Keep it simple, (or else) samsara!

triple think style stream of consciousness incoming - I'd like to get the gory details out of the way first.

Began meditating at the age of 16 after picking up Mindfulness In Plain English from the local bookstore. For the next three years, my daily practice was boom-or-bust... went weeks without sitting, other times attempted a few hours a day. Joined a few meditation groups, tried out zen, experimented with noting, but it never really amounted to any progress.

I brushed up against some jhana-like experiences, but wasn't particularly convinced that it was the real deal.

All that I really can say that I did was to gain a small amount of concentration, a bit of mindfulness, and a familiarity with fundamental Buddhist teachings. Pretty bad for three years, IMO.

The problem, I now realize, was that I was too stuck in my content. My meditation periods were 50% mental chatter, 50% weak awareness of the breath. Couldn't stop rehearsing or rehashing stories within my mind.

Doubt was probably the biggest problem for me. I'm reading Prometheus Rising right now, where Robert Anton Wilson breaks down Timothy Leary's 8-circuit model of consciousness. I am a third-circuit member AKA a rationalist. I tend to over-conceptualize and map out reality with my thoughts. Thus, it was extremely difficult for me to let go of this mental activity and start pay bare attention to reality. Thoughts like "What's the point of meditation?" or "Should I note or should I just be aware?" constantly interrupted my zazen session and left me feeling confused and frustrated. Spinning my wheels, going nowhere fast.

So that brings me to where am I right now. Today, I had the apartment to myself, so I said "fook it, let's do this!", and spent half the day (5.5ish hours?) meditating a la Mindfulness in Plain English style. Paying attention to the sensations of the breath, noticing the 3 characteristics if they rise, noticing being caught up in thoughts or emotions, and returning to the physical sensations. I kept it simple, focusing on the fundamentals... and for the first time ever, I actually made some real progress!

This is what I accomplished:
- Two occurrences of blissful happiness, each lasting about a minute with some cool colors (maybe jhana, maybe not?)
- Heightened sense of awareness, things look bright and pretty, sensory delight!
- Better able to detect being caught up in doubt/thoughts
- Thought activity down, bare attention up
- Moderate mindfulness of breath and thoughts throughout the day
- A spacious feeling of being grounded in my sensory experience

Conclusions:
- Don't over-complicate things. I feel that I can get very far by just sticking and continually returning to the sensations of my breath
- Being an armchair meditator does no good. Less theory, more testing.
- Thoughts are very sticky. Be careful of even innocent ones, because they serve as the glue for the grasping/rejecting reaction and keep you caught up in that treadmill.
- I shouldn't have felt so frustrated and hateful towards myself and my doubt. My aversion and resentment to confusion was keeping me in emotional bondage and made the doubt even stronger. Accept the doubt, love the confusion, and move on. It's only a problem if you treat like one. (Might be time to put some metta into my practice)

On the menu:
- Try to be aware of the breath and thoughts 24/7. Make my on-the-cushion practice as close as possible to the off-the-cushion practice. Tall order, I realize, but this is what I think I need to do to make progress.
- Keep probing around the 3 characteristics. Impermanence and no-self I can occasionally see, trying to get unsatisfactoriness in there as well.
- Rewire my brain to be less "thinky" and more "awarey". That's where the good stuff is.
- Sign up for a Goenka retreat or two sometime in 2014

Encouragement or advice from fellow third-circuit sufferers is always appreciated.

Humbly,
rein drop

thanks for droppin' on in rain drop

streaming right along w/ya
dancin' in the rain
hey, just remember to take it back to square one every chance you get, it is all there right under your nose
bank line ups
supermarket check outs
any where any time
note the breath
note it in the whole body
note, whatever else is noted
on it goes

gets brighter as it gets sorted

all the blest/blast

triplethink

your prose be jammin, so good it damnin
thoughts, images, ideas - what's with this stuff?
just can't outrun these plans...
too smart for my own good cause i'm a reinman
but ill take your advice into consideration
helping me build this one-man army into a nation

i need to get into your head space, if only for a day
you see a much more interesting world than i do, my friend.
it has such different texture, a totally new overlay
but i guess it's simply all the same in the end

Ah, the irony...

My suggestion is find one practice, and just do that. What seems to work well for my 3rd-circuit mind is a breath concentration practice, e.g. counting the breath. Don't worry about concentration vs. insight debates. With your kind of mind whatever you do in meditation is going naturally incorporate insight. So just do this one thing, e.g., counting the breath, and only that. Keep on coming back to the same instructions. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Your mind won't like it. Just be aware of proliferating tendencies when they arise and go straight back to the breath. Over and over again.

If you want to kickstart progress, a retreat will work.

Well, rainman, I'm like sponge bob, I'll take up anything. When I hit the void the first time I had no clue about anything except that the VOID was PURE and SWEET and INFINITE. If that was all I was in the end I didn't see the point in any limits. Shucks I do now...

Still, I simply did not know any better and I was not prepared to deal with any of it. So I tried anything and everything. All those human limits they speak of... not that I can see...

worries me too...

Balance, work to balances...

hows that? See Level...

Take it slow...

Build the strengths... overcome the weaknesses

It's like refining gold. Gather the ore, and work it.

Plant the Seed. Grow the Poet Tree.

your friendly neighborhood spiders, man
triplethink

Just did 1.5 hours of breath counting - it was a fruitful zazen session. Counting helped reign in the monkey mind, and boosted concentration a bit. Me gusta. My goal for the day is to count as many breaths as I can... 1 to 10 and back again. Can't say I understand how a rationalist mind helps increase insight. Seems like all this conceptualization hinders meditative progress in general. If there's a good side to having 3rd-circuitry hardwiring for meditation, I'm all ears!

I don't know... I'm trying to overcome this rationalist mindset right now. Can't say for sure if it's the right thing to do, but after getting a taste of what meditation can do (guessing that's the VOID for you), I'm hungry for more.

I'd like to take it slow... as fast as possible. Realized today that I put a little bit too much pressure on achieving expectations. Gotta drop those, take it moment by moment.

I enjoyed writing my rap verses earlier - I don't know what spurred me to do that. Maybe lack of sleep, maybe post-meditation afterglow. Apologies if it sounded snarky. Wasn't what I was going for.

Keep dropping nuggets in this thread if you see me going off the path. My 3rd-circuitry always can go for some 5th-circuitry advice.

Back to meditation - shooting for 8 hours today. We shall see.

Wow, pristine perfect meditation fundamentals . Bruce Lee had perfect fundamentals, Jordan had perfect fundamentals.





Don’t count, just let the breathe be and be aware of it

And don't wuss out on those goenka retreats!

There is no need to "to overcome a rationalist mindset". Rationality is one manner of thinking. If it is the only manner of thinking one has, particularly if there are severe limitations to the efficacy of one's 'rational faculties' then one is truly impoverished by these limitations. There are many ways to strengthen and extend or develop rational faculties and various modes of rationality can be very useful and beneficial faculties. There is nothing particularly wrong with rationality except when it the supposed 'rationality' is in fact quite poor and undeveloped. Quite often the greatest kinds of widespread harm or self harm are typically done by those who suppose a kind of thinking is rational when in fact the given thinking is not at all rational.

At the same time there are limitations to the applicability of rational kinds and types of thinking. There are many other ways to employ the mental qualities, faculties and capacities which are a typical of human beings.

There is great promise for human beings in the "Age of Reason", there are, no less so, great dangers in the "Age of Treason." The differences are important and involve the important and discernible distinctions between the development and perfection of qualities of and applications of reason, as opposed to remaining in relative ignorance and delusion about qualities and applications of reason.

Meditation is both attention to and attending to. Meditation is attention/attending to sense perception and sense abilities. Meditation is attention/attending to perception and perceptual abilities. Rationality is a part of the nature of perceptual and sensate or sensual being, beings and becoming. So too is irrationality. So too are outlooks, insights, internal knowledge, external knowledge, conformative knowledge, understanding, wisdom, and ultimately liberating types of knowing and understanding.

I don't take the view that any kind of knowing or understanding of any kinds of healthy and well developed functionality need to be sacrificed in order to become more aware or more knowledgeable or more free from ignorance or delusion. I take the view that this kind of thinking is simply irrational and false and can be seen to be obviously so quite easily.

For instance some people might say that 'enlightenment' will mean the end of 'emotions' or 'feelings' of one kind or another. I don't think so, I think how I view the nature of sensations or responses changes as I understand the nature of such faculties but I don't think such faculties go away or that it would be desireable that these faculties go away for some reason. I don't want to become a machine or a block of wood. If that is someone else's goal, that is fine, it isn't a goal for me.

What one comes to understand by developing the senses and the mind is that all views are limited in one way or another and that all views are confining and imprisoning in one way or another. The path to freedom is always expansive and not more confining. It is not about destroying what is necessary to be what we are, it is about setting what we are free. In order to be freer we need to become better informed and better disciplined, it is this greater knowledge and skillfulness that frees us, regardless of what kind of knowledge and skill it may be, meditation is no different.

Sometimes I rise to the height of rationality, other times I head out for some other mode or range of thought and thinking, it depends what serves. Investigation and experience are the teachers of us, the self taught percipient and sensing minds of the conscious universe. What works and what proves out in practice, to one end or another, is what wins out for this or that purpose. When we start in to something new it is best to do the learning about it up front. It is not good to just throw a kid with no experience or knowledge into the drivers seat of an eighteen wheeler and send them out on the freeway with no instruction or practical guidance. Everything skillful takes a lot of time and energy and rational attentiveness. I hope this is clear enough for you if you think about this for a while because you will find this to be so whether you wish this to be so or not.

Return to sense, to the senses, to sensibility. Enjoy what you can of it. Don't unnecessarily belabor it. It is the life and mind you have, be kind and walk towardsbeing at peace with it as you transform it.

Maybe this sounds too "advicey" but you said you were up for it so, here is some, straight up. It's your thread, after all.

For instance, one needs to accept stuff before one can let it go and let it be. I can cling to my asshole for a long time but eventually it is going to leave another shit smear on the highway of life. Just sayin'.

rationally yours
triplethink

Perhaps you are right to say that I have been "throwing the baby out with the bath water", so to speak. I find that during my meditation sessions, my body tenses up when my rationalizing mind act up. That's probably an unhealthy habit to be developing... but in my defense, the perceptual habits that I've developed over the years have caused me much suffering. I find that they are for the most part based on completely arbitrary chains of justifications. But however invalid my justifications for my actions and thoughts are, I cannot help but continue to do them. So it seems very natural to me to take this macho approach and try to "overcome" my rational mind, even if it's a stupid way of going about it.

Just to be clear, when say I have a rational mind, I mean to say that I have irrational mental habits that pretend to be rational. The unhealthy narratives and anxiety that pervades my head space is a very compelling... unless I'm careful, I can get caught up in the most outlandish, B.S. thought chains that cause a lot of collateral damage in my life. But when I try to solve the problem of irrational thinking by replacing it with more rational, objective thinking (CBT style), the results don't stick. These mental habits have drilled a deep groove into my mind and are pretty resistant to change.

So I guess that's the story of my whacked-out noggin'. Maybe "rational" isn't the word I want to be using. "Giddy" and "insidious"... those are much better. Point being, I'm just going to follow the KISS method, and follow your advice of "Return to sense, to the senses, to sensibility. Enjoy what you can of it. Don't unnecessarily belabor it. It is the life and mind you have, be kind and walk towardsbeing at peace with it as you transform it." That seems to me to be the nugget of your post. I've got more than enough theory to work with. The goal for me is make sure that I don't needlessly over-complicate things. I'll drop my distaste for rationalism - it's just another option in the toolkit... gotta make sure I realize that.

Anyways, onto today's update.

• 4 hours of sitting meditation, about to go for 2 more
• A mixture between counting breaths and silent awareness depending on concentration level
• It was a bad idea to say that I was going to meditate for 8 hours yesterday night. Made it seem like meditation was a 9 to 5 job... took some of the fun out of the process. In the future, try to make meditation less goal dependent.
• Off-the-cushion practice was tough, but I'm making gradual progress in paying bare attention to my thoughts, emotions, and breath.
• Getting a better sense of how craving and rejection can hijack my consciousness and make life go from "=)" to "meh" to "bleh". Working on accepting all sensations, even unpleasant ones, to hinder craving and rejecting process.
• Not much progress on the 3 characteristics front... focus of the day was on getting unstuck out of my mental distractions and feelings.

@ J . - appreciate the enthusiasm! Yup, I'm signing up for a Northern California goenka retreat over the summer as soon as the registration opens up.

Clocked in between 4 and 6 hours of zazen today - don't know the exact number. I can feel the momentum starting to pick up... clarity and mood are both improving rapidly. No earth shattering experiences yet, but vibrations are steadily becoming more noticeable.

Some things that I found helpful include...

• Locking myself in my zazen room and blockading the door with my cupboards. It helped encourage me to continue sitting through unpleasant mind states. Putting the power of my laziness to work!
• Really encouraging myself to accept and simply be aware of all sensations. No fighting, no stories, no grasping... just being mindful of what's going on under the hood. I discovered that there some subtle aversion/control going on that was disrupting my concentration and feeding into my suffering. Need to watch out for that.
• Unsticking myself from my thoughts/reactions just by being aware that they are a particular set of ingrained mental patterns that are completely arbitrary. No matter how compelling they may seem, these thoughts and reactions are done out of habit, not out of wisdom.

The thinking process didn't have much as hold on me as it did yesterday. Slowly becoming aware of unfiltered and unadulterated reality... it's both overwhelming and exciting. We do this thing with my Shih-Tzu at home where we "make a party" to reward good behavior. Because my dog is dumb as a doorknob, he has no idea what the hell is going on, but he likes it! That's sort of how I feel right now when I immerse myself in reality at it is. It's amazing how much my life is based on these concepts and what's left when they start dropping away.

A recap of today's events:

- Watched Gary Weber and Rich Doyle talk about the nature of attachment and suffering, specifically how one can physically feel the tension and energy changes caused by attachment within the body. Here's the link. Well worth watching if you have 20 minutes.

- During the talk, Gary and Rich mentioned self-inquiry as a valid strategy for dealing with attachment. Asking questions such as "Who is listening?" or "When am I?" and investigating what arises helps dissolve the sense of self that holds attachment in place.

- I decided to use these two techniques during today's meditation. I began my meditation today by simply enjoying my thoughts. No forcing anything or attempting to bring my awareness to my breath... just letting myself think while getting comfortable on the chair I was sitting on. I've been finding that beginning my meditation with any sort of struggle or control leads to tension throughout the entire sit. Gradually, my thoughts began to slow down, so I invited my mind to see how it would feel to pay attention to my breath and relax the thinking process completely. Again, no forcing or violent striving. Just a simple suggestion that would peak my mind's curiosity, relax it, and turn in towards the sensations of the breath.

- At this point, I started noticing the areas of tension and heat within my body and tracking down their causes. Planning thoughts caused a tightening in the back of my head, doubt could be felt like a hand grasping my intestines, anger could be felt in the tension of my neck, face, and chest, etc... bringing these emotions and thoughts to a physical level helped me understand them without getting stuck in them.

- When I began the self-inquiry portion of the meditation, many of these areas of tension and heat simply dissolved. Searching for the "I" in my physical and mental sensations removed the linchpin that held the agitation within my body together. It was a liberating feeling - I felt extraordinarily energetic, compassionate, and grounded. My self-narrative dropped away and simple awareness took its place. After the meditation, I was extremely refreshed and in a good head space - a happy occurrence for me.

So that's my feel good story of the day. It helped confirm why I began meditating again in the first place. I always thought that self-inquiry was a dumb exercise - seemed too new-agey and semantic to be of any value. That was stupid of me. Shouldn't knock it 'till you try it, as the saying goes.

rein drop out.

I went 20 hours without sleep today - had to pack up everything for a temporary move to Nor Cal. As such, only could handle an hour of sitting meditation. Bleh.

Going to crash right now for a very long time, but need to remind myself to do two things for tomorrow:
- Put some sticky notes around the house to remind me to have a moment of mindfulness and self-inquiry... "Who is listening?" has lately been a good question for me to work with.
- Play around with how grasping/rejecting feels by bringing objects of attachment into my thinking process and then removing them... switch between foreground and background awareness of attachments and notice the changes that result in my body. Must remember to keep it at a non-semantic level.

That's all folks. Happy Holidays!