confusion enough

back in jan & feb, i spent 3 weeks meditating in northern thailand. it was intense, but the last bit was the most overwhelming thing i’ve ever put myself through. we were instructed to not sleep for 72 hours, stay in our room (food was brought to our door), not shower, and mediate the whole time (i did 90 minutes meditation with 30 minute breaks). to be honest, i did go to sleep for 3 hours sometime during the first night. and there were plenty of unintentional micro-naps.

it was as hard as it sounds. there were no chairs in my room to rest in, just a bed. the temptation to lie down was overwhelming. i would alternate between despair at the thought of all those hours of sitting & stewing in my own consciousness juices, and laughter at the fact that i had chosen to do it of my own “free will.”

sometime during the second day, the internal pressure i had been feeling became extreme & obscure. i felt a massive confusion, but without an underlying question to ask. i stopped doing the walking meditation, sat down on the bed, & tried to think it through. nothing happened; the mind was a rusty steam engine without any water to boil. i stood back up, and continued to do walking meditation. after one more step, a vast & awful mantle lifted from the inside of my mind.

i saw the process of division. right there in front of my mind’s eye, the world was being split apart into two: self & not-self. it was odd to see & i am not sure if the description will make sense, but here i go anyway. there is thing in my mind (and probably in yours) that puts a label on everything that it encounters. the label is either “self” or it is “not-self.” when i looked at my hand, i felt/saw the label of “self” arise. when i heard the sound of a truck, i felt the label of “not-self.” my orange towel was “self” because it was mine, but the orange curtain was “not-self” because i didn’t own it. everything from the five senses got a label. even thoughts! certain concepts carried label of self like “friendly” and “human,” but the rest (like “cruel” or “lizard”) carried the label of not-self.

not only that, there was a different feeling to things that were “self.” i felt protective over them, and wanted them to continue. even negative stuff – the label of “anxiety-prone” had the label of self, and this may be why my anxiety sticks around way longer than i’d expect – anxiety is marked as “self” and, therefore, sustained as all other aspects of self are. it’s an extension of the basic biological need to survive.

this process is usually automatic & below the threshold of consciousness, but for about 3 minutes, the whole show was on display. larry rosenberg once summarized buddha’s whole teaching with “never attach to anything as me or mine.” i was given a hard-earned glimpse into the functioning of this attachment process. it freaked me out. i ran out of the room to find a teacher, who then calmed me down.

for a few months after that, this experience was hard to think about; i didn’t know what to make of it. a week or so ago, however, i started thinking about it again. this time, it made a lot more sense. two common mystical statements are “everything is one” and “the self is an illusion.” when i first encountered these, i could only speculate as to their meaning. but in the context of my experience, i think i have some sense as to what they refer. the “self” is an illusion in the sense that it exists as a hodgepodge of labels, aggregated & sustained according to some hidden logic i’ve yet to fully penetrate.

so how does this relate to meditation? the labels are not permanent, and part of the meditative process is de-labeling. an example. after my first meditation retreat, i came back home & abruptly stopped reading a whole genre of novels (difficult, depressing, post-modern fiction). i was reading them not because i enjoyed reading them, but because i had conceived of myself as someone who reads such books. to not read them made me anxious in a very specific way that i now associate with a loss of some aspect of self.

since then, the de-selfing process has continued. i am actively stripping down my conceptual self. this allows the natural, unadorned, always-changing self to emerge. when sergey ceases to conceive of himself as someone who dislikes asparagus, maybe sergey will realize that he now likes asparagus. to not be bound by ideas of self is to be exactly who you are at every moment, and to allow that person to change as s/he does.

this also brings into perspective the claims of advanced meditators wrt experiencing oneness. when the machinery of self-labeling is turned off, automatically all is one! the hypothesis here is that “self” and the experience of it exists primarily as a construct in the mind. we only feel separate from the the rest of the cosmos because of semantics. the “self” is a complex network of concepts, upheld by an active piece of the mind. when it ceases to be upheld, it dissolves. then there is no self, and when there is no self, there is no not-self. all returns to being one continuous field of being.

that’s just a hypothesis though. i haven’t figured out how to turn this thing off yet. will get back to you when i do =).