{"id":3439,"date":"2014-05-17T12:07:19","date_gmt":"2014-05-17T16:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/mindfulnessmatters\/?p=3439"},"modified":"2014-05-17T12:07:19","modified_gmt":"2014-05-17T16:07:19","slug":"10-percent-happier-courtesy-of-mindfulness-of-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/mindfulnessmatters\/2014\/05\/10-percent-happier-courtesy-of-mindfulness-of-course.html","title":{"rendered":"10 Percent Happier Courtesy of Mindfulness, Of Course"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"10percent\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Greetings faithful readers. I have been busy finishing up the final draft of my forthcoming book The Awakened Introvert: A\u00a0Practical Mindfulness Skills to Help you Maximize Your Strengths and Thrive in a Loud and Crazy World<\/em> (New Harbinger, Spring 2015). I had a chance to read the conversation between the Harris’s and it got me thinking about dualism versus non-dualism. I’ve excerpted some quotes from that dialog and see my commentary below.<\/p>\n

Dan Harris, author of\u00a010 Percent Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works\u2014A True Story, <\/em>talked with\u00a0Sam Harris<\/a> (no relation) author of The End of Faith<\/em>, on his blog Taming the Mind.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dan: “It\u2019s this thunderous truism: We all know on some level that we are thinking all the time, that we have this voice in our heads, and the nature of this voice is mostly negative. It\u2019s also repetitive and ceaselessly self-referential. We walk around in this fog of memory about the past and anticipation of a future that may or may not arrive in the form in which we imagine it.”<\/p>\n

Sam: “And this is why training the mind through meditation makes sense\u2014because it\u2019s the most direct way to influence the mechanics of your own experience. To remain unaware of this machinery\u2014in particular, the automaticity of thought\u2014is to simply be propelled by it into one situation after another in which you struggle to find lasting fulfillment amid conditions that can\u2019t provide it.\u00a0<\/span>So there is a point to meditation after all\u2014but it isn\u2019t a goal-oriented one. In each moment of real meditation, the self is already transcended.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“When you turn attention upon itself and look for the thinker of your thoughts, the absence of any center to consciousness can be glimpsed immediately. It can\u2019t be found by going deeper. To go deep\u2014into the breath or any other phenomenon you can notice\u2014is to start looking out the window at the trees.\u00a0“It simply doesn\u2019t matter what the contents of consciousness are. The self is an illusion in any case.<\/span><\/p>\n

I liked the analogy of looking at the glass. You can see your reflection or you can look\u00a0through to the world. By following the breath out there in the world, you will\u00a0eventually, reach back to the reflection. All the techniques are like scaffolding (or the raft image the Buddha used; once you use the raft to cross the river, you don’t carry it on your back). Once you have gotten far enough\u00a0along with the project of getting to know yourself as a human becoming (notice I didn\u2019t say\u00a0\u201cbeing\u201d) you don\u2019t need the scaffolding anymore and you can dismantle it. In other words, technique is a transition to a less formal place. That is where you\u2019ll find your reflection, as it were.<\/p>\n

The goal reinforces the self that tries to reach the goal. The major work of the practice is to keep showing up and try to be open to what is happening.<\/p>\n

A lot of what they discussed is covered by the Third Noble Truth. Self is a construction, it is fabricated when we project a sense of ownership onto our experience. When we can stop doing that, we are nirvana. We are not adding anything to the experience of consciousness.\u00a0S. Harris is talking about looking at the\u00a0source of that construction. When we can\u00a0turn attention to that source that construction, seemingly solid otherwise, becomes flimsy and may collapse. When it collapse the duality disappears, if momentarily. I\u2019m not sure if the Buddha used the language of\u00a0non duality, but the cessation of nirvana is the same thing.<\/p>\n

The question of wanting leads us to the constructedness of self. Remember the\u00a0exercise of asking what is it that I am seeking when my attention moves away from now? These departures from the moment are in the service of this constructed self. In fact, these desires are what keeps that building up. When the desires stop, the construction collapses and\u00a0there you are in consciousness without a subject and object.<\/p>\n

Sam: “The non-dual truth is that consciousness is already free of this thing we think we have in our heads\u2014the ego, the thinker of thoughts, the grumpy homunculus. And the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness can be recognized, right now, before you make any effort to be free of the self through goal-oriented practice. Once you have recognized the way consciousness already is, there is still practice to do, but it\u2019s not the same as just logging your miles of mindfulness on the breath or any other object of perception.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes. It is all available to anyone in any instant. However, the more you practice, the more opportunity you\u2019ll have to experience it. It is like what Ben Hogan (I think) said about luck,\u00a0\u201cThe more I practice, the luckier I get.\u201d When I was on retreat, the teacher Rodney Smith talked a lot about presence. I think this was his term for the non-dual awareness. We get to presence by relinquishing all secondary agendas. Easier said than done but that presence IS\u00a0available always but it not reached for as much as revealed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sam: “Technically, it\u2019s not true mindfulness at that point, but even when one is really balanced with one\u2019s attention, there is still the feeling that one is patiently contemplating one\u2019s own neurosis. It is another thing entirely to recognize that there is no self at the center of this storm in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have written about th<\/a>e issue of mindfulness within the current frame of self versus mindfulness as a radical technology for change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sam: “But I\u2019ve learned, as a result of my humbling encounters with my own mind, to charitably discount everyone else\u2019s psychopathology.\u00a0<\/span>I like this statement and it reminds me of one of the more salient fruits of practice\u2014that humility. When you know how complex the brain is and how we are actively involved in constructing our experience and how the self doesn\u2019t\u00a0exist as we think, it leads to a certain skepticism\u00a0about our own mind and the mind of others. It\u2019s a daunting process and, again, our job is to keep showing up and\u00a0make the effort.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Being the host of ABC’s Nightline gave Dan Harris a great platform for promoting mindfulness and his book:<\/p>\n