“Live neither in the entanglements of outer things nor in inner feelings of emptiness.” – Chan Master Seng-T’san
One common hurdle to the development of wisdom is to identify with the sense of expansiveness in practice. By expansion, I mean those states that seem to be more open and free. States like stillness, clarity, silence, & even witnessing. Any state where it feels more expansive, more transcendentally pleasant, more free from states of contraction and suffering. But this isn’t real freedom, only a pseudo-freedom from what we perceive is the real problem… Contraction.
Often times we start a contemplative practice completely embedded in contracted states of consciousness. We are habitually caught up in states of fear, anxiety, hopelessness, & tension. We’re on auto-pilot, at the mercy of these unpleasant states. We chase states of pleasantness, but just as with a Chinese finger trap, the more we struggle to have pleasantness the more stuck we are in contracted states. It’s not to say we don’t spend time experiencing pleasantness or expansion, it’s just that we don’t know how to cultivate a more reliable refuge from these states.
So, when we do discover a way to cultivate more expansive and open states of consciousness it’s a tremendous relief! And it’s quite understandable that we take these new states to be the freedom that sages throughout the centuries have talked about. Or, if we don’t quite believe it’s the states themselves, we at least hope that if we hang out in these expansive modes of experience that we’ll reach this state of complete freedom. I can’t tell you how common it is to hear practitioners in the Buddhist meditation world say that being mindful %100 of the time is the goal of Buddhist practice. But mindfulness, just as with any state, is something that comes and goes. It to is shaped by the winds of chance.
Karl Renz, a German Advaita teacher that I met last year, kept telling us that expansive states of consciousness were a prison. He said in his thick German accent, “Yes, they’re a bigger prison, a more comfortable prison, but still they are a prison.” Like many Advaita teachers, Renz was pointing directly to a freedom that is not dependent on conditions. One of my friends and teachers, Kenneth Folk describes that type of freedom as, “freedom in heaven, freedom in hell.” It’s the real freedom that comes from not trying to change the way things are, or as Seng-T’san suggested, to “live neither in the entanglements of outer things nor in inner feelings of emptiness.”
So, if you find that you’re really caught up in cultivating states of expansion, and some part of you genuinely believes that this is the way to be free, the suggestion I’d offer is this: Get interested and curious in the expansive states of consciousness when they come. Let them arise fully, not avoiding them, cause then you’re simply cultivating a new state of contraction around the expansion. And as they arise, really pay attention to the quality of that experience. Where is the experience located? How big is it? Does it have a physical component? An emotional component? Any visual images or auditory thoughts arising with it? Get interested in seeing that this state is a state, and that it to is dependent & contingent on a whole host of conditions. The more this is directly experienced, the more genuine freedom develops. And what emerges is not an expansive state or a 24-7 bliss out. It’s a direct perception of the way things are.
Vince, this is really an important point that is often overlooked and/or not well understood. We all tend to think that achieving some state is the objective of our practice, but that’s a path that leads to further suffering. A state is a state is a state, and in no mind state can true freedom to be found. True freedom, as you so aptly say, can only be had when we’re able to abide in any state, whatever its nature, knowing just what it is while not trying to change it or to eliminate those states we deem “unpleasant” or otherwise problematic.
Thanks for explaining this,
- Chris
Extremely well said (and so true). Thank you.
“Get interested and curious in the expansive states of consciousness when they come.”
Such an important point. Failing to do this, we experience dismay when those states dissolve or seemingly become inaccessible. And notice the shift that happens when a person gets interested instead of just getting absorbed.
If we fail to investigate the expansive states, we will surely fail to investigate the contracted states as well. At that point, it’s “hello, samsara” yet again.
Great column, as usual, Vince!
Thanks Vince, just what I needed to read.
Vince, you’re becoming such a wonderful teacher. Not only is this an excellent teaching, but it’s also very well delivered.
Vince,
Wow my dharma brother, this is a killler post! You’ve boiled down the “freedom within vs freedom from” awakening principle into a chewable bite.
Bravo!
…now if I could only get my clients to “get” this.
~Patrick Kerwin
Wise words.
Thanks all, I really appreciate the encouragement and kind words. Of course, if anyone has any critical words, feel free to share those as well.
Vince,
Very well said!
Expansively pleasant states will tend to alternate with their opposites. If we cling to one and try to resist the other, we entangle ourselves in a hopeless morass of unnecessary complications which never work out as we wish in any case.
Keep tellin’ it like it is, bro!
Regards,
Mike “Gozen” LaTorra
So nicely said. I think you put it really well so that we can understand more deeply. Something I could learn more. thanks!
What you describe sounds a little like the “inquiry” done in the diamond approach. That is, not trying anything to attain anything, just “understanding” what is there. It is not meditation of course but a practice that is both subjective and objective where meditation tends to be mostly objective.
My addition is that the practice itself is the only achievement there is. Everything else is less important.
Cheers!
Nice stuff, Vince!
Would you say that practices which develop expansive states aren’t worth cultivating, then? Or even perhaps that they *can’t* be cultivated to any reliable degree because – as you say – they come and go?
Twice I’ve determined that I was going to master concentration practice. And twice I’ve given up, asking myself what’s the point and deciding ‘mastery’ isn’t what I’d supposed it was anyway…
I wondered what your take was on the validity – or otherwise – of these practices…
Hey Duncan,
Yeah man, that’s a great question. Theoretically the way I’m answering that question now is that it’s totally fine to cultivate any state whatsoever (and it’s possible with the right conditions), just like it’s fine to get involved with a fun hobby, play video games, enjoy physical exercise, have sex, or experiment with different mind-altering substances. If it’s someones fancy, fine. Certain states may even support giving rise to further insights about the nature of freedom, or could be helpful in other ways, so it seems (again, theoretically) useful.
From a more personal perspective, I’ve had a similar experience as you. I’ve played with the jhanas, learned to go up and down the jhanic arc–Kenneth Folk’s method for learning jhana which is sort of cultivating a soft jhana mastery–and thought it was “ok”. But I didn’t find it all that compelling and I stopped after a couple months.
The best way I can describe it, is that there’s this internal wisdom which has been guiding my practice and my life, and that wisdom hasn’t really led me to be all that interested in mastering these states. Other things have really got my attention now, and feel so much more alive than the thought of further mastery of concentration states; like dream work and psychotherapy for instance. And that’s pretty much what I’m trying to follow. But who knows, maybe in a couple of months I’ll find myself really drawn toward cultivating concentration states.
What practices (if any) have you been drawn to lately?
Me, I’m interested in the moment at looking very closely at the apparent limits of what it’s possible to see in meditation. Such as the specific nature of thoughts and emotions and sensations and what makes each distinct from the others, and also what makes them oddly ‘irreducible’ to nothing but themselves. These limits *are* the human experience – or so it seems… In other words I’m fascinated at the moment by the specific ways in which being human manifests itself…
Sounds very abstract and philosophical, I suppose – but I just don’t care!
Agree with what you said above, and feel kind of relieved that your experience was similar to mine. But I’m left feeling concerned that concentration and state-based practices are (as far as I can tell) the kind that gets most widely taught, and are the kind most commonly associated with Buddhist practice.
Hi Vince, Good post.
If dream work and psychotherapy is something that interest you now I have a couple of suggestions of books/teachers/explorers whose insight I found helpful along the path.
1. Anything written by Mark Epstein is excellent, but Psychotherapy Without The Self: A Buddhist Perspective is amazing. It goes into depth on the more technical definitions of terms like ego, ideal ego, ego ideal, and does a good job of mapping some of mindfulness & concentration practice onto a psychoanalytic framework. Epstein’s work helped me a lot.
2. Dream work – Most of my experience here has been in just trying to apply mindfulness while in a dream to snap out of it…and by doing so this seems to resolve some of the psychological issues that dreams sometimes address. However, I really don’t know much about this area. However, there is a fun read called The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren. If I remember correctly this has 1-2 chapters on lucid dreaming that are pretty fun and the techniques he describes to try to cultivate lucid dreams worked for me for a period of time. It was fun to play around with for a while, flying in dreams, etc. However, there are probably better techniques and discussions out there on how to use dreams to work with psychological material…just don’t know much about that myself.
Hope that helps. Enjoyed the article.
Thanks
Thank you, Vince. About a year ago my counsellor (fantastic guy who introduced me to enlightenment intensives, which, as a plug, changed my life) gently advised me that while expansive states may be more pleasant, more intensive (and may I add, I have discovered, much less fun) work may yield more ‘real’ results. It’s taken me this long to actually google to find out exactly what this “expansive states” reference, heard often in EI circles, is about. Your entire discussion here is very helpful. Bravo.
So…. the ultimate Buddhist is a Taoist? ;^)