Requesting a guide

[Mad biker]

That is just great to hear...REALLY hear!
Here is something I came up with in the early 'Eighties for city sits that you might want to use. I call it 'Sound Assimilation'. It sounds like you were doing it last night in that very SOUNDY environment but making the approach quite conscious can make all the difference.

Basically it is a listening meditation. It involves opening up to all of the sounds of your meditation environment and not tryng to exclude them in any way; trains in the distance 'planes overhead general traffic sounds and on summer evenings the sounds of pneumatic drills while it is still light enough for the Road Men to tackle the roads.

We had already been doing this 'listening to the city' meditation for some weeks, but last Monday was even better as we now had the windows open for the first time for the full symphonic experience! These sounds are the objective reality of your current meditaton environment and it is good to embrace that. Silence is nice, but you only get real silence in Outer Space.

Like I said, it sounds like you were on the case last night and could more easily look forward to doing more of the same.
Is there a hearer? Or just the heard?

[Amanda44]

Yes, that is what I was doing. Sound meditation. I do it very often. Actually, I think it's where I always start all my sits. Settling in first to sounds all around me.

I don't have anything new to report this morning. Other than maybe realizing that Mara's daughters actually DO come to visit me. In the form of doubt and impatience! I saw them approaching. I threw flowers at them, and that seemed to keep them at bay. I also have a tendency to compare, as in "today's meditation isn't as good as yesterday's". Another of Mara's daughters. More flowers.

[Mad biker]

OK, looking good for this stage.

Of course you got doubt and impatience arising because you had expectations from the previous evening. But hey! That means you can now say to yourself quite genuinely: 'Look, it's not just beginners who throw the dolly out of the pram when things don't go the way they expected. Some of us long termers do it too sometimes!'

It can be really useful to just settle in to being a beginner to this approach. That can help you to see old words in a newly helpful way. I say that because you will have heard it all before, but just being aware of that can really make all the difference when it comes to 'seeing'

I now want to ask you to tell me about 'doubt' in as much or in as little detail as you can muster.

[Amanda44]

Sure. Doubt comes to me in the following thoughts:
- I don't think you're making any progress, despite what MB says. I don't feel the least bit different from when I started.
- Maybe I'm just not cut out for this stuff. Maybe I'm too stuck in my head. Maybe I'm just fooling myself. Maybe I've gotten too jaded, too full of myself...
- It'll be really embarrassing if I don't succeed at this. And maybe I won't!
- What's this folderol about liberation anyway? Is this stuff for real? (I thought the same thoughts at my ordination retreat, except substitute "ordination" for "liberation")

It's all an amazing collection of rubbish.

[Mad biker]

Yep!
Rubbish indeed, as you well know! I will just take up one item with you briefly:

Yes I suppose it could have been a bit embarassing if you did not 'get it' but believe me, that is just not going to happen. You are closing in on it in good order and will 'get it' in the next few days. I can guarantee that for you, if you just keep giving me beginners mind receptivity and a relaxed, no really relaxed, then relax a bit more! Really RELAXING into letting go. There is no catch in that last point of mine. In fact one single usage of the word 'relax' would have done fine, if there was not a risk that you might have thought I had not really, really meant it.

I am not asking for any extra sitting or extra yoga. I would be completely happy if you were even to half your sitting time and half your yoga time. That is how certain I am that you are going to 'get it' shortly. (Remember too what I said about only doing the yoga asanas you enjoy/savour for the duration of our enquiry here)

Nor am I consoling you wishful thinking rhetoric here. I can say you are going to get it quite simply because you have been progressing by a standard pattern of deletions of possibilities of what, or where the self is, and are yet maintaining a healthy circumspection combined with a non delusional honesty and what now sounds like just the right amount of the kind of catalytic frustration which flowers into the creative. It is simple and you have all the required faculties.
More from me later

[Mad biker]

Firstly just a little bit more on those limiting, doubt filled thoughts of yours from earlier on:

Are your thoughts the real you? Are thoughts your 'self'?

Do you really want to be identified as your thoughts?

Especially when they are sometimes as unhelpful as those ones were?

Can a thought really be 'your' 'self' if it just arrives unchosen and takes up unwanted residence?

Can a thought actually DO anything?

Thought was not even capable of reminding you that metta is the way forward here. You already knew that but 'thought' did not even bother to wheel that one out for you, an item that you tell students about all the time.

Can we seriously rely on thought since we don't know where it comes from, and don't know where it goes to when it goes, and we don't know when the next one will arrive!?

There is never more than one thought experienced at any given time. Thought is just so limited! It's like a one note instrument compared to the symphonic possibilities of that fuller awareness which becomes available when we leave thought aside for a bit, de-emphasise its centrality in our lives, and instead just 'be'. Just savouring the direct experience of the Universe.

Just take these six questions one by one at your ease. If you can get back by 10.30 GMT that would be nice but no pressure.

[Amanda44]

Off teaching an MBSR class this morning, then having lunch with a friend. So won't have a chance to post until much later today...

[Mad biker]

OK. That's fine.

[Mad biker]

Just another question for you, to add on to those last ones:

We have established that when 'you' hear there is only the heard. No actual hearer can be found.

In the same vein; with seeing, is there actually a seer to be found in direct experience without any imputation? Or is there instead just the seen itself?
Sure, the thought you are calling a 'self' tends to jump in quite quickly and appropriate the scenario with its mine-making tendency and make out that an imaginary 'I' or 'self' did the seeing, but how did that self manage to do the seeing? Are we now being asked to believe that a 'self' can somehow see?

Take another look at the Rubber Hand experiment from earlier on: This 'self' that 'thought' it was a rubber hand, was not 'seeing' too well in that case in broad daylight was it? Come on now! 'It' 'watched' a rubber hand being stroked yet the result was that the 'self' actually 'felt' that IT was being stroked!!! In that case, why doesn't Stevie Wonder just use his 'self' to see with?!

Would it not be more true to say that the seen, was seen by our ordinary Homo Sapian Ape as its basic skandha of vision scanned its habitat? (as nature would have us routinely do for survival purposes anyway, without any imagined self having to be on board)

[Amanda44]

Hi, I'm still here. I'm still alive. I was feeling under the weather today. Not exactly sure what it was. Maybe it was my lack of sleep catching up with me (I've been going through a period over the last month where I wake up at 5am every morning, which is about 1-2 hours too early).

I wonder if this is Mara. This is more the kind of pattern that Mara takes on for me. Rather than coming as doubt, he usually comes to me as outright blocks. Typically health issues that flatten me, or one time, I ended up with two tires stolen off my car, preventing me from engaging with a new meditation teaching job with Wildmind (that was back in 2006).

Anyway, I was feeling too brain-tired to do much of anything today. I'm feeling better now, in the evening, having rested most of the day. I hope to pick things up again tomorrow. Though again, I may not be able to post until later in the day.

[Mad biker]

Ok. Just give me your responses to all of those questions as soon as you can.

[Amanda44]

I'm noticing that a lot of the time, my mind or body are going off and doing things on their own. For example, right now I'm eating some corn chips that I really really like. And i just noticed that my hand goes into auto-feed mode. Straight into the mouth.

At other times I noticed that my thoughts are going off and thinking themselves. Happens most of the time, actually. It's surprisingly rare that I am consciously directing my thoughts, as in concentrating on solving a problem or mindfully making an effort to go against the grain of a karma-vipaka. (more on that later). The default mode of my brain during the day is mostly undirected wanderings.

You're right, I am more like that ape you brought up before. I THINK it's me behind it all, but actually more often than not, that's just not true. My body and mind are off doing their own thing. There's no actual "me" directing it a lot of the time. And my thoughts are for the most part, very removed from what's actually going on. They are mostly invented stories.

I don't know if this is getting off the subject into too heady a space, but where does Will come in? Where does my wish to gain enlightenment and the viriya I put behind it come from? I'm not bringing it up as evidence of a self. It just feels like it's of a different nature than the thoughtless vipaka-fed actions I described before.

[Mad biker]

Great observations! More from me tomorrow. Good night from the UK.

[Mad biker]

I don't know if this is getting off the subject into too heady a space, but where does Will come in? Where does my wish to gain enlightenment and the viriya I put behind it come from? I'm not bringing it up as evidence of a self. It just feels like it's of a different nature than the thoughtless vipaka-fed actions I described before.

How could this Will, your volitional tendencies, be something that exists outside of karma and karma's resultant vipakas? Phenomena arise because certain conditions are present. When a homosapien bi-ped has been using his or her six senses to orientate consistently towards enlightenment, and has found the practises rewarding and/or has just become so accustomed to repeatedly doing them for years, then it has already become that kind of an animal, to some extent, so to speak. But we are also social animals. Every other Primate in our Dharma-tribe is talking and acting in a similarly Dharma orientated way. In your case there was a whole Buddhist cultural backdrop from birth. So there is certainly some quite substantial weight of habit there!

This is why we don't need to have any worries about just blobbing out and jacking-it-all-in once we pass through the Gate! We have just got the albatross of a fictitious 'self' off our backs (slowing us down with its procrastinations, its silly beratings of 'self' and others, and that whole host of anxieties that proceed directly from a belief in a 'self') and that's why our practise really takes off. While I am on the topic I will just add something I wrote to a friend yesterday; '...the aftermath of passing through the gate is such that our secondary dart Dukkha is reduced by 95% (and since secondary dart Dukkha is the only real Dukkha that modern Westerners ever get in general day to day existence, this therefore largely means the end of suffering for all of us when we pass through.'

[Mad biker]

Or had you been thinking that our will exists somewhere outside of conditioned co-production? Something that did not naturally arise as the result of supportive karmic conditions?