My flawed but brilliant teacher, 1 a recently deceased Andrew Cohen, spoke endlessly on ego, not in its Freudian sense of self-organising principle but in its everyday sense of arrogant self importance, as the obstacle to ‘enlightenment’. Ego in that sense, he insisted without claiming originality, is a wrong relationship to mind. Declaring it impossible to move from wrong to right relationship to thought and feeling in one jump, he argued the necessity of first establishing no relationship to mind. In his view that was the primary point of meditation, though it offers such side benefits as therapeutic calm – the peace which passeth all understanding – and occasional epiphanic experiences. Establishing no relationship to mind, by so withdrawing from the world of karmic cause and effect, is a necessary but, I would discover, far from sufficient condition of attaining right relationship on re-entry. 2
Call me quitter and faintheart but, having spent thousands of hours in meditation, I saw no one – not me, not fellow students, not the teacher – exemplify unwaveringly right relationship to mind. In the world of karma the ego rises, at drop of hat and with the speed of a striking cobra, however diligently we polish our auras and backsides on the meditation cushion. What I have glimpsed though is a game changing possibility for homo sapiens-sapiens, the only species we can say for sure not only knows, but knows that it knows.
… people almost never come together in conditions where the object of inquiry is more important than the diverse egoic agendas at work. And the chances of those agendas being fully absent, even for a few moments, are infinitesimally small. Total suspension of ego seldom happened, not even in these rarified conditions, but when it did the shift was palpable. As was its abrupt cessation. Such states of radically objective inquiry, I came to realise, are more likely on retreats than in any other situation. Though about as stable as a candle flickering in a wind tunnel, that they can occur at all opens up an astonishing possibility for every arena of human enquiry: scientific, philosophical, moral, political.
I wrote that five years ago in footnote 9 to a post – How I joined a cult: Part 4: Who am I? – in an unfinished series I neither rule out nor commit to finishing. 3 The context was a retreat high in the Swiss Alps, led by Andrew in the summer of 1996.
But back to what Eckart Tolle calls the power of now. Five days ago I showcased – see Media Lens on the failure of success – a fascinating piece by ML editor, David Edwards, on which I had a rewarding email exchange. David and I talked a little shop, on the treadmill aspects of writing as we do, within the wider context of the subject of his The Magic Begging Bowl, Part 1 – The Failure Of Success.
Three days ago Media Lens posted Part 2. Before I get to it, let me say to materialist hard-hats 4 that ML have for a quarter century produced splendid exposures, as hard-hatted as they come, of ruling class criminality and media complicity in the same. And to such ‘spiritual’ friends as I may still have, let me say there is no such thing as an apolitical stance. When ‘spiritual seekers’ scorn ‘politics’, the results are at best cluelessness and at worst the delusionality shown by the Andrew Cohen who, after decades of his own ‘enlightenment’ – while insisting the Enlightened One can make no serious mistakes – declared on the eve of America’s lawless plunder of Iraq that “I stand with my president!”
Over to David.
The Magic Begging Bowl, Part 2 – Self-Inquiry
In Part 1, we saw how even the most exalted stars in the celebrity firmament look on in dismay as their greatest successes – Wimbledon titles, World Cups, sell-out concerts – vanish into the magic begging bowl of their heads that can never be satisfied. No matter how many triumphs are poured into the bowl, discontented thoughts continue to blaze through the mind:
‘I could have experienced the ultimate satisfaction, glory and happiness of being considered the greatest tennis player who ever lived, but I blew my chance.’
And:
‘I’ve achieved fame and fortune playing rugby/golf/snooker and thereby missed the fulfilment of contributing something meaningful to society.’
As we have also seen, when these thoughts arise, they can become agonising fixtures for years and decades.
If we find this depressing – what possible chance do mere mortals like us have of finding contentment when even the rich and famous fail? – consider this comment from the American mystic Adyashanti:
‘When we get what we want, we experience this blissful moment – we got what we wanted. We don’t want anything else. The joy we experience, the release that we experience, the happiness, is not because we got what we wanted, but because we’re no longer wanting. We, for a moment, experience the great happiness of not wanting anything.’ (Adyashanti, 19 May 2003, ‘The Gift of Wanting’) 5
Why would ‘not wanting anything’ be experienced as ‘great happiness’? Why would it not be a state of grey boredom? Because the present moment is inherently blissful, because that ‘great happiness’ is always available here, now; but we, alas, are not.
Where are we, then? We are lost at the bottom of our begging bowls dreaming of the next moment, the next goal that will bring us ‘that final, complete thing that I don’t have now’ (McEnroe). Or we are lost in the past, dreaming of ‘the days when everything felt infinite’ (McKagan). In reality, that final, complete thing when everything feels infinite is here, now, freely available to all! It is not ‘there’, ‘then’.
From this perspective, winning a million-pound jackpot floats a million shiny lures drawing our minds away from ‘the great happiness’ of the present moment into misery-inducing thoughts of future happiness supposedly secured by all that money. From this perspective, wealth, fame and glory are fool’s gold tempting us into the mind and away from the blissful present.
It’s hard to believe the present moment is really this friendly – it’s always seemed a bit brutal. Is there any way we can check to see if there’s truth in any of this? By experimenting with directing our attention into our feelings and sensory experiences, we can temporarily escape the influence of immiserating thoughts and experience ‘the great happiness of not wanting anything’. Not because we have got something, but because we have won a respite from the begging bowl mind. That is all meditation is.
A complementary remedy is to subject the thoughts to inquiry. If we test the truthfulness of the thoughts luring us into the future, we can dispel them and again experience ‘the great happiness of not wanting anything’.
‘The Work’
It took me around ten years, with a large, ego-sized gap in the middle, to get my head around Byron Katie’s system of self-inquiry that she calls ‘The Work’. Eckhart Tolle has said of this method that it ‘acts like a razor-sharp sword that cuts through illusion’.
Born Kathleen Reid, it seems her mother was amused by Katie’s early passion for poetry, calling her ‘Byron Katie’. The name stuck.
If that sounds bizarre, so does the idea that revolutionary insights can be gained from completing something called a ‘judge-your-neighbour worksheet’ evaluating our complaints against existence, especially pesky humans.
In essence, the process involves identifying a stressful thought and subjecting it to rational challenge. But don’t we do that all the time anyway? Interestingly, no.
A good example of a stressful thought was offered from his own life by psychiatrist and brain scanning specialist Dr. Daniel Amen, a friend and admirer of Katie’s:
‘My wife never listens to me.’
Doesn’t sound like much, does it? A standard marital complaint, but this is exactly the kind of thought that can smoulder at the back of the head for years, generating misery for oneself and others.
The statement is to be written down and then challenged by the first two of the four questions on Katie’s worksheet:
‘1. Is it true? (Yes or no.)
‘2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true? (Yes or no.)’
Ingloriously, I initially fell at this first hurdle – why ask the same question twice? In fact, both questions struck me as surplus to requirement. Let’s say my statement read:
‘I’m upset with my friend because he never phones me anymore. I always phone him.’
Is it true? Well, I am upset because he doesn’t ever phone and I do always phone him – so, yes! There’s nothing to discuss. Can I be absolutely sure it’s true? Yes, I can – you can ask the question two, three, ten times, the answer will still be ‘yes’! A sobering insight into just how stubbornly and naïvely trusting I was of my complaining mind.
Having written our stressful statement down, we are to think back and anchor our minds in a particular situation when we felt upset about the problem we have identified. The problem may have arisen a thousand times, but we are to cast our minds back to a particular incident. So, in the case of Daniel Amen, he is to anchor himself in a moment – perhaps at home in the lounge or kitchen – when he strongly felt his wife was ignoring him. He brings the situation to mind: what she was doing and saying, how he felt, and he then challenges the statement:
‘My wife never listens to me.’
Is it true? Amen’s answer:
‘No. I’ve written 19 public television specials; she’s listened to every script.’
This is already remarkable – the stressful statement seemed powerfully true. Certainly, as we will see below, it seemed true enough to cause Amen intense suffering. And yet, here we are, having meditated for a few minutes on this most elementary question, and a powerful contradictory example has already popped into view. And if Amen can find one, he can surely find second and third examples of when his wife did listen to him.
The second question:
‘Can you be absolutely sure that it’s true, with 100% certainty?’
‘No.’
This is already clear enough. Even the single example of the TV specials means it is not ‘absolutely’ true ‘with 100% certainty’.
The third question:
‘How do you react, what happens, when you believe the thought, “My wife never listens to me”?’
Amen is again to meditate on the situation in which his statement is anchored, and he relives the pain of the experience. His description of how he felt:
‘Terrible. Isolated. Alone.’
How did his thoughts and feelings in this situation make him act?
‘Distant, irritable with her.’
And what was the outcome of the thought? Irony of ironies, Amen comments:
‘She’ll not listen to you!’
This is a common theme in ‘The Work’ – our stressful thoughts and emotions tend to provoke or aggravate precisely the problem we’re complaining about, even when the original complaint was baseless. Many a ‘jealous guy’ will nod sagely in response to that observation!
The fourth question on the worksheet:
‘Who or what would you be without the thought?’
Here we need to slip into a meditative state where we try to sense how we would have felt in that precise situation without the stressful thought. Amen’s response …
Continue The Magic Begging Bowl, Part 2 here …
* * *
- Yet again an oft recurring principle – don’t throw baby out with the bathwater – raises its head. Depending on mood and purpose, my references to Andrew shift between “flawed but brilliant”, and “brilliant but flawed” …
- A ‘wrong relationship to mind’ means in this context a superstitious one where we draw, usually unconsciously, conclusions about who we are from what we think and feel, i.e. the contents of mind. Walking down the street, Andrew would say, we experience a noble and uplifting idea, and bask in a sense of our innate goodness. Minutes later, assailed by a mean-spirited and cold hearted impulse, we’re laid low by a sense of unworthiness. But to anyone observing, nothing happened.
- I abandoned the project after Part 6: Science – bafflingly my most widely read post, on every continent bar Antarctica – for two reasons. First I’d hit a point where to continue I needed to re-engage with Andrew’s books and audio visual teachings, but had cleared my shelves of them. Second, other concerns were taking up more and more of my time and headspace.
- It’s unfortunate that two very different things share the same label. In ‘spiritual’ circles materialism is A Bad Thing, denoting avaricious illusion. In political analysis it’s A Good Thing that can cut through the cant of venal politicians, and systemically rotten media and other cultural institutions, to get at the real drivers of human history.
- Adyashanti and Andrew Cohen both draw indirectly, though neither exclusively, on Indian mystic Ramana Maharshi. Unsurprisingly, both insist that the momentary bliss of getting what we want is not the joy of success or acquisition but – in the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty – fleeting respite from our blindly shouldered burden of chasing happiness and fulfilment “out there”.