"When your mind is clear,
You can see yourself."

Meditation & Consciousness:
A Dialogue Between a Meditation Teacher & a Psychologist

An Interview with Shinzen Young by Charles T. Tart, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Noetic Sciences

Shinzen Young: When I meditate I apply a few axioms, which embody for me the basic principles of meditation. The first axiom is the axiom "mindfulness": clarity of awareness is preferable to murkiness of awareness.

To illustrate: A person might say "I feel angry". That represents a certain amount of clarity. They know they're angry vs. not angry.

But they could be more clear by saying, i.e., "I have a sequence of negative thoughts about this situation & at the same time I have certain sensations that are rising within my body." That represents a greater clarity.

Instead of one bit of information "I'm angry", there's a richer information flow, a higher "baud rate". One has become specific about the types of thoughts & feelings that constitute the anger.

One could become even clearer still & recount the exact sequence of thoughts, their interrelationships & the locations of the body sensations. This is what is meant by mindfulness.

Charles T. Tart: So one way to look at what you call clarity here is the richness of a perception, or the articulatedness of it.

From a conventional scientific perspective, though, or even a "common sense" perspective, someone might ask,

"How do you know that increased articulation is true detail of what is there? What is truly clearer perception & what is vivid fantasy about perception?"

One might have a muscle tension due to anger in the body & generate many fantasies starting from that tension, vs. being more clearly perceptive of how those muscles actually feel. How is the distinction made?

Shinzen: Actually, I would say from my experience that, in meditation, we just want to be more clear about what seems to be real. So, in a sense, the distinction between fantasy & actuality isn't so important.

Charles: You just made thousands of philosophers roll over in their graves!

Shinzen: From my point of view, the process of meditation isn't the same as the endeavors of philosophy or of science.

The endeavor of meditation is a utilitarian endeavor. It's to know the truth of one's own internal processes. Even if those processes are "illusory", you strive to have more knowledge about the specifics of the "illusion".

Meditation has a goal: that goal is to allow a person to experience the mind-body process without feeling limited by & trapped within that process. It's not to find some kind of cosmic truth outside of whatever truth you need to know in order to be a free person.

In meditation you are simply observing the mind & body as it is experienced in the moment. If they happen to be lost in illusions of different sorts, then your job is merely to trace, in real time, the course of the illusion, to experience its comings & goings, rather than try to get rid of it. At least that's one approach to meditation.

So "mindfulness" is a first axiom.

A 2nd axiom is the axiom of "equanimity": that it's desirable not to grasp or block the flow of the mind-body process. Our ordinary tendency is to grasp or block, to fixate or freeze the on-going process of consciousness & that is what brings us a sense of limitation & suffering.

So we sit down & we begin to observe, to develop heightened clarity & we make a conscious effort to be, moment by moment, as accepting of this process as possible.

A 3rd axiom is the axiom of "realization". It states that when we meditate in accordance with the first 2 axioms, important transformations will take place within us. These will culminate with some very dramatic experiences which represent permanent transformations, such that we no longer feel trapped in the mind-body process. Therefore we will realize an abiding, constant sense of freedom & fulfillment, which is independent of conditions & circumstances.

Posture for Calming Mind & Body

Shinzen: The posture aspect in meditation is related, I would say, to developing calmness of the mind & body. Calmness of the mind & body is virtually identical with one's ability to focus & concentrate & concentration plays the role of what we might metaphorically call a microscope.

You turn that microscope towards aspects of the mind-body process & observe them. So if you sit in a posture that is "perfect", it is true that it is easier to get a settling of the mind-body & at the same time it involves an alertness. The settling, plus the alertness, is the microscope.

However, a person can begin this process of exploration without having a particularly deep state of microscopic awareness & it is also true that it's possible to develop an attachment to certain positions & postures.

I have heard of teachers that discourage the use of special postures, & make you do your meditation as a day-to-day activity, while you work, play, eat, go to the bathroom, etc. This might seem a hard way to go, but that is the method of what is sometimes called sukkhavipassana, or "dry mindfulness meditation".

It's just completely dry awareness; it's not watered by any of the bliss of special concentration states. And you can do that in any posture at all.

Charles: Most of my experience is in what you call dry mindfulness. It's been work I've done in the Gurdjieff tradition, which says develop this self-remembering, this quality of presence in the here & now, a simultaneous awareness of body & psychological self coupled with simultaneous enhanced awareness of that is going on around you.

Certainly there's no special posture involved; you do it in the midst of life. For me to practice traditional meditation, where I'm sitting still in a quiet place, is very different.

Shinzen: Remember, though, some "traditional" teachings are that way, too, like what you call the nontraditional.

Charles: My finding to date has been that these two methods both seem necessary to complement each other. I've learned to produce a certain kind of mindfulness thru self-remembering in the midst of intense activity. It's valuable in a variety of ways.

But it's like learning to balance on an actively moving surface, like surfing must be. There's a very high activity level while I'm doing it. The kind of self-remembering I do doesn't generally get me in touch w/very subtle mind-body processes, although they may be going on in the background & ultimately affecting my foreground experience.

When I sit down  practice the traditional sort of vipassana meditation, the subtle processes are much more visible because they're not being swamped by the activity / noise of everyday life.

At the same time, this awareness at a more subtle level feels like a problem in some ways. A level of thought, i.e., that wouldn't interfere in the hurly-burly of life with a certain high degree of mindfulness now seems like a rampaging storm!

Shinzen: You've raised a lot of interesting issues. We can branch out in a number of ways here. Before we go any further, though, I'd like to clear up a couple of things.

What constitutes a special meditation posture is a posture that allows for stability with alertness. Any posture that allows for that is valid.

There is nothing magic about twisting yourself into a pretzel. Any posture is useful only insofar as it allows for stability & alertness. The fact that the spine is kept upright affects the posture sensors that are connected to the reticular activating system.

An upright posture keeps the activational level of the brain up. If you start to allow the posture to degenerate in different ways you get a direct physiological impact on alertness.

On the other hand, you want a meditation posture that gives you not just wakefulness, but a real sense of "settled-in-ness". In Japan they have been doing physiological research on Zen meditation since before World War II.

They did electromyographic studies of the muscles showing readouts as though they were asleep! They're that relaxed. So you know that a profound physiological change is taking place in the musculature to allow a person to sit in such a rigorous posture with muscles relaxed as if lying down, asleep.

So, it's not so much that the legs have to be crossed, or anything like that, but the position has to give relaxation & alertness at the same time. That could be achieved in a chair, depending on how you use the chair - if you don't slouch.

Skillful Experiencing of Pain

Shinzen: I described these traditional meditation postures as being stable, settled, comfortable. In point of fact, though, to learn them you probably are going to have to go thru years of discomfort. That may seem the opposite of the goal.

As you're sitting there holding one of these postures, you have a baseline of discomfort. You begin to notice that your sense of suffering around that baseline of discomfort goes thru ebbs & flows.

Every once in a while you'll have a significant experience. The discomfort will not have changed, but something in your relationship to it changes - spontaneously.

That's because there are moment-by-moment fluctuations in your level of "grasping" or "resistance". Psychological grasping is your main source of suffering, not the physical sensations in your legs -that is to say, how much you are tightening psychologically around those sensations is the main source of suffering.

You may be spending most of your time in habitual tightening or resisting of the sensations, but if you sit there long enough, every once in a while, just because of the impermanent nature of things, your resistance will lessen for a moment, just spontaneously.

At that time you begin to make a correlation. Diminished "resistance" brings about diminished suffering. You literally train yourself out of the habit of suffering.

What you learn in this way with respect to pain of physical origin is immediately generalizable to pain of psychological origin. Suffering is a function of two variables: one's discomfort & one's habit of resisting that discomfort. Put mathematically: s = f(d,r).

Charles: But I wonder about "unnecessary" pain. i.e., Shinzen, you don't have us wear hair shirts when we meditate. Hair shirts, as were used in medieval Christian mysticism, would definitely add to the pain. You don't have us lean sideways ten degrees, which would considerably increase the muscle strain & consequent physical pain.

Shinzen: Pain does two things. If it's experienced in a "skillful" way, the energy in pain will break up the knotty, hard parts of one's being.

This is true whether the pain is of physical or psychological origin. On the other hand, if pain is experienced in an unskillful way, it does just the opposite, creates more knots, making a person brittle & rigid.

Therefore, there's nothing whatsoever to be said in favor of pain per se for meditators. It can just as much create new blockages as it can break up old ones.

Everything depends on one's degree of skill in experiencing it. Very little depends on the intensity of the discomfort itself. A small discomfort greeted w/a large amount of skill will break up old knots. A small discomfort greeted with a large lack of skill will create new knots.

The same is true with respect to big discomforts. The trick is not so much to endure massive doses of pain, but to develop that skill which will allow you to get the maximum growth out of whatever happens to come up.

i.e., sometimes I'll do a practice where I'll lie in bed & be completely motionless for several hours. Somewhere along the line I feel that I'd like to move part of my body in some little way. I get subtle pressures here or there. I find that if I can detect & open up to those subtle pressures completely, I really get somewhere.

These minor irritations are likely to come up at any time, so if you can greet each with great skill, they're opportunities for growth.

"Skill" with sensation means to be relatively more clearly aware of the sensation & relatively more accepting of the sensation than you would be otherwise.

When a person greets a minor pain with great awareness & great acceptance, then it has a much more powerful growth effect than to greet a major pain with grudging endurance.

This was nicely summarized by Thomas Merton. Merton was a Christian monk with a great appreciation of the Eastern meditative traditions - not an uncommon combination nowadays. I'm paraphrasing, but somewhere I remember him saying something like

"I did not become a monk to suffer more than other people, I became a monk to suffer more effectively."

Learning to Relax

Charles: In my reports on my meditation experiences, I noted that when I settled down to meditate & I consciously put attention to my body, one of the first experiences is that of tension patterns.

Sometimes just being aware of them results in their automatically relaxing, sometimes it doesn't. It's variable. If you feel an obviously useless tension, such as noticing that you're sitting there clenching your hand for no good reason, should you deliberately relax the tension, or should you just study it as it is?

I think you already said something to the effect that you would be mindful of whatever it is you do with it.

Shinzen: You've just asked a really interesting question. I believe that there are two ways of learning relaxation, because there are two distinct levels at which a person can relax.

I speak of top-to-bottom relaxation vs. bottom-to-top relaxation. "Top" refers to the surface conscious mind, "bottom" the deep unconscious.

Top-to-bottom relaxation is what most people think of when they think of relaxation. It's voluntary relaxation, like a progressive relaxation where you make an effort to relax.

When a person sits to meditate I think it is good to do whatever possible to relax the overall body. I usually try to get an overall sense of the body relaxing. I call it a "settled-in" sense.

i.e., I notice that during sitting sometimes my shoulders will come up, so I'll relax them as an act of conscious intention.

This form of relaxation, although it's valid & useful, is also limited, because there are certain things that you can't relax intentionally, like the kind of intense sensations that come up when you stub your toe.

You can't go thru a progressive relaxation & just relax the sensations going on in your stubbed toe. And what about the sensations that go with a stubbed ego?

For that type of phenomenon, it's desirable to learn about a second kind of relaxation which I call bottom-to-top.

Bottom-to-top relaxation deals with the source of tension which is deep within the unconscious mind & way out of the range of conscious control.

How can you