I had a beautiful experience this morning while reading in MINDFULNESS, BLISS, AND BEYOND. While Ajahn Brahm's writing is a little doctrinal, it seems technically very good ("seems" because I'm no expert here). In reading about the jhanas this time around, I realized there were a few reasons why I didn't find deep absorptive types of meditation trustworthy. One partial reason is probably the existential fear that many proponents cite, the fear of losing my sense of self. But I've found the same basic problem in politics and psychology as well. In politics, it looks like humanists who can't understand or admit the necessity of military applications. In psychology, it looks like therapists who are very sensitive but afraid or unable to face traumatization and deal in trauma recovery.
When it comes to meditation, then, it is most often seen as the difficulties involved in translating these wonderful systems of meditative actualization from the convent or monastery into everyday life for us non-celibates. It's all about insight with balls.
(I'm going to throw out some religious/sectarian language along with what I have to say, but I think you'll be able to follow my gist even if you're unfamiliar with terms like "Mahamudra". I'll include the terms in case anyone wants to run down these valuable leads.)
The Mahamudra approach does a great job of describing the interaction between tranquility and insight. This relationship runs through samatta meditation--a focused kind of meditation that involves stabilizing one's mind, which results in tranquility. When tranquility is applied to adequate analysis, insight results. Without tranquility as the basis of analysis, opinionation and sectarian ideology result. This is a very reliable, steady approach to meditation. (Mahamudra also includes descriptions of the lightning path or immediate path, as well as much much more.)
Brahm's presentation is a nice challenge or addition to my understanding of this interaction between tranquility and insight. It asks the question, "What about delight?" Brahm has called himself a "meditation junkie", and he begins his instruction in this book in mindfulness and the joys of meditating. Joy is good, right? He makes a very interesting point that Buddhist meditation centers around bliss, presenting the jhanas as the way in which bliss is stabilized. In my own terminology, I've said that the center or inertia of one's motivation eventually moves "up" to inspiration and flow. Bliss is very important here, and I'm happy to see that Brahm also puts mindfulness as the doorway into bliss and also somewhat of a balance or fulcrum for further movement.
My hesitation has concerned developing subtlety or some sort of transcendental nice feelings without being able to apply those states and motivations in everyday life. Do these various systems have the balls to make it into and through war? What about thirty years of physical labor? Seeing the pictures of monks immolating themselves in protest of the Vietnam war encourages me to answer that yes, the power is there, but I also believe we have a little more translating to do--translating the bliss into balls without losing the tranquility and insight. Who's out there?
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3 comments:
Emmy said...
Just as practicing Ramana Maharshi’s system of meditation and mahamudra meditation simultaneously could be dangerous (e.g., could cause a psychic split), do you think practicing mahamudra or theravadin Buddhist meditation while in the military could be dangerous, or at odds with their military physical and mental training?
Also just interesting to note: I was excited to go to monastery but I would have done it for the wrong reasons: escape. Looking back, I was looking for TM type meditation, just spirit. I said that I wanted to go someplace where I could be whole, but I was actively seeking to dissociate. Luckily, when I went to monastery, I found nuns fighting over goat cheese recipes. But then I had no bliss or balls. (Depression is another kind of meditation.) So now I’m seeking and trying to practice in the world and with people.
Maybe translating bliss into balls is being able to survive these disparities in practice? Survive is not the best verb because I believe there is something better for us than that.
Yeah, Emily, I think any time you multi-task rather than focus singlemindedly, you can get into ambiguity, possibly dissociation, and splitting.
With the specifics, I've run into special forces folks that have learned to over-focus in the moment without necessarily knowing how to unpack that after the military action which sometimes calls for some very difficult personal decisions and actions.
These types of disparities are exactly the type of stuff I'm curious about. Depression seems to involve an ambiguous mental state as well--it's different from just having a low-energy mental state because you can be relaxed without being depressed. The genetic stuff--chronic and major depression is linked to genetic influences--puts another spin on things.
It makes sense to me to focus on improvement wherever you start from, whatever situation you're in. So there's a movement from a homeostatic sort of survival focus to a homeodynamic progressive focus. It makes sense to me to admit all of the causative influences, from genetics and physical input to training to on-the-spot decisions.
What do you think?
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