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

by Jason Siff

  These journal entries demonstrate several aspects of the explorative process, including what has already been said. One important aspect is how we pick up certain areas of exploration and stay with them for a period of time, which is why a series of journal entries is so helpful. A particular area will have a hold on us—we are very interested in it at that time.

  Another side to the explorative process is the exploration of the practice you’re doing. Since these journal entries are from someone who has been meditating with the Recollective Awareness approach for a few years, there is less doubting of this practice in her contemplations on it and more investigating the value of it. Still, key elements of it are subject to scrutiny.

  There are also several explorations concerning the nature of how we know our experience. Putting our attention on the ways we know what is happening (the process) is much different from what it is we know (the content). We can know, for instance, that we are hearing a particular sound and what that sound is. That is knowing the content of our experience. We may also know that the sound comes and goes, that it arises and passes away due to conditions. That is knowing the process of our experience. But that is just the beginning of our exploration into the various ways of knowing our experience.

  This sit was interesting in that it took a different point of interest halfway through. I had a few things on my mind before the sit . . . and they all arose in various forms and to various degrees in the transition period . . . the tennis I had just been watching, the letter to a friend who has cancer, the email to another friend . . . my father’s wife, school, a meeting I recently attended. They all sort of arose and sank, arose and sank, in waves of different intensity and clarity. There was a sense of the awareness of this arising and falling. Then a sense of the awareness of that. Then a kind of big picturing of it all . . . a broadened awareness of all that was being experienced. It seemed like all at once but it probably had varying degrees of a major/minor focus if I really go back to recall.

  It felt like an awareness of all the sense-doors experience. These sensations were the whole catastrophe of what I was picking up. There was a ringing sound of tinnitus, with a background sound of the sea and the sound of my husband walking around . . . all with apparently equal pick-up value.

  Then a taste in the mouth, sensations in the body, belly, legs, face, a background image of the body being there and a kind of tone of awareness of it all, even the colors on the eyes.

  There was an easiness, a resting in the “big picture,” but also awareness of the movement toward and away from this. Like when it all stopped being equal and a dominance occurred or a preference, then the movement would go toward personalizing it all . . . a story, a sense of my face . . . a hook into a fantasy, a carrying on of what would otherwise have been just there. So really there was an awareness of the movement in and out (wavelike again), of taking what was arising as personal . . . or broad focus to specific focus . . . in and out again . . . in and out. Then there would be a jolt of realization that something would have been taken so personally that big-picture awareness was gone and I was absorbed in the story line again . . . then outward the focus would go to breath and impartiality again.

  This description gives a feel for how Vipassana meditation sittings are generally talked about, with references to “arising and falling,” “witnessing and personalizing,” and “broad and specific focus.” Most notably there is this experience: “There was a sense of the awareness of this arising and falling. Then a sense of the awareness of that. Then a kind of big picturing of it all . . . a broadened awareness of all that was being experienced.” In later journal entries, Joan makes attempts to assure me that this is not a concept but a real experience.

  What is her experience of being aware of her awareness of arising and falling? “It felt like an awareness of all the sense-doors experience. These sensations were the whole catastrophe of what I was picking up . . . all with apparent equal pick-up value.” Her way of knowing tastes, sensations, images, colors, and her body sitting was such that each sense impression was somehow equal, there being no dominance of one over another or preference for one over another. When the “pick up” stopped being equal it was because she found herself in a story or hooked into a fantasy, where experiences were once again taken personally. She was aware of going in and out of this way of knowing her experiences as being equal, seeing it as moving from the “big picture” to being “absorbed in the story line.”

  The exploration initiated in this sitting continues in future sittings, as in this one six weeks later.

  There was a sense of being with whatever hit my senses, but it was almost overlaid with a question that started as just a focused curiosity that soon became an actual question. It was something like “What’s the difference between how this is being picked up now and what would be picked up if there were no craving/aversion? What’s the difference between this mind and a liberated mind?”

  I tried to pick up a quality about it that would show the difference. Would even the curiosity about the difference be a form of craving? Where was the subtle sense of judgment that would make that difference? Was it the sense of there being an “I” who was picking it up? I kind of played around with these questions and the sense of there being some karma formed with the process. I could go into the quality of it but always inevitably zoomed out to the one watching it and therefore commentating. Whatever was happening, the transitions felt smooth and free-flowing.

  Then I went into a time of thinking about metta. I’m not sure if I thought of my friend who has cancer first, or the idea of metta practice first, but I went over a few scenarios of what is happening to him in his life and then went into an old practice of visualizing him and sending him love through the out-breath. It actually moved into imagining his body with cancer in it, almost like sooty deposits through his veins/organs, and on each out-breath pushing it out, like dust moving out through his skin pores.

  I did this for quite a while. On occasion going back to when I was a student and doing a similar practice (predharma days) in trying to use strength of mind to send an image to a friend. I could remember the bed I was in and the sense of focus I had while doing it. It was a strong visual memory. This turned into a sidetrack again. Interested in how memory was working with this. It was almost not recalled but “dropped in” due to the familiarity with the same sense of the power of visualization.

  This is almost becoming an area of interest in my sits now. How recall works and the different types of recall and different levels of agency involved. Sometimes I just can’t see the process and sometimes the decision is obvious.

  This time the sitting starts with an explorative process. Joan is receptively aware of whatever is “hitting” her senses, while curiosity forms into a question around picking up sense impressions with a mind that has craving and aversion in it and one that does not. She reports this exploration as being overlaid onto her experience of being aware of the sense doors, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting it as the story lines did in the sitting six weeks prior. She is wondering about self and karma in the experience, and she “could go into the quality of it but always inevitably zoomed out to the one watching it and therefore commentating.” I surmise that she was going back and forth between what she directly sensed and her exploration of it, which contained observations and ideas on the experience.

  After that she moves into the generative process when she remembers a friend’s illness. She does a metta practice for him for a while. It seems perfectly natural for her to do this, and she reflects on the habits she has formed in meditation in regard to metta practice. But from going into the memories of this practice, she then emerges once again into an exploration of memory. This is not because she wants to explore the subject of memory as a topic to pursue but because of an experience that confronts her notions about it. She wrote, “It was almost not recalled but ‘dropped in’ due to the familiarity with the same sense of the power of visualization.” This sets the
stage for the area of exploration found in another sitting a month later.

  On shutting my eyes, I sank really quickly into “just listening” as sounds arose. There was very little energy. I was just taking it in. A sort of interest in it arose. Then the recalling process came into interest. It occurred to me that “being with” something involved a recalling process of just a few seconds. It was like a net being cast back. In being aware of what was happening now—like sounds and sensations—the net was just cast back a nanosecond. At other times the net was cast a little further back. Then on that jolt of “Where was I?” cast back quickly for the past few incidents. I watched this for a while. The image was not so much a net but a sort of amoebic foot that would stretch back, bringing experience to mind in a constant process of recall. It could be broad or thin, specific or general, deliberate or automatic. It seemed like the recall process was the whole of awareness. One of the benefits of Recollective Awareness! With the sense of noticing comes the awareness of context and what brings it on. And then there is taking it less personally.

  The meditation sitting begins with her entering a process where she could just listen to the sounds around her and take them in. An interest in the sounds arises, but soon after, she becomes interested in the recalling process. She sees that “being with” an experience is not in the present moment, as she had been taught, but rather involves a recollection of an experience. She has discovered a fact of her experience that directly contradicts the view of mindfulness as being only in the present moment. If awareness is always after the fact, then any moment when you become aware of something, you’re actually calling that back to mind. When she has the experience of wondering where she has been in the sitting, she can recall a series of events that occurred. This exploration provides an understanding of how her mind works in meditation when becoming aware of things, which does not fit in with the conceptual model of experience that she previously believed in. She finds exploring the operations of awareness engaging, and she continues to discover new things about it. For instance, she sees that by recollecting experiences in this way, she can better see the context and how these things came to be. In that process, she learns that she is taking things less personally.

  The Explorative Process and Transformative Conceptualization

  Much of the work that is done to go beyond concepts in the transformative conceptualization process occurs in the explorative process. You could rightly say that transformative conceptualization is a type of exploration, but it’s not the only kind of exploration that can occur. It is also the outcome of a series of explorations, which, while one is in them, may give no indication that your perception of things will be diminished or abandoned by the process of exploring them. The third step of the transformative conceptualization process that I outlined in chapter 12 may just come about without any warning or any intention.

  In the meditation Joan had on the day following the previous meditation sitting, she stumbled upon this third step.

  My mind went over a few things from the day but quickly went into watching the recall process. I actually now see it as a “thinking-through-concepts process” scattered amongst watching the “thinking-through process” and watching the “being-with” process. Hard to pinpoint and explain.

  Joan notices three separate processes: (1) the “thinking-through-concepts process,” (2) watching the “thinking-through process,” and (3) watching the “being with” process. The thinking-through-concepts process describes investigative thinking that uses concepts we have already learned. In some cases, it might involve investigating whether the definition of a word actually fits the experience we are having. In other cases it might be how a particular concept, such as “the now,” applies to what we’re experiencing. These are the first two steps in the transformative conceptualization process, of naming an experience and moving to a new description of it.

  When she watches “thinking-through,” she notices the thinking-through-concepts process she is engaged in. She is not exclusively thinking things through but also witnessing that process. In this way the concepts she arrives at through thinking in the meditation get looked at as part of the thinking process. When this happens she begins to see how concepts function and thus begins to treat them less as ideas to be held on to and believed in for all time and more as related to a particular effect of a moment of understanding about her experience. Then the concept, label, or interpretation has done its job and can be dropped. This is the third step of seeing into the narrative of the experience.

  I was revisiting in thought my previous thinking that one can’t “be in the moment” because that nanosecond of experience makes no sense if its not in context. I went through this in my mind trying to articulate it . . . or trying to actually test it and experience it . . . then articulate it. Any of the so-called being in the now involves recall, even if to the minutest degree, because without a “being in context” the nanoseconds of experience wouldn’t make sense.

  Here Joan drops the concept she learned at the beginning of her meditation practice, the notion of being in the now. It makes no sense to her. In the explorative process, as she tries to articulate it to herself in the sitting, she tests it against her experience. It no longer makes sense because she is seeing it in relation to another concept, based on her experience, that all experiences arise within a context: experiences cannot be singled out from the conditions out of which they arise, such as the preceding moment, and thus there cannot be a present moment without a past moment.

  This may sound like an intellectual process, because it deals with concepts, but in meditation sittings, it is an experiential process of exploring the function of concepts. In this series of sittings, Joan has looked into her experiences of being aware and has seen that the most pragmatic approach is to define awareness as recollection rather than as present-moment awareness or mindfulness. It is through explorations such as this that you can feel confident in dropping a concept that the larger meditation community has generally taken as being true and valid.

  21

  The Non–Taking-Up Process

  At first hearing, the term non–taking up may sound awkward. It is not as clear as words and phrases with similar meanings, such as nonattachment or nongrasping. Why would I choose to use this awkward expression instead of these others? First of all, “taking up” is different from attachment or grasping. With attachment we have a notion of two things being joined, of their clinging to each other, or in a psychological sense, of an unhealthy way of holding on to people and things. The word grasping has a similar sense, though it perhaps carries greater force, especially when it is taken as “holding tightly.” Taking up includes the capacity of choice within the process of holding on to something and therefore does not have the feel of being an impersonal, strictly determined habit. There is more freedom in the taking up of something than there is in being attached to something or grasping it.

  What do I really mean by taking up in regard to meditation? I mean several things:

  Choosing to hold on to experiences

  Intentionally building upon or fueling an experience

  Believing in the self-structure that has formed around an experience

  I will now go into the following three areas in relation to the non–taking-up process.

  Where there are no choices to hold on to experiences

  No intentional building or fueling of experiences

  No beliefs in the self-structures that form around our experiences

  Where There Are No Choices to Hold On to Experiences

  This is the most basic form of non–taking up (or “not taking up,” whichever sounds better to you) and can be arrived at through a variety of practices, not just the approach I teach. In a general but imprecise sense, it may be likened to a flow experience of “arising and passing away” in Vipassana meditation. Nothing is held on to in one’s experience for any significant duration. Thoughts tend to vanish immediately upon being noticed, feelings ar
ise for an instant and gently subside, and bodily sensations are generally pleasant and transitory. Not only is there a flow to the rapidly changing experiences, but there seems to be less volition in the process. Things are happening on their own; choices are not arising. Most particularly, choices to hold on to a particular experience rarely surface except, of course, when the flowing stops and everything slows down and becomes more “normal” once again. Then choices to hold on to or get rid of certain experiences appear more often.

  The non–taking-up process grows out of tolerating the intensity and duration of your meditation experiences. When we become more able to tolerate intense, painful, and/or long-lasting experiences, we find that we hold on to them less and less. It is often the case that people have flow experiences following upon periods of tolerating discomfort, agitation, and intense emotions. There are even a few longtime meditators who regularly meditate for long periods and endure all kinds of physical pain in order to arrive at the non–taking-up process.

  A key feature of meditation practices in which you sit motionless through intense pain (which I would caution against) is that the choice to move is constantly dismissed. Other choices to do things in the meditation are also summarily disregarded. So it seems to me that such practices serve to reduce the power of choices that arise in your sittings, though they do so in favor of following one strict line of direction: to sit through the pain.

  Now, of course, people will also arrive at the non–taking-up process, or at least this form of it, through meditation practices that are essentially painless and calming. Choiceless awareness practice, for example, often leads to these experiences of “arising and passing away,” which happens by not trying to hold attention on anything for too long. Instead, the meditator lets his attention go from one object to another, not making choices beforehand, allowing the attention to go where it will for a moment before moving on.