once born again let the mud settle

let the mud settle

Metaphor - the normal mental state is muddy water stirred up by the ever active mind – the ONCE BORN. But this mental state can, through stillness, be transformed to clarity and peace – BORN AGAIN.

There is a vital, mental churn which identifies fleeting patterns and agencies in the external world. These mind-made perceptions help us to monitor the sense channels for signs of positive or negative stimuli. But what type and level of busy-ness is most functional and under what circumstances?

There would appear to be an abnormal (supra-normal?) mental state of peaceful clarity. This becomes apparent when the mind has been still for some time and the mud has settled. It is the human birthright and is ever-present; but, in most people, the mental mud hides it from view.

between them and us

Those who have known the mental clarity report experiencing patterns and agencies that are non-egoic (self-less). These are related to compassion and peace as reflected in an ever-expanding boundary line between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Inclusiveness continues to develop until the principle pattern is the Oneness. 

As a result of the non-egoic perception the frantic desire to have and to do is replaced by the simple intention to be. Renunciation follows automatically.  The erstwhile blood lusting tribal warriors and capitalist consumers are now seen to be mind made mental mud.

So there is a continuum (see the table) and most reasonable observers consider it to be a good thing that the mind state of most people transforms from ONCE BORN to being BORN AGAIN. 

ONCE BORN		BORN AGAIN
Ever-active mind		Still mind
Muddy water		Clarity
Territorial warriors		Global stewards
Capitalist consumers		Renunciants
Egoic greed & exploitation		Non-egoic compassion
Many phenomena		The Oneness
To have and to do		To be

The following quotes are from
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Meditation-Masters/218587618170634

 

"At its core, meditation is about touching the spiritual essence that exists within us all. Our spiritual essence is not something that we create through meditation it's already there, deep within, behind all the barriers, patiently waiting for us to recognize it." ~ Aaron Hoopes

"Meditation means to be constantly extricating yourself from the clinging of mind. By letting go of even the thought ‘I,’ and 'me' what is left? There is nowhere to stand and no one to stand there. No separation anywhere. Pure awareness. Neither this, nor that. Just clarity and being.” ~ Ram Dass

"If your mind is happy then you are happy anywhere you go. When wisdom awakens within you, you will see Truth wherever you look. Truth is all there is. It’s like when you learned how to read, you can then read anywhere you go." ~ Ajahn Chah

"Thoughts are impediments to seeing your deepest nature. Don't give rise to any thought, and discover who you are. That ocean of eternal peace is you. What is the difficulty that we suffer from? It is that we seek peace elsewhere and do not experience that we are peace incarnate itself." ~ PapaJi

"You are not merely the body; you are 100% Pure Being. But you must find this out for yourself. It must become your own discovery, happening in your innermost being."
~ Mooji

“Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware— not only of our own inner workings but also of what’s happening around us in the here & now.” ~ Sharon Salzberg, Born 1952

Jon Kabat-Zinn

“Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.” ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

“The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart.” ~ Noah Levine

"Meditation is giving yourself time to just be yourself. There is nothing to it other than that, it’s nothing really special, just allowing yourself to relax and be yourself without worrying about what has happened in the past, or without worrying about what’s going to happen in the future. Just to simply relax and rest in your own natural state is all that you need to do, giving yourself the opportunity to do that." ~ 17th Karmapa

"Is it possible to stop the noisy mind? Yes, but not through force, for it thrives on force. I will show you an easy way. Stop identifying with your mind's play. Be the witness only, detached and impersonal. Don't move from this. Once you are stable as the witness, find out if this witness can be found."~ Mooji

"You are always the Supreme. But your attention is fixed on things, physical or mental. When your attention is off a thing and not yet fixed on another, in the interval you are pure being. When through the practice of detachment you let go of sensory and mental states, pure being emerges as the natural state." ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

“We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.” ~ Dalai Lama XIV

“Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.” ~ Shunryu Suzuki

“Just Sit.” ~ Dogen

Mental formations for the new year

mental formation generator

These days there are many multidisciplinary approaches to knowledge and understanding. This is mainly so as to include insights from the growing fields of evolutionary psychology and neurology.

It is now widely accepted that all subjectively experienced, meaningful, mental formations have neural correlates in the brain and that many of these have well established evolutionary roots.

But, by taking thought, mental formations can change. It is never too late to change your mind. It is inevitable and desirable. It is the root of bright hope for the future.

Long live impermance

M, B and C flows

Flow is a useful metaphor for what happens with thoughts and feelings. Like water, they proceed from a source and move along in a stream. Sometimes they gush, spout, or spurt sometimes they just trickle in a small, gentle stream, and some times the flow disappears into the background and seems to have stopped (for example when dosing or sleeping).

There are many approaches to the concept of flow but I have found three of them to be particularly useful for training my mind – Meditative (M) Flow, Brande (B)Flow and Csikszentmihalyi (C) Flow 

M-Flows

Meditation and Mindfulness go back at least 3000 years. There are many variations on the basic theme of stopping (Shamatha) and seeing (Vipassana). People who have trained their minds to Olympic standards can do wonderful things but I am not interested here in being an Olympian.

Ordinary people can set aside some free time in a quiet place where they just sit. Thoughts and feelings will flow. The trick is to avoid being caught up in the particular thoughts and feelings by becoming a witness to them. Not “I am angry”, but “Anger is arising”. In time attachment to the mental formations gets less and you become free of them. The peace that results causes empathy and compassion for others. One of Eckhart Tolle’s books is called “Stillness Speaks”. It does.

B-Flows

Dorothea Brande (1893 – 1948) was a well-respected writer and editor in New York. Her book “Becoming a Writer”, published in 1934, is still in print and offers advice for beginning and sustaining any writing enterprise. I have returned to this classic many times over the years.

She recognises that the professional writer has to be able to dive into the flow of ideas passing through mind in a controlled way. Techniques include (a) waking half an hour early and writing non stop for 20 minutes, and (b) setting a time later in the day (say 12:00) and writing for 20 minutes with no excuses. Do this for a month. Patterns emerge and the problem of writer’s block does not arise.

C-Flows

According to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi  flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents the ultimate experience in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.

Flow theory notes three conditions that have to be met to achieve a flow state:

•  One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals and progress. This adds direction and structure to the task.
• The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows him or her to adjust his or her performance to maintain the flow state.
• One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and his or her own perceived skills. One must have confidence that he or she is capable to do the task at hand.

"Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason." Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one's emotions.

Buzz terms for this or similar mental states include: to be in the moment, present, in the zone, on a roll, wired in, in the groove, on fire, in tune, centered, or singularly focused. There is also the notion of the muse talking through the poet or novelist.

Subjective Flows - non-egoic and out of space and time

I have practiced mindfulness meditation off and on for more than forty years. It has a calming effect and through my own suffering I am reminded of how other people are suffering and compassion thus arises. These days, if I begin to get anxious, I have faith that ‘just sitting’ and being the witness will have a calming effect.

I have been a Brande fan for more than 20 years. For some reason I hesitate to set a timetable for the writing which thus goes through phases. I was at my peak about 10-15 years ago when I could easily crack out 40 words per minute for 20 minutes. These days I rarely manage more than 30 words per minute. In the main I have been disappointed by the triviality of the stuff that emerges. But the exercise of pumping words against the clock is therapeutic.

I have been aware of flow and of positive psychology for more than 10 years. I think of it as being in the zone when writing my more disciplined and professional works. The mind state used to keep up for 2-3 hours when I was non-egoic and out of space and time. It was effortless action (wu-wei). I would sit at the computer and stuff would happen. There might have been joy and bliss at being so absorbed but it was non-egoic – there was no ‘I’ present to experience the bliss. But it was a great way to escape the troublesome ego and profitably use time.

influencing the unconscious will

inputs through the sense organs

Presumably the unconscious will can be influenced by inputs through the sense organs. These inputs trigger the unconscious patterns to follow this way rather than that. But how are the influential inputs chosen? What agency is involved? 

Serendipity plays a part (see box). For example I have just finished scanning the email, FaceBook and a couple of online news sites. This generated a range of minor stimuli whose influence is largely unconscious and presumably relatively slight. But ‘I’ have little control over the quantity and quality of inputs that were delivered.

There is also serendipity concerning the narrow and more wide ranging geo-historical happenstances that have been and are shaping what passes for ‘me’. Those can be thought of as my nurture. There will also be particularities concerning my nature – my genes.

So is it all serendipity, all accident and chance? Is my life a snowball rolling down a mountain: something initially very small (with some hard wired instincts and frameworks) that grew by picking up bits and pieces of stuff (eg food and knowledge) that happened to be in its way?

Like a snowball down a mountain

That makes the process sound emergent rather than deterministic and that brings pleasure to this vital churn of matter that is me – a zoologist by basic training. 

Determinism is about conscious design and blueprints in advance; about planning for the future in the belief that the evidence supports pursuing this policy and plan rather than that one. But as Robert Burns pointed out, “the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agleigh”. 

Emergence involves going with the flow. Cause and effect are still the basis for everything but the complexity of multi-cause and multi-effect means that the ability to predict the future is severely curtailed. Meteorologists know this only too well. 

Development planners take note – humility and holism are the order of the new day. Determinism has its uses when planning the creation and maintenance of physical infrastructures such as water, sanitation, roads, bridges etc. Emergence is more useful in dealing with social infrastructures such as health, education, land tenure, culture and governance[1].

press button people

But what do ‘I’ think? What is ‘my’ opinion? A lot of Pavlovian buttons[2] have been built into my brain by nature and nurture. There is thus reaction to particular stimuli in particular ways. But few of these are freely chosen by me. They snuck in by various back doors. They are not thus the conscious me. They might be the unconscious me but ‘I’ do not know that consciously! Either way, there is the option of being aware of what is going on in consciousness and also in the unconscious. Where the latter is done indirectly by noting what the unconscious throws into the attention centre and how this affects the body in terms of hot flushes and cold sweats etc.

But, to get back to the earlier question, “is it all serendipity, all accident and chance?” The temptation is to say yes. 

metaphorical parent

A key concept is ‘agency’. Our brains seem to be wired linguistically to make sense of the world by perceiving patterns and agents. The ‘agents’ are responsible for making things happen, they are causal agents. And language continually evolves to map ‘reality’ - and it uses metaphor to explain the unknown in terms of the known.  

The known agents are ourselves and we have intentions, motivations and moods.  There are unknown agents responsible for thunder and lightning, droughts and floods, feasts and famines. But these unknown agents are like people – they have intentions, motivations and moods. They need placating. They become the gods, ghosts and ghouls of magic and metaphysics. The exact nature of the metaphor varies through time as indicated in the following list.

·         The pantheon of many nature gods. ·         The ghosts of the ancestors. ·         The omniscient God.   ·         The Satanic Devil. ·         The infallible Pope. ·         The Divine Right of Kings (and Queen’s). ·         The Glorious Leader.

·         Our Elders and Betters. ·         The Good and the Great. ·         The CEO (Boss, Leader) ·         The community. ·         The nuclear (?) family. ·         The Individual.

And so… the unconscious will is inevitably influenced by inputs from the sense organs and by memories. It is not easy to pin down the agencies for choosing influential inputs. But there is no need to impute magic or metaphysics. The multi-module mind is in a continual state of flux with much ongoing and speedy creation and destruction. Sometimes there is ‘will’ in the attention centre and sometimes something else. It is a case of self regulation in complex systems.

Box: Serendipity

Serendipity means a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise"; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful while not specifically searching for it. The first noted use of "serendipity" was by Horace Walpole (1717–1797). He formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of". Ikujiro Nonaka points out that the serendipitous quality of innovation is highly recognized by managers. It links the success of Japanese enterprises to their ability to create knowledge not by processing information but rather by "tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches of individual employees and making those insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole". William Boyd coined the term zemblanity to mean somewhat the opposite of serendipity: "making unhappy, unlucky and unexpected discoveries occurring by design". A zemblanity is, effectively, an "unpleasant surprise". Source: Wikipedia

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[1] I have developed a holistic acronym – social, technical, environmental, economic, political, ethical and spiritual – STEEPLES http://sites.google.com/site/steeplessrds/

[2] http://dodclark.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/push-button-people.html