Conversations on the Convergence of Buddhism, Technology, and Global Culture

BG 186: A Different Way of Approaching Meditation

Play

Episode Description:

We’re joined again by meditation teacher Jason Siff to conclude our exploration of the fundamental ideas and practices behind his unique approach of Unlearning Meditation, or what he calls Recollective Awareness.

We begin with exploring what recollection, or mindfulness, is and how it can be harnessed through a practice of meditative journaling. Jason continues his deconstruction of the type of prescribed practices which suggest doing something “all of the time” and suggests instead that we find out for ourself what meditation is about and where it is leading. We wrap up the discussion by exploring a different way of developing samadhi, a method that Jason describes as “drifting off in meditation.”

This is part 2 of a two-part series. Listen to part 1, Unlearning Meditation.

Episode Links:

Transcript:

Vincent: There’s another tool that you draw on in your own teaching that I found really interesting, and it’s meditative journaling of some sort. And I’ve had experience writing down experiences after meditation and the way I was doing it, I was telling you before the interview, was the Mahasi journaling where I write down to the best of my ability what I remembered in very specific descriptive experiences of the phenomena, and the notes that I used to note them. And then the teacher would sort of use that as a way to diagnose where I was at in my practice and to fine-tune the actual instructions of the practice.

And then I had a class actually when I was at Naropa University where we did this journaling about our experience and it was much more open. It was use whatever words that you want to use, describe things in detail, or use poetic language. And that was something more akin to what you teach people…

Jason: Yes

Vincent: …and I was wondering if you could say something about the meditative journaling, why you suggest it, and then also what are the mechanics around it, how is it done?

Jason: Well one of the main reasons why it’s done in this kind of approach is that because people aren’t given instructions of what to do in the sitting, they’re more or less learning from their experience. In order to do that you need to have some way of journaling or recalling what goes on, and picking up a bit more of how you are with certain things that are happening and getting much better descriptions, honest descriptions. These don’t necessarily have to be accurate, but strike you as truer to, or closer to, what you are experiencing. Through some of these new descriptions you may find that they help you when you sit again to be a bit more conscious of what’s going on. So this is a process of calling back to mind what goes on in your experience, and when you sit again and you have similar experiences, you’ll find a greater familiarity.

Now one thing about the journaling is to really try to use more descriptive language and to just journal a descriptive narrative or a list of descriptions of experiences and not to use technical language, or single words that generalize and try to capture a whole range of things. Instead, write a bit more detail and use metaphors and similes that come to mind and you’ll find that it may bring you just a little bit closer to what was going on.

In doing this kind of description, you may start to see that there’s many more aspects to your experience, or different factors that are present, than you realized. So if someone is doing a noting practice and they’re just writing down that they had a period of “anger” or they had “aversion” to something or felt some “desire,” that says something, but it really doesn’t say that much about what was going on. In fact, it’s often a summary of an experience rather than a description of it. If you could go back into those kinds of experiences that maybe you thought were “planning,” for instance, it’s different at different times. Sometimes you’re thinking about a work project and what you’re going to do later and you’re actually figuring something out and sometimes you’re picturing meeting somebody and maybe having some apprehension about that and considering what you’re going to say. To write down those fuller descriptions is much more helpful than to say that all of these things are planning.

Vincent: Interesting, and it’s striking me too that you’re mentioning the word “recollection” a lot and I understand that the term mindfulness, sati, is related to recollection.

Jason: Yes.

Vincent: That’s a little different and I saw an article by B. Allen Wallace and he was talking about how mindfulness often gets sort of misunderstood as being sort of bare attention to what’s happening in the moment, versus this sort of ability of the mind to recollect—both in terms of the past and in terms of recollecting in the future—which is intention. To recollect something, like when I have the intention to sit down if I’m doing your journaling practice for instance, I may have the intention ok at the end of this I want to sort of remember some of these things that happened. Anyway that’s a bit of a tangent but it’s striking me that the way you use the term “recollection…”

Jason: It’s an important distinction and historically I mean in the language, “sati” and “smriti” referred to recollection. And I really do believe that what the Buddha was teaching in many respects was how to notice your experience, how to become aware. And if you can’t be aware of something in the moment… certain things like thoughts, for example. If you try to be aware of them in the moment you’re stopping them, or you’re trying to create distance. You’re not really seeing where they go, what’s holding them together. So, the only way I could see to develop awareness of thinking would be recollection. And then it started to seem to me the only way I could really develop awareness of how things developed, in a sense where things would lead, would be by letting them go on and then recollecting afterwards.

So recollection enables us to get a much broader picture of what’s happening. And I think one of the criticisms that people may have about it is that you’re talking about something that’s already happened. It’s in the past. You’re not really with it right now so how do you know it? Well, when you’re with something in the present, even though you’re with it, you’re still representing it to your mind. You’re still telling yourself something about it. Just as you are when you are recollecting something. And you may be telling yourself something about the experience which may just be a bias or a conclusion. Whereas in recollection you might notice you’re not always in the same reacting, or thinking, or intending the same way around certain experiences. You may find that there’s more going on. So that’s part of that whole direction.

Vincent: Interesting. And as you’re talking about this it really strikes me that there’s not, in the way you’re talking about things, such a big distinction between the mind and views, and then our “direct experience” on the other hand. That these things really are incredibly interconnected and intertwined. Is that something that you’ve come to in your own process?

Jason: Right. Well, I see that a prescriptive meditation technique such as the Mahasi method, or many of the approaches where you’re supposed to do something all the time, has a concept about how things are—about the nature of reality, or truth, or mind. And so the instructions are there to help prove that concept. And I think many people don’t realize that the concept within instructions is still just another idea about experiences. It’s still another view that you’re trying to have. Is it something that you’ve come to? That’s one of the questions, how you’ve actually understood things to happen. And so the way to question some of the views is by looking at the views we hold.

And so when I teach meditation, instead of trying to just give a view of how to see things, often what I really try to do is hear the students’ views. The student has a view of God, or a materialistic view of the world, or any type of religious spiritual view. Then I try to understand how that view is working within that person’s practice and we’re able to talk about it. And then it can be contrasted with some of their descriptions, and that they can start to learn to see things differently, not because I’m telling them how to see things necessarily, but because they’re starting to pick up that their experiences may actually contradict some of their views. Or not actually fit into some of the views. Or some of the views are really speculative. They have do something other than the nature their experience. They’re speculating about something transcendent.

But along those lines when I do a retreat I will talk a bit, quite a bit actually at times, around conditionality and the teaching of dependent arising. And I don’t quite see that as a view, as a type of prescribed concept for people. I actually see it more as something that emerges from how you’re aware of your experiences and how they’re put together. It’s not necessarily something where everyone comes up with the same experience and the same notion that this is it. They come up with how certain things keep going in their practice: “Why are certain thoughts or feelings repeating themselves? Why do I keep making these same choices? How do things hold together, like a certain feeling? What keeps this state alive for so long?” And so there are a variety of things that people start to look at, which I would say have to do with conditionality.

Vincent: So part of what I’m hearing you describe is something around this process of meditation. That it’s more of a process, and it’s not clear that there’s a specific endpoint. I know you’re talking about conditionality, and awareness of how things arise, and how things are related. But it sounds like there’s a lot of also mystery in what you’re talking about. That there’s an open-ended quality to it.

Jason: Many meditation practices are actually given with a particular goal in mind. And when you have a goal in mind, you really have a concept and a view, and you imagine what that goal would be. So you’re also hearing descriptions from teachers or reading descriptions from books about that goal, which may also feed that imagination a bit. Then you are trying to actually have an experience that you haven’t had and you believe somebody else has had. And that you’re going to have a very similar experience to that other person, and it’s going to totally change you in some way, or at least have some great beneficial effect. When meditation is presented from that kind of standpoint, I see that there really isn’t that much mystery in it. You basically have an idea of what’s going to happen if you keep doing it. Whereas when you meditate with just staying with your experience and seeing where the process goes, you start to find that there isn’t really a formed concept of where it ends. You might have some glimpses into some more optimal states or different ways of looking at things, but you tend to come back into more or less how you are, at least after some time. So there’s a way in which a process where you’re just kind of noticing your experience over time will start to give you something a bit more realistic around how your mind develops or how changes occur, and what things seem to stick, and what some of the new perspectives are that are useful, instead of trying to get to some particular attainment or realization.

And part of this, I think, in practical terms is that when we look at our experience of meditating, it’s not necessarily on a single track. We’re going into a variety of different states. We’re not always getting into the same kinds of tranquil states when we meditate, or having the same relationship to certain experiences. You might have a sitting where it’s very easy to be with some anger or sadness, and the next one you’re really upset or you’re crying. And that’s part of what meditating is. It’s not something which is going to produce a static type of experience that you have all the time.

The way of looking at your development in meditation—it’s not so easy. Earlier I was talking about the difficulty of trusting our minds in this process. We might also not be able to trust our own assessment of it, our own way of looking into our experiences and seeing what we found was beneficial. Or the perspectives that seem to be useful, or the orientation around practice, and tensions around practice, that we really want to cultivate. This kind of approach to meditation really does require quite a bit of self-honesty. That you’re not trying to tell yourself another story about your meditation practice, or have somebody else’s meditation experiences or something like that. But see where your practice goes. So I often suggest that people do a review of their sittings. And if you have journal notes, it really helps to be able to do that. And to maybe look at it every six months or a year or so. To spend some time looking at some of the changes within your meditation practice and how you’ve changed as a person from the way you’re meditating. I think we all kind of intuitively know that. That anyone who has meditated for a long time can see that there are certain things that they just won’t do anymore, or certain thoughts that seem to be not coming in as much. And that’s a part of what happens when we practice. And that’s truth. It’s true feedback around what your meditation practice is doing, rather than something that is more of imagination. Saying that because you’ve had a certain realization or experience, that you’re now a particular way, even though sometimes you lapse from it.

My suggestion, I go into this in the book, it’s in the last part of the book, is to really try to look at whatever you’ve stated as a particular accomplishment or attainment in meditation, and live with it. And see if it is actually serving you, or would it just be better to just put it aside, and just go back into being with your experience as it is and just being honest with yourself.

Vincent: And I figured, to wrap things up, it’d be nice get into some of the more practical suggestions in here that are not that common. One of them is how to work with calm states. And you present one way of getting into what you call samadhi, that’s completely different than anything that I’ve heard before. Which has more to do with drifting off and then allowing the mind to come back, and as a result, somehow, there’s a deepening sense of calm that happens. Could you maybe lay a little bit of that out, in terms of how people could do that and so forth.

Jason: Well I think the first thing is, if you’ve been meditating and you haven’t allowed yourself to go toward sleep in meditation, that you’ve continued to try to wake yourself up, stop doing that and really let yourself drift. And that it’s ok. It’s ok to slump while you’re sitting and it’s ok to be drowsy. And it’s not necessarily a problem. In fact what will happen is that you may find that as you go towards sleep, you’re not actually falling asleep many times. You’re getting close to sleep, and there can be fragmented sentences, or sentences with words that don’t quite make sense, light, or colors, or strange movie-like scenes. And these kinds of mental phenomena coming in at that time may help you just wake up a little. So let your attention go to those things. And you may find that you pass through it, and you get into more of a tranquil state, that your mind can start to focus more, and think a bit more clearly.

This is in contrast to our normal notion of developing tranquility. We often think that to go into a tranquil state, we need to stay focused on a visual image, or a mantra, or the breath. And we follow that, and keep following that, and then we’re going to be really tranquil and focused, and we’re going to get into a particular state around that. And that does happen to people. But this approach that I’m talking about of allowing yourself to drift is one that you don’t use force or effort. You don’t have a sense of any kind of tension or trying to get somewhere. It’s naturally occurring, and so when we do get relaxed in meditation, even by following the breath, we may actually start to get sleepy. That’s part of a relaxation response for many people. And to allow that kind of sleepiness in, and then to see what starts to emerge from that kind of hypnagogic state.

So this way of developing samadhi, we’ll say, one would start to wake up a bit more and find that these kinds of twilight or hypnagogic states are going to continue longer. They’re going to have a slightly different quality over time. And they won’t be much of a hindrance. You won’t see them as something to get rid of. You might see them as actually something that is a bit pleasant and welcomed. And many people have reported to me that when they’ve allowed these experiences in, that their meditation has had a bit more pleasure. And it’s an internal pleasure. It’s not a gross sense pleasure. And these kinds of calm states are very good periods of relief, because what will often happen is you will go from a calm state back into something maybe more agitated, or filled with thoughts. And that cycle is quite natural—calm states aren’t always necessarily going to lead to more calmness. It might actually bring up other things.

Vincent: Why is that cycle so common? I know you’ve talked a little bit about this in your book as the meditative process. What’s up with that?

Jason: Well it’s an interesting question.

Vincent: [Laughter]

Jason: I would say that the calm states, and this is found in Buddhist suttas, they suppress certain emotions, or corruptions, or defilements. They don’t get rid of them necessarily. They may help us look more deeply into them at times. But there’s no sense in Buddhism of a calm state being transcendent and eliminating something. That elimination, or abandonment would come about through wisdom. So these calm states, they’re periodically suppressing our agitation, our worries, our cares. But they’ll come back again.

And my sense of it is that if you do a practice of getting calm by just watching your breath, or focusing on a particular object, that you don’t get to look at some of these states going into the calmness. You don’t get to look at your agitation or worry so much. You are taking a shortcut, bypassing them. Whereas in a more open meditation practice like I’m proposing, you’re actually able to look at your cares, or worries, or fears, or sadness, or grudges, whatever is of alive in your mind. And you may find that while you’re looking at them your mind does settle down. They become less of a hindrance and you find yourself getting calm. And then you might find when you come out you don’t necessarily go right back into them. You may, but when you do go back into them you have a slightly different perspective on them because you’ve stayed with them. You’re not trying to avoid them. And that will have an effect on this kind of cycling. It won’t stop it, but it may make it so you’re actually more patient and tolerant of those times when you come out of a calm state and suddenly you’re agitated and restless. That instead of trying to get calm again you might utilize that calmness to be with that new experience.

Vincent: Sounds like some development of equanimity, but in a big sense, not in trying to develop it right there in the sit but something that develops just as…

Jason: Develops over time. Right.

Vincent: Right, over time.

Jason: And not equanimity as a kind of being detached from your experience.

Vincent: Right.

Jason: Of separating, but how you are with it.

Vincent: Nice. I’m wondering just to wrap up if you had anything that you felt like you didn’t get a chance to touch on or any concluding thoughts?

Jason: I think the thing I really haven’t touched on is found in the third part of the book on the meditative process. And it just may help in looking at what I’m saying. That I do see a place for more traditional practices. But rather than having students start with a traditional practice, say of being aware of the breath, or noting, or practicing metta, I suggest that people allow those experiences to come up more naturally in the sitting.

For metta, for example, you may notice at some point in your meditation sitting that you do have some thoughts of gratitude, or kindness, or friendliness towards some other people. And you might find at that moment that you really feel it and you could stay with it. So I would suggest practicing metta then, when it is effortless, when it just kind of comes to you. The same thing with awareness of the breath. When you just find yourself noticing the breath in the meditation and there isn’t really much effort in it, you can them hold your attention there without thoughts and other things pulling your attention away so much. And really get a lot of benefit from that practice.

So, instead of doing these kinds of techniques as something to start meditation practice with, or something you do all the time, to see them as things you may bring your attention to at different points within your sitting. And then do them as you would. You may find that you’re doing them then without a particular kind of force or pressure. And they’re actually starting to go in the directions which you’ve probably read about and heard about.

Author

Jason Siff