How's it going?

That Jeffery Martin interview on BATGAP recently was pretty interesting. Defining contemplative progress through a battery of psychological inventories is kinda reductive, but it demonstrates a good point, that contemplative progress increases wellbeing well beyond what could ever be expected. So if bliss, ease and enjoyment are not your experience, it may be worth broadening your vision of the path. There's a complexity to consider, in that the road to that involves getting real with your experience, which is messy as hell. Also, changes in the context of your experiencing are pretty mind-blowing, and in every state you feel like, "this is it, period."

A year ago, just before the context of all my experiencing was inverted/upturned/normalised, I was exposed to a really useful perspective, one which distinguished the progress of insight from that of clarity, meaning that the state of consciousness you're in can be different from the level of clarity about the content and relations between the types of content of your experience. It's true that the content of your experience can seem to matter less as you go into deeper states of consciousness, but it seems obvious that having both together is best. The enjoyment you get from experiencing is dependent upon your understanding of the experiencing. Recognising your true nature as awareness makes all experiences more enjoyable, because they are all understood more, and the unreality of permanent negative experiences is known, as is the unreality of negative psychological constructs that you add to your experience and previously had liability to buy into. Given that that's the case, deepening understanding through both insight and clarity seems worthwhile.

Practicing non-directive meditation will help with both processes; you go into an easily appreciably (in retrospect) non-dual perspective, while simultaneously the mind explores resisted prior experiences and completes them.

Apart from that, the main technique for insight would be reading non-dual literature that resonates with you, and returning to the perspective it leads you toward throughout your day, particularly when you're having difficult, multifacted or mundane experiences. And for clarity, recognising what you are experiencing experientially, labelling it appropriately, and inquiring into it is useful. For instance, if you're thinking about a parking ticket you got, you might ask what emotion is under that. Maybe it's anger. Then you can sit with that energetic experience, see if you feel it in or around your body and see if it changes or just dissolves. Maybe it won't dissolve, but you'll sense it shift into fear - see that fear was underneath it. Then you do the same thing with that, and maybe you'll feel that it's trying to express something to you. But again, though you become conscious of what messages it's expressing to you, you sit with the emotion and don't invest in the story it's telling. And then maybe you sit with the emotion, fully feel the signal it's sending and see that none of the stories it tells are true, that even if they were, it wouldn't matter, and then it will be done, completed. However, you might do this kind of thing a lot, there seems to be almost no horizon on how far you can go with it, it just becomes easier and faster to let go of more and more as you get the hang of it. And ease and enjoyment will become more and more the norm of your experience. If you're not feeling anything, neither "positive" nor "negative" emotions, you're repressing everything. That's not to say that you should sit around all day obsessing over your emotions, perceptions, associations and beliefs, but having that process going on in the background of your life, as and when it comes up, is good. Expressive writing is another way of going about it, if you don't know where to start. Gratitude is also pretty magic, it raises the baseline wellbeing you're in over time, getting you to platforms where your mind is comfortable for more and more old stuff to be seen, accepted and let go. The flip side of gratitude is forgiveness, which is letting-go focused, and causes the higher comfort and wellbeing as a byproduct.

Nothing on the surface of my life would suggest that I'm happy all the time; I live a simple life, several of the people closest to me are going through the worst periods of their lives, and in the last year I had some difficult experiences working in an in-patient mental health hospital. But all of that actually only serves and served to authenticated that this path and these all initially weird-seeming and contradictory concepts are legit. It might sound cold that was internally surfing through peace and bliss while interacting with patients and staff who are slogging through a purgatory, but understanding causes compassion, it doesn't negate it.

And to answer my own question, how am I doing? Well, that's a pretty abstract question. Something I've really been enjoying recently is that I've felt like I'm experiencing the sense of sight the way I haven't since I was a child. Just less subconsciously conceptually filtered, I think, which makes this neighbourhood, which I initially felt I was forced to live in by circumstance, very beautiful. The colours seem very vivid, the forms all unique and overflowing with character, detail and emotion. It's like my sense of sight in this quiet, commuter suburb is all lit and shot by Robert Elswit.

I don't know what this post was about. Or at least, I didn't know what it was about until now, in retrospect. I guess I do think that you can get Zen sickness, or nondual obsession, and there's more to the path than delivering the most awesome koan, sending the former koan deliverer out of the monastry in shame, left to wander the nonduality manscape until they return a koan master, their honour restored. The nondual teachings are the highest teachings (and my current suspicion is that they don't even see fruition until some of the furthest "stages" of consciousness) and they're encouraging of "no traditions" and "no teachers" stuff. On the contrary, I think there's value in every tradition and every teacher. Traditions (particularly those that cater to non-monks) have all the tools for increasing clarity you could need.

If you made it this far, wow. Why'd you read all this nonsense? I don't know why I wrote it. And if you have a koany response having got this far, for the love of Gutei, please only deliver it if you're being at least a little ironical.