Post #137: The Teaching Prison of Our Sensations

5 Sep. 2024

     I gather that some human beings actually experience life as safe. I find such a perspective as incomprehensible as they may find this text. Luckily for them, they may set my musings aside much more easily than I my life.

     I console myself that however uncomfortable my position may be, at least I am not alone. As Thomas Hobbes reported in his Verse Autobiography (line 25 ff.), “my mother dear did bring forth twins at once: both me and fear” (she went into labor upon the shock of hearing about the invading Spanish Armada). Perhaps my own very premature birth set the stage in comparable ways, though my parents insist that I was, by all outward appearances, a cheerful and a happy child. The two are not perhaps entirely incompatible: a disposition to watch life with a nervous eye may be tiring, but it does not mean that things will turn out badly more often than for the less wary; in fact it probably means the opposite, most of the time, the considerable costs of wear and tear excepted, of course.

     One of the most impressive statements about the inveterate precariousness of life that I have always felt so keenly in my bones, I owe to none less than Jean Calvin, about whom I wrote my dissertation (believe it or not):

Innumerable are the evils that beset human life; innumerable, too, the deaths that threaten it. We need not go beyond ourselves, since the body is the receptacle of a thousand diseases... Wherever you turn, all things around you not only are hardly to be trusted but almost openly menace and seem to threaten immediate death. Embark upon a ship, you are one step away from death. Mount a horse, if one foot slips, your life is imperiled. Go through the city streets, you are subject to as many dangers as there are tiles on the roofs... But if you try to shut yourself up in a walled garden, seemingly delightful, there a serpent sometimes lies hidden. Your house, continually in danger of fire, threatens in the daytime to impoverish you, at night even to collapse upon you... Only half alive in life, man draws his anxious and languid breath, as if he had a sword perpetually hanging over his neck.*

     Calvin, like many a man and woman of anxious disposition, found his refuge in faith. Perhaps so do I, though in a more roundabout way. I’ve heard Jordan Peterson talk about how some individuals just happen to be so constituted—to some extent as a result of past experience, in greater part owing to their basic temperamental disposition and hardwiring—that the threshold for all manner of negative feelings (pain, shame, fear, discomfort, embarrassment, awkward self-consciousness, etc.) is simply lower than it is for others. And not only that, but when they occur, they are felt more intensely. (These individuals will tend towards being more introspective, neurotic, and disagreeable, categories of personality traits of which Peterson makes much.)

     The way I would conceptualize it, coming at the issue from a Vipassana angle, is that some of us are simply more exposed to feeling unpleasant sensations, and to feeling them more sharply, while others struggle more with the opposite challenge of getting carried away by their pleasant sensations (a real danger on the Vipassana circuit), or with perhaps not feeling much of anything. Consider the implications: if one happens to be especially prone to these maddening inward sensations, no amount of external success or remedial action can ever make the fundamental problem go away! Anxiety is practically inevitable, because one can never know, even a moment ahead, how long a precarious spell of pleasantness might hold, or what might trigger the next dreaded episode of perhaps severe unpleasantness, because it can take very little, most of it not under one’s control.

     Just as the Dhamma teachers say, there is no way to be safe in such a situation, even if externals could be brought under perfect control, which of course they cannot. Not only circumstances and other people, but one’s own uncontrollable inner states will constantly threaten the real basis of one’s well-being, and the result will be a near-constant sense of “feeling uncomfortable in one’s skin.” I don’t want to exaggerate this diagnosis in my case. I would not say that my days are merely a succession of such miserable moments; nevertheless, the sense of vulnerability is very real, and the difficulty of unruly inner states, quite serious, though not critically severe.

     The question it raises for me, not for the first time, is why, once this discovery has been made and the diagnosis has been accepted, it remains so difficult, even many years into the struggle, to keep up with the recommended regimen—and not lapse regularly in the only thing, by one’s own best judgment, promises to go to the roots of the problem. One reason has to be that the habits even of one ongoing human lifetime (to say nothing of the countless other forms of creaturely existence to which we are heirs, via an evolutionary inheritance that goes all the way back to the beginnings of life on our planet) must be formidable in the extreme. For aeons already, though taking different forms, we have, at the genetic level, existed as sentient creatures guided by the simple but highly effective signaling mechanism of precisely those pleasant versus unpleasant sensations towards which we are now trying to develop some mediative distance. The very idea is remarkable enough, and distinctively human; that we should hope to reprogram ourselves in this manner, steeply uphill from the first, against the powerful currents of life itself, is so bold, if you consider it in its proper perspective, that one might well come away awed not so much by the project as by the scale of our ambition. No wonder the Buddhists make so much of the unique potential of a human life.

     The other half of my answer would be that even if success is possible in principle, it requires such a high level of commitment and discipline to maintain one’s sittings reliably, day in day out, through easy and difficult times alike, that those particularly sensitive to their own sensations may again find it almost inconceivable to keep going. Then again, those who find the Path the roughest also have the most to gain for it, and temperamental differences are not the decisive factor here. If one thing is certain for everyone on the Path, it would be that maintaining a proper daily practice is the most difficult thing of all, harder certainly than the retreats, and harder too than keeping the precepts at least in a general, rough-and-ready manner, this side of saintliness.

     To keep up any regular meditation practice, even for only a few minutes a day, but sustained for years and decades, nay for an entire lifetime, is no small thing; to do so with the full prescription-strength regimen—two hours without fail, one in the morning, one at night—can be so overwhelming a demand on one’s time and determination that even relatively serious meditators often dismiss it out of hand, as if it were simply out of the question, or else they founder on the shoals of attempting it, after a few weeks, or a few months. Beyond the first full year, Goenka promises, it should become easy. Alas, I have not found it to be so, even after two years, and close to three; but perhaps that’s because I never got it quite right, even at my most diligent and determined, who knows. Alternatively, I may be an especially difficult case. Neither explanation pleases me much.

     That said, while staying fully on track is indisputably difficult, heroically difficult perhaps, it is certainly not out of the question; in a sense it is the question itself, and the beginning of the answer too. On the most pragmatic, undogmatic and unphilosophical understanding of Vipassana, the practice may be said to turn on nothing other, fundamentally, than this new relation to be cultivated with one’s own sensations. If so, what could be more important, as the foundation of everything else, than keeping up one’s daily training, precisely because almost everything else in life pulls and pushes us so strongly in other directions? If what we have before us is a reconditioning technique at bottom, painfully slow and inefficient as I have admitted many times, but the most truly radical (in the sense of going to the roots) remedy we have not only against this or that ailment or affliction in life, but against the problem of sentient suffering itself, then how could we keep hesitating and dallying? But of course that is what most of us continue to do, long after we are ready to concede that we should surely get our act together more consistently, if we know what is good for us. And that would include me, duh.

     From contrary quarters, some of them highly situated, one hears not infrequently that regular sittings are of no great significance, and that what one should cultivate instead is a capacity for awareness and mindfulness throughout the day. Very well, in the same sense in which one might say that the three main meals of the day are not decisive for managing one’s waistline, but that one should instead be mindful of whatever one eats at any time; or that going to the gym is not what counts, because one “only” needs to stay physically active in general. These are half-truths at best, distractions and pretenses at worst: for most of us, most of the time, a basic everyday regimen is simply indispensable for keeping the wolves at bay. Just as we brush our teeth two or three times a day, and we eat at typical hours according to rules we establish for ourselves (or that circumstances suggest or require), or we go to the gym on a regular schedule, though we may handle it as flexibly as our lives require, so the sittings are not optional extras for spiritual amateurs, to be scoffed at by the pros, but the very practice itself. It may sound overly mundane and pedestrian to some, but the most basic verities in life often have such a homely, humdrum tone about them. Meditation or medication, as I’ve concluded; and the latter would have to be taken regularly too, to be effective.

     For me at least, the picture could not be any clearer. If there is any hope of ever living at peace with my sensations, then neither chasing after the pleasant ones, nor running away from the unpleasant, has much prospect of success. The former (pleasant), while occasionally attainable, usually with much effort and modest returns, are not nearly reliable enough, and even when they are, they stoke the fires of an already formidable addiction, the most unacknowledged of all, which we are all suffering from, if only we look closely enough. The latter (unpleasant) are simply not subject to the kind of control I would need to ever become reliably comfortable in my skin.

     So there I am, once again, before the quandary that I have arrived at many times before. I see the bottom line clearly, and no way around it. The diagnosis is unanswerable, the confirming experiences are on internal record and stored in memory. Yet I struggle with the obvious, I resist it, before long I lapse again; yet, fight it all I want, I can come up with no better answer. The game of sensations, played with a modicum of success for a while, can seem fun, but it is bound to issue in frustration sooner or later; it offers no real solution to the fundamental problem, and the terms of engagement, over time, get progressively worse, from what I can tell. Facing ageing, sickness, and death is no fun whatever tools one may have at hand; having to do so without the Vipassana is something I would rather not imagine. I do not take sanity for granted as it is; without the practice I would go mad for sure, or rather, I would have already gone to pieces (on the generous assumption that I have been able to keep things together, more or less).

     Growing a thicker skin, as they say, is not an option; I have tried that too, and it doesn’t work. We must inhabit the skin we’ve got, not the one we would like to have; and anyway, having a thicker hide comes with its own hidden costs. Learning to control directly the ephemeral stream of one’s moods and sensations might be a nice super-power to have, but it is just that: a big-screen fiction for superannuated children. Of course booze and recreational drugs of all kinds can work wonders in giving you more pleasant sensations temporarily, but all that must be paid for with even greater pains and discomforts afterwards—not only because of the various damaging and dangerous side-effects, but even in principle, since when you are coming from hot water back into the lukewarm that you found insufficiently titillating before, it can only feel all the more tepid and unsatisfactory now by comparison.

     One can play around with the brain’s chemistry in more subtle and refined ways, and I keep acknowledging the legitimacy of such strategies, all the way up to the heavy medical guns where a productive or emotionally tolerable life is not otherwise possible.** I am not finding myself in that situation; no imperative medical demands are forcing my hand; my life is productive enough, and tolerable, only not nearly as joyful as I would like it to be, let alone as blissful. The problem is therefore not a straightforward medical one, nor tangential in the sense of calling for this or that tinkering strategy: it looks like the problem of life itself to me, of how to make one’s peace with it at the ultimate level, especially in view of inevitably declining vital force (ageing, sickness, and death again). Chemical remedies may slant the field, perhaps favorably; but they involve delicate trade-offs and cannot decide the profound contest playing itself out there, for the prize of our souls, one might say (speaking loosely), and I remain deeply unsure how helpful the medical options ultimately are in that respect. Such spiritual scruples would not stand in my way in extremis, before a true medical emergency; but that is not what I am facing, despite troubles enough of a more ordinary kind.

     Whether my particular life should be judged, comparatively speaking, a happy or a good one, or perhaps even blessed in some ways, is not at issue. We are not dealing with a game for points here, or an assessment exercise, however often it may get played that way. The question before us is one of where, and how, to make one’s temporary home; where to take a stand and fight, to the death if necessary; and where to look for the exit—I mean on what terms and with what purposes and ends in mind, not whether to reach for the rope or the gun. I am glad that I have at least arrived at a general direction and a broad strategy, even if my speed and constant stumbling leaves something to be desired. Dreaming is not my thing, as I’ve said in the previous post. So keep walking! What else?

     We do need to find a way out, only not just out of this life, or out of our most pressing miseries, but out of the familiar terms of existence altogether. And paradoxically, the only such way out may be no way out at all, but a way in: not towards comfort as against one’s often recalcitrant inner landscape, by trying to force pleasant sensations on it and unpleasant sensations out, or by numbing or distracting or variously intoxicating oneself, but by the establishment of equanimity, with all sensations at the deepest level.

     It should be clearly understood that such equanimity with one’s sensations does not mean ignoring or suppressing anything, but rather noticing and continuously observing what one is feeling without blindly reacting to it. Only by such a discerning way of responding to the sensations is it possible to remain alert to the often vitally important signals they send, without therefore driving oneself crazy because one is completely identified with them and therefore exposed to every little ripple, sometimes to devastating effect. When related to in the usual way, with automatic identification rather than proper awareness and detachment, our sensations are the bars of the cage in which we are trapped; but when they are made the object of wise observation instead, they turn into tools of liberation, teachers and turnkeys that can let us out of our cells.***

     On the way to becoming equanimous in this radical manner, I see no other route than learning to see these sensations as not properly yours at all, not subject to your control—but rather not-self, ephemeral and fleeing phenomena that belong to no one, not essential experiences that define you in contrast to everything else. Yes, this is all a very a tall order indeed, I  quite agree; but how could attempting to rewrite the basic terms of our existence be anything else? If you think you can do better by drifting along with the usual program, then go ahead; I often wish I could too, if only that strategy in life yielded more satisfying results. In my experience it doesn’t, though not for want of trying, even now. If you are different, do it your way, and good luck! May all beings be happy.

*Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xvii.10.

**I’ve said it before, but let me stress it again: I do not in any way question the gravity of debilitating depressions. What I am saying (see #32) is that clinical depression in the severest sense looks to me like the darkest end of a very wide and complicated spectrum that runs from the ordinary blues of life, via the navy and midnight shades, all the way to the pitch-darkness that can swallow up all light and life like a Black Hole. I have not said a word against medical interventions on the darkest end of the spectrum; all I am insisting on is that while medical treatment may be imperative in some cases, it is much less so in others, and that the different layers of the problem overlap in such complex ways that ready formulae seem not very applicable to me. I would no more be in a hurry to prescribe pills than would I withhold them from anyone who is convinced that they are the right way to go. It’s the waverer in between whose position raises the most tricky questions, whether on the meditation or the medication side of things.

***Goenka uses the image in his 3-Day discourses, to great effect. I think it was Ledi Sayadaw who in one of his classic manuals likens the sensations to a bustling old railway station from which trains depart in all directions and to the most contrary destinations. From rebirth in the highest realms to the torments of the lowest hells, from endless rotating in misery to finding a way out of the cycle of Samsara at last: everything depends on how you interact with and relate to your sensations.