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Several years ago, I stayed in the MaeJiis section of a Buddhist monastery on the outskirts of Bangkok. It was one of the very few places in strongly patriarchal Thailand where men and women were considered equal on the meditative path. The abbot of the temple was regarded as a teacher of teachers in Sati-based meditation.

When the monks were doing their intensive retreats, the MaeJiis ran the temple, including the teaching aspects. Conversely, when the Maejiis were practising meditation intensively, the monks were to be seen cooking and cleaning in the kitchens, This mutual respect and support between the monks and the Maejiis was extremely rare at that time and continues to be so even now.

I started to practice meditation spontaneously at the age of four in a culture where Buddhist meditation was almost unheard of, let alone practised. As a four-year-old in a nominally Christian English family, I lacked words to talk about what I was discovering and experiencing. Nobody in my family expressed any interest in what that was - beyond being anxious when I appeared hours late for meals or sat still with my eyes closed for long periods of time. So I found it quite wonderful, over twenty years later, to spend time in south-east Asia amongst other people who were doing what I had been doing all my conscious life.

My knowledge of both spoken and written Thai language was still limited, but I knew enough spoken Thai to make myself understood most of the time and my little, much-thumbed, English/Thai dictionary became my trusty companion. It didn’t matter much at the monastery because I spent virtually the whole time on my own, either in the room or in an area of virgin forest that was surrounded by rice fields nearby.

Long hours of intensive practice and isolation may eventually result in heightened states of awareness. They can be intensely wonderful or intensely scary. With little to distract you or to mitigate the effect of these states, they sometimes have a strong effect on your mind. The effect can be one that releases you from counter-productive mental tendencies.

 

A fearful encounter

Consider spiders: Late one night, I was lying down on the thin mattress on the wooden floor of the room in the monastery, ready to go to sleep. A small amount of light was filtering in, through makeshift yellow curtains. I was lying on my side and when I looked across the planks of the floor to a far corner of the room, I saw a spider – a large black hairy spider – and, as I looked at it, it seemed to grow larger, hairier and more fearsome. I was filled with fear. I did not know whether it was a poisonous spider or not. It just stood there poised and quivering.

I was going to get up and push it out of the door with a broom but I could not move. I was literally petrified with fear. Perspiration drenched me. I could do nothing except be aware of the dread that was filling me. Eventually, exhausted from the effort of maintaining awareness of the fear, I fell asleep.

In the morning, I went, with some trepidation, to have a closer look at the place where the spider had been. In that part of the room, there was a concrete step built up to prevent water from the simple bathroom seeping out onto the wooden floor.

 

The concrete was cracked, and in the dim light, those cracks combined with the gaps between the wooden planks of the floor had, from a floor-level perspective, merged into what appeared to be a spider. There had been no spider. It ad been an illusion. The fear, however, had been real.

So often, our misinterpretation of sense data from our surroundings is like this.We experience fear and suffering due to our ignorance of the true nature of existence.

Dependent origination

According to Buddhist metaphysics, existence is a cycle or spiral of inter-related events that constitute our experience of being alive in the world. Those events start with impressions that come to us through our eyes, ears, skin, etc. The impressions are sorted in the mind and interpreted according to our previous conditioning. Certain emotional feelings and sometimes physical actions are contingent upon those interpretations.

The speed of the processes of reception of sense impressions, interpretation of them and action (or non-action) are incredibly fast. They are like one rotating fan blade following another but, like the fan when it is turned on, the movements of the blades are so fast that we cannot see them – registering sense impressions or thoughts, decoding them, and reacting to them according to previous programming also happens so rapidly that we are seldom aware of it.

In meditation practice, you gradually hone up your ability to perceive this cycle of interactions more clearly. With time, your ability to do this becomes established and you will be able to do it in everyday situations too.

When learning to meditate, you slow down your movements so that your awareness has a better chance to catch up with the minutae of the processes involved.

Movements may be slightly exaggerated or made a little different from how you usually do them, so that the strangeness of the differences helps you to be more aware of your movements and of how you are perceiving them. The slowed-down or exaggerated movements help you to change from interacting with the world as if you are on automatic pilot - to being in a state of conscious awareness. Another way of saying this is that you begin to wake up. Being on automatic pilot is like sleeping. When you are tuned into the world and reacting to it authentically, you are relatively awake.

For example, in one fairly formal way of practising walking meditation, you deliberately become more aware of your body standing - by sensing it and then acknowledging what you have sensed by noting it in words three times.”Standing, standing, standing”. Then you deliberately focus on the intention to walk. This is followed by moving your focus point to your right foot and holding it there as you slowly lift your foot, move it forward and set it down.

At first, this slowed down way of walking feels awkward and unnatural, but it doesn’t take long for you to appreciate how it helps you to become more tuned into and aware of the present moment. When you become clearly aware of each present moment, it becomes possible to break the chain of stimulus: sense impression, orientation to the sense impression according to pre-established tendencies and subsequent reaction - so that the process does not have to go through to its programmed culmination.

When you are tuned into the present moment and aware of what is transpiring and how you are sensing, interpreting and reacting to that, opportunities arise to break the continuum.

If you are interested in the subtle interrelated continuum of mind processes that happen as a result of the contact of sense organs with external stimuli, such as the eyes with light, you can read the Paticcasamupada – The Doctrine of Dependent Origination, alternatively named in English - The Doctrine of Dependent Arising.

 

Breaking the chain of conditioning

Going back to the apparent spider in the dark room, I had been programmed to fear spiders. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially if they are poisonous spiders.

But, in England anyway, most spiders are not poisonous. The vast majority of them are going about their business of web building without causing any harm. But due to exposure to shrieking relatives, ghastly comic book creatures and ghost movies, you can become programmed to experience fear each time you see a spider or similar multi-legged creature.
If you are clearly aware of the continuum of mind moments that arises when you see a spider, you can consciously break the cycle, so that the pre-programming does not click in and fear does not arise.

A word of caution here: understanding the process intellectually is a good start but for the chain to be broken, a more profound and holistic understanding is required for someone to go beyond fear.

 

Waking up

Simply acknowledging that - this chain that leads from stimulus to eventual reaction is a logical possibility - is not enough to free you from becoming caught up in the process.

The Pali word Bhāvanā  ‘mental development’ as some Pali/English dictionaries translate it, has a much more inclusive spread of meaning than ’mental’ does in the English language. It encompasses emotional development, ongoing and refined participation in sensory interaction with the environment and with one’s own inner tendencies and even the development of moral character.

‘Bhāvanā (Pali; Sanskrit, also bhāvana) literally means "development" or "cultivating". When used on its own bhāvanā signifies 'spiritual cultivation' generally.’ Adapted from Wikipedia

The word bhāvanā is sometimes translated into English as 'meditation' so that, for example, samatha-bhāvanā means the development of tranquility, vipassanā-bhāvanā, means the development of insight and metta-bhāvanā may be translated as 'the meditation on loving-kindness. In the context of this article, meditation refers to a state of absorbed concentration on the reality of the present moment.

When you live in a way that does not harm you or others and you take whatever opportunities arise to help yourself and others and, in addition, regularly practice ‘absorbed concentration on the reality of the present moment’, you will become healthier, stronger and clearer in mind.
In a clearer state of mind, you are likely to be able to perceive how we have been programmed to behave in a way that benefits the few and disempowers the many - and also to know that you can overcome that programming.

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