Category Archives: vipassana

Second thoughts

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When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill (provided he is not wearing a headset of some kind). But we all talk to ourselves constantly—most of us merely have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. We rehearse past conversations—thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said. We anticipate the future, producing a ceaseless string of words and images that fill us with hope or fear. We tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our heads who required continuous narration to know what is happening: “Wow, nice desk. I wonder what kind of wood that is. Oh, but it has no drawers. They didn’t put drawers in this thing? How can you have a desk without at least one drawer?” Who are we talking to? No one else is there. And we seem to imagine that if we just keep this inner monologue to ourselves, it is perfectly compatible with mental health. Perhaps it isn’t.

Sam Harris, Waking Up, p.94

But, if we are really alert, we may detect – almost like a shadow, or a pre-echo on old-school reel-to-reel tape – a wordless thought milliseconds before the verbalised thought, with (as far as we can tell) the identical informational content; only we can’t then resist putting words to it and reciting it to, as Harris says, the invisible blind man in our head.

What is going on? The nearest thing to an explanation I can come up with – and I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of years now – is that continual contemplative practice somehow opens one’s attention, one’s witnessing attention, to the actual operation of something Dan Dennett described as “multiple drafts”: one draft, normally unconscious, is actually registering and even reacting to to perception; while another – the conscious, “front of house” storyteller – is constructing his usual narrative scenario dedicated to the maintenance of a stable, but illusory, sense of self.

I’m not sure that any particular consequence arises from this rather disorienting perception, except perhaps insofar as it further dislocates any remaining sense we may have of being a permanent, unchangeable self or “soul”. It is disconcerting, though – for the first few times even scary – so here again I probably should repeat my regular “health warning”! If any reader feels there is a risk of anything like a spiritual crisis being precipitated by this kind of practice, or merely wants to be prepared, there are hopefully useful links to the Spiritual Crisis Network and other resources on my own advice page on this site.

Wandering home

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The mind wanders. Of course it does. As Louis Sokoloff discovered as long ago as the late 1950s, the brain never stops its processing, and if it is not actively engaged in some task or another it wanders. Where? Robert Wright explains:

As for where the mind wanders to: well, lots of places, obviously, but studies have shown that these places are usually in the past or the future; you may ponder recent events or distant, strong memories; you may dread upcoming events or eagerly anticipate them; you may strategize about how to head off some looming crisis or fantasize about romancing the attractive person in the cubicle next to yours. What you’re generally not doing when your mind is wandering is directly experiencing the present moment.

To recognise this fact, clearly and without judgement or any attempt at inward coercive control, is one of the first tasks of meditation, especially vipassana meditation. The wanderingness of the mind has a name, the default mode network (DMN); defined, in Wikipedia, as “a large-scale brain network… best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering.”

Wright continues (above):

In one sense it’s not hard to quiet your default mode network: just do something that requires concentration. Do a crossword puzzle or try to juggle three tennis balls. Until you get to a point where juggling is second nature, you probably won’t be fantasizing about the attractive person in the cubicle next to yours.

What’s hard is to abandon the default mode network when you’re not doing much of anything—like, say, when you’re sitting in a meditation hall with your eyes closed. That’s why you try to focus on the breath: the mind needs some object of focus to wean it from its habitual meandering.

I have found that it is foolishly easy to characterise the default mode network as somehow the enemy, not only during meditation itself but when one catches oneself, instead of mindfully shaving, or washing up, instead doing the task on autopilot, while the mind goes off on any of those fruitless missions Wright lists. It’s infuriating!

Needless to say, stamping one’s foot, or calling oneself names, does no good at all. It is tempting to use one of the well-worn tools like the Nembutsu or the Jesus Prayer, which are not only employed in formal contemplative practice, but can be useful as “arrow prayers”, to borrow an old Christian expression, in order to damp down the wandering mind. But – to replace the pointless ponderings and fantasies of the DMN with an all but unconsciously uttered phrase is possibly not all that much of an improvement, regardless of how one feels about the content of that phrase.

If the point in question is to pay attention – to do things carefully and consciously, with full awareness – then a quite different approach is needed. Sam Harris:

The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as “mindfulness,” and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant…

Mindfulness is a translation of the Pali word sati. The term has several meanings in the Buddhist literature, but for our purposes the most important is “clear awareness.” …

There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant. One of the great strengths of this technique of meditation, from a secular point of view, is that it does not require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified beliefs. It simply demands that we pay close attention to the flow of experience in each moment.

The cultivation of mindfulness as a doorway to choiceless awareness, more than merely as a  way to reduce anxiety or depression, or to improve task-oriented concentration, is a practice shared by many spiritual disciplines, but expressed (and developed) most clearly in vipassana and in shikantaza.

Viewed from this perspective the footling of the default mode network is perhaps no longer an embarrassing impediment, but an unexpected ally. Once we have become used to spotting its activities in formal meditation, it becomes easier and easier to recognise when it attempts to hijack our everyday activities. And once recognised, it can become, paradoxically, a welcome beacon back to clear attention, a seamark to the open ground of presence wherever we begin.