Reflections on The Mind Illuminated
I am saddened to hear about the revelations that have recently disrupted Culadasa’s Dharma Treasure Community [1]. Without a doubt, they have caused tremendous pain for his many students, the community at large, not to mention Culadasa and his family. On a personal level, I have never met the man nor have I studied with any of his students. I have, however, worked with his book, The Mind Illuminated, and spent about six months diligently practicing the instructions laid out there with great interest. Regardless, the recent events have compelled me to write this blog post because, at least from a distance, they seem to capture some of the blind spots that endemic meditation theory and practice.
I’d like to focus in this blog posts on a critique of Culadasa’s theory of meditation, as laid out in his book The Mind Illuminated. In a future post, I will outline a sketch of my thoughts about what a productive – a word that clearly needs further specification – meditation practice might look like. I’d very much like to hear your thoughts about what I have to say.
Culadasa’s system, laid out in The Mind Illuminated, is based upon a nine-stage model developed by a Tibetan monk, Asanga, in the 4th century. It is, in essence, a concentration practice. Jason Siff, in his book Unlearning Meditation, distinguishes between receptive and generative meditation practices. In any given moment, we can be receptive to what’s happening in our minds, in an effort to tolerate what’s happening there without any attempt to control or change it. In contrast, we can attempt to generate a different state of mind by deploying a method or technique intended to alter our mental state. Clearly, this is not a hard and fast distinction and much of the time both processes are at work. A concentration practice, though, is weighted toward the generative end of the continuum, as its intent is to develop a particular mental state – samadhi – by employing a set of techniques.
Culadasa deploys a theory of “sub-minds” to describe how the mind is moved toward greater unification. In this metaphor, which clearly has great utility as a means of self-understanding if not as a model of the mind itself, through the repeated application of intention, sub-minds are increasingly trained to follow an overarching intention (i.e., to concentration on the breath). When I initially encountered his text, my first thought was, “This is a recipe for dissociation.” It’s that thought that I will unpack more here.
Philip Bromberg is an American psychoanalyst who has actively developed the notion of self-states. Let’s begin with the example of a patient who has Dissociative Identity Disorder. Such a patient presents with seemingly disconnected “selves” – organizations of affect, object relations, patterns of thought, etc. – that appear to be largely disconnected from each other. The notion of self-states emerges when we ask the following question: what if the multiplicity that we encounter in this patient population is simply an exaggerated, indeed pathological, version of the normal state of affairs? In other words, what if we are all comprised of such multiplicity, but to a lesser (and hence, often invisible to us) degree? When things go well developmentally, a person is only dimly aware of the existence of self-states, because each functions as part of a cohesive whole , an overarching “me.”
For many of us, all does not go well in our early development. This, incidentally, appears to be the case with Culadasa, who has admitted to unfortunately suffering severe childhood trauma. In such a case, it is typical for some self-states, especially those that originate in maltreatment, to be cordoned off because they are emotionally intolerable in one way or another. Of particular importance here is shame. We all need to maintain a sense of self that is narcissistically stable – in other words, to maintain reasonable self-esteem, the sense that we are basically loveable, competent, etc. – and one way of doing this is to classify some experiences of ourselves as “not me.” This, of course, makes it extremely difficult for us to be aware of those self-states when we are in our other, “me,” self-states.
Bromberg (1993) writes that, “health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them – the capacity to feel like one self while being many” (p. 166). Standing in the spaces, here, is a shorthand for describing a person’s relative capacity to make room at any given moment for the subjective reality that is not readily containable by the self she experiences as “me” at that moment. This is exactly what trauma, especially when it occurs in early development, interferes with: the rage at our loved ones, the hunger for their love (which, in adults, often manifests through adult sexuality), and the despair that we experience about ourselves in an abject relational situation simply cannot be accommodated by an experience of ourselves that supports our narcissistic balance.
With these ideas laid out in a simplistic fashion, the problem with stage-based models of spiritual progress (i.e., the path models) and with notions of purity and impurity becomes increasingly clear. Notion of attainment have the side effect of reinforcing a concept of self that excludes more and more varieties of experience, making it increasingly difficult for them to be reflected upon in our usual states of mind. To return to the sub-mind metaphor, through repeatedly deploying certain intentions (e.g., concentration on the breath), we ignore questions like, “What are these sub-minds up to? What are their concerns, preoccupations, and fears?” We don’t learn more about ourselves. If we also situate this practice within a religious system of attainment in which some states of mind are privileged above others and dedicate a significant portion of our waking lives to that system (i.e., make a narcissistic investment in it), it is more likely that certain self-states will be banished to the shadows.
It’s interesting to consider that most Westerners would readily acknowledge what I’ve written – though perhaps not in this theoretical language – with respect to Western traditions, especially those that are more rigid and moralistic. Yet when those same characteristics show up in an Eastern tradition in a different idiom – think of the typical “false self” of many meditation and yoga teachers marked by odd laughter and slightly atypical buoyancy – it’s far more difficult to spot. Life is incredibly difficult and the pull of fantasies of transcendence is incredibly strong.
In my next post, I’ll share my thoughts about what a more productive meditation theory and practice might look like. I think that many of the benefits people experience from meditation are side-effects of the practice, that is, not results of the practice that are directly intended by its underlying theory. One of the main benefits, I believe, is an increased capacity to tolerate and psychically elaborate affective experience — that is, to represent emotional experience in images and language. This certainly happens for most meditators, as we naturally recollect our experiences during meditation; however, as far as I can tell, this fundamental mechanism of change is rarely acknowledged or worked with directly.
Very interesting. The Culadassa thing has made possible an open dialogue about many things that have created a huge confusion in me for years.
Looking forward to read your next post.
Josep
August 24, 2019 at 7:45 am
Dear Parlêtre,
I agree that this is definitely a situation and area that contemporary psychology can lend a lot of wisdom and practical advice to, so thanks for your writing and pointing this out.
As is my habitual style, I thought I would lend some more.
Warning: massive MCTB2 quote-fest follows. If this is all too much, which it probably is, it would be very reasonable to just skip to the very last paragraph.
“Those with a taste for more controversial aspects of the dharma might look towards John Stevens’ Lust for Enlightenment: Buddhism and Sex. I personally also look to the work of Dan Savage for many relative aspects of navigating modern adult lay life.”
“A point that will be repeated in this book is that success in one of these areas doesn’t guarantee success in the others, and what one person considers success, someone else might not… This is an essential concept when it comes to all these trainings and axes of development that is often not well understood; just because you may be strong in one developmental skillset doesn’t necessarily translate into being strong in the others. Just because you have developed one to a degree and in a way that suits your ideals doesn’t mean anyone else will hold that view. Too often, models of spirituality assume that just because you have one practice or skill down that you will necessarily have some others, what I call the “package models”. While there are some examples of people who do get packages of benefits that arrive together, there are just as many exceptions to those rules.
While learning specific things can help us learn related things more easily, such as people who play the violin well might be able to more quickly pick up guitar or cello, plenty of skill sets don’t translate to other areas of our life. This applies not only to you but also to your dharma companions, teachers, etc. The most common example of relevance is that just because someone may speak well, look good, be well-educated, be a dharma scholar, or even have strong meditative abilities, doesn’t mean they will necessarily have such things as good interpersonal and communication skills, or skillful relationships with power, money, or sex.”
“There are ancient and modern debates about how much we should go into our emotions, repress our emotions, or acknowledge our emotions but not dwell on them or unskillfully act on them. It is a hot topic in current psychology as well, with Freudian psychoanalysis and related techniques on one end and cognitive behavioral therapy and similar schools on the other. Clearly, if we just let emotions run amok we will be in big trouble. We also must figure out how to acknowledge our emotions so as not to be in denial of them. Emotional denial and repression are serious problems that can lead to unrecognized or unacknowledged shadow sides giving rise to explosions of emotion and unskillful actions, all the way to the mass destructive actions issuing from a mob mentality. Further, recent research shows that repressing emotions is physiologically toxic. Still, the fine points of how to handle our more “negative” emotions are many, complex, and not easily resolved, but for the sake of this discussion, I am advocating careful, honest, human acknowledgement of feelings and then finding the useful elements that can skillfully fuel practice.”
“There are some benefits to identifying and then skillfully moderating the inner processes and external manifestations of negative emotions while simultaneously being conscious and accepting of the fact that difficult emotions occur. Morality training is vast and contains many foundational practices, forming a skillful, albeit incomplete, solution to how to deal optimally with our unskillful emotional aspects…. However, if we repress our various emotional reactions to suffering while simultaneously pretending that they can’t or don’t occur within us (usually based on some “spiritual” model that tells us they’re verboten), this sort of cultivated denial can also produce huge shadow sides and a lot of unconscious, more extremely reactive, neurotic, and even violent behavior. A tour of basically any spiritual community on the planet… will reveal this in staggering abundance. Dissociation and passive aggression are classic manifestations of this sort of denial and refusal to see our emotions for what they are.
A far more practical approach is to accept that we are human, try to be decent in a normal, down-to-earth sort of way rather than in a grandiose, (non-)self-conscious, spiritual way, and assume that reducing and eliminating the illusion of the dualistic split is possible through doing basic insight practices. Reducing the sense of a split can provide more clarity, allowing us to be the human beings we are with more balance and less reactivity in the face of that humanity. In fact, it is by being clearer and more aware of exactly what our emotions are, and how and when they arise, that makes it easier to come up with wiser responses to them. As we habitually bring attention to the whole range of human experience, that attention can transform aspects of what happens in our experience and in our interactions with others.
That said, all living examples whom I have encountered fail to live up to the highest ideals of the standard emotional models that promise the elimination of either all negative or destructive emotions, or all emotions entirely, in some way. I know a few people who claimed to have eliminated all emotions only to realize later that they were totally wrong, sometimes with extremely unfortunate consequences. I know a few people who claim to have eliminated all emotions and yet externally seem to be totally emotional, including demonstrating what looks exactly like emotions that would often be considered bad by the standard ideals. That they claim to be unable to perceive this seems more like denial than realization to me. Is it possible, as is sometimes argued, that people will for all the world appear to have emotions externally and yet not have any internally? While there is an in someone, I truly believe it is just another form of hyper-sophisticated spiritually-induced blindness and rationalization, common things being common as they are, and there is no reason this couldn’t be blended with genuine insights, as most of the people I know who claim this sort of thing have spent a lot of time practicing.”
“The action models tend to involve certain actions that awakened beings cannot commit or must commit. Both types of models are completely ridiculous, and so we come now to the first of the models that simply have no basis in reality. The traditional Theravada models contain numerous statements that are simply wrong about what an awakened being cannot do or will do. My favorite examples of this include statements that arahants cannot break the precepts (including killing, lying, stealing, having sex, doing drugs, or drinking), cannot become sexually aroused, cannot have jobs, cannot be married, and cannot say they are arahants. They also state that unordained arahants must join the Theravada monastic order within days of their realization or they will die. Needless to say, all are simply absurd lies, lies that have unfortunately often been perpetuated by arahants.
There is also another subtler and more seductive view, which is that awakened beings somehow will behave in a way that is better or higher, though they won’t define what those actions might be or what actions they might avoid. I consider this view exceedingly dangerous. While I wish to promote the shift in perception that I call awakening and other names, I don’t want to imply that somehow this will save anyone from stupid actions or make them always aware of how to do the right thing or avoid screwing up. Such views are a set-up for massive delusion and huge shadow sides, as anyone who has spent enough time in any spiritual community knows all too well. As a Zen expression says, “The bigger the front, the bigger the back,” and this particular view can give you a shadow side the size of Texas.
The list is remarkably long of awakened individuals who have bitten the proverbial dust by putting themselves up on a pedestal, hypocritically violating their own lofty ideals of behavior, and then having been exposed as actually being human. The list of spiritual aspirants who have failed to draw the proper conclusions from the errors of the awakened is even longer. That so many intelligent individuals have such a hard time sorting all this out, instead putting a spin on, rationalizing, enabling, justifying, protecting, and defending the often dangerous behavior of countless teachers and spiritual leaders is truly mind-boggling, until you consider its parallels in the leadership that countries with the capacity to end most life on the planet choose for themselves, and suddenly it is less surprising. There are many schools of thought on this issue, and I will give them formal names here, though in reality, they don’t think of themselves this way.
“The partway up the mountain school” essentially believes, “Those who screwed up and caused a scandal were only halfway up the mountain, only partially awakened, as anyone who is really awakened couldn’t possibly have done those terrible things.” While clearly some were only partially enlightened, or perhaps not enlightened at all in the technical sense, a number who screwed up clearly knew and know ultimate reality inside and out, and so this model misses many important points.
“The crazy wisdom school” believes that, “Enlightened beings transcend conventional reality and with it conventional morality and causality, so they are the natural manifestation of a wisdom that seems crazy to us foolish mortals but is really a higher teaching in disguise!” While not entirely absurd, as there are many cultural aspects and societal norms that can seem a bit childish, artificial, unnecessary, unhelpful, or naive in the face of realization, the crazy wisdom school provides too easy an excuse for plenty of behavior that has been and is just plain wrong, irresponsible, stupid, exploitative, reckless, hurtful, delusional, narcissistic, inconsiderate, juvenile, depraved, vile, and needlessly destructive.
Then there is my school, for which I have yet to come up with a catchy name, but perhaps we could call it “the reality school”, and it promotes the view that, “Awakened beings are human, and unfortunately humans, enlightened or otherwise, whose brains contain a thin veneer of civilization retrofitted over a much larger, more ancient, more primal (lizard) brain, all screw up at times. There is nothing special or profound about this.” In short, this school categorically rejects the specific lists and dogmas of the traditional action models in all forms, from the preposterous lists of the Theravada to the subtle sense that enlightened beings somehow are guaranteed to act in “enlightened” ways perpetually, whatever those are. It also rejects the rationalizations of the crazy wisdom schools.”
“Spirituality that ignores, denies, or covers up our inevitable undesirable sides is doomed to be bitten and burned by them. Models of realization that involve high ideals of human perfection have caused so much dejection, despair, and misguided effort throughout the ages that I have no qualms about doing my very best to try to smash them to pieces on the sharp rocks of reality. They are not completely useless, and there is some value in keeping the standards to which we aspire high, as we will see in the next chapter, but most of the time they are taken too seriously to be helpful at all.
Those who adhere the most rigidly to the self-perfection models of awakening are also very often those who believe awakening is unattainable and feel the most disempowered in their spiritual practice and life. Not surprisingly, those with the highest standards for what realization will entail often have the lowest standards for their own practice and what they hope to attain in this lifetime. They are the armchair quarterbacks of the spiritual path. Becoming grandiose about aspiring to a high ideal seems to be a common coping mechanism for dealing with a complete lack of confidence and insight. As Christopher Titmuss, one of my best and most honest teachers, said, “We do not come from a self-perfection lineage.” There are those who do explicitly come from self-perfection lineages. I wish them good luck. They’ll need it.”
“Further, it is oh-so-easy to imagine that the teachers on the front cushions couldn’t possibly be as neurotic as we are, and before you know it we have the breeding ground for massive shadow sides, exploitation, isolation, and scandal, just like we had with the models that serve up emotional perfection. The jet-set culture of teachers popping in and out of town, getting up on the front cushion, spouting their beautiful ideals, and jetting off to somewhere else before anyone can see them as the humans they really are, only goes to reinforce these dangerous notions. It is just so easy to project all kinds of wondrous qualities onto them when the dream is so nicely laid out, the opportunities for reality testing so few, and the amount of transference and countertransference out there is simply huge.
As an aside of great importance: anyone working with meditation teachers or teaching meditation should read up on projection, transference, and countertransference, as these fly thick and fast in the world of meditation just as they do in psychology (and basically all other human interactions)…
Other highly recommended topics of useful theory that Western psychology provides that are largely lacking in Buddhism: narcissism, narcissistic injury, narcissistic rage, and narcissistic supply. All of these are worth reading up on and recognizing when they occur. While knowledge of them is not enough to eliminate their negative effects, it is better to understand the mechanisms than not. It is true that skillful use of transference can occasionally occur, but that is as slippery a slope as they get. Clearly, the amount of transference, projection, and idealization suits most teachers just fine, or they would go more out of their way to counter those notions and set the record straight, but, as those teachers quickly learn, countering those notions just doesn’t sell well most of the time, and getting caught up in that sort of transference feels mighty friggin’ nice.”
“You can also get a lot of respect by getting on some senior teacher list, but there are subtle forces that then come to bear that may tempt you into denying a lot of your own humanity when in public, thus leading to the shadow sides I mentioned previously.”
“I realize that the advertising strategies, myths, ideals, and ways of presenting all these ancient practices and traditions arose in cultural contexts, times, and places where perhaps they were skillful and augmented personal and cultural paradigms in ways that made for inspired yet humble practitioners who could practice well and achieve extraordinary results. Maybe medieval yak-farming peasants needed a bit of grandiosity to get them through snow-swept nights in freezing caves. Maybe they helped those sitting for long hours alone in sweltering jungles endure malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, and ravenous insects. We must respect the extraordinary trials and tribulations that great practitioners went through who mastered and transmitted these teachings in much more difficult times and settings.
I can easily wax very grateful and pragmatic, thinking that any advertising or coping strategy that delivered the wisdom to this time and place was worth it. But, on further investigation of the workings of religious or spiritual grandiosity in the history of the various meditative sects over the millennia, it might be worth deeply investigating how we frame high ideals, whether those aspirations are reinforcing grandiosity and spiritual narcissism or true humility and excellent practice, and whether those aspirations have been and continue to be the skillful approach that meets the needs of our time and context moving forward in these very troubled days.
There are misunderstandings that are perpetuated within all the schools of Buddhism and all fields of human endeavor based on ignorance, attachment, and aversion. My own take on many of those grandiose notions and advertising strategies, created by beings with mixed noble and ordinary mammalian motivations, is that they often do not work well in our time and place, are often not received or practiced well, and do not often skillfully counterbalance unskillful personal and cultural factors. Instead, I believe that many of those advertising strategies, ideals, and myths, all of which emphasize specialness of tradition, teacher, and methods, can cause serious imbalances, sectarian arrogance, and often exacerbate our already pronounced tendency to take ourselves way too seriously and be way too into ourselves, often to the detriment of our own practice and those around us. Obviously, I am not free of this either, and here we have evidence that even one who is trying with everything they have to break free of this conditioning can easily fail.
Luckily, we have some valuable terms and technologies that come out of modern psychology that may shine light and relative wisdom on what may be serious shadow sides of the meditative traditions, the three patterns that most readily come to mind: narcissism, narcissistic supply, and narcissistic rage. Narcissism, simply defined, is being pathologically self-obsessed, sometimes posited to occur because of not having physical and emotional needs adequately met in early childhood. Modern psychology contains a significant body of very useful and applicable theory about narcissism, much of which applies with scary precision to certain institutional aspects of the various meditative traditions. Any internet search will provide plenty of information on narcissism, and it is no accident that what is likely the most narcissistic age in human history is starting to realize that it needs much more information about narcissism.
Narcissistic supply refers to the various pathological interpersonal supports to a narcissist’s grandiosity and exaggerated self-importance. Many meditative traditions, sects, and more broadly many human organizations and institutions, from family units to large corporations, build communities around narcissists and reinforcing narcissistic supply.”
“There are other problems created for the person being put on the pedestal, of which the temptation to exploit the naivety, body, and wallet of the person putting them on the pedestal is only the most obvious but not necessarily the worst. In my view, just as bad is that the person on the pedestal is now cut off from acknowledging some part of their flawed humanity, as it doesn’t fit the idealized story and role dynamic the two people are generating, such that they become less able to be with who they are. This creates the inevitable shadow sides, as they are called, and shadow sides nearly always cause trouble, coming out in ways that the person now can’t recognize, as the people on the pedestal (and the people who put them there) are cut off from the ability to see their causes clearly due to buying into the transference and countertransference that shadow sides and shadow dynamics create and reinforce.
Positive transference and countertransference also have this nasty way of flipping to negative transference and countertransference when the “honeymoon phase” wears off. This is also common in all relationships: marriages, dating situations, workplaces, and the like. We realize the other person is less perfect than we imagined them to be and then we get angry at them for that, even though they were ordinary the whole time, and we were just busy idealizing them.
Further, the shadow sides created by transference and countertransference and the nearly inevitable bad behavior that follows often makes the person on the pedestal worse than when the two started this strange dance of delusion. I assert that the fall wouldn’t likely be as hard if expectations, disclosures, and reality testing had been better early on…”
“Where the real problem comes is the let-down, the embarrassment, the shame, the strange role reversals we might find ourselves in if that attainment turned us into some sort of teacher, expert, or authority, the personal confusion about what is suddenly happening and why, the disappointment that comes when we worked so hard and things didn’t work out as we thought. All of that can cause the worst part of it all: isolation. If we find ourselves unwilling to admit to others that we were wrong, or feeling like we are unable to do so, or that we will be ridiculed, blamed, or ostracized if we reveal what we know to have not been true—then real damage is done, for it is in those times that we most benefit from friends who can help us put it back together, go back to basics, regroup, retool, or modify our practice, learn, grow, and move on.
Instead, we may find ourselves feeling like outcasts, failures, victims of our own hubris, afraid of being thought of as liars, fools, or both. We may disconnect from our fellow dharma companions, communities, teachers, friends, family members, and wander lost and confused, which is something that very few handle well in the shadow of some feeling of past glory, achievement, and even widespread recognition and authority. That isolation is where the real damage happens…
Realize though that these challenges are not only going to happen, they are very normal in this open-disclosure world of states, stages, names of levels, and achievement-oriented culture. If we recognize this as a community and can encourage conversations about it, then when it happens, which it will and perhaps often, members of the community who are dealing with all the complexities that these strange phases can cause won’t have to deal with the additional stigma of feeling like people think we are freaks, losers, or knowing or unknowing charlatans when we face the likely outcome of blowing it and making some grand claim that didn’t turn out to hold up over time. We will also get to benefit from the reality testing and other benefits that good dharma companions provide.
Those wise dharma companions who supported us through admitting to error also get the benefits of living in a culture and community that is realistic and kind, such that, when they make their own mistakes, they can stay connected and be helped also, and you may be surprised at how much people who make mistakes like this can grow to be amazing practitioners and wise beings later. Much can be learned from falling down, and hopefully we will be lucky enough to have good and kind people around to help pick us back up such that we can later do the same for them or others.
Thus, I urge each of you, should you run into someone who has this happening to them, who has claimed something and then renounced that claim, to have similar empathy, to wish that person well, and to realize that, if you are in this rarified business long enough, it will likely happen to you. When it does, think about how you would want to be treated and pass that on ahead of time if you haven’t already been in their shoes, realizing that you might very well be soon enough. This is the mark of a mature community of practitioners and it leads to more healing, mutual respect, kindness, renewed progress, inspiration, and harmony than negative, defensive, condemning, demonizing, and other immature reactions, not particularly well guided by the morality, loving-kindness, and compassion that the Buddha advocated…”
danielmingram
August 24, 2019 at 9:13 am
Thanks Daniel!
Diamond
August 27, 2019 at 6:32 am
(sorry for my English)
Thanks for the interesting article, every critique is useful to understand better the practice and the path.
It is true that in concentration (I prefer “calm abiding”) practice as presented in TMI you follow an overarching intention and you momentary put the other interntions in the shadows, but concentration is simply a tool for a goal: understanding Dukkha. And as the meditation master Corrado Pensa has said many times: before the understanding of dukkha, you have to be able to see it. That is the goal of vipassana and “in-action” practice, a practice that is especially important for laypeople. Sati derives from “sarati”, “to remember”. Remember what? The four noble truths, to understand Dukkha and link it to the causes and verify if the main cause is attachment. It is not simply to “stay in the present moment”.
Thanks to the equanimity that the calm abiding momentary gives you (and with at least a bit of insight into conditionality and emptiness) with the help of insight you can deal with those traumas effectively, by LETTING THEM STAY IN THE MIND ALL THE TIME THAT THEY WANT (a thing that normally the you in command doesn’t allow to do for the motives that you have said) and then get disenchanted by them, seeing their emptiness and let them go completely. I don’t know if you have ever experienced this letting go, but it has allowed me to abandon some traumas and modes of thinking completely, changing my life for the better. I now see many self-states of envy, of comparison that causes Dukkha and that I was unable to acknowledge in my experience because just pointing my attention towards them was unpleasant for my ego. Admitting that you feel lower than someone else is dukkha when there’s attachment. Admitting that you lack love or that you don’t care while you feel that you should care… I could go on and on. What is most important is that now when I experience Dukkha in many forms I WANT to investigate the mind, to find the trauma or the defilement and try to let it go with faith that everytime I can bear the dukkha I will see under the veil (emptiness, anatta, impermanence and paticcasamuppada) and my life and my mental state will improve, i will feel more freedom.
So concentration practice (TMI main course) is a tool that allows you to stay with trauma and difficult self-states and investigate them with the light of paticasamuppada, anatta, emptiness, while path attainments as I see them are not temporary mind states but understadings that you apply in your life. First path? Understanding that rites and superstition doesn’t really work to free the mind from suffering. Understanding that you’re not a unified self but a part of conditioned process. The next paths are the understanding of Dukkha (suffering, pain, stress, unsatisfaction) and his automatic (if you really understand) abandoning of the cause that is tanha.
To see all those different self-states/sub-minds is important in the process of starting to understand anatta. But it is precisely thanks to the effect of calm abiding and vipassana that many of those self-states that were hidden or that had made me agitated all the time or most of time could erupt into consciousness.
Gian Luca Barbetta (@Glucab)
August 24, 2019 at 2:19 pm
Interesting perspective on TMI, though my experience working with it has been different. In my view, even though it’s heavy on developing stable attention (concentration), it’s even heavier on developing skills in using attention and awareness in balance. That’s the main contribution of this book.
The result is that metacognitive introspective awareness enables one to see the workings of the mind, including stuff that one doesn’t ordinarily “want” to see, a panoramic vision of experience, warts and all. If properly developed, there’s no way to dissociate from what’s coming up–it plays out in the mind and is just not being clung to if done skillfully.
I suspect that Culadasa either didn’t fully develop this skill himself (after all, he didn’t practice with TMI, and perhaps this angle of the book was a product of three authors working together), or he developed it, but didn’t mind acting on thoughts and impulses he was well aware of were unwholesome (in other words, his morality wasn’t strong to begin with).
Matt
August 25, 2019 at 1:55 am