BG 187: Non-Meditation and the Nature of Thought

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Episode Description:

“You need not make efforts to create non-conceptuality. You need not regard thoughts as a fault. And so that your practice does not succumb to famine, from the beginning have a bountiful crop. Not searching for a state that is calmly resting, vividly clear, and filled with bliss, bring into your experience whatever arises without taking it up or discarding it.” – Orgyenpa

We’re joined again this week by one of our favorite Buddhist Geeks, Robert Spellman. In our discussion with him, we delve into the often tenuous relationship that meditators have to their own thoughts. Robert shares a profound teaching from a 13th century Tibetan teacher, Orgyenpa, on how to relate to the thinking mind. He also talks about the difficulty in getting personally identified with insights, and explores what is meant by “non-meditation.” For those meditators out there who are interested in having a more empowering and healthy relationship to their own minds, this promises to be a very interesting interview.

Episode Links:

• Robert Spellman
• Orgyenpa

Transcript:

Vincent: Hello, Buddhist Geeks. This is Vincent Horn, and I’m joined today by a very special guest, Robert Spellman. Robert, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with the Buddhist Geeks.

Robert: I love the Buddhist Geeks.

Vincent: I know you do. Because you are one. [laughter]

So, Robert, there’s a topic that we thought would be really interesting to explore with you, and I know you’ve been teaching meditation for a long time, and that’s basically: how do we relate to the thinking mind as meditators? From what I’ve seen, the thinking mind gets a really bad rap. It’s kind of the ugly stepchild of meditation. [Laughs]

Robert: The ugly stepchild. Yeah, I think it’s one of the most common misconceptions about meditation, that thoughts are a problem. That they’re something that need to be gotten rid of, and that a lot of people shy away from meditation, probably intelligently, because that sounds like it might be a, what did you say earlier, Something almost anti-life to do that.

So, yeah, I’m interested—I teach that in my classes at Naropa. I try to dispel that misconception right from the beginning, that the point is not to get rid of thoughts, but to see thoughts. It’s to see the nature of thought. That’s a very different thing.

Vincent: What is the nature of thought?

Robert: Oh, damn it. [Laughs] I was afraid you were going to ask me that.

Well, I don’t know if I want to answer the question directly to say what is the nature of thought, but you could say, “What is the quality of thought?” That might be a place to begin. Most meditators are familiar with the quality of thought. It can be fast-moving, it can be very repetitive, it can be very seductive, that there are a lot of qualities to thought. I think I would recommend that as an investigation first: what is the quality of thought? What is just the quality of it? And the quality is a different –that’s a very different investigation than the meaning or the content or the—how did you ask it earlier—what is the nature of thought?

Vincent: What is the nature of thought? Yeah.

Robert: Yeah. That’s a very different kind of investigation. You know, just what is the quality of it? So you have to adopt a kind of neutrality about it in order to be able to maybe even get a glimpse of that.

Vincent: Yeah, it makes me think of the vipassana or vipashyana type of practices, where one’s observing the process of thinking, and noticing when thoughts arise, are they images? Are they auditory? What’s the, kind of, like you’re saying, the quality of them? Are they desirous thoughts? Are they thoughts about the future or the past? What kind of time senses is in there. Is that what you’re describing?

Robert: Somewhat, although even on a more—you could almost say idiotic level, if we’re saying, “This is a desirous thought,” or “This is an angry thought,” that’s still analytical from the point of view of the meditator, where this is more just, “What are these, anyway?”

Actually, underneath, even, you could say, “What is the quality of it?” It’s… I don’t know. I actually never put it this way exactly, but you never know what happens in a Buddhist Geek interview.

Vincent: Yeah, yeah. And I wonder if we could maybe go at this from another angle, which is: why is it so common that people feel that thoughts or thinking are problems? Why does it feel so naturally that they’re problematic in some way?

Robert: I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them is presentation. Too often the presentation isn’t done carefully enough to be able to be very, very clear about what the relationship is to thoughts.

Part of it is in the presentation, but part of it is also the culture that most people, say, in North America grew up in, which is based on a generally Christian, Judeo-Christian view of sin, and good and evil, and those kinds of dichotomies. Which interestingly, doesn’t seem to have developed in other parts of the world—that kind of dichotomy. So that if we receive instructions saying that the mind wanders everywhere, all over the place, and when you practice meditation you’re training the mind to come back, the first thing most people will conclude is: thoughts are bad. It just seems to go that way.

Vincent: Yeah. Yes.

Robert: So I think partly it’s embedded in the culture, but I think partly it’s in the presentation as well.

Vincent: Yeah. Yeah, we interviewed a guy named Jason Siff, and he teaches this whole practice of Unlearning Meditation, and he talked about just that, that there are sort of rules even in the instructions themselves that tended to make certain things wrong, in some ways.

Robert: Yeah.

Vincent: That’s interesting.

Robert: Yeah.

Vincent: So, I know there are teachings in different traditions around how to work with thinking in a way that’s more—I don’t want to say nondualistic—but I guess that’s one word to describe it. That somehow thoughts aren’t pushed away; they’re an integral part of the exploration, kind of like how you were describing to notice the quality of thoughts.

Robert: Yeah.

Vincent: Could you say some about that?

Robert: Yeah. I like that term, that it’s an “integral” part of the investigation, rather than something to be gotten rid of and then we can get on with the investigation. That it is the investigation itself, you could say. Although that could be a tricky thing to say, too.

There was a 12th century, actually 13th-century, Tibetan teacher named Orgyenpa. This is an extract or an excerpt from a larger text. I don’t actually know what the larger text is, but the quote is: “You need not make efforts to create non-conceptuality. You need not regard thoughts as a fault. So that your practice does not succumb to famine, from the beginning have a bountiful crop.” He’s talking about thoughts here. [Laughs]

Vincent: A bountiful crop of thoughts.

Robert: From the beginning, a bountiful crop. Let ‘em rip. He goes on to say, “Not searching for a state that is calmly resting, vividly clear and filled with bliss. Bring into your experience whatever arises, without taking it up or discarding it.” It’s that last phrase that’s really important to remember. It’s bringing everything into your experience whatever arises. This does not mean just doing whatever—it’s not just blowing around like a plastic bag in the wind. At the same time there is this continual dawning of experience, a kind of “thisness” of reality. And he is recommending, instructing—and I love that this eight centuries ago at least and it still applies—he is saying bring into your experience whatever arises. Bring it in, without taking it up or discarding it. He is talking about a very specific kind of view of experience.

Vincent: Yeah the taking it up or discarding that. It’s like without getting engaged and without pushing it away? Is that kind of where he is pointing into?

Robert: Yeah because I think the pushing away is another point where we often get confused with meditation. Is that we think we need to push these things away, we need to push away the thoughts that happen on our mind, or the extreme emotional upheavals, or things that happen and we need somehow to get rid of them, so we push them away. And in fact there is a tremendous amount of energy right within the arising of this. Always. It is very exciting.

Vincent: I am wondering, because you’ve kind of been talking almost in the abstract up to this point, talking about it. I wonder if you could say a little bit about your experience as a meditator, I know you’ve been meditating for decades. How is your relationship to thinking or the thinking mind? How has it changed or has it changed? Could you say something about that?

Robert: Yeah, sure.

Vincent: …to kind of bring it into the personal realm.

Robert: Yeah. There are a couple of things. One of them is that I’ve been doing this for about 40 years and sometimes I think, “Wow, I am a hopeless case. It’s too late. It’s not going to happen for me.” And then other moments I realize, “Oh this actually has been a really, really good thing to have done.” I think maybe where I stumble is when I identify personally with insight. And when that’s not there it’s actual insight. But as soon as I try to sort of locate it as here then something goes south with it.

I think the other thing is, this instruction from that quote I’ve just said, I’ve been contemplating that lately because the “whatever arises into your mind” he says “bring into your experience, whatever rises in the mind.” So, whether it’s taking credit for some kind of insight, or feeling completely disconnected, or all of those things, those are all included, they are all included with you could say the thisness of my experience.

Vincent: Is there some sense in which that’s a good thing? Is there some sense in which there is freedom associated with that? Why do that?

Robert: Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good question. I would just say yes comma yes comma yes. Because I think that the space of bringing into experience whatever arises does not include the necessity of somehow getting rid of something or bolstering something else up.

There is another term that is sometimes translated into English, I don’t know what the Tibetan word is, but it’s sometimes translated into English as “mind’s resource.” It’s the functioning of the mind; that it functions all by itself. It’s autonomic in a way like digestion and other bodily functions are, the mind sort of does what it does all by itself. The term “mind’s resource” I like because it’s not like “mind’s problem”, which is I think we are again getting back to the original question, is that we tend to think of operation of the mind, the workings of the mind, as a problem. If instead we’re thinking of it as a resource, that’s a very different kind of view; that it’s a richness, and it’s energetic, and it’s filled with color, all kinds of possibilities. Which is both the energy of it and where we can get ourselves into trouble. Because it can be so seductive and we can just get sucked right into that energy in a way that if we are not looking closely will get us into the kind of circular problems that we find ourselves in.

I had one other thing just to add to that about we were talking about earlier outside, and it was that term “non-meditation.”

Vincent: Oh yeah.

Robert: In the Tibetan tradition, in the Kagyu tradition especially, there’s a term, the word is non-meditation and it literally means “transcending all sophistries of meditation or non-meditation.” It’s actually transcending the idea that there is something that we do with the mind that makes everything ok. And that it actually is going beyond any need to manipulate or work with any kind of contrivances at all with the mind so that the mind is truly let be, it’s let alone. But it’s a very advanced term at the same time. It’s not let alone in the sense of like letting a dog run off a leash. It’s letting it alone because it is fundamentally fine to begin with but that recognition takes years of practice.

Vincent: Yeah, it seems like throughout everything you’ve been saying, there’s this paradoxing, the effort and the non-effort.

Robert: Yeah.

Vincent: That somehow you’re not saying non-meditation is non-effort.

Robert: Yes.

Vincent: That somehow it’s the type of effort that emerges from a lot of practice and seeing the relationship between these things.

Robert: Yes. And eventually actually having there be no effort. That it becomes effortless. You could say as a synonym for non-meditation, there’s no effort. There’s not a kind of conceptual boundary between regular experience and meditative experience. That distinction would no longer be… it just wouldn’t exist.

Vincent: So that’s why one can still drink a beer and still be a Buddhist Geek.

Robert: I think so, yeah.

Vincent: I’m hoping so. [Laughs]

Robert: Yeah because drinking a beer could be really great or it could be a problem. Or not drinking a beer could be really great or it could be a problem, depending on how we’re approaching it.

Vincent: Thank you.