#Meditation

Resting the Mental Body in the Field of Consciousness

This is Post 15 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

One of the most common misconceptions about meditation is the idea that it is a merely mental activity. Anyone who would characterise meditation in this way has been taught incorrectly. Meditation is more akin to dance than ordinary egoic thinking. We meditate with the body.

But we need a much larger and more sophisticated conception of what the body is, than scientific materialism has afforded us. We need an understanding of the subtle bodies, especially the first four subtle bodies: the Physical body; the Mental body; the Emotional body; and the Volitional body – which may be called the surface bodies. This seeming digression from my thread of discussion about the brahmavihāras is necessary if we are to fully understand the actual experience of the brahmavihāras and embrace them as transformational processes in our felt experience of resting as Consciousness.

We need ways of thinking about the body that are experientially true – conceptualisations that fit our actual experience. Prior to modern medicine and the domination of our thinking by the Newtonian / Cartesian dualism of a physical body and a mind that is entirely separate, various ancient cultures had very rich and complex ways of imagining the soul or mind/body system.

Psycho-Physical Anatomy – The Seven Bodies

For me, the most experientially true account of our psycho-physical anatomy is given to us by the great meditation traditions of India and Tibet, which identify seven subtle bodies, or ‘energy bodies’, or auras. While we can say that the first of these is most obviously connected with the physical body (which we now know from Science to be much more subtle than we had thought – pure energy and empty space in fact), and the other six are certainly not separate from the physical body. To be true to our experience we need to speak of the whole integrated system not as body and mind but as a body-mind – an integrated body-mind that is described both by the mandala and by the hierarchy of subtle bodies.

As Carl Jung recognised, the depth of human psychological experience cannot be understood unless we conceptualise it as being simultaneously individual and universal – ultimately characterised by a mysterious internal relationship between these two poles, which leads to an integration of these two poles. He gave us a vision of soul that includes a spectrum of experience – the personal, physical and instinctual at one end of that spectrum, and the universal, spiritual and archetypal at the other. This is how we experience ourselves in meditation. Far from leaving the body behind, we find ourselves greatly expanding our sense of what the body is, and opening to more and more subtle dimensions of bodily experience.

The Tibetan Buddhist Body-Mind Model as a Middle Way

The seven layers of our psycho-physical anatomy are a way of objectifying and conceptualising the paradoxical nature of our range of felt experience when we turn our attention inwards in meditative-inquiry. The range of our experience in meditation is vast – we have the experience of being a person in a physical body, but we may also recognise that the core of our experience of self is Consciousness – a non-locatable field phenomenon, that appears as a unity, and seems to pervades the universe.

The universal Consciousness in which we rest is generally ignored because it is non-personal and felt to be incongruous with our concrete experience of a separate physical body. By seeing the body as not single but seven-fold, and predominately energetic and subtle, we are able to overcome that fundamental incongruity and give ourselves a way of making the universal Consciousness central to our experience, while also emphasising the energetic dimensions in the way we think about our inner life.

Many modern Western students of Buddhism, not finding a clearly articulated body-mind model in the early Buddhist texts, tend to shy away from the challenge of giving conceptual form to our experience of the body-mind. There is some value in this attitude of avoiding conceptualisation – just letting our experience be as it is. This approach can however, paradoxically lead to extremely crude and un-thought-through conceptualisations – and at worst leads to an unconscious embrace of a scientific materialist view that is far from that proposed by the Buddha.

It is important to remember that the Buddha rejected the anti-body view that he had initially embraced when he embarked on his spiritual search. The insights gained at the time of his Enlightenment found expression in a ‘Middle Way’. This was an extremely subtle view of the path to realisation, in which the body was embraced, and seen as the vehicle of, and venue for, realisation – and valued both as the crucible in which spiritual transformation takes place, and as the vehicle for the compassionate activity of Enlightenment.

The venue for the practice of samadhi, or meditation, is the body; and the states of dhyana, or meditative absorption, are bodily-felt experiences. It is however, with a keen awareness of the reservations that some may have about this, that I have I am going to be taking the body-mind model that is found in Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the starting point for some ideas that I have found helpful. In my experience the model works. We can think of it as a somatic ‘anatomy’ – but hopefully not in a literalistic way. The main thing is that we release the literalism, and the extreme constraint that unconscious scientific materialism places on our ability to fully receive the rich, complex, and multi-layered experience of embodied Consciousness.

The Mental Body – the Somatic Reflection of the Thinking function

The somatic dimension that we can call the Mental Body is the second of the seven that are spoken of in esoteric literature. All these subtle bodies are ‘mental bodies’ of a sort, but have different felt-qualities and associations, so I will try to distinguish what we might mean by this term. This subtle body is experienced as, and ‘seen’ by some, as very slightly larger than physical body. This means that the first subtle body – the complex psycho-physical reality that we can call the Physical Body – rests inside the Mental Body. Thus it is entirely enclosed and interpenetrated by it, and subject to its contents – a fact that all healers, acupuncturists, shiatsu practitioners and applied kinesiologists would attest to. While we cannot know the mechanisms involved, it seems clear that all the subtle bodies interpenetrate and resonate with each other to some degree – and that the Physical Body and the Mental Body are a particularly closely related pair.

#MentalBody #Consciousness — Artwork by Doreen Kinistino. This image will post to social media when you click the share buttons below.

The Physical Body and the Mental Body exist in polarity with each other in that one is yin, or feminine, or receptive, while the other is yang, or masculine, or expansive. Understanding these polarities is of great assistance in meditation. I shall be returning to this phenomena in future posts, and shall be addressing the little known fact that the Mental Body is experienced as yin, or receptive, in men, and yang, or expansive, in women.

The Thinking Mind is Both Energetic and Neurological

Even if the mechanisms of this are not knowable, it is helpful for meditators to think of the egoic mind as an energetic and somatic phenomena – one in which thinking has an energetic reality, not just a neurological one. It seems that even though thoughts take place in the neuronal networks of the brain, there is an energetic reflection of thought in this somatic phenomenon that I am calling the Mental Body.

So, in addition to the more concrete and well-understood neurological and hormonal connections between the subjective experience of the thinking mind and physiological processes of the body, there is also a profound energetic one. And whereas the neurological re-wiring of our brains, and the calming of our endocrine systems that has been traumatised by fear-based thinking can take a little time, the energetic realignment of our Mental Body, can be achieved relatively quickly if we allow the Mental Body to rest receptively in relationship with the primordial stillness of Consciousness.

The Buddha’s Equanimity practice – Healing the Thinking Mind

This is the power of the Buddha’s Equanimity practice. It allows the Mental Body, and hence the personal thinking mind, to be held in the healing field of Consciousness itself. The transformation that takes place is a purification of the Thinking function, which starts with the Mental Body, and then via its profound effect on the Mental Body, initiates a process in which the dysfunctional wiring of the brain is progressively undone.

When we rest as Consciousness and acknowledge that from the point of view of meditation practice, the Thinking function of the mind is primarily energetic and only secondarily neurological, we open ourselves to a powerful new path of psychological transformation. By choosing to allow the Mental Body to rest as Consciousness and be informed by the field of Consciousness, we do not immediately wash it clean of all its egoic habits of punishment, judgement, justification and projection of shadow, but we do very concretely initiate that profound process.

Purifying the Mind and Integrating Mental Clarity

When we rest in a receptive relationship to Consciousness, we may not suddenly experience the perfect peace of the Great Equanimity immediately, but we can open ourselves to it, and we can readily experience a deep sense of Being, and a sense of alignment with a transpersonal healing power. It is as if we can rest under an inner waterfall of white healing light that is running through our body purifying us and washing us clean of the mental negativities that are inherent in egoic thinking. The more we rest in the mental silence and the mental stillness of the field of Consciousness, the more our mind is cleansed by it, and the more we integrate its qualities of objectivity and mental clarity.

The Buddhist tradition speaks of the purification process within our meditation practice as one in which egoic kleshas are released. These kleshas can be thought of as the energies of the egoic mind – somatic energies that accumulate in the subtle bodies. To the extent that life in self-identification we will accumulate kleshas, and those kleshas have a momentum – they will keep us in habitual egoic identification until we release them though meditation. The category of kleshas that Buddhist tradition associates with the Thinking aspect of the mind is called dvesha, or ‘hatred’ – but this includes the egoic habits of punishment, judgement, justification and projection of shadow, which I mentioned above. The more extreme kleshas that accumulate in the Mental Body show the characteristic quality of ‘hatred’, but they all fall into the category of dvesha. I shall be returning to this important theme in future articles.

Being as the Basis of Identity – Not Thought

Our experience of the Mental Body when we rest as Consciousness, is not primarily one of thought, but of Being. We are still aware of the momentum of our thought processes and of our reflections on our experience, but these are felt to be secondary to the experience of Being. Consciousness and Being are in the foreground of our experience, and thought is arising secondarily, and in that context.

The effect of resting as Consciousness is to fill the Mental Body with the experience of Being. What we experience over time is a new basis for our identity. Our identity is no longer predominantly a mental construction as the Cartesian error (“I think, therefore I am”) would suggest, but instead is rooted in Being, and in the field of Consciousness. It is as if Consciousness stands behind us like a constantly affirming friend, except that we are that Consciousness – we are that friend.

William Parker 2017

If you wish to share this article you can do so by clicking the buttons below.

For more on the themes addressed in this post consider reading these previous articles:

Egoic Consciousness and its Shadow

The Content of the Mind is Not Important

Non-Duality – Buddha, Jesus, and Plato

Objectivity – Meditation and Thinking

René Descartes’ Error

July 15, 2017

Upekshā – Equanimity – Touching the Cosmic Stillness

This is Post 14 in the Meditation Guidance series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

Although I have already talked a little about mettā, or Loving-Kindness, I shall be starting at the traditional beginning point of the mandala-cycle in this post, with upekṣā, or Equanimity, which is the brahmavihāra associated with the eastern quadrant; and with the creative use of the Thinking function of the mind – and with the dawn.

Those whose frame of reference is pre-Quantum-Physics scientific materialism, and who do not have a psychological framework that acknowledges a transpersonal or archetypal dimension, are forced to understand the brahmavihāras as personal emotional states. This is certainly not the way the Buddha understood them. With due respect to those who pride themselves on their ability to cram the Buddha’s sublime teachings into a Newtonian / Cartesian world-view, I feel bound to talk about the brahmavihāras as cosmic principles, which find – if we are receptive to them – a reflection in our personal mental and emotional development.

An Archetypal Source of Mental Clarity

Mahupekshā, the Great Equanimity, the archetypal source of upekshā, or Equanimity, is best thought of as the imperturbable cosmic stillness, which pervades the universe, and is single and unified – and has the power to bring integration, unity, and mental stability to those who are willing to recognise it as their own ultimate true nature. Mysteriously, this cosmic principle is also the basis of each individual person’s experience of observing, thinking and knowing. I have talked in previous posts about how, when we rest as Consciousness, the Thinking function of the Mind finds a new intelligence – a mental stability that starts to approach the always illusive quality of objectivity, and that is non-judgemental, solution-focused, relational, collaborative, and inherently creative. Continue reading

July 9, 2017

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

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

Buddhas and Bodhisattvas – Archetypes of Consciousness

This is Post 6 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

In previous posts, I have spoken about our need for a psychology that gives us a language with which to talk about soul and spirit and Consciousness, and of my belief that we do not have to be scholars or psychotherapists trained in Carl Jung’s tradition, in order to make use of his powerful psychology of the archetypes, or archetypal psychology. The Mandala of the Five Buddhas, which was such an inspiration to Carl Jung, came out the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, and I would like to talk briefly about that tradition before moving on to talk about the mandala archetype in more general terms.

The Mahayana – the Expansion of the Buddha’s Vision

The Mahayana or ‘Great Vehicle’ is the phase of development of Buddhism that emerged in the Indian subcontinent during the 1st Century BCE, and thereafter spread to most of the countries of Asia. Although the rich and refined culture of the Indian Mahayana was almost entirely destroyed by the invasions of India in the Middle Ages, the vestiges of it remain because it was translated, before its demise in India, into so many other Asian cultural forms – in Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Continue reading

May 6, 2017

The Mandala as the Landscape of the Soul

This is Post 5 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

The Sanskrit word mandala is comprised of two words: manda, which means ‘essence’; and la, which means ‘container’. Hence we have the wider association of the word mandala with the idea of a ‘sacred space’, but also the deeper idea of mandalas as visual presentations of the archetypal essences that govern of our lives; of a collection of visual images depicting the essential qualities of the Divine – the essential qualities of Consciousness.

The Mandala as Sacred Container

Importantly, the mandala that I am presenting in this book blog series – the universal mandala that I like to call the Mandala of Love – does not exclude anything from the container. It contains not just the essence of the Divine, but also, since the Divine interpenetrates all things, it contains imagery of the ways in which the same archetypal principles can also manifest their mirror opposite – as egoic patterns, as psychological shadow, and even as the appearance of evil. The psychological possibilities, which might, in religious language, be called ‘Grace’ and the ‘fall from Grace’, are both ever-present – and if we better understand the nature of the choice between these two, a choice that we are making in every moment, the greater is our power to chose between them. Continue reading

May 4, 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-David 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