Random Dharma

wow, fascinating

cold-withstanding guy who uses breathing techniques. Tonglen?

Interesting video - he undergoes an experiment where he is injected with an endotoxin that should create rapid immune response, but supposedly he triggered his body to pump out adrenaline and suppress that from happening

Thanks for the video, it was pretty cool. (haha! no pun intended)

spiritualawakeningforgeeks.com/how-to-cultivate-insight/

Spiritual Awakening for Geeks - How to Cultivate Insight

By Jacob Gotwals, July 11, 2015 —0 Comments

(Part of a series on How to Awaken.)

The intellect gives us the power to think, to reason, and to make sense of life. As we grow, our developing intellect gives us an increasingly sophisticated understanding of ourselves and reality. However, we pay a price for this power: we become increasingly identified with conceptual constructs, and our experience of life becomes increasingly filtered through conceptual understanding. The intellect makes up a story that explains life, then we lose track of life and focus all our attention on the story. Insight reminds us that the story is just a story.

Insight is the transformation of consciousness that results from transcending and including conceptual understanding. We transcend it in that we free ourselves (and our experience of life) from unconscious embeddedness in conceptual constructs, and we include it in that after insight, all the power of conceptual understanding remains available to us. With insight, we don’t lose the intellect—we shift our relationship to it.

Can Insight Be Understood?

I’ve heard it said that insight can’t be understood. It might be more accurate to say that understanding insight isn’t sufficient for attaining it. Understanding insight probably isn’t even necessary; some would say it’s actually counterproductive. That’s because insight is a shift in one’s identity and one’s relationship to the intellect; it’s not just a shift in conceptual understanding. Insight is distinct from philosophy.

That being said, I’ve found that having an understanding of insight has been helpful to me for cultivating insight. If you want to get somewhere, it helps to understand where you’re going. I’ve also found descriptions of insight helpful as a measure of insight; as I gained deeper insight, descriptions of insight that had previously seemed paradoxical started to make sense. However, be aware that you can study insight forever and never actually achieve insight—so, if you want to achieve it, plan to spend at least as much time on spiritual practice as you do on spiritual study.

Insight Can Be Disturbing

Cultivating insight is inevitably disturbing because insight removes us from the familiar conceptual matrix that we developed in, leaving us in a conceptual free fall in which nothing is certain. Insight practices have the potential to be psychologically destabilizing, especially for people with a fragile personality or a weak grasp on reality. The aim of insight practice is not to weaken your ability to cope with life or to make you lose touch with reality; if any of that seems to be happening, use your judgment about how to proceed, and consider seeking guidance from someone whose advice you trust. It may be that at this time, your awakening would be best served by cultivating vitality, mindfulness, and compassion (rather than insight)—or, it may be that you simply need to take a break and regain your balance before proceeding. For some, insight practice causes problems; for others, it doesn’t. The more mindful and psychologically healthy you are when doing insight practices, the safer and more effective they will be.

In my own insight practices, I’ve experienced awe, joy, and exhilaration, as well as many experiences that have been less pleasant: temporary states of fear, nausea, confusion, disorientation, and depersonalization. I’ve also had a number of very bizarre dreams that seem related to insight practice.

Cultivating Insight

I believe insight is best approached in two stages. In the first stage, we pick some low-hanging fruit by freeing ourselves from confinement within the frame of reference formed by two especially-pernicious concepts: self and reality. (A frame of reference or framework is a conceptual model that allows you to make sense of subjective experience.) In the second stage, we tackle the larger project of disembedding ourselves from all frames of reference.

Disembedding Yourself from the Subject-Object Framework

We’re used to thinking of subjective experience as an insignificant intermediary that lies between what’s really important: ourselves (“in here”) and reality (“out there”). Insight reveals a different way of experiencing life in which our relationship to self and reality shifts and subjective experience assumes a much more prominent role.

Look around you and notice what you experience. Notice the quality of certainty that comes with that experience—you feel like you know what you’re experiencing. That quality of certainty isn’t actually inherent in the world; it’s a byproduct of how your intellect makes sense of your experience. The world isn’t nearly as “solid” as it seems to be. You can discover this for yourself—if you’re brave enough to look. Your own current subjective experience is where you need to look; it’s a weak spot in the intellect’s armor.

Taking advantage of this weak spot requires the ability to rest your attention on your current subjective experience—that’s why some level of mindfulness is a prerequisite for insight. After you’ve developed enough mindfulness, use practices like the ones below to start investigating the relationship between self, reality, and subjective experience. (You’ve developed enough mindfulness to do these practices when you can do them without getting completely lost in thought.)

Intentions for spiritual practice:
•Investigate your experience of self. Notice that your deepest sense of self is that of being an inner witnessing subject (“I”) that witnesses everything else, including your subjective experience. Search for this witnessing subject (or self) within your current field of subjective experience. Keep looking until you know you won’t find it there. Each time you think you’ve found it, ask yourself whether you’ve found the self (“I”) or just something of “mine” (“my thoughts,” “my feelings,” “my sense perceptions,” and so forth).
•Investigate your experience of reality. Reality is the apparent world of shared experience; the world of phenomena that both you and I can perceive. We tend to forget about subjective experience and assume that we perceive reality directly. To correct this misperception, thoroughly investigate your experience of reality. Is it anything other than subjective experience? Look until you know that all you ever experience is subjective experience, and that your apparent experience of reality is actually a subset of your subjective experience. (Notice that this doesn’t imply that the universe is in your head, that you are alone in the universe, or anything else about the structure of reality.)
•Investigate the nature of subjective experience. Look directly at your current subjective experience and investigate its nature. Where is it? What’s it made of? What are its other characteristics? Look until you recognize how subjective experience doesn’t “fit” within reality. (Of course, experience can be correlated with brain activity and other phenomena—but notice that experience is distinct from these phenomena. Finding correlations is not the point. Investigate the nature of experience itself.)

Insight reveals that the self is a concept without a referent, reality is a hypothesis, and subjective experience is both unreal and more real than reality. It’s unreal both in the sense of not fitting within reality and in the sense of being amazing and mysterious. Think about it: all you ever have experienced and all you ever will experience—your entire life—is a phenomenon that’s both glaringly obvious and impossible to put your finger on.

In moments of insight, my experience of life is simply that of subjective experience arising, with no self to be found anywhere. My body, my emotions, and my thoughts all show up as experiences arising in subjective experience—just like my home, my friends, my memories, my plans, and my fantasies. “In here” and “out there” get flattened; it all simply becomes subjective experience.

My insight practice has led to a dramatic and welcome reduction in my overall level of anxiety. It’s not that I have no fear—I’m still afraid of plenty—but insight has reduced my fear of being worthless and my fear of not existing, because insight reveals that “I” have never existed, and there is nothing there to be bad or worthless. In moments of insight, the perception of “I” disappears and all that’s left is “my”—my body, my habits, my relationships, and so forth. This frees me to respond less reactively to life’s challenges. If a mountain lion were chasing me through the forest, would I feel afraid of being eaten? You bet! Would I feel afraid of ceasing to exist after death? Less so now than before I started doing insight practice.

Disembedding Yourself from All Frames of Reference

After you stop identifying with self, you’re likely to start identifying with the practices that freed you, the experiences you had along the way, and—especially—the frame of reference in which those practices and experiences are embedded. As that happens, your drive toward self-protection will be activated, and you will zealously start protecting and promoting your preferred frame of reference. (All spiritual practices are supported by some frame of reference—whether explicit or implicit. The point at which we take that framework to be ultimate is the point at which spiritual practice becomes religion.) The antidote to this is to disembed yourself from all frames of reference by understanding them, recognizing them, and becoming aware of how they affect your perception.

Intentions for spiritual practice:
•Learn to recognize how you make sense of life. Learn to recognize frames of reference. Recognize how they act both as lenses (focusing attention on some aspects of experience) and filters (hiding other aspects).
•Investigate your experience of making sense of life. Conceptual perception, as I define it, is the process by which your subjective experience is transformed into conceptual understanding via a frame of reference. (For instance, when you look at a tree, conceptual perception is how you know that it’s a tree.) Thinking is the process by which your frame of reference is refined and elaborated upon. Conceptual perception and thinking are ordinarily automatic, involuntary, and unconscious, but you can learn to become conscious of them. Do so, then meditate on your subjective experience of conceptual perception and thinking. Watch your conceptual understanding of life unfold before your eyes. Stop when you have a visceral understanding of how every conceptual perception that you experience depends entirely on some frame of reference.
•Stop seeking the ultimate belief system. Recognize that no frame of reference can be rationally determined to be ultimate. (If you found the ultimate frame of reference, how would you know? If the ultimacy of a frame of reference is to be determined rationally, it must be determined in relation to some frame of reference.) But, how about faith in the ultimacy of a particular belief system? As I see it, developing faith can be a positive step forward into a particular stage of human development and spiritual practice. (And, people at that stage will not find insight practices to be helpful or interesting. Never force spiritual views or practices onto others; the fact that you find them helpful doesn’t necessarily mean that others will.)
•Stop seeking the ultimate spiritual practice. Recognize that no spiritual practice can be rationally determined to be ultimate. (If you found the ultimate spiritual practice, how would you know, given that there can be no ultimate frame of reference?)
•Stop seeking the ultimate experience. Recognize no experience can be rationally determined to be ultimate. (If you were having the ultimate experience, how would you know, given that there can be no ultimate frame of reference?)
•Relax your understanding of life. You have recognized that your perception of life is defined by a hypothetical frame of reference and that no frame of reference is ultimate. This frees you to be more open to alternative ways of understanding life—ways that may differ from what you’ve been used to. You can hold divergent frameworks in mind as possible interpretations of phenomena—without having to reduce them all to a master (ultimate) frame. Consider what frames of reference you’re most familiar with. (For instance: scientific materialism? New Age theology?) Conceptual perception in terms of these frameworks is a habit, and old habits die hard. Recognize when you’re limiting yourself to familiar ways of making sense of life, and make a conscious effort to expand your horizons.

What are the signs that one is entering this phase of insight? One sign is the dropping away of zeal, defensiveness, and sanctimoniousness in relation to our preferred frames of reference. Another is humility in relation to the finality or completeness of our spiritual development. (Be suspicious of any sense of certainty that you’ve arrived at an endpoint of your spiritual development; unqualified certainty suggests embeddedness in a frame of reference.)

For me, the results of this phase of insight practice have included deepening levels of equanimity, humility, and conceptual flexibility, and an increasingly strong sense of “Uh… maybe! I don’t know!” about every possible conceptual understanding. In moments of insight, what do I know for sure? Nothing—except for the presence of this! (This being my current subjective experience.) Am I certain that what I’m doing is right and good? No. Does that mean I sit around idly all day? No—I still do plenty; I just try to recognize (and drop) any sense of righteousness about what I’m doing. Why do I do what I do? I can give justifications relative to my preferred frames of reference, but I have no ultimate justification. Ultimately, I just don’t know. It’s turtles, all the way down.

Is my mind a pure, blank slate? No—I still think a lot, and I use frames of reference all the time; I’m just more conscious of them now. In fact, playing with frameworks is one of my favorite pastimes! Case in point: writing this article—in doing so, my intention is to construct a frame of reference that efficiently creates an experience that I’m calling insight.

I’m also attempting to construct frames of reference that create experiences of vitality, mindfulness, compassion, and intuition. Does that contradict what I’m teaching about insight? No—insight is about disembedding ourselves from all frames of reference, not discarding all frames of reference. Insight is distinct from nihilism and hedonism; these are frames of reference, like any other (and they aren’t ones that appeal to me much). I still have opinions about what’s good and bad; I just try to recognize them as opinions based on my preferred frames of reference. Would it be good if you adopted my preferred frames of reference? Relative to those frameworks: maybe. But ultimately: I don’t know!

Is insight itself a good thing? Will it make you a better person and make the world a better place? Any definitive answer to these questions must depend on some frame of reference; without an ultimate frame of reference, there’s no ultimate answer to these questions. My advice to you: only start insight practice if you are willing to let go of your certainty about everything you currently understand to be true.

Resources

Disembedding Yourself from the Subject-Object Framework
•Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention by Ken McLeod (Chapter 9: Insight and Dismantling Illusion).
•Crystal Clear: Practical Advice for Mahamudra Meditators by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche.
•As It Is, Vol. 2 by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche.
•Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book by Daniel M. Ingram (Chapter 5: The Three Characteristics). (Also available online.)
•The Dark Side of Dharma and The Dark Night Project, a two-part interview with Willoughby Britton about her research project “The Difficult Stages of the Contemplative Path.”

Disembedding Yourself from All Frames of Reference
•Ken McLeod’s Heart Sutra Workshop.
•To expose yourself to alternative frames of reference, see The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena by Dean Radin; and The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives by Stanislav Grof (Part III: The Transpersonal Paradigm).

In Other Frameworks

What I’m calling insight is known as insight, vipassana, or vipasyana in Buddhism.

Sources

My approach to cultivating insight has been informed by the published work of Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod, my experiences with meditation instructor Kenneth Folk, my experiences with Buddhist teacher Lama Yeshe Gyamtso, and my experiences with the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.

The published work of Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod has informed several ideas in this article, including the concept of the world of shared experience and the idea that insight reveals a different way of experiencing life.

The published work of philosopher Ken Wilber has informed my use of the transcend and include concept.

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to meditation instructor Kenneth Folk for providing helpful feedback as I revised this article.


Copyright © 2015 Jacob Gotwals · Terms of Service · Privacy Policy[\I]

shargrol wrote: spiritualawakeningforgeeks.com/how-to-cultivate-insight/
Spiritual Awakening for Geeks - How to Cultivate Insight

By Jacob Gotwals, July 11, 2015 —0 Comments

<snip>

I joined Jacob's closed Facebook group right after he created it, but it's gotten very little action. I'll contact him and see if AN might be something he'd be interested in. He's a student of Kenneth's, I think.

Andy wrote: I'll contact him and see if AN might be something he'd be interested in.

I'm curious how his career change to counseling is going.

"This is Water" speech by David Foster Wallace. Not sure if this is already on here but WOW.

web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf

For some reason this made me feel like practice was very important and made me want to stop what I was doing and have a sit

Andy wrote:

shargrol wrote: spiritualawakeningforgeeks.com/how-to-cultivate-insight/
Spiritual Awakening for Geeks - How to Cultivate Insight

By Jacob Gotwals, July 11, 2015 —0 Comments

<snip>

I joined Jacob's closed Facebook group right after he created it, but it's gotten very little action. I'll contact him and see if AN might be something he'd be interested in. He's a student of Kenneth's, I think.

That was a great write up, thanks for sharing! I think it was another interesting take on a 'post-modern' interpretation of the path(s) and fruit(s) of contemplative practice. I am ambivalent about the ultimacy of non-ultimacy and am curious about the relationships between 'tradition' and 'modernity' and 'post-modernity' and it helps to have clearly articulated presentations of different approaches. Sounds like he would be a great fit for AN

Jake St. Onge wrote: I am ambivalent about the ultimacy of non-ultimacy and am curious about the relationships between 'tradition' and 'modernity' and 'post-modernity' and it helps to have clearly articulated presentations of different approaches.

On that topic, if you haven't read it yet, I can't recommend David McMahan's The Making of Buddhist Modernism too highly.

Thanks for the invite, Andy! Glad to be here.

every3rdthought wrote: On that topic, if you haven't read it yet, I can't recommend David McMahan's The Making of Buddhist Modernism too highly.

If I'm not mistaken, David Chapman summarizes some of that material on his blog, right? Or maybe I'm thinking of other material. Thanks for the recommendation either way!

I find it fascinating that when Buddhism is transmitted to a new society, it is received differently by different sub-cultures within that society, and it can provoke reflection in those subcultures about the nature of their society. We also happen to be living in an age where our society is in the midst of much cultural upheaval and there are many attempts to understand ourselves in new ways (and this process is stretched across centuries).

This has an impact on how Buddhism (and other contemplative traditions) are received, I think, in that alliances are formed between branches of Buddhism and various subcultures within our society (i.e., vipassana and psychotherapy/behaviorism, Zen and Existentialism the arts and music and counter-culture, etc., Dzogchen and Heidegger, and so on).

I tend to think the "Buddhism" that gets "transmitted" is actually more of a big projection of the sub-cultures within that society. It's not like the heart of Buddhism can be seen by folks who haven't done the work, so it's more like it becomes just one more angle a culture or sub-culture uses to promote it's interests.

Well, I agree and disagree. I think that the history of Buddhism shows that it takes on new forms when it travels to new cultures and I don't believe there is an 'authentic' original Buddhism that we can find outside our projections. I like that Chan is heavily influenced by Taoism. I like that IMS is heavily influenced by psychology. I agree that there are examples of what you're talking about-- for sure there are. Our society has a history of cultural-colonialism AND -appropriation and Orientalism and all the rest. But I don't think it's that simple. The insights at the core of contemplative practice, I will venture to say, aren't linguistic-cultural insights-- they are phenomenological insights about the nature of experiencing.

But for a subculture to form around contemplative practice (and, this is what happens when two or more people communicate their insights to each other) and support people to enter that practice and to integrate the fruits of that practice with their actual lives, there is a need for cultural and linguistic articulations of those insights and of that process of integration.

So how do we do that when we live in a time when our own society is going through such massive transformations? From agrarian to industrial to information based society in a few hundred years? When (without any injection of contemplative insight practice) we are collectively searching for ways of making sense of our human lives in this changing social and technological context? And then throw contemplative traditions in there.. it's gonna be messy. But I wouldn't write off all the various sub-cultural attempts to make sense of contemplative insights as mere projection.

It seems like in the rare circumstances that there really is a contemplative practice at the core of a group, what happens is the language/rituals that are used is simply that of the culture.

Maybe I'm scar-ed by 1950's beatnik zen and a lot of dharma groups I've visited, but it seems like a lot of "Buddhism" isn't informed by contemplative inisights/practice.

Baby Elephant chases birds:

shargrol wrote: It seems like in the rare circumstances that there really is a contemplative practice at the core of a group, what happens is the language/rituals that are used is simply that of the culture.

Maybe I'm scar-ed by 1950's beatnik zen and a lot of dharma groups I've visited, but it seems like a lot of "Buddhism" isn't informed by contemplative inisights/practice.

I agree that there is a lot more thinking reading and talking going on in many dharma scenes than actual practice; and I agree that therefore a lot of dharma scenes are not informed by transformative insight;
but that doesn't have anything to do with what cultural forms Buddhism takes in new societies Plenty of folks do what you're talking about with very traditional forms of Buddhism. And they did it in those very traditional Buddhist cultures! So, I disagree.

Jake St. Onge wrote: Plenty of folks do what you're talking about with very traditional forms of Buddhism. And they did it in those very traditional Buddhist cultures!

Could you say this in other words? I don't understand what "folks do what you're talking about" means in the sentence.

EDIT: and if this conversation is going on too long in "random dharma" feel free to reply in my practice log thread.

Tina wrote: Baby Elephant chases birds

I can almost hear it say in a tiny elephant voice "Let's play!"

Shargrol, I meant "plenty of folks [consider themselves Buddhist and get involved in various cultural trappings whether new agey or traditional and yet mostly just think speak and read about dharma, and have little or no transformative insight]"

EDIT: basically, I'm just saying, I don't think Westerners have a corner on the market of shallow Dharma, and I don't see any evidence that the issue of whether or not there is a core of insight in any given dharma subculture has anything much to do with the specific contents of that subculture. I am responding to your seeming assertion that attempts of a given society (or just, our society?) to understand dharma is mostly the result of projecting our (sub)cultures onto Dharma.

An example would be the projection of Romanticism onto (or, AS) 'Eastern Spirituality' in general. I don't disagree that this happens I'm just not at all sure that this is particularly a Western problem and I don't think it gets us off the hook for trying to understand our own society in meaningful terms and then translate our insight into those meaningful terms and that furthermore, I am saying, it's Ok, natural and even awesome that there are multiple subcultures in our society that are doing this (such as the psychotherapy-IMS axis, the archetypal psychology-Vajrayana axis, etc). I think these movements are potentially as valid as Chan (Taoist influenced Buddhism) or Vajrayana (Central Asian Shamanic influenced Buddhism) are.

Nice article by Byron Katie

"How I Learned to Stop Suffering"

Thanks Jake. That helps, I appreciate it. We both agree that westerners don't have a corner on the market of shallow dharma (or ritualistic Buddhism, in my words). It seems like we basically disagree about if/how insights can become manifest in a culture. I don't see how the domain of culture can overlap with the domain of insights. I actually think they are separate domains.

EDIT: Conversation moved to Shargrol's Stuff thread. Sorry for the distraction, we now return you to the Random Dharma show already in progress...