by Jason Siff
Other Vipassana practices, such as body scanning (S. N. Goenka’s method) and noting the body and sense doors (the Mahasi Sayadaw method), also lead to the non–taking-up process. Body scanning, or “sweeping,” is a practice where the meditator moves one’s attention up and down the body. The technique starts slowly and carefully, but after a few days spent doing this practice on retreat, the speed and ease of doing it can increase dramatically. The moving of one’s attention up and down one’s body and limbs can be highly focusing, and combined with the increased tolerance for painful sensations, it often leads to a non–taking-up process. Though often described at Goenka’s retreats as a free-flow experience, it is technically considered to be of the nature of a rapid arising-and-passing-away experience. Arriving at this state of mind is one of the objectives of that meditation practice and would be considered an optimal experience, though it is still not seen as the final goal.
The noting practice of the Mahasi method, in which the meditator notes each moment of experience with a label, also leads to the non–taking-up process, though the experiences are of a different sort than those experienced in body-scanning practice. Noting your experience as it is happening has a way of concentrating the mind on discrete, separate moments of experience. It breaks the habitual mode of perceiving thoughts, feelings, and sensations as having a duration in time. Instead, what would normally be considered a painful sensation, such as a dull lower back pain, would not be looked at as a continuous sensation but as made up of moments that follow linearly, one ending before the other begins, having no connection with each other. The fact that the person just keeps noting “pain,” “pain,” several times a minute breaks up the notion of there being a continuous sensation.
I would say that this noting practice does create greater tolerance for the painful experience while at the same time turning it into something impersonal. That it eventually leads to a non–taking-up process is no surprise. As in the Goenka method, the non–taking-up process is not the final goal, though it is still considered an optimal state and may even be found as the basis for the definition of equanimity as taught in that tradition.
No Intentional Building or Fueling of Experiences
The meditation practices described in the last section can also lead to not building upon experiences, but they do it by not having the student look at the building process. In unlearning meditation, you concentrate on the ways experiences build and form, exploring them while trying to understand their dependently arisen nature. In this way, non–taking up is a state of mind that arises out of the explorative process. It is not arrived at through techniques of focusing your attention on prescribed objects of meditation or by breaking experiences down into discrete moments or separate parts. It is arrived at through staying with and tolerating the ways we fuel our experiences and through investigating that process.
It may appear to be a contradiction that by allowing ourselves to receptively go into our experiences and let them flourish we will not take them up and build upon them. Through a series of processes (usually receptive and explorative), you can begin to disentangle from building upon experiences and eventually begin not taking them up. This is a way of arriving at “letting go” by gradually loosening your hold. And that is how it often feels to people—like a loosening around the experience. Here is an example.
Lots of chatter of women outside the hall makes me start thinking I should do something: close the door tighter, get up to say something to them. Recognize my immediate knee jerk to “do something.” Just sit and recognize gratefulness and happiness that I am sitting and not part of their conversation. Anger arises—mostly the feeling, not so much thoughts. I hold it like a baby. Women’s voices are becoming tedious and seem to parallel my experience of the tediousness of self-creation. Wonder if it is possible to truly empty of self? . . . Sounds of women’s voices seem to pass through my ears as if there is a channel through my head. It is a very open definite channel. I am not holding the sounds.
In this sitting, the meditator allowed her feelings of anger at being disturbed by women talking. There was a certain amount of building on the feelings, enough to make her want to get up and do something about it. She restrained herself from doing anything but still let herself feel the anger. She held the emotion “like a baby” and went on to contemplate how the women’s voices were similar to her own self-created dialogues that ran through her sittings. Eventually she found herself in a state of mind where she was not holding the sounds. She was still experiencing the women’s voices but was not taking them up as something she had to take care of, as she had earlier on in the sitting. They were just sounds entering her ears and nothing more.
Though in this case the end result was that her irritation at the women’s voices vanished, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case with the non–taking-up process. With certain emotions that tend to linger and have an effect on our body chemistry, we may experience the feeling persist while we are no longer taking up any kind of building upon or elaboration of the experience. This is most noticeable with anxiety or fear. You could get to the point of no longer being afraid or anxious and yet still feel those sensations. In meditation practices where such emotions are equated with corresponding physical sensations, the meditator often believes that the sensations must cease in order for her or him to become free of the emotion. Instead, the emotion can cease but leave residual sensations. That is, you can still have a bodily experience of being anxious even while your mind is calm. This is a subtle, however easily discernible, indication that the non–taking-up process is the dominant process.
In this kind of situation it may still be hard to discern whether you’re in a receptive process or a non–taking-up one. In a receptive process, you’re drawn into and build upon the mental scenarios, thoughts, and feelings, while in a non–taking-up process, they tend to pass by without your being pulled into them—or the mental scenarios simply don’t arise at all.
Not Believing in Self
In the previous example, the meditator mentions that she “wondered if it is possible to truly empty of self.” Most Buddhist meditators believe that it is possible, even though it’s not so easy to accomplish. Many Buddhist meditation practices approach this directly by giving instructions and teachings on seeing your experience in terms of no-self. And you can enter the non–taking-up process through those means, but because they are often directed, they generally employ a generative process to get there.
In going through a process of unlearning meditation we are not trying to employ some concept, image, or practice of no-self in order to see that there is no self. Instead, we are having experiences of self and seeing into them in such a way that the nonself, or dependently arisen nature, of them is known. For the purpose of talking about this, I tend to use the compound word self-structure for what we normally call self. What we are seeing is not a self but a way of perceiving and structuring our experiences as having a self. This way of structuring our experience as belonging to us, identifying us, and defining us gets seen in our explorations and contemplations within our meditation sittings. But this happens only because we have let ourselves own and identify with those experiences during the meditation sitting and because we have recollected aspects of that afterward.
This whole phenomenon of building a self-structure out of our experiences has great depth and subtlety to it. It exists in our projections onto others and the kind of transference we have with them. This area is outside the scope of this book, but I would like to touch on it briefly as it applies to how we take things up and to the non–taking-up process. To aid in this exploration, I will introduce a simpler concept than the psychodynamic mentioned above. This is a concept of “imaginary relationships with real people.”
All of our relationships, even the one we have with ourself, are in some ways imaginary. In meditation we will have many rehearsed or imaginary dialogues with people, and we may come to certain conclusions about them and us from participating
in those thoughts. We may see how our decision of seeing somebody as right or wrong, good or bad, friendly or hostile, affects how we feel about the person and informs our actions toward him or her. By defining someone else as a self with substantial and enduring qualities in our inner dialogues, we may inadvertently be sustaining a particular self-structure for ourselves. Usually these kinds of self-structure are difficult, if not impossible, to notice—when we are in them, we are them.
What can begin to happen in meditation is that by allowing your mind as it is into your meditation sittings, you will be taking up one self-structure after another through the course of being with your thoughts and feelings. When you are angry, it may not always be just a simple sensation that you identify as anger. That feeling of anger and the energy to act on it, when sat with and tolerated, may begin to reveal that it is held together somehow. It is not loose and flowing but tight and sticky. It is like the instances when you were angry at someone about something. Even without the memory of those particular instances, you may feel a familiar identity in the anger. The way you see the other person may also be familiar. He or she may appear threatening, belittling, or cold, and may exhibit any number of upsetting or irritating qualities.
It may take many rounds of going through emotionally difficult and painful sittings to develop this kind of awareness of self-structures. Even when we know better, we keep taking up these old, and for some reason trusted, selves, and we feed them the nourishment they seek. This is not something you can just transcend and be done with, though I wish it were so. This is a state of affairs that we need to learn how to disentangle ourselves from.
The non–taking-up of self-structures is just this type of disentangling. It may not be total or complete when it happens, as this is a process and not a fixed state, but it allows us not to take up a self we once were. This is different from the experience of not taking up the sensation of anger when it arises and passes away quickly. It is the experience of not taking up the angry person you feel yourself becoming at that time.
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The Connected Process
The connected process generally occurs in the samadhi or jhana states mentioned in an earlier chapter but not in the pre-jhanic or hypnagogic states, which is one way to tell those states apart. It is the most “meditative” of all the six processes, as it fits the main definition of what traditional meditation is supposed to be: a unified state of mind. It is the meditative process where your attention is connected with an object of awareness, like the breath, a sound, or a visual image. That is why I call it a connected process instead of a unifying process, though that would be an equally accurate way of designating this particular meditative process.
Experiences of a connected or unifying nature have some common features. They often come with a loss of ordinary self-preoccupations and personality. For many people they seem to engender an experience of a transcendent or higher self (a pure consciousness). There can be a knowledge or intuition of a metaphysical reality that is beyond the mundane mind within these experiences. You may feel not only that such experiences connect you with a higher truth but also that the experiences themselves are the higher truth, to the extent that you’re inclined to define such a truth as being synonymous with the experience of it.
On the surface, the connected process doesn’t seem like a process, since it is not experienced as changing. It seems too stable, fixed and solid to fit in with our ordinary notions of a mind that is continuously in flux. By its very stability, it is like a mountain that rests under a veil of clouds, in that when it is discovered, it seems as though it has always been there. Thus there is often a perception of eternity with certain connected experiences. It replaces the self as the ground of your subjective reality while it is present. When it vanishes and you return to more ordinary modes of consciousness, you can easily believe that it always exists, for that is a part of the connected process (the belief in an eternal, stable reality somewhere). Here are a couple of instances of how the views inherent in the connected process come up when someone is in a samadhi state, taken from a journal by a student who has been working closely with me for the past five years.
I immediately enter into samadhi. As meditation continues I wonder if I am actually in samadhi throughout meditation. Different view—that the samadhi is always there to some extent—what changes is whether I am perceiving it.
And in another sitting around the same time, the student writes:
I pick up that I have some more-subtle attachment to this satisfied state of mind I have been in—that is, some subtle belief that it will last or that it is who I am.
Arriving at prescribed connected experiences is the goal of many meditation practices. Generally, the means to that goal is through generative practices, such as focusing on an image, concentrating on a mantra, or watching the breath. One seldom reads or hears of someone arriving at unifying (or transcendent) experiences through a receptive process. The common notion then is that such a powerful and complete loss of the separateness of an ordinary self can only come about through great feats of concentration and applied effort.
But the connected process, and the experiences that go with it, are sometimes described in terms of surrender. You surrender your attachments, your ego, or you just let go and merge with a divine essence. These are typical descriptions of following a generative practice, such as concentrating on a single-syllable mantra and then letting go of that practice once it has gotten you to a place of peace and concentration. Then the receptive process takes over for a little while until the mind finds that which it can connect with so thoroughly as to lose its sense of separateness.
Theravadin Buddhists, along with some other schools of Buddhism, see the connected process as having two distinct forms: those with wisdom and those without wisdom. The perception of not having wisdom in unified states of mind is when you have beliefs about the transcendent, eternal, unchanging nature of those unified states, but in other traditions, such as Vedanta, these beliefs would be seen as knowledge. This is one major area where Theravada and some other schools of Buddhism disagree with Hindu and other theistic teachings. My position on this in regard to unlearning meditation is that if you have connected experiences and believe in the transcendent, unchanging nature of them, then you can loosen your hold on those beliefs and begin to examine them, just as you’ve done with the meditation instructions. Those beliefs may carry a truth for you, which you can look into and verify or disprove for yourself over time.
The connected experiences with wisdom, from the Theravadin perspective, are those that are seen as changing mental constructs. They appear to be of a higher self or of a merging with a transcendent reality or essence, but when looked at closely, they are just as much mental constructs as our mundane, worldly experiences of mind. The wisdom lies in seeing mental constructs in connected states for what they are: products of the mind, not external or transcendent realities.
The connected process comprises only those samadhi states that are focusing and absorbing. It does not include those that are drifting, internally fluid, apparently empty, or rapidly changing. Such samadhi states may actually arise more within a receptive, explorative, or more particularly, a non–taking-up process. In this respect, the connected and non–taking-up processes are opposites, much like the generative and receptive processes are.
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How to Use these Meditative Processes Skillfully
It is best to use this model of six meditative processes to reflect on segments of a sitting after it’s over. Often when people try to apply the processes during the sitting, they turn them into a labeling technique. Someone might just call off to himself that he is receptive, then conflicted, and so on, without gaining much insight into what is going on in his experience. Sometimes people will do this as a way to learn how to identify these processes, but I suggest you learn about these processes after the sitting, from having read your honest descriptions of your experiences in your own words from your journal
.
Along these lines, I would suggest that you don’t overuse these six processes in your descriptions of experiences, whether in a journal or in a dialogue with a teacher. Doing so could easily turn them into jargon, which would inhibit their usefulness as tools for exploring your experiences more deeply and learning about the interaction between the conditions that create your experiences and the ways you relate to them.
These six processes are concepts about experiences and so should not be granted some kind of exalted status of being the “truth” about our meditative experience. There are no definitive experiences of any of the meditative processes—no single experience can describe a process. There is no one experience of non–taking up, for example, though in some traditions it is taught that there is.
In practice, the six meditative processes actually become less separable as time goes on, less clearly delineated as we keep learning about them. They are helpful in the beginning to make discernments between different practices and to help us make choices about which practices meet with the conditions of our experiences. So you might be able to see how each process is different and separate, but after a while, they begin to overlap more and more and can be seen to be interrelated. This is because in unlearning meditation, all of the six meditative processes are known and cultivated equally, even the conflicted and generative.
Meditation Practices and Their Goals
Below is a table listing different meditation practices. To the right of each entry is the type of instruction one is taught to do when beginning that practice. To the right of that is the kind of meditative process that I assume is the goal or objective of that particular practice.