effort

Since my latest obsession seems to be trying to understand the role of effort and non-effort I thought I'd share a couple of things I stumbled on today that were relevant:

"Practice
is releasing resistance, but that resistance goes very deep. Each
thought we have about something is a resistance to allowing that
experience into our life unfiltered. We place a shield of resistance
called thinking between life and us, and that shield protects us from
anything unexpected by having us reflect upon it prior to living it."

"if
we rely solely on our will and determination it will take us in the
wrong direction. Meditation often takes us to our breaking point where
we see our strenuous effort to overcome a problem is doomed to failure.
We slowly begin to see how ambitious effort intensifies the problem. A
problem is created through our reactive response to an experience, and
effort directed toward overcoming is actually a further reaction to the
difficulty. We cannot meet force with force and expect contentment to
result. When we struggle with a problem the sense-of–self arises from
that very effort. Buddhism is about understanding the arising of the
sense-of-self not reinforcing its patterns."

Both from this teacher, Rodney Smith: http://seattleinsight.org/Resources/RodneysQA/tabid/114/Default.aspx

I'd love to hear some more pointers on this stuff too.

With the cessations, will they just happen by themselves if you don't do anything at all (I mean if you just sit and meditate doing noting or whatever)?

Trying to learn to access some of the jhana states might have been a bit like this (it's something I've really only practiced recently, and am not very experienced with). I had to pay attention in a certain way, but also sort of not pay attention at the same time. I still am not very good at it - but the best results have tended to be when I don't try as hard, which sort of makes no sense, but there it is.

Reminds me a bit how in a game of squash or tennis or while playing a musical instrument there's a sort of sweet spot where you are focused but not paying attention in any kind of detailed way, and you just go on automatic. If you start paying too much attention it breaks your focus and you miss the ball or a note...

Here's something I saw today in a Daoist magazine, The Empty Vessel:

"All forms of doing-- activity, speech, and thought-- give rise to movement, and all movement creates the illusion of linear time, with a beginning, middle, and end. Not doing b]wu wei [/b make time collapse in the infinite stillness and radiant space of being in primordial awareness, which has no beginning, middle, or end. When you stop moving, speaking, and thinking, time stops and awareness expands into infinity, dissolving all dualistic boundaries between self and other, here and there, now and then. What you realize in this still and silent state of awareness is that everything arises from and returns to its original source-- the empty, luminous, infinite potential energy of the primordial state. Here's the way Lao-tze expressed it in the Tao The Ching:

Something formless yet complete that existed before heaven and earth, without sound, without substance, dependent on nothing, unchanging, all-pervading, unfailing... Its true name I do not know: 'Tao' is the nickname I give it.

The nickname the Buddha gave it is 'Dharmadhatu:' 'the way things are.'

'To be or not to be' is therefore the first choice you make when embarking on the path of cultivating awareness. There is nothing particular to do to reach the primordial state of enlightened awareness, because you're already there before you start. However, it takes a lot of practice to stop interfering with it and simply let it be. You must arrive at the realization that it's already here within you, right now, and learn to recognize its radiant light. This is the path as well as the goal of all the practices taught by the masters of the Tao and the Dharma-- to be present in awareness."

-- I'd add that there are Chan texts that describe meditation as 'sitting and forgetting.'

And that, weird creatures that we human beans are, the hardest thing to do is nothing: where is 'I' when it's not doing something?

mmm-- and as a postscript: somewhere I saw it pointed out that breathing is a universal entry point for meditation because it is uniquely something that happens of itself, and something that we 'do.'

Maybe 'right effort' is just continuing to show up, whether we think we're making progress or accomplishing something or not. Being willing to be where we are, sitting, clueless, breathing-- without subordinating it to some grand plan.

Thanks, Kate! I knew you'd have some good pointers! Those are cutted and pasted to my "reminders" document.

"What you realize in this still and silent state of awareness is that everything arises from and returns to its original source-- the empty, luminous, infinite potential energy of the primordial state."--

Hope y'all don't mind all the addenda: I was just remembering a story my daughter wrote about the first time I took her to daycare and she was shocked to discover we could be apart from one another.

She was sitting on the porch watching me walk away, crying big salty tears and saying "Ma Ma" in a slow rhythm, with a bubble of spit filling her mouth then popping at the end of each "-ah." And got engrossed in the arising and passing away of each bubble and each syllable. I just realized that kids improvise 'meditation' in all sorts of odd ways...

So, so, so ironic, isn't it? It's not even that 'we can't get there from here.' It's that we can't 'get' here. We can only be here. When we sufficiently exhaust all our other plans.

There's an element of 'surrender' being not some sweet, religious sentiment but just-- 'Oh, Hell! I freakin' give UP!'

I suppose on a practical level it's about noting grasping. If you feel this or that nice feeling coming up and you get that little flicker of "ah, grab it!" inside, note that.

If you keep noting grasping and aversion, they start to fall away and be seen through, and the purple monkey peeks through. But looking for the purple monkey, i think, defeats the purpose, because then you get caught up in "where is it? there? look! got it!" and then you are back to grasping and aversion again.

Thoughts on this?

Great discussion, guys.

My experience of effort is that effort applied to letting go is self-defeating—but that effort applied to concentration and mindfulness produces letting go as a happy side effect. My best meditative experiences have been where I applied effort with diligence and energy to the process of focus and concentration—and once I reached a level of good concentration and balance, some of the the stuff I had been clinging to just became obviously unnecessary. I never was able to force myself into that 40,000 foot perspective; but I was able to apply diligence to getting myself to a higher vantage point, at which point that perspective arose as a natural and necessary result.

I honestly still don't know what cessations are :/. I was never very good with the technical jargon. I think it's a TF thing insofar as the Thai teachers, and maybe by extension Southern teachers in general, tend to be a lot less ambivalent about effort, exertion and discernment in general than Northern traditions. Thai Forest Buddhism is definitely, well, a Forest practice, and thus encourages a level of renunciation and effort—an overall degree of pushing oneself and possibly putting oneself through a little bit of hell—that is sort of the precise element that so many Mahayana traditions find to be unnecessary and short-sighted. So we have no problem at all in casting meditation in very unilateral terms; there is a lot of room in other words for meditation practice as struggle, as mental workout. So you sit, and you suffer, and you are diligent and protective of your thoughts and indeed sometimes suspicious and defensive towards 'bad' unskillful thoughts in a very non-equivocal, dualistic way; but when you do break through, you are infused with that classic sense of serenity with brings along with it equanimity,
dispassion and goodwill, allowing you both to look with metta on things you might have been fighting and also to let go of things you were grasping to.

So one exerts and expends real effort to get to a place of effortlessness. I have no problem with that. It's the classic analogy of the raft; one has to do the work and use the raft in order to get to a place where you can discard it. But just because the place you're going to has no need for rafts doesn't mean that your practice should be one of eschewing rafts. My practice is necessarily pragmatic and heterogeneous. And if you never expend the effort to begin with you are just carried along by the stream.

Sorry Chris, I must have been misleading. I honestly don't know what cessations are. I don't know what the term refers to.

With Chris's description in mind (since I know those experiences, though I never used the term "cessation" for them), I would re-address Tomo's question like this:

There may be a purple monkey, but your job is to look at what's happening right now, in this moment. If you think about the purple monkey, you aren't paying attention to now. If you are hoping you might have this or that experience or wanting to experience a certain way, then right now is "hoping" and "wanting". Good things to note. If you keep bringing your attention back to this exact moment of now, then you just ride along with the sensations and phenomena of this moment, and don't try to change them or make them do this or that. And everything else will take care of itself.

And in the midst of experiences like Chris describes, I had to put a hell of an effort into just riding along with exactly what was happening, and not trying to change it. A lot of effort. Because joy and terror and bliss and ecstasy and dread and revulsion were part of the stream of experience and my mind was constantly thinking "No! Don't want to! Yes! Want that!" and I the effort came in just being with all of that, just as it was happening.

It often felt like being in a kayak in the rapids with no oars, or in the back of a jeep on a bumpy road, going too fast without a seat belt.

Is any of this helpful at all?

I think I have lost the plot here. Just to clarify, when I said i think it's a TF thing, I wasn't referring to anything about cessations; I was answering his question 'is it a Thai Forest thing?', where I interpreted 'it' as my experience of effortlessness and letting go arising out of effort. That was the topic of the rest of my post—TF's and my approach to effort and striving. I'm afraid I miscommunicated something because the two subsequent responses seem to be in a totally different context from what I thought we were discussing. I apologize for my thickness

lol - yes, I assumed you were referring to cessations (also not a term I use, but Chris's description was of familiar experience), and effort as it might relate to that...but the whole effort discussion is useful despite our occasional miscommunications, methinks.

Ah, I see. Sorry. Well in that case, I can't answer your question. I'm gonna guess cessations aren't a huge deal because I haven't heard of them. But the dharma talks and books I read dont spend a lot of time in the technics of meditation and its maps, so maybe I'm just not exposed to them.

Well, the Zen folks do talk about 'dropping off body and mind'-- which seemed to be pointing at the same experiential area. They just refer to it in a more impressionistic, rather than photo-realistic way.

Tomo, anyone's eye-trajectories are sorta beside the point: you're keenly interested in what you're interested in. The question is what approach is likely to serve best. There's that hoary old story about the Buddha dialoging with a musician about whether it was best to tighten the strings of his instrument, or to loosen them... The skill is in perceiving when you're too tight and when you're too slack-- then music is possible. And skill is developed by practicing, and getting the 'first 1000 mistakes' [that hone your skill] under your belt, or cushion, or whatever. Fixing hard on a specific goal is likely to be too tight; not giving a crap is so loose you're not gonna even make it to the cushion. Somewhere in the middle is an open, curious sense of seeing what's possible, and what is so.

A sort of funny thing happened once at my Wednesday night meditation class: a nice, late-middle-aged lady like myself came to check out the class. It was one where brief instructions were given about how to approach the practice; I don't remember exactly which ones they were, but they worked so well for the visitor that afterwards she mentioned sort of 'disappearing.' She seemed a bit rattled, in fact. And never returned...

@Kate - you mentioned a curious attitude and that's a great pointer I think. Bringing as sense of wonder, curiosity, play, the mind of a child to practice is a useful way to let go of being too grasping.