[Don Salmon]

I just thought I should add, if anyone here is familiar with Indian philosophy, they may passionately disagree with the way I defined manas and buddhi. And they’d be right!:>))

[Don Salmon]

Hey again, Matt, just thought of a question.

I assume your work involves an understanding of yin and yang energy. If you feel like it, could you say something about how this relates to Iain’s writings?

From my familiarity with Indian philosophy, there is actually one interpretation of the Sanskrit terms “manas” (usually translated as “mind”) and “buddhi” (usually translated as intellect) which track quite closely with LH and RH. Sanskrit words can have multi-leveled meanings, so there’s no one interpretation that is “the” correct one.

But one way of understanding ‘manas” relates to recent neuroscientific research suggesting we cannot actually focus on more than one thing at a time. The manas, in the most ancient texts, has a kind of point-to-point kind of attention and divides the world into pieces. The buddhi (at least, the “awakened” buddhi, which is related to the term “Buddha”) sees the world both as “process” and as “whole.”

To be very concrete, if you’re doing breath meditation, and you strain to focus on the movement of the abdomen, with a rather conceptual image/though of “the abdomen” moving, you’re employ the manas, in this sense. And then if you try to add the focal point of the tip of the nose, you’re likely to be alternating very rapidly, shifting your attention from the abdomen to the nose.

On the other hand, if you “zoom out,” and take in BOTH the abdomen and nose in a field-like manner, you’ll be employing the buddhi. And if there is a sense of immersion – so rather than “me” observing an object it is a field observing itself, you’re employing a still-deeper functioning, a more integrated one, of the buddhi.

I’m guessing there are some equivalents to this in Chinese philosophy and medicine, but I”m not familiar with either. I know in the Chan (the Chinese precursor to Zen, strongly influenced by Taoism), effortless, “wholistic” playful attention was always emphasized, recognizing the “field” of non dual awareness within which we are always immersed, which is not in any way separate from the forms that are perceived or the perceiver of forms.

[Don Salmon]

Hi Matt:

Glad you started a conversation. This website, as I understand it, just got started within the last week or so.

Let’s see, I’ll introduce myself a bit. 1970s and 80s, professional pianist/composer, worked mostly with dancers. Since the 1990s, clinical psychologist, particularly interested in the integration of science and spirituality, with a focus on the work of Sri Aurobindo (one of the founders/leaders of the Indian independence movement in the early 1900s, prior to Gandhi’s arrival on the scene).

I find that Iain’s work dovetails perfectly with the integrative approach taking by Sri Aurobindo and by numerous others in the contemplative Christian, Sufi, Tibetan Buddhist and similar communities looking to integrate science, spirituality, social action, etc.

I also started a group (you’ll see the “BE” logo in the group list) aimed at practice – getting an experiential sense of what the various modes of attention (there’s more than 2, actually!) are.

Hope others join in.

[Don Salmon]

Is anybody else active here? The groups on this channel seem quiet at the moment (9-10-22)

[Don Salmon]

Elspeth, a much shorter reply in the form of a few rhetorical questions:

“Why do we assume, when imagining a person focusing attention on what is occurring “in” the psyche, that it necessarily involves separation? Are the thoughts and feelings and perceptions associated with a specific individual necessarily “separate” from anything else? If EVERYONE and EVERYTHING in the universe “lives and moves and has its being in God,” wouldn’t that include thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc?”

[Don Salmon]

Perfect. Better than perfect.

you’ve hit on what is perhaps the single most absurd, impossible, frustrating thing about the whole modern mindfulness/meditation movement – that it is taught in a way to REINFORCE our sense of separateness and disconnectedness from each other, from the world (and if I may add, from the Divine).

This is all an essential part of ALL traditional contemplative traditions. However, our modern arrogant borrowers of ancient contemplative practices have long felt that we need to “leave aside” all that primitive stuff and only take “what works” scientifically, and what can be shown to be intellectually respectable. One of the things they left aside is the central importance of “sangha,” the spiritual community.

Well, it turns out that you cannot find ANY contemplative practitioners anywhere on the planet where the entire practice is seen to involve a separate individual (I’m even including those who do month or years-long retreats – they just don’t have the sense of themselves as utterly cut-off separate points the way most modern people experience themselves).

I would say that the single most damaging thing in the whole modern movement is that the way mindfulness and similar practices are taught, it can reinforce individual separateness, narcissism, obsessive compulsive tendencies, even schizoid tendencies!!

Owen Barfield has a beautiful image for this. He says prior to the modern era, most people felt the sky to be like clothing that is an essential part of their being. With the emergence of what Jean Gebser called “the deficient mode of the mental structure of consciousness,” (Descartes’ “I think therefore I am,” and Galileo’s casting away of all experiential qualities as illusory), the world is placed – as Kierkegaard once wrote so beautifully – as some kind of alien thing into which we are placed without having a clue as to how we connect to it or even why we’re here.

This has resulted in an incoherent, parasitic, nihilistic view being attached to the whole of our modern science – what is called variously “physicalism,” “Materialism,” or “positivism.” As one physicist noted, we take this in “with our mother’s milk,” and until we examine it closely, we have no idea how much it has affected our entire political, economic, military, scientific, artistic, systems AND our very mind and body. Meditation potentially can undo this, but if we take a physicalist approach to meditation, it will be just one more instrument of our destruction.

You can get a sense of this if you talk to any conservative evangelist and ask them what St. Paul meant when he told the Athenians, “As your wise folks of ancient times knew, God is that “in which we live and move and have our being.” I once asked a graduate student at Bob Jones (fundamentalist Christian) University who had read the Bible in Greek about why conservatives feel the need to put God so far away from us, and he said, “Oh no, the King James translation is wrong. God is He “BY” whom we live and move and have our being. we don’t live “IN” God.”

Interestingly, one of the most common pieces of advice my Kriya Yoga teacher, Roy Eugene Davis, used to give about prayer was “Don’t pray TO God. Pray IN God.” Something similar was meant by the old Taoist sage who told Buddhist writer John Blofeld, “Nirvana does not just involved ‘the dewdrop slipping into the shining sea,’ which seems to involve the complete loss of individuality. When you realize the Tao, you – the apparent finite – BECOME the infinite but WITHOUT LOSS OF INDIVIDUALITY.’

This is very important, because so many of us feel oppressed by our separateness, we are inclined to try to escape with psychedelics, or inappropriate use of meditation, or following authoritarian leaders, or obsessing about patterns of eating, or any number of ways.

*****

It’s hard to put that all together when I’m introducing practices, but you know what? Your comment is just the perfect counterpart to what I’m saying. All of these ways of “being” (these different mode of practice and attending are all ways of be-ing, which is why I included the BE logo next to the name of this group) are intended to assist us in seeing past the “exclusive concentration” or “separative” consciousness which is so characteristic of the modern age.

I’ll close with a story, one of my favorites about the profound nature of attention, and one which emphases the journey from disconnectedness to what Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.”

*****

Paula was a nurse on 12 hour shifts, and the stress was so intense that over the years, she had developed crippling migraines, severe stomach cramps (both chronically painful) and sudden, overwhelming panic attacks as well as generalized anxiety.

She went to Dr. Les Fehmi, who treated pain, depression, anxiety, relationship problems – and even trained Olympic athletes – simply by teaching them to attend differently to their experience.

In Pam’s case, he noted that her habitual mode of attention was to grip experience as if it was made of discrete, separate elements, each to be manipulated and controlled. All he taught her was to shift her attention frequently to notice the space around objects (as well as the “space” between and around thoughts). She did individual closed-eyes practice about 45′ twice a day, but the most important thing (as you rightly observe, Elspeth) was to make this shift in the midst of activity, in the midst of interaction and connecting with nature, with others, with the world.

In just three weeks, ALL of the symptoms – from which she had suffered for years – were completely gone.

And she also said, in three months, there were major improvements in virtually every area of her life.