The recent five-day retreat at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center in the state of Washington was the first retreat I taught since the book came out. It was attended by about thirty people, many of whom were new to me. A good many of the participants already had a copy of “Unlearning Meditation” and were reading it during the retreat.

At first I wasn’t sure if I would talk about the book and teach from what is in it or just teach the retreat as I would normally. I began by talking about the material in the book, elaborating on some of the earlier chapters, just I have in this blog. Then I decided that what I needed to do was fill in the Dharma teachings that were only briefly touched upon in the book. A similar thing happened during the weekend retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, which immediately followed the Cloud Mountain retreat. I will post segments of two talks given at these recent retreats following this blog entry.

I would like to say more about the area of “transformative conceptualization” as found in the book. This theory is actually quite simple, though it may seem intimidating at first encounter. It is a theory about how we conceptualize our inner experience, and is especially relevant for meditation practice. The theory goes like this: we tend to conceptualize our experience using single words to describe it and have no way to question these concepts except by developing more accurate (or honest) descriptions, which entails using phrases, sentences, metaphors, and similes.

A single-word description is a summing up of an experience that is used to link and associate a variety of intrinsically different yet superficially similar experiences. For example, if a person labels a thought about seeing a friend for dinner tomorrow as “planning,” and also uses that label for a train of thought about writing a paper for a class next week, then that person is only looking at one superficial detail (that of being about “the future”) of the thoughts and identifying them as the same on account of that detail. When looking into each of these thoughts however, one can see that the thought about seeing a friend for dinner tomorrow may also have had images of one’s friend and feelings for that friend, along with pieces of the history of the relationship; while the train of thought about writing a paper may have moments of focused attention on how to best articulate certain ideas, recollections of what one has read on the subject, an imagined dialog with the professor who will read the paper, and so on.

These more developed descriptions can then be used to question whether “planning” is a correct and useful conceptualization for these experiences. How does the single-word description affect us compared to the more detailed description?  The use of the label “planning” in the example above may make one feel like one is doing something wrong, or at the very least, unproductive, especially when these thoughts occur within a meditation sitting. The more detailed description doesn’t carry the judgment of doing something wrong within it; such a judgment would be an assessment after the fact, while with the label the judgment would be immediate in most instances. But that is not all. The single-word description usually tricks us into believing that we have a definite, correct view of the experience. It is a closed, final description. It is used to create fixed and lasting stories about one’s self and others. Such stories as “I do a lot of planning in my meditation sittings” are products of believing in these kind of labels. Once the labels have reached this stage of becoming “true narratives,” it is not so easy to unseat their authority.

This brings us to the third stage of the transformative conceptualization process: seeing into the narratives. This can only be done when, through recollection and investigation, we have arrived at an alternative narrative that is either more plausible or accurate. Thus the more detailed descriptions are needed in order to question the validity of the narratives that have been built upon the single-word descriptions. Thus seeing into narratives involves honestly looking at how these narratives got built and were given authority, while at the same time granting greater authority to one’s more detailed descriptions. This process transforms our way of conceptualizing such experiences.

The section on “transformative conceptualization” can be found on pages 95 to 104. You may also want to read the chapter on the Explorative process (161 to 172). 

Talk on views given at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies

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