#SympatheticJoy

Consciousness, Meditation and the Four Qualia

This is Post 38 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

The four brahmavihāras are a description of Consciousness, and of our innately compassionate nature, and together they give us a very powerful approach to meditation. This extremely important ancient Indian framework for personal transformation is unfortunately however, very little known and poorly understood. I am very keen to do what I can to help the brahmavihāras to be better known – the world sorely needs this practice and this understanding.

In my efforts to find ways of making this approach to meditation more accessible, I have developed a somewhat simpler, and more experiential approach, which supports the original brahmavihāras framework, and which I call the Four Qualia. I have been introducing this Four Qualia framework in detail in recent posts (here, here and here), and I recommend that you read those articles first – as they will provide context for this one. I hope, students of meditation and non-duality will find that these four Qualia – these four ever-present, but subtle and difficult-to-define experiences – provide a useful foundation from which the brahmavihāras can more easily be integrated into their practice and their understanding.

The Four Qualia are a mandala framework, and can be approached in meditation as a mandala-cycle – usually starting with the Eastern Quadrant. The exploration of the Four Qualia that I have set out below however, is presented in the order that is suggested by the stupa – by the natural hierarchy of the subtle bodies and chakras – and which I have described previously (here). Those wishing to incorporate this approach into their meditative enquiry, may wish to return to this article several times.

Embodiment, the Physical Body, and Appreciative Joy

The Qualia associated with the experienced reflection of Consciousness in the Physical Body, is Embodiment. When we sit to meditate, and we bring the word Embodiment to mind, we find that we can use it as a pointer to the whole experience of embodied Consciousness in the field of the Physical Body. Continue reading

August 30, 2018

The Mandala and the Stupa

This is Post 35 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

Taking the mandala as our guide, I have been presenting the journey of self-enquiry into the nature of mind, as a four-fold one, and as a circumambulation of the mandala – a clockwise series of enquiries into Thinking (east), Sensation (south), Feeling (west), and now Intuition-Volition (north). There has been a traditional logic in this sequence, but in meditation practice there are many orders of priority that can be used, as we systematically progress our integration – or simply respond intuitively and spontaneously to the needs of our integration process.

In this post I shall be exploring, in conjunction with the symbolism and psychological dynamics of the mandala, the psychological symbolism of the stupa – the traditional symbolic monument that is seen in various forms across the Buddhist world. Much like the mandala, the stupa is a five-fold symbolic representation of an ideal state of psychological and spiritual integration. It is a very useful pointer to the nature of mind, because it brings us back to the enormous importance of the energy anatomy of the subtle bodies.

The Stupa – a Monument to the Experience of the Liberation

Whereas the mandala can perhaps be thought of as a larger symbol, which represents both Consciousness itself and also the tensions, or polarities, that exist within the egoic mind, the stupa represents the somatic embodiment, or reflection, or resonance, of Consciousness in the energetic fields of the body, in the so-called ‘subtle bodies’, and highlights the hierarchical dimension of the relationship between them – at the same time bringing a hierarchical dimension to the way we approach the corresponding brahmavihāras, and the egoic cognitive-perceptual functions (which Buddhist tradition calls the skandhas, as mentioned previously here). While different cultures have elaborated their symbolism in different ways, ultimately the stupas of the east are monuments that celebrate the profound mystery of the energetic embodiment of Consciousness in this world – in the lives of individual human beings.

Consciousness exists everywhere. Indeed it is because of Consciousness that life exists, and because of Consciousness that we are capable of knowing and experiencing life. Paradoxically however, although we are all resting in the field of Consciousness, very few of us have ‘recognised’ Consciousness and fully embraced the non-dual reality that pervades all experiencing. But it is only by deeply acknowledging Consciousness, and learning to ‘turn towards’, or ‘rest back into’ Consciousness, that we allow Consciousness to become energetically embodied in us. Continue reading

August 2, 2018

Flowing with the Currents of Feeling – our Psychological Parts

This is Post 29 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

The psychological function of Feeling, is symbolised in the Western poetic imagination, and in the esoteric lore of Western tradition, by the element of Water. Whereas the Indian imagination generally uses the element of Fire to symbolise Feeling, as I have described previously (here), I would like to now draw on Western tradition to very briefly acknowledge something that the symbolism of the Water element can teach us about the nature of Feeling. As the parallel with Water might suggest, Feeling is a phenomena that is almost always in a state of flow and change: like tides, or waves, or the tributaries of a river, or the eddies in a sparkling stream, or like a stormy ocean.

Feeling, like Water can seem chaotic, but it carries energy and moves with purpose – a purpose that may sometimes be hard to discern, but is nevertheless always present. Just as the Fire element in the symbolic language of India, can be seen to be reaching consistently upwards towards the Divine, so the Water element in the West can be seen as relentless and purposeful in its downward course towards the universal ocean.

Psychological Parts – the Apparent Persons behind our Currents of Feeling

It is perhaps helpful, to see Feeling as analogous to currents or tributaries in a body of Water, because Feeling is certainly not single. Feeling is also much more like a surging wave that recedes and appears to disappear, only to surge again when we don’t expect it. When we examine our experience carefully we notice that it is inaccurate to say “I feel sad” or “I feel afraid” – and worse still to say “I am sad” or “I am afraid”.

Both sadness and the fear are actually only single currents among the many currents of feeling that surge in us from time to time – but more importantly, if we look carefully at our experience, we have to acknowledge that the ‘I’ in both those statements, is always separate from those currents of Feeling. It is never the ‘I’ that feels sad or afraid. The ‘I’ is the imperturbable field of Consciousness within which Feeling is experienced. The conventional verbal forms “I feel …….. “, “I am feeling …….. “, or “I am …….. ” followed by words identifying the category of our feeling state, are not only inaccurate, but very unhelpful psychologically – because they encourage identification with Feeling rather than self-empathetic connection with it. Continue reading

March 5, 2018

Overview Part 2 – Embodied Consciousness

This is the second of a series of pages that are intended to provide an overview of my approach to meditation ad self-enquiry. To access the previous page in the series please click here.

I believe that the true practice of meditation – such as was taught by the Buddha – must be rooted in the psychology of non-dual wisdom. Hence my characterisation of meditation as resting as Consciousness.

While the adoption of this sort of approach at the outset is unfortunately currently relatively unusual, it is by no means without precedent. Indeed it is, in my view, the approach that is now being adopted by all the best meditation teachers around the world. Non-duality is a confusing notion to grasp however. This is partly because non-duality runs so strongly counter to everything that we generally assume about the nature of ourselves and our world.

There is also perhaps, a failure on the part of many meditation teachers to engage with, and to effectively explain, the huge practical benefits of a non-dual approach to human psychology. There is a tendency to put non-duality in the ‘too hard’ basket, and to make it irrelevant by thinking of it as a difficult-to-understand feature of a distant goal, rather than as a starting point and a foundation for meditation practice.

Ultimately non-duality cannot be completely ‘understood’ in the ordinary way by the thinking mind. We can ‘point’ to it with concepts and with symbols, but ultimately we have to seek the actual experience of it within ourselves in meditation or meditative enquiry. The mandala is particularly valuable as a guide for those engaged in such an experiential exploration of non-dual wisdom, because it shows the multiple dimensions of our meditative experiencing in a very systematic and comprehensive way, and gives a great many pointers to the ultimate nature of mind – pointers from each of the four directions of the mandala.

Resting as Consciousness – a brief explanation

In my ‘Meditation Guidance’ articles, on this website, I have been using the notion of resting as Consciousness as a shorthand for my approach to meditation. Once you have experienced resting as Consciousness you will recognise that this phrase as very descriptive. You will find an explanation of this idea in the paragraphs below.

Resting

Firstly, it needs to be understood that the notion of ‘resting’, when we talk of ‘resting as Consciousness’, is an invitation to relax – to rest; to step back; to let go; and to just allow ourselves to experience Consciousness and everything that we are experiencing within Consciousness.

In this ‘resting’ approach to meditation there may be ‘pointers’ to help the beginner to ‘know what to be open to’, but there is nothing particular that we have to do, or be, by an effort of will. In Zen tradition, meditation is sometimes described as ‘just sitting’ or even as ‘doing nothing’. While the egoic mind assumes that the integration that we seek in meditation practice, can only achieved by the effort of egoic will, the reality is opposite. It is very important that we relax and let the harmonious energies of Consciousness take over from the inherently conflicted energies of the egoic will.

Consciousness

The invitation to notice ‘Consciousness’ is a invitation to recognise that which is normally overlooked – the illusive, non-locatable ‘I’ that is aware of experiences and aware of itself. I use the word ‘Consciousness’, with a capital ‘C’, to refer to this ’empty’, non-personal, experiencing ‘self’ in order to highlight the fact that this source of knowing confounds our assumptions about its personal nature as soon as we investigate it though self enquiry. This is the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha that the Buddha spoke of, and that Mahayana Buddhism placed in the centre of the mandala.

The discovery that the apparent ‘self’ has no discernible location, centre, or boundary, is not as alarming or as dramatic as we might expect. We may have to go back to the enquiry many times before we start to fully register the enormous implications of this odd discovery. Even when we have recognised what Consciousness is not, and are starting to relax about not knowing what it is, and perhaps starting to sense that it is something that contains and pervades our experience like space, we will continue to move in and out of identification with our egoic parts, but it is wonderfully liberating to start to realise that none of these egoic parts is the previously assumed self – that all are ‘empty’ of self-nature, and ‘full’ of the energy of Consciousness.

When we start to release our erroneous conviction that the thoughts, feelings, intuitions and sensations, which are the cognitive-perceptual components of our psychological parts, constitute a fixed and substantial ‘self’, we are on the road to psychological freedom. The approach to meditation that I advocate, allows us to move beyond our identifications in a systematic way. The four brahmavihāras and the first four subtle bodies, together provide the framework we need to progressively embody Consciousness though meditation – to discover an energetic reflection, in the internal space of the body, of the essential attitudes or qualities of Consciousness.

Once we recognise that Consciousness is not just a personal point of view within, we are free to experience Consciousness as a ‘field’ – as the shared multidimensional space in which all our experience is arising. But Consciousness is not just ‘out there’ like space, and not just ‘in here’ in a vague general sense as a disembodied knower of our experience – it is also ‘in here’ in a very particular embodied way, in the field of the body, as embodied Consciousness. This is why I find the brahmavihāras to be such a powerful description of Consciousness – the cosmic attitudes of Consciousness that are the brahmavihāras, are simultaneously embodied in us as an energetic reality in our bodily-felt experience, and as integral dimensions of the psychology of any happy, healthy human being.

Those that are familiar with the distinction will notice that when I refer to the brahmavihāras as attitudes of the absolute reality of Consciousness, I am actually referring to the absolute brahmavihāras, or mahabrahmavihāras – the ‘great’ brahmavihāras, of which the relative brahmavihāras are a reflection in our human psychology. While this Mahayana Buddhist distinction between the relative and absolute levels is extremely important and helpful, in general, I do not make the distinction. Our experience in relative existence is always a reflection of the absolute level – meditation practice is implicitly about opening to the non-separation of those levels in our experience.

Resting ‘as’ Consciousness

Before talking about resting ‘as’ Consciousness, I would like to talk briefly about resting ‘in’ Consciousness. Although it is ultimately limiting, and does not quite fit our experience, it would be a huge step forward to think of meditation as resting ‘in’ Consciousness, and this is indeed, in my view, a very good way of initially approaching the self-inquiry and beginning to breaking our egoic identifications. The process of non-dual realisation seems to require that, before we can realise non-duality, we must first acknowledge and embrace the duality of the experienced internal relationship between the universal Consciousness and our various psychological parts and psychological fragments that make up our illusion of a personal self or soul. Initially at least, the relational attitude of receptivity towards the universal Consciousness is essential to the process of our deepening embodiment of it.

As we look within and explore the experience of being aware of being aware, we find that at first it does indeed seem that we can peer out, or ‘feel’ out in all directions into the universal field of Consciousness. This relational ‘looking out’ at the field of Consciousness from the point of view of the experiencing personal self or soul, has the profound and paradoxical effect of intensifying our sense that the universal Consciousness is not just some form of disembodied ultimate observer, but is embodied in each of us.

This is why the notion of resting ‘as’ Consciousness, and the conceptualisation of meditation as a process of letting go of identification with the egoic patterning in the four surface bodies in order to reveal the underlying reality of embodied Consciousness, is so descriptive of our experience in meditation. Our experience when we sit to meditate is always one of embodied Consciousness – and of sensing the presence of energies in the internal space of the body. And as we sit regularly, committing ourselves to familiarising ourselves with Consciousness, the internal energetic structure of the way in which we embody Consciousness becomes increasingly clear.

The Mandala – the Psychodynamics of Consciousness

For me, the essential structure of the maps and diagrams of the internal energetic structure of Consciousness that are provided by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, are superbly accurate – they fit my internal experience very well indeed, and function as a very effective guide in meditative enquiry. I am thinking here of the mandala especially, but also of the stupa, which I will talk about below.

The Westerner can find the symbolism of the mandala and stupa somewhat overwhelming however. Both these symbolic arrangements are so heavily adorned with cultural elements that it is hard to see the archetypal structures themselves. While the cultural details and culture-bound personifications of Consciousness in the great variety of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, male and female, peaceful and wrathful, can be very illuminating, and definitely worth studying and connecting with, unfortunately it helps if we strip these complex multidimensional symbols down to their most essential and universal structural elements.

I have talked in Part 1 of this ‘Overview’ series (here) about how I have found it necessary to clarify and simplify the structure of the mandala that we find in the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead) by using Jung’s Functions of Consciousness in place of the Skandas, and by using the brahmavihāras in place of the Wisdoms. When we see the way that the egoic tendencies in Jung’s four Functions are clearly represented in the four main Realms that are represented in the Buddhist Wheel of Life, and the way in which these egoic tendencies find healing through Consciousness in the brahmavihāras, we have almost all we need to gain access to the storehouse of Tibetan mandala wisdom.

The Stupa – the Hierarchy of Embodied Consciousness

The stupa is usually understood primarily as a memorial monument, which in Buddhist tradition is often built over the grave site of, or to house the cremated remains or relics of, a great spiritual teacher. In the course of the development of the tradition however, stupas came to take forms that were specifically intended to symbolise the components of the experience of embodied Consciousness that the great teachers had achieved.

I find the hierarchical arrangement that we see in both the physical and symbolic structure of the stupa to be a great support in our conceptualisation of the relationship of the personal to the universal in meditation. In the brief summary of the typical structural and symbolic elements of the Tibetan Buddhist stupa monuments that I have provided in the paragraph below, I have included the associated brahmavihāras in brackets. My aim is to reinforce the connection, and ultimately the inseparability of, on one side, the brahmavihāras as the cosmic attitudes of Consciousness, that I have been presenting primarily in the context of the mandala structure, and on the other side, the brahmavihāras as the levels or dimensions of the embodiment of Consciousness in the subtle bodies, such as are highlighted by the hierarchical structure of the stupa.

The square base of a stupa symbolises the earth element and the embodiment of Consciousness in the Physical Body (i.e. Appreciative Joy); the spherical or rounded structure above that symbolises the element of water and our embodiment of Consciousness in the Thinking Body (i.e. Equanimity); the conical structure above that symbolises the fire element and our embodiment of Consciousness in the Emotional Body (i.e. Loving Kindness); the dish shaped or up-turned crescent form above that symbolises the air element and our embodiment of Consciousness in the Volitional/Intuitional Body (i.e. Compassion); and the spire or flame-like feature on the top of the stupa symbolises the element of space, and Consciousness itself.

Stupa_Bodies

One of my aims in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series has been to highlight this correspondence and inseparability between the hierarchical somatic structure of the subtle bodies and their corresponding chakras, and the purely psychological (or what Jung distinquished from the somatic using the term psychic), but equally important archetypal principles, which are the brahmavihāra attitudes and their corresponding opposites among the Six Realms. Taken together, these two aspects of the brahmavihāras give us a wonderfully comprehensive conceptual understanding of the paradoxical way in which the psychic and somatic reflections of Consciousness manifest themselves in meditation as two sides of the same experience.

Individual Embodiment of a Universal Consciousness

In the ‘Meditation Guidance’ articles on the brahmavihāras, I have been acknowledging the hierarchy of the subtle bodies that we see in the stupa, but emphasising the all-important polarity dynamics within the surface bodies, that are highlighted by the vertical and horizontal pairs of opposites in the mandala structure.

Brahma_Bodies

I believe it is important to give primacy to the way Consciousness is organised according to a mandala structure. The mandala structure gives emphasises to the need to cultivate balance and wholeness, and to heal our Shadow dynamics by always holding both poles of the polar oppositions simultaneously in Consciousness. The stupa highlights a very different inherent structure in the way Consciousness is organised – a hierarchical structure that corresponds to the universally experienced somatic structures of Consciousness in the subtle bodies that we experience within and around us.

A wonderful implication of the ancient Indian ‘seven bodies / seven chakras’ system is that the surface is contained within the deep, and the personal is contained within the universal. The non-dual wisdom with its focus on the universal Consciousness, and its recognition that the appearance of selves is an illusion, paradoxically does not devalue or dismiss the appearance of individual beings. On the contrary it deeply appreciates and celebrates the lives of all sentient beings by revealing and honouring each one as a manifestation of the universal Consciousness.

And the spiritual traditions give special appreciation and honour to those who make the universal Consciousness the context for their lives, because these people eventually come to embody the ethical and compassionate qualities of the universal Consciousness in every energetic layer of their being – right down to the Physical Body.

Oneness is the Context for the Plurality of our Embodied Experience

When the whole hierarchy of the way Consciousness is embodied is experienced fully in meditation, we naturally move towards taking the universal as the basis of our identity, and the physical body, the breath, and the sense of ‘being a person’, are each experienced in the context of the universal. We come to see each of these as merely a doorway – a doorway that seems to want to disappear as soon as we walk through it.

Non-dual wisdom becomes much more accessible, and is of much greater practical value, when we recognise that an experience of a separate self seems to remain even when the oneness of the field of Consciousness is recognised and embraced as the basis of our identity, and as the context for a lives. The more that we recognise the way that the unity of Consciousness completely pervades every experience however, the more the distinctively egoic nature of our perception, with its conviction of separateness, falls away.

So, in a non-dual approach to meditation we are invited to embrace the universal Consciousness in our process of embodiment of its qualities – to make ourselves profoundly receptive to it, by recognising it as who we already are in our most essential nature. The Oneness, it would seem, is the context for, and the evolutionary driving force for, the inevitable plurality of our experience as human beings – as rich and complex personal embodiments of Consciousness, living in an extraordinarily beautiful and diverse world.

January 8, 2018

Mettā – Healing the Egoic Shadow of Love

This is Post 27 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

When we rest as Consciousness, the Feeling aspect of that experience is the brahmavihāra of mettā, or Loving Kindness. Mettā is associated in Buddhist tradition with the colour red, with the end of the day, and with sunset. Although, in Western tradition, the Feeling function is associated with the water element, in Indian tradition it is associated with the element of fire.

In the poetry and imagination of India (and that of the first nation peoples of North America) fire is the element that turns the gross into the subtle, that cooks and transforms things, that extracts bright metals from dull ores. When the body is cremated, fire helps the soul on its journey to the heavenly realms. Fire is the element that radiates a nourishing warmth – but we instinctively recoil from it when it threatens to scorch us. It is the upward-rising and aspirational element that dances, and appears to reach up to heaven. All this fire imagery provides eloquent symbolism of the Feeling function. In India, the Hindu religious ascetic, or sannyasin, will usually put on robes that are the colour of fire when he or she abandons the worldly life – signifying the fire of their aspiration, and the self-transformation that they are undertaking.

In the context of the mandalas of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the fiery Feeling function in the red Western Quadrant appears to carry us upward from the earthy Sensation function in the yellow Southern Quadrant, to the airy function of Volition / Intuition in the green Northern Quadrant. The downward-flowing water element in the blue, or white, Eastern Quadrant, which symbolises the Thinking function, carries us back down to the yellow Southern Quadrant, the earth element, and the Sensation function, and so completes the cycle. The elements, in this context, are symbols of the cognitive-perceptual functions that Indian tradition calls the skandhas – something that students of the mandala wisdom need to be keenly aware of.

It is traditional among the Tibetan people to orientate their maps to the path of the sun, so they put the blue eastern sunrise point at the bottom of the mandala, and the red western sunset point at the top – so the way in which the element symbolism highlights the cyclical process of the mandala is unfortunately usually lost. While it is very much my wish to honour the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, I find the western-style orientation of the mandala, which puts the north-point at the top, to be much more symbolically meaningful.

The archetypal symbolism of the two axes – the two main pairs of polarities within the mandala – are so important. By placing the Earth-Air axis vertically, with the Earth Element, which in Buddhist tradition symbolises the basic and foundational skandha of vedanā (Sensation) at the bottom; and the Air Element, which symbolises the subtle and energetic skandha of samskaras (Intuition/Volition) at the top, we allow the mandala to express important truths that would otherwise be missed – important truths that in other traditions might be suggested symbolically by the dichotomies of Heaven and Earth, or Spirit and Matter.

A Four-fold Embodiment of Consciousness

The foundational stages of meditation practice require that we familiarise ourselves deeply with embodied Consciousness in all four of the surface bodies, and one of our best guides to this four-fold embodiment is the cycle of the four brahmavihāras. The Emotional Body is the third of the surface bodies, and is associated with the Western Quadrant of the mandala, and with the brahmavihāra of mettā. It is the Emotional Body that is felt most keenly in the region of the maṇipūra, or Solar Plexus Chakra, which is a point in the centre of the trunk of body just below the sternum, which I have written about in the previous post (here). Continue reading

December 28, 2017

Overview Part 1 – A Mandala Framework for Meditation and Self-Enquiry

The approach to meditation that I have adopted in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series of articles is unusual because it brings together elements from philosophical, spiritual, and psychological traditions that do not usually cross-pollinate, and tend not to understand each other. My aim in this article is to provide an overview of my approach, and to show why I have found the relatively unknown brahmavihāras to be so essential to my framework for meditation and self-enquiry.

My Psychological and Spiritual Influences

Although I was born into a nominally Christian family and a nominally Christian culture, my first real spiritual education, in my twenties, was in a Western Buddhist tradition that integrated Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana elements, with a special emphasis on re-creating something of the spirit of the lost Indian Mahayana in a Western cultural context – especially the spirit of the Bodhisattva Ideal. I then became a Quaker for 10 years, and subsequently studied with a number of different Advaita Vedanta (non-Buddhist non-duality) teachers.

Although I worked in General Psychiatry settings for many years (as an Occupational Therapist), the main psychological perspectives that I have drawn on personally are those are Carl Jung, Eugene Gendlin (original developer of the ‘Focusing’ self-empathy/self-enquiry practice), and Marshall Rosenberg (originator of the Nonviolent Communication model).

Returning to Meditation – A Fresh Approach

Since my return to meditation in 2016, my daily practice has been experimental, personal, and driven by my own self-enquiry into the nature of Consciousness. Although it has been informed to some extent by my reflections on my Buddhist studies in my twenties, the new approach that has emerged from my meditative enquiry bares almost no relation to anything that I was formally taught at that time. The success of this new approach – in supporting my own mental and emotional development – has been so marked that I have felt strongly motivated to share my experience as best I can.

The Mandala as a Psychological Map

Like Carl Jung, I love to make connections, and to notice the archetypal patterns that inform our lives and inform our psychological and spiritual models. A particular fascination since I discovered the archetype in my early twenties, has been the mandala. A great diversity of mandala images, representing forms of cosmology and psychology that are based on a four-fold model of the Divine, are seen in vastly different cultures across history and across the globe. The most refined expressions of the mandala archetype, in Carl Jung’s view, and in mine, are the mandala images that can still be seen today in Tibetan Buddhism, but which originally emerged in the form that we are familiar with, during the Indian Mahayana period.

The Bardo Thodol – Tibetan Book of the Dead

Carl Jung found the mandala that is described in the Bardo Thodol (or Tibetan Book of the Dead) to be a revelation. Among other things, the mandala wisdom of the Bardo Thodol integrates, and establishes correspondences between, three key symbolic formulations, each of which can be arranged as a mandala or quaternity: the Five Wisdoms; the Five Skandhas; and five of the Six Realms (all except the Animal Realm). The combination of his understanding of the Tibetan symbolic system, and his years of dream analysis with his patients, gave Jung the conviction he needed to publish his ground-breaking and comprehensively detailed Psychological Types essay, which described a mandala-form model of the psyche.

Carl Jung’s Genius and Gift to Humanity

The importance of Jung’s Psychological Types is not widely appreciated. What made the ideas in that essay so important as a spiritual document was the way it explained the egoic Shadow in such detail, and so comprehensively described the oppositions within the archetypal mandala structure of the egoic mind. It explained, via these oppositions, the various ways in which the natural human ethical sensibility is so easily lost, so that profound inhumanity becomes possible, and has been witnessed so frequently in human history. The weight of the understanding that Jung presented in that paper, was equal to, and similar in importance in my view, to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, since, like that teaching, it demonstrated both the nature of our psychological dysfunction and egoic bondage, and the means of our liberation from it, through Consciousness.

Jung_Functions

These oppositions (between Feeling and Thinking; and between Intuition/Volition and Sensation in particular) are a key feature of Jung’s mandala – symbolising the way that Consciousness allows us to ‘hold the tension’ between these opposites. This need to achieve a separation of these opposites and a reconciliation of them at a higher level, that was so well descried by Jung – is seldom highlighted, even in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition where knowledge of these dynamics is identified symbolically as a key aspect of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom, which plays such an important part in that model.

The Five Skandas – Lost in Translation?

In the articles in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series, I have for the sake of brevity, avoided engaging with the understandable but disastrous historical mistranslations and loss of meaning that has made the wonderful Five Skandhas teaching so impenetrable and almost valueless for most modern students of Buddhism. Instead I have made use of Jung’s Four Functions of Consciousness, which I believe play the same role in Jung’s mandala structure of the psyche that the Five Skandhas teaching is intended to do in the Buddhist tradition.

Skandhas_Jung

Both Carl Jung’s four perceptual functions, and the ancient Indian Skandhas provide a framework for analysing the way in which, in the absence of a deep recognition of the nature of Consciousness, the component elements of the perceptual process collapse into the illusion of a separate self. I would very much like to present an analysis of where the Skandhas appear to have got lost in the course of history. Although I have not yet published on this, I have written about it, I would very much like to post an article on this important theme in the future.

The Male and Female Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala

Although I have personally found the beautiful symbolic personifications of Consciousness in the Bardo Thodol to be very valuable, a have also chosen, at least in the context of the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series, to avoid reference to the five pairs of male and female buddhas, which the Five Wisdoms are associated with. While it might be interesting to explore these beautiful archetypal figures at a future time, my concern has been that the symbolic imagery of these forms tends to overwhelm us. The cultural richness of Tibetan Buddhist iconography can easily become a distraction from the simple and bodily-felt nature of the non-dual wisdom that these images are intended to point us towards. It is always important, in my view, for spiritual students to be able extract the universal spiritual knowledge from the cultural form in which it comes – as the highest-level Buddhist practitioners have always been able to do, even in regard to their own tradition.

The Four Brahmavihāras and the Five Wisdoms

In place of the Five Wisdoms therefore, I have initially used the Four Brahmavihāras, which are very similar, very closely associated, and very much more accessible as a framework for self-enquiry. Indeed they are so closely related in their symbolic associations, and in the somatic experience that they present in the body, that we can only assume that the brahmavihāras were a precursor in the earlier teachings of the historical Buddha, of the later Mahayana Buddhist teaching of the Five Wisdoms. I have found that studying the two systems concurrently and recognising their inseparability has brought a richness and clarity to my understanding of both – and I thoroughly recommend this study to others.

Brahma_Wisdoms

The Inherently Ethical Nature of Consciousness

In my view the four Brahmavihāras also have the advantage over the four corresponding Wisdoms among the Five Wisdoms, of being much more obviously relational and connected to ethical principles. They point very clearly and concretely to the inherently ethical and beneficial nature of Consciousness, and the way in which, as we explore them in meditation and self-enquiry, the cultivation of a familiarity with the somatic experience of the brahmavihāras is inseparable from the development a natural ethical sensibility and naturally compassionate orientation in life.

The Six Realms – Extreme Cultural Manifestations of the Egoic Mind

It is important to recognise, that while the brahmavihāras are aspects of Consciousness – and can be regarded as a description of the ultimate nature of mind – they also have great practical relevance in everyday life. Indeed the brahmavihāras provide us with foundational insights about conscious communication and ethical behaviour.

Brahma_Realms

These insights become especially keen and incisive when the brahmavihāras are considered in opposition to their counterparts among the Six Realms. The implication when we make these connections, is that the five key Realms can be seen as cultural tendencies that arise out of our collective failure to recognise Consciousness and the four ‘attitudes’ of Consciousness that are the brahmavihāras. The brahmavihāras on the other hand, can be seen as specific antidotes to the Realms – to the psychological and cultural problems that are inevitably generated by the egoic mind – antidotes that are inherent in the nature of Consciousness and always available to us.

The Realms, the Skandas, and the Functions of Consciousness

By opposing the brahmavihāras and the Realms, I have been addressing exactly the same fundamental spiritual choices that we are shown in the symbolic language of Tibetan Buddhism, but hopefully in more accessible form. Indeed the Bardo Thodol associates five of the Six Realms with the Five Skandhas, to give us a powerful way of reflecting on how, to the extent that they are not informed by Consciousness, and recognised as ’empty’, these five components of the cognitive-perceptual process, or categories of cognitive-perceptual data, lead inevitably to five unhelpful egoic mental states and forms of unconscious behaviour that can be seen in individuals and groups – and can be seen represented in the Realms.

So we have five opposed pairs: the Hell Realms or Narakas represent the egoic tendency that is inherent in the Thinking function, and a failure to recognise the brahmavihāra of Equanimity; the Human Realm represents the egoic tendency that is inherent in the Sensation function, and a failure to recognise the brahmavihāra of Sympathetic Joy; the Preta Realm represents the egoic tendency that is inherent in the Feeling function, and a failure to recognise the brahmavihāra of Loving Kindness; the Asura Realm represents the egoic tendency that is inherent in the function of Intuition / Volition, and a failure to recognise the brahmavihāra of Compassion; and the Deva Realms represent an egoic appropriation of Consciousness itself, and a failure to recognise its ultimately impersonal nature.

Brahma_Realm_Function

Gaining Familiarity with the Shadow – Personal and Collective

The immense value of this set of associations does not appear to be widely known, mainly because it is undermined by the previously mentioned problems with the Five Skandhas teaching. The recovery of meaning that we achieve by replacing that formulation with Jung’s Four Functions of Consciousness, is further enhanced by opposing the Realms and brahmavihāras rather that the Realms and the Wisdoms.

The five Realms are powerfully illuminated by these juxtapositions, and hopefully rescued from their status as merely a perplexing curiosity of Buddhist cosmology. When we use Jung’s Functions in place of the Skandhas, and start to see the Realms as the collective psychological landscapes that are generated by the corresponding egoic Functions of Consciousness. By seeing the Realms as the archetypal landscapes of the ever-present psychological Shadow in the individual and collective psyche, we come closer, I believe, both to the Buddha’s intention, and to the intention of the great Padmasambhava, the author of the Bardo Thodol.

The Brahmavihāras – Consciousness Embodied

The fact that the brahmavihāras are very obviously and precisely related to bodily felt states in the first four subtle bodies makes them extremely important for anyone interested in meditation. Essentially, they are four aspects of the deeply paradoxical, but very beautiful way, in which an energetic reflection of the boundless and universal field of Consciousness is embodied in us as a personal and bodily-felt, or ‘somatic’, experience. I shall be providing a summary of this in my next article in this ‘Overview’ series.

Although the subtle bodies have well established associations in Tibetan Buddhist tradition with the Wisdoms, and these can also be recognised in our felt experience when we explore them, the associations with the brahmavihāras that I have been emphasising in this ‘Meditation Guidance’ series are less known, but are actually much more obvious in our felt experience than are the associations with the Wisdoms.

Effortless Transformation by Resting as Consciousness

The associations between the brahmavihāras and the subtle bodies are as follows: Muditā, or Sympathetic Joy, is felt as the resonance of Consciousness in the Physical Body (and Base Chakra); Upekṣā, or Equanimity is felt as the resonance of Consciousness in the Mental Body (and Hara Chakra); Mettā, or Loving Kindness, is felt as the resonance of Consciousness in the Emotional Body (and Solar Plexus Chakra); Karuṇā, or Compassion is felt as the resonance of Consciousness in the Volitional / Intuition Body (or Heart Chakra). Viewing the brahmavihāras as the embodiment of, or as the resonance of, Consciousness, allows us to recognise their entirely impersonal nature. It also releases us from the suggestion that we should be cultivating the brahmavihāras by an effort of the egoic will.

Brahma_Bodies

Rather the brahmavihāras can be seen as innate – as aspects of Consciousness and as aspects of our natural state, that can easily be recognised in self-enquiry. The ‘cultivation’ of them therefore, does not happen by the egoic will holding an intention to do so, but primarily by a recognition of that which has previously been obscured – and by the spontaneous self-release of the energetic residue of egoic habits of mind that have previously been held in place by our egoic identifications. Hence my essential characterisation of meditation practice as resting as Consciousness.

The Direct Path – Every-day Non-Duality

I will be giving more time in future articles to the way in which our unconscious identification with egoic parts – even identification with positive and aspirational egoic parts – locks us down energetically and prevents psychological change. When we approach meditation via the notion of resting as Consciousness, we have a wonderfully simple way of entering experientially into the sort of non-dual way of being that is necessary to break this deadlock, and a powerful way of facilitating the inner energetic transformation that we are seeking.

To read the next article in this overview series – Overview Part 2 – Embodied Consciousness – click here.

December 23, 2017

Feeling – The Discernment of Goodness, Value and Beauty

This is Post 25 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

While there is much more that could be said about the brahmavihāra of Sympathetic Joy and the Southern Quadrant of the mandala, we need now to move clockwise round the mandala to the Western Quadrant, to the function of Feeling (the samjñā skandha of Buddhist tradition), and to the brahmavihāra of Loving Kindness, or mettā (Pali), or maitrī (Sanskrit). Although in general I like to use Sanskrit, the classical language of Indian spiritual discourse, and the language of the magnificent but no longer existing tradition of Indian Mahayana Buddhism, I prefer, out of habit, to use the more familiar Pali word mettā, for Loving Kindness, rather than equivalent Sanskrit word maitrī (pronounced ‘my-tree’).

Even those who are unfamiliar with the four brahmavihāras as a mandala map of Consciousness, such as I have been presenting, may well have heard of mettā, which is the most well-known of the four. And some will perhaps be familiar with a form of the popular Buddhist meditation practice called the mettā bhāvanā, or ‘Cultivation of the Loving Kindness’. Because of this, I have already written one post about mettā (here) in my introduction to the brahmavihāras at the beginning of this ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

In that previous post, I explained that mettā is most frequently presented in a way that does not clearly distinguish it from karuṇā (Compassion), muditā (Sympathetic Joy), and fails to acknowledge the important connection between mettā and upekṣā (Equanimity). Because I believe so strongly that a deeper understanding the whole mandala of the brahmavihāras constitutes such a powerful framework for self-enquiry and meditation, I would like now to return to the themes of that previous post.

Distinguishing Feeling from Sensation

In order to fully understand and distinguish the nature of mettā, we need first to understand that function of psychological cognition that we call Feeling, and in order to understand Feeling, it is extremely important for us to make a clear distinction between Feeling and Sensation – something that not all psychological models achieve. Indeed these two words are unfortunately often used interchangeably in English and other languages – and this causes much confusion. The distinction I make between the perceptual sensing function of Sensation and evaluative and discriminative function of Feeling follows both Carl Jung and the Buddhist tradition. I also draw on Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication model and various others who have also recognised and described this universal four-fold pattern, which I have some sometimes called the Mandala of Love, or more simply, ‘the mandala’.

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We also need to recognise the limitations of psychological models that do not include either Consciousness, or the possibility of a somatic, or energetic, dimension of experiencing. Such Newtonian-Cartesian psychological models are usually forced to see Feeling merely as a form of Sensation – as a pattern of neurological and hormonal excitation in the abdomen and chest of an entirely physical body that has no connection to the Quantum field.

This assumption that there is no functional interaction between the Quantum Mechanical level and the Classical level within the nervous system is just that – an assumption, and one that is contrary to our experience. The spiritual gift of a century of rigorous experimentation in Quantum Physics has been the understanding that all of the phenomena of the Classical world that we call matter (including the human body down to the molecular level) rest inseparably in a perplexing but undoubtedly unitary field of energy and Quantum information that completely interpenetrates all experience. While the mental habits of scientific materialism have been slow to erode, it is clear to all those in the field of Quantum Physics, who have given deep thought to the implications of this new science, that the participation of Quantum Mechanical mechanisms in the brain and nervous system is necessary for there to be any actual experiencing, or knowing, or Consciousness in any perceptual process. This is the only explanation we have for the data of human experience.

The quantitative psychological methods of non-phenomenological models have tended to simply exclude a deep investigation of the nature of Feeling, because it is dismissed as inherently too subjective – and because it is subject to the limited vocabulary of most people in the general population in regard to feeling. We rarely describe feelings specifically, and the extreme variability in the usage of the standard ‘feeling words’ – the commonly used categories and sub-categories used to describe feeling – unfortunately makes them unsuitable for use in most types of psychological research.

The Feeling Function – Our Emotional Guidance System

Phenomenological approaches like that of the psychotherapist-philosopher Carl Jung, or the philosopher-psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, have however recognised that Feeling is an enormously rich territory for psychological exploration, and for personality change. In my view the contributions of both Jung and Gendlin have been incalculable – and their legacies has been insufficiently acknowledged. I shall be drawing on both these perspectives in my next few articles, as well as once again drawing on the mandala-wisdom of various traditions (especially Buddhism), and on the seven bodies / seven chakras somatic model that is well known to meditators and healers. As I explained in my previous post on mettā (here), when we experientially recognise the way in which Feeling is associated with the Emotional Body in that model, we are given a valuable way of grasping the energetic dimension of the somewhat intangible psychological function of Feeling.

Marshall Rosenberg and the global community that created the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model have also given us a useful way into our process of enquiry into Feeling – by suggesting that positive feelings arise when Needs are met, and negative feelings arise when Needs are unmet. Putting aside, for now, any attempt to define a ‘Need’, and also putting aside the fact that Feeling appears to be very much subject to Thinking, and clearly also related to physiological processes in our nervous systems and endocrine systems, this does nevertheless gives us a very good starting point.

The Feeling function, which Indian tradition calls the samjñā skandha, is clearly a form of cognitive discernment, or evaluative discrimination, and functions as a sort of ‘guidance system’. Whereas Sensation may be regarded as a neutral way of knowing our reality though the act of sensing, Feeling can perhaps best be thought of as the function by which we subjectively evaluate our experience via the subtle movements, patterns, and processes of felt-knowing in the field of body. Feeling, like Thinking, is a discriminative, or judging function – a function by which we make decisions – but is clearly a non-logical and subjective mode of discernment. Feeling, it would seem, draws on our accumulation of life experience, via a difficult-to-define subjective knowing, to make decisions that require an evaluative mode of discrimination – not a logical one.

The East-West Axis of the Mandala – Thinking and Feeling

In several earlier posts (here, here, here, here, and here) I spoke about the Eastern Quadrant of the mandala, and talked about the way resting ‘as’ Consciousness allows us to step back out of identification with the beliefs and points of view, which are the Thinking aspect of the egoic patterns – allows us to draw back into Consciousness, and into a place of objectivity and Being. We also saw that this place of objectivity and Being was relational and creative – capable of rational creativity, solution-focused collaboration, and mental stability in the face of challenges.

As we now address the Western Quadrant and cognitive function of Feeling, I hope to show how resting as Consciousness can allow us, in a similar way, to step back out of identification with our emotions, moods, and subjective reactions, which are the Feeling aspects of the egoic patterns – can allow us to draw back into a place of rational subjective discernment or felt knowing.

As we saw with the Thinking function, the ability to rest as Consciousness changes everything. Just as Thinking only becomes capable of objectivity when it is truly a ‘function of Consciousness’ rather that a function of the egoic illusion, so Feeling only becomes capable of providing accurate evaluation, discernment, and guidance when, through resting as Consciousness, we have learnt to dis-identify from the vast accumulation of egoic conditioning that is patterned into both our somatic anatomy and our neuro-endocrine system.

The Feeling function is sometimes characterised as having an orientation to the past (whereas the Thinking function may be thought of as an orientation to the future). Only by allowing the Emotional Body to rest as Consciousness in the present moment, can we start to free Feeling from past conditioning – conditioning which usually entirely shapes our felt experience and our emotional lives into the future. In reality, all forms of conditioning are an orientation to the past. Without Consciousness, which gives us an orientation to the eternal present moment of felt experience, everything that we are as conditioned egoic beings marches relentlessly from the past into the future – always reacting from past conditioning, endlessly repeating old patterns of relationship, and always tending to bring the same old emotional tone in our new experiences.

Conscious Thinking and Feeling – Differentiation and Reconciliation

The East-West axis of the mandala reminds us that Consciousness allows us to differentiate Thinking (East) from Feeling (West) and to reconcile these two principles at a higher level. As we learn to rest as Consciousness we recognise that truly objective Thinking arises in the context of a shared experience of existence, or Being – so truly conscious Thinking is always relational, and always serves connection, communication, and creativity. A capacity for conscious non-reactive Thinking is as foundational for our relationships and collaborations as is our capacity to be consciously ‘loving’. Indeed the two are inseparable, and each without the other is incomplete, unbalanced, and hides the unconscious shadow of its opposite – and is therefore not achievable.

Similarly, Consciousness allows us to experience and communicate Feeling objectively, so that it profoundly supports connection with ourselves and connection with others. This objectivity allows us to experience Feeling as much more than a form of subjective emotional response. Instead it becomes a capacity for objective discrimination – a subtle mode of discernment and evaluation in the context of our communication, our relationships, and in areas of life where aesthetic and ethical judgement is required. Similarly in communication, the ability to accurately and objectively observe and describe our feelings opens up vast new self-empathetic and empathetic possibilities, which lead to a deepening of relationships and to psychological and social healing.

Consciousness – Our only Protection against Shadow Projection

The way in which the axes of the mandala give us a visual image of the way the functions of Consciousness (Feeling and Thinking – at west and east; and Intuition/Volition and Sensation – at north and south) are experienced as oppositions on the egoic level, but are reconciled and complementary on the level of Consciousness, is a key feature of the mandala wisdom, which is of enormous importance for the meditator – or for anyone who wishes to become more conscious, especially in their relationships.

This wise mandala-psychology, which I have been calling the Mandala of Love alerts us to the ever present danger of the unconscious opposites in ordinary egoic functioning. I have talked previously (here) about how egoic Thinking, instead of functioning as a capacity for relational objectivity, inevitably tends to express shadow Feeling qualities – frequently becoming emotional, judgemental and punishing, when Consciousness and the balancing quality of fully conscious Feeling are absent.

Similarly, until the ability to rest as Consciousness is established, egoic Feeling will, instead of functioning as objective discernment through felt knowing, can always tend to show the complementary opposite, or ‘shadow’ qualities of moodiness, compulsiveness, and depression – experiences and behaviours that relate directly to an inability to reflect and relate objectively and affirmatively to felt-experience. It is only with the help of these Thinking-related functions of reflection, objectivity, affirmation, thoughtful communication and relatedness, that Feeling can function in a fully differentiated way – as a function of Consciousness.

The Mandala Map of Consciousness – Our Shield against the Shadow

Without Consciousness, the polar oppositions between Thinking and Feeling (at East and West), or between Intuition/Volition and Sensation (at North and South) collapse into an unconscious egoic fusion, that is reflected in unconscious patterns of thinking, language and action. Only Consciousness can provide the spaciousness in which we can hold the tension between the opposites. Consciousness supports the necessary processes of differentiation and reconciliation, protecting us, and freeing us from our unconscious tendencies and from the inevitability of shadow projection – psychological dynamics which make us ineffective, which keep us stuck, and which cause us much harm by undermining our judgement and damaging our relationships.

Readers interested in this built-in egoic tendency towards internal fusion, division, and shadow projection, in the egoic patterns, may be interested in my previous post on this (here). An awareness of the psychodynamics of the personal and collective Shadow are essential for anyone who would wish to be become conscious or to function harmoniously and ethically in their relationships and in society. One of the greatest gifts of the mandala archetype that these Mandala of Love posts are exploring, is its ability to highlight the unconscious Shadow and bring it into consciousness – knowledge of the mandala dynamics is our shield against the Shadow.

William Parker 2017

These articles are best read in sequence. To go to the next article in the series just click the ‘Next’ button at the bottom of the page. For an overview of the whole sequence of articles, with short summaries of each one, click here.

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November 13, 2017

The Yin and Yang of Embodied Consciousness

This is Post 24 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

In order to understand meditation fully, an understanding of the way our psychology manifests somatically, or energetically in the field of the body, is essential. We especially need to understand the way in which female and male spiritual character manifests somatically. These are things that are extremely poorly understood, given their great importance as key factors that govern the level of harmony and fulfilment that we experience in sexual relationships. They appear to be difficult to consciously acknowledge and talk about, even though we are all very keenly aware of them.

This is perhaps partly because these phenomena are so difficult to conceptualise. The great Carl Jung, who developed a very sophisticated understanding of the way archetypal, or transpersonal, psychic forces shape male and female psychological character, also understood that the archetypal psychology of sexual difference manifests somatically – in the subtle energies of the body. He theorised that there was an energetic patterning of the body, or somatic unconscious, that shapes our psychology in a similar way to the archetypes of the collective psychic unconscious. Whereas the archetypes of the collective unconscious show themselves in our myths, stories, dreams, and movies, the energies of the somatic unconscious can be felt in the body as energetic dynamics and states.

Our ability to know ourselves, and to function with psychological freedom and integrity, is closely related to our capacity to fully acknowledge this bodily-felt dimension of the inner world. Our engagement with the somatic dimension takes us to the core of the human mystery – and to the core of how human beings embody Consciousness, or fail to do so.

The Qualia of Embodiment

In connection with the yellow Southern Quadrant of the mandala and the brahmavihāra of muditā, or Appreciative Joy, it is helpful to acknowledge the experience of ‘Embodiment’ that we have been addressing is a ‘qualia’. The qualia are the difficult-to-define subjectively experienced phenomena that occur in connection with Consciousness. As a way of finding alignment at the beginning of a meditation session, try just taking a few moments to notice your experience of ‘Embodiment’. You are likely to find that when you look in your experience for ‘Embodiment’, you will find yourself being pointed to the experience of Consciousness. You will have a similar experience when you look for the experience of ‘Being’, which names another key qualia. Continue reading

October 17, 2017

Plato’s Cave Revisited

This is Post 23 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

Self-inquiry, meditation practice, and the practice that the English-speaking Buddhist traditions call ‘Mindfulness’, all involve what can be described metaphorically as an inner drawing back, out of the egoic identification in which we find ourselves, into an identification with the field of Consciousness itself – and discovering the blessings that flow from that. We usually associate these practices with Indian and far eastern spirituality (and perhaps with a few Christian mystical traditions like the Quakers). It is important to understand however, that the same subtle spiritual knowledge was present at the beginning of Western Philosophy in the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions that flourished before the Christian period, and then re-emerged in the Renaissance.

An Ancient Greek Vision of Spiritual Freedom

Socrates, the Classical Greek philosopher, who lived in Athens in the 5th Century BCE, was teaching on ethics and the ultimate nature of mind in the same century that the Buddha was addressing these themes in ancient India. If he did ever do any writing himself, none of Socrates’ writings have survived, so we only know of his ideas though the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and via the playwright Aristophanes.

There is much in Plato’s literary record of Socrates’ life and teachings, that is relevant to this series of posts on the brahmavihāras, but I would like to return to one of his teachings that I have touched on briefly before in this series (here) – the ‘Allegory of the Cave’ from Plato’s Republic. Set in the context of a wider discussion about the value of education and of spiritual knowledge, it appears to present a philosophical theory of human perception that is very similar to both the Buddha’s view, and that of Quantum Physics. Continue reading

October 1, 2017

Zazen – Just Sitting – Resting as Consciousness

This is Post 22 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

In very general terms, the classic Zen meditation practice of Zazen, or ‘Just Sitting’, is usually thought of as a meditation that takes the body as a whole, and its environment, as the ‘object’ of the meditation practice. For those that have not experienced the practice, it can be difficult to understand how this seemingly diffuse and unfocused approach to meditation could, in a very natural and effortless way, give rise to strong states of somatic integration, where it appears that Consciousness is the unifying power that is producing the state of effortless concentration. I could be argued that the ‘object’ of attention in Zazen practice, if there is one, is Consciousness itself – the field of Consciousness in which all our experiencing is happening; and Consciousness as it is experienced in the field of the body. Zazen therefore, is a prime example of the practice of ‘resting as Consciousness’.

Sympathetic Joy – the Zen of Embodied Consciousness

In the last few posts I have reflecting in different ways on the brahmavihāras or muditā, which is usually translated as Sympathetic Joy. In the text of these articles, I have mostly been translating muditā as Appreciative Joy, which I prefer. I can see that the translation of muditā as Sympathetic Joy is in some ways more appropriate when we are describing the extraverted aspect of muditā – our relational response to the wellbeing or achievement of another – but when talking about our relationship to our own experience, Appreciative Joy is definitely more appropriate.

I am aware that Zen Buddhism has different associations for different people, and different schools of Zen have different emphases. In this instance, I am making reference to Zen to highlight an approach to meditation practice that is characterised by a sense of embodiment, expansiveness, appreciation, contentment and gratitude, and a deep and fearless willingness to fully inhabit the body and the sensory world as Consciousness – attitudes that are characteristic, in my view, of Appreciative Joy.

While all of the brahmavihāras can spontaneously arise during Zazen meditation, but I believe the practice has this especially close connection with muditā. This is because muditā, or Appreciative Joy, is the brahmavihāra that arises in connection with the skandha of vedanā – the brahmavihāra which arises as our relationship with the vedanā skandha begins to take on a less personal and more universal character. There is a natural refinement of our relationship with our internal sensory experience as we learn to dis-identify from our experience, while simultaneously recognising our experience as ’embodied Consciousness’ – and this more refined and objective experience of vedanā is called muditā, or Appreciative Joy.

September 23, 2017