This is part 5 of a longer essay about spirituality, which I'm be posting here in installments.
I recommend reading the parts in order. Read Part 4 Here.
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From the previous essay:
Most people have habitual thoughts or types of thoughts, which they rarely challenge or change. These thoughts lead to habitual feelings, information, kinds of people, and experiences. All this habit keeps most people metaphorically in a little room. Spiritual wisdom is just recognizing this room for what it is.
And spiritual practice is just recognizing the room over and over.
Anyone can do this any time. While eating dinner, walking, or sitting at a desk, we can pause for a moment and just be aware of what we’re thinking, without believing in it. Or we can just be aware of the sights, sounds, and sensations we’re experiencing without commenting on them.[1] This alone is a powerful spiritual practice. There are also other spiritual practices that more resemble practicing an art or a sport in that we set aside time to do them.
One powerful and common such practice is meditation. There are different methods. Some involve repeating a mantra or focusing on our breathing. The idea is to interrupt the 24/7 thought-broadcast that usually streams through our internal airwaves. The particular “something” we direct our attention to is not so important, whether a mantra, our breathing, or the humming of a refrigerator. It just must be undramatic so it doesn’t stimulate our habitual thought responses.[2] We are trying to set our minds as close to “neutral” as we can.
The most direct meditation method is no method: just being aware of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and allowing them to be there. We can even allow the thought that we’re failing miserably at meditation, or that we have no idea what meditation even is. If we react to a thought with judgment, we can allow the judgment to be there. If we judge ourselves for judging, that’s allowed as well. No matter what thought, reaction to a thought, or reaction to a reaction to a thought, it’s always possible to step outside of it and let it be there. The idea is complete permission. Everything can be allowed because none of it is you. You are just watching.
When many people hear “complete permission,” their mind immediately jumps to an image of mayhem. Most people have an idea that only certain things should be permitted to prevent chaos and harm.[3] But the complete permission of meditation is not the same as running amok in the world. This is because the permission of meditation allows the thought, feeling, or urge to just be, without it having to lead to some action. It’s almost as if the thought, feeling, or urge needed the action in order to prove itself. But when it’s simply allowed to be, no further validation is needed.
Normally, our thoughts, feelings, and urges automatically lead us somewhere. We get angry, for example, and it immediately leads to saying something harsh or accusatory. Or we think, “I’m unloveable,” and this is taken as true and leads to feeling depressed, which leads to eating a pint of chunky monkey.[4] These are the kinds of automatic actions that cause chaos and harm. Most of the words and actions of most people are of this automatic kind.[5] To put it another way, most of what we call our actions are really reactions. [6] These reactions keep us going in circles inside our room.
Meditation can theoretically hold any thought, feeling, or urge in the container of detachment. Detachment is like a larger room that contains the first room.[7] By stepping outside of every thought, feeling, sensation, and urge and just allowing and observing them, we hold them in the biggest container of all—our awareness.[8]
The key to this allowing is that fundamental insight of spiritual wisdom: not identifying who you are with your thoughts, feelings, and urges. In this allowing, we don’t take anything that arises in our inner world as a substantial truth. No thought or feeling has to imply or mean anything. No thought or feeling must lead to some other thought, or feeling, or action. It can just be there. It isn’t who you are.
Detachment is natural. When a squirrel runs across your lawn, you probably don’t get upset. You probably don’t take the squirrel as a comment on you. You probably don’t feel compelled to react to the squirrel in any way, except perhaps with curiosity or delight. Now, most would say a squirrel is more real than a thought. It’s certainly more substantial. And yet, we usually allow our thoughts to drag us around as if they were wild horses.
Detachment may be natural, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. In Western culture, there’s a big difference between natural and easy.[9] Detachment is not easy because of our intense and prolonged conditioning to do the opposite. Our culture bombards us with the idea that we are tied to those wild horses and there’s nothing we can do about it. We are encouraged, that is, to believe thinking, feeling, or doing something means being that something.
This belief is reflected in how we speak. We say, for example, “I am angry,” instead of “I feel anger,” or perhaps, “Anger is arising.” We say “I am a doctor,” instead of “I practice the art of medicine forty hours a week.” We say, “She is smart,” instead of “She gets good grades in high school math.”[10]
If we believe our thoughts, feelings, and actions “stick to us” and reveal something about our true identity, then they become a problem. If, for example, we don’t want to share our favorite dessert at a restaurant, we may be told we are a selfish person. This may make us angry or ashamed or self-sacrificing, all of which lead to more problems. If a man cries, he may believe that makes him a weak person. This might cause him to avoid intimacy, which will make him sadder and want to cry even more. If someone feels anger, they may believe that makes them a violent person. In all these cases, we will spend energy trying to deny and resist problematic thoughts and feelings. But, as every psychologist knows, this is counterproductive and exhausting. Trying to stop wild horses only makes them wilder.
In meditation, we simply cut the rope and watch the horses gallop off. The horses are allowed to be horses and you are allowed to be whatever you are.[11] There are, literally, no problems. Thus, heroic effort isn’t needed for meditation. Nor is discipline in the way we usually think of that word. The discipline needed for meditation is not trying to rein in our wild horses; it’s the relentless slicing of the rope to let the horses run off without us.
Next Up: The Void
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Footnotes
[1] Often, when we do this, we discover some unnecessary tension in our body that we then automatically release. We drop our shoulders, for example.
[2] There’s a story that when the Beatles went to India to spend time with the Maharishi, the master gave each Beatle a secret mantra not to be shared with the others. They later discovered the mantra was the same for each of them. The most important thing was repeating any mantra (whether positive or just neutral. The Maharishi likely considered this a harmless “trick” to increase the power of repeating the mantra.
[3] The whole history of human civilizations (along with the news we hear every day) seems to back up this idea.
[4] Many people believe feelings cause thoughts. This is because by the time we are swept up in a feeling, we have forgotten or lost sight of the ideas that caused them to begin with. Feeling hurt, angry, or aggrieved because of the words of someone else, for example, arises from ideas about our inherent worth, the power others have over us, and so on. We don’t feel hurt if we don’t take another’s words seriously. If I say, “You’re a red penguin,” you wouldn’t be upset. Rather, you’d think I might be crazy.
[5] It’s the normal human condition now and has been throughout the well-documented portions of human history. We don’t know how humans operated in various tribal cultures in the huge stretch of human existence between about 70,000 and 10,000 years ago.
[6] This is an underlying cause of the cultural fascination with zombies.
[7] Jesus said, “In my father’s house are many mansions.”
[8] In practice, extremely powerful emotions are difficult to step out of. In these cases, as Eckhart Tolle notes, we can practice stepping out of these in retrospect, or whenever we can. Over time, the stepping out becomes easier.
[9] In most cultures, this is true to some degree or another.
[10] Non-Westernized cultures tend to see people’s attributes and behavior as more conditional and relational—i.e. they depend on where you are and who you’re with.
[11]Which is a question no one has ever answered. We know we ARE, we just don’t know what. And that’s OK. Spirituality says it’s enough to know what you are not and the rest will take care of itself.
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