confusion (that I hope to one day see through!)

yes, exactly. einstein said he "thought with his body', and I feel like the direct form of thinking has a very tactile quality to it, for me. It feels like another way of touching something, just like the other senses. It's a direct interface, an immediate mediation, rather then a mediated mediation if you will.

Heidegger points to a difference between re-presentation and making-present. Basically, if I imagine some other time and place without losing the context of here-and-now, I am "making-present" the there-and-then, actually touching it. Meanwhile, if my here-and-now becomes eclipsed by a there-and-then, so that there-and-then seems like the context of here-and-now rather than the reverse, that is the fallacy of the representational attitude. Then the whole dualistic proliferation of imaginary elements like a separate solid self, a world "out there", and the inauthentic modes of past, present and future all emerge and are confusion and disturbance.

Yes! Thinking with the body. I love that description. It reminds me of this from the Richard Wilhem translation of the IChing:

Image commentary (hexagram 52)
The heart thinks constantly. This
cannot be changed, but the movements of the heart-that is, a man's
thoughts-should restrict themselves to the immediate situation. All
thinking that goes beyond this only makes the heart sore.

Thought is beneficial so long as it is restricted to the immediate situation (immediate situation being what is experienced through all 6 senses, including thought). In other words, thought that that concerns itself only with what is brought up in the eye of the mind regards to the experience of the present moment. Thinking that goes beyond this only leads to suffering (and is usually pretty useless as well, in my own experience)

Your comment, Ian, reminds me that Asian-- as well as Native American-- teachings locate the 'mind' in the heart, not the head. Chris' comments about practice being all about the heart for him lately seems to indicate his own discovery of the accuracy of this.

And because I just can't stop referencing Liu Ming, lately, let me supplement the excellent I Ching quote above, with his version for Hexagram 52:

"COMMENT: Gen [Still] is about the nature of stillness and the potential for wisdom and inspired action that is inherent in stillness. The first kind of stillness, expressed in the lower three lines, is a stillness that is imposed-- self-restraint. This discipline creates an inner struggle that smolders like a volcano. It is the myth of spiritual heroism.

The second kind of stillness is one that is simply found-- self-evident. It is the stillness of non-conceptual meditation or deep trance. This sort of keeping still is the natural and effortless expression of our true nature and inspires acceptance, spontaneity and generosity. The first stillness maturing into the second is the end of dualistic struggling and the definition of refuge, liberation-- the path of wisdom."

@ Kate: I love the distinction made there, between natural stillness and imposed stillness. Tying that in with the Wilhelm translation, we get the idea that the thoughts, as movements of the heart, can be still in both these ways, but that one is to be preferred over the other. By considering the "movements of the heart" in this "simply self-evident" way we are pointed toward exactly what Chris mentions: "natural activity", stillness in movement. I am still very much in the lower trigram myself, but this is a good enough "map" as any! I like.

@ Chris: That's fascinating! I have once or twice gotten the sense of "me" coming from my heart rather than my head, and I quite liked it. But it never lasted. You say this is a permanent thing for you? That's 3rd chakra territory, and supposedly the source of the physical body. I can definitely see a connection with there with what your saying.