Things I Wish I'd Known Earlier

We’ve had it drummed into us our whole lives that there are five senses. We all know what these are!

• Sight
• Hearing
• Smell
• Taste
• Touch

However, is that the end of the story? No, of course not. As with most commonly accepted facts, a closer look reveals that things are not quite so straightforward, as pointed out in the following extract from the Wikipedia article for “Sense”.

There is no firm agreement among neurologists as to the number of senses because of differing definitions of what constitutes a sense. […] Humans are considered to have at least five additional senses that include: nociception (pain); equilibrioception (balance); proprioception and kinaesthesia (joint motion and acceleration); sense of time; thermoception (temperature differences); and possibly an additional weak magnetoception(direction), and six more if interoceptive senses are also considered.

So that makes for a count of 17, so far.

On top of these, there is also the frequently referred to, but little understood, sixth sense. It is called the sixth presumably because it is based on the assumption that there are only the five others to start with (rather than 17 or more), and is generally considered to mean “extra-sensory perception”. This is usually considered to relate to the paranormal, but a more straightforward interpretation is that it means sensing with the mind rather than via a physical sense, and therefore refers to the everyday experience of the sensing or perception of our own thoughts. After all, who could deny being aware of their own thoughts, even though they are obviously not sensed through any of the traditional senses.

And thus we arrive at 18 senses. However, despite this surprisingly high number of supposedly separate senses, do we really experience 18 different types of things?

I very much doubt that anyone would actually be able to keep track of which particular sense is responsible for any given feeling / sensation / perception at any given time. My own experience, and I suspect the experience of everyone else is that there is really only one experience, regardless of which supposed sense it comes through. Rather, everything happens seamlessly in our consciousness.

I might be having a conversation with someone in a crowded room, and there are all manner of perceptions occurring together – the sounds of their voice, of my own voice, of other people and things in the environment, the smells, the bodily sensations of balance, movement, temperature, my thoughts etc. All these things are occurring simultaneously, and although my attention may wander at times from one to another, or sometimes include several or more things at once, there is never any experience of things being disjointed, or as coming via different mechanisms. Rather it all runs together – a single ongoing, evolving experience of the whole thing.

So when it comes down to it, although we may use our minds to discriminate and categorise various senses, direct experience demonstrates that there is really only ever ONE sense, which might be called the sense of awareness – or even just awareness itself.

It has occurred to me that for much of my life I have done nothing but copy the behaviours of other people.

It is as if I were an empty vessel, with no contents of my own at all. And in confirmation, if I look deeply within, beyond the ever-changing thoughts, feelings, sensations, I can find no “thing” at all. Just an empty presence, which observes, which is aware.

In early life this copying was of course almost entirely unconscious. There may have been instinctive responses and behaviours, but a combination of fascination, fear, enjoyment, horror and engagement with the people around me led me to mimic them, repeat them, and then apparently somehow adopt many of their behaviours as my own.

At a later stage, the copying became more selective, although still largely unconscious. There was some discrimination between behaviours which I found appealing, interesting, inspiring, beautiful, as opposed to those that were ugly, painful, inefficient, unnecessary. And there was a desire for, and an attraction to the more refined behaviours, which then presumably started little by little to manifest more in my own behaviour, and led to a more gratifying response from the world from the actions I subsequently took.

Now the process is much more conscious, and there is less inner resistance to it – perhaps because I recognise the illusion that I am actually anything tangible at all, and if I am not anything tangible, then there is no obstacle, no limitation to the ways in which I may express myself. Thus the delight of discovery of a special quality in someone becomes immediately a known new potentiality in my own behaviour.

The ultimate conclusion of this process, it seems, is to offer no resistance at all, to surrender completely any illusion of selfhood, and to recognise the oneness of us all. “My” qualities are not my qualities at all.  But neither are they “Yours”, because you copied them too! Rather, all qualities are inherent in us all. This is yet another pointer to the essence of non-duality.

In the quest to know ourselves, it is likely that, at some stage or other, we will attempt to observe our own thoughts. Indeed, doing so is central to most techniques which purport to lead to self-realisation.

After all, much of our lives appear to be dominated by our minds, and although we have physical senses, our experience of them is typically interpreted continually by the mind. So clearly, any insight that we can obtain into thoughts and thinking will be key to self-understanding.

Having undertaken quite a lot of meditation myself over the years, I have gradually come to get a sense of what goes on in my own mind, and I am expressing here conclusions based on my own experience.

The first observation I have is that thoughts appear to come to me more or less instantaneously. I am unable to identify anything that I could reasonably call “thinking” which takes any length of time. Rather the thoughts just arrive or occur (as in the expression “it occurred to me that”).

It is true that there is a time-based element in what happens subsequently. For example if I want to express the thought verbally, this process takes some time. However, I am not necessarily actually thinking while I speak. Rather I am just holding the memory of that thought and transcribing it. During that process I might realise (ie. have another instantaneous thought occurence) that a word that I was about to use could be improved with the substitution of another. So I can have another thought occurrence while the memory of the original thought was still there. But it appears to me that this is still not really a process of thinking per-se, but rather the subsequent occurrence of further related thoughts. So while the talking may appear to be continuous, there is no continuity in the process that fuels it ie. no “thinking” process.

An apparent contradiction here is how I can appear to be able to string coherent, related sentences together. Would that not imply some kind of thinking process going on?

I suspect that can be explained by the fact that when I focus on a particular topic, for example, the thoughts that occur to me do usually relate to that topic, and to one another – and the reason for that is because I am filtering thoughts ie. choosing to ignore or disregard any thoughts which are not relevant, which gives the impression that only relevant thoughts are occurring to me at all. It is a matter of where I am putting attention.

In those cases where extraneous thoughts do also appear, they are usually ones triggered by some form of sensorial input eg. I may hear a sound, or see something that apparently triggers a “distracting” thought. However, might it not be the case that all that happened here was that the change of attention from the topic of discussion to the distracting sound/sight simply caused my focus to change, and hence be receptive to thoughts relating to the distraction rather than the original topic?

So the picture that I am painting here is one in which

• thoughts occur to us – and that therefore we do not “think” per-se
• the subject of thoughts that occur to us depends on our current focus of attention
• the focus of our attention may or may not be changed by distracting phenomena that we perceive

The conclusion that we don’t actually “think” may seem contentious, as it seems to imply either a lack of individual control over our thoughts, or that there is no personal creativity involved. However, I cannot deny that some of the thoughts that occur to me are creative ones. They can at times be funny, inspiring or even beautiful, for example. But if they appear instantaneously in my mind rather than being constructed by me in some kind of process, then what actually created them, and can I really take personal credit for them?

This kind of self-questioning is central to the teachings of Advaita (non-duality). The results of such enquiry may seem to go against common sense, but unless you are actually prepared to question what is commonly accepted as true without question, then can you be sure that it is?!

I am hardly a poet by any stretch of the imagination, but on one or two occasions in my life I have never-the-less been inspired enough to put pen to paper.

The following expresses what I was feeling whilst I was preparing to leave Adelaide, after having lived there for 18 years – a very meaningful phase of my life. It still brings a tear to my eye, each time I re-discover, re-read it, and re-remember everything and everyone who made it so special to me. The photo is one I took myself one Easter, just south of Adelaide, South Australia.

These clouds, this sky... no longer exist

One of the greatest illusions under which we labour is that there exists such a thing as permanence.

Permanence exists only in our minds, which like to make order out of chaos, to make sense out of non-sense, to attribute qualities and traits to our existence which are not truly there at all.

We cling to memories of things, events which have passed, expired, evaporated.

Perhaps without our memory of these things, we feel we have no foundation, no security, no basis for our lives.

And yet without them we also have utter freedom from pre-conception, conditioning, habit and expectation. And life becomes eternally novel, fascinating and pristine.

Are you willing to let go? To forget? To experience each moment anew?

To accept fully the fleetingness, the changeability, the ephemerality of existence… is to become truly liberated.

The Vipassana meditation course requires that you abstain from any and all alternative meditation or healing practices for the ten day duration. Amongst the reasons given is that mixing different types of meditation will not allow you to fairly assess what effect the Vipassana meditation has had on you. In other words you would not be giving it a fair, or scientific, trial.

I suspect that there are some, if not many, who would find it hard to reconcile science with meditation practices that are usually seen as being of mystical or religious origin. And yet there is no reason at all why someone of scientific bent cannot turn the focus of their scientific mind into the subjective realms just as easily as they do to the objective, concrete world. In fact, there are definite advantages to taking a scientific approach to such things. Self-development and self-discovery can be achieved more quickly and consistently via a scientific approach than via a purely mystical one. In my own estimation, meditation is actually much more of a science than it is a mystical art.

The only difference between the science of subjective versus objective matters is that when you investigate your own subjective experience, you cannot typically cross-check your results with anyone else, as there is never any guarantee that anyone else’s subjective experience will match your own in any given situation. But despite that, I have often been surprised to find definite similarities in the documented experiences of some others, which I have typically stumbled upon when reading around related subjects of interest, some time later. At the time of these experiences, I felt that it seemed a little odd and perhaps unique, and I could not even necessarily be sure that they were directly related to any meditation I have may been practicing. But when I later came across accounts of similar experiences by others, I was able to see that my own experience did indeed fit into a certain pattern or archetypal experience, and that it was in fact a definite “expected” result of the ongoing meditation practices I had been maintaining.

My own meditations generally seem rather uneventful and bland (for example I do not see any light or imagery, hear sounds or voices, or get catapulted into alternative realms of consciousness), but over the course of many years, I have accumulated a few experiences which have stood out to me as especially meaningful or noteworthy – some of which have left me with an enduring shift in attitude or perspective on life and my place in it. And as it happens, one of these noteworthy things happened during this very meditation retreat. And once again, it was only afterward, when I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Vipassana, that I saw recounted the experience of someone else who had been through a rather similar experience.

At the time of the experience I did realise that it was a significant event, and was fully aware that attending such an intense meditation retreat provided an environment in which such things probably happen more frequently than in the normal course of events. But it had seemed to be something that was fairly unique to me and my own stage of unfoldment – rather than something which, it is now apparent, is specifically what Vipassana meditation is intended to convey to the practicer ie. an insight into the human condition, our collective, mutually inter-dependent misery and suffering, and our need for liberation.

That one precious, deeply insightful and heartfelt experience was worth a thousand meditation retreats. But beyond that, I must also say that, despite some battles with the arising and processing of some previously subconscious issues, the aftermath has also been very positive.

During the drive home from the retreat, I felt a sense of inner peace and tranquility which was bordering on the blissful. Even when I encountered the stop/start snarled traffic of Newtown, along with the odd irate, horn-blowing, shouting driver, my sense of peace remained entirely undisturbed. I was merely an observer, remaining fully alert and aware as a driver, and yet totally unperturbed by it all, being totally indifferent to how long it may take to get through all the traffic, or even how many other irate drivers I might encounter.

Since then my level of peace has settled to a slightly more “normal” level, and was even disturbed by a couple of periods of mild anxiety as I faced the 300+ emails that had accumulated during my absence. But overall, in the eight days since my return, I have felt unusually calm, centred and strong, and able to deal with work-related issues more powerfully and efficiently than before.

I am so encouraged and by this change that I have decided to continue the Vipassana meditation technique for the foreseeable future, despite the recommendation that one spend two hours each day practicing it. In reality, the inconvenience of fitting this into the daily routine is minuscule when compared with the benefit. And of course it is a benefit not just for myself – but also for everyone else I come into contact with. Why inflict anxiety or discontent on others, when you can spread a calm and peaceful enjoyment of life instead?

Having read this, if you are still not persuaded to try meditation, or encouraged to increase the depth of your practice if you already do, then I can only have failed to express myself properly. Your liberation is at hand – all you have to do is dare!

During the meditation retreat I was not entirely well for several days. In fact I lost my voice. Given that it was a silent retreat this hardly mattered of course! And I suspect that I had lost it for a couple of days before I even noticed. It was only when the meditation teacher asked for some brief feedback to ascertain whether the technique was being properly practiced that I suddenly found I was voiceless, and had to whisper instead to make myself understood. Its quite funny really.

But one of the symptoms of the illness, apart from loss of voice, was some fatigue and tiredness. I could tell that it was not quite the same tiredness that comes from lack of sleep, and despite the draconian course schedule, I never had any trouble waking up or getting up promptly at 4am each day.

The tiredness, when it did come, seemed to occur mainly late mornings and then again early to mid afternoons – and almost always during a meditation session. Hence I had plenty of opportunity to experience the transition between normal wakefulness and drowsiness/sleep whilst in meditation. And these are my observations on it.

My first observation was that the transition is quite rapid, and there are no obvious early warning signs. One minute I was mentally alert, then next I was on the verge of sleep, and could easily have nodded off there and then I had let myself, and had I also not been in an upright sitting position, of course. However, very quickly I saw a pattern to the process.

• The first sign was that I would start to see vague imagery. This was a clear distinction from being in meditation because this particular technique does not involve any visualisation at all – instead it is all about sensation and bodily awareness. And although I can’t be sure (because my eyes were closed) I got the impression that the imagery always occurred in the right eye only.
• The second sign was that I would get a flckering of that imagery on and off quite rapidly, between vague white and black/nothingness – multiple times per second.
• There third sign was that I would suddenly realise that I had lost my place in the meditation, and could not immediately recall where I had been and where I was intending to go next. In fact I suspect that this may have indicated that I had already fallen into sleep, even if perhaps only a very, very brief (micro?) sleep.
• A fourth sign, although it very rarely got to that stage, was the experience of a jolt in posture to effect a recovery from a slumping head.

Having recognised this process and these signs, I was able to be on the lookout for it, and as soon as I noticed any sign of imagery forming I would deliberately labour my breathing slightly. This would normally cause the imagery to disappear again within 3 or 4 breaths, although during the worst of my tired periods I would have to do this repeatedly over a period of 10 to 20 minutes before I naturally seemed to pass through that tiredness phase, and return to normal wakeful alertness again.

However, I must also admit, that on a few of the occasions that this happened when I was meditating alone in my room, I did succumb to the urge to just lie down and have a brief sleep. But that only after having made a conscious decision that it would be in my best interest to do, rather than just allowing myself to doze off by default.

So all this may seem utterly trivial to some. But for me, it is all about a fascination I have with consciousness, and the changes and transitions in it that we experience. What causes them? Can we control them? After all, this is what dictates the entirety of our experience of life!

In various spiritual/mystical texts there are references to a state referred to as “continuity of consciousness”. Supposedly, this state can be attained as a yogic skill, along with various others, by advanced practitioners of meditation. The defining characteristic of this state is to be able to maintain consciousness not only during normal waking hours, but also during sleep. Those who have this skill are able to observe, interpret and query their own dreams, and have perfect recall of the dream state and its content.

So perhaps my observations on my own wake/sleep are my first baby steps towards discovering just how to prevent the loss of consciousness that we normally experience when we fall into sleep. At least I would like to think so. 🙂

During meditation, ideally your mind will become settled – or at least more settled than it was.

In fact the nature of the mind is such that there will almost always be thoughts arising, and every meditator knows that the mind never settles completely – except perhaps in the highest exalted states of meditation that are talked about in certain spiritual texts, and always described as being difficult to attain. The general point, though, is to minimise the level of extraneous thought, by maintaining focus and attention on the subject/object of meditation.

In my own experience, after starting meditation, it may take a little while for the mind to settle, and some days are better or worse than others – depending on just how distracting the day’s events have been. On a “bad” day I might well feel a little frustrated that I never managed to get properly into the meditation, because my mind kept latching onto some thing or things that it wanted to process and re-process. On a “good” day however, I might go quickly into a focused meditative state, and feel the benefits of a calmer mind for some time afterward too.

On the Vipassana course, due to an almost utter lack of distractions, over the first few days my mind found less and less things to latch on to, and it became possible to go very quickly into a focused meditation. In fact the mental focus and stillness never completely left after each meditation, and the mind became much stiller and calmer on an ongoing basis.

I noticed the effects of this most around the 7th, 8th and 9th days of the course. And one of the ways in which it was most noticeable was in my gaze. My eyes would simply “lock” onto whatever I was looking at, with absolutely nothing to distract them, no motivation to move them away, and I would just observe and absorb whatever was there. In fact during one of the evening discourses, while watching a video of the course founder (S.N.Goenka) giving instruction and background, I noticed that my gaze seemed to be perfectly still for minutes at a time as he talked – maybe even for 10 minutes or more, but I can’t be sure because I was hardly glancing at a clock to find out!.

But it wasn’t until the course had just finished that I got a real taste of what a difference it had made. It happened when I turned on my iPhone for the first time in 10 days, to look up the weather forecast for the trip home. At first I thought there was something wrong with the iPhone – it seemed to be working very slowly. Irrationally, I even wondered if the battery was too low, but instantly dismissed the idea as impossible – obviously it was I who had changed, not the iPhone! Then I opened the weather app and started to scroll between the different screens. And amazingly the scrolling didn’t seem to work normally. Rather than seeing a smooth continuous scroll motion, as I had seen so many times before, what I was seeing was a series of sequential fixed frames – very clearly and distinctly, the same screen image was disappearing, then reappearing in a slightly different position over and over until the “scroll” finished.

I mentioned this to another course graduate who was nearby, and they exclaimed that they saw exactly the same thing. So clearly, what had happened here was that the intensive meditation had steadied our gaze so much that our eyes were no longer being fooled by what was clearly now just a simulation of scrolling.

Of course, having read this, if you watch your own iPhone carefully you might also be able to detect this stepping to some extent – but I suggest to you that it takes some careful observation to pick it up. To all intents and purposes, the eye normally sees it as smooth motion. And now, even just 2 days after the end of the course, my eye no longer picks it up. The scrolling once again appears to be almost completely smooth.

So what to make of this? To me this highlights just how refined our powers of observation could be, if we were only able to still our minds enough to make them more receptive and attentive. The example I’ve used may seem trivial, but the key thing it exposes how easily we can miss something, and can be fooled, even by our own eyes. I, for one, want to have greater powers of observations. I want to see things as they really are. Don’t you?

Meditation: 1 / Monkey mind: 0

Yesterday I arrived back home from a 10 day Vipassana meditation course.

This is not a course for the faint-hearted or the merely curious. It is a serious and highly concentrated retreat during which participants refrain from almost all worldly pursuits (apart from the essentials like eating, sleeping and showering) in the pursuit of an initiation into the age-old art of meditation as a spiritual practice.

During the course you are taught a simple, pure and powerful meditation technique, and the opportunity to practice it repeatedly and extensively, with absolutely minimal distraction.

Assuming you have the will and determination to carry it through in its entirety, and without “cheating” by perhaps sleeping during meditation time in your own room, then over the course of the 10 days, you would be meditating for more than 100 hours. So, assuming that you might otherwise typically meditate for 30 minutes daily, this course effectively compresses more than half a year’s worth of meditation into a single retreat.

But in reality it is actually worth even more than that. The continuity of practice and absence of distractions during the retreat means that it is all high quality meditation time. With a daily practice you could easily spend to first 10 to 15 minutes letting your mind wind down enough to really go deeply into meditation, and in many cases your mind might not even settle at all, if the days events have been especially troubling, exciting or otherwise stimulating. So taking that into account, I would suggest that this single retreat is worth at least a whole year of “ordinary” mediation practice. Now that is concentrated!

One of the aspects of the course that most people seem to pick up on is that it is a silent retreat. All forms of communication with co-participants is barred, and there is also strict segregation of the sexes. So you certainly wouldn’t take this course in the interest of meeting people, even if it is only to have contact with like-minded or spiritually inclined people. This is a deeply introspective environment. And that is what most people seem to find most disturbing about it. “Ten days without talking?! Wow! I’m not sure I could do that!” And yet, having completed the course I must say that the silence was actually one of the most trivial issues involved. I hardly even noticed it. But then maybe that’s just me! 😉

The other big issue for most is the rather extreme hours that are observed. Awaken at 4am, start meditating at 4:30 followed by a series of short breaks interleaving longer meditation periods. By the 11am lunch break, you will already have meditated for 5 hours. The only non-meditation period is about an hour’s discourse during which various aspects of the technique and its background are presented to, by now, very receptive and attentive minds.

But the issues that are perhaps a bit less obvious at first glance are firstly the meals – really only 2 meals a day plus fruit and tea in the evening, resulting in a plethora of hunger pangs, and secondly (for me especially, given a couple of joint injuries) the sitting cross-legged, resulting in quite a bit of hobbling, not to mention some fairly searing pain towards the end of the special “endurance” meditation sessions, during which you are asked to do your best not to move at all for one full hour.

So by now you’ve probably gathered that this course is not just about meditation. Its also about enhancing the depth of your personal will-power and determination, and the desire to better yourself, whatever the obstacles, pain and discomfort that may confront you. Of course I’m not suggesting that this is a sadistic or masochistic exercise by any means. Each person that attends will no doubt have a different set of issues that they find most challenging, and things that one finds difficult another will not, and vice-versa. But the simple fact is that each and every inconvenience your do manage to overcome or surmount through sheer will-power and persistence is a deeply rewarding personal victory that will empower you in all aspects of your life. In fact I think this course could quite properly be called a spiritual boot-camp.

I have always enjoyed a personal challenge. Perhaps that is not the case for everyone, but no doubt because of this I found the entire experience deeply valuable and transformational on various levels.

I will write more about various other aspects of the experience in further articles to follow. I feel I could write quite a few! This may seem odd to some, considering that most of time was spent seemingly just sitting in silence – but in fact the inner, subjective side of life is every bit as rich, complex and fascinating as the outer.

Question: What is the most universally potent, scientifically tested and proven healing agent?

Answer: The placebo.

I mentioned the placebo effect in an earlier posting, but recently found a great article in Cosmos magazine by Ben Goldacre.

Here are a few interesting, if not downright amazing, things that have been discovered in scientifically run Placebo trials.

• Two placebo pills are more effective than one
• The color of placebo pills affects the outcome – eg. pink pills are more effective at maintaining concentration than blue ones.
• The form of the placebo has an effect on outcome – eg. capsules are more effective than pills as placebo sedatives
• The way the placebo is taken has an effect on outcome – eg. injections are more effective than pills
• The way the placebo is administered has an effect on outcome – eg. more elaborate acupuncture-like treatment is more effective at pain relief than taking pills
• Brand name placebos are more effective than placebos in plain or generic packaging
• More expensive placebos are more effective than cheaper ones
• Placebo operations (sham surgery) for knee pain and for angina are both effective treatments
• Having a pacemaker installed, but not switched on, improves heart function
• Being told that your current lifestyle is beneficial for your health actually improves your health and reduces your weight
• The doctor’s verbal affirmation about a treatment improves the outcome of that treatment on a patient
• The doctor’s own belief in a treatment improves the outcome of that treatment on a patient
• The doctor providing a diagnosis of a health problem improves the outcome for the patient even without any treatment being proscribed for it
• The suggestion that a treatment will help can result in a positive outcome, even when that treatment would normally be expected to seriously aggravate the symptoms
• Even when patients are informed that they are only receiving a placebo treatment, but it is supplied with words of cheer, their outcomes are improved
• Intelligence, skepticism or other character traits do not lessen the effects of placebos – everyone responds to placebos

The underlying thread of all this is a demonstration of just  how profoundly mental attitude affects our health and the healing process – both the attitude of the doctor and that of the patient.

If the true meaning of these facts were to be fully apprehended by the population at large, and acted on, our lives would surely all be deeply transformed for the better. But even if the true import remains elusive to most, you can still transform your own life in all manner of ways, simply by adopting the intention of taking a positive mental attitude to life in general.

Good luck! I know you can do it!

I will write more about this  in a future post.