Response to Ingram #2
I’m not making it through Daniel Ingram’s response very quickly, for each paragraph requires significant time for reflection. Here are my thoughts about a significant mechanism of change implicit in vipassana meditation which, I will argue, is not given the attention it merits. I’d appreciate hearing thoughts from readers in the comments section.
What compounds our misery is the mental content we tend to kick up in response to sensations. Often the stories we make up and then tell ourselves, about why these difficulties are happening and what it all means, exacerbate the problem they were intended to solve. There are multiple ways to reframe the meaning of these occurrences that might make them more bearable and point to solutions that are more likely to work, particularly learning to reframe them in terms of these insight maps (and the three characteristics), which is why they can be so valuable. It is not that the insight maps are the be-all and end-all of meaning, as they obviously aren’t. However, focusing entirely on the psychological end of our work without also focusing on the underlying insight process is a common trap that typically doesn’t go as well as the dual approach that keeps making progress on the insight front also.”
I think here we are getting to one of the fundamental transformative mechanisms of vipassana meditation when the process is successful. I think it may also point to the reasons that it creates problems, or even fails, at other times. Let me explain.
You write, “What compounds our misery is the mental content we tend to kick up in response to sensations. Often the stories we make up and then tell ourselves, about why these difficulties are happening and what it all means, exacerbate the problems they were intended to solve.” This is a common trope in spiritual circles that, without a doubt, contains an element of truth. Clearly we can have patterns of thought that are problematic. Equally common, if not more so, is that our emotional experience hasn’t made it to the level of thought; rather, it is expressed through lower level channels, such as I will describe below. Regardless, I would argue that the solution lies in engaging further with symbolic activity – that is, thought and imagery – instead of deconstructing that activity into sensate experience or reframing it into a pre-determined explanatory model. Let me take a brief detour so that I can better explain my thinking.
In psychoanalysis, there is a whole area of study that called mentalization, which refers to the ability of a person to connect bodily excitations with endopsychic representations (i.e., to connect sensate experience up with higher-order symbolic activity). Lecours and Bouchard (1997) argue that affect can be expressed through four different pathways: somatic activity, motor activity, imagery, and verbalization, each representing an advance in symbolic capacity in relation to its predecessor. Expressed affects are similarly understood to occur in five increasing levels of tolerance, containment and abstraction: disruptive impulsion, modulation impulsion, appropriation of affective experience, and abstract-reflexive meaning association. To give an example drawn from the authors, anxiety can be actualized and experienced as an ulcer (somatic activity), as a bodily activation (increased heart rate), as dream imagery (a fallen tooth), or as an emotion that is owned and expressed (the feeling of anxiety) and worked through symbolically (fear of competition, for example).
While I won’t go into detail about the five different levels of tolerance, containment, and abstraction here, instead referring readers to the article itself, let me give a couple of examples. Affect that is expressed through the channel of motor activity with only minimal levels of tolerance (disruptive impulsion) might manifest as kriyas, twitches, shakes, and other involuntary movements that are frequently described as a ‘process of purification’ in Buddhist circles. What we can see, using this model, is that ‘purification’ consists of the discharge of relatively unmentalized mental contents. To give another example, affect might be expressed through the imagery channel at a low level of containment. If at the level of disruptive impulsion, we might experience hallucinations, persecutory images (e.g., Shinzen Young describes seeing insects all around him during a period of ‘purification’ that he experienced). Seen this way, kriyas and such visual phenomena are ‘purifying’ to the extent that any expression of affect is purifying.
Now, to my question: I wonder to what degree progression through the stages of insight can be explained through the arising and expression of emotional experience that is, then, without recognition that this is happening, slowly shifted toward higher-order pathways of affective expression. This would explain, in part, why the maps seem to be helpful to people: they provide a higher-order symbolic language (i.e., verbalization) for bodily excitation (i.e., sensate experience). It would also, of course, explain why maps are problematic for some people: the symbolic language they provide may not adequately contain the underlying bodily excitations; that is, the meanings the maps convey is not well matched with the underlying affective experience. It might also explain why some people don’t make progress: they remain at the level of bodily excitation and don’t progress toward higher levels of symbolic representation.
I also think this mechanism accounts for some (how much?) of the frequently reported therapeutic impact of vipassana meditation. If this is correct, it would not be “insight into the three characteristics” that accounts for this effect but, rather, the process of symbolic elaboration that the practice can facilitate. (I have discussed in my previous post concerns about framing vipassana as providing ‘insight’ into reality.) If I am correct, I wonder whether vipassana meditation itself might be refined so that its therapeutic mechanism is more transparent and so that it’s nature as a religious ritual, as opposed to a investigation of reality as it actually is, is outwardly acknowledged.
References:
Lecours, S. & Bouchard, M. (1997). Dimensions of mentalisation: Outlining levels of psychic transformation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78, 855 – 875.
Just a few thoughts on this point, for what they’re worth.
My experience with vipassana has been that teachers tend to try to discourage moving beyond the level of sensation. They stop at just noting that any sensation if impermanent and never get to the point of trying to explain just which causes and conditions exactly have given rise to it. I’m not discussing Ingram here at all—but in my experience with Buddhist teachers the process stops at noticing that something IS dependently arisen, as if this would be all that was needed. What is actually needed, though, is to figure out how the problem is arisen, and how to transform the causes and conditions of its arising. When you tell someone “notice it and let it go,” or something like that, then no real change takes place. I’ve always suspected that the temporary “healing” of meditation is the result of what an analyst would call an unexamined transference—the gaze of the supposedly wise “teacher” whose approval is sought and sometimes felt, temporarily works as a reparative symptom.
On a more theoretical note, I think there is some problem with moving too easily from “sensation” to “difficulties.” We don’t, I would argue, tell stories about sensations; rather we have goals and projects we want to accomplish, and these establish “frameworks” or structures of symbolic thought within which we have perceptions—within which we determine a things usefulness for our project. It is problematic, to my mind, to start out talking about a “sensation” and then transition to assuming that that sensation is an “occurrence” or a problem, or whatever. This happens often in popular Buddhist discourse, in my experience. There is a huge gulf, though, between the color blue and my unhappiness at work, and it isn’t helpful to talk about them as if they are the same kind of thing.
More importantly, I think the theory of emotion needs to be made more explicit here. I’m sure you noticed the tautology of saying that the emotion of anxiety can be expressed as the feeling of anxiety? A more theoretical explanation of just what we mean by the term “emotion” might avoid this, and be more helpful. I prefer Nussbaum’s explanation of emotion as what happens when we attribute (consciously or not) great importance to something that remains outside of our control. That emotion may lead to any number of manifestations (the “four pathways” heuristic, while perhaps useful, runs the risk of limiting our detection of emotions). Then, instead of assuming the “emotion” is a thing, which needs to be “expressed,” we can think of the expression AS the emotion, which arises because of a lack of clarity about our desires and their relationship to our abilities to control our environment.
wtpepper
June 23, 2019 at 9:41 pm
This is a very interesting comment. It has been a long time since I have read Nussbaum’s work on emotions, but perhaps I should go back for a refresher. What I can recall is that she sided with the Stoics to some degree, in holding that emotions are a form of judgment. In other words, anger at someone is a judgment that I have been wronged by that person. I guess I’d want to add something about the necessity of bodily enactment of the emotion and that judgment can occur in more or less psychologically primitive forms.
The work I drew from is building upon the work of Wilfred Bion in his 1962 paper, “A Theory of Thinking.” He describes the situation as follows: thinking is a process through which beta-elements are transformed into alpha-elements through alpha-function. He uses this level of abstraction because he did not want to ‘saturate’ the theory with other associations. In my comment, I wrote, “anxiety can be actualized and experience as an ulcer, ….” I should have written, “… the raw senses impressions and emotional data, what will later be symbolized as ‘anxiety,’ …” Does what I’m getting at make sense?
Thoughts?
parletre
June 24, 2019 at 12:52 am
I haven’t read Bion in over 20 years, but I seem to recall not being able to make much sense of him then and giving up on him. (I tend to prefer illustrative examples, so perhaps his abstractions were just beyond my capacity.)
I think I see your point, though. I am just wary of any claims about “raw sense expressions” or that there is “emotional data.” My position—which I thought you were arguing for as well in an earlier post—is that sense experience is always already informed by the symbolic. That is, that the mental, in the form of our symbolic/imaginary systems, shape even our supposedly most pre-conceptual perceptions (I’m not sure we can know anything about “raw sensations” at all). I have tried for years to argue that humans are language using animals by nature, and so for us the escape into the preconceptual is a fantasy. (At this point, someone usually mentions a severely brain-damaged person they know who cannot speak, and tells me how elitist I am being to suggest such people aren’t fully human—but I don’t want to engage that debate here.) That is, my position is that the term “mind” is best reserved for the intersubjectively produced symbolic/imaginary system which empowers us all to construe the world in ways that allow us to better interact with our surroundings and one another. There are individual “minds” only in the sense that my hand is an “individual” part of my body—separately, it would be just an inert and useless mass of rotting organic matter.
On my understanding of Nussbaum’s theory of emotion, she does draw on Stoic thought, but modifies it significantly. So, we may be angry with someone who we believe impedes our ability to do something we have attached great importance to. Of course, we may be mistaken about this, and may even not consciously know what it is we have attached this importance to. So, much of the mental occurs outside our conscious awareness—even the judgments on which emotions depend may occur in the general symbolic framework in which we participate, and not in our conscious thought.
I think of this as similar to what Spinoza says about emotion, and of course Spinoza’s thought was quite influential for Freud, so it seems to me implied in psychoanalytic thought as well.
These are difficult points to make, for me, without making use of concrete examples, though. But I think this illustrates that the arguments you’ve made in your posts, although perhaps prompted by an engagement with Ingram’s book, are actually engaging in a critique the general “common-sense” assumptions about mind in our culture generally. Ingram may share these assumptions (he seemed to in the first version of his book—I have not read the second one), but what concerns me is not the debate with Ingram but the opportunity to move beyond the generally muddled idea of mind implicit in our shared social-symbolic system.
wtpepper
June 24, 2019 at 2:33 pm
Bion is notoriously impenetrable. You can’t really make sense of him unless you’re familiar with Klein and the object relations tradition more generally and, even then, he’s quite confused himself at times. You said that you’re wary about any claims about “raw sense impressions.” Bion was a Kantian (though his interpretation of Kant seems idiosyncratic) and says that beta-elements are noumenal, that you can’t know them at all. (At other times, he seems to contradict this, I believe. It’s further confusing because he’ll sometimes say that while you can’t “know” the noumenon, you can “be” it – perhaps this why he’s often called a mystic.)
You write “my position is that the term ‘mind’ is best reserved for the intersubjectively produced symbolic/imaginary system which empowers us all to construe the world in ways that allow us to better interact with our surroundings and one another.” I believe I agree, but personally am still trying to sort out all of the implications of this idea.
You commonly hear in Buddhist discourse the idea that sensations are the basic building blocks of experience and that these are “built up” into more complex kinds of experiences. So, for example, pain is “just” a conglomeration of sensations that has congealed into pain. I can see how this explanation develops because in meditation you can deconstruct the phenomenal experience of pain into blips, vibrations, etc. How would you reframe this in language better suited to the theory of mind you are proposing?
parletre
June 25, 2019 at 3:25 am
Having had a long-term engagement with both meditation and analytic psychotherapy, my experience has been that their transformative effects are quite different. Meditation beyond the point of “mindfulness” is not a therapy, although it may have healing and psychologically beneficial effects.
An “investigation of reality as it actually is” surely entails a brush with the Real rather than the Symbolic. The non-experience of fruition is indescribable, yet (impossibly) real. It would be odd if a process that consisted of “progress toward higher levels of symbolic representation” culminated in an experience that doesn’t make sense at all, but is actual. Yet that’s where vipassana meditation leads. This is in contrast to therapy, where what formerly could not find expression suddenly becomes sensible and comprehensible.
To my mind it seems that only a “religious ritual” could deliver an experience of reality as it actually is, because that’s what religion is for: linking human experience to the divine.
Duncan
June 24, 2019 at 3:04 pm
This is the big question, for me. I don’t accept the idea that there are “noumena” which we cannot access, and I don’t accept that sensations are basic building blocks from which more complex experiences are built. I would not be able to reconcile these two positions,either (but I do agree that most people, including most Buddhist teachers today, hold both of these positions and simply fail to see the contradiction). The kind of Buddhist thought that I find useful does not hold that there is a level of unconstructed sensation from which things are built up—but that kind of Buddhist thought is usually either ignored completely or misrepresented in American popular Buddhist discourse.
I use the term “ontological collapse” to try to work through the problem suggested here. Briefly, we assume all things must exist in the same way, in order to be real. But this is not the case. With regard to humans, some things exist independently of our minds, others are completely dependent on the human mind. When we fail to make this distinction, we wind up talking about ineffable noumena or irresolvable paradox. To use an example, when we experience pain, there are components of both the mind dependent and the mind independent. The pain is a real physical response to physical stimuli, an indication of something actually happening in the body (I’m setting aside somatoform conditions for now). This is mind-independent: if you cut someone, real damage has been done to the body regardless of what he thinks about that. Then, there is also a mind-dependent component, which is the way we evaluate and respond to kinds of pain. As you no doubt know, it is even possible for some people to enjoy and seek certain kinds of pain. My position is that we need to maintain the divide between what is occurring independently of our minds, independently of our construal, and what is dependent on how we think of things. The scent of a rose is a real chemical process, but it is also an equally real set of associations and beliefs—it contains two components with different ontological origins—arising from different sets of causes and conditions. When we forget this, we begin to talk nonsense about the ineffable beauty of the scent of the rose or about that scent being a mere illusion, etc.
In meditation, you can “deconstruct” the experience into “pain blips,” as you put it—as someone who deals with chronic pain all day every day, I have encountered this kind of meditation practice, or many varieties of it. But this is not engaging the fundamental reality of the pain—it is, instead, a kind of mind-dependent construal of the pain. It is meant to make the pain seem less significant, but in my experience, for most people with serious pain, it only makes it the focus of their lives, and robs them of the capacity to do anything at all but obsess about their pain—it offers the abandonment of all agency as the solution to physical pain. I try to discourage people from wasting their time with such practices.
Again, I would suggest that the intentions—the goals and projects—set for us in our collective mind will shape the kinds of sensations we focus on, and determine our construal of them. These intentions will not, of course, alter what is mind-independent. Our belief that we have not been shot will not keep us alive, for instance. A placebo can only do so much—it will decrease anxiety and allow the immune system to work more effectively, for instance…but it won’t eliminate a serious staph infection. But how our sensations become perceptions is determined by our mind—and when we forget this, and assume we have access to any kind of pure an preconceptual experience of the world, we are making a mistake that will put us right back in the Kantian dilemma.
I doubt I’ve made the case for this position here—it is a very counter-intuitive position today, where all of our discourses assume a very Lockean model of perception, minds, selves, language, consciousness, etc. I’ve been working on a book that is meant to explain this more fully. But quite difficult to do—most people will refuse to acknowledge their fundamental assumptions, and simply become quite angry with what I write—or, just as often, dismissive. Still, I think if one is willing to make explicit one’s own fundamental assumptions (about reality and mind) then my position is not so hard to grasp, although it might be a bit disconcerting.
wtpepper
June 25, 2019 at 2:40 pm
Are you saying that you believe that your sensate world is stable and permanent rather than unstable and impermanent? If so, please list all the sensations you experience that are permanent and unchanging, that have persisted without wavering throughout your entire life or even survive through deep sleep from one day to the next.
Are you saying that you believe that you truly exist outside of causality, outside of the biology, chemistry, and physics of the universe as a separate, independent, continuous entity with an independent will that is unconditioned, in short, that you have a Self in some permanent sense despite all scientific evidence to the contrary? If so, please give evidence for this from whatever field of science you prefer.
Are you saying that you believe that the gap between the sense of the observer and pleasant objects is optimal and the best it could be? Are you saying that the blind contraction into thought that causes so much suffering is not actually a cause of suffering? Are you, as a psychoanalyst, saying that nothing in the experience of truly being a Self causes any suffering? Please provide sound evidence for these points if you truly believe them.
If you are stating that impermanence, not-self, and suffering are all just constructs and not observable facts independent of social context, please demonstrate this through concrete examples and solid proof. Please give examples of people who live today for whom these are not demonstrably true.
danielmingram
June 29, 2019 at 11:14 am
My above post was directed at the original article Response #2 at the top of this page.
danielmingram
June 29, 2019 at 11:15 am
I have begun to be envious of the power of Social Construction Wizards, as their Social Construction magic apparently can do anything and knows no boundaries on its power, unlike the magicks with which I am familiar.
How do I learn this All Powerful Magick? If everything is Socially Constructed, why can’t this power be harnessed to utterly transform all aspects of reality? If you have such magicks, then it would seem the height of irresponsibility not to be using them right now to accomplish everything and right all wrongs?
danielmingram
July 3, 2019 at 6:23 pm