Do you know the feeling when you wake up immediately after some much-needed sleep? You may find that, at least for those few moments before life begins rushing in, you can see the world and hear its sounds at a level that you don’t normally get the opportunity to enjoy. There is a certain unmistakable clarity that is difficult to describe. Then, within a few seconds or minutes, it goes away, like Coleridge’s dream of Xanadu. Sometimes, you feel, you can hold onto it for a while, and maybe you do.
Many people think more in images. The above changes may be rather common to people who tend to think mostly in words. But it may not matter whether you are more words or images. This phenomenon of “life rushing in” is typical, and not even the most blissful monk or California guru may be completely immune to its power. Yet perhaps you’ve occasionally asked yourself whether this is not controllable or voluntary, whether we can bring this state back whenever we need it. If so, then this modest essay is for you. The ability to keep the thoughts at bay for a while is a fascinating channel into that question, one of many underused ways of exercising a muscle most people don’t know they have. The main difference between you and different animals is that you can read and understand me, and the animals can’t. But then you may also wish to be able to switch this ability off, whereas the animals do not.
I’ve been meaning to write this for some time, only I’m not such a disciplined writer, and I’ve also been very concerned about how to explain it concisely, conservatively, relatively completely, and with limited self-serving rhetoric. Not long ago, some people in Changsha asked my opinion about it. I could never explain this succinctly in Chinese, let alone English. This is for anyone who wants to begin to understand or round out their knowledge with a condensed view of how we might recapture an ability that people have when they are young. This state of mind is what the old poet Laozi may have meant when eight times he mentions “the [unnamed] uncarved wood” (pu 朴, which Victor Mair suspects is related to the European word “block”) and when numerous times he writes about tao (dao 道) and related things that “escape all description” (fei chang ming 非常名).
But part of my point is that we don’t need to be fancy Taoists, throwing around fancy names, to be entitled to experiencing a state of our own minds. That’s ours, surely? I sure am not a fancy Taoist. Ironically (and yet apparently unknown to modern Taoists), this fact about staying uncarved is perhaps the central point of all of Laozi’s messages. That is, until his disciple Zhuangzi had to go and pull out a chisel.
I think it would be a shame to wake up one day at 80 and think things like:
- “I’ve rarely really savored an apple [or whatever good thing] because I’ve been too busy [watching the screen, reading] while eating the apple.”
- “I’ve rarely really savored washing dishes [or whatever more humdrum life activity] because I’ve been too busy [listening to music, thinking about my fucking boss] while doing it.”
- “If I’d only just shut up at the right moment all those years ago, I wouldn’t have lost my [job, love, friend, argument with a police officer, etc.].”
- “I hit a wall on [some skill] and thinking back I suspect it was all in my mind.”
- “Over the last 50 years, it’s been like I’ve needed more and more coffee, and less and less sleep.”
- “When was it that I forgot how to [laugh, cry, see, yawn]?”
- “I thought too much, and enjoyed too little.”
- “Turns out alcohol [or other drug, including caffeine] had a big impact on my life.”
For simplicity’s sake, perhaps I ought to call all of the acts and non-acts under discussion meditation, though this word has really too much ambiguity and diversity and general baggage to meet the needs of a thing that really wants better support from cognitive science and human communication. Ironically, one good way I’ve found in English to describe what I think of as the true final act or state, is mindlessness. But that’s bound to be at least as problematic (not to mention the baggage!). For now, to disambiguate, other useful ways I’ve found to label the act in question are mental retraction or, perhaps better, abtention, reserving any etymological and ontological defenses of these for later. They sound almost as pretentious and inadequate as anything else, so feel free to pick whatever serves any given part of the discussion. Nothing is gospel, because it appears that this eludes naming. Ultimately, and more to the point, you may discard all terms and just do it and pass on your own understanding – the simpler, the better.
Right off the bat, I should say that I have no formal training in this, but close to 50 years of experience exploring, using, and struggling with it. I’m no zen master, but I can go into zen mind right away, and stay in it for long periods – although I regularly neglect to do so and am then back on the wheel of suffering just like all of us. Yet the key is there for me, and it’s there for anyone, and I think it’s not that difficult to attain. The act and state are so universally useful in everyday life that I have never heard anyone familiar with it contradict me whenever I have loudly complained that this should be compulsory education in middle school or early high school. Youth, especially coming into their teens, can and probably should be examined for it, and it should be a lifetime companion for billions. It comes closest to this in India, though even there the gurus and their sutras and vedas undermine the formula, and government inertia undermines the programs.
This mental training seems to have the potential to serve many related purposes. Some examples:
- focusing on a key action while dismissing distractions (sport, work, anything)
- falling asleep
- reading without subvocalization
- ignoring an earworm (cognitively related to subvocalization)
- “noticing” things around you
- seeing a thing in vivid detail
- not bursting out in anger
- kicking a habit (e.g., drugs), or managing other urges (e.g., diet)
- the reverse: motivating action (for example, exercise)
The practice of meditation, or retraction, or mindlessness is probably so basic and simple that it shouldn’t even require a text this long to explain it. One problem is that Western languages (and even most other languages) so far lack a good vocabulary and explanation of what is happening and how we can reproduce its beneficial effects – assuming it is even possible to explain verbally. And so an industry has sprung up with various explanations that cloud it in mystique instead of bringing clarity. In their quest to maintain commercial value, each new novelty is more complicated and costly than the last. I receive the most pushback from people who have had, and especially those who offer for profit, formal training in meditation and yoga. After all, it is a multibillion-dollar industry, and any such thing calls for loyalty, whether deserved or not. Even in Asia, the gurus put yoga and meditation together on a linear path in a complicated training regimen filled with terminology from divergent schools that is inscrutable even to native speakers. I think this overcomplicates the issue and puts it out of reach for all but the jet set, who can fly out and spend their money and time in an ashram. Further east (and west), the zen masters put any hope of chan 禅 (dhyana, the abdication) and ming 冥 (profound, the underworld) in a hopelessly inaccessible haze.
Broad recognition of the benefits of Asian physical and mental training practice came to the West, primarily England and the U.S. West Coast, in the fertile intercultural period after World War II, when international air travel was demilitarized and made available to the upper-middle class. Returning from the Orient, explorers excitedly shared their discoveries. Courtenay Wright studied go, Ed Maisel and Betty Cage studied taijiquan, and greater numbers got into various martial arts, meditation, and yoga. The closest thing to a communitarian effort to popularize the practices without a profit motive came in the beat and hippie period, and then died out, so that by the mid-1970s there was nothing left but a large number of for-profit franchises, many of which still exist. I once visited “The Farm,” Steve Gaskin’s collective in Tennessee, and as we were chatting he seemed to try to pierce through me with his eyes. Eckhart Tolle and his wife have flogged mindfulness to death, shrouding it in mystery. I’m afraid that the Western ashrams and schools have done the same, charging plenty of money for long, disciplined regimens. Even Buddhist monks in Asia are treated like celebrities, and their complex trainings, again, require money, mobility, and a great deal of leisure time (years!) to begin to benefit. That’s not what this should be about. Actually, Eknath Easwaran (despite his deeply flawed character) comes close to bringing the ideas to their simple purpose. His basic book, if it hasn’t been overlarded in later editions, might be useful.1
Any complication over the brass tacks of this practice of meditation does a great disservice to the poor and suffering, the illiterate or less educated, and any others who cannot easily access it but who need and deserve it more than any of us. That is the primary justification for my dismissal and even denigration of the commercialization and specialization of this practice. This is plain elitism, and it seems to come in part straight out of the West Coast.
What these people have done is to arrogate the practice to themselves, put themselves at its gates, restrict free access. But isn’t this knowledge the property of all humankind? Aren’t these our brains? Shouldn’t we all be earnestly expending our last energies to give this skill away to those who most need it? Laozi wrote: “Dao gave birth to one, one to two, two to three, three to the universe.” He meant that the simple has been obscured by the complex. Starting with the elemental form that is mindlessness, and naming, branding, absconding with it, is a kind of crime. The reversal back to dao, back to a viewframe of nothingness (which really seems to be what meditation achieves in practice) – stealing the light, taking it back from those who would control the knowledge – should be the work of the 100 million privileged few who have the space to learn and teach it.
I wonder how those who indulge in this can explain how they think the commercial production and consumption of this business serves humanity and not primarily themselves. If anything should be open source, it should be this.
The cognitive
I won’t go deep into the cognitive underpinnings of this, partly because nobody really knows and the science seems to be extremely patchy and conflicting, and partly because it probably doesn’t matter much. This part may be skipped, I think, or returned to later. What I have found in the surface literature is mostly research on things like the benefits of mindfulness in various occupations and schools in reducing stress, which is certainly valuable. Thomas Joiner has found counterevidence that mindfulness therapy may not work. But I have not found any coherent and mature field of study that convincingly reduces the act itself to practice.
That said, my own reading and research have included good doses of cognitive science. This traditionally goes back to William James and his little experiments on “the education of attention,” then leaps across the mess of 20th century Gestalt and behavioral theories into the cognitive and neurocognitive science of our own time. Where we land is approximately the realm of giant thinkers such as Tversky and Kahneman, Sir Alan Baddeley, and a host of others. In general, this huge family of theories model the brain as a computer-like processor and center around attention as a resource or pipeline of limited capacity, like primary memory and data bottlenecks in computer terms. Overloading causes us to drop information, some of which may be crucial. There seems to be strong empirical support for Baddeley’s central executive that coordinates two independent short-term memory systems: a linguistic “phonological loop” and a visuospatial “sketchpad,” either of which you might recognize when you voluntarily (or involuntarily) repeat a phrase or a number in your head, or try to picture something in your “mind’s eye.”
Some researchers have proposed that our brains record absolutely every stimulus we attend to. But only a very small part of the stimuli we attend to gets strongly reinforced in the human neocortex, becoming long-term memories of virtually unlimited capacity and durability, recorded and relatively easily accessible. The rest, we “forget” (it’s there, latent, but not strong enough to recalled).
A separate area of study looks at the left and right brain hemispheres. Very roughly, and with many complicated exceptions, parts of the left hemisphere are analytical (such as with descriptive language) and parts of the right hemisphere seem to synthesize things into larger schemes (such as into images and cohesive constructs). It’s increasingly evident in the relevant sciences that this may all be tied up with the auditory and visuospatial. Attention, then, may be where the two hemispheres meet, somewhere along the hippocampal path.
Can we even think of two things?
I’ve said that when we practice deliberate attention, we go from thinking of two things to thinking of one thing. In fact, that is probably not perfectly accurate and I am only using it as an explanatory tool.
Let us set aside that Sir Alan Baddeley’s image sketchpad and sound loop appear to be independently running processes in the brain, and that the executive (perhaps that is the center of attention?!) can switch our focus from one to the other. That may be the explanation for the brain being able to interrupt us at inappropriate times. But surely the sketchpad and loop can’t be respectively the same as the right and left brain, since there are some contradictions. But isn’t it the insistent, linguistically and analytically obsessed left brain that constantly interrupts us, harasses the synthetic, peaceful, resolving right brain? Might that be what is behind Alan Watts’ idea of our “monkey mind” playing tricks on us and distracting us, getting us wandering or angry or impulsive? This seems somewhere near the truth.
Whether we are the type that thinks more in words or images, it appears likely that the brain can really focus or concentrate its point (“attend”) only on absolutely one thing at a time. We can walk and chew gum at the same time, but the two acts are automatic and by the time we’re about 5 years old neither requires any attention at all. But I imagine you may have tried in the past to attend simultaneously (not alternatingly) to two things at a time and found it impossible. My point in talking about “thinking of two things” is to describe our normal pattern of thinking during regular waking hours as thinking of many different and disparate things without discipline or the ability to attend to one and only one. Certainly, we may be able to focus on a single task in front of us, such as when we are pondering a choice of words at our desks, but during this work, in effect our attention may be in several places in rapid sequence, leaping and landing on whatever is most important at the time (it’s not “attention deficit,” it’s an overabundance of nondirected switching). In cases when we are well focused, our ability to attend to each thing at its appropriate time is good, but when we are scattered in thought, we can’t focus, can’t easily direct our attention. We are thinking of many things, which is to say alternating rapidly among at least two. And even if we are in the groove, we can still only think of one thing at a time.
The step we need to take is to go, at will, from bouncing back and forth (often unwillingly) among attention to two or more stimuli in a jumble, to attending to a single stimulus of our choice, and to practice the deliberate maintenance of that attention for increasingly long periods without getting distracted by any number two stimulus. That is the essential thing that mindfulness training and meditation can exercise. I believe that it is simply and more or less exactly that, that it is the root of all peace of mind, and that it is the same thing that I am talking about whenever I say attending to one thing or no-thing.
If most of this is already obvious to you, and if the ideas and descriptions come easier to you than to me, then both congratulations and shame on you. The truth is that it is not obvious to most people, and it is famously difficult to articulate. So shame on you for not sharing. If you’re good at this, spend part of your life finding unpretentious, non-self-serving ways to pass this on to people who suffer more than you and I do.
The practice
How does one begin to move the ineptly named2 “monkey mind” in a new direction, let alone to “stop thinking,” as it were, for example to get to sleep? Attention seems to have the property almost of a muscle, and it even seems conceivable that the neurocognitive mechanisms of attending to or abtending away from a thing are analogous to those of flexing a muscle. But if we tolerate this analogy, then there is still an important concern: is this “muscle” flexing or extending when we respectively attend and…well, abtend?
This has not been easy for me to answer. We may try to answer this by looking at the basic work of simple meditation, which I encourage you to try if you are not already familiar with it. I gather that meditation is a process that helps us get from thinking of two things, to one thing, to nothing at all.
In any exercise of meditation, we focus on (or, yes, attend to) a specific thing and slowly go over it. One may listen to a set of ambient sounds, or observe some object. One may use a poem or other mantra, a visual image (a butterfly, a mandala, the bark of a tree), any rhythm, any simple thought, or any cohesive single gestalt of sensory stimuli. How to attend without concentrating hard and spoiling the sensation of relaxing? I recall Easwaran explains it best, telling us to move along the piece, lightly resting on each successive word or other part of the whole. I would describe it as wandering or meandering across the work, but in a single and single-minded direction. We do not “think” at all of the meaning of the word or image or sound or sensation, nor do we make any judgments at all. Doing this distracts, makes us think of different aspects of the thing and then further drift off. We simply pause on the thing itself briefly, then (deliberately) wander on to the next part in the sequence or the repetition of the previous one.
We start practicing by doing this in a quiet room with no distracting stimuli, on a single work. Understanding how you are working this muscle should not take long, although it may take time to control your focus. This is attending. We are focusing on a single thing, and as animal behavior seems to suggest, it is our original state anyway. Concentrating takes effort, but simple attending need not take much if any. As we improve at this skill, we can find ways in the real world to apply it, such as to closely gaze at a bird or a pebble or any other natural (or manmade) thing, or to hear a sound with increasingly deep focus. The whole world.
Deeply focusing on a single thing is not easy. It is not the same as concentrating, since it should not be effortful. Another part of our brain (perhaps this is some part of the left brain or the phonological loop) is competing for attention and drawing us away (perhaps the central executive in the busy modern human brain biases too much in favor of the linguistic loop, as it constantly accesses past and future information). Exercising the muscle of attention is done by maintaining focus on the object and either moving deliberately elsewhere or else digging deeper into the details of that object. An orange, the next orange; or an orange, the pores of the orange, the depths of colors of the pores of the orange. One pore, another pore, and so on.
I wonder if simple descriptions like this might not be all that is needed for anyone to understand all aspects of getting from thinking about two things to one thing, for the rest of their lives. But perhaps you can improve on this.
You might already be able to see the analogies in counting sheep (walking past, or leaping over a farm fence) to drop off to sleep. Why sheep? Soft, woolly, harmless. Most of us don’t count dragons or cadavers. Why leaping? A graceful, noiseless action. Even their bleat is soothing.
Stimulus should not be jarring or otherwise highly stimulating, because that distracts attention. I don’t think even many zen masters are going to be able to easily remain in no-mind, where there is construction, horns honking, or a baby wailing nearby. So I hope we can stop feeling inadequate. The process is yours to own, it does not belong to the masters in any sense of ownership, either in some right to gatekeep its teachings or some (surely exaggerated) right to claim perfection in it. Practicing abtention or whatever you want to call it is like any exercise – you can always improve, but some effects at any level should be immediately felt.
So, are we attending or abtending?
If we can improve our skills in this, many of the difficulties of modern life should be ours to get the better of, at least insofar as having a way to alleviate suffering. If we can simply avoid certain distractions at our will, if we can move deliberately from any thought to any other without fighting with our own brain, many conflicts can be resolved. In theory. This is at the heart of managing all of our impulses – to grab that next cigarette or hit of cocaine or betel nut, to yell at a loved one, to put off that morning walk, to obsess about a subject. Is it really that simple? I am pretty sure that it really is. And so, practice on attending and abtending is potentially of unlimited value. I suppose it can stop wars.
Until recently, I thought that attending (thinking toward something) and abtending (thinking away from something) were two completely distinct acts. But let this part of the essay be a mental exercise into whether abtending is not simply the mirror image of attending: whenever we attend, we are simultaneously abtending away from another thought.
If we use muscles as an analogy, as the flexor muscle attends (toward), the extensor and tendon simultaneously abtend (away). The extensor is slack when the flexor is flexing, and vice versa when the limb returns to rest. And remember that many muscle movements are automatic, and muscles can be trained for strength, and the mind for focus and endurance in maintaining that strength. If the neural analogy holds, then all that we are doing when we attend and abtend is learning to flex and extend a pair of neural pathways at will and with increasing surety and stability. We learn how to do this with hundreds of muscles as infants; how can we fail to do this with two more muscles as adults? (Or is it that we forget this skill, probably starting in early adolescence?)
Try this. Look at the word below, but try simply seeing it, observing it, not letting yourself try to find out anything about it, not thinking about yesterday, or Peru, or anything else, not hearing the voices in the next room. See how long you can do this. If you get distracted, ease yourself back:
attention
Now, consider that the moment after you stop attending to this one thing, the switching to something else, for however brief or long a period, is probably the abtention from it, the experience of no-thing (see more below). (If you move calmly enough away, do you feel the breath rushing in?)
Here is another kind of experiment:
While taking a short or long walk from one place to another, try giving your calm but as full as possible attention to one thing, such as the pavement or the trees or grass or even the gleam of parked cars or sound of birds or any other consistently appearing thing. This is essentially what Hermann Hesse’s dashing Siddhartha is doing in the first chapter as he meditates with his appropriately impressed wingman, Govinda.
If you send me your favorite, I will include it here.
Another point I think worth making is that when we are attending without concentration or thought, we are in the proverbial “here and now” that the gurus and zen masters boast about. It is probably that simple. This is because when we are attending well, the “other” spatiotemporal aspects of the world are put aside. In the model I built here, when we are not attending, we (our analytical processes) are either reviewing or anticipating. When attending, memories of past and future, and of different places, and of other aspectual abstractions, are temporarily put away. I don’t like to say they are suppressed, because that suggests force; only that we are keeping ourselves from wandering there. Likely what we are doing is deterring our attention center from activating to the brain’s abstract, high-level left-hemisphere processing. Interestingly, “there” is where most of our problems lie. Unless we are engaged in a knife-fight or something, when in the here and now, the problems are usually elsewhere – even if only a few moments in the past or future, or just out of sight instead of in front of our faces.
Human babies learn to cope with, or make “permanent,” such aspectual anomalies (aka “ideas”) at a surprisingly early age. By the teens we are expert at filing and accessing these ideas, and we spend a lot more time doing it. Human language and other symbols create the handy schematic referents for these spatiotemporal aspects, and so when we are linguistically engaged, we cannot possibly do anything but be away from the here and now. When Eckhart Tolle and other masters are flapping their jaws or negotiating keynote engagements and profits and airports as they so often do, I will lay down good money that they are not in the here and now. Fortunately for them, they have assistants to cook, clean their toilets, and make arrangements for them, so perhaps there is a little time left over each day, when they are not talking, to actually be in the here and now. You and I, however, in our seemingly little lives, may thus, ironically, have more opportunities. Because, as Thich Nhat Hanh points out, mindfulness is available to us especially when we are doing mundane things like slicing vegetables, washing dishes, or swabbing the toilet. (Not so, delivering a lecture or negotiating a delayed flight.) And if you’re in the type of shit job where you’re paid to think for someone else, try not to do it for too long. Nonmembership has its privileges.
This expertise at wandering away for long stretches from the here and now seems largely or entirely unique to humans, though perhaps the higher apes have some of it. It seems that animals are almost always in the here and now. Even the dog, as bright as it is, knows only a limited level, or perhaps nothing at all, of the human constructs of yesterday or tomorrow, here or there, and so its thoughts are mostly, or entirely, in the here and now. Although even birds are believed to be able to hold grudges for a few days, what is the substance of a grudge?
Going from one thought, to no-thought
I hope that I’ve described clearly enough above about attending and its mirror, what I am calling abtending. It is true that it will probably take most of us some good amount of time, perhaps months or even years or more likely a whole lifetime, to get totally proficient at always attending without ever involuntarily losing focus, assuming we would ever want to do that. That is another reason we should be teaching this to people at a young age and insisting on its companionship throughout life as diligently as we do math or history. I discovered this on my own in my 20’s during a minor period of hardship, without any book or expert or mystical epiphany to guide me. I often still can’t walk down a street without my mind wandering off to yesterday and tomorrow. But I can move into the now, and stay there at will, and I can get to sleep and recognize and control most impulses pretty well.
I think that it is worthwhile to take a trip to the “gym” in our minds as often as possible. Walking, resting, working, cleaning, doing a craft, or deliberately finding time to meditate are all opportunities to go in and practice the mental gymnastics of attending (but see below; perhaps gymnastics is the wrongest analogy!). I can only reiterate that when we are using language, it is impossible to attend to anything but the discussion at hand. It is also when we are drawing without trying to use cartoon forms as intermediary gestalts (as Kimon Nicolaides and Betty Edwards have pointed out) that we can attend fully to the subject and draw directly from life. Drawing is another good activity to bring out a meditative state.
And so, once we are on the path to learning how to attend, learn some mental self-control, get to one thought, how do we go from there to no thought?
You might assume that once you have taken the time to understand attention, you are an important but only tiny part of the way along a difficult path to get to one-thought, and that, with years of further exercise in attending, you can then graduate and begin a trek to the next peak, that of getting to no thought at all – a skill that may help you to get to sleep, come to full peace with your surroundings, and other mysterious and mystical acts. That’s what the gurus seem to want us to think.
But I think that, refreshingly, it may be far simpler than this. If attending is the flexing of a kind of muscle to focus (remember, not concentrate) on a particular point, and if abtending is its mirror, then perhaps getting from one thought to no thoughts is simply abtending without attending to the next thing. The Latin prefix a- means to go toward, ab- to go away. The -tend- root is Latin for “stretch.” The flexor muscle is usually the lifting muscle that does the work, and the extensor muscle is the one that brings the limb along the joint back to an extended and relaxed position. So, it doesn’t seem outrageous to propose that when attending, we may be flexing the flexor of our attention, and when abtending, we may be activating the extensor of our attention (unflexing) without regard to lifting something and challenging gravity – in this case, a subsequent thought instead of allowing entropy to rush in.
And so going from one thing to thinking about no-thing may simply be to not attend to anything – to allow the muscle to relax and float free. This may be approximately the feeling that one who is proficient at falling asleep gets when they “stop thinking” and start drifting towards sleep. It may also be what we as beginning bodhisattvas (how I hate that term!) reach when in a deep meditative trance, or when leaving the realm of the singular focused object to the universal. This is, I think, far easier to achieve than the gurus will admit, easier than we might imagine.
Let us take falling asleep as an example. When counting sheep, we are attending to one wisely evolved, deliberately fantastical imaginary episode: coming to rest on each prancing sheep, then abtending, then attending to the next sheep, then abtending, in a rhythmic cycle of identical one-thoughts (attend this one sheep) that alternate with no-thoughts (abtend, the pause in the space between any two sheep) – and eventually we sleep. Where does consciousness go when it lets go of that last sheep? Arguably, it simply lets go of it and neglects to latch onto another sheep, like a baby does when the bottle finally falls out of her hand and she falls asleep. Thinking of no-thing.
Now, all that said, it is also possible to bypass the step of counting sheep by abtending directly for long enough that we pass the threshold into unconsciousness. This is to say, to think of nothing, to be barely present until the fields of random noise soon begin dancing across our sketchpad and through our loop. Sometimes falling asleep takes a few minutes, sometimes longer. But in any event, counting sheep or any of these techniques work well only when we are intentionally attending to the task and not letting our mind wander.
And so relaxing or abstention [sic; a different root, but similar] from any activity may come from deliberately attending to a new thing at will, or through bypassing an attentional act and simply abtending, or letting go of thought.
As I use the muscle analogy, I want to emphasize that it may perhaps be this way neurologically. We know how it feels to practice a certain new or unfamiliar muscle action, and this attention work is very similar. Let us set aside eye movements (a separate set of muscles) and speak only of thought. When we are forcing ourselves to attend to something (concentrating), it is as though we are guiding our brains to fire a certain lifting action, which is to say firing neurons. Cognition as neural activity may sound like a neuroscientific redundancy, but to many of us it is a new insight to consider many kinds of conscious neural impulses as analogous for the purposes of learning how to fire them, regardless of their very distinct practical effects. I think it is important to emphasize this, because it serves as a reasonable, credible, and perhaps even quite valid explanatory frame for the physiological and neurological aspects of this very beneficial practice.
About that monkey
One thing I have found lacking in the traditional teaching is its use of terms. We can pardon millennia of black-boxing about how the brain actually functions, less so the decades since the art of mindfulness began arriving at a welcoming West, given our pretensions relating to psychology and the scientific method. But “monkey mind” as a black-box term has been particularly problematic: I wonder if it is not this single conception of having to tame our inner simian that gave rise to the images of years of training in an ashram under a master where we must become disciplined. Given even the limited knowledge of cognitive science that we nobodies have, it should be easy to see that this description and approach might be counterproductive.
To call it “monkey mind” is to presuppose a single wayward brain that is to be tamed. Whether we rely on or reject an information processing model of cognition (where we explain the brain almost as a computer), it is pretty clear from most of the science that cognition (and, importantly, perhaps perceivable consciousness of that cognition) is not a single process but operates on parallel simultaneous activities. The brain, we now understand, is truly an electronic device, and electrons flow as naturally in parallel as they do in series, and more efficiently. That is about all we need to know to conclude that we might be more accurate for our discussion to call it not “monkey mind” but “multi-mind.” I mention “perceivable consciousness” just above because I suspect that all inner conflict we experience may not only be the cause of “multi-mind” but that it is possible to make the conflict fairly visible to us for personal study and self-treatment.
This is important because of the problematic teaching that has come out of the assumption of needing to control a single process like training a “monkey.” The “taming” of the monkey-mind assumes that some impulses need to be suppressed, through toil and sweat, in an expensive and very lengthy discipline. I think it could well take a lifetime under any circumstances ultimately to become very good at what it is we are talking about here, but that is not what I mean. Today there are any number of movie scenes panning across a field of “disciples,” soon to settle on the hero, sitting on the floor alongside companions (I picture Julia Roberts), sweating in some ancient, exotic Indian hall, in obedience to some great guru, clumsily and effortfully reciting a mantram. The assumption is that after years of expense and struggle one will have tamed the monkey.
Taken this way, two assumptions immediately become apparent even to us jerks who can’t afford the guru: (1) this characterizes the matter as a battle of will; (2) it follows even from the fact of a battle that there already exists an assumption of being of (at least) “two minds,” though it seems poorly thought out.
Certainly, we can discipline our children by force and have been doing it for millennia. We see that it seems to work and we know that it creates obedient and grateful charges, although it can also encourage resentment, disrespect, and sometimes rebellion. On the other hand, recent generations are being taught that calm, reasoned persuasion with a child (real or perhaps inner) can leave fewer scars, and if we must use something like force it should be applied without rancor. Just as a shorthand here, let me call yang 阳 the part of consciousness more or less understood as more analytical, linguistic, active, compelled, male perhaps, left if you will; while yin 阴 will be the part that is more synthetic, artistic, passive, soothing, female perhaps, right if you will. (Understand that these are only approximations and nothing here is meant to be immortalized as vocabulary: I am sure everyone has varying conceptions.)
I have looked at this training more as a gentle and probably nonlinguistic campaign of the yin to persuade the yang to settle down. How that works out as neuronal pathway processes and what cortical lobes are involved, at least for now, God only knows and we needn’t care. This arrangement has been helpful for me. When I hear any “voice” or rebellion in my mind, I assume it to be the yang, the linguist, the phonological loop, or what have you. I sense my yin responding calmly, using no voice per se, only softer metaphors of gentle persuasion, but equally persistent and always a lot more sensible. The result is that language and analysis vanish, and along with this, aspectual concepts are set aside temporarily for later deliberation. I enter the mindful state. At least in my mind, this has become like a pretty good marriage. This should never be a frustrating experience, but more of a cooperative one. You might keep this model in mind whenever practicing and experimenting leads to frustration, and it may also have other fringe benefits (such as relates to what it might mean to “learn to love oneself”).
Yoga and its place
I mentioned before that yoga and meditation are mixed together in a lot of programs because they are related in Asian culture. I will not go into detail about yoga except to say that the way it is taught in most cases seems to be an excessively complicated ritual program of something as simple and natural as stretching out the body. With this problem it is on a complete parallel with meditation.
As adults, we begin forgetting the practice of stretching the body, though animals do it their entire lives. This must have something to do with the fact that we spend most of our time anticipating and reviewing, and little time fulfilling our body’s needs. Apparently, stretching and yawning may not be totally reptilian impulses, but our distractive thinking can actually pre-empt or deactivate the impulse to enact them. Meanwhile, yoga schools insist that we might hurt ourselves if we do not spend hundreds of dollars at a time to put ourselves in their care.
Animals never tire of intense, sometimes seemingly dangerous, acts of stretching and yawning, and they never seem to hurt themselves doing it. When you see a cat in full stretch, notice how it is extending all of its muscles. Does it seem to be holding back, in fear of breaking its spine? When you abtend at will, and even when you have involuntarily abtended against your will, you may notice yourself suddenly yawning or taking in a breath unintentionally. That is arguably the involuntary core of yogic practice, perhaps the original link between yoga and meditation. The key is to figure out how to take it from involuntary to voluntary. Perhaps it starts with deliberate yawning and stretching. In other words, taking back yoga as your birthright, not the province of some “master.”
I think that yoga is a beneficial form of exercise. But again, the professional masters have taken it to a realm and level that puts even the basics out of reach unless you are willing to pay. It also overcomplicates the whole simple thing. Most things that belong to us are actually taken away by these hypocrites who pretend they want to benefit us, when in fact it is all about benefiting them. We see videos of guitar masters doing effortless riffs and hence taking the guitar and personal music away from us; taijiquan teachers in their flowing silk robes doing their dramatic, punctuated postures and hence elevating simple calisthenics to a place out of reach; and men and women with tight-fitting leotards showing their pefectly toned bodies, demonstrating the most impressive splits and headstands, hence taking our very bodies away from us.
Even the etymology of the terms reveals some contradictions. Yoga – both the physical activity and the related practice of meditation – are meant to yoke, or harness together by determined discipline, the practitioner’s body and mind to spiritual nirvikalpa, the ultimate release. The two holy lovers Shiva and Parvati, yogi and yogini, god and goddess, symbolize a kind of perfection in this discipline that seems out of reach of the mere mortal. Thus one requires a guru (the grave, venerated one; alternately and less accurately, the one who uncovers that which is hidden) to help reveal to us that which would normally be unattainable, that is, to become like gods. This placing the goals at such a conceptual distance from humanity (yet so much easier if you pay me!) obscures the idea that this was always in everyone’s brain, that it belongs to every human, that it is not a complicated matter – and so puts it out of reach of the humble billions who most need and deserve to benefit from it. The teachers are doing the world an incalculable disservice.
The art of stretching and yawning belongs to no teacher, and it is an offense to humanity to gatekeep it just as is done with meditation and mindfulness learning. The basics are quite enough. There is no need to do the splits or even to stand on one’s head to enjoy the many benefits of stretching and yawning. It is really our right to lie on the floor after a hard day at the desk or in the stockroom, and turn our torsos whatever unusual way we please, feeling our bodies relax. Perhaps it is a mistake to promote yoga, and schools should just teach the value and natural majesty of simple stretching and yawning. And if you want to get to the splits or standing on your head or balancing on one foot, any of those also belongs to you and should not take a long time to develop.
And yet note again the analogies: At times our inner cat suddenly yawns or stretches (extends muscles) on an impulse, feeling a sudden, strange joy as if we had just remembered how to do a thing long forgotten. And, how delicious the abtention must feel, just after the stretch! At times we find ourselves suddenly and involuntarily taking in a breath on an impulse, walking out onto the street and seeing the contours of that tree for the first time, or that sweet cloud, and thinking, “Where have I been all these weeks?! How can I make this feeling last more than this moment?” Yoga is no more than deliberate stretching and releasing of muscles, and mindlessness is no more or less than deliberate mental abtention. Perhaps the Eastern gurus originally put the two practices together for this reason; but if so, twenty centuries of elaboration have complicated that simple reasoning.3
Note, too, another interesting point: that the Western Greeks popularized gymnastika or literally the “naked” workout, which is all muscle-flexing; and they invented sophia and analysis, which is all brain-flexing. On this physical and intellectual might, much of our Western capitalist civilization rests. But the Greeks did not do what the Hindus did, which was to define and consider the opposites of these actions, to make clear names and practices for the reverse (one might say abtention) of those two things. Unfortunately, the two philosophical forces met on the West Coast of the United States after WWII, where our (literally) sophisticated interpreters were unable to adequately reconcile them, too focused as they were on flexion, on personal glory. And so billions have suffered! Sermon endeth.
Without a supreme effort but merely with frequent awareness and practice, it should be possible to develop such a sensitivity to this simple state of existence that you can spend a large part of your life in it, instead of elsewhere.3 Even with my limited skill, I am better off than most people. I hope that you do even better – and, more importantly, that you find some unaffected way to pass it on to many strangers in need around you.
- As an aside, if you want an honest text on taijiquan 太极拳, try to dig up Edward Maisel’s Tai Chi for Health. And to me, the best and most valuable English translations of the Dao De Jing and the Kongzi are definitely Lin Yutang’s The Wisdom of Laotse and The Wisdom of Confucius, including his commentaries. Eknath Easwaran was a complicated character. A kind and gentle writer but a very different person in real life. Despite being named for the great ancient saint who was excommunicated for supporting untouchables, Easwaran enjoyed the brahmin life himself and was well-compensated ministering exclusively among the middle and upper classes in California, and like the Shambhala scandal, Easwaran has been accused of grave sexual improprieties.
- In fact, xinyuanyima 心猿意马 (“monkey mind, horse thought”) is an inappropriate and unfair anthropomorphism indicting lower simians and equines. It’s much more likely that these mammals are largely single-minded, lacking as they do the abstract support of our human neocortex to do much more than a relatively short-lived shifting of “aspect” to past and future, here and there. If these animals had “human mind,” they might dwell on this insult to their species for more than a few minutes, and hold a grudge against mankind for this popular Asian saying. That said, these and other species are capable of holding rudimentary grudges for up to a few days or even weeks and acting on them, and their memory for specific positive and negative events and individuals is often precocious, if their ability to link cause and effect is far more limited than ours. But that their ability to attend is supremely better than that of humans is indisputable. These mischaracterizations are even more acute when we consider that the Hindu god Hanuman is a symbol of composure and discipline.
- For a lead on future spelunking here (two relevant vectors, meditation x yoga, and India x China), I recently found this from the great Victor Mair in his essay on the two oldest Dao De Jing texts recently discovered in Mawang Dui 马王堆 in Changsha (whence I write to you): “Let us discuss, in the first instance, the native designations for these practices in India and in China. The Chinese word is the bisyllabic tao-yin [导引] which means ‘leading, guiding, channeling, duction (an old English term that we may revive for this purpose [PZ’s emphasis: cf. my abduction])’ and basically signifies the directed movement through the body of ch’i 气 (‘vital breath’) as well as the controlled extension or drawing out of the limbs, muscles, and joints of the body. This sounds conspicuously close to Yogic breath control pranayama, from prana [‘vital breath’] and ayama [‘lengthening, extension’]). Pranayama is the rhythmically restrained drawing in and out of the breath, precisely what the Taoist adept engaged in tao-yin attempts to achieve. It is mentioned by name in the Manusmrti (Institutes of Manu, VI.71-72; see Kuvalayananda, p. vi), a codification of social relationships during the first millennium B.I.E., and is frequently found in the Brhad-aranyaka Up. which dates to the first half of the same millennium.” For Mair’s take on whether Sun Wukong of the late-16th c. Journey to the West derives from Hanuman of the Ramayana from 2000 years before, see his paper: Mair, Victor H. 1989. “Suen Wu-kung = Hanumat? The Progress of a Scholarly Debate,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Sinology. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 659-752. p. 662. But then Mair, tireless scholar though he may be, still occasionally makes links that don’t necessarily exist. Regardless, the connections he makes are at least as important as the names.
- Just remember that I strongly suspect it is categorically impossible to both be in this state of mind and simultaneously be doing anything active and worldly with your brain, such as reading, speaking, listening, reflecting, or anything that involves, well, thinking. You can switch back and forth very rapidly, but you cannot attend to anything while in this state. I think that this is an underexamined point.
Etymological note on dhyana (Ch. 禅): It’s accepted that Indic dhyana ध्यान effortless mediation, focus, attention, thought, as well as the practice of meditation (e.g., in the Ashtanga tradition, from 6 dharana focused concentration, to 7 dhyana mindful meditation, to 8 samadhi the renunciation) is where all of the fuss began at least as early as 1500 BCE, and it traveled eastward toward East Asia and elsewhere somewhere near the 6th century BCE. (As I hope I made clear above, I think the operative area for interesting investigation of practical utility for the world is neither the fairly accessible dharama nor the esoteric samadhi but instead the minor miracle of dhyana that has been abandoned to the leisure class but that everyone should inherit.) While western Eurasia in the ancient period (i.e., our Semites) were increasingly cultivating concepts of lawfulness under the watchful eye of the god Elah (which clearly occasioned meditation upon and grateful prayer toward Him), Eastward it appears there was greater interest in cultivation of abdication (cf. Lao and Mo, which did perhaps help occasion ceremonial and legal practice, consider Confucianism and of course Hinduism and Buddhism). However one might tolerate this ultra-abbreviated historical scrawl, some of the early carrying words for these traditions may be of interest, such as words for laws and dhyana. The PIE and Semitic record is ambiguous, but there is some evidence for the relationship between Sanskrit dhyana and the Semitic din دين which refers to morality, law, judgment, creed. (Importantly, due to the lack of a clear record, PIE etymologists for the past 150 years are ignorant of any link between dhyana + din on the one hand and -teng* think, perceive, seem on the other hand, but this is circumstantially available and a very interesting proposal.)
For an interesting and well-informed perspective, see Georges Dreyfus (2011). Is mindfulness present-centred and non-judgmental? A discussion of the cognitive dimensions of mindfulness,Contemporary Buddhism,12:1, 41-54, DOI: 10.1080/14639947.2011.564815
The problem of risk here appears to be a semantic one involving statistics and time. Some fevers or infections can become life-threatening, in some limited cases, if left completely untreated for too long. An allergic reaction also has certain signs and symptoms that should be monitored. It might be better to say that most allergic reactions, even ones in which there is some core effect, begin with almost zero risk of actual danger; in limited instances, the risk rises, and if treated improperly (such as in cases after taking epinephrine without following up with buffering) it could react at higher levels. Discomfort and swelling of the esophagus with an allergic reaction is a natural and routine response, and yet only in the rarest instances does the constriction become so extreme as to truly endanger life. Nobody wants anyone to stop breathing, but today we have emergency provisions for essentially every moment of allergic discomfort — not because there is a warranted risk of death, but primarily because doctors would rather not have a mess on their hands if something bad were to happen.
View from the L 