Being Alive

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) was a Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist and author who was called the "father of mindfulness." He popularized Engaged Buddhism, which applies Buddhist insights to social, political and environmental issues (Ai summary).

William James on Mindfulness

Harvard professor William James (1842–1910) was an American psychologist and philosopher who is regarded as the “father of American psychology.” He developed of the philosophical school known as pragmatism. 

How to Let Go

David R. Hawkins: “The first step is to allow yourself to have the feeling without resisting it, venting it, fearing it, condemning it, or moralizing about it. It means to drop judgment and to see that it is just a feeling. The technique is to be with the feeling and surrender all efforts to modify it in any way. Let go of wanting to resist the feeling. It is resistance that keeps the feeling going.

"When you give up resisting or trying to modify the feeling, it will shift to the next feeling and be accompanied by a lighter sensation. A feeling that is not resisted will disappear as the energy behind it dissipates."

Releasing the Attachment to Suffering

Anatta is the Buddhist doctrine of  “no-self,” meaning there is no permanent, unchanging soul or essence in any living being or phenomenon. 

Instead, the self is a constantly changing composite of physical and mental processes called the five aggregates. 

The individual is seen as a collection of five constantly changing components: form, feeling, perception, mental formations (volitions) and consciousness.

The concept of anatta is one of the three characteristics of existence, along with impermanence (anicca) and suffering (dukkha). Understanding anatta is considered crucial for ending suffering by releasing the attachment that arises from believing in a fixed self. 

 (Ai summary)

Knowing It's a Wave

“In Dharma, we learn to observe the mind.

We do not follow every wave. we feel it rise, know it’s a wave, and let it pass.

Anger, fear, longing, none of them define you.

They visit. And you breathe.

This is freedom from impulse. This is right mindfulness.”

— Mark Nicholls

The Answer is Attention

The more I consider it, the more I realize that attention, properly directed, is the solution to many of our difficulties. 

We tend to underrate the value of the simple act of attention, but I assure you that Madison Avenue and political propagandists do not.

After all, as the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”

And the poet Mary Oliver advised, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

Merely momentarily shift your attention from your driving to your phone, for example, and a child may die. This isn’t a metaphor, but a memory. The driver was a teenage girl, and the child was an 8-year-old boy.

The Devil's in the Downward Dog

So apparently “anti-yoga Republican” is a thing now.

The satanic sin of stretching, I guess.

The Hereness of You

Beyond the health benefits, the reason to meditate is simply to return us to the hereness and nowness of conscious human existence. So much of what we worry about or stew over are pointless phantoms from the past or groundless speculations about the future.

At the Boundary of Conscious and Unconscious

“Yogis describe the breath as lying precisely at the boundary between the body and the mind,” observed psychotherapist Stephen Cope. “Most of us have experienced the shallow breath of terror, or the long deep sighs of melancholy…

“Breath connects the inside of the body with the outside world — taking the outside world in, and expelling the inside world out.”

Recalling Thoughts on the Wing

Mindfulness is the necessary counterweight to the digital age. 

Dan Harris: An Insight at Midnight

Lying in bed one night, reading a book by Eckhart Tolle for work, ABC reporter Dan Harris was shocked to find the self-help guru reading his mind.

Tolle’s insights about living in the present were startlingly relevant to Harris’ life.

“The ego is never satisfied,” Harris wrote in his book 10 Percent Happier. “No matter how much stuff we buy, no matter how many arguments we win or delicious meals we consume, the ego never feels complete. Did this not describe my bottomless appetite for airtime — or drugs? Is this what my friend Simon meant when he said I had the ‘soul of a junkie?’

“The ego is constantly comparing itself to others. It has us measuring our worth against the looks, wealth and social status of everyone else. Did this not explain some of my worrying at work?

“Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We ‘live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation,’ he wrote…”

“Some of the only times I could recall being fully present were when I was in a war zone or on drugs. No wonder one begat the other.

“It finally hit me that I’d been sleepwalking through much of my life — swept along on a tide of automatic, habitual behavior. All of the things I was most ashamed of in recent years could be explained through the ego: chasing the thrill of war without contemplating the consequences, replacing the combat high with coke and ecstasy, reflexively and unfairly judging people of faith, getting carried away with anxiety about work, neglecting Bianca to tryst with my Blackberry, obsessing about my stupid hair.

“It was a little embarrassing to be reading a self-help writer and thinking, ‘This guy gets me.’ But it was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realized that the voice in my head — the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember — was kind of an asshole.”

Riding Across the River

“I have taken thousands of people across, and to all of them my river has been nothing but a hindrance to their journey. They have traveled for money and business, to weddings and on pilgrimages; the river has been in their way and the ferryman was there to take them quickly across the obstacle. However, amongst the thousands there have been a few, four or five, to whom the river was not an obstacle. They have heard its voice and listened to it, and the river has become holy to them, as it is to me.”

— The Ferryman and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha

We Can Only Hope

A Container for Fear and Frustration

“The key to the transformational potential of bare attention lies in the deceptively simply injunction to separate out one’s reactions from the core events themselves,” wrote Mark Epstein in his book  Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective.

“Much of the time, it turns out, our everyday minds are in a state of reactivity. We take this for granted, we do not question our automatic identification with our reactions, and we experience ourselves at the mercy of an often hostile or frustrating outside world or an overwhelmingly or frightening inner one. With bare attention, we move from this automatic identification with our fear or frustration to a vantage point from which the fear or frustration is attended to with the same dispassionate interest as anything else.

“There is enormous freedom to be gained from such a shift. Instead of running from difficult emotions (or hanging on to enticing ones), the practitioner or bare attention becomes able to contain any reaction; making space for it, but not completely identifying with it because of the concomitant presence of nonjudgmental awareness.”

(Emphasis added)

The Teddy Bear of Bare Attention

“Like a stray dog that has no owner, the stray thoughts that are attended to with bare attention are treated as if they, too, are ownerless,” observed Dr. Mark Epstein in his book Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective.

The Buddhist concept of bare attention is akin to the psychological process known as “transitional space,” Epstein observed.

“Long recognized as the crucial stepping stone between infantile dependence and the ability to tolerate being alone, transitional space has been called an ‘intermediate area of experience’ that permits the child a feeling of comfort when separated from the parents.”

“The transitional object — the teddy bear, stuffed animal, blanket or favorite toy — makes possible the movement from a purely subjective experience to one in which other people are experienced as truly ‘other.’ Neither ‘me’ nor ‘not-me,’ the transitional object enjoys a special in-between status that the parents instinctively respect. It is the raft by which the infant crosses over to the understanding of the other.

“Many qualities of the transitional object — its ability to survive intense love and hate, its resistance to change unless changed by the infant, its ability to provide refuge and warmth and its gradual relinquishment — are all shared by bare attention… (which) is different from our usual subjective awareness and has been portrayed in the Tibetan tradition as a kind of ‘spy consciousness’ that observes from the corners of the mind.”

“An image that is sometimes used to convey this constancy is that of a stream rushing under a stone bridge. Through bare attention, it is said, the meditator becomes not like the stream but like the bridge with the stream rushing underneath.”

Epstein describes bare attention as “… impartial, nonjudgmental and open. It is also deeply interested, like a child with a new toy.”

Jung on the Meaning of Life

Awareness is the point, whether for Buddhists or Jung.

Life's Challenges Are Your Tests

“The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life’s challenges when they come,” Eckhart Tolle wrote. “Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare.

“If you cannot be present even in normal circumstances, such as when you are sitting alone in a room, walking in the woods, or listening to someone, then you certainly won’t be able to stay conscious when something ‘goes wrong’ or you are faced with difficult people or situations, with loss or the threat of loss. You will be taken over by a reaction, which ultimately is always some form of fear, and pulled into deep unconsciousness. Those challenges are your tests. Only the way in which you deal with them will show you and others where you are as far as your state of consciousness in concerned, not how long you can sit with your eyes closed or what visions you see.”

When Freedom Isn't

Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness. The solution to the problem the Buddhists wisely identified as “dukkha.”

Freedom is insufficient to provide happiness to most people, because they are unprepared to be happy within the conditions of human existence. The next thing you want or must have will not provide happiness, any more than the last one did. This, by the way, is the opposite of the lesson that commercial television is employed to teach you. That sells freedom, or rather the illusion of freedom.

Be a Lion

Mindfulness is not urgency, but calm. It’s not tying your courage to the sticking-point and trying, but untying and untrying.

What Do You Have in Mind?

Mindfulness. Examining one’s thoughts as if they were as remote as the dancing reflection in the pond of the distant streaks of clouds high in the sky.