We don't need no stinkin' witness

After some experience meditating, it's easy to come to the conclusion that "I am not my thoughts." The more closely one observes one's experience, the more one sees that one is indeed not any of his perceptions, but is merely witness to them. Thoughts come, thoughts go, perceptions come, perceptions go, and "I" stand alone as observer of them all.

But it's easy to get stuck at this realization, and feel there's no more left to discover. Can we go deeper?

Imagine looking at a dog. Now notice that you are not looking at a dog, but more precisely at the image of a dog. For example, in a dream you could have exactly the same visual experience, but there's no dog there.

More generally, one does not experience things, but perceptions of things.

Now, what does it mean for something to be a perception? Would it still deserve that title if it were not being perceived? Was that image of a dog just waiting somewhere for you to perceive it, or was it an "image" only while it was being perceived? Investigate this question very closely in your experience, and resolve that a perception that is not being perceived isn't a perception at all -- it's just the thought of that perception.

Perhaps you can feel the steel jaws of logic getting their grip.

Every "perception" already contains "the perceiving" of it. It is a self-contained unit, and has no need for some "perceiver" to come along and perform some more perceiving. There's no job left for such a perceiver to do.

At best, one could say that there's a subjective aspect to experience, which we sometimes conceptualize as a separate "witness." But like all other conceptualization, it doesn't quite touch the deep truth of things, it seems.

Mistakes

The typical mistake made by a non-practitioner is to believe that experience can be permanently improved (i.e., that I can become happier) by rearranging bits of experience (i.e., doing stuff).

The mistake commonly made by practitioners is more subtle: it's that we can somehow improve experience (get more enlightened) by doing something (possibly very subtle) with our minds. There can be this underlying sense of improving our minds in some way. To make them calmer, clearer, sharper, etc.

But how would you do such a thing? Where is this mind you seek to improve, anyway? What properties does it have that could be improved upon?

This is why Mahamudra instructions spend a lot of time making you search for the mind and its characteristics.

Dzogchen instructor James Low comments (on a Dzogchen teaching from a master):

The purpose of this teaching is to give you confidence to trust that the mind is pure from the beginning. You cannot purify that which is already pure so don't waste time in that direction. ... The more you see there is nothing for you to do the more you find yourself relaxing.

And, after all (Thrangu R):

A relaxed mind is all that is necessary. Perfect meditation will arise in a perfectly relaxed mind. 

Tulku Urgyen R:

The antidote for exhaustion is, from the very beginning, to relax deeply from within, to totally let be. The best relaxation brings the best meditation.

We need the best relaxation. The difficulty comes from not having this. What becomes tired is the dualistic mind. 

And finally:

Our body is the Bodhi tree,
And our mind a mirror bright,
Carefully we wipe them hour by hour,
And let no dust alight.

That is the poem that was refuted by Hui Neng, who went on to become the 6th Zen Patriarch, with this gem:

There is no Bodhi tree,
Nor stand of a mirror bright.
Since all is void,
Where can dust alight?

That for which you are looking is that which is looking -- St. Francis of Assisi

What the hell is going on?

Sometimes I get asked what the purpose is of all of this "spirituality" stuff. I figured I'd write a bit about it. This is written from a vaguely Mahayana Buddhist perspective, with loads of my own interpretation mixed in.

There's one fact that seems unavoidably, uncomfortably true about being human (or, presumably, any other sentient being). It's so obvious as to be almost a tautology; a fact so banal that it almost doesn't merit mentioning. Ready? Here it is:

We prefer feeling good to feeling bad.

Duh.

Now, if you're looking for counterexamples to this statement (you pedantic bastard), they're not hard to find. Masochists enjoy pain. We often take on short-term punishment for long-term gains. Some of us love to wallow in self-pity.

But if you analyze those examples carefully, you'll find that we haven't really countered anything: in every case, our motivation is the same. We want to do something to make things feel better, somehow -- even if the means are counterintuitive. This is what is referred to as suffering (and the urge to escape it) in Buddhism. It includes not just overt suffering, but that constant buzzing sense of discontent and incompleteness that most of us recognize (and yearn to consummate).

Okay, so let's say we buy this for now. So what?

Well, by early adulthood (at the latest), most of us have developed a rather refined and increasingly static set of mental heuristics that help us achieve that basic goal. We've got a list of preferences a mile long (and that should keep us relatively pacified over the course of our slow, unceremonious march toward death), or in lieu of that, at least a sense of personality that allows us to sidestep that particular cliché: you see, we're adventurous!

But how adventurous can we really be, when most of our assumptions about the very nature of reality are so static?

Consider: when you were a baby, you had no idea what the hell was going on. There were sights, sounds, fear, joy, wonderment... sometimes all at once. A marvelous, confusing dance of experience. Maybe like being on a months-long LSD trip.

Over time, you started developing a model of this experience that would stay with you for a long time to come. If you were particularly curious and bratty, someone was forced to explain to you that this whole lively dance was somehow equivalent to, or caused by, some mushy stuff inside your skull. Just what it meant for the liveness of experience to be the same as, or a byproduct of, matter, they couldn't tell you.

But it didn't matter; such concerns are easily hand-waved away. All of the contents or details of your experience -- the sights, sounds, smells, emotions, thoughts, etc. -- are easy enough to correlate with the firing of neurons, after all. And if you weren't watching very carefully, you forgot that this didn't settle the basic mystery: the sheer fact of experience, quite orthogonal to any of its details.

If you were intellectually honest but only tepidly adventurous, perhaps at this point you bought the premise of promissory materialism, sort of the scientific materialist's version of the god of the gaps. We don't exactly know yet, but since reality is made exclusively out of stuff, eventually we will explain everything in terms of stuff.

Spot o' materialism, Mr. Dawkins?

But maybe something still tickles the back of your skull-meat: it is incontrovertible that conscious experience seems to be happening. Even if I dispute it, that dispute takes the form of a thought occurring inside this seeming-ness of experience. Everything else -- including this seeming physical reality, and even my certainty of it -- I only know of via this experience. And as a result, all of that stuff is, and always will be, ontologically suspect. What would it even mean to catch a glimpse of reality that bypassed experience? Try to imagine it -- and then notice that your imagined solution took place inside of experience.

And if consciousness is physical, then where is it located? In my brain? Then why is it that my brain can be moved (say, out of the back of my skull) without conscious experience moving?

So no, it can never be entirely satisfying to accept that the most basic, unassailable fact of existence will be explained in terms of some of its contents (e.g., matter). Otherwise, it's easy to see that given a sufficiently convincing dream, you could be tricked into absolutely certainty that consciousness is caused by, well... the sky is not even the limit.

So we'll have to settle for tentative certainty: in this dream I find myself in, it sure seems that the brain is somehow involved in consciousness. And though we may never be able to close that gap entirely, it doesn't seem particularly worthwhile to leave the question open.

Or does it?

Okay, he didn't really exactly say this, but... close enough.

What if the first truth about humanity -- that we seek to escape sucky-ness, but fail the vast majority of the time -- is somehow intimately connected to the assumptions we've boxed ourselves into regarding the second (the sheer fact of experience)? This is more or less the claim of Mahayana Buddhism. How would we test such a hypothesis?

Well, we can use science -- but not the kind that clutches onto metaphysical assumptions like the assured primacy of physical reality. A much more radical kind. One that strips us of everything that we can be stripped of. That is, everything but direct experience itself.

Now, if you were to try this by yourself, you'd (probably) very quickly run into an immense difficulty: your mind just won't shut up. And it sure as hell won't buy into this suspicious plan to investigate experience directly. It's always been the intermediary and arbiter of experience, and damned if it will go down without a fight.

At this point you could settle for the booby prize: fail to recognize that this yammering mind is not the same thing as direct experience, and simply declare something like "I think, therefore I am." And who could blame you? Thought is bloody persistent.

But if you're persistent and passionate enough, you may eventually catch a glimpse of the machinery that runs the whole show. You will not have shed the mind -- for what good would you be without being able to think anything? But you will have transcended it: witnessed its mechanism and functional value without mistaking any of its coarse or subtle proclamations as Truth.

And if it the result just so happens to live up to the Buddha's original promise of unconditional freedom -- that by transcending the tyranny of mind, one also transcends suffering itself, well that's a fine cherry on top, wouldn't it?

The highway

 Ramana Maharshi says:

Since every other thought can occur only after the rise of the 'I'-thought and since the mind is nothing but a bundle of thoughts, it is only through the inquiry 'Who am I?' that the mind subsides. Moreover, the integral 'I'-thought, implicit in such enquiry, having destroyed all other thoughts, gets itself destroyed or consumed, just as the stick used for stirring the burning funeral pyre gets consumed.

Even when extraneous thoughts sprout up during such enquiry, do not seek to complete the rising thought, but instead, deeply enquire within, 'To who has this thought occurred?' No matter how many thoughts thus occur to you, if you would with acute vigilance enquire immediately as and when each individual thought arises to whom it has occurred, you would find it is to 'me'. If then you enquire 'Who am I?' the mind gets introverted and the rising thought also subsides. In this manner as you persevere more and more in the practice of Self-enquiry, the mind acquires increasing strength and power to abide in its Source. 

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche says:

Repeatedly you hear, 'recognize mind essence; attain stability in that'. What this really means is that we should repeatedly look into what thinks. We should recognize the absence or emptiness of this thinker over and over again, until finally the power of deluded thinking weakens, until it is totally gone without a trace. At that point, what remains to prevent the state of enlightenment?
...
In the recognition of mind nature, the thought has no power to stand on its own. It simply vanishes. Just as our nature is emptiness, so is the nature of the thought. The moment of recognizing the thinker as empty cognizance is like the snowflake meeting the water. 

Ramana Maharshi:

It is only when the subtle mind is externalized through the activity of the intellect and the sense-organs that gross name and form constituting the world appear. When, on the other hand, the mind stays firmly in the Heart, they recede and disappear.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche:

Samsara is mind turned outwardly, lost in its projections;
Nirvana is mind turned inwardly, recognizing its true nature. 

You gotta be kidding me...

Have you ever found yourself thinking (or blurting out) these words? "You've gotta be kidding me?"

WHO's gotta be kidding you? The universe? Reality? Reality is not kidding you. You're in denial. Same with the undirected rhetorical question "are you serious?"

These thoughts are one baby step away from "this isn't happening." Would anyone doubt that this is, indeed, denial? A most painful kind of crazy?

The alternative is coming to terms with reality. Staring it straight in the face, accepting that this is happening, and courageously doing what needs to be done. The closer you get to doing this, and abandoning the denial, the more you'll be back in touch with the profound joy that suffuses every single moment.

That is what it means to live fully in the present. To be fully at ease with what's happening, no matter what it is. Even if you're going to take steps to improve things, the first step is coming to grips with things as they are now.

And this is what is meant by "acceptance." It's a radical kind of acceptance; one which can accommodate anything that reality throws at you. It's not a passive, meek, "mokay, guess I gotta live with it" thing.

And here's a little secret: it's tremendously hard to develop this most crucial life skill without practice. And not a half-hearted, once-in-a-while practice. This is what mindfulness is about, and why people practice it so deeply. Though I'm not exactly religious, I daresay this is also at the heart of some other traditions (though what concrete steps they offer to develop it, I'm not an expert in):

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
Courage to change the things I can
And wisdom to know the difference

So don't resist reality. Doing so is crazy, and your life will free tremendously better when you stop.

Do nothing...

I love it when quotes from one tradition sound very much like those from another. A favorite of mine is this:

Do nothing, and everything is done -- Tao Te Ching

Now here's one from Lama Gendun Rinpoche:

Nothing to do, nothing to force, nothing to want--and everything happens by itself.

And now the Gita:

By nature are actions done in every way, and who sees the self as the nondoer, he truly sees.

 ...
One who sees action in inaction and inaction in action is intelligent amongst men. He acts in an integrated manner