Further Questions About Meditation

 This continues the thread begun in Questions About Meditation. Vlastimil writes,

I want to ask, which meditation techniques do you practice? Or rather, do they include some specifically Buddhist ones? Even vipassana/insight practice?

Some Buddhists told me that doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs. I wonder if you agree. Or if you think that vipassana practice as such is not exerting that tendency and that the tendency is rather exerted by the combination of the practice with certain doctrines brought into the practice.

E.g., yesterday I read (in a Buddhist manual by Daniel Ingram) that when practising vipassana -- in a way that increases the speed, precision, consistency and inclusiveness of our experience of all the quick little sensations that make up our sensory experience -- "it just happens to be much more useful to assume that things are only there when you experience them and not there when you don’t. Thus, the gold standard for reality when doing insight practices is the sensations that make up your reality in that instant. ... Knowing this directly leads to freedom."

Will the vipassana practice tend me to believe that "useful" assumption, so useful for becoming to believe the Buddhist doctrines? Also, can I make any serious progress in that practice without making that assumption?

A. One Way to Meditate

Let me tell you about a fairly typical recent morning's meditation.  It lasted from about 3:10 to 4 AM.  

After settling onto the meditation cushions, I turned my attention to my deep, relaxed, and rhythmic breathing, focusing on the sensation of air passing in and out through the nostrils.  If distracting thoughts or images arose I would expel them on the 'out' breath so that the expulsion of air coincided with the 'expulsion' of extraneous thoughts.  If you have already learned how to control your mind, this is not that difficult and can be very pleasant and worth doing for its own sake even if you don't go any deeper.  

(If you find this elementary thought control  difficult or impossible, then you ought to be alarmed, just as you ought to be alarmed if you find your arms and legs flying off in different directions on their own.  It means  that you have no control over your own mind. Then who or what is controlling it?)

I then visualized my lungs' filling and emptying.  I visualized my body as from outside perched on the cushions.  And then I posed a question about the awareness of breathing.

There is this present breathing, and there is this present awareness of breathing.  Even if the breathing could be identified with, or reduced to, an objective, merely physical process in nature, this won't work for the awareness of breathing.

What then is this awareness?  It is not nothing.  If it were nothing, then nothing would appear, contrary to fact.  Fact is, the breathing appears; it is an object of awareness.  So the awareness is not nothing.  But the awareness is not something either:  it it not some item that can be singled out.  There is at least an apparent contradiction here: the awareness-of is both something and nothing.  A Zen meditator could take this as a koan and work on it as such.

Or, in an attempt at avoiding logical contradiction, one might propose that the awareness-of is something that cannot be objectified.   It is, but it cannot be objectified.

I am aware of my breathing, but also of my breathing's being an object of awareness, which implies that in some way I am aware of my awareness, though not as a separable object.

Who is aware of these things?  I am aware of them.    But who am I?  And who is asking this question?  I am asking it.  But who am I who is asking this question and asking who is asking it?

At this point I am beyond simple mind control to what could be self-inquiry. (Cf. Ramana Maharshi)  The idea is to penetrate into the source of this awareness.  One circles around it discursively with the idea of collapsing the circle into a non-discursive point, as it were. (I just now came up with this comparison.) 

B.  Does doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs?

I don't think so.  The Vipassana meditator's experiences are interpreted in the light of the characteristic Buddhist beliefs (anicca, anatta, dukkha).  They are read in to the experiences rather than read off from them.  A Christian meditator could easily do the same thing.  I reported an unforgettable experience deep in meditation in which I felt myself to be the object of a powerful, unearthly love.  If I take myself to have experienced the love of Christ, then clearly I go beyond the phenomenology of the experience.  Still, the experience fits with Christian beliefs and could be taken in some loose sense to corroborate it.  The same goes for the Vipassana meditator.

C. Impermanence

For example, does one learn from meditation that all is impermanent?

First of all, that

T. All is impermanent

Can be argued to be self-refuting.

Here goes.  (T) applies to itself: if all is impermanent, then (T), or rather the propositional content thereof, is impermanent. That could mean one of two things. Either the truth-value of the proposition expressed by (T) is subject to change, or the proposition itself is subject to change, perhaps by becoming a different proposition with a different sense, or by passing out of existence altogether.  (There is also a stronger reading of 'impermanent' according to which the impermanent is not merely subject to change, but changing, and indeed continuously changing.)

Note also that if (T) is true, then every part of (T)'s propositional content is impermanent. Thus the property (concept) of impermanence is impermanent, and so is the copulative tie and the universal quantifier. If the property of impermanence is impermanent, then so is the property of permanence along with the distinction between permanence and impermanence.

In short, (T), if true, undermines the very contrast that gives it a determinate sense. If true, (T) undermines the permanence/impermanence  contrast. For if all is impermanent, then so is this contrast and this distinction. This leaves us wondering what sense (T) might have and whether in the end it is not nonsense.

What I am arguing is not just that (2) refutes itself in the sense that it proves itself false, but refutes itself in the much stronger  sense of proving itself meaningless or else proving itself on the brink of collapsing into meaninglessness.

No doubt (2) is meaningful  'at first blush.' But all it takes is a few preliminary pokes and its starts collapsing in upon itself.

Now perhaps the Vippassana meditator gets himself into a state in which he is aware of only momentary, impermanent dharmas. How can he take that to show that ALL is impermanent?

There is also a question about what a belief would be for a Buddhist.  On my understanding, beliefs are "necessary makeshifts" (a phrase from F. H. Bradley) useful in the samsaric realm, but not of ultimate validity.  They are like the raft that gets one across the river but is then abandoned on the far shore.  The Dharma (teaching) is the raft that transports us across the river of Samsara to the land of Nirvana where there is no need for any rafts -- or for the distinction between Samsara and Nirvana.

D. How Much Metaphysics Does One Need to Meditate?

Assuming that meditation is pursued as a spiritual practice and not merely as a relaxation technique, I would say that the serious meditator must assume that there is a 'depth dimension' of spiritual/religious significance at the base of ordinary awareness and that our ultimate felicity demands that we get in touch with this depth dimension.

"Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (Emerson) I would add that meditation is the difficult task of swimming upstream to the Source of one's out-bound consciousness where one will draw close to the Divine Principle.

As St. Augustine says, Noli foras ire, in te ipsum reddi; in interiore homine habitat veritas.  The truth dwells in the inner man; don't go outside yourself: return within. 

Related articles

Infinite Desire and God as Being Itself

The Competency of Desire

Breathe Deeply and Slow Down

Jack Kerouac: A Buddhist Wanderer Comes Home

Nothing is Written in Stone

Just Say 'No' to 'No Self'

Buber Contra Buddhism

Comments

[Astute]

Would it surprise you if I told you I had once done a course on meditation? Covering many of the things you mention above, although not in great depth.

[Whyaxye]

More excellent advice and insight on the topic of meditation. It's both interesting and heartening that I have been following a Buddhist path of practice (the meditation, and the other bits) for many years, yet I find a Christian philosopher talks more sense than a lot of Buddhist "experts".

Please permit me to add a few details, and perhaps some words of advice to other readers. First, BV's account is of a meditation session in which there is quite a lot of thinking and reasoning going on. Less experienced practitioners might be better off doing less of it. Dr. Vallicella thinks and reasons with far more confidence and clarity than the rest of us, and other meditators might be better off just developing their calmness and concentration upon their chosen meditation object.

In the same vein, many beginners do indeed experience a complete lack of thought control. They sit down to meditate, and their mind is all over the place. In one sense, it is right to be alarmed at this. But don't just leave it there! Beginners might want to use this alarm as the basis of insight, or as a spur to developing that control, or both.

Vlastimil and others might want to check out Daniel Ingram before committing too strongly to his recommendations. He might be an excellent teacher, but he is well-known on the internet for his own claims that he has reached extraordinary levels of insight, including enlightenment. This is so rare as to warrant caution.

Finally, a point about the alleged ability of meditation to reveal the impermanence of everything. Of course, this is impossible; an example of the problem of induction. All that it could conclusively reveal is the impermanence of those things hitherto experienced. But the Buddha himself did not claim that all things were impermanent. Along with Dukkha, impermanence (Anicca) applies only to all sankhara, which is usually taken to mean "all conditioned phenomena".

[BV]

Astute,

I am shocked, SHOCKED! A man of your English sobriety and good sense?

[BV]

Whyaxye,

Thanks for the comments and kind words.

True, the meditation session I described above involved thinking and reasoning, but the goal is to arrive, not at a conclusion, a proposition, or set of propositions, but at a direct non-dual experience of the thinker behind the thoughts. The goal is one-pointedness, but the route is roundabout.

One might compare this approach to work on a koan, except that the Zennist is not trying to get to the thinker behind the thoughts, convinced as he is that there isn't one. But, to take the hackneyed example, to ask "What is the sound of one hand clapping?," to puzzle over this, is quite different from attempting to sink into nondual awareness by the repetition of a mantram or the focusing on a chosen theme or object. Koan work has a ratiocinative element built into it. In this respect it is like the Hindu style self-inquiry described above.

As for those who claim enlightenment, the commenter offers sound advice; they are almost certainly frauds. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they take money and/or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. (I don't know anything about Ingram, so this is not directed against him. I am thinking of Rajneesh and Trungpa.)

>> But the Buddha himself did not claim that all things were impermanent. Along with Dukkha, impermanence (Anicca) applies only to all sankhara, which is usually taken to mean "all conditioned phenomena".<<

Isn't this a point of dispute among Buddhists?

[Thomas]

Dear Dr. V,

this comment is not related to this post, rather it is in regards to your potentiality argument (I couldn't figure out how else to contact you, and your older posts are closed to comment).

Do you still find issue with the neo-scholastic substance view of the persons? I think there is one line of thinking you did not address in that post. I don't think the fact that 'normal human fetuses' have the potentiality to become rational beings is irrelevant to the anencephalic fetus. The anencephalic fetus, in virtue of being the kind of thing it is to be of the human species, inherently carries within it certain potencies that it would not carry had it been something else.

For example, a tree is not a defective tree qua rationality, because it is simply not the kind of thing that could ever be rational. Trees do not have the potency to be rational. But the human essence does entail the potency for rational animality, whether a particular human fetus actualizes that potency or not. Presumably, you would object by saying "the anencephalic fetus, physiologically, cannot ever become rational, it is nomologically impossible for it to ever be rational, and therefore lacks the potency for rationality."

However, I think the neo-scholastic view is that regardless, if the physiological defect of the anencephalic fetus could somehow be fixed (let's presume there was some procedure that could do this), then that fetus would , undoubtedly, develop into a fully functional, rational human being- in a way that something like a tree could never develop into a rational animal, no matter how many defects of the tree we correct. In this way, it seems like the potencies of a species is morally relevant to a particular individual that may be physically incapable of actualizing those potencies.

Your case regarding the 4-minute mile I think might be off-base. For a person's potential to run a 4-minute mile is not an essential feature of what it means to be human. Certainly I do not have the potential to deadlift 500 lbs, I probably never will, given my size and build, no matter how much training I do. But I think its irrevelant. I wouldn't argue in the first place that all persons have to potency to deadlift 500 lbs, or run a 4 minute mile, because I don't think that is entailed by the essence of being human.

All the best.

[Whyaxye]

Dear BV,

True, the meditation session I described above involved thinking and reasoning, but the goal is to arrive, not at a conclusion, a proposition, or set of propositions, but at a direct non-dual experience of the thinker behind the thoughts. The goal is one-pointedness, but the route is roundabout.

Point taken, but I was merely reminding other readers that this approach might not work so well for them. Many beginners seem to need a more thorough grounding in basic concentration before they start on the thinking. But if they can follow your approach in this, so much the better.

As for the issue of whether the Buddha restricted the application of anicca to fabricated or conditioned phenomena, I might be influenced by a Theravadan approach here. But the canonical sources which claim that

"All fabrications are inconstant (anicca)...
All fabrications are stressful (dukkha)...
All phenomena are not-self (anatta)"

seem to be as reliable as any (most notably the Dhammapada, which is part of the Khuddaka Nikaya.) To explain it away or ignore it would be to invite questions as to why we might nevertheless want to retain ideas such as the Four Noble Truths, or the reality of kamma, as they come from the same stable. To the best of our knowledge, it's what the man said.

Moreover, if a Buddhist were to imply that all things whatsoever ("sabbe dhamma", as opposed to the more restrictive "sabbe sankhara") were impermanent, then they would also be including nibbana. No point in the aeons of work if the supreme goal doesn't stay put! The point of this little passage in the Dhammapada and elsewhere is that there is one thing beyond impermanence and suffering, but even that is as devoid of self as the phenomena encountered on the way there.

As another famous passage has it of nibbana:

There is, monks, an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated. If there were not that unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, there would not be the case that escape from the born — become — made — fabricated would be discerned. But precisely because there is an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, escape from the born — become — made — fabricated is discerned.

[Vlastimil]

Bill,

I've tried to discuss impermanence, suffering and no-self with some Buddhists. No progress so far.

www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5882999

[BV]

You won't get anywhere with these people. They are too muddle-headed.

I'll send you a couple of published papers of mine.