This inconceivable combination of umpteen quadrillion neurons, this miracle of evolutionary engineering, my mind, won’t do what I want: to simply BE HERE NOW! There are two gigantic obstacles, habits honed by 58 years of instinct and repetition: 1. thinking about stuff, AKA “sleep trains;” and 2. doing stuff, “autopilots,” are constantly taking me, against my will, back into the past or forward into the future, and away from “pure awareness” of this moment, right now. More properly stated, when my mind functions normally, it is filled with words and concepts, as I unwittingly jabber to myself, completely self-focused, all day, every day. Buddha and others claim that this leads to unnecessary suffering, and they assure me that I can change the way my mind functions. As Sam Harris puts it, “each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.”
By all accounts, Buddha regularly said of enlightenment, “you can make it in this very lifetime.” When I heard that Sam Harris was coming out with a book about “spirituality,” I thought “forget enlightenment in this lifetime,” how about enlightenment THIS WEEK! In spite of being an extreme materialist, biased towards scientific evidence and reason, I have believed all my adult life that some type of “spiritual" path, (probably Buddhism), would lead to maximum fulfillment, or, if you will, optimal mental health. Having read and LOVED all Sam’s books and many of his essays, I knew he was coming from essentially the same place, so “Waking Up" felt like the second coming to me. If you find all religious beliefs to be equally valid, Sam's words will offend you, and if you listen to hearsay without personally reading his writings, you might believe him to be a racist. Sam addresses the subjects I find most interesting, ethics, epistemology and consciousness, using clear, precise reason, logic, and scientific evidence. I love "Waking Up" for its simple, concise argument: (in chapter 1) for taking meditation and Buddhism seriously, and (chapters 2 & 3) the logical and scientific reasons for accepting the ego/self as an illusion, and (chapter 4) the Dzogchen and “headless” methods of recognizing the illusion of self. Sam so BRIEFLY outlines these strategies in “Waking Up,” that, I next devoured Douglas Harding’s “On Having No Head,” and Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche’s “Quintessential Dzogchen.” In these last few months, there have been many moments when I felt like I was getting a true glimpse of selflessness, otherwise known as "non-duality.” You can read Sam’s first chapter for FREE here:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/chapter-one
Last month, I came across a 36-page essay written in 2007 by Rick Hanson, called “The Neurology of Awareness & Self,” which is extraordinarily similar to Sam’s “Waking Up.” It is a stunningly succinct overview of the Psychology AND the Philosophy of consciousness. Sam’s book and Rick’s essay feel so completely and totally RIGHT to me that they have become my Holy Grail. Here is a pdf of that essay:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LcbZ8Jf6SoQJ:media.rickhanson.net/home/files/Awareness%26Self.pdf+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Sam says in “Waking Up,” “if there are important truths to be discovered through introspection, there must be better and worse ways to do this." Our time is short, I believe these two works present what might be the most efficient path to a significant reduction of our suffering. What follows is a brief personal spiritual history, filled with my own strategies and uniquely bizarre perspectives, but, if you must economize your reading time, (and who doesn’t?), please read Sam and Rick first, they’re REALLY GOOD writers with a profound understanding of these truths.
Back in the 80’s I began meditating every day, in a manner I’d now call “casual" for 15-20 minutes. Since 2011, I’ve hunkered down hard, for at least an hour every day. In the beginning, I believed in the possibility of “enlightenment,” but there was plenty of clinical evidence, even back then, that meditation, of ANY style provided clear physical benefits like reduced blood pressure and lower rates of heart disease, so even if “enlightenment” was a fantasy, I could bank on the “fringe benefits.” Today, there’s a huge body of scientific evidence linking mindfulness meditation with improved physical and mental health; a small investment of one’s energy leads to what Dan Harris, (no relation), calls “10% happier.” And, while several of my wise and/or cynical friends have always understood that my idea of enlightenment, busting completely through the door into full-time Happy-Land, was naive, I now believe the definition of the word “enlightenment," might be as simple as: “moments of pure awareness.” More importantly, my old treasured vision of “enlightenment” has a new name: “fruition,” a non-supernatural state of stabilized, continuous moments of pure awareness, might still, with hard work, be possible; the DREAM lives on! There are several salient features to my journey that are simultaneously surprising, and dead obvious: becoming mindfully aware EVERY moment, is an enormous, perhaps unreachable goal, and the barriers to success, fully entrenched mind/body habit patterns, (“sleep trains” and autopilots are just two of many), seem practically invulnerable to my best efforts.
At the tender age of 12, I had an emotional experience in church which I referred to as being “Born Again.” Until I was 18, I had daily chats with the Big Fella, that gave me little shivers. He never actually spoke, all the talking came from me, but I often thought, and even said out loud, that these shivers indicated the validity of my experience of God’s existence, which I would otherwise deem “illogical,” (I was completely in love with Mr. Spock).
The improbable supernatural, conscious deity I conversed with as a teenager
In the summer of 1975, entering UCSC, I encountered the “Subject-Object split,” in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which has been my philosophical pivot-point for 39 years. You will have trouble imagining just how excited I was that first year about the idealistic pursuit of Truth, OBJECTIVE TRUTH, truth at all costs. Not surprisingly, during that first crazy year as a Psychology/Religious Studies major, while reading “Varieties of Religious Experience,” by William James, I fully confronted the oft-considered possibility that my two-way conversation with God was only one-way, i.e. “me-talking-to-me," and carefully set aside, without completely disavowing, my Christianity. At the end of my first college year, May 1976, having lost my High School Sweetheart at Christmas, having surrendered my Christianity, and unable to BEGIN writing my last required paper, I lost my reason to be, the academic search for truth. Suicidal depression followed. I believe that fear of depression was a primary motivator for almost 40 years of alcoholism. Here’s a double scoop of irony: it’s likely that my alcoholism was a significant motivation for my intense exercise-ethic, “if I can do 60 pullups, my drinking can’t be THAT bad.”
Four major events have shaped my “spiritual" life since that scary depression in ’76:
1. I spent several years trying to study the Bible with an open mind, including sincere daily requests that Jesus/God/Holy Spirit "come into my heart." Several other books played a key role, like “God, a Biography" (one of the most fun non-fiction books I’ve ever read), before I eventually had to recognize/admit that I did not/could NOT believe in a sentient personal God. I’m still today learning how much I resent what feels like a “betrayal," and how afraid I am of again falling into the trap of bamboozlement, particularly anything remotely “supernatural."
2. The infamous “drug-incident” of 6/29/84, when I suddenly realized, (while driving up to UCSC to repair a typewriter), that I was coming on to some massive, totally accidental and unintentional drug-overdose, and ended up wide-awake for three days and nights, and then paralyzed by fear for several years. Way back in 1984, I was excitedly dabbling with the idea of non-stop, mindful awareness, but this terrifying experience of painful, fearful, tight little circles of rumination unfortunately scared me away from serious meditation, and sadly led me into an intentional flood of self-distraction for many years: movies, music, television, NPR, every possible diversion, whenever and wherever possible.
3. My brother Shaun’s conversion to New Age beliefs, some of which I found very improbable, that sent me back to my Epistemology books to better understand what I meant by "Truth and Knowledge.”
4. March 24, 2011, at a big Driscolls party in Baja, I got drunk as a skunk, slept it off the next day, and then had to fly back home that next night, tired and hung over. I made a couple of small, but significant mistakes over which my Chief Pilot became apoplectic. Though already dedicated to excellence in every realm of my life, I vowed to bear down to the utmost extent, I would become the best frikkin' pilot, husband, and human, possible. Having meditated for decades, I sought Sam Harris' advice, which led to Bhante Gunaratana's “Mindfulness in Plain English,” and my current four-year long serious devotion to practice. This experience was ALSO the beginning of the end of my drinking.
letting go of God and the soul
Old, foundational beliefs die hard. It took me a full decade, screaming and kicking before I could finally, fully let go of my belief in a sentient deity. And another several years to let go of my strong conviction to the idea of a spirit or soul—I just couldn’t imagine that this miraculous combination of body and mind, especially conscious awareness, could come into existence, and then completely disappear into nothingness. After stridently, ardently confronting this idea with cold, steely eyes for years, I finally recognized the soul and the afterlife are nothing more than “wishful thinking.” I wanted very badly, and I worked my ass off to find any good evidence or any good reason to believe in God or my own soul, but eventually these ideas have been relegated to cartoon unreality in my worldview. Desperate to find THE objective truth about the world, I came to eschew any and all things “supernatural." When it comes to fictional stories, like novels, movies, and television, I like magic as much as the next fellow, but in my “real world,” I’ve never experienced one single event that couldn’t be better explained by simple, rational means. I understand completely that in this vein, I stand almost alone, even among my closest friends.
A cartoonish representation of a deity (Neptune) that I beseech regularly, to bring me larger and more frequent waves. It exists in my mind, BUT, I am confident that it does NOT exist separately or independently of my imagination.
material vs. spiritual world/illusion of self, duality/subjective/objective split
After a couple years, I changed my major from Psychology/Religious Studies to Psychology/Philosophy. My devout crusade was to find the TRUTH, understand “belief” and “knowledge,” and overcome illusions, always tortured by the Philosopher’s plague: everything, even the most simple ideas, are open to question; is this “real,” is that an “illusion,” does this matter? Bottom line, there are just two things in life for us to learn about and understand: 1. self; 2. world. For as long as I can remember I have openly scoffed at the Platonic idea, espoused by most religious mystics, (including Buddhists), that the material world we perceive with our senses is an illusion, and invisible stuff we can’t sense, (like mind, or God) is “real.” My feet still walk in what LOOKS like a material world. As mentioned above, entering college, I found the extremely crucial locus between self and world, the individual's subjective perspective vis a vis an ideal “objective” truth about the world. Technically, we can never truly grasp “objective” truth, because we ALWAYS see the world through our subjective lens. In my view, “objectivity,” is the attempt to rise above our limited, biased perspectives, to clarify our “subjective" representations to MORE OR LESS accurately reflect the truth of the objects in the external world. Theoretically, each and every representation lies on a continuum of relative objectivity, i.e. more or less accurate in matching the object. Our amazing imaginations are capable of conjuring representations/pictures that are 100% subjective: I am currently imagining a 1,000 mile tall unicorn-octupus simultaneously pulling down Mt. Denali and Mt. Whitney. (Please see the above essay, “I Believe I Think I Know,” for a fuller picture of my view of the subjective/objective split). It is easy to witness examples of LESS objective representations all day long on Fox News, because they don’t even TRY to be objective. A gold-standard example of objectivity is a double-blind science experiment, or a randomized controlled trial. Do scientists screw up? Of course, they’re human, but as a truth and knowledge-gathering system, science is self-correcting. Watch the excellent documentary “Particle Fever,” to see the inconceivable depths of knowledge that science has plumbed. Browse through any college text in Physics, Biology, Chemistry, etc. to see the fact that slowly and surely, Science has forged ahead, miles ahead, BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF MILES AHEAD of the foolish, confused pablum that passes for our cultural dialogues on what matters. I believe the “material world” exists, and I have no doubt that reason and science are the best way to understand it. Nevertheless, our minds are capable of more than one way of viewing the world, and the subjective/objective split creates a dualism in our minds that just MIGHT be the central location of our suffering. Our brains work in such a way that we see our selves as separate from everything else, but it is possible to see intellectually, and even to KNOW experientially that we are “one” with the universe.
A photographic representation of a very real cat, that I see and speak to regularly in our backyard. I believe it exists inside my mind, AND separate from and independent of my perception and consciousness.
paying attention increases contentment
Long ago, Bill Moyers did a PBS program about Jon Kabat-Zinn, demonstrating his raisin-experiment introduction to mindfulness. He encourages a roomful of new meditators to pay full attention to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings of consciously chewing and swallowing one raisin. One woman calls the exercise “stupid,” and then becomes overwhelmed by the rich, full experience of CHEWING ONE RAISIN! Think for a moment how much time we spend “feeding,” unconsciously munching away, focused on something else, often willfully, intentionally distracted by a TV show or smartphone. If it were within our power, imagine being completely attentive for every bite. Heck, why not every single moment of EVERY EXPERIENCE! There is ample scientific evidence that humans are more “content” or “happy” when they simply PAY ATTENTION, even during disagreeable tasks like commuting or washing the dishes, than when they conduct these same tasks with distractions like music or podcasts, i.e multi-tasking:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-wandering-mind-is-an-un/
thinking leads to sleep trains/DMN
Not until I undertook the absurd, quixotic quest for “mindfulness every moment," did I gain a fuller picture of just how entrenched and implacable my 58 years of habit patterns are. In fact, habit patterns run our lives. All day, every day, I’m constantly whisked away by one “sleep train” after another, with NO conscious control! Thinking isn’t intrinsically bad, (except for painful rumination), but it is “sticky,” and it takes us away from here and now. Even in sitting meditation, when I’m working as hard as I can to stay focused, eyes closed, in complete silence, my 58 years of mind-body habitual training, (and millions of years of evolutionary engineering), have produced an almost impregnable system of seamless, instantaneous, constant floating off into thought without noticing it, off into the dastardly “default mode network," DMN:
© Scientific American 2014
DMN/monkey mind
Though it seems that our minds are consumed by external stimuli, the Default Mode Network, AKA “the monkey mind,” is, in fact, the default mode of the normally functioning human mind. Hans Berger, the inventor of the electroencephalogram, proposed the idea that "the brain is constantly busy.” Put another way by Buddha himself: “The river never stops: there is no moment, no minute, no hour when the river stops: in the same way, the flux of thought.” Yet a third variation, from Sam Harris: “the principal enemy of mindfulness is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thought…not thoughts themselves, but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking.” Before scampering off to find a Dzogchen Buddhist guru, I decided to explore what science has to say about consciousness. At the cutting edge of current scientific research on consciousness, I discovered the truly outstanding book, “Consciousness and the Brain,” by Stanislas Dehaene. In the beginning he clarifies: “contemporary science of consciousness distinguishes a minimum of three concepts: vigilance—the state of wakefulness, which varies when we fall asleep or wake up; attention—the focusing of our mental resources onto a specific piece of information; and conscious access—the fact that some of the attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others. He makes clear that he’s not talking about a “higher order meaning of consciousness” a “sense of self.” Most of the book focuses on experiments using fMRI and electro- and magnetoenchephalography, and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain…to find patterns of brain activity that appear if and only if the scanned person is having a conscious experience—what I call the “signatures of consciousness.” Several markers of brain activity change massively when a person becomes aware of a picture, a word, a digit, or a sound. These signatures are remarkably stable and can be observed in a great variety of visual, auditory, tactile, and cognitive stimulations.
Dehaene has proven, to me, at least, that science can now demonstrate when a human mind exhibits conscious awareness of some stimulus or other, in fact, his three “signatures” consistently show up in a wide multitude of experiments, by many different research groups. BUT, the interesting thing is that these external stimuli only make up a VERY SMALL fraction of our brain’s activity. Lo and behold, Dehaene makes clear that the monkey mind, far from an atypical event, is our normal state:
"Do such bouts of endogenous activity exist in the real brain? Yes. In fact, organized spontaneous activity is omnipresent in the nervous system. Anyone who has ever seen an EEG knows this: the two hemispheres constantly generate massive high-frequency electrical waves, whether the person is awake or asleep. This spontaneous excitation is so intense that it dominates the landscape of brain activity. By comparison, the activation evoked by an external stimulus is barely detectable, and much averaging is needed before it can be observed. Stimulus-evoked activity accounts for only a very small amount of the total energy consumed by the brain, probably less than 5 percent. The nervous system primarily acts as an autonomous device that
generates its own thought patterns, (my emphasis). Even in the dark, while we rest and “think of nothing,” our brain constantly produces complex and ceaselessly changing arrays of neuronal activity... For instance, a large subset of the language circuit activates when we listen to a story, but it also discharges spontaneously when we rest in darkness—giving support to the notion of “internal speech.” …For instance, one of the resting-state networks, called the DMN turns on whenever we reflect upon our personal situation, retrieve autobiographical memories or compare our thoughts with those of others…In a nutshell, ceaseless neuronal discharges create our ruminating thoughts. Furthermore, this internal stream competes with the external world…Endogenous states of consciousness interfere with our ability to become aware of external events. Spontaneous brain activity invades the global workspace and, if absorbing, can block access to other stimuli for extended periods of time." CS & the brain loc 3125
habitual physical autopilots
As well as compelling thought-trains, we each have a wide array of automatic physical behaviors, (really, every single thing we DO), that are largely unconscious. Each of these autopilots are learned “habitual” skills, awkward and challenging at the beginning, which become easier and automated with practice, like walking, riding a bike, and my favorite example, talking. If you try to carefully think about each word before you say it, you will instantly be tongue-tied, but amazingly, the norm is for entire sentences to simply flow out of our mouths with ease. Unfortunately, almost all of our behaviors, which would be impossible without practice and unconscious “automation,” also carry with them the trap of taking our conscious awareness away. Even when struggling mightily, each day, to stay focused and mindful of what I’m hearing and saying to others, I invariably “wake up” after a conversation, to realize that I’d turned on the dadburn’ auto-pilot the entire time. We could not function, (and wouldn’t have evolved so successfully), if we had to relearn every single task every day, so automation is inevitable and necessary, yet, as I’ve been carefully observing how these autopilots operate on my brain, it feels to me like they almost always keep me away from the here and now.
Disney’s team-version of the little-person-in-your-head running the show
Incredibly, Daheane actually says, years before this movie was released: "One must constantly resist the absurd Disney-like fantasy of a homunculus standing in our brains, peering at our screens and commanding our acts. There is no “I” who looks inside us, the stage itself is the “I.” In reference to the massive network of unconscious brain activity that makes the tiny tip of the conscious iceberg possible, Daniel Dennett whimsically states, “One discharges fancy homunculi from one’s scheme by organizing armies of idiots to do the work.” Loc 2773 Cs & the Brain
letting go of the “self”/going headless
Intellectually, it is quite an easy exercise to view my “self” as an illusory construction, reliant on my imagination for existence, just like the cartoon image of Neptune, and unlike the cat. BUT, in everyday lived experience, that person constantly speaking inside my head feels like the MOST REAL thing in the world. In fact, as Sam states: “the fact that I’m having an experience is indisputable (to me, at least), this is all that is required for me to fully establish the reality of consciousness. Consciousness is the one thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion.” However, on occasion, the “headless” idea strikes me, and I truly feel like I’m the whole-world-on-top-of-my-body, with no head there, and no self. I AM the world, I AM the OBJECTS I’m perceiving, I am GROKKING, the impossible goal: “OBJECTIVITY.” How many times have I read some master saying that this stuff can’t be put into words, well, the first word I think of (afterward) is: “wow!” I palpably feel my existence is against all odds. Douglas Harding sums up this feeling: “the key to it is minuscule, and it lies in the distance between those little words, what and that. Here, WHAT reality is loses all importance, THAT reality is becomes all important.” I AM thankful, and I feel in my depths the fact that our EXISTENCE is an unlikely and unbelievable miracle! As I said 27 years ago, even if there IS no enlightenment, the fringe benefits are great! OR, perhaps these moments are precisely “enlightenment."
Buddhism is hard work
When I revealed my all-day breath-counting, Leslie rightly characterized my efforts as Crossfit-like intensity. I struggle to understand “effort,” and determination. Terry tells me that he long ago decided to “do nothing special.” My path feels like a careful balance, (like Yoga poses), of hard work and letting go. Over 30 years ago, I read Huston Smith’s brilliant book, “The Religions of Man,” and recently returned to re-discover where I acquired the idea that Buddhism was hard work. "Buddha distinguished two ways of life. One, a random, unreflective way in which the subject is pushed and pulled by circumstance and impulse like a twig in a drain, he called “wandering about.” The second, the way of intentional living, he called the Path. What he is proposing here is a rigorous system of habit formation designed to release the individual from the repressions imposed by unwitting impulse, self-ignorance, and tanha, the drive for private fulfillment...Right Effort: Buddha laid tremendous stress on the will. Anyone serious about making the grade will have to exert himself enormously…Buddha counsels such continuous alertness and self-examination as almost to make one weary at the very prospect." Huston Smith
effort/grace
Back when I first read Gunaratana’s description of mindfulness, or bare awareness, being without judgement or categorization, it sounded like a return to the infant stage, what William James called “blooming and buzzing,” perceptions unclouded with ideas. Like trying NOT to think of an elephant, this is 10 times harder, TRYING NOT TO THINK! Achieving this sounded difficult to me, how can I MAKE myself see the world without categories and thinking? I imagined gritting my teeth and TRYING REAL HARD to set aside my categorizing thoughts, but now I see that my mind occasionally FLIPS over to that mode of seeing, I can only TRY to make myself available and open to it, and it sometimes “just happens.” On a few occasions people have praised one of my photos, and I always think, I simply happened to be in the right place and pushed the little button, no talent or skill needed. However, in many cases there was, in fact, a fair amount of hard work and determination to PLACE my self in the “right place,” quite similar, perhaps to the hard work and determination to put myself in “place” to be open to the GRACE of the NOW. After a certain point, hard work simply doesn’t get it done, but without it, you don’t get past the foothills. Without the determination and effort to open my mind, I know what happens to me: sleep trains and auto-pilots take over the whole show, all day, every day.
OMZ, such a simple riddle!/Dzogchen Buddhism
I just re-watched the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy, and in the scene where Gandalf reads the inscription on The Doors of Durin: "Speak, friend, and enter.” It takes Frodo to unlock the riddle, “what’s the Elvish word for friend?” For the last few years, I’ve put so much energy into “concentration” working my ASS off trying simply to frikkiin’ REMEMBER to pay attention to the now, that I’ve often forgotten the most important part, really SEEING the now, mindfully. It has been suddenly dawning on me, over and over again, that when I sit still and become FULLY PRESENT, I almost always catch myself thinking about something, without having realized I WAS thinking. Huston Smith speaking about Zen says of WORDS, “even when their description of experience is in the main accurate it is never adequate: they always dilute the intensity of immediate experience even when they do not distort it… and most important, the highest modes of experience transcend the reach of words entirely.” The presence of ANY words in my mind, indicate “thinking,” and for Dzogchen Buddhists, thought is the problem. Sam’s favorite guru, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche says: "The state of being a buddha is unconfused and undeluded, just like the sun shining in the sky. The state of mind of sentient beings is like the reflection of the sun on water. Just as the reflection is dependent upon water, our thoughts are dependent upon objects. The object is what is thought of, and the subject is the perceiving mind. The fixation upon subject and object, the perceiving subject and the perceived object, is solidified again and again each moment and thus recreates samsaric existence…what is the obscuration? It is our own recurring fixation of subject and object.” I’m starting to believe that the solution to the riddle is so ridiculously simple, right in front of my face, just SEE without thoughts, words, concepts. It may be simple, but it is not so “easy” and if it is so “close” why don’t we all see it? Sam talks about this at length in chapter 4:
Selflessness is not a “deep” feature of consciousness. It is right on the surface. And yet people can meditate for years without recognizing it. How can something be right on the surface of experience and yet be difficult to see? Here is an analogy to give a clearer sense of the subtle shift in attention that is required to see what is right before one’s eyes. We’ve all had the experience of looking through a window and suddenly noticing our own reflection in the glass. At that moment we have a choice: to use the window as a window and see the world beyond, or to use it as a mirror. It is extraordinarily easy to shift back and forth between these two views but impossible to truly focus on both simultaneously This shift offers a very good analogy both for what it is like to recognize the illusoriness of self for the first time and for why it can take so long to do it…the truth is that most people are simply too distracted by their thoughts to have the selflessness of consciousness pointed out directly. And even if they are ready to glimpse it, they are unlikely to understand its significance.
“pure awareness” right before our eyes/intellectual understanding vs. experiential “knowing"
So, it is “easy” and it is “hard.” We’re all “seeing” the fact of our “pure awareness” all the time, but it is obscured by our habitual thinking, lost on unconscious sleep-trains. Vipassana meditation training is precisely designed to help us see the “stickiness” of our thoughts, and gradually get unstuck. The other “easy” part is gaining an intellectual concept of selflessness in our mind, as opposed to actually seeing, experiencing and KNOWING our awareness. Having gone through the process of seeing God as a cartoon, followed by my soul, it is now relatively easy for me to cartoonize the little man-in-my-head, which helps me start believing the possibility that it is an illusion. The Dzogchen Buddhists are VERY CLEAR that this conceptual process might help reduce the obscuration a little, but that is not our goal. According to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche:
Up until now we have studied and learned, and our understanding may have remained an idea, a separate object held in mind. But the natural state, the luminous wakefulness as it is, is not a physical object composed of matter that we can see. Moreover, it is not as though we, as one entity, are supposed to look at the essence of our mind as another entity. We do not recognize our essence through the dualistic act of one thing looking at another. Our dualistic fixation and thinking is like a veil that covers and obscures this luminosity. We must experience naked wakefulness directly, and this occurs the instant that our mind is stripped bare of conceptual thinking. That experience, therefore, is not a product of our fabrication. It simply is. The problem is that it is too near to us, just like something held so close to your eyes that it is difficult to see. Moreover, it is too easy. We would prefer something more difficult. The difficulty is that remaining free from concepts goes against our tendencies—we enjoy conceptual activity, we like to have something to take hold of.
Waking Up pg 81 there are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understaning these reasons.
words = thinking
The big news here, is that there’s nothing at all new here, we’ve heard and read all of this jazz a million times, I’ve been bumping my head into this truth every frikkin’ day for 27 frikkin’ YEARS! It FEELS like a suddenly solved riddle to me, probably partly because I’ve worked and practiced so hard for so long, that I’ve made a wee bit of progress; I can see what I could not see before, all these words hidden in the shadows, even in the midst of thinking that I was really aware, fully present here in the moment, BOOM, NO I’M NOT! Now, I can often see concepts and ideas suffusing almost every moment. Once I “flip” over to a split second of bare awareness, there is a sense in which it is “easy,” but getting there often seems pretty difficult. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from all of this research is that our minds, when functioning normally, are "organized spontaneous activity, omnipresent in the nervous system.” In other words, humans are stuck with the “monkey mind,” condemned to sleep trains and autopilots. It might sound superficially pessimistic, yet, I have zero doubt that the “fringe benefits,” or what Dan Harris calls “10% happier,” are definitely worth the effort I’ve put into this path. There is more than enough evidence for me to reasonably believe that lifelong monks, so-called “10,000 hour” meditators, are experiencing dramatically different brain states than normal people, at the drop of a hat. It is possible, maybe even for a married, non-monk devout practitioner, to change his mind.
Love mas
a short list of successful strategies:
1. Counting every breath, all day long. I’ve done variations of this for over two years, and in spite of some intrinsic difficulties, it has proven a worthy tool in the arsenal in the battle to alter entrenched unaware habit patterns.
2. While reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” in the section with exercises, he began each one with the imperative: “half smile.” From this, I came up with the inevitably extreme idea, “try to ALWAYS half smile.” Since I forget constantly to be aware NOW, I also constantly forget to smile, but if I’m here now, I’m smiling.
3. Walking meditation; the Buddhist books almost always state something to the effect, that the REAL goal is to be mindful when you “leave the cushion,” i.e. during your everyday life away from sitting meditation, and for me, by far the best “walking meditation” is Yoga. Using the body to move and stretch as a meditative focal point, is in some ways easier than sitting still in meditation, as Gunaratana says, “all else is pushed aside,” leaving “no room for thought.”
4. Maximum time in the wild.
5. Watching attentively all day long for each and every time I think, “I like/love that,” “I dislike/hate this.” Actually releasing our attachments is hard as hell, but the process begins by just noticing what Buddha calls the “three poisons,” “love/attraction, hate/aversion, and neutrality/ignorance.” Simply seeing one's aversions and attractions over and over is an almost automatic path towards equanimity.
6. For years, I’ve used Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “body scan” method to begin my sitting meditation. I focus my inhalation breath traveling to certain body areas, then traveling up and out of the top of my head on the outbreath. My newest strategy is a form of Buddhist Tonglen, I learned from Pema Chodron, but my variation features me breathing into and out of someone else, i.e. I imagine breathing into and out of Suzanne’s heart, to keep my focus on her, and in the moment, simultaneously.
7. 3-part sitting meditation; A few months ago, I, once again overhauled my sitting meditation technique. I sit for an hour, with my Zazen meditation timer giving me two bells, one at 20 mins, and one at 40 mins, so I have three sections: 1. samatha, “concentration,” where I STRUGGLE to stay focused ONLY on breathing; 2. vipasana, “mindfulness,” where I keep a less desperate hold on the breath, but watch the feelings, ideas, and perceptions that fall through conscious awareness, promptly letting them go, returning to the breath; 3. headlessness, where, for the first time in 27 years, I open my eyes, look around at my visual scene, then turn my mental focus inward to see whatever I can see of my “self.” samatha and vipassana Gunaratana explains that traditional Theravada Buddhism has two meditation techniques, samatha (concentration) and vipassana (insight). “Concentration is often called one-pointedness of mind. It can be developed by force, by sheer unremitting willpower.” On the other hand, “you can’t develop mindfulness by force. Active teeth-gritting willpower will hinder progress, but mindfulness does not happen by itself…energy is required, gentle effort is required, constantly reminding yourself in a gentle way to maintain your awareness of whatever is happening right now.” “Learning to look at each second as if it were the first and only second in the universe is essential in vipassana meditation.” Gunaratana.
8. “Letting Go.” I believe that determination (like a bulldog) and incessant repetition (like an ox) of LETTING GO of each thought, perception or feeling, each moment that we become mindfully aware, (the central feature of vipassana) and returning to the breath, is the most important and effective strategy of them all in changing the way our brain/mind functions, so we can live in the NOW.
9. To “cultivate loving friendliness,” I begin each sitting meditation with the rote recitation of Bhante Gunaratana’s thoughts of metta:
May I be well, happy and peaceful, may no harm come to me, may no difficulties come to me, may no problems come to me, may I always meet with success.
I then I repeat the phrase, first with my “family,” then “friends,” then “all persons that are strangers to me,” then “my enemies,” then, “all living beings.”
At the conclusion of my sitting meditation, I recite another Gunaratana passage:
May my mind be filled with loving friendliness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. May I be generous and gentle. May I be relaxed. May I be happy and peaceful. May I be healthy. May my heart become soft. May my words be pleasing to others. May my actions be kind.
May all that I see, hear, smell, taste, touch and think help me to cultivate loving friendliness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity, generosity and gentleness. May they help me relax. May they be a source of peace and happiness. May they help me be free from fear, tension, anxiety, worry, and restlessness.
No matter where I go in the world, may I greet people with happiness, peace, and friendliness. May I be protected in all directions from greed, anger, aversion, hatred jealousy and fear.
© Mark Swanson 2015
After our scary 2-hour drive through deep sand, we braved 100ยบ+ heat, hiking out to
some interesting hills. This two foot high rock formation, with its unlikely striated
colors boggles my mind. 
Buckskin Gulch
Recent rains left mud cakes to play with, as well as standing water in other spots, so strange and unexpected in this searing heat.
Now we're decisively heading towards Colorado, on "Scenic Byways," (roads that, theoretically, have no destination), where we found a fabulous Jeep trail, in the middle of boondocks-nowhere-ville, the perfect place to set up camp on White Canyon
Wet and GORGEOUS, Loch Vale and Suzanne 
