"Dancing with Life" by Phillip Moffitt

"The most life-changing benefits of mindfulness meditation are the insights, which arise spontaneously the way a ripened apple falls from the tree of its own accord. Insight is what changes your life....

Each insight is a direct knowing or 'intuitive knowing' of the truth of your experience as contrasted with the conceptual perception, which comes from your usual way of thinking...

During meditation, you will most often have personal insights about your life and how it has been conditioned. Such insights help you grow and understand yourself better, leading to a fuller life. For this reason, many psychotherapists teach their clients a simple form of mindfulness practice.

Less frequent, but having far greater impact when they arise, are the insights about the nature of life itself. These are universal insights about the ever-changing and impersonal nature of your life experiences. These universal insights are what constitute the Buddha's teaching of ...dharma... which is often translated as 'truth.' For example. mindfulness meditation helps you realize the impersonal nature of difficult experiences, that they are just part of life. This is known as anatta or 'not-self,' the realization that much of what you previously identified as 'you' is actually 'neither me nor mine.' Therefore you do not take defeat or loss as personal failures, and you are much less reactive to them. You also become aware of anicca, the rapid and endlessly changing nature of all things in life. Not -self and the constancy of change are basic characteristics of life, but the truth of them, in the sense of being life altering, can only be known through direct insight, which comes from mindfulness."

Pardon the length of the quote, but Mr. Moffitt is making a carefully crafted argument about some crucial points, and I wanted to do it justice. Somehow, lately, what has captured my attention is displays of clarity on the subject of anatman-- and the associated characteristic of impermanence.

It has seemed to me that the more resolutely geeky/'pragmatic' among us have, in a fit of well-intentioned deconstruction, reduced the 'three characteristics' from life-changing insights to sensations or mind-states to be 'achieved.' Some want to achieve them momentarily as developmental milestones en route to the 'Big E'; and then there are factions who want those mind-states to be permanent, and say that taking up residence there IS 'enlightenment'-- or beyond.

I really appreciate teachers like Mr. Moffitt who bring sufficient breadth and depth of experience and study to their writing to give some perspective to these matters.

Kate, I must, of course, only respond to this as it applies to something that was on my mind, which may not be related to what's on your mind.

You quoted "Less frequent, but having far greater impact when they arise,
are the insights about the nature of life itself. These are universal
insights about the ever-changing and impersonal nature of your life
experiences"

What I was discussing with a friend this morning is how in some cases I've seen people get so oriented onto maps of specific experiences that they use those experiences (and not insights) as markers of awakening. Thus, for example, having had this kind of vibratory perception and that kind of cessation and the other kind of buzzing sound or such and such jhana, they are therefore at point X.

Although I think in many cases the states which one is experiencing tend to arise in association with the development of insights, it is the insights that are the true markers of the stages of awakening. I might go so far to say that life-changing insights are the only really relevant thing in this process, and they may arise in association with a wide variety of states, and one may be really quite inattentive to the states per se, and still have insights.

By states I mean anything from jhanic trances to perceiving sensory input as flows of vibrations to deep tranquil concentration to visions to surges of kundalini energy etc. All of these things can be tools to assist in gaining insight or mere side effects, depending on the style of ones practice, and may tend to predominate at certain stages of meditative practice, but they are not equivalent to or substitutes for the naturally arising insights of which the above author speaks.

Thoughts on that?

I think we are on the same wavelength-- and it was noticing the tendency for discussion of dharma to get snarled up in back-and-forth about technical minutiae that made Mr. Moffitt's writing so welcome. He really keeps his eye on the big picture, without omitting to make a careful, point-by-point argument for the particular insights that compose dharma as a whole.

That's probably far too general: I'm only a little way into the book, but for my money, he has nailed 'anatman' in a few phrases: you do the practice; you inevitably notice that there's a kind of impersonality to the way things go; this insight changes the way you behave in your life the next time something happens right in your face. Maybe it changes big-time; maybe it's just a little flickering doubt about your knee-jerk response-- a signal that the habitual mode is kind of starting to fall apart, and you're not gonna be able to keep it going forever.

And I do feel a little righteous irritation when people -- to my eye-- misrepresent this process as some kind of groovy triumph or altered state. Because I think this view produces more confusion and discouragement than clarity and encouragement.

...you inevitably notice that there's a kind of impersonality to the way things go; this insight changes the way you behave in your life the next time something happens right in your face. Maybe it changes big-time; maybe it's just a little flickering doubt about your knee-jerk response-- a signal that the habitual mode is kind of starting to fall apart, and you're not gonna be able to keep it going forever....


-kategowen

Oh, a friend who only started meditating some six months ago just told me just such a story! It was so cool to hear. She had gone to a large social gathering and late in the day some in-law with an old grudge and far too many beers in him walked up and started saying the most hostile and awful things to her face. She said for the first time ever in her life she felt the instinctive reaction to lash out and cuss him to kingdom come, and in an instant the realization that she didn't have to go there, and she walked away. And she didn't feel humiliated, but so happy and relieved that she didn't automatically respond in her old habitual way. She's still in awe of that small (but huge) moment days later. It's really so cool to share her joy in that experience.

Maps are okay IN CONTEXT. In the context of understanding that anyone's map of their journey is their map, their journey. Possibly helpful for someone very like themselves, starting at the same place with the hope at arriving at the same place-- except, is that set of conditions ever met outside of a very homogenous, confined institution?

Insights, understanding about how some feature of reality works-- those are more broadly useful, as long as it is recognized that insight, like orgasm, is not a matter of conceptualizing about what someone tells you, having a glib grasp of the lingo, belief, or anything else other than personal, direct experience. Likewise, there's no need to get someone else to confirm it. [You can infer what I see all the nattering on about meditation phenomena to be, by analogy...]

Bad old broad. Bad, BAD old broad.

I think I may need to write a book that brings together dharma and horse training. Sigh. So bear with me.

I co-wrote several books on horse training with the trainer who was most profoundly influential in my own riding, because her method changed my understanding. For several years I spent about 3 hours 5 days a week watching her train, studying with her, working my own horses under her supervision, and practicing.

One of the things I saw a whole lot was clients who brought horses to her to fix insurmountable training problems (horse "disobedient" to the point of creating fear in the owner). Here was the usual scenario: Owner bought young or troubled horse because it was affordable. Owner liked to be independent, wanted to train horse themselves. Owner bought lots of books and videos and spent lots of time on various forums or talking to friends to get ideas for methods for training horse. Owner then tried to apply all or parts of those methods, with limited success. Owner got scared badly and finally gave up and brought horse to trainer for help. Trainer showed owner exactly what they were missing. Owner learned to apply technique consistently and made great progress.

The fact is, they probably could have made great progress with the methods in those video tapes, too. BUT they didn't have the experience to make the judgment calls about when something was working or not. Or they watched and didn't SEE - they didn't have the powers of observation to really see the details of what the trainer in the video was doing. With a real live trainer there was someone right there to say "no! you missed the moment! do it again!". Doing it themselves, they missed the moment again and again, and then wondered why the technique didn't work and tried another method, and another and another. There is a really intense level of attention to timing and precision needed to train horses. A good majority of training methods work perfectly well IF the person doing the training is absolutely consistent, accurate and aware of when exactly to give and release cues. However *that* is very hard to learn without personal instruction. Thus the endless forums full of people with misbehaving horses asking for advice from random strangers.

The same thing could be said for someone struggling with really deep personal issues. Sure you can ask all your friends for advice at lunch each day, or write to a different advice columnist each week, but there are myriad trained professionals out there who can really guide you to the root of the problem and assist you in working it out. Why would you avoid that in favor of ten different unqualified opinions from your friends?

There are so many proven methods, qualified teachers, myriad approaches which one can commit to in depth when learning to meditate. Why rely on the random opinions of unknown people on forums to be your main source of teaching?

Then again, maybe I am the sort of person who likes focus, method, structure and clarity, and such an approach just happens to suit my personality and isn't right for everyone.

Maps are okay IN CONTEXT. In the context of understanding that anyone's map of their journey is their map, their journey. Possibly helpful for someone very like themselves, starting at the same place with the hope at arriving at the same place-- except, is that set of conditions ever met outside of a very homogenous, confined institution?
Insights, understanding about how some feature of reality works-- those are more broadly useful, as long as it is recognized that insight, like orgasm, is not a matter of conceptualizing about what someone tells you, having a glib grasp of the lingo, belief, or anything else other than personal, direct experience. Likewise, there's no need to get someone else to confirm it. [You can infer what I see all the nattering on about meditation phenomena to be, by analogy...]
Bad old broad. Bad, BAD old broad.


-kategowen

ROFL!

Let me know when you write your horse training/dharma book-- it's one I've been looking for, for the last quarter century-- because a lot of what I've learned about learning, teaching, and communication has been learned in those literal arenas. Horses are as gorgeous and on-point an example of 'BEING the body' as it's possible to find.

Interesting about the Zen ox-herding pictures, as an analogy for 'taming the mind', isn't it?

It's interesting, I was watching the stray dogs in a little town where we stopped for lunch over the weekend. They are so purposeful. No matter what they are doing - trotting along, napping, stealing a bag of garbage, they have a total focus on what they are doing, or at least appear to.

It's also interesting to look at the behavior of the horses that have "issues". These nearly always come from social dysfunction. One common reason for this the horse is not allowed a social life (by being confined alone in a stall for most of the day - some horses are more bothered by this than others, and the most bothered ones develop neurotic habits like chewing on the walls, pacing back and forth, having ongoing minor stomach ailments, etc.). The other variation is horses who are treated with a great deal of inconsistency by their handlers. This often has nothing to do with cruelty, but just a constant inconsistency that makes it impossible for the horse to guess where he stands in the herd pecking order (with the human). So he is sometimes told what to do - meaning he is lower status than the human - and he can understand that; but another time - even a moment later - he is allowed to make his own decision in the same scenario, and thus is higher ranking than the human. That also makes sense, but the back and forth makes no sense, so he becomes nervous and unsure of himself, constantly experimenting and pushing back to see where the herd order stands, and never being clear about it. Among horses themselves there is never a question - at least no question that isn't resolved after a few minutes of posturing and squealing.

My older mare (now retired) who can be a pain in the ass with humans because for years she was not handled consistently in small ways, is a completely different animal with other horses - deferential, gentle, submissive to the point it's hilarious. She loves to be friends and literally lowers her head and ears and sidles up to new horses to demonstrate her harmlessness. When a human approaches she always throws in a few habitual glares and minor threat gestures to see if she can scare them off. If the human tells her to shut the f up and put the halter on she rolls her eyes, sighs and sticks out her nose to take the halter.

Anyway, that's not so much about dharma, but I love to talk about it, clearly.

It's interesting to me when we talk about animals and the dhamma. It comes up a lot, obviously. Just today I was listening to a dhamma talk from Amaravati and the ajahn was mentioning how she had noticed the swallows that day, and how they were, as one says, just being.

At the same time, animal behavior also very often comes out of the exact same deep instinctual responses of fear and hatred, violence, aversion and rapacity, that cause such grief when they arise in us. Whether you practice 'evolutionary dharma' or not, I think anybody with a little bit of experience starts to see the unskillfulness of so many of our instinctual, reptile brain behavioral responses.

I guess there's no real contradiction there; neither the Buddha nor the ajahn in question ever said, 'Be like the animals.' So there's no reason not to take certain aspects of animal life as instructive, and certain others as things to avoid. Still, it's interesting to consider. In any case, I am grateful that my kamma was good enough that I am a man, and not a swallow.

Interesting, yes. It seems many times (not always) animals act from fear, for example, but they don't then feel guilty about it or hate themselves or wish they weren't like that. Well, perhaps they do, but their behavior seems to usually indicate a more "teflon mind", where once a moment is passed they are focused on the next thing, not dwelling on regrets, guilt, wishing they had done differently, imagining how they will behave next time that happens, etc.

To return to Kate's original subject, I think it is a real loss when people's practices become about specific meditative experiences and not about the insights and the real world impact of those insights. As I offered in the example of a friend above, and could offer many examples from my own life, the point of this practice is to transform your life, and the "fruit" of practice is that transformation. Whether it's having a deeper compassion for others, being able to face what would have previously produced anxiety or humiliation without those reactions, feeling a deep and abiding peace in your daily life that then impacts your interactions with others...

Another example is a friend who started meditating last year, and says it basically saved his marriage. Although his wife doesn't care about meditating and doesn't practice, the changes in his own levels of patience, calm, wisdom and peace have made their relationship bloom, where before it was on the brink of divorce. These are the blessings that come from developing wisdom, compassion and receiving insight. These are the things that make practice worthwhile.

I strongly believe that you will get exactly the dharma that you need. For me, at some point, the maps were exactly what I needed to be re-engaged with my practice. I was completely stuck on "where I am on the maps" and "how much progress am I making" and this is what got me to practice seriously and to go on over 70 days of retreat in less than a year. This is also what got me to make the progress that I made and have the insights that came up. Without those maps, I don't know that I'd still be interested in any of this today. It was the right dharma for me at the time.

Through this same fascination and attachment to the maps I also had to engage a lot of my own hang ups about achieving and comparing and all that and I let to let go of a lot of this. Still am. I don't know that I would have faced any of that if it didn't come and bite me in the ass as it did time and time again.

Eventually, though, I started seeing things differently and to some degree learned to let go of the maps, learned to let go of attainments and find a different mental space to practice in. It's possible that the maps are no longer the dharma I need, so I put the maps down and moved on. However, I think that to imply that the maps are all bad, always a hindrance, are unnecessary or whatever is too narrow a view.

You get exactly the dharma you need because you keep seeking until you find what it is that engages you and you probably won't be able to see anything else once you find that thing. Eventually, though, when you're ready to move on, you might find that all this absolute BS that people have been saying around you suddenly makes complete sense. But it only makes sense because you're ready for it to make sense and it won't make much sense until you are.

Am I making sense?

You are totally right, Eran. I too benefited from the map "obsession" for a time. And some people will never find it engaging and never go that route, and others will find it endlessly engaging.

Perhaps the more useful thing to say is that - particularly without good guidance - people tend to get stuck in ANY method. They can be doing a bliss-based practice, and if no one points to anything else they may well do bliss practice for forty years, and wonder why they are not enlightened. Same can happen with hardcore noting practice, ritual-heavy devotional practice, "just be, dude" practice, whatever method, tradition, school...IF there is no good teaching. That said, even with good teaching, the student has to be ready to hear. As you said, some stuff just makes zero sense until you are ready to hear it, and a good teacher can point and point and the student can not see and not see...

Had I been working alone I may well have clung to the map obsession for decades, who knows? Maybe I would have stumbled on some other idea that resonated, read some book that clicked, and shifted to a different practice at the moment when it became relevant.

The thing is, I know people who spent 10, 20, or more years in a traditional Buddhist or other tradition, seeking, sitting, sitting, going on retreat, and getting really good at sitting still for hours a day... and that's pretty much all. Because in a tradition, the tradition becomes more important than the individual sometimes. That was, I thought, part of the reason all these new dharma movements were invented, to break free of these situations where people are just spinning in some rote practice.

Perhaps it's really more about human nature, but I see that the same exact spinning in rote practice can happen in these modern movements, too. People try to reinvent the wheel...and invent another wheel.

Or not?

Thoughts?

I think "just be, dude" is gonna be my new .sig

As you say, Ona, there are shadow sides to any practice. I think that an honest practitioner will eventually have to face the shadow side of whatever it is that they are doing if they do it seriously enough. Similarly a practitioner who lacks self-honesty can find himself trapped in pretty much any sort of practice.

I try to meet people where they are because I believe that's the best way to communicate what I have to say. If they're into maps, we can talk maps. if they're into jhana, we can talk jhana. Somewhere in there I also try to show them that there is more to the practice and if they're ready to see that's great. If not, maybe they'll see it later. I can see a situation when I will raise the alarm bells, if someone is completely hung up on something but even then there are more and less effective ways of communicating that.

I'd like to believe that the practice will self-correct itself. That a practitioner cannot stay stuck on (for example) attainment for much longer than is useful for her to do so. Eventually something will come up in that kind of practice that will completely block any progress until it is faced. That something could be fear or greed or clinging or whatever but when it comes up, you have to face what's real. At that point it stops being about attainment and it is absolutely about life whether you see it or not. The other way I see this working is life smacks you upside the head and then, guess what, it's about life again.

If you're practicing honestly, you'll get to it eventually. If you're not practicing honestly, there's not much I can do for you (especially since hitting people with sticks is no longer accepted)

--
Just be, dude.

Not to continue on this tangent but I agree. Especially difficult with younger minds, IMO. Maybe sometimes you need to start over several times before it catches.

--
just be, dude.

Yeah, "experiences" and states are the low hanging fruit which can distract from liberating insight, which latter I find more often than not is rather anti-climactic, at least at on-set, but has the real lasting and deepening consequences on perception and action and feeling.

LOL

"Just be, dude."

Eran, you sound like you have a good head on your shoulders!

I guess the issue with teaching, mentoring or just offering advice always comes down to communicating. Maybe if someone gets totally stuck and quits, that's just where they need to be right now. Heck, I had a long and deep practice years ago that I walked away from. It hurt like hell, and when life crashed down on my 12 years later I took up meditation.

What often happens when people get stuck and quit is they blame the system and lash out at the people who were trying to help. I did that, too. It was only recently that I realized how much really good stuff I had learned back then, and how deep it had taken me, and all the good things that had come from that time.

Inevitably I guess we wish others wouldn't "repeat our mistakes," but everyone has to walk their own road.

If you had talked to me about my former practice just after I left it I could have told you all the reasons it was bullshit. The same happens with dharma practices, where a person feels burned by a particular tradition or teacher, and then writes it off as bullshit and moves on to a different method.

Good discussion. I appreciate you all's input and experiences. Thank you.

Not to go off on another tangent but sometimes stuck people just stop practicing. They quit. I'm conflicted all the time about how much to say to people who seem stuck in some state or phase or stage or map place.

-cmarti

Ooh, this is a tricky one. What comes to mind is the question: Is there a difference between stuck and stable?

Stuck, to me, carries a connotation of a lack of openness. Stable, on the other hand, makes me think of realization that has been integrated, and thus persists even when one approaches the whole of experience with openness. More importantly, I think, "stuck" could be dwelling in some state or another, while "stable" could describe some kind of developmental structure. Structures tend to follow the same grooves as states, but the former are capable of engaging multiple variations of the latter. The opposite is, I think, not true.

Without a significant amount of practice and life experience, it can be difficult to discern where someone else is coming from, and thus, whether or not they are speaking from stuck-ness. I think it gets easier, though, the more we practice.

Thoughts?

that's interesting. hadn't thought of it til just now...so this is on gut:

For me "stuck" implies dissatisfaction

and "stable" does not.

I would tend to think of a person as "stuck" if they were constantly expressing some kind of frustration or dissatisfaction; where if they were not (and really came across as content), then that would seem more like "stable."

ETA: Of course whether I perceive them as dissatisfied or not is going to be based on my interpretation of how they present themselves, but I don't think it's rocket science.

Thoughts?