Authoritative Observer Commentary

            I received several responses from the short piece on the Authoritative Observer and I want to thank you for sharing your ideas and impressions with me.

What people took as “My Observer” covered the spectrum from a pure higher self to an internal critic. Some people felt that the observer is always watching, while others felt that it comes and goes. Some found the observer comforting and useful, yet others maddening and counter-productive. And the whole notion of finding another observer to observe the one you already have was compelling for some, but an area of frustration for others.

I have posted two of the emails I received from readers on my blog. One is written by Matt Young, who is a meditation teacher in Melbourne, and is a member of a group of Australian meditation teachers who are learning to teach recollective awareness meditation at my annual retreat for teachers. The other is written by Mike Finch, who is a long-time meditator and has been a friend for the past eight years.

            My commentary is written from my own background and perspective, and is an attempt to reconstruct what I was thinking when I wrote it. With poetry and fiction often the readers’ interpretations and associations are more interesting than the author’s, which may certainly be the case here.

THE AUTHORITATIVE OBSERVER (with commentary in italics)

            As I was sitting and thinking one day, I became aware that I was sitting and thinking. This awareness of thinking was a bit sudden, but I surmised it had been there all along and I just wasn’t aware of it. As I got to know it, I began calling it, “My Observer.” He would notice everything, every little thing. I couldn’t think a thought without being immediately told that I had thought this thought. And, usually, the thought was considered a mundane thought, or a bad impulse, or a wrong notion. This observer is a great authority on thoughts—he knows the right label for each thought and whether it is wholesome or not.

            Here I am attempting to present the kind of observer that people develop from doing “mindfulness” meditation as it is practiced in the Mahasi method, where one notes each experience with prescribed labels. In that practice, one’s attention is first focused on the breath at the abdomen, which one notes as “rising, rising” and “falling, falling.” When one hears a sound, one notes “hearing, hearing,” and does the same for each sense door. With thinking, people tend to note “thinking, thinking,” or “planning, planning.” In that method people are often led to view thinking as mundane, trivial, worthless, or simply as a distraction. The situation I am portraying at the beginning of the piece is when a person who has practiced breath or body awareness suddenly becomes aware of thoughts in the same way he has learned to be aware of his breath.

            It sounds like I am familiar with this observer, but that is not the case. I really know nothing about him. He doesn’t seem to have a past, at least one with pictures, places, and people. His past is an indefinite expanse of time, without beginning, without events, and without places where he has lived or things he has done. In fact, I don’t recall he has done anything in his life other than observe the life of someone else. He seems so skilled at observing that I doubt I could be his first subject. But how could he go from life to life, person to person? No, he must be my observer. If that is so, then he may be very young indeed, maybe but a few days old, for how could he have been around longer than that without my noticing him? But he acts so mature; he knows so much about human behavior.

            This observer appears at first to be the one who occupies the position of being wholly objective. Without a past or any other attributes, he seems not to have any biases. His or Her observations also seem to be mature, to be wise beyond his/her years.

            I wish he had a face, so I could see how old he is, where he comes from, what kinds of facial expressions accompany his comments, judgments, and directives. But he just sits there in the background of my thoughts watching and noticing and announcing his observations. When I try to get to know him by listening more closely to his voice, I can conjure up a picture of a big man, a towering being who looks down on me. He never whispers, always speaking as though addressing a large audience.

            In this paragraph, the character takes a harder look at the observer, and is no longer completely under the spell of his supposed objectivity. I am suggesting that in meditation, if one is going to see into this kind of observer, one has to see him as “subjective” and thus get to know his way of speaking, his presence in the background, his way of dominating and being in control.

            We do not have intimate dialogues, my observer and me. We’ve never shared a joke or willingly let slip a confidence. He knows my faults when they happen, while I never know any of his imperfections, believing that he is flawless. The relationship is a bit one-sided. But he is the authoritative observer after all. Perhaps the only way to get to know him is to acquire the services of another observer.

            The observer lives in a safe and privileged place in one’s psyche. He or she can easily be seen as perfect, flawless, transcendent. It is natural to make a higher self out of this process of self-aware observation.

            “By acquiring the services of another observer” I am referring to perhaps the most common way people would consider working with an observer such as this one. But that will only lead to an infinite regression of one observer observing another. Instead, we can look at this observer as non-self, dynamic, and created through conditions—he has no independent existence. My observer only exists when he is observing my thoughts, emotions, and sensations; and what he is at that time is nothing more than “a way of knowing of those experiences” that comes and goes with them.  Sometimes, what arises is a moment of critical knowing, other times the knowing is more calm and non-reactive, while at other times the knowing is more discerning and sharp. I can know my experiences in so many ways, so how could I ascribe an unconditioned self to such a variety of perceptions?

Matt Young’s Comments:

“The Observer” to me is a somewhat mysterious and mercurial character. I’m not sure he’s a character at all, perhaps something more akin to a phenomenon.

I’ve assumed, somewhere along the way, or it seems to me that people speak of the observer in this way: that he’s either home or he’s not, either on or off (and also, that he might be my own personal observer, or he might be a generalized universal observer that we all share).

For me this doesn’t seem to be the case. To me it feels like the observer is always home (available might be a better word). That is, I’m always noticing my thoughts (Though I’m not sure that other people monitor their thoughts as much as I do). That might seem to suggest that “My Observer” is always functioning at some higher, superior or ideal level, but this is not the case. For me, it’s more like a spectrum of awareness or attention. Sometimes the observer is dim, sometimes very bright; and it can emit a little or a lot of light.

Another way to say this might be that our awareness of our inner world waxes and wanes. In order to know that we think at all, requires some degree of awareness, albeit, not necessarily very discerning or alert. Calling this “awareness” an observer posits the notion that awareness is someone or something else. This is a bit like positing a “breather” because our breath continues to breathe, whether or not we’re aware of it. You could do the same with a “walker” or “talker.”

One could also surmise that the observer is one part of our brain, observing another, or that there is an observing function within the brain, but that it is not always used, or required, or even beneficial.

Another analogy or model might suggest that the observer is not so much a character or function that exists, and who is sometimes home, sometimes not, but rather, that the observer has to do with the relationship between attention and a thought (or emotion etc.)

One common assumption seems to be that the observer is a neutral, objective observer, just commenting on “what is,” the naked truth, reality. The observer is “The Witness” or even “Pure Consciousness.” Take this a step further and he actually becomes God. That is getting authoritative!

I’m not sure it’s possible to be truly neutral and not convinced that this is a useful function for the observer. What seems to be useful is when the observer is curious and somewhat detached (from my usual ways of relating to internal phenomenon) examining my experience with a discerning eye. When the observer is operating like this I find myself less embedded in my thoughts, less identified with them. Interestingly, I can be aware of my thoughts, and still be embedded in them—that is, to believe them unquestioningly. In this way, they can trigger emotions and further thoughts. Sometimes however, the observer may watch thoughts as though for the first time (freshly, or from a different angle or perspective). Then it has the capacity to recognize habitual (and perhaps unhelpful) patterns of thought and to generate insight.

Perhaps then, the key ingredient here is curiosity (or interest) plus a little dose of skepticism or “out-of-the-box” thinking? When I get curious about my experience, the so-called observer (apparently) arises, and I find myself relating to my thoughts (or broader experience) in a fresh and productive way.

I guess for some people this might be construed as evidence of “The Higher Self” or “The Real or Essential Self,” or any number of the aforementioned characters. I seem to lack this tendency. I like my language to be accurate, rather than metaphoric.

In conclusion, for me at least, the observer is not something that exists anywhere except in my mind, and there, only as a concept—as a way of describing the confluence of mental attitudes and relationships that results in fresh ways of thinking, new insights, and relief from habitual patterns.

Mike Finch’s comments:

I have been meaning to comment on your “The Authoritative Observer” (AO) email before now, but I got tied up with things.

You paint an interesting and (dare I say it) cute little vignette, and particularly the wry comment in your last sentence about perhaps needing another observer to observe your usual one.

I would say it is an accurate phenomenological picture of how it seems. It certainly *seems* as if there is an AO, and most meditative traditions describe this appearance – Zen’s ‘monkey mind’, Freud’s superego even. As you suggest with the adjective ‘authoritative’, this observer is not just a simple observer, but has authority too, generally critical and telling us to do ‘better’ etc.

My response is to say that while this is certainly how it appears, it is not how it is. There are many belief-systems and spiritual theories to explain it away, and some of them seem to me actually quite good and useful.

However, the most effective way of dismantling the illusion is I think to look at it in the right way. First, by calling it an ‘illusion’ I am not saying the AO does not exist (an illusion is not something that does not exist, but something that is not what it seems). And by saying to look at it in the ‘right way’ is a bit of a Catch-22, since by the ‘right way’ I *mean* in that way which dismantles the illusion (that is what makes it ‘right’, same sense of ‘right’ as used in the Noble Eightfold path).

It is tied up with anatta, since if I actually see the experience without me the experiencer ‘having’ the experience, then the AO loses its force. It is not the AO that needs addressing, it is the sense of ‘I’, since AO feeds off a robust sense of ‘I’. But I think this approach needs subtle handling, since a robust sense of ‘I’ is often a very good thing, and painting anatta as merely meaning ‘no I’ is too simplistic.

The nearest I can think to say it in a short email, is that my viewing of things including my mental contents, self, and AO, needs to be done as subjectively *and* as objectively as possible, both at the same time if one can. This is in a sense my meditative practice these days, both on and off the cushion.

By ‘subjective as possible’ I mean just feeling my whole ‘feeling mass’ (Bradley’s wonderful phrase) as a unity. It breaks up into parts, the main part being the sense of self, and probably AO being another part, but as Bradley says, these are only distinctions *not* divisions - in other words whatever I feel or experience is always a single feeling mass, and when I see parts break off, to reincorporate them back into the single feeling mass by enlarging that sense of the feeling mass to re-include them back into the totality. This sounds somewhat intellectual as I write it, but in fact as a meditative practice I find it both simple and profound.

But I also need to be as objective as possible, and funnily enough this has a similar effect. It is almost as if the subjective-objective spectrum meets round the back, as it were, and the two ends of the spectrum are closer than you would suppose. Being as objective as possible is to include all my experience, including my thoughts and sense of ‘I’ and my being in the world, in a larger container or concept. This is what discursive thinking and rationality actually is - taking any experience which an ‘I’ has, and stepping back to see that experience and that ‘I’ and that I’s viewpoint as part of a larger whole. This is how science, certainly hard science, has progressed, stepping out beyond any individual’s view, Nagel’s famous ‘View from Nowhere’.

This of course has a limit, since there are some thoughts or experiences that I cannot step outside of. Nagel thought that reason itself was one such, and that Descartes’ cogito was another. So when I get as objective as possible, and step back from any thought or system to make *that* another thought, and then step back *again*, I find something very like Bradley’s feeling mass. But now I have approached if from the other side, if you will, by reaching the very edge of possible experience, and trying to include *that* in my experience.

I have wandered a ways from your original article, but I think how you paint AO is certainly how it appears to be for most of us. What is needed is a way to meet that always-occurring situation, and both to see through it and dissolve its power it holds over us. I have tried to paint briefly how and what I do to accomplish that.

The “un” in “unlearning meditation” is sometimes taken negatively as criticism of the various meditation practices that are currently being taught. I have had to counter that criticism with a clarification of my intention of teaching unlearning meditation: this is about seeing into the habits of mind that create obstacles and impasses. People practicing unlearning meditation have permission to continue doing the meditation practices they have been doing, though they are asked to reflect back on their experience of doing those practices and “learn” about how they have been doing them. The unlearning comes about through the learning of what has not been beneficial in their meditation practice. Seeing that their meditation practice has been dominated by forceful means, adherence to rules and techniques, or strategies to exclude or avoid certain states of mind, can lead to a questioning of those methods and to disentangling from their hold.
     How can anyone unlearn a meditation practice without becoming aware of what he has learned as that meditation practice? When people try to adopt a meditation practice without unlearning the previous practice first, all they really do is substitute one practice for another. The same habits of mind that have shown up as obstacles and impasses in the previous practice will most likely emerge in the new one. That is because these habits of mind are ingrained and inform most of an individual’s undertakings, not just meditation. At this level, unlearning meditation is using meditation as a tool to see into what sustains many of one’s unsatisfactory ways of being.
     In unlearning meditation the meditator develops positive qualities, though not in a linear, directed fashion. I have already mentioned greater awareness of, and discernment into, the existing habits of mind found in their meditation practice. But there are other equally important beneficial qualities that are touched upon and cultivated through unlearning meditation. A very noticeable quality at the beginning of this practice is that of gentleness, of kindness to one’s self and others. This quality is supported by a meditation practice that allows the meditator’s attention to go to anything that draws his attention—by surrendering control over where the attention goes in meditation, a meditator can learn to meet each experience in a softer, kinder manner. And gentleness is most effective when someone is not gentle, for by being kind to one’s harshness and aggression, the hard edge can soften and become gentler.
     When meditators have unlearned many of the strong habits of mind that have created obstacles and impasses in their meditation practice, they might find their meditation practice moving less in the direction of unlearning old meditation practices and more in the direction of being able to sit with what comes up in meditation and trusting in their own meditative process. This may sound like a minor development compared to the notions of “enlightenment” that occupy the popular imagination. But it isn’t a small thing in one’s life. For some people it is a revolution in their ways of seeing, being, or doing. It may show up as a feeling of relief, of freedom, of finding a path or it may be a connection with their inner worlds in meditation that is vital, focused, and creative. While for others it may be all of these things, things I haven’t mentioned, or none of the above. For with unlearning meditation there are no promised results—there is what you experience from having undertaken it.

          

Early Buddhist teachings that many of us have received on Vipassana retreats have been focused on Abhidharma ideas around elements. Elements can be just elements like the five aggregates, the six sense doors, six sense realms, the factors of enlightenment, and the hindrances and so on. The various lists can all be considered as types of elements. They might not necessarily all be primary elements; each of these things is traditionally taught as what you look at if you are going to accurately know your experience. They are the building blocks from which our experiences are constructed.

What this notion does, however, is that it makes people believe that these elements actually do exist—that there are such things as craving or lust or ill-will or delusion, or any of the other elements. That any of these things, in and of themselves, exist as real things, as much as something concrete or material exists.

What happens with that point of view is that when people look at their experience they can just say, “I was sitting with a few minutes of anger and then that shifted and I had some sloth and torpor and then I started to notice I was getting a little restless and then I started to find that what I was really experiencing was a state of ill-will.” And the person could feel, or you could feel—I’ve done this myself, so I’ve felt this way—that you’re really getting at it. That the true experience you’re having is ill-will. But when you recall the experience and recount it in detail it may look more like you’re thinking about person who really irritated you and that your mind is going through a variety of scenarios of how you’re going to encounter that person again and what you would like to say. Instead it’s nicely packaged into three minutes of ill-will.

The problem with any system that deals with elements like that, especially in terms of mental phenomena, is that the elements are actually no more than conceptual signs. They’re something that we use to be able to mark an experience and say, “Ah, this was ill-will or this was laziness or this was sadness.” They have none of the flavor of the experience that you’re going through. The label of ill-will has none of the flavor and passion and heat and different kinds of personalities that your actual thoughts and feelings have.

I was thinking that it was very similar to any object, like fruit. You have five oranges and you could basically say that on one level you have five of something and on another level, they’re all similar, they’re oranges. But does that say anything about the actual sweetness or sour flavor of the orange? Does that say anything about how that orange might be enjoyed? And saying, “I have eaten an orange,” does that say anything about the actual experience one had eating that orange? It just says it is an orange and puts it in a group of other oranges.

That’s what the Abhidharma essentially did regarding the wide range of human experiences, and that’s what many people who use that system fall into at some time or another. They are led to believe that the richness of an experience, the content of experience, is not what you’re supposed to be looking at. You’re only supposed to be looking at the process. But looking at elements is actually not looking at process. It’s looking at a type of abstraction of experience. It’s actually asking you to abstract what it is you’re going through and come up with another name for it, a name that usually fits within a particular system, which for Vipassana meditators is the Abhidharma.

 

During my recent visit to Australia I had the opportunity to go on a yatra, which is similar to a group-backpacking trip, except with periods of walking in silence, meditation, yoga, talks and small group sharing (visit the yatra web page for more information). In the East, the word “yatra” is used for a pilgrimage to a holy place. The holy place on this yatra was Mt. Gulaga, a mountain sacred to the aborigines, located 370 kilometers south of Sydney on the coast. I was only able to attend 4 days of the yatra, and so did not get to climb Mt. Gulaga, though I saw it the previous year when I taught a retreat at Namgyalgar (a Tibetan center near Tilba, at the base of the mountain).
             Victor von der Hyde, Ronnie Hickel, Jane Dwyer and her partner, Peter Byrne, organized the yatra. I have known Victor for six years—he organized a few retreats for me on my initial visits to Australia and has since assisted me in teaching a couple of retreats. He asked me to give the Dharma talks and offer some meditation instruction during my time on the yatra. What I would like to include in this blog is a talk I gave on the second evening, which was originally composed in the form of the narrative presented below.
           Here on this yatra, your life is empty of email, phone conversations, work to be done, the various activities of your home life—with that emptiness, other things arise, such as remembering your daily jobs, where you left your bowl and silver-ware, when to be silent and when you can talk again, being aware of where you step, and so on. Our lives have this quality of being empty of some things for a while, replaced by other things. So with our inner world in meditation—we may have periods of being empty of certain mundane and ordinary thoughts, but find ourselves aware of our bodily sensations, sounds, inner images, or inner quiet. Our experience in meditation has this dynamic quality of change, where we become empty of something that is then replaced by something else.
          During the day you are no doubt shifting from one mental state to another, with no one state remaining constant—fears, sadness, irritation and excitement, last for a bit of time and then you move on. Meditation can heighten this process of one thing arising and passing away, another thing arising, where it may move faster and be easier to see and navigate. This leads to a truth of the Buddha’s teaching: there is no single state of mind we live in all the time. That is, there is no stable, enduring self. Such statements as I am an anxious person, or I am a depressed person, are labels given to one part of our experience, but there is no way for us to be always anxious or depressed.
         Those of you who shared the other night that your challenge in life is your own mind speak for all of us.

             Yesterday I gave a rather simple talk on the development of qualities in meditation to a group of about 25 people in Goolwa, South Australia. The talk was in response to the notion that one can develop loving-kindness (metta) or compassion through doing exercises to generate those states of mind. I started off by stating a basic principle of the teaching on dependent arising: nothing arises from itself, nothing is self-created, nothing is born without conditions. I applied this to the idea of creating a mind-state of loving-kindness from trying to generate an experience of it based on having heard the concept of loving-kindness. This is what most people are taught: you identify an experience of loving-kindness based on what you have been told loving-kindness is and then expand on that experience, spreading the feeling from your heart to other parts of your body and/or out to other beings. It is then believed that you have created a state of mind known as loving-kindness. But how can you create a mental state? By imagining it and having it appear? By trying to get into that state by some technique or strategy? By connecting with that state believing that it exists in some kind of separate reality which you have to reach in order to manifest it? Each of these approaches treat loving-kindness as something created by itself or by another and not as being made up of conditions (arising out of conditions).

            Let us now take another approach to this same matter, one that involves seeing how our experience develops through causes and conditions. Friendliness (I prefer this word over loving-kindness when translating the Pali word “metta”) is then a higher development that emerges out of the cultivation of related qualities that are more readily accessible in our ordinary experience. Let’s say one of those qualities is your ability to tolerate unwanted or unpleasant thoughts and feelings. For example, you sit down to meditate and immediately remember an argument you had with someone. You start replaying what was said, but may not be sure that you want to let these thoughts go on in your meditation sitting. If you have given yourself permission to allow yourself to have thoughts in meditation, then you might feel less resistance to having thoughts, but you may still have resistance to replaying an argument while you meditate. Sitting with your resistance, tolerating it a bit more, may help you become kinder and softer to yourself. This kind of tolerance of an unwanted experience may then actually influence how you relate to the content of the argument running on in your mind, enabling you to be gentler with yourself, more willing to accept your feelings and the other person’s. The conditions are thus being developed that would allow for the emergence of friendliness and compassion.

            But many people may not recognize such qualities as friendliness and compassion when they arise out of conditions rather than being created by some intentional practice or strategy. That may be because when there is a self that creates something that it has tried to create, the thing created is easier to see—the fulfillment of a desire is as clear as day! When something comes about through conditions, it may take greater discernment, a more subtly attuned awareness to pick it out of the other conditions (elements) arising with it—it is like picking out stars at night.

 

Being Mindful is Optimal

Being Aware is Just Plain Degrading

            I came across a quote from Sylvia Boorstein on a thought-for-the-day posting: “Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn’t more complicated than that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.” I take it that certain people reading this statement find it uplifting, illuminating, and quite appealing. I find such statements problematic.

            But what is this practice of mindfulness (without all the fluff)? At its core it is the attempt to be aware of something one is instructed to be aware of. If one is instructed to be aware of eating, for example, it is the attempt to notice all the phases of eating: tasting, chewing, swallowing, etc. But not only that—one is also to be engaged in the experience of eating. That is, one’s mind should not wander from what one is doing. The practitioner is thus instructed to do two basic things with her attention: 1) Be in the experience, and 2) Notice the experience. This is prescribed for all kinds of experiences, except for thoughts, where “being in the experience” is not recommended.

            Mindfulness, as a method, cannot work with thinking. It is a doomed direction because we cannot be aware of thinking without being in it, and being in it is not being mindful. I believe you have to cultivate the capacity of awareness from within the experience of thinking; however, it can’t be something you add on to it like the notion of detaching yourself from your thoughts and being a pure observer of them, which is the general direction mindfulness teachings have adopted.

           Now, you may wonder why you can’t detach yourself from your thoughts and observe them as they are. It is because by trying to detach yourself from them, you are changing the way your thoughts are. Your thinking becomes unnatural. And you will tend to think about your thinking, believing that you are just observing it, not noticing how the observer’s thought process becomes the dominant form of thinking. This also goes against the notion of a pure witnessing awareness that can somehow be detached from thoughts—only in certain states of mind does that appear to be so, but even when that happens, there can periods of thinking in words and images. To go into those kinds of meditative states is beyond the scope of this article. It is worth noting here that I do not believe such states adequately address the question of how to become aware of thoughts in meditation—in fact they tend to lead one in the direction of trying to find a particular optimal state of mind to be in so as to become aware of thoughts. Whereas in recollective awareness meditation practice, one allows thinking to continue as it is and does not attempt to detach from it. One becomes aware of thoughts mostly after the thinking has run its course. In this way recollective awareness practice is not about creating an optimal state of awareness, but rather staying with one's thoughts at the level of awareness present at the time of thinking, and adding awareness of the whole thought process after the fact. This is a critical distinction to make regarding mindfulness and recollective awareness meditation.

            So, mindfulness is an optimal (“idealized”) form of awareness that does not lend itself to becoming aware of thoughts. I think most mindfulness teachers, in truth, would rather have it that way. It is much easier to teach a method of directed attention when you have a clear idea of what needs attention and what is to be avoided. Mindfulness can work for some people to help them develop awareness of sense impressions, but I would caution against its usefulness in developing awareness of the workings of the mind.

            Being aware of one’s thoughts through the allowing of thinking is not an optimal experience. In fact, it is rather degrading. You get dragged into the muck. Well, at least it looks and feels like muck, and you may feel more down than up while going through it, but it is your mind after all. It may well be that non-optimal (by that I mean, “non-idealized”) awareness does not look and feel like anything special—it doesn’t have such concepts as “balanced acceptance,” “non-judgment,” or “non-clinging” attached to it. But it may have a hint of curiosity, a touch of playfulness, a certain level of self-honest seriousness, and an emerging willingness to be open to what one would normally have avoided.

           I can safely say that meditation is primarily conceived and presented as a way to get out of one’s head and back in to one’s body and senses. Optimal meditative states are considered those where thoughts cease—and every meditation practice is supposed to somehow accomplish arriving at a quiet, thought-free state of mind. Thoughts are not just mere distractions—they are often seen as the cause of suffering. There are teachers who believe that nothing good can come out of thinking, and that meditation practice should never “encourage” thinking but always “let go of it.”

            These and similar statements about thinking in meditation seem so absolute and authoritative that we often forget that they are narratives about meditation. By that I am I mean that they are someone’s story about thinking in meditation. Unfortunately, it has become many people’s story, and therefore has achieved greater credence as a belief in how things really are, that an “awakened” individual sees the world with a mind where “thinking” has stopped.  This belief is so entrenched in the meditation community and culture that to question it goes against the very notion as to what meditation is and where it should lead (the narrative that it should always lead to the elimination of thoughts).

            It is not my intent to convince you through the dismantling of the narrative of “no thought in meditation is the truth” that the opposite narrative of “thought can lead to true understandings” is more valid. People can meditate with both narratives. They have done so for centuries in the Buddhist tradition. There is age-old distinction between vipassana (seeing into the nature of inner experience) and samatha (stilling the mind) practice. But unfortunately, vipassana has been invested with the narratives of samatha practice—most vipassana techniques and methods are meant to still the mind and arrive at thought-free states, which blur the distinction between these two “narrative” strands of meditation. 

All you need to do is question whether there has to be a single, over-arching narrative for meditation practice, such as all practices should lead to “thought-free” states of mind, or whether multiple narratives about meditation practice are possible, and perhaps even healthier and wiser. Such a multiplicity of narratives does exist in traditional meditation practices, but are viewed more like streams that should flow into one large river, rather than as separate strands of meditation practice and experience. For example, someone can do traditional practices on mindfulness of breathing, loving-kindness, and noting moment-by-moment experiences, knowing that they are indeed separate practices with their own narratives, but somehow see them as operating under a grander narrative of leading to awakened states of mind that are free of thought. If one were to set aside the grand narrative and just practice with the separate narratives of each of these practices, the notion of becoming “thought-free” would certainly factor less into those practices. Loving-kindness practice certainly requires thinking and feeling. A noting practice starts off with the use of language to describe momentary experiences, and mindfulness of breathing, surely the purest no-thought practice of the bunch, may at times require verbal observations, such as “in” and “out” as well as moments of remembering to return one’s attention to the breath and some kind of thought about where the breath is and what it is like. Though initially taught as techniques that utilize thinking, they are supposed to lead to that which is beyond thinking, which keeps the narrative of “no-thought” as the dominant narrative.

If the practices you are using require thinking, then thinking is useful. Why then the message that thinking is somehow wrong or bad? Isn’t it just a case of some kinds of thinking being wrong while other kinds of thinking are deemed right? In the case of traditional practices, isn’t it that thinking that pertains to noticing your breath is considered useful while thinking about what you will do after the meditation sitting is considered a distraction? For it is believed that thinking that pertains to your breath will lead to experiences of no thought, or of a pure awareness, while thinking that is about what you will do later in the day is believed not to lead to the elimination of thinking, but to more thinking. It can be safely said that thinking which eventually leads to the elimination of thought is the only kind of thinking one should engage in during meditation. And very few people seem to question that narrative. That brings us back to where this article started, except with one interesting twist: Is thinking that is meant to eliminate thought the same as thinking that is done to understand what fuels thought?

I’ve taken some time off from this blog, mostly due to teaching a two-week retreat in New Mexico earlier this month, but am now back to a regular commitment to keep it going on a weekly basis for the next month. There is quite a bit I would like to say about the kinds of narratives that seem to drive people’s meditation practices, as well as skillful ways to explore internal monologues and dialogues in meditation. In the meantime, I am posting some comments I have recently received on my book, “Unlearning Meditation.”

The first person, who wishes to remain anonymous, writes:

The tone was gentle and accessible and felt respectful of the diversity of practices and traditions, with criticism carefully framed and qualified so as not be polemical, with the result that the book has an open, expansive flavor. I was really impressed at your careful language avoiding arguments about “reality” or the “real” nature of phenomena, although I would have preferred a phrase such as “your mind as it operates” to “your mind as it is.” Also, I gained a better understanding of how one’s pre-existing practices might naturally arise in a receptive context.  It’s funny that my own early practices don’t really show up in a recognizable form much in my sits: as you know, I’m pretty quick to recognize when they do and then everything shifts. The excerpts from journals allowed me to empathize with other meditators.

Your discussion of impasses prompted me to ponder them. I realized that I tend not to label my practice as “stuck” or “at an impasse” because I have grown to see the progress of practice as naturally jerky and unpredictably flowing in an organically regulated manner (a “mysterious” ecology) that doesn’t require me to take an adversarial relationship to it, especially since multiple themes or threads seem to move through practice and typically all don’t hold up at once. I’m not sure the chapters on impasses really brought out these nuances—I’d have to reread them to decide.  I’m astonished that your book is one of the few that directly and richly addresses this subject—so many meditation manuals give rote, perhaps even harsh, formulae to deal with this stuff and don't encourage investigation of process. Similarly to impasses, I found reading what you said about hindrances a helpful opportunity to look at them in my experience: I realized that I tend not to label things hindrances, as they seem a natural occurrence. I hope your discussions of impasses and hindrances helps others reflect on their experience in practice, too.

I also hope the book prompts readers to look at how many views are implicitly embedded in ways of practice. I'm really curious regarding this because I occasionally hear an “of course” or “so what” response from folks when discussing the pervasiveness and perniciousness of unexamined views. The other chapters I most hope people take to heart are the ones on samadhi and assessing meditative states: there is a lot of fresh material here for my inquisitive, thoughtful friends.

I actually found the discussion of meditative processes more helpful than it has been in retreats.  There often is other more compelling stuff going on in retreat and considering the different processes doesn't get much traction for me, especially since you tend to give dhamma talks on them far along in the retreat enough that I'm getting disconnected from language and logic.  The descriptions seemed fuller and more elaborated, so reading these chapters now (especially the not-taking-up chapter) gave me a chance to look at them in context.  I liked the discussion of the interconnections between the processes and how they relate to transformative conceptualization and to traditional practices.

Mike Finch’s comments:

I found it well written and very innovative. I was aware of your whole tenor from knowing you before, particularly your meditative processes model, which you were working out in that period when I was attending your retreats in California and Spokane WA, but it was inspiring to read your polished version. And I don’t just mean only polished, there is much that I found new as well—for  instance, your discussion of the transitions between the processes was new to me.

There were many sentences and phrases you used which I found struck just the right note. You come across as a seasoned meditator yourself, which of course I already knew, and yet willing to think outside the box, as they say, and present something that other seasoned meditators (and newbies as well, naturally) will find groundbreaking and original.

For myself personally, though, I am interested in a slightly different area than what your book covers. Your book covers meditation—in great depth, and your starting point (logically that is, not the start of the sequence of the book) is your definition that meditation is whatever happens whenever you have the intent to meditate, and you go from there.

My interest these days is more the context of meditation. I mean by that why I meditate, or intend to, and what I want to gain from it—how  it locates in my life, if you will. There are no slick answers to those questions (or rather, there are many slick answers, but none that satisfy) but for myself I find that the inquiry is essential, even though I have no ready one-liners to summarize my inquiry. (But I do try and answer my own questions in some of my papers on my website: http://mikefinch.com.)

I think part of why I find this important, is that I can no longer fit my meditation, and certainly not my life, into any established tradition. The last sentence of your book mentioned ‘inner awakening’ and the ‘Dharma’, but I have turned aside from Buddhism, although I still find much in the Pali Canon which inspires. So my logical sequence would be to start with the question what does ‘inner awakening’ mean (if anything), rather than have it at the very end. This is what I was starting to say when we met recently how philosophy helps with this—at least the practice of rational and critical thinking, and thinking for oneself.

As a result, I have little empathy with much of your supposed audience. I have no meditation teacher, and have not had since I left Maharaji (albeit I listened to what you and others—Tan Geoff, Larry Rosenberg etc—had to say). I have no meditation instructions, except possibly my own, and those are in a constant state of revision anyway. So I felt one of your main themes—the conflict between the mind as it is, and the instructions—to be irrelevant to me. I understand that you are trying to winkle people out of a rigid adherence to their instructions (as I read you) and I was cheering you on when reading you do so, but I feel I parted company from the bulk of your audience several years ago.

Of course, in my own meditation process there are still conflicts, but they are between my mind as it is, and how I would like it to be, or how I think it should be, which you do address. But there is no conflict between my mind as it is and what teachers instruct me, since I have no teachers and am wary of most (actually all, but I am trying to appear reasonable!) of the meditation instructions I am aware of.

One very clear consequence of my inquiry into life and context, is that my own meditation practice follows, or is at least suggested by, that inquiry or context itself. This gives a different view of meditation, and allows me to approach it from a different angle than those people who are trying to realize in their meditation what Ajahn X or Roshi Y or Guru Z told them to.

Another way of saying the same thing, is that for me not only is my meditation a process, but my life is a process too, and each informs the other. The temptation to want to step out of either process to try and reach some state (nirvana, the void, even ‘inner awakening’) is strong. Your book says something like this, but I feel you are writing for people who are looking for states, and need persuading to accept a process. I need no such persuasion.

This is not a criticism in any way of your book, I am merely saying that I felt I was only on the fringe of your audience, and that my interest in meditation is in a different area from what your book covers. But having said that, there is of course a big overlap, and as I started this email by saying, I found it interesting and helpful in several respects—particularly your six meditative processes model. I am grateful to you for writing it, and grateful to you for giving me a copy.

My response to Mike’s comments:

Thank you for delineating the audience of this book. There are so few people who meditate on their own and in their own way, and to write for them would be difficult to do. About as close as I can get is offering some support for breaking away from teachers and traditions, as well as a providing theories on the meditative process that they may find useful.

You write: “My interest these days is more the context of meditation. I mean by that why I meditate, or intend to, and what I want to gain from it—how it locates in my life, if you will.” There are two parts to the context of meditation as you state it: the intentional and the actual. Meditation can be written about and discussed from those two perspectives without including “history.” My approach has been to assume that the context of meditation for many meditators is the history of their learning meditation and how that has created certain intentions and ways of assessing experiences. But if someone has already “worked through” or “unlearned” what they were taught, then history is no longer a dominant factor, and intentionality becomes a greater focus of investigation. I see this often—people looking into how their intentions for their lives enter into their meditation practice rather than meditating with someone else’s aspirations. This is far more authentic and rewarding. The actual experiences of meditation and one’s encounter with one’s mind outside of meditation begin to inform the direction of both meditation and the person’s life. If people only knew that when they are taught a meditation practice that they are taking on someone else’s stories, desires, dislikes, etc. and are moving away from seeing into their own. And, of course, this can be happening with me and my teaching—people have to unlearn what I teach them as well. At least, I hope, they get the message that this approach to meditation leads to the emergence of one’s own way of being with their experiences in meditation and outside of it.

            I get asked many questions about how to recollect one’s meditation sittings. It is, after all, the “technique” of this form of meditation. The meditation practice itself is open and highly unstructured, which may pose problems for developing awareness of one’s experiences. There is nothing one is supposed to do inside of a meditation sitting to become more aware, since trying to be present with one’s experiences, or mindful of them, creates tensions and interruptions in the natural course of one’s inner world. Whether one tries to be mindful or not, there will naturally be some awareness during the sitting. Recollection becomes possible because some degree of awareness is already present in any conscious experience. However, the level of awareness at any time is dependent on the conditions of the experience. Thus a dull, drowsy state of mind will have a considerably lower level of awareness than an excited state of mind. But we might be equally ignorant of what goes in each of these states, because we have never examined them in any detail. Recollective Awareness is a technique of recalling back to mind the various states of mind we experience in meditation and exploring them in ways we have not done before.

            Now to some of the most common questions:

1. Should I try to recollect my experiences during the meditation sitting while they are happening? Either by taking notes, speaking into a voice recorder, or by reminding myself to remember things?

Answer: Applying recollection while meditating will interrupt the course of inner experience and create additional tension. The purpose of recollecting one’s sitting afterwards is to give oneself the freedom to go with whatever one experiences, so trying to recollect during the sitting defeats this purpose. Some people are concerned about how well they remember things in meditation (and in general), and so may feel more of a need to practice some recollection during the sitting. What I suggest here is that you loosen up around the task of recollection and just wait until the sitting is over before trying to recall what happened during it. However, there will be natural and spontaneous moments of recollection during a sitting, and these will not have the kind of force or pressure that would often come about when trying to intentionally recollect something.

2. What if I can’t remember anything after a sitting?

Answer: After some states of mind, especially those that are very calm or sleeplike, you may not always be able to recall much. That is perfectly natural. Just try to recall something general, like how the state felt, or if there was light or color, or if the state had a certain texture or movement to it.

There are also times when so much has happened in a sitting that you may not know where to begin your description. As a way to begin writing down your experience, start with what you most easily remember, or what is most important to you, and once you have written that down, go on to other areas that you now can remember.

3. Why keep a journal?

Answer: Often when we write things down, we discover additional information and possibly more detail in our descriptions. When talking to a teacher about your meditation sittings, it is also helpful to have a journal handy.

One of the side-effects of keeping a journal is that you will sometimes think about what you are going to write in your journal during the meditation sitting. And that can be disruptive, leading to more thoughts around writing about an experience, or to more comments on the experience. I believe that any technique that will help us become more aware will produce similar side-effects. One thing you can do if this happens repeatedly is to stop journaling for a few sittings or to journal only one out of every three to five sittings, deciding on which sitting to journal only after it is over.

            If you have any questions about recollecting and/or journaling your meditation sittings, please feel free to email me or any of the other teachers of the Skillful Meditation Project. We would be most happy to hear from you and to assist you in any way we can.

Here is a recent talk I gave on recollecting one's experiences in meditation:

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