concentration depends on a healthy ego

After a meditation recently where I was very easily distracted, unable to concentrate for long, I started wondering about the defilements and/or the Five Hindrances, and ethics (vinaya or virtue, in Buddhism). The Five Hindrances are a traditional categorisation of obstacles to concentration ~ ultimately, obstacles to self-mastery:

desire
aversion
sloth and torpor
restlessness
doubt

Honestly, I think itchiness should be the Sixth Hindrance!

While the Hindrances are obstacles to concentration, we practise virtue to protect and support our concentration. The timeless example is that it’s hard to have a clear mind in the afternoon when we’ve committed murder in the morning. And we practise concentration on the present to allow insight to penetrate illusion …

👆🏽 in this sense, concentration meditation is a transpersonal practice, and therefore everything that supports concentration is a therapeutic practice ~ this might seem like an arbitrary distinction (and isn’t duality precisely what we are trying to escape!?) but it’s a helpful dichotomy for me at the moment.

During that very-distracted meditation, I thought, The mental content doesn’t seem to be about any obvious breach of ethics, so why is it that I am especially disturbed today?

Maybe it’s just that I wasn’t aware of how my conduct compromises one of the less-obvious ethical precepts, such as ‘do not extol self over others’ or the one about not harbouring ill-will.

Maybe a distracted mind is just something a student needs to accept ~ radical acceptance of that fourth Hindrance, restlessness.

It certainly seems that access to consistently strong concentration is dependent on factors outside my control, but also I’m not sure about that.

There must be things we can do that support concentration.

I don’t know ~ I’m trying to understand what to do with distraction in meditation, with what has been called kapicitta since Buddha’s time. Monkey mind! It’s old school.

In the concentration basket of the Eightfold Path, with right mindfulness (samma sati) we notice our mind has wandered, and with right effort (samma vayama) we bring the mind back to right concentration (samma samadhi). Over and over again, and gradually we become more content among suffering.

I had to look up ‘defilements’ again, and read about the kleshas ~ rooted in the Three Poisons of ignorance, attachment and aversion, the defilements or afflictions are the 108 mental states that disturb the mind and result in unwholesome actions.

So yeah, I was right in my wondering, even if I was supposed to be concentrating at the time and allowing thoughts to come, dwell and fall away 👈🏼 that is the practice, the whole practice and nothing but the practice.

And yet, I was compelled to scrounge around for a pen and scribble on the nearest piece of paper (my precepts sheet), “I am enough”, because I felt I had arrived at some insight that would continue to bug me until I made a note and allowed myself to forget the idea while I continued concentrating.

As I currently understand it, the whole practice in Zen is to concentrate on an object of meditation that keeps us from indulging the monkey mind (kapicitta), and we concentrate some more until some kind of non-cognitive insight penetrates illusion.

Yes but there are other things, such as ethics, which support the practice of concentration. Concentration is but one aspect of the Eightfold Path ~ surely the other aspects of the Path are complementary to concentration (samadhi).

Let’s see if I can remember the others, and see if what I’m thinking about here fits among any of those:

right concentration
right mindfulness
right effort
right speech
right action
right livelihood
right view
right resolve

Maybe it falls within right view (samya dristi), but I’m guessing here ~ wondering whether our perception of self is an aspect of right view. If I have an unhealthy view of self, will that compromise concentration? I think so, yes.

Because it seemed a lot of the mental content (kleshas or afflictions) were about how I could be better: more loving, more organised, more efficient, more available, less distracted all the time, more able to concentrate, and I thought, We may need to complement our (transpersonal) concentration practice with the (therapeutic) practice of treating the health of our ego.

If we cultivate healthy ego, our ego is not always going to be popping up and saying, “Do this!” or “Do that!” when we’re already damn-well trying to do exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, which is concentrating!

This is not a new insight for me ~ it’s been percolating for a while and keeps coming up in my reflections. Reflecting on it has been helpful if only because it colours in the details of my own practice.

And these reflections may also illuminate beyond the lines of what I feel like calling “the original Buddhism” ~ I mean, we might need to elucidate other Hindrances or nuances of the kleshas to accommodate the mental state of humans in the twenty-first century, compared with the mental state of humans when the Buddha was alive and teaching.

As I draft this today, I have been tinkering with the various documents where I am trying to track the development and expression of these ideas in a more coherent way that I can share with others, but for now this meandering post will have to do.

I love a good meandering post.

I am distractedly curious and passionate about understanding and applying these ideas, and helping others to do so. As I move into the mental-health sector as a peer-support worker I hope to find opportunities to do so.

Meanwhile, I have updated the Heartwards website where I am starting to publish ideas from a transpersonal perspective about mental-health peer work. And I have opened but not worked on a hypertext project I think of more often again lately, called Whatness. I would like to add something about the Hindrances there, because processing such ideas enough to be able to express them without reference to some other source means I have integrated them enough to apply them on the fly.

Meanwhile, if you’re reflecting on things that support concentration in meditation, I’d love to hear about in the comments.

Legend 🤙🏼

the wisdom of insanity

During my first experience of what I now understand was mystical psychosis, a friend at the time would like to say something like, “It’s called ‘insanity’ because you go in-to-sanity,” and I appreciated that because it was a kind of anchor, an affirmation that the experience I was having might be positive.

Since then I have had two similar experiences, each of increasing intensity and both tipping from what Stan Grof calls “spiritual emergence” into “spiritual emergency”. I wrote about the second episode in a post called “Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening”, and I have since learnt that I am far from the only one who believes in the potentially positive transformation that can occur if a person is appropriately supported through the expansion of consciousness that psychosis can sometimes be.

Enter the documentary Crazy Wise, whose short blurb (trailer below) reads:

Crazy … or wise? The traditional wisdom of indigenous cultures often contradicts modern views about a mental health crisis. Is it a ‘calling’ to grow or just a ‘broken brain’? The documentary Crazy Wise explores what can be learned from people around the world who have turned their psychological crisis into a positive transformative experience.

As a survivor of our lagging mental-health system who has experienced profound insight through episodic psychosis, I very much value the message of this documentary. One distinction I like to make is that if, in modern Western psychology, psychosis is ‘a break from reality’ and, in ancient Eastern psychology, reality is an illusion, then psychosis is a break from illusion. Apart from that, I will let the filmmakers do the rest of the talking:

During a quarter-century documenting indigenous cultures, human-rights photographer and filmmaker Phil Borges often saw these cultures identify “psychotic” symptoms as an indicator of shamanic potential. He was intrigued by how differently psychosis is defined and treated in the West.

Through interviews with renowned mental health professionals including Gabor Mate, MD, Robert Whitaker, and Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD, Phil explores the growing severity of the mental health crisis in America dominated by biomedical psychiatry. He discovers a growing movement of professionals and psychiatric survivors who demand alternative treatments that focus on recovery, nurturing social connections, and finding meaning.

Crazy Wise follows two young Americans diagnosed with “mental illness.” Adam, 27, suffers devastating side effects from medications before embracing meditation in hopes of recovery. Ekhaya, 32, survives childhood molestation and several suicide attempts before spiritual training to become a traditional South African healer gives her suffering meaning and brings a deeper purpose to her life.

Crazy Wise doesn’t aim to over-romanticize indigenous wisdom, or completely condemn Western treatment. Not every indigenous person who has a crisis becomes a shaman. And many individuals benefit from Western medications.

However, indigenous peoples’ acceptance of non-ordinary states of consciousness, along with rituals and metaphors that form deep connections to nature, to each other, and to ancestors, is something we can learn from.

Crazy Wise adds a voice to the growing conversation that believes a psychological crisis can be an opportunity for growth and potentially transformational, not a disease with no cure.

It really is a fantastic film, very moving and inspirational. There is a new paradigm of integrative psychological awareness emerging, and these documentaries are helping to spread the word.

If you experience or have experienced acute psychological distress, have a look at this documentary and please know there is an alternative to what the medical-system narrative might believe is the only truth about your “symptoms”.

Reach out to me if you need support, or check out the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN) of Australia, who have peer-support workers operating in Brisbane at least, and other parts of Australia. There is also a US-based SEN, and hopefully these links will get you started if you’re investigating this for yourself or someone you know from other parts of the globe.

What is trauma?

I’m curious to know what you think of Peter A Levine’s theory of trauma.

I’ve been listening to Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma and I appreciate most of all that trauma should be diagnosed and treated on the basis of symptoms rather than the events that caused the trauma. One person may be traumatised by events that are not necessarily considered traumatic by others.

What do you think?

I think it’s imperative we have a holistic, integral, new-paradigm understanding of trauma because the symptoms of trauma keep us dis-integrated and leave us more prone to dis-regulation and dysfunction.

To become awakened or fully potentialised, we need to first be whole and healthy on the mundane-psychological level, otherwise in our practice(s) we’re going to be always bombarded by those aspects of our unconscious that are always bubbling up from those parts we keep compartmentalised, trapped away in the skeleton closet.

That’s just my view though. I’m curious to know what you think.

Can we awaken or become whole without first healing our wounds?