🙋Tamler: _Yeah, so this is something that I’ve definitely grasped intellectually and not only that, but I’ve tried to apply it. In fact, I’ve tried to apply it to sleepiness. You know, there are times where, you know, I’m someone who likes to have a few drinks and somebody who likes to go out and, but then sometimes I get tired, you know, like I haven’t balanced it right.
_And in those moments, because of things like what you just said and hearing that from you and others, you know, I can conceptually understand my sleepiness is just a sensation like other sensations and that I have an awareness of the sleepiness, which means there is something that’s aware of that. And, you know, and I think that’s helpful to a degree momentarily in terms of whatever I’m trying to do, like focus on the person who’s talking or, you know, stay alert and, you know, and fun in the environment that I’m being. But it’s just, it becomes, and I think this generalizes to a lot of things, like it becomes more intellectual than something that I feel like is actually helping me. It doesn’t make me less tired. It just makes me aware of something that’s aware of the tiredness that is, but it’s not all of a sudden like I can just focus. So what’s going, like what am I missing there where that happens and I understand it andI can even feel it probably to some degree anyway, like even feel this idea that tiredness is just a pattern of energy that I’m aware of from a condition that isn’t tired and that’s never tired. I get that, but what my, like my real goal here is, is I don’t want to like, you know, I want to be able to listen to this person and not tune out or not yawn or not, you know, and it doesn’t seem to help with that. Is it not supposed to help with that or is there something like a step that’s being missed on my part?
🧘🏻♂️ Sam: Well, sleepiness is really perhaps the hardest case or one of the hardest cases because, you know, if you’re sufficiently sleepy, you’re obviously just going to fall asleep, right? You can’t get behind it. I mean, you can get behind it in perhaps in other ways. I mean, you can, it is believed, although I can’t fully confirm this, although the truth is I have had brief experiences where this has actually seemed to be true. It’s believed that you can actually just remain aware in the sense that you would recognize, you know, meditatively through all stages of sleep, right? So you could, you know, you can fall asleep and you can go into dreamland and then you can go into deep sleep and be conscious of all the while as opposed to just seeming to go under some kind of general anesthesia and then you wake up as thinking that that experience was truly interrupted.
So however agnostic we might want to be about all that, that’s just to say that awareness is not necessarily going to keep you in the waking state even if it can persist, right? So sleepiness maybe is in a category by itself, but you definitely can recognize it as a pattern of energy and again, recognize as opposed to think about it as a pattern of energy. And that is in that moment, you can give you the very vivid feeling of being free of the problem even if the problem doesn’t go away, right? And this is much more, again, you know, if you’re sleepy enough, you just need to go to sleep and then that’s how you wind up feeling better. So you know, people can also experience sleepiness actually just dissipating in meditation and then, you know, it was a state of energy and then it just disappears and sleep was not the only remedy for it.
_That’s true. And I’ve experienced that. That doesn’t help you when you’re at a bar or when you’re like at a dinner with somebody or something like that.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, there’s no, you’re not going to get an argument from me that suggests that getting enough sleep is a luxury we can dispense with. I think being chronically underslept is a bit of a bummer and I know it intimately. But for other things like, again, things like nausea or pain or a mood that is classically negative, recognizing awareness in those conditions and recognizing that awareness never truly takes the form of what it knows, even though, I mean, that can sound kind of dualistic when I put it that way, but it intrinsically transcends what it knows.
The analogy I often use is a mirror, right, where the mirror reflects everything vividly. Everything is appearing without any obstruction, but it’s pretty obvious that the mirror itself is never besmirched by the ugly things. It’s reflecting. It’s never confined by those things. It’s never reduced to those things. And all of those things are an expression of its reflective capacity. And consciousness can be recognized to be mirror-like in that sense. And so it’s useful to, again, with a classically unpleasant experience like nausea, say, to the moment of fully feeling it and giving up. You’re not trying to get elsewhere, right? You’re not trying to put your attention someplace that is away from the unpleasant state. You’re actually giving yourself license to feel it as fully as it can be felt, but from the position of no distance, right?
__So you’re not the self on the one side that is edging closer to the nausea or being more and more willing to get close to it or accede to it or, no, just the center drops out.
And there’s just consciousness and its contents as a kind of unity. And nausea is where it is, right? And then sounds are where they are.
But there’s just this totality of experience without a center.
In that moment, in what sense is nausea a problem, right?
That’s the question that I think should be asked there. And from what position are you motivated to react to it as though it were a problem, right?
If you’re going to resist this experience, where would you be resisting it from when there’s no center? And that is an experience. Again, this is not a matter of reframing and thinking about it in a new light.
It’s a matter of really just dropping the point of view from which you could have stood the moment before in opposition to feeling this feeling or having this experience. And so what I would posit there is that there really is a freedom to be recognized there, which is, again, it might only last for a second or two and then you might be back resisting the feeling of nausea because a thought has arisen which suddenly seemed to become what you are.
You might recognize this open condition without a center, and nausea is just an appearance in the mirror of consciousness. And then in the next moment, the voice in your head might have said, yeah, but what if something’s really wrong? What if I have a ruptured gallbladder? And now you’re talking to yourself, right, and those thoughts are going unrecognized. And then it’s at that level that you’re going to contract again and problematize this experience. But in the next moment, if you just recognize thought as thought and recognize the energy of nausea from the point of view of no center, the problem really does go away. It’s not incompatible with taking certain thoughts seriously and doing what you need to do to maintain your health, obviously. At every step along the way, you can punctuate it with a recognition of the freedom that a truly open awareness gives you.
🙋Tamler: Yeah, and that seems to be at the heart of this practice, as far as I can tell, is this idea that when you take this, I don’t know, broader, more spacious perspective and something like pain or nausea or even tiredness, even if that’s a special case, becomes just one content of consciousness among many that is just part of this big open space. You know, and I actually have some questions about to what extent, you know, like, is there dualism kind of creeping in, but actually not for this question. I do find this to be like just from what I can gather intellectually and also what I can feel as I’m practicing, like this idea of no, you’re really trying not to resist anything, not to push anything away, not to, you want to surrender. I like, I think you use this word a lot, unclench, you know, like unclench your mind and shouldn’t be like a fist.
_Everything should be wide open. And there is an ease that comes with that. And it can, yeah, I mean, it works for me for things like pain, not that I don’t bitch about like, you know, if I, if I’m sick or if I, but I can actually get myself into that mode where I understand the end and that it’s not the problem that I think it is by de-identifying with, you know, whatever it is that I’m experiencing.
_And it’s that this kind of surrendering and lack of resistance that I find most, I don’t know, enlightening about this, this kind of practice. __I have one #question about this though, and, you know, it occurs to me whenever I hear meditation, which you often do in this kind of tradition, it seems like, let everything be exactly the way it is, right? Like that’s part of the practice is you’re not trying to change anything. You are, you’re just trying to relax to the point where you’re not aspiring to anything or trying to keep anything from happening, right? You’re just allowing these waves to appear and you can become a part of those waves as, you know, when you do that successfully. The one thing I kind of miss about the more focused mindfulness practice is that I find, like I wonder if my #concentration is not what it was at the height of, you know, when I was practicing more the mindfulness tradition and maybe I can get more easily distracted because I’m not trying to #refocus on anything.
__I’m not trying to get so I can eat more easily, perhaps drift away and yeah, I can get back and that’s fine. But, you know, when you would notice it before in the mindfulness approach, it was like, well, you had something to go back to, sensation in your hands, sounds, whatever. But here it’s not that, you’re just supposed to re-relax, soften, you know, but I sometimes wonder if my concentration has been harmed by this. I assume that this is something that has been brought up to you or that maybe you experienced somewhere along the way.
The speaker is questioning the impact of non-dual meditation on their concentration. They explain that this method, which involves surrendering and not resisting any sensations, may have led to a decrease in their ability to focus. Unlike traditional mindfulness practices where there is a specific point of focus like sensations or sounds, non-dual meditation doesn’t provide anything to refocus on. The speaker wonders if this lack of a concrete anchor has negatively affected their concentration levels.
🧘🏻♂️ Sam: Yeah, no, that’s certainly a possible pitfall and, you know, in my guided meditations and in the daily meditation, I often have people focus on the breath for some period of time or, you know, go back to sensations and you can really just do this as needed. You can just kind of diagnose your problems as they arise and yes, one problem is you can be imprecise in a way that you’re not clearly noticing emptiness or non-duality. You’re just kind of spacing out and that’s not the same thing. And if you’re just #spacing-out, you’re going to be susceptible to getting distracted more than you otherwise might.
So if that’s (spacing out) happening, you can, yeah, there’s nothing wrong with doing even classically dualistic mindfulness just to sort of tune up your attentiveness and your energy. In the Buddhist framing of this, there are different factors of mind that you’re trying to balance and some of them are things like effort, you know.
The concept of right #effort in Buddhism relates to this and, you know, it’s easy to denigrate effort from the side of non-duality, but that only makes sense if you’re actually able to be non-distracted, right?
The true non-dual practice as presented in a tradition like Dzogchen is described rather often as non-distracted non-meditation.
You’re not meditating on anything. You’ve dropped the artifice of deliberate practice, right? There is no remedy you’re applying because you’ve recognized the way consciousness inherently is because of the intrinsic perfection and freedom of it.
__The term Dzogchen is a contraction of Dzogpachempo, which means great perfection or great completion, right? So it’s already perfect. It’s already complete.There’s nothing to improve. There’s this Zen parable of, you know, somebody trying to polish a brick into a mirror.
You know, you’re just, you’re not going to polish a brick into a mirror. The mirror is already there and need only be recognized. So you’re dropping the remedial philosophy and logic of applying a technique to yourself so as to improve something. _But on the other hand, there really is a difference between distraction and non-distraction, right?
__And if you’re just going to be falling into distraction, you’re not actually going to be recognizing the thing you’re purporting to recognize. So yeah, there is a bit of a needle to thread here between the extremes of practicing dualistically and just not practicing at all.
And you just have to become an increasingly intelligent consumer of your own changes in state to notice when to apply any kind of deliberate remedy to what’s happening or not happening for you.
_Tamler: _So you don’t have a problem with, because I think I do this sometimes with sounds, like to having an anchor of some kind that if you start to notice yourself drifting or being distracted that you can pull back to that. And sounds, I think, seems like a good one in a lot of ways because it doesn’t seem to be at odds with the more non-dual approach or perspective. But at the same time, it is something to redirect attention. So I will do that when I’m meditating and as a way of returning, I guess, to or re-recognizing. But yeah, so…
Yeah. I mean, just to make that point perfectly clear, yeah, there’s no problem with that. And that is the very essence of what the Buddha called skillful means.
“Skillful means” is a concept in Buddhism, also known as “upaya” in Sanskrit. It refers to the ability of a Buddhist practitioner, particularly a bodhisattva or enlightened being, to use various techniques, methods, or strategies that are most effective in aiding others to reach enlightenment. These methods can vary greatly depending on the circumstances and the individuals involved. The idea is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching or practicing Buddhism, and that wisdom lies in adapting the teachings to the unique conditions of each situation or person.
It can seem paradoxical, and there are certain paradoxes here, but there are things you can do within the framework of the dream to wake up from the dream, and it’s important that you do those things. Right now, having woken up, those things themselves were illusory and their utility was in some sense paradoxical. But it just doesn’t change the fact that this is a very standard experience of people traveling this path, that certain things make a difference. And so deciding to pay attention to any of this stuff makes a difference, right?
Most people are not going to learn to be non-dual yogis just by accident, right? So it’s just, you’re just orienting yourself by thinking about these things, having conversations like this, deliberately practicing, et cetera, all of that’s a method. And yes, there is a point at which practice becomes synonymous with dropping all methods and simply recognizing the goal in each moment as your mode of practice, but it’s still important to keep doing the things you need to do in order to accomplish that non-accomplishment.