Unlearning Meditation: What to Do When the Instructions Get in the Way

by Jason Siff

  I saw a close-up view of double Dutch ropes being turned and felt my hands had become enormous. My hands were in the foreground, opening as they moved forward and becoming crescent moons as I pulled them back. Back and forth to the rhythm of the two ropes moving through space. I just stayed here feeling the rhythm of the ropes and my hands guiding me into this space, knowing how to enter. I then felt surrounded by the two ovals of the ropes and the rhythm of moving slightly to the left and right, staying here forever, until the rope turners were tired.

  Here the meditator’s mind could keep the motion of the two jump ropes and the rhythm of jumping going for an extended period. The imagery of the ropes and the way of moving with them had been developed in earlier sittings, and now it just comes to her quite effortlessly. Her mind has learned how to follow the imagery and become absorbed in it. This is a much more realistic and natural use of visual imagery than is commonly found in the more orthodox meditation manuals, where the direction is often to fix one’s attention on a stationary image. Our experience, especially our thinking, is not stationary. It is moving all the time. Thus it is quite natural to follow moving imagery, changing colors and forms, and shifting intensities and opacities of light.

  There are so many varieties of visual experience in these pre-jhanic states that I can’t cover them all in this chapter. But there is one more I’ll mention that is fairly common. It is when one image quickly follows upon another in a way that doesn’t seem to make any sense whatsoever. We can usually handle the odd random image with a surprised “Where did that come from?” But a succession of unrelated and unusual images can leave us wondering about our mental health. It is normal, however, in some of these pre-jhanic states, so don’t worry. In fact, they can be quite integrating and beneficial when they’re allowed. Here is an example from another one of the previous meditator’s sittings.

  I feel myself contained within this daylight oval space with a growing heaviness within my body. Sinking into something. Then a series of fleeting images, quick flashes—the residue of two orange canoes in a two-dimensional space, vibrating with a certain fuzziness, one on top of the other, the top canoe a bit to the left of the bottom one. The background shifting maroon, an aloe vera gel bottle underneath a counter, a bicycle stuck in an adobe wall, not as if it had crashed but that it had been embedded there for years. The words “sorting in rather than sorting it out.”

  16

  Questions Surrounding Samadhi

  Those of you new to learning about samadhi are probably unaware that there are several questions surrounding the topic of jhanas in Theravada Buddhist circles. It is not the purpose of this book to give my answers to certain questions and then try to explain and defend my point of view on what is a jhana and what isn’t. What I have written regarding pre-jhanic states is as far as I am willing to go.

  As much as jhanas can be defined, listed, and described in texts or talked about by meditation teachers, they must be experienced in order to be known. A concept or description won’t convey what the experience is like to someone who has never experienced it, and for that reason I haven’t commented on any of the journal entries as to what experiences in them might be jhanas.

  Regarding particulars of the experience of a jhana, there are questions in these four areas:

  Whether someone is breathing in a jhana or not

  Whether there is awareness of the body and sense impressions or not

  Whether a jhana is short-lived, as in a momentary flash, or lasts longer than a few seconds

  Whether a jhana is an accessible experience for most meditators or is highly advanced and largely inaccessible

  My response to these points is a philosophical one: A jhana does not arise from nowhere, nor does it create itself. It does not exist in a separate world, reality, or universal consciousness. It is not eternal. It is not a being, an entity, or a substance. It is a state of consciousness, like any other, and thus comes about through causes and conditions.

  One of the main conditions is pre-jhanic samadhi states. A jhana is grown like a plant from a seed that has the right soil, enough water and sun, and grows in an appropriate climate according to the seasons. Other conditions include your morals and behavior, awareness and discernment, ability to focus and concentrate, and the effectiveness of your meditation practice to wear down the impediments to calm states of mind.

  The Split between Samatha (Jhana Practice) and Vipassana

  Most Vipassana teachers discourage the development of jhanas, warning students against them. “You will become attached to them” is how it is often put. Without the necessary wisdom to see how jhanas are mentally constructed, it is believed that Vipassana students will be led away from the path of insight and go down the road of seeking only bliss and happiness in meditation. Students are therefore only deemed ready to practice jhana when they have sufficient insight so as not to be deluded by these peaceful and purifying states of mind. The Vipassana goal is final liberation; jhanas are considered a temporary liberation that masquerades as the end of suffering but is nothing more than a pleasant resting place, a refreshing oasis in the scorching desert.

  In response to that, those who teach the jhanas often go back to the Buddha’s discourses, in which final liberation through the practice of jhanas is spoken of far more commonly than is liberation through strict Vipassana. The jhanas are extolled. They are a vehicle for seeing into erroneous views and purifying the mind. The initial four jhanas are even included in the Noble Eightfold Path and are thus seen as essential for a person’s development on the path to final liberation.

  Each side is right from its own perspective. Though I disagree with the tendency of certain Vipassana teachers to devalue jhanas, their concern about people being drawn into the pleasurable worlds of the jhanas, and taking those experiences as liberated states, is nonetheless valid. Though I agree with valuing samadhi and its cultivation in meditation practice, I do question the methods, theories, and observations of most of those who teach the jhanas.

  What I do believe, for what it is worth, is that we don’t have enough control over our path of meditation to say that we are exclusively practicing Samatha (calming, emptying, focusing) or Vipassana (noticing, discerning, exploring). We move from one to the other and back again. To use my language, sometimes we are with impasses, practicing awareness and discernment as found in Vipassana, while at other times we are in calm spaces, practicing ways to develop our inner peace and increasing our capacity to focus.

  PART THREE

  Multiple

  Meditative Processes

  17

  A Theory of the Meditative Process

  When I first came up with my theory of the meditative process, I saw it as primarily addressing the question of transformation in meditation. A few months later, after I had written and lectured on this theory, I saw that it addressed a much more basic question: What is meditation?

  This is a question everyone asks. It is also one of those questions you can forget to ask after some years of meditating, when it has become quite obvious to you what meditation is: It is the meditation practice you use. If you sit and watch the breath, then meditation is sitting and watching the breath. It is that simple. But what about all those “other” meditation practices where people don’t watch the breath? Are they also “real” meditation?

  Instead of working on a narrow definition of meditation, I worked on one that would include all meditation practices (in truth, as many as would fit in the definition). What do all meditation practices have in common? The intention to meditate. The definition “meditation is what happens when you act upon the intention to meditate” is one that could be applied to almost every meditation practice that people learn. But then, there are always those questions that irk most traditional meditation teachers, ones like, “When I listen to music, I go into a meditative state. Isn’t that meditation?”

  Here’s a case where the definition of meditation as “what happens when you act upon the intentio
n to meditate” might not work. The person is intending to listen to music, not meditate, and since he or she happens to go into a meditative state while doing so, the person thus rightly wonders if that is meditation.

  There has to be some way for the definition of meditation to include both the intentional application of a technique or method and the experiences of a meditative sort that come about unintentionally. This distinction relates back to where I began this book, with the tension between the meditation instructions you use and your mind as it is. That our mind can find “meditative” states and understandings without doing an intentional practice is certainly within the realm of people’s experience. We could then say, “the experience of meditation defines what meditation is.” I would personalize that definition, since meditative experience is individual, inward, subjective, and relative. So what we then have is the definition that has appeared on my Web site for the past decade or so, “One’s experience of meditation defines what meditation is (for oneself).”

  That definition takes intentional meditation practices out of the privileged position of being the standard-bearer. The practice of observing the breath, for example, is no longer what you measure your practice by. The practice is now assessed by your own experience of observing the breath, either in response to the use of a technique or quite spontaneously. For instance, if your experience of staying with the breath has been one great struggle much of the time, then that is what that meditation practice has been for you. You might argue that when you do that practice well, you’re meditating, while at other times you are trying to meditate. But that once again puts the technique into the position of defining what meditation is. When you look at it from the vantage point of your experience of watching the breath, there is really no absolutely right or wrong way of doing it. There is just your experience of doing it the way you are doing it. This shift in vantage point enables you to examine any of the practices you do, instead of evaluating yourself on how well you do that practice.

  If meditation is defined by your experience of it, what then is the meditative process? Here is where my theory comes in. There is no single meditative process. By process I mean two things: (1) a particular way our minds function and (2) a particular way in which we relate to our experience. Let’s just take it as granted in our meditation sittings that our minds do not always function in the same way, nor do we always relate to our experiences in the same fashion. We might assume that a meditative process should be calm, unemotional, focused, and mindful (or any combination of similar “meditative” qualities) and that when an unusual experience occurs we relate to it without reacting or judging or thinking about it for too long. That may be our experience for a part of a meditation sitting, but not for an entire sitting and certainly not for all of our sittings.

  If we look honestly at our experiences in meditation, we’ll see several types of meditative process, not just one. That is where my theory begins. I came up with six meditative processes, although I acknowledge that there could be more (theories about the operations of the human mind, especially when they rely on subjective experience, as this one does, cannot be set in stone).

  Before I introduce the six meditative processes of my theory, there is a particular way of talking about them that you need to understand. When talking about a meditative process, I am essentially referring to your mind as it is. So when using generative process, I am referring to the mind being in a generative state, capable of creating and prone to building. When talking about a type of meditation practice, I am essentially referring to the meditation instructions you use. So when I state that something is a “generative practice,” I am saying that when doing such a practice, you’re instructed to create, generate, and build. This distinction between process and practice is maintained throughout my discussion of the meditative process.

  The six meditative processes are as follows:

  The Three Basic Meditative Processes

  The Receptive Process

  The Generative Process

  The Conflicted Process

  The Three Developed Meditative Processes

  The Explorative Process

  The Non–Taking-Up Process

  The Connected Process

  We begin our meditation practices with the first three types of meditative process dominating our sittings. As we continue to meditate, the three more-developed processes begin to make more of an appearance. They not only indicate that development has occurred in meditation but also become what is primarily developed.

  After I created this model, I soon realized that it was a useful framework for talking about how meditation practices work. Along with that, I saw from how people began to use this theory that it is not very useful as a new labeling system. I want to emphasize that it is best to use this model as a way of gaining a perspective on meditation practice and experience, not to turn these processes into new names (or designations) for experiences you have in meditation.

  The Receptive Process

  This process is the cornerstone of unlearning meditation. It occurs when you’re open and receptive to your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions in meditation. But it is not wholly perfect, since when you’re receptive, you also experience resistance in the form of not wanting to be led, or swallowed up, by certain feelings, trains of thought, or unusual states of mind. We may even find ourselves more receptive to certain experiences sometimes and less so at other times, even though we remain in a receptive process. The process is found in how we permit our experience to go on as it is, regardless of any ideas we get about changing it by doing something else, such as a meditation instruction. We may even be ambivalent about letting it go on, and yet we do, finding that the receptive process has its own way of working.

  So let’s use this theory to address some of the questions you may have regarding unlearning meditation in relation to other meditation practices you have learned. What is really different about unlearning meditation compared with more traditional approaches to meditation?

  First of all, unlearning meditation tends to be contrary to what one would rationally expect a meditation practice to be. It often results in doing the opposite of what is commonly taught as meditation. Could it be that unlearning meditation is based on different meditative processes from more traditional practices? That it is even perhaps the opposite of those practices?

  If that were the case, then unlearning meditation would be as simple as making a rule to do the opposite of whatever you were trained to do. But it’s not that simple. You have to be doing a meditation practice in order to observe what is going on for you in it. What is going on in unlearning meditation is a shift in the process you’re using to do your “learned” meditation practice. Initially it is the same practice, more or less, it’s just that you’re relating to it differently.

  This is where the receptive process becomes a helpful concept. When we relate to our experiences receptively, we let them wash over us, even carry us along. We may have some resistance to being pulled in one direction or pushed in another and want to hold our ground. It is natural to resist some of the experiences that come upon us when we are open and receptive. That’s why something like pure acceptance, or being completely allowing, is more an idealized state of mind than an actual experience of what it is like when we are receptive. Even receptivity can be painful and unpleasant, and it is certainly chaotic at times. Just letting your mind roll on and on without stopping it is difficult to tolerate—but that is what receptivity is. It is not some ideal flow of experience that is always pleasurable, peaceful, or optimal.

  To meet our familiar meditation practices with receptivity is to let them go on as they will while not getting caught up with fueling that process. That would be a different process, the generative process, which I will get to shortly. When doing any meditation instruction within the receptive process, you lose the sense of doing the instruction and take on the sense of experiencing the instruction.

  For example, let’s
say you’ve constantly brought your attention back to the breath as your main meditation practice. As a consequence of this, you haven’t let any thoughts or feelings remain for long. And you’ve probably deemed this particular way of meditating to be the way to meditate. Then you encounter this book, read many passages in disbelief, but find something in it persuasive enough to incline you to try some of it out, such as the instruction to sit with awareness of the touch of the hands while allowing thoughts and feelings into the meditation sitting. In a single stroke, this instruction allows you to break the habit of always returning to the breath; it allows you to let your thoughts and feelings remain and persist; and it causes you to question your assumption that breath awareness is the only way to meditate. So even if you do return to the breath on occasion, that practice occurs within a larger context of being receptive to other dimensions of experience. Within this receptive mode you are actually experiencing things about that practice rather than doing the practice. You perhaps see how you were using the breath to manage or avoid difficult feelings, or you might pick up on how awareness of breathing and thinking cannot really coexist when you force your attention solely on the breath.

  The Generative Process

  Meditation techniques that utilize the generative process are ones where the student is instructed to generate particular experiences or states of mind. Such practices as metta meditation, in which you try to produce a state of loving-kindness, are generative in this way. In these kinds of practice, the act of generating is given high importance—just stumbling upon a state of loving-kindness is not granted the same status as arriving at it through doing the appropriate formal meditation practice. The emphasis is thus on how to develop the ability to generate such states in times when you need them.