March 26 Oxford Buddha Vihara
The construction of functional mental states has enabled me to keep my practical life in order. What I mean by this is that, before attempting to undertake an action I desire to carry out but find difficult in practice, I focus not on the action but on moving myself into a mental state where the action comes with automaticity. Repeated construction of these mental states has strengthened them. It is like programming a machine. It is always fun to see what works and what doesn’t, and it is also beneficial when life brings stress.
There is always mechanistic causation for behaviour. I find that self observation (meditation being the most focused kind) allows me to zoom in on mental causation. When you see the sequence of events that lead to your own behaviour in finer detail, you learn to take each step one by one and watch it happen. I was reminded on retreat that motivation must be constructed just like anything else. If it does not appear to exist I don’t want to impatiently attempt to act without motivation but rather find a way to construct it first. A meditation book I read explained that step one of starting a meditation practice itself was preparation. What I am really doing is generating belief and purpose, which I feel more fulfilled by when my actions are built upon.
If I regretfully act without purpose, I should inquire myself. I must value any reason I find and come to understand that my decision served a purpose. It will no longer feel like a regret as I have acknowledged its purpose. Acknowledging the decision had a purpose allows you to find better ways to fulfil the same purpose.
We discussed the discriminating mind. This refers to the part of our mental activity that categorises, judges, and divides experience into opposites. I realised a lot of my restrictive behaviours exist as they allow me to value other aspects of my life that are less stimulating. They allow me to enjoy life holistically, rather than constantly living in wait for something more exciting than what’s in front of me. A life of waiting feels like a life of restriction to me. Ive realised I don’t want to engage in anything that actively devalues the other things in my life important to me by a significant margin. I want to look at things for not just what they are but how they relatively fit into my life holistically, as everything is relative. The discriminating mind is powerful, if something is good, something else must be bad. When you praise one thing you are always condemning another.
I have direct evidence that I am not my body as I found I could turn myself on and off by redirecting my focus during meditation. I could make the chatter in my mind immediately cease, yet I was still aware of the presence of my body. My body could exist without my internal narrative.
Speaking from a more scientific perspective, I moved more from thinking to raw sensing. Meditation research suggests my experience is explained by deactivation of higher order networks in the functional hierarchy and lower order networks involved in sensation predominated my awareness. Since my sense of self resides in higher order networks such as the default mode network, this makes sense. Lower order networks include sensory cortices and other sensorimotor areas that process raw experience without attaching a conceptual “self” to it.
I also found that by observing myself and asking “where am I?”, that the POV of observation felt localised in the brain, my body. There are different aspects of selfhood. The narrative self which involves stories about yourself is linked to the DMN. However there is also the embodied self, which is the feeling that you are localised, the sense of being a point of experience located in space. The very questioning of my location may have activated networks involved in situating myself in the world.
Before we left for the retreat one of my peers made a point that stuck with me. He explained that his mind never by default quietens, but through meditation practice he has learnt how to make the chatter cease on will.
While I was in psychiatric hospital, my friend who visited strongly suggested that the reason I had ended up in such a battle with my mind was because it was overactive. He framed this positively, and described it to be more that I had a powerful mind. Remembering this conversation while on retreat made me feel quite happy. The intensity of my thoughts and emotion have indeed driven much of my proactive approach to life and have resulted in a lot of growth to which I wouldn’t have encountered without the initial driving factor. Only when I feel purposeful towards what I’m doing do I focus hard on it, so I immerse myself and attempt to make all the work I do meaningful, to keep myself driven. I actively search for purpose and construct meaning. I allow myself to lead a meaningful life in order to work with my own mind. I feel blessed to have a tool I can do so much with.
July 25 Month long templestay at 월정사, SK
I took a walk after my meditation and realised that meditation allows you to prioritise senses over thoughts. When I say realised, I meant that I felt these things with emotion rather than thought, as I'd already heard them as words. Yifa says there is a difference between knowing and realising and I believe what I said above is the best way to explain this psychologically.
Experiential knowledge in buddhism is emotional knowing. Neuroscientifically speaking, we feel first then generate a thought to explain the feeling. It takes longer for the cortex to process information. You can attempt to use cognitive knowledge to correct thoughts education tells you are unhelpful but emotions must change too for growth. I feel I have learned through this retreat to put less value on the intellectual. Cognition only plays a part of knowledge and only reading wont bring you as close to a truth you seek as you may think. Additionally, you must target emotion to change peoples thoughts as it is prerequisite to thought.
Discipline is cognitive. It is when you use your higher brain areas to drive your behaviour, when your primitive brain areas want something else. I’ve realised meditation doesn’t develop discipline, because it aims to rewire your emotional programming and align your “head and your heart”. In true enlightenment it shouldn’t be painful to let go, it should be freeing. I think an example might make more sense. You aren’t resisting eating the bagel, but rather you truly don’t believe it will bring satisfaction. It no longer is effortful but the natural response.
In academic class, as an experiment we were asked to focus on “nothing” and were told to make a dash each time we had any other thought. Neuroscientifically speaking, the mind cannot focus on two things at once. When you multitask you are simply switching your attention by the second, it does not make things faster than doing one task fully after the other. During my longer meditations I noticed shifts in my awareness. Sometimes I felt almost fully focused on the breath, other times I felt I was thinking while also being focused on the breath but I was actually rapidly switching between the two. When you are fully focused on your breath in buddhism, this is called single pointed concentration and is the starting point for higher meditative states.
On my long walks during the silent retreat I explored the mountain the temple was on and felt for the first time that I was discovering korea for myself. Being back in silence, Ive decided I resonate very much with the buddhist principle of right speech. Most chatter seems to disturbs a peace I find from solitude. I enjoy conversations I can walk away from remembering.
Greed comes from a lack of attention, you can only want change if you aren’t happy with the present and if you aren’t focused on the present you cannot value it.
In my time in silence I imagined looking back on my experience at the temple and things I wanted to do came to mind. Only by stepping out of the experience I seemed to see the things I wanted to do more clearly. I do this outside the temple too and I often do not fulfill my full potential as I am blinded by my immediate needs of safety taking priority. Yet I watched my programmed mindset take over again when I looked over at a girl next to me and an immediate thought came to mind “It’s not worth attempting to chat with her I’ll never see her again when this is over”. I want to have conversations for the joy of having them in the moment rather than carry the hope they will turn into friendship.
“This is it” is a phrase from a book called “four thousand weeks”, a book recommended to me by my psychologist a few years back. I didn’t reject the phrase but I used to think living fully in the present destroyed goal setting and prevented you from getting things done. I’ve realised now that when living in the present, the goal just becomes the process instead and the objective of the original goal becomes a side effect.
For example, setting a goal for completing a task will always put some amount of stress on your shoulders as in that very moment the completion of the goal is physically impossible. The goal should just be to work there and then. This goal can actually be done in the moment as you are completing it every second. In each moment you follow the process and your original goal simply occurs as a side effect of pointing in the right direction. I believe this is the mechanism of the flow state.
I have realised is that people are never responding to you, but to their feelings.
I never want to engage in anything I cant commit most if not all my attention to. I believe it is best not to set goals, only directions, as directions are possible to do now, but goals are not. I believe choosing to do one thing after and learning to focusing your attention leads to the most fruitful life.
April 25 Goenka Vipassana UK
We can always detect primal emotion but cannot always assign the correct reason.
I remember reading a comment by a lady who went on this same retreat previously. She described how she had come to dislike a woman on retreat having been given a cold stare on the first day only to be told by the woman after silence lifted that she had just been admiring her hair.
She used this as an example of how the mind confabulates reasons “she must dislike me”, however I slightly disagree. I believe the primal mind is very capable of detecting primal emotion. I believe the woman had detected a primal fear response to ambiguity, but then cognitively come
up with an incorrect assumption “she must dislike me”. It was more likely the staring woman had a natural fear response to the ambiguity of a stranger, did not want to admit this, but also wanted to convey to the woman it wasn’t because she disliked her.
Vipassana is a meditation technique specifically designed to teach you to observe the world “objectively as it is, not how you wish it to be”
Sense objects cause sensations. When sensations arise, in vipassana, you observe them objectively rather than reacting with craving or aversion. This works by moving your attention. Awareness can only be in the present. As soon as you are aware you are thinking you are back in the present. If you are angry, you divert your attention to the angry thought present rather than attending to the object of your anger, which will only cause more anger.
Vipassana in a way is the “scientists view”. In an interview I had with the teacher, she explained that Goenka had called Buddha the Super scientist.
The technique itself is designed to develop equanimity (non reactivity). In the technique you are required to sit for extended periods of time between 1-2 hours without movement and bring awareness to your body. Soon you begin to notice sensations that you don’t notice when not focused on them. Unpleasant sensations arise, you experience and are non reactive to them, and soon you find, they pass. You watch the rise and fall of sensations in your body and observe them objectively. Goenka explained how the technique teaches you to understand the truths of Buddhism
(impermanence) on the experiential level rather than intellectual level. Wisdom as opposed to intelligence, can only come from direct experience.
I understood why they said no taking notes when I tried taking them. You are not supposed to engage the mind, egg it on in other words, but rather observe it from afar, and analyse it objectively.
By the 6th day, all the conversations I had had repeating in my head from the past few days had gotten stale, and without any new stimuli for my mind due to noble silence, a lot of old things came up. This is the intended purpose. Goenka said this allows old sankhara (conditioned patterns of reactivity) to rise to the surface and you will teach yourself to be non reactive to them.
On one of the later days I briefly experienced what felt like derealisation and felt a bit of doubt to continue practicing. I could see the mind so clearly as being constructed rather than real. Belief in science tells me intellectually that we are composed of masses of constantly changing
subatomic particles, as opposed to being a constant entity, I just could see it experientially this time. Intellectual understanding was not enough. When you see the mind objectively, it’s harder to get upset at it. It just does what it does. A good analogy is how you can get emotional while watching movies but in the back of your head you know it isn’t really real.
On the 10th day, silence was lifted and I made the decision to leave. Everyone immediately began to converse as they left the hall and I felt a huge knot in my body. I took a walk in the woods and lay on a park bench. The fact that I wasn’t speaking with the others reminded me that I was different, but it was the fact that I couldn’t be non reactive to these thoughts that hurt most.
Deciding I had reached my maximum determination, I told the course leader I wanted to leave. I was honest with my reasoning and explained that I found the social environment uncomfortable. She brought me into an interview with the teacher. The teacher told me I had made a commitment to stay the full 10 days and part of the courses was learning to accept discomfort. I told her the tension I felt and the breathlessness was quite unbearable. I thanked her and left. I spoke to the course leader again before I left. I asked her if she was Korean after having a hunch, and we had a chat. She was course manager in Korea before and explained that in Korea on the last day in Korea, everyone is much more silent, here they just talk! I’m really glad I pushed for that last conversation
I came away from retreat feeling a huge gratitude for the human mind. Once you understand something you are able to appreciate it more, in the same way I can also appreciate art more through an artists lens. This also means you have a bigger appreciation for people, which improves your quality of life when you are surrounded by them.
Feburary 25 Oxford Buddha Vihara
The monk taught us a metaphor using traffic lights. He asked us if we are living in red/orange or green. Resistance/waiting, or present moment acceptance. I find I am often living in red/orange. The monk said most people are living in red/orange all the time. When you believe everyone else is living in green, you will feel left behind.
The monk taught that meditation is really about building a home for your mind. It will always wander. We spend our whole life making sure our body has a home but never give our mind one. Many people are therefore mentally homeless and always searching for a place. This is why we have so many questions and feel lost and searching. Looking after your mind is therefore important. Once you are back home you can decide what to do next.
The lack of dinner reminded me of a question I asked two students after a philosophy talk back during my first week in London. “If you can learn to live with nothing why give yourself anything?” This question gave me a lot of suicidal thoughts last year. We work hard in order to satisfy our needs (mostly wants) when instead we could work hard in meditation to remove the needs and wants in the first place. The thoughts that encouraged me were along the lines of “I can train myself to not need much food or money and still be happy” I am glad that buddhism advocates for the middle path, and not asceticism.