‘Meditation’ 2017 May-Jun

The Brahmavihāras – the Soul’s Moral Compass

This is Post 13 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

When we look within, we find that Consciousness, the ultimate nature of the human mind, appears to be structured like a mandala – like a compass rose. And at each of the directions of this inner compass are ethical principles that are inherent in the nature of Consciousness. In the last few posts, I have been starting to explore one cultural form of this archetypal mandala structure – an ancient pre-Buddhist formulation called the four brahmavihāras – the four ‘abodes of Brahma’, sometimes called the four immeasurables.

Meditation as a Mandala-Cycle

Traditionally in the Indian and Himalayan countries our circumambulation of, or progression around, the mandala, follows the path of the sun in the northern hemisphere, so we enter the mandala in the east, which is associated with sunrise; then move round clockwise to the south, which is associated with mid-day; then move round clockwise again to the west, which is associated with sunset; then move round clockwise again to the north, which is associated with midnight; and then return to the east point and the sunrise once again. I shall be adopting this traditional order as I go deeper into the four brahmavihāras in the future articles is this series over the coming weeks. When we have a full understanding of all four brahmavihāras there is great value in practicing all four in sequence, as a mandala-cycle. Continue reading

June 21, 2017

The Ethical and Relational Nature of Consciousness

This is Post 12 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

Consciousness is like the space we move through – it is easy to go through life completely unaware of it. And even though it is always there when we look for it, its nature can be difficult to grasp. If we are setting out to systematically familiarise ourselves with the ultimate nature of mind, the four brahmavihāras provide us with an extremely good, and relatively simple framework for engaging in this exploration – one that highlights the inherently ethical and relational nature of Consciousness. They also offer us four very attractive and relatively easy ways of moving out of ordinary egoic consciousness into states of alignment and healing.

The Four Mahabrahmavihāras

In Mahayana Buddhist tradition, reflection on the brahmavihāras brought a development to the early Buddhist approach to that teaching, which is of enormous practical and philosophical significance for those who wish to use the brahmavihāras as a framework for meditation and self-inquiry, and I would like to share it here.

Essentially, the understanding arose that it is helpful to see each one of the brahmavihāras as having both a personal, egoic and conditional aspect, and a transpersonal, or archetypal, or unconditional aspect – even though these two aspects can never be completely separated. The implication was that the most effective way to connect with the brahmavihāras is by opening ourselves to the transpersonal aspect of each one – and allowing the energies of each one to flow through us.

For example mettā, or Loving-Kindness came to be seen as a reflection, in personal felt experience, of mahamettā, or Great Loving-Kindness, which is unconditional, archetypal and transpersonal – an aspect of the field of Consciousness in which we rest. Each of the personally experienced brahmavihāras has a corresponding archetypal source in Consciousness – a mahabrahmavihāra. Continue reading

June 12, 2017

Mettā – Consciousness as Loving-Kindness

This is Post 11 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

It is understandable that mettā, or Loving-Kindness, would be the best understood of the four brahmavihāras. It is the one which has its own short recorded discourse in the Pali Cannon of early Buddhist tradition, but more importantly, it is the one which most resonates with our experience in ordinary life. Mettā extends our ordinary notions of love to express an attitude of unconditionally valuing everything in our experience, and unconditionally valuing all of the people in our world. People who practice the mettābhāvanā meditation practice, would generally describe mettā as being characterised by a feeling or attitude of warmth, kindness, care, and of love – in the sense of a deep valuing and well-wishing. The most common translation of mettā is Loving Kindness, but it includes qualities of ‘unconditional love’, ‘unconditional valuing’, and ‘unconditional acceptance’.

The mettābhāvanā practice is often felt by practitioners to be powerfully transformative – a powerful support to psychological integration, and to social interaction. Because mettā is that attitude of Consciousness, which unconditionally values and accepts our experience, it powerfully transforms the evaluative, or ‘Feeling’ function of the human mind. In ordinary egoic consciousness, the evaluative, or ‘Feeling’, function discerns that which is of value to us by attending to the internal flow of pleasant and unpleasant feeling states that are our emotional guidance system throughout life.

This discernment between that which is of value to us and that which is not, may be conscious or unconscious, and plays a very important role in the egoic construction of identity, and in the establishment of the defensive threshold between egoic feeling, which we are happy to identify with, and the feeling aspect of the unconscious – emotional content of the mind that we would rather not feel, or that which we would rather not remember, or that which we would rather not recognise as an aspect of ourselves.

Mettā – Healing and Evolving the Emotional Body

In regard to how this Feeling aspect of the personal unconscious is experienced, there is a useful notion in esoteric Buddhism and other spiritual traditions – the Emotional Body. In my view, the idea that we have a psycho-spiritual anatomy made up of subtle energy bodies and ‘chakra’ points or areas, where the energetic state of the subtle bodies is most keenly felt, is a very useful one – and is one that fits the experience of myself and other meditators. I am in general very critical of the way this ‘somatic’ anatomy is described, and shall be attempting to bring some clarity to this area ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Continue reading

June 6, 2017

The Four Brahmavihāras – Four Attitudes of Consciousness

This is Post 10 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

One of the Buddha’s respectful borrowings from the earlier spiritual traditions of ancient India, was the four brahmavihāras (Sanskrit). I regard this teaching as fundamental to our understanding of meditation, and I shall be devoting a long series of posts to exploring it. In my view, the four brahmavihāras are not only essential for understanding and practising meditation – they are essential for understanding life.

As a starting point we can say that the four brahmavihāras are very refined and positive mental-emotional states associated with the divine in Indian tradition. I hope to show, in the course of these articles, that it is important to think of the four brahmavihāras as more than this. They are better thought of as the characteristic mental-emotional attitudes of Consciousness, or qualities of Consciousness – ethical and relational attitudes, not merely mental states. Correctly conceptualised they constitute a universal moral compass that is inherent in Consciousness, and if they were correctly and widely understood in this way they could change the way humanity sees itself, and change the course of history. The importance of this particular ancient description of the divine cannot be overstated. The four brahmavihāras are probably one of the most refined expressions of the mandala archetype, and also one of the most perfect and most illuminating expressions of Jung’s four functions of Consciousness, in the whole of human history.

Brahma – An Archetypal Image of Consciousness

In Indian spiritual tradition, the Sanskrit word Brahman denotes the absolute divine, and the god Brahma is the deity who personifies that ultimate reality – and who occupies the highest place in cosmic order of the ancient Indian pantheon. He is held to be the creator of the universe in Hindu tradition, so he is very like the Judaeo-Christian Yahweh in that regard, but in other ways he is very different. Continue reading

May 24, 2017

Nurturing an Authentic Self

This is Post 9 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

Having reflected on the insubstantiality of the egoic parts, I need, in this meditation blog series, to balance that understanding by at least touching on some other helpful concepts in regard to the tricky and paradoxical question of what it is to have, or be, or become, a ‘self’ – one that is perhaps more affirmative. The nature of the human self and the processes by which it develops, or fails to develop, have challenged Psychology since its inception, and challenged our philosophers and spiritual thinkers for very much longer. Donald Winnicott, an innovative British psychoanalyst and writer, who had a passionate interest in the subtle role that parents, and especially mothers, play in the evolution of a child’s sense of self, put it this way:

“Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman.”

Donald Winnicott, Psychoanalyst and Writer

The largely unrecognised value, of the complex and powerful way in which a mother provides a mirror for her child’s emerging self, and provides a ‘facilitating environment’ through the mother-child bond, was the subject of Winnicott’s life’s work. He was not alone among the psychoanalytic thinkers in this. Jung, as always in my view, went further, recognising that the mother is ultimately an archetypal figure, and that the personal mother constellates the archetypal power of the Mother archetype in her relationship with the child. Characteristically, Jung also recognised that the mother archetype has two sides – that it includes a dark side that may stand in the way of spiritual maturity.

May 19, 2017

Egoic consciousness – Divided against itself

This is Post 8 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

It is often claimed that meditation brings about psychological integration – that it helps us to become less scattered and more unified. This is certainly true, but I am hoping that it will be helpful for us if, in this article, I clarify the nature of the disintegration that is inherent in ordinary egoic consciousness, so that we can better understand why, ultimately, Consciousness itself is the only force that can bring about psychological integration. Clearly, the egoic will has a part to play, but the integration process that we speak of in spiritual and discourse is a ‘Middle Way’ in which the universal and the personal meet and are reconciled.

In the course of the development of psychology and psychotherapy practice during the 20th Century, an understanding was introduced that, while it was startlingly original at the time, also seems to be an absolutely obvious reality in everyday life. This was the idea of the Unconscious. The notion of the Unconscious has been conceptualised in detail in a variety of different ways, but the core idea is that the mind is structured in such a way that we all tend to have a variety of unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, sensations, intentions and memories, that are entirely incongruous with, and even opposite to, the contents of our conscious mind.

Egoic parts – Soul parts – Psychological parts

This tendency for the self to continuously divide against itself leads inevitably to, not a single self but a profusion of opposing pairs of psychological parts. I am not talking about Schizophrenia here, or Multiple Personality Disorder – rather I am referring to a commonplace psychological reality that we are all familiar with in ourselves and others. We are all familiar with internal psychological conflict, and our language reflects this. When we are trying to make a decision, we say “Part of me feels this, and part of me feels that”. When we use the personal will to deny a thought, or a feeling, or a desire, we usually have a “reaction”, and suddenly find ourselves identifying with a part of ourselves that we had previously suppressed. Continue reading

May 15, 2017

Mindfulness – The Buddha’s ‘Remembering’ practice

This is Post 7 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

There is a mysterious and powerful word in the Buddhist texts: Sati in Pali, and Smrti in Sanskrit. This word refers to a spiritual practice advocated by the Buddha, that was like a great overarching principle which guided and informed all the other practices that he taught. These words are usually translated, following T. W. Rhys David’s Pali translations in 1881, as ‘Mindfulness’, a word that had come into the English language several centuries earlier, and which seemed suitable. As Rhys Davids acknowledged however, both Sati and Smrti (pronounced smRti), literally mean ‘to remember’.

The fact that these words clearly refer to the act of remembering in other ancient Indian texts, has not troubled most English-speaking Buddhists, or the many Clinical Psychologists who have become interested in Mindfulness. There have however been about a dozen attempts at better translations into English, which might better express the Buddha’s intention. Some of these have been based on an examination of how contemporary Buddhists understand the remembering practice, leading to translations along the lines of ‘concentrated attention’. Other translators and commentators, have been more courageous, and have instead proposed new non-literal translations that are entirely un-related to the word ‘remembering’ but much closer, I believe, to the Buddha’s intention – words like ‘reflective awareness’, ‘self-recollection’, and ‘presence’. Such is the confusion that we are bound to ask ‘What was it that the Buddha was asking his students to remember?’ Continue reading

May 3, 2017

René Descartes’ Error

This Post 6 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

In a previous article (here), I spoke about Plato’s advice that we know the truth by drawing our attention back into an identification with Consciousness (the ‘Plato’s Cave’ allegory). When we exercise this freedom to direct not just the placement of our attention, but the placement of our identification, the initial effect may be undramatic. This shift may at first seem to change nothing in the content of our experience, but as we look deeper we are usually delighted and amazed.

And if we continue to experiment so that we learn to sustain this shift from our egoic preoccupation with the objects of Consciousness, and start to cultivate the habit of resting as Consciousness, everything changes. To be able to recognise Consciousness as ourselves, and know its qualities as our own, even just for short moments, is the ultimate freedom.

The greater our receptivity in meditation, as we allow ourselves to expand into the imperturbable and equanimous quality of the field of Consciousness, the quieter the thinking function of the mind becomes. And the quieter the thinking function of the mind becomes, the deeper is our experience of Being. Also, as we practice this regularly, we begin to break our habitual identification with our thoughts, recognising that they are only points of view, and points of view that inherently lack objectivity. Paradoxically, it is precisely through our recognition that thoughts can only ever be points of view and therefore have an inherent tendency to lack objectivity, that the capacity for objectivity arises.

“I think, therefore I am”

The 17th Century French philosopher, René Descartes, famously stated ‘I think, therefore I am’. His words reflect a Western world that was starting to abandon the certainties of religious belief. While this intellectual process that he was part of (le Siècle des Lumières – ‘the Enlighmentment’) was in many respects necessary, it also left the Western world in a state of moral disorientation, with only the intellect for guidance – and global culture has been dominated by that dangerous moral malaise to this day. Continue reading

May 2, 2017