Direct Contact

From “Purpose and Method of Vipassana Meditation,” by Shinzen Young:

The essence of this practice can be stated as a simple formula: ordinary experience plus mindfulness plus equanimity yields insight and purification. In this formula, each term is defined very precisely. Ordinary experience is defined as hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, the feeling body and the thinking mind. Mindfulness is defined as specificity in awareness, clarity in awareness, continuity in awareness, richness in awareness, precision in awareness. Equanimity is defined as not interfering with the flow of the senses at any level, including the level of preconscious processing.

When sufficient mindfulness and equanimity are brought to bear on ordinary experience, we arrive at purification and insight. And, as a result of the purification and insight, our intrinsic happiness, our true birthright and spiritual reality, gets uncovered and we discover that what we thought was the world of phenomena—the world of time, space, and matter—turns out to really be a world of spiritual energy, and that we are in direct contact with it moment by moment. Because, when the senses become purified, when the inner conflicts—at all levels—have been broken up, the flow of these ordinary senses turns into a prayer, a mantra, a sacred song, and we find that, just by living our life, we are in moment-by-moment contact with the Source. In the Christian contemplative tradition this is called the "practice of the presence of God." In the Jewish mystical tradition it is called briah yesh me ayn—the experience of things (yesh) being continuously created (briah) from no-thing (ayn), that is, from God.

For most people the senses are opaque. A window is opaque if it is covered by soot; light can't come through. The soot is craving, aversion, and ignorance. When that's cleared away, the ordinary senses become literally transparent. It is very hard to describe what this is like. Hearing returns to being part of the effortless flow of nature, seeing returns to being part of the effortless flow of nature, and likewise with smelling, tasting, the body sensations whether they are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, they all go back to being part of "God's breath" so to speak.

Even the thinking process returns to being part of this effortless flow. At the beginning stages of meditation one is very concerned with overcoming the wandering thoughts in order to develop enough calm and concentration to be able to practice mindfulness. But when you get further along in the process there will be no necessity whatsoever to have a still mind because the ordinary flow of thought will be experienced as not different from the activity of the Source.

Read more…

Signs

“There are many doors to the spiritual and they don’t all have a big sign over them saying SPIRITUAL.”

~ Shinzen Young, from Working with the Dying

A High Resolution Emotional Radar Screen

Shinzen Young, from “A Meeting with a Pioneering Meditation Teacher,” with Tami Simon, Sounds True’s Insight at the Edge (November 2, 2010):

“Neuroscientists are aware that there is a system in the brain that they call the limbic system; it’s sometimes called the emotional brain. What I’ve attempted to do is create certain focusing exercises that will allow a person to be able to detect when their limbic system activates. So, then, well how do you go about doing this? Well, I can give you a tangible example.

Let’s say you’re listening to music and, as you listen to music, you are monitoring how your body is reacting to the music. Your body may smile if you like the music, but then at some point if there’s something you don’t like about the music, you get some other kind of sensation reaction in your body.

Or, you can listen to people talking, listen to people you agree with—politicians, philosophers, religious leaders—listen to them and then notice the impact on your body. Then, listen to people you disagree with—religious leaders, political leaders, philosophers—who have the opposite of your beliefs, then watch what happens in the body. Pay attention to that.

By monitoring your body’s reactions to sounds, especially human speech sounds or music, and then by monitoring your body’s reaction to external visual impressions, with time you can develop a sensitivity to detect the locations and flavors of sensation that are emotional in nature. It’s a training and it takes a while, but if you’re willing to do it, your whole body becomes like this high resolution emotional radar screen. So, as soon as there’s an impact from the physical world, you’re aware if there’s any emotional juice, however subtle—subtle is significant. If there is, you’re able to detect it and open up to it. If there’s not, you’re also aware of that fact.

So, by doing exercises in that way, eventually you learn to detect the subtle emotional reactions that we’re constantly having in the body that are triggered by other events. And, that’s how you go about doing it.”

Listen to the entire interview…

Appreciating Nothing

This presentation was my contribution to Pecha Kucha Night Columbus this evening.

See More, Hear More, Feel More

The first five seconds of this IMAX 3D countdown summarizes the mindfulness strategy I practice and share. Shinzen Young has been saying for years that the development of basic attentional skills through working with ordinary sensory experiences can lead to a life lived in higher definition. Of course IMAX can only enhance your awareness of the objective world by increasing the intensity, while Shinzen’s strategies also address your awareness of the subjective world—as well as the interplay between the two—while strengthening your ability to remain open to the full range of intensity and subtlety. It’s similar to the difference between watching marathon runners cross a finish line versus training to run one yourself.

“There are actually two reasons why people in general are out of touch with their subjective experiences: They have ‘low definition’ bodies and they are continuously fixated in thought, especially verbal thought. Of course, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with thinking. Indeed complex thought is evolution’s wonderful gift to humankind, giving our species special powers that the others lack. Thought per se is not the problem. The problem is the driven and fixated way in which we think. Fortunately, both low definition in the body and compulsive fixation in the mind can be remedied through systematic practice of mindfulness.”

~ Shinzen Young, from Bringing the Monastery Home

The Same Enlightenment

Filmed in Nov. 2009 at Mt. Carmel Spiritual Centre in Niagara Falls.

Human Sensory System

From “Spiritual Practices and the Sliding Scale of Identity,” from Har-Prakash Khalsa’s blog:

Shinzen Young has reworked the common western categorization of the sensory system into a simplified and elegant model. This TSSFIT chart, particularly when combined with the triple skill-set of mindfulness – concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity— is eminently practical and effective in helping us to understand how the various constellations of the human sensory system, and our relationship to that sensory system, affects identity and behaviour.

In the west we usually conceive of the sensory system as seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling. External sights and sounds are usually identified as other—other people, other beings, or the world in general as something existing separate in relation to our conventional sense of self.

Now when we consider how our conventional sense of self arises, what we most identify as who we are is composed of a combination of our body’s touches (for a simple working model smell and taste will be considered special categories of touch or body space—see chart below) and emotional feelings, and thoughts that have internal visual and auditory components, or T-F-I-T for short.

Individually we often refer to this as “my” body and mind. Deeper within the self-referential body/mind system are the feelings and thought combinations arising in F-I-T, or feel, image, and talk space.

Our reactivity arises most personally as F-I-T activity – shame, embarrassment, rage, terror, grief, happiness, joy, compassion, etc., accompanied and reinforced through thought. “You’re making fun of me!” “I love you.” “That’s mine!” These sensory components of body and mind are self-referentially reflected and reinforced in the “I”, “me”, “mine” of our language.

There’s nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but as we’ll see later, if that’s all we identify with we stay limited within our conventional fixed identity.

Now let’s look at the chart below. Notice how in the right side of the TSSFIT chart the FEEL-IMAGE-TALK, or F-I-T sensory spaces, represent the more subjective “I, me, mine” conventional sense of self. On the left side of our chart the T-S-S sensory spaces represent a more “not I, me, mine”, or a more objective “other” or “world” space.

HUMAN SENSORY SYSTEM
Conventional Sense of Self and World

“T-S-S” Space Objective—Other/World	“F-I-T” Space Subjective—Self (I, Me, Mine)
Touch (body space, smell, taste)	Feel (emotional/body space)
Sight (external seeing space)	Image (visual thinking space)
Sound (external listening space)	Talk (auditory thinking space)

More…

@c4chaos

Life is a Giant Feedback Device

"As long as you stay focused, you’re perfectly happy, but it’s when you get scattered that your life becomes unhappy. I came to realize that life is actually a giant biofeedback device. The reason you go to the monastery is so you eventually come to the place where you can see ordinary daily life as a monastery; it just took a special situation in order to develop that sensitivity.”

~ Shinzen Young, from “Shinzen Young: The Reluctant Monk,” NEXUS, July/August 2009

What Disappears at Enlightenment

Excerpts from “On Enlightenment: An Interview with Shinzen Young,” from Har-Prakash Khalsa’s blog (September 5, 2009):

Enlightenment is not yet another thing that you have to get.  And meditation as a path to enlightenment could be described as merely setting the stage for Nature/Grace to eliminate from you what needs to be eliminated.

Sakkaya-ditthi is the perception that there is an entity, a thing inside us called a self. That goes away.The ambiguity is the word perception. The actual word is ditti in Pali, or drishti in Sanskrit, which means “view”, literally. In this context ditti or drishti refers to a fundamental paradigm, or concept about something.

So in this case perception is perhaps not the best word. It’s more like the fundamental conviction that there is a thing inside us called a self disappears—according to the traditional formulation, after enlightenment—that never comes back. However, if by perception of self we mean momentarily being caught in one’s sense of self, that happens to enlightened people over and over again, but less and less as enlightenment deepens and matures.

So if we take “self” to mean “the perception self-is-a-thing in me”, that is gone forever. But if we take “self” to mean:  A) mental image, internal talk and emotional feeling arising within, and B) one’s clarity and equanimity around them are not sufficient in that moment, then even a somewhat enlightened person may get caught in self, for awhile. Certainly that is going to happen over and over again.

I like to analyze subjective experience into three sensory elements:  feel (emotional-type body sensations), image (visual-thinking) and talk (auditory-thinking). Those sensory elements continue to arise for an enlightened person forever. Sometimes when the feel-image-talk arises the enlightened person is momentarily caught in them but even though they’re caught in that, some part of them still knows it’s not a thing called self. That knowing never goes away. The frequency, duration and intensity of identifying with feel-image-talk diminishes as the months and years go on as you go through deeper and deeper levels of enlightenment. There are exceptions, but typically it takes months, years, indeed decades learning how not to get caught in feel-image-talk when it arises.

You can have a “no-self experience” even when there is the arising of feel-image-talk as long as there is so much clarity and equanimity that you’re not caught in them. Furthermore, as the process of enlightenment deepens you find you experience longer and longer durations during which little or no subjective activity needs to arise.

So enlightened people have three kinds of no-self experiences. In the first subjective elements of self simply don’t arise. Subjective space vanishes. In the second emotion in the body and visual thinking and verbal thinking all arise, perhaps even intensely, but you don’t get caught in them because they never tangle or coagulate. In the third the subjective elements arise and you do get caught in them but some part of you still knows this experience is a wave called body-mind, not a particle called self.

So to sum it up, what disappears at enlightenment is a viewpoint or perception that there is a thing inside this body-mind process called self.

Setting the Stage

Shinzen Young describing what he means by having a complete experience (Jan. 6, 2009):

Having a complete experience is a technical term. I don’t mean complete in the sense it was intense. I don’t mean complete in the sense that you stayed with it until the end—although that’s part of it. By complete I mean there was a certain critical mass of concentration, clarity, and equanimity present from beginning to end in that experience.

We can’t always have complete experiences, but sometimes we can and with practice we can have them more and more.

When we have a complete experience of something that’s ordinary, it becomes utterly extraordinary. It becomes paradoxical in that it becomes deeply fulfilling and no longer there at the same time…One could also say that when you bring an extraordinary degree of concentration, clarity, and equanimity to an extraordinary experience it becomes utterly ordinary. That’s the path of liberation instead of the path of powers.

We can’t always have enough concentration, clarity, and equanimity to have a complete experience of something. But maybe we can have a little bit of concentration or a little bit of clarity or a little bit of equanimity and that’s not too shabby. Maybe we can’t have any concentration, clarity, and equanimity at all under certain circumstances. But we can have equanimity with that. We can accept that that’s the case and we can continue to do formal practice despite the fact that we have essentially no concentration, no clarity, and no equanimity.

However, we’re still setting the stage for nature to do its job. We’re catalyzing a natural process. We’re giving nature what it needs. On the surface it seems like we’re wasting our time because it's like total monkey mind, total confusion, total lost in emotional chaos, sleepiness, aches and pains, etcetera. But deep down, slowly, changes are taking place, even under those circumstances.

The Truly Living

Holy Longing (Selige Sehnsucht)
By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Translated by Shinzen Young

Tell it to no one but the wise
For most will mock it right away
The truly living do I prize
Those who long in flame to die.

In the coolness of loves evenings
Where you beget and were begotten,
You're overcome by strange new feeling
As the silent candle brightens.

No longer are you trapped and mired
In the darkened shadowings
But swept away by new desire
To a higher lovemaking.

Distance does not pall your flight
Spellbound through the air you're borne
Til at last mad for the light
You are a butterfly, then…gone.

And until you know of this:
How to grow through death
You're just another troubled guest
On the gloomy earth.

Zero and One

Shinzen Young talks about zero and one as the two main paradigms used to describe the path of enlightenment. He then talks about having a complete experience of feel, image, and talk—or the subjective self—and experiencing ordinariness as extraordinary, and experiencing the extraordinary as ordinary. Filmed in Santa Barbara in January 2009.

• www.shinzen.org
• www.basicmindfulness.com

Coming to Understand the Nature of Consciousness

Shinzen Young talks about the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures can be interpreted in two different ways. One shows the stages on the path of enlightenment and the other shows the process of truly grasping consciousness. This lecture was filmed near the end of a fourteen-day intensive at La Casa de Maria Retreat Center in Santa Barbara (1.9.09).

(1) Searching for the ox (2) - Seeing the footprints (3) Glimpsing the ox (4) Catching the ox

 

(5) Taming the ox (6) Riding the ox (7) Arriving home alone (8) Both Ox and self forgotten (9) Returning to the source

 

(10) In the marketplace with hand outstretched

[Thank you Randy!]

The Monastery Will Come to Each of Us

"I’ve been teaching meditation for two and a half decades, always exploring new ways to improve what I teach. Over the course of those years, I have made a number of interesting discoveries, some of which do not appear in standard books on the subject. One question I struggled with early on was how to make the practice doable by anyone, without watering down its intensity. When people read accounts of traditional monastic training, the usual reaction is, “If that’s what it takes to get enlightenment, I think I’ll wait for a few lifetimes.” And indeed it’s true. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to do intensive formal meditation practice. Why should they? Isn’t there enough physical and emotional discomfort in ordinary life? Why intentionally seek it out?"

"But the monastery will come to each of us when we have to confront our fears, losses, compulsions and anxieties, or process the aftermath of trauma. The monastery comes to us in the form of emotional crisis, illness or injury, a phobia or a failed relationship. The question is whether we will be in a position to recognize and use it as such. If there were a way to help people maintain continuous quality meditation through intense real world challenges, anyone could experience insight and purification comparable to that of traditional renunciates’ regimes. Basically it boils down to this: Intensity of Challenge multiplied by Sharpness of Mindfulness multiplied by Depth of Equanimity equals the Rate of Psychospiritual Growth. When things are most challenging, we have the opportunity to leap forward in our spiritual development, provided we make use of the challenge."

~ Shinzen Young, Bringing the Monastery Home

The Key to Life is to Forget Things

"The key to long life, is to immediately forget things. If you forget, then instantly and inevitably, a new state of consciousness always arises," says Sasaki Roshi, a Zen master who turned 100 years old this month. My meditation teacher, Shinzen Young interprets for his teacher in this short news clip.

Sasaki Roshi entered a Rinzai monastery when he was fourteen. He earned the title of Roshi (which means "old" and "teacher") when he was forty and moved to California to teach in 1962. His most famous student is Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer-writer who served as the Roshi's personal assistant during the years he spent in seclusion at Mt. Baldy Zen Center.

Shinzen was ordained as a Shingon monk in Mt. Koya, and has been teaching Vipassana meditation for thirty years. He draws the majority of his teaching analogies from mathematical and scientific concepts and emphasizes the similarity among the contemplative and ethical traditions of the world's religions. He has extensive experience coaching people who are suffering from chronic and acute pain.

On a Path to Becoming Wind-like

Excerpt from a talk given by Shinzen Young called Understanding Impermanence:

The word for spirit in English is from the Latin, spīritus which is a translation of a Greek word, pneuma. Pneuma is a translation of a Hebrew word, ruach which means breath or wind. So when we say we’re on a spiritual path, people can interpret this in a lot of different ways. I like to interpret it literally. You are on a path to becoming spiritualis. You are on a path to becoming wind-like: powerful and insubstantial and unfixated.

The native people of the plains of North America have a natural way of expressing this idea. In the Sundance ceremony, you dance around a cottonwood tree. If you look at a cottonwood tree, it’s a little different from other trees. It has the ability to respond to the wind very immediately. With the tiniest little movement of wind, you can see the direction and magnitude of the wind at a very fine scale in the accelerations and decelerations of each little leaf in the cottonwood tree. You can see ruach in that tree. So you dance around that tree and look at that tree for four days. It gets you in sync with one of the flows of nature.

And why does that tree work that way? Well, if you look at the way the leaves are articulated on the stems, they are very pliant instead of being rigid. There’s a link between our equanimity, a kind of pliancy in our sense gates, so that the more equanamous we become, the more we literally vibrate with ruach, with spirit, with the wind, with the basic forces of nature.

Iroha Uta

This ancient Japanese poem contains each of the phonemes from the Gojuuonzu (50-Sound Chart) and illustrates a core concept in Buddhism - impermanence (anicca). School children in Japan are taught it the way American children learn to recite the alphabet.

Iroha Uta

Iro wa nioedo, chirinuru wo
Waga-yo tare-zo tsune-naran?
Ui no okuyama kyookoete
Asaki yume miji, ei mo sezu

The Flower Song
Translated by Shinzen Young

Bright indeed the flowers may be, but surely not for long.
In this life, who indeed, will not someday be gone?
Passing beyond the furthest peak in the Province of Shifting Streams,
No longer will I drunken speak, nor gaze at shallow dreams.