I’m no builder, and that was another reason to
participate: to learn something. And
even more interesting, to learn through the hands. My work was simple enough:
to slap mud onto a template and build a wall about two feet/60cms thick with a
central cavity of about 5 inches/12 cms to fill with rice husks for insulation.
That was the instruction, to which when necessary were added quiet comments
from the builder monk: ‘Pat it down well so that it bonds to the previous
layer’; ‘Make sure all the rice husks go into the cavity, if they stick to the
wall, the earth won’t bond.’ Meanwhile he was doing his learning; at one time
nearly sliding off the corrugated metal roof before rigging up some strapping
to hold onto when he lost balance. What was clear was that ‘there are no
experts, we learn as we go along.’
It’s this kind of earthiness that I appreciate about
the forest monk’s lifestyle. You watch what the other monks are doing, try to
get the hang of sewing, chanting, meditating, living in the wilds; you make
mistakes, there’s a laugh, and you try again. But you learn how to learn rather
than have to get it all from a book and sorted out in your head before you dare
begin. In many forest monasteries, meditation is encouraged but barely taught
in the way that we would understand teaching. The instructions might be: ‘Use
the word “Bud-dho” on the in- and out-breath; put other thoughts aside for now,
investigate and tackle the defilements.’ That’s about it, along with plenty of
modelling and anecdotes of the practice and results, and the encouragement to
keep at it.
This can leave Westerners stranded. ‘How to put
thoughts aside? Aren’t thoughts of goodwill and compassion to be cultivated?
And what is a defilement anyway? Isn’t that a judgement and a lack of
self-acceptance? How do you tackle your mind without blind will-power, or
thinking even more?’ To which the response might well be: ‘Too much thinking
... walk up and down for an hour or so. Just relax.’ It seems simplistic, but
the understanding is that as you get settled in your body, there’s a learning;
you get a feel for the right balance and then the details start to come into
focus. Body, then view; calm, then insight. Through bypassing your head, a lot
of the need for certainties dissolve; your knowing is beyond thought and the
need for belief. It’s a hands-on, suck it-and-see approach.
The main snag with this approach for Westerners is
that most of us are barely in our bodies a lot of the time, and we only use our
hands to press the button that will link us to a system that operates on our
behalf. Except when it breaks down. Then we’re helpless, so we have to phone an
engineer. This kind of relationship extends over so much of our infrastructure
that the overall sense is that you, the individual, can’t deal with your stuff.
Engineers, consultants, bankers, therapists; getting through life is a task for
experts. And of course, to a great extent the systems we use make that true. My
father used to fix his car; take the engine apart and tinker. You can’t do that
with a 21st century automobile; can’t even change a headlight bulb – it’s all
sealed in. At Cittaviveka, we did all our own electrical installation using
volunteers and the skills’ base of one or two monks. After thirty years of doing that, with no
problems, not only did the government ban it, but it also insisted that all the
work we’d done be taken out and refitted by qualified electricians, at a cost
of thousands of pounds. There are safety reasons, for sure. But the effect is
that we become divorced from the environment that we live in; it’s not in our
hands, we are its passive occupiers. Meanwhile in the general public
environment, we are led by remote control. Traffic signals and flashing lights
tell us when to walk. Turnstiles snap open and shut to get us moving through
them at the correct speed. Recorded messages, thanking you for your call,
respond to your phone or email inquiries. And when you fill in a form on the
web, it won’t let you continue unless it understands and accepts your
entry. There’s no-one there to negotiate with. In the face of such a
dissociative environment, social dysfunction and personal dissociation are the
consequence.
By this I mean that what one learns is that a) there
is no room for free inquiry, for trial-and-error learning; instead the safe bet
is to adopt the prescribed system; b) one is left with the feeling of personal
impotence and lack of initiative, fearful of making a mistake (and being
judged); c) if you have an idea, an intuition or hunch outside the information
that is given to you – forget it, it’s irrelevant; it may even be illicit or
dangerous.
The result of that, depending on how far gone you are,
is that there is no native intelligence when it comes to things such as how to
meet people (you need a dating service); how to stay well (you need a dietician
and a health expert); how to handle your emotions, disappointments and work load
(you need a coach and a therapist). And all of it becomes true, because the
participatory way of life and the natural intelligence that it encourages gets
shut down by the Expert. Not that we don’t need advice – but a more useful
process is one that helps you get your natural intelligence to wake up and step
up; to develop personal confidence and self-reliance, and learn the details
from there. But this development doesn’t happen just by telling it to. You have
to go into situations with enough safety and enough challenges, and with
friendliness and advice when you need it.
It’s much the same with Dhamma practice. The forest
teachers, and especially the situation of being unplugged and in a forest with
wild animals, encourage you to develop alertness and self-reliance and so make
your own way in terms of Awakening. There are details, but these are given when
needed; often they’re not technical, but just what a particular learner
needs at the time. For example, in the case of an anagārika (apprentice) who
was so up his head that ‘meditation’ was just wall-to-wall fantasy movies, and
who lived in a tangle of thoughts most of the time, Ajahn Chah’s advice was:
‘Eat like a pig and sleep a lot.’ To get earthy. This is hardly canonical, and
goes directly against the forest ajahns’ maxim of ‘eat little, talk little,
sleep little.’ Such advice is relevant for the norm of people who are in their
bodies; it’s pretty disastrous for the dissociated mind, which will spin out
further if it disengages to that extent. Ajahn Chah was wise enough and
flexible enough to reckon that the standards had to adapt to meet the case (a
growing occurrence) of people being disembodied for most of the time.
Disembodiment is a common feature of dissociation,
because the mechanism of dissociation is a response to shock or danger, whereby
receptivity to bodily sensation is lowered or shut off. In the natural state, this allows you to react and
escape without having to deal with any bodily feeling or emotional responses.
Note that, as the body and heart-mind aren’t separate at the level of feeling
and energy, the mechanism that switches off your bodily receptivity also
switches off your mental, i.e. emotional, receptivity. Then, as you normalize,
you come back into your body and emotional receptivity is re-established. If
this return doesn’t occur, the result is trauma: buried pain, an
emotional/psychological dead-spot that nevertheless can irrationally spring
back to life when the incident that caused it is remembered or simulated. So with dissociation, trauma or not, it takes quite strong
stimulation to feel ‘in’ your body, and emotional sensitivity is reduced. Hence when people live in dissociated contexts they experience a background sense of
sterility. This is sensed as a loss of personal meaning and value,
with loneliness as the relational norm. This mixture can be a basis for addiction
(find something to get high with); an inability to form mutually-based (rather
than domineering/dominated) relationships; and a constant sense that there’s
‘something wrong with me’ – which can transfer to anxiety about body shape or
size. And overall there’s depression (the most common life-inhibitor in the
West): ‘I can’t do anything about this; I’m stuck.’
So perhaps we try to meditate to get out of that. And
meditation as we might read and therefore undertake, is about being on your own
and calming the mind by focusing repeatedly on an object, and using a range of
techniques to do so. But for a disembodied person, someone suffering from a
sense of sterility and emotional numbness, this is not good medicine. It will
tend to make them more numb – and therefore lost in thought, strategies and
doubt; obsessively dependent on a technique and anxious for the ‘high’ of
achievement. What they need is friendly
non-intrusive company, practices that brighten the mind and encourage it to
engage in skilful ways, and a non-technical, no-pressure approach that supports
mindfulness rather than emphasizes a goal. This approach is the foundation of a samana’s life, from the time of the
Buddha onwards. The norm is one of living during the early (five or more) years
with an experienced guide, in a participatory social environment (in Pali, the
disciple is ‘one who shares the cell’ with their teacher). To this is added the
strong relational support of lay people and fellow monastics. The training is
to acknowledge, enter and be part of a supportive field, one that is
established at a heart and gut level. And it is at this non-rational level that an understanding is established – that you, as an individual with flaws, belong
and can make a meaningful contribution; that you are in a society of cooperation,
morality and generosity, and you're part of a tradition that realizes the highest
human potential. Without the establishment of this felt spiritual field,
‘disengagement’ just deepens the dissociation: you’re not in this world, but
you’re not in the Dhamma either. People can go very weird.
But as that field is established through witnessing
other people acting in accordance with it, and through repeatedly chanting and
reflecting on it, then a disengagement from worldly aims and values occurs
naturally. And the default need to prove oneself, to compete and to achieve;
the psychological defence and body armouring to cover the weak spots; and above
all the sense that what you are isn’t good enough so that you can’t learn
without detailed verbal input – all
that isn’t there. When that isn’t there, one doesn’t need that much
information, and one readily feels gratitude and contentment; therefore one’s
body is free from tension, the mind is happy and yes, it enters samādhi. Consequently the most common defilement that
the Asian teachers would be pointing out isn’t personal meaninglessness and
self-aversion, but of getting so relaxed and at ease that one doesn’t use the
time in a focused way. Hence: ‘Exert yourselves and strive!’ Hardly: ‘Eat like
a pig and sleep a lot.’
As dissociation is by definition a state in which
you’re not feeling that much, you’re not necessarily aware of it. So look out
for: obsessive thinking, lack of self-worth, indifference to or awkwardness
around other people, and compulsive habits, hobbies and chatter that substitute
for ease of being in your own skin. And loss of bodily awareness. You may assume that the
only sensations and feelings that occur for a body are the tactile ones caused
by contact with external thing. But the theme of meditation on in- and
out-breathing relies on access to, cultivation and enjoyment of the subtle
energies and inner sensations (called ‘kāyasankhāra’) that are linked to
the process of breathing. If you can’t feel them (and quite a few people can’t)
then mindfulness of breathing will mostly be an exercise of holding your
attention on a point in the body with will power – and that isn’t the way the
Buddha taught it. You might be better advised to work on embodiment through Qi
Gong or Hatha Yoga and pick up the breathing from there.
As for the mental aspects of dissociation: get to the
nub, the gist of what the experience of being yourself is like. How does it
feel? Don’t think it, get it in your gut and get your hands on it. So if you
enter the state where thoughts form useless, unpleasant and compulsive loops –
how are you with that? Even better – what is the bodily effect of that: giddy?
groundless? or is there a lack of bodily sensation? And if the sense of ‘stuck’
arises, pause and handle that directly. ‘Stuck’ is a sense of alienation, a
non-flow, a lack of vitality that may seem familiar; it often manifests with a
verbal string, such as: ‘People are like this to me’, or, ‘I’m in this stuck
situation’, or, ‘I’m this kind of a person’, or, ‘If only I could get what I
don’t have, then…’ The setting is beyond one’s power to change (‘always, other,
never’ are common words) but there’s an inner pressure to get out of it. This
pressure makes the verbal string long, tortuous, studded with statistics and
narratives, and an engrossing monologue for hours of ‘meditation’. It could
elicit the kinds of responses that analyze, come up with answers, and allocate
blame. And yet with all that ‘knowledge’ you still feel impotent. This is
because this kind of knowledge comes from a mind that has adopted the systems
that disempower it: the expert analyst, the expert coach, the expert lawyer and
judge; the intelligence base of the developed world. Dependence on these is the norm in a
dissociated society; and it makes you feel stupid. So these responses can’t get
rid of the stuck place, because the stuck place is just the lock, or the
closure, of your own natural intelligence. Only you can unlock that.
Natural intelligence comes with the piece of nature
that we’re born with, our body – within a context that it participates in,
even if it’s challenging (which is why people feel great climbing
mountains). The intelligence is in the living gestalt, not in your knees. So
handle the verbal string and ask: ‘What’s the overall feel of this?’ And: ‘How
is my body now?’ You may feel energized in your head or constricted in your
chest or abdomen: feel that fully and stay with it, returning to it every time
that the verbal string takes you out with advice, analysis and blame. When your
system finally simply feels the pain of the dissociated state (it’s the direct feeling beneath ‘I don’t
belong here,’ ‘I’m inadequate ...’) allow the body to respond. It knows how to
handle pain and pleasure, energies and impulses; how to hold them and how to
let them go. It knows release.
But to get that embodied sense to be fluent and
expressive is what the foundational work is about. Get earthy and be with trees and
birds and other forms of life; learn to chant, to connect the heart-mind to the body through voice; practise generosity (time, attention, service)
for relational health. It’s all simple hands-on stuff. That’s why it works.
