Ideas at Play

I've been thinking about what happens "structurally" to mental phenomena once we become somewhat accustomed to mindfulness, when mindfulness becomes enough of a trained habit in our brains that the potential onslaught of phenomena is too familiar to be troubling or distracting. I put the word structurally in quotation marks because I am not as interested in the physiological correlates as I am in the "logical" structure--mind, not brain, in this note.

And, as always, I question the place of play--how important it is, how it fits in with work, relationships, meditation...etc. Hasrat Inayat Kahn said that many people feel their ideas are dead because they model their ideas (or their ideation, the process of making and using ideas) on inanimate things. People, then, who model their ideas on living things seem to adjust more easily to growth, change, novelty, and unexpected occurrences.

I am also interested in this intersection during a meditation session where, once one has calmed the mind and found a reasonably stable sense of centeredness, clarity, and precision, what then? There are all kinds of possibilities. The tranquility is not the same as mind-blowing or transcendent insight, but the moment of tranquility is certainly rife with potential. In Zen, there are plenty of warnings about makyo--illusory phenomena--and how easy it is for one to invest the feeling of novelty and interest in unimportant, even deluded, daydreaming. Certainly, if one is on the straight and narrow path to "enlightenment", all this potential is a distraction to progress. But part of what makes makyo compelling, besides the novelty, is the heightened sense of awareness-energy that it involves. Like being high, makyo is enticing because it is different and can be pleasant--although, even when it is unpleasant, it tends towards being fascinating. (Alas and alack, though, vacationing in makyo will probably not lead to the true-dharma-eye-treasury.)

For those who are not familiar with makyo in Zen or in their own meditation, makyo brings in a range of feeling(s) that is similar to those in dreaming. Ken Wilber calls this range "subtle" phenomena. In this range, or realm if you like, we end up feeling enchanted, compelled, enticed, curious, bright, enlivened, quick, etc. Even something like fear is likely to be pumped up and become something like the terror that lets you know you are alive. And this terror easily rolls into jubilation once the perception of threat has passed if one is not already feeling an adrenalin "rush" while the perceived threat is still immediate.

Play is often hard to logically structure adequately. What really happens in play? In asking this sort of question, we are usually trying to see what purposes can be imposed on play. While we grow, the types of play we choose change. Sometimes play can be engaged in in order to determine a status hierarchy, and especially this type of play can go "over the line" and become not so fun while still being rewarding for the winner. We incorporate formal conceptions into play in strategy games. I love chess, and I like to play just for the fun of it, but I also prefer to win. In playing chess, some days I get in the flow of the game, and it's almost like I'm not thinking through what my moves are. My awareness is very much on the chess, but it feels like I'm almost not there. The normally functioning, gross-ego/chunk-processing is occurring, but it is not the only thing going on in my awareness; it's not even primary on the better days.

Now, we all always have more going on in our brains than we can attend to. With mindfulness training, we can learn to attend (be aware) at a much higher degree of precision and to a much wider range of phenomena than is usual. In these moments of flow, I'm aware of being able to think and attend in my usual manner or I can "let go" to a greater extent, like mentally relaxing my focus analogously to the way we relax our visual focus to see a certain type of visual illusion (the type I am terrible at seeing). In team sports especially, coaches talk about "letting the game come to you". In more individual athletics, it's more like, "Be the ball."

Being the ball allows for time to "stop" or be so unimportant as to seem nonexistent; the same is true of self-awareness in that it is so heightened that the usual self may seem nonexistent. When coordinating with others, flow involves feeling not only some degree of relationship but also of pacing, timing. Time only seems nonexistent after these flow moments when we look back and have the feeling that time didn't matter then. If you think about it, you can re-mind yourself of your sense of timing during that moment of coordinated action.

In the same way that tranquility can be said to exist between (temporally) thoughts, and we can become very aware of this by doing intentional relaxation meditation, the bright energy of bliss can be said to exist between sensations and perceptions that are more subtle than thoughts. As we become aware of thoughts, we can learn to dis-identify with them, and this dis-identification allows us to familiarize with the time/space between thoughts. And as we become more mindfully aware of perceptions and sensations, we can either be led around by the tails or trailers of these stimuli or we can familiarize with the energy that is available as like the background of all of that. We can stick our attention in the background, in the bliss, while allowing sensation and perception to pass in and through, or we can also "follow" the sensations or perceptions that seem so alive with this energy. It is like playing hide-and-seek in heaven. This variety of options is becoming more obvious as it becomes more familiar.

And then--there is always one more "and then"--it is very interesting to think about bringing this energy consistently and intentionally into relating. I think that we can do with ideas, relationship, pacing, etc. the same thing we do with impulse and emotions when we play in ways that seem more simplistic. It's just harder to say what the game is, to limit the game, because of referring to a wider array of stimuli and also investing our responses with bliss--which is like the icing on the cake of ecstasy. It's okay to just eat the icing.