Just Sitting or Is There More to It?

Buddhism, as a healing art rather than a religion, in its therapeutic mandate of healing human suffering, takes the path of getting rid, not of the Suffering, but of the Sufferer...

Let me clarify...

Buddhism, in its strategic (long-term) rather than tactical (short-term) mandate, is not a "feel-good" endeavor, it's a "feel-nothing" endeavor: "According to Buddhism, the pleasure/pain mechanism keeps people locked into a self-perpetuating cycle of conditioned existence <...>. Any teaching, or medical or therapeutic intervention intended simply to improve the lived quality of people's lives cannot move beyond the pleasure/pain mechanism, because such tools are themselves conditioned responses designed to make people "feel better." in order to break out of the cycle of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, and achieve a state of supraliminal equanimity, an entirely different type of medicine is required, a transcendental one. <...> Dharma leads to a state beyond the very possibility of suffering" (Fenner, p. 2).

That is to mean: beyond the possibility of feeling! Not beyond the possibility of sensing, but beyond the possibility of identification with the sensation. Beyond the possibility of the emotional involvement with the sensation (whether it's of pain or pleasure). In other words, beyond the posibility of feeling the sensation!

Read on...

According to the doctrine of Anatman (the doctrine of No-Self), "a human is composed of five components physical form, feeling, perception, drives and impulses, and consciousness. Even the most cherished and seemingly distinctive features of our humanity - affection, loyalty, memory, talent, aesthetic discernment - resolve into the interplay of these five components. Since each of these components is impermanent and lacking in any defining characteristic, it inevitably follows that the whole that they compose must share those characteristics - it must, in other words, be anatman, ‘no self.' <...> This realization progressively frees the meditator from pain and suffering as he or she realizes that there is no self to suffer . Ultimately, the meditator ceases to exist as an independent entity. His or her conditioned experience transforms into an experience of unconditioned freedom, transcending all notions of time, space, and existence" (Fenner, p. 15).

Bottom-line: Buddhist psychology takes no Self hostage.

"Through repeated meditations over thousands and thousands of hours, they (meditators) thoroughly eliminate all traces of the belief that they are unique and self-existent " (Fenner, p. 33).

In a manner of speaking, the nine digit social security number of your self-other distinctions is reduced to just one number: One.

And in this phenomenological enmeshment you stand to gain the true social security of being One with All.

The King/Queen of Self disrobes the layers of its acquired informational-biographical distinctions in an identity striptease...

So, it seems that the idea behind this type of suffering-reduction and pain management is to basically put you out of the misery of suffering through a kind of phenomenological lobotomy which is accomplished by doing away with the very notion of the suffering Self and/or by erasing the duality of pain and pleasure in the first place...

Is it a mercy killing of individuality and subjectivity or a form of transcendence? You decide.

With this in mind, it seems that in the West, the Buddhist psychology - as a school of therapy - is mostly utilized at a tactical, short-term plane, without the strategic buy-in. Mindfulness meditation is clinicaly taught as a tactic of pain/distress management with the goal of getting rid of Suffering, and not in its strategic sense of getting rid of the Sufferer.

As we (clinicians and clients) fool around with various tools of Buddhist psychology, we often fail to appreciate that these surgical "diamond cutters" in our hands are designed to "grind away the false belief that we have an autonomous and independent existence" as stand-alone and localized Selves (Fenner, p. 30).

The goal of Buddhist psychology is not Self-Growth, but Self-Reduction!

Take the case of Zazen, the "just sitting" meditation.

Here's a description of the purpose of zazen by Peter Fenner: "There seem to be two ways to stimulate an intense observation the ego. One way is to remove all structure and meaning from living , so that the there is neither reason for doing what we are doing, nor any way of determining whether we are on or off track in terms of our spiritual aspirations. In this situation, the ego constantly searches for grounding and reference by creating its own systems of meaning in order to have a purpose and to track its performance and progress. The other way to stimulate the ego's defenses is to impose a severe level of constancy and uniformity on one's physical uniqueness and independence against a background imposed from outside" (p. 39-40).

So, zazen is designed to "stimulate the ego's defenses," a kind of psychological tickle, if not a squirm... Not exactly water-boarding, but clearly a mandate of distress inoculation...

A look into the Nietzschean abyss of emptiness for those of us who keep climbing the ladder rungs of self-growth without having yet worked through our fear of existential heights...

A reality check into our own non-reality...

No wonder that "just sitting" and "doing nothing" stirs up such a panic in the prototypical Western mind that's always on the run from its own emptiness...

As such, zazen, in its strategic mandate, along with the rest of the Buddhist self-deconstruction tool-kit , is not intended as a relaxing moment of respite.

Strategically, zazen is just another way to jog your mind into a state of categorical weightlessness, to shake up the pseudo-gravity of our assumptions about our existence, to knock the mind of its quick-sand ground of illusionary permanence.

Tactically, however, "just sitting" might be a nice moment of contemplative respite during a busy day... And - paradoxically - a way to get grounded.

Where do you go from here? Do you want to use Buddhist psychology on a "feel-good" basis or do you want to try to go all the way into the Nirvanic never-land of No-Suffering?

It's your existential choice.

In the meantime, here's a "feel-good," existence-affirming (rather than existence-disconfirming) take on zazen. Read the following "primer" and try "just sitting."

Zazen: "just sitting."
Such a simple set of instructions...
But so hard to follow!

It is...
It is, indeed, hard to follow a set of instructions that leads a chronically goal-oriented mind into a Nowhere of Purposelessness...

That's right: just sitting is just that: just sitting...
without any attempt to meditate or not-meditate,
without either trying to think or trying to not think...

Sitting is sitting...
Nothing else to it...
It's neither a meditation, nor a non-meditation...
Just a practice of just being...
without any pragmatic just -ifications...

Just being...
Just being in time...
Rather than doing time...
An affirmation of existence for its own sake...

Copyright 2009

Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of "EATING the MOMENT: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008) www.eatingthemoment.com

References:

Peter Fenner, The Edge of Certainty: Dilemmas on the Buddhist Path, 2002, Nicolas-Hays, Inc