See­ing Past My Sto­ries

Loyal reader Jon Pol­mar (the host of my May webi­nar) sent me a link to an arti­cle on Mind­ful­ness

The basic point of the arti­cle is sort of two-fold -

Whoopee! Sci­ence has now, cat­e­gor­i­cally and for­ever, using MRI! Oh MY! tech­nol­ogy, proven the exis­tence of two states, or two ways of perceiving.

Some­thing the Bud­dha dis­cov­ered 2,500 years ago, sit­ting under a tree.
Thank God for sci­ence, eh?

I’m really only slightly annoy­ing myself here. I sup­pose, as the arti­cle sug­gests, it’s eas­ier to teach mind­ful­ness to busi­ness folk, and “ordi­nary cit­i­zens,†by remov­ing the “taint of reli­gion†from the equation—more will sign up for a sec­u­lar “mind­ful­ness course.†To quote the author:

My annoy­ance, such as it is, is about how play­ing games like this throws the baby out with the bath water. Jack Kornfield’s new book, The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Uni­ver­sal Teach­ings of Bud­dhist Psy­chol­ogy, rightly points out that the Bud­dha was right on with his under­stand­ing of the work­ings of the human mind and heart. His lessons for under­stand­ing and focus are as accu­rate now as then.

In other words, they aren’t going to get “bet­ter†once we turn on the MRI! Oh my!

OK. Rant over.

Rather than get into com­par­isons, let me just say that Bud­dhism has long iden­ti­fied the two realms or per­spec­tives regard­ing how we view our selves and that which is around us. We might think of them as “absolute†and “rel­a­tive.†This are equiv­a­lent to the article’s expe­ri­en­tial and nar­ra­tive.

So, let’s just unpack them, using some of the stuff from the above article.

The Nar­ra­tive Baseline

The Expe­ri­en­tial Experience

How This Works

“Stuff†comes in through our six senses: sight, hear­ing, smell, touch, taste, and ‘mind’ (as he sneaks in the Bud­dhist perspective…)

Thus, expe­ri­ence comes first, and is sort of a cou­plet: there is an organ and a func­tion. Eye and vision, ear and hear­ing, etc. Mind is cou­pled with sense impres­sions, feel­ings, etc. and is actu­ally the ‘thing’ that hap­pens after each sense is trig­gered. i.e. Nam­ing: “That smell my nose is smelling is baked bread.â€

In other words, pure expe­ri­ence is “nar­ra­tive free.†It’s one expe­ri­ence, and then the next, and then the next, never cling­ing to or attach­ing to any of them. That this is not the norm should be obvious.

No, typ­i­cally an expe­ri­ence leads to our assign­ing a story or nar­ra­tive to it.

Remem­ber, the Nar­ra­tive net­work is the norm! There­fore, almost instan­ta­neously, the nar­ra­tive net­work kicks in, and begins the process of telling you a story. We get so caught up in our story-telling that we lose con­tact with what is actu­ally going on.

Let me quote the author’s recap:

Remem­ber, mind­ful­ness is typ­i­cally taught through meditation.

Here’s where the author’s take gets, well, lazy. He pooh-poohs med­i­ta­tion as being the nec­es­sary approach to learn­ing to be mind­ful. Instead, he posits tak­ing time to notice sen­sory input. He reduces this fur­ther, to his prac­tice of tak­ing 10 sec­onds before a meal to take 3 mind­ful breaths. He writes:

The prob­lem here is that telling some­one to be mind­ful, and then leav­ing it to chance and cir­cum­stance, typ­i­cally means that noth­ing much changes, as peo­ple are lazy and don’t like change. (See the first quote from the arti­cle, above.) And… I would sug­gest that this half-assed approach is des­tined to give you a glim­mer and a taste, but not to cre­ate what is required; the abil­ity to dis­tin­guish between, and acti­vate either state by directly shift­ing your focus. The author is cater­ing to the masses, who want it “fast, easy, and now.â€

The prob­lem with this is that, with­out a dis­ci­pline, we sim­ply do not remem­ber to focus in on the expe­ri­en­tial state. He acknowl­edges this dif­fi­culty, and yet quotes the Farb exper­i­ment to pro­vide the “science.â€

Hmm.

The Farb study is the basis for the arti­cle, and Farb used the tra­di­tional, 8-week Mind­ful­ness train­ing devel­oped by Kabat-Zinn.

In other words, the peo­ple in the study were taught to med­i­tate every day for 8 weeks. Kabat-Zinn’s approach is decid­edly with­out Bud­dhist trap­pings, (being a Zen guy, I’m not much into the trap­pings anyway.)

The above quote gets it back­wards. The Farb exper­i­ment involved med­i­ta­tors. Med­i­ta­tors were the group that was tested. The study does not sim­ply prove the exis­tence of two mind sets, nor does it sim­ply demon­strate “notic­ing.†It demon­strates that med­i­ta­tors more eas­ily dif­fer­en­ti­ate the two states, and this is because they spend more time actu­ally prac­tic­ing. You can’t do this in 10 sec­onds, before a meal.

Learn­ing to let go of your story, your nar­ra­tive, is a moment-by-moment let­ting go of clinging.

We cling to sto­ries about our­selves, about oth­ers, and about the
world—and none of the sto­ries are true. Remem­ber, the nar­ra­tive approach is the default behav­iour of our minds and egos. When bored, pre­oc­cu­pied, or out of touch with the per­cent moment, our minds con­coct highly detailed, rich sto­ries— out of noth­ing. And then, we fight, we argue, we demand, that oth­ers accept our fic­tions as true.

Mind­ful­ness gives us the option to step away from the sto­ries, into the direct expe­ri­ence of living.

More on this, using the senses to guide, start­ing next week.

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