Hi Roy,
I understand you are winding down your participation in the forum, but I leave you this message as some food for thought, particularly as it relates to details of the spiritual journey I went through.
There are no fundamental clarity of language issues that I can see here. There may be one or two instances where you meant one thing and your follow-up clarified, and that’s the end of it. The disagreements here are related to the substance of what’s being discussed, not the words being used to discuss it!
I can relate to what you say about constant negative thoughts of worrying because I used to have constant negative anxious thoughts, day in and day out, for hours and sometimes days at a time of constantly feeling it.
I will put it like this. When I was meditating and on a spiritual journey, thoughts were really a problem. Constant thoughts, bothersome thoughts. Thoughts all the time. And also I had the same self-report at the start of my journey that meditation helped with it! But interestingly they bothered me more and more the more I meditated! Why couldn’t I just quiet my monkey mind? I was able to have long periods without thoughts, especially with closed-eye meditation, but ‘they’ kept cropping up, throughout daily life. I was very concerned about stopping these negative thoughts!!
Once I genuinely started down the actualist path, I almost immediately completely stopped being bothered by thoughts! I’m not making this up, this was my actual experience near the start of practically putting actualism into practice.
How is it possible? The key insight was this: I saw that it was not actually the thoughts that were ever bothering me in the first place! What was actually the problem was the feeling underlying the thoughts.
I used to be extremely anxious, like going entire days with a constant feeling of anxiety. Meditation didn’t help lessen it, and I was attempting to use meditation to quiet the anxious thoughts, with the idea that once the anxious thoughts are gone I would be ok/at peace. But I came to see that the problem wasn’t the anxious/negative thought per se, but rather the feeling of anxiety that was running as an undercurrent, ‘behind’ the thoughts.
I came to see, for example, that when I was feeling anxious, I had a lot of anxious and ‘bothersome’ thoughts about topics A, B, and C. But when I was in a good mood, I did not have these anxious thoughts. I could even think essentially the exact same things about A, B, and C… but they were not bothersome thoughts anymore!
In other words the problem never was the negative thoughts, it was the negative emotions and feelings and worry underlying the thought. This allowed me to actually do something about the actual problem – the negative emotions – which thereby also resolved ‘for free’ the problem of the negative thoughts. It didn’t happen instantly but gradually my situation started to improve, whereas the more I had been meditating, the worse it got.
I appreciate your actually doing it for yourself to see what it’s about. I would just advise that you do this with the actualism method instead of with meditation, as the former will have a better impact on your life.
I’ll say this: the only reason I was able to move away from spirituality and meditation to actualism is because actualism was a better alternative. In other words, you are currently finding mindfulness meditation to be helpful – it doesn’t make sense for you to stop unless you replace it with something even better than that. I write this message with the intent that you can see for yourself how you can do this – it won’t even be a big change practically.
Mais non, look, I started with the book 8 Minute Meditation, which is particularly a book on mindfulness mediation. As one reviewer put it:
Even though I have numerous books on meditation I found this 195 paperback volume surprisingly refreshing, interesting and informative. Where most books on meditation recommend doing two 20-minute sessions as a minimum, the author, in order to bring more people into the practice of mindfulness meditation promotes just 8 minute sessions at a starting point.
The techniques I was using were all forms of Vipassana meditation, which is a form of mindfulness meditation, viz.:
Vipassana meditation is a form of mindfulness meditation that comes from the original teachings of the Buddha. It is a way of observing oneself without judgment, and it is said to be helpful in achieving enlightenment.
What Is Vipassana Meditation? Benefits and History
You gave some more detail of what you are calling mindfulness meditation:
Yes, exactly, that is how it starts. That’s the instructions of the 8-minute meditation. And that is the purpose of Vipassana meditation – to just ‘observe’ things ‘as they are’.
However there are many sneaky premises buried in these superficially neutral instructions. One is that you must not ‘judge’ any of it. Another is you must not ‘do’ anything about it – just observe. This already is serving to separate you from what you are experiencing. The normal way to be is to engage with the world around us – this is teaching you gradually to distance yourself from the world. And not only the world (‘senses’) but also from yourself, from your own thoughts & feelings!
If you take this to heart then later you see that part of the point of the meditation is also to see that anything you are perceiving can’t be “you” because it must be that you are the person that is perceiving that. But then who is doing the perceiving of that? If you seek more information you will see that intrinsic to this type of meditation is to “see” that there is actually no ‘self’ at all, all that can be experienced is a series of sensations. And as the sensations are impermanent, they arise and they disappear, then therefore they cannot be lasting or ultimately satisfying. So you then subtly shift and go into the direction that nothing in the world is satisfying and there is no self anyway, and off you go into further and further Altered States of Consciousness.
I am concerned because this is what happened to me, and if it can happen to me it can easily happen to you. I put it here so you are forewarned if and when you see yourself starting to go down this path.
It’s even simpler than you write here. If you are having a repetitive negative train of thought nearly 100% of the time, then that is your answer to the question of how you’re experiencing this moment of being alive – with a negative train of thought! That is the answer to the question for you in that moment.
I will say that the cause of the negative trains of thought is not a lack of attention, of being able to concentrate or focus. The cause of the negative trains of thought is negative feelings, moods, and emotions. There are things in your life that cause you stress, worry, and anxiety. The solution to the negative thoughts is to change yourself such that you do not relate to those things in your life via stress, worry, and anxiety. Stopping the thoughts will not resolve the underlying emotional issues. It will actually make it harder to do so as you will lose a potentially valuable tool to help you notice when you are feeling not good.
You may be saying that you are not able to be aware of how you are feeling and when you go from feeling good to feeling bad because of a lack of attention. That is possible, but my advise would be that you can train this type of attention by using the actualism method rather than a meditative method.
One key distinction to make here is a difference between affective awareness and cognitive attention. The former is a literally intuitive “How am I feeling right now?” which is arrived at by affectively/intuitively/emotionally “feeling yourself out” to see whether the current mood or emotion is happy, sad, angry, good, bad, etc. I suggest you try this out right now to get the flavor of it.
The latter is an attention at the level of thoughts – eg what color is this thing I am seeing? Is this sensation in my body more of a dull pressure or a sharp pressure?
The actualism method is about establishing that affective awareness on an ongoing basis – basically getting to where you self-monitor your moods on a constant and consistent basis. This is much easier to do than the latter as it doesn’t interfere with any cognitive tasks you may be doing (like computer work). They are two different types of attention, in other words.
It does indeed take some doing to get used to it, and it is a skill to a degree. But if attention of this type is lacking, the best way to train it up is to do precisely that! In other words, consciously go about and train this very type of attention. Instead of sitting and just observing senses, thoughts, and feelings, without reacting or judging them – you could even do the same sitting, but instead be monitoring your affective states and experiences.
In other words, to the degree that lack of attention is actually an impediment to your actualism practice, to that same degree you can solve that issue with the tools used to facilitate the actualism method. It is, in other words, a self-contained method that entails everything needed to succeed in it.
To whatever degree lack of the proper type of attention is resolved by mindfulness meditation – it will be resolved better by applying the actualism method.
What this means is that there is ultimately only one category or type of reason to be preferring mindfulness meditation over the actualism method, which is that it provides something different than what the actualism method does. And that is where it is worthwhile to get into the aims and ultimate goals of each to distinguish them and see how they are different. And then you can really make an informed choice of what you want.
This touches upon a core issue which may be why you are being drawn to mindfulness rather than actualism. What is the nature of you as a person? What does it mean to be a ‘bad person’?
I have found a more beneficial way to put it rather than if I am a good or a bad person is – look, I am a person! I am a human. What does it mean? Every human has ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects. What I have come to see is that I, too, have ‘bad’ aspects. No matter how much I may deny it or insist it doesn’t define me – I am ‘bad’ in various ways (as well as ‘good’ in various ways).
This used to cause me great consternation. I don’t want to be ‘bad’! But I found it was much more beneficial to simply accept that I am ‘bad’ in various ways – as everyone is (so it’s not personal). Thus rather than recoil from a bad thought I have, as to the implications of what it might mean for ‘me’ being ‘bad’… I accept that I am a human, and part of the human condition are these bad thoughts and bad aspects.
This entirely removes a reactionary layer and makes it much easier to see and accept that I am the way that I am… which then makes it possible to change that, so I no longer express that aspect of myself in that way, and instead of suppressing the badness, I rather express myself in a felicitous way instead. This is essentially what the actualism method is about – neither expressing nor suppressing either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feelings, minimizing them, and instead expressing and maximizing the felicitous ones.
But you do have to accept that whether you identify with it or not, you are the reason you have the bad thought – it isn’t someone else that is having it after all! And that together with the ‘good’ aspects of yourself, these ‘bad’ and ‘good’ together are, indeed, who you are as a feeling-being. There is just no way around it, ultimately.
Accepting this, really accepting this, is a tremendous relief, and goes a long way towards resolving various emotional troubles that may be causing consternation.
“Dissociation” just means “separation from”. You are separating yourself from your thoughts.
A dissociated state is one in which you walk about and thoughts may or may not arise and they don’t have anything to do with ‘me’ so they’re not an issue.
This is also a great way to avoid fixing actual issues in your life. Whenever thoughts about it arise you “don’t judge” and “don’t react” and “let them subside” and then never actually fix the issue, despite recurring thoughts about it.
I’ll re-iterate what I said earlier: the negative emotions are what is actually the problem. It’s perfectly possible to think negative thoughts about ‘bad’ things, while being felicitous, and utilizing those thoughts to resolve some issue about a genuine problem in one’s life. And doing so does not take away from the felicitous mood.
Mmmmm it’s interesting! You appear to be grouping together what I said here about the nature of the soul and the ego, with the metaphysics of a religious believer.
Metaphysics are indeed impossible to prove or disprove, one either believes in it or not, and there’s no real arguing about it.
However, what I wrote here is more akin to describing how a computer works, down to the nitty-gritty. Ultimately a computer is a series of circuits where high voltage represents a positive, 1, or ‘true’ value, while low voltage represents a neutral, null, 0 or ‘false’ value. These circuits can be combined together with various logical gates, for example one which outputs a high voltage if and only if both inputs are high (an AND gate). And you can then build flip-flops out of these circuits that are the basics of how to form computer memory… then combining circuits into a CPU, which runs machine code, which is generated by compiling assembly code, which is generated by an even higher-level compiler from a language like C or C++, etc., etc.
It would be odd if the reaction to describing how a computer works is that it’s like a Jehova’s witness, isn’t it!
What I came to realize is that it is entirely possible to figure out how I tick, how the human psyche is structured, in this lifetime, without reference to any metaphysics… it’s a factual process of uncovering how I tick, not unlike figuring out how a computer ticks! It’s just a lot more difficult as I’m investigating myself and emotions and passions can make that difficult. But ultimately it is the same.
So when I say ‘soul’ I don’t mean “that which survives death” but rather, the seat of the emotions, the psyche, who you yourself are experiencing yourself to be right now. I wrote more about it here: Appreciation, the key to enjoyment and becoming likeable and liking - #7 by claudiu .
It’s like that with all that you quoted but this is long enough so I’ll leave it here for now. If you have any specific queries you want answered then let me know.
It’s not a matter of being dismissive but more that I have trod the path you have trod and found it to be lacking. So as you are my fellow human being I thought I would warn you away from it. But it is your choice, of course.
I’ll leave on this note:
You have to consider that the MDMA experience was of a single 21-year old – would you say the same when you were in that situation vs having a family now?
In any case, you may be alluding to that it was the drugs that caused the harm that I experienced. But it is not the case – note from the report: “In any case, even at the time I knew drugs were obviously not the answer, so I started seeking out how I can make my day-to-day experience more like how I was that night.”
In other words, that experience was the impetus for me starting on the spiritual journey, but what continued to propel me on it was not a constant ingesting of substances, but rather, a full-hearted diving into precisely that spiritual path and putting all efforts into it.
And I’m not the only one. A researcher at Brown University even explicitly studied this phenomenon of how meditation ruined people’s lives. You may find this article about it illuminating: The Dark Knight of the Soul - The Atlantic : “For some, meditation has become more curse than cure. Willoughby Britton wants to know why.” . It ends on a very relevant note:
“I understand the resistance,” says Britton, in response to critics who have attempted to silence or dismiss her work. “There are parts of me that just want meditation to be all good. I find myself in denial sometimes, where I just want to forget all that I’ve learned and go back to being happy about mindfulness and promoting it, but then I get another phone call and meet someone who’s in distress, and I see the devastation in their eyes, and I can’t deny that this is happening. As much as I want to investigate and promote contemplative practices and contribute to the well-being of humanity through that, I feel a deeper commitment to what’s actually true.”
Cheers & all the best in your journey,
Claudiu
Your first message got me on the defense for some reason, but this one felt very positive and friendly. You are an excellent communicator.
