the cessation of fear

in a search today i discovered that Science News put a Buddha on it’s cover for the Feb 17th, 2001 issue and covered a group of researchers who were studying mystical experiences. i found a mention of this in a 2001 zen sangha newsletter. in that they summarize one experience:

The report begins with a description of the experience of neurologist James H. Austin, who, after 8 years of Zen training, spent a sabbatical year at the London Zen Center. One morning, while waiting for a train, he suddenly felt the loss of his “I-me-mine” perspective, and the scene around him seemed to acquire an “absolute reality, intrinsic rightness, and ultimate perfection.” He felt that his experience was impossible to fully describe, that he had nothing to fear, and that he immediately took himself less seriously. In his book Zen and the Brain (1998, MIT Press), Austin described how the experience inspired him to initiate a scientific investigation into the neurology of enlightenment.

i’m quite struck by this theme, and ani pema chodron mentions it in her writing too, that meditation can lead to the cessation of fear. but it doesn’t seem to do so by checking out of our situation particularly. it’s the removal of fear within the messiness of the world. sorry if i sound like i’m selling something. but i hadn’t heard this particular claim when i first started meditating. and i’ve had some small tastes of it personally. but that kind of fruition is very very appealing.

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alan wallace on science and buddhism

salon published an interview with alan wallace, who is both a student of the dalai lama and former monk as well as a scientist pushing for a new discipline of contemplative science. he does a very interesting job of theorizing how reincarnation might be possible and scientifically tested. very compelling but relatively short four page article.

creating contrast

meditation seems, at a basic level, to be just about creating contrast in the experience of our mind so that we can see it more clearly. thoughts and emotions that are obviously overblown are never really a problem for us, because we see them and know instantly, “oh i’m overreacting”. it’s like they’re too bloated and they pop on their own.

but the thoughts and emotions that are less bloated, or slightly fuzzy and distant, are the ones that linger and start to rule our world.

so with meditation and other techniques, one can increase the clarity until the stuck emotions in our minds and hearts bloat and pop. the more precisely we see them, the more the blow up. creating contrast is one way of doing that, either by sitting still and quiet (in meditation) or other techniques like exaggerating what we’re feeling on purpose. the more contrast, the more bloated the emotion appears and the more likely it will pop and the energy will start to move again.

for this reason, in the tantric traditions one is encouraged to lean into the painful experiences - the sharp points in life - to feel them more keenly instead of trying to renounce or push away those experiences in some way. pushing them away is what we’ve done our whole life and it has resulted in them being slightly distant, and thereby they have a more lasting hold on us.

so one way to overcome anger, fear, and addiction might be to create more contrast in the experience of those emotions, by meditation but mostly by leaning into the experience of them more directly and getting really curious about how we experience them - in our body, in our mind, in our environment. then “pop”.

karma ghost

in billyblog’s flash cartoon karma ghost (it’s the left most icon on his site, take it for a spin) he depicts nicely how the tone of our actions tent to plague us. what comes around goes around. he does this with a supernatural metaphor though, and that’s i’m guessing the almost popular understanding of karma in america.

and perhaps that is how it’s presented in old indian texts as well, but everything was presented in an almost supernatural air then. like you accumulate psychic brownie points and then things ‘just happen’.

to me, karma is most simply that the situation we find ourself in makes sense. it’s the result of many causes and conditions, lots beyond our awareness or comprehension, but this situation logically follows from past situations and also past actions. those actions put us in motion, have shaped our attitudes, etched our minds with opinions, ideas, emotions all leading up to this present moment. then we act out of those situations, biases, and habits that we’ve formed.

but then the potentially annoying question is to what degree do we have free will in the present moment, and to what degree are our current thoughts, emotions, and situation both simply the result of past conditions? what if each though were simply a response to current stimuli and past habituation, would any ‘consideration’ or ‘contemplation’ that we perceive as free will truly be free will? how do we experience free will in our lives exactly?

the official teachings on karma that i’ve studied do say that we have free will in the present moment, but for the most part we don’t actually take advantage of it. we let the habitual responses of thoughts and emotions simply dictate our actions and relinquish any free will to habitual mind. we look for what ‘feels right’ and that might just be the vicissitudes of past conditioning basically. but if that’s true, what in our experience of the present moment really would constitute free will?