“Steve?”
The phone had rung just as I was getting ready for my early morning walk to the cemetery to meet Jake. It was Susan. She sounded out of control.
“Can you come to the house?”
I was not prepared for the scene I found at Susan’s house. Phillip, Susan’s husband, had taken their daughter, Monica, to Belize on a birding trip, and had left Susan at home. The place was a mess—and this was utterly out of character for Susan, whose interior worlds were so well-ordered. I wondered: was Susan eating compulsively again?
I found Susan on the sunporch in her oversized terrycloth bathrobe. She was sitting in fetal position on a corner of the porch swing in a pool of sunshine with Boots the cat curled up next to her.
She lifted her head and looked at me, then covered her head with her arms. “Oh God. I cannot believe you’re seeing me like this. Such a pretty picture.”
I sat next to her, picked up Boots and put him in my lap.
“The hair. The bathrobe,” said Susan, wincing.
“OK, Susan. Forget about that. I’ve seen it before.”
“Oh, it’s just so pathetic,” she said, drawing a deep breath.
“I was in the parking lot of the Stop & Shop with a goddamned cart full of pastries. Last night. About eleven.” Susan looked up. “Tried to call you on my cell. Tried to call my OA sponsor. Nobody home. Finally I just sat in my car and prayed.”
After praying, Susan had found the strength to start the car and drive away. She had slept poorly. She’d just spoken with her OA sponsor when I arrived.
“I left the goddamned cart full of food right in the middle of the parking lot.”
We looked at each other for a moment, and something between a grimace and a smile began to flicker across her face. The image was irresistible: A lonely shopping cart filled with Sara Lee cheesecakes and chocolate truffles. Fully paid for. Adrift in a sea of empty parking spaces.
Susan got up and walked to the window, looking out on her manicured garden.
“Just before I got into the car to drive to the Stop & Shop, I was standing right here. It was like standing on a bridge deciding whether or not to jump.”
She turned back to me. “You know what I wanted? I just wanted complete oblivion. I wanted to get totally lost. In chocolate cake. To bury my face in it. To devour about ten of the fucking things.”
Susan had been shaky for weeks. I had seen it. She had been distracted. Uncharacteristically irritable, and barely present. We had all noticed it at yoga the previous Saturday morning, when she had snapped angrily at Jake, and then at Maggie.
Susan was pacing now, rolling up the wide terrycloth collar to cradle her face. “There’s something going on here that I just can’t bear. Just can’t bear.”
Slowly the story spilled out. Susan had been home to spend some time with her parents in New York City. “I had another huge scene with them.
“I swear to God, Steve,” she began, shaking her head. “We went out to eat. First of all, my mother showed up looking like Astor’s pet horse. Ridiculously overdressed. Then it started. They’re in my food. She’s got her fork in my Cornish hen. He’s got his fork in her profiteroles. She’s criticizing my weight. They’re all over Monica for not visiting them.” Shaking her head now, as if in astonishment, she says, “I got up and stormed out.
“Shit. And I said some very nasty things.”
She picked up Boots. “Steve, this is pathetic. They’re old people now. But I just cannot bear who they are. Jesus, they’re completely enmeshed.”
Susan gave me a slightly desperate look and walked back to the window.
I understood exactly how Susan felt standing on that imaginary bridge: The aversion to being present with the moment. The craving for a different moment, a different mind-state.
Susan’s voice began to shake. “I thought I was beginning to set better boundaries. To take better care of myself. All that yoga. Oh, Steve, I just feel so discouraged. I’m so fucked up.”
She sat back down on the swing. “I hate my life. This is hell.
“And now I’m a middle-aged fat person. Just like them.”
She flung herself back on the porch swing dramatically. “Shit. They won.”
Susan was having a “multiple affliction attack”: craving, aversion, and delusion all at the same time. Talk about the War With Reality. Susan was at war with everything. Her parents. Her career. (She confessed that she’d been refusing to return phone calls from clients for weeks.) She was at war with her own moment-to-moment experience of life. With pain. With sensation. She couldn’t get comfortable in her own body.
Each of us has had an experience like Susan’s—hijacked by a state of craving or aversion that we did not understand. These experiences can be bewildering. Susan felt captive—bound to an invisible chain of events which she could not fathom, much less control. She could see the pattern in this chain of events. She had lived it out over and over again. But she felt powerless over it. Alas, a good deal of human life is characterized by this sense of loss of control to patterns driven by inscrutable motivations. All systems of human transformation are compelled to notice this problem. St. Paul noticed it in his own life: “The good I would do, I do not; the evil I would not do, I do.” Freud spent his life studying it, and postulated an unconscious, which is the repository of these hidden motivations.
How do yogis understand these unseen forces at work in the human experience? I had a personal reason for wanting to know. Not long before Susan’s meltdown, I had had a food hijacking myself. It came with the same feelings of powerlessness as Susan’s had. Since that event, I had begun to study precisely how these unconscious reactive dramas unfold—and particularly how Patanjali might work with such a situation. How would his view differ, say, from St. Paul’s or Freud’s—or Susan’s OA sponsor?
I had been teaching a morning seminar in the Sunset Room at Kripalu—which is located just adjacent to the bakery. Almost every day the Kripalu bakery produces fresh bread, along with a steady stream of scones, muffins, and cookies. I was teaching a seminar on yoga philosophy when I became mildly aware of the scent of freshly baked banana muffins, wafting through the open windows of the room. “Banana muffins,” I thought vaguely when I smelled them.
At the mid-morning break, I found myself in the bakery eating banana muffins. As we all stood around the bakery table and noshed on muffins, I said to myself, “How did I get here?” How did I end up in the bakery eating a muffin at ten thirty AM? For the previous three months, as an experiment, I had been observing a diet with no wheat or sweeteners. These muffins were loaded with both. At what point did I decide to ditch my diet? When was the moment of choice? Or was I choiceless in the matter? Am I powerless over muffins? Am I powerless over these dense states of craving and aversion? Do we have free will, or don’t we?
It turns out that yogis adopted these hijackings—and the allied questions about will, power, and choice—as a central object of their intensive meditative scrutiny. They were compelled to. After all, these dense experiences of craving and aversion seem to be a universal part of human experience. The good I would do, I do not. The evil I would not do, I do. These moments of hijacking by afflictive forces seem to be central stumbling blocks to happiness.
The first response of the yogis was, as always, Stop the world! Stop the world. Quiet down. Investigate. Look closely. How, precisely, have we created this particular knot in our experience? This theme of self-investigation, self-scrutiny, self-study is perhaps the central theme in the great symphony of yoga. Patanjali and his peers were interested in investigating these states closely in their meditation laboratories—using themselves as the objects of their scrutiny. Quite by accident, they found that investigation itself is the first part of a highly effective strategy to attenuate these densely afflicted states. As we shall see, the power of investigation to expose and end suffering will become another major theme in Patanjali’s work.
In the Yoga-Sūtra, Patanjali recommends the strategy of observing these afflicted states so closely that the hidden volitions that drive them are fully exposed.
In their subtle form, these causes of suffering are subdued by seeing where they come from. (2.10)
When foiled by afflictive patterns, says Patanjali, trace them back to their source. Expose their roots!
So, yogis investigated. They looked carefully at the chain of events that leads to these dense states of craving and aversion. They saw precisely how craving and aversion first emerge in the stream of consciousness, and how they influence behavior. And finally, as Patanjali suggests, they were successful in tracing these tendencies in the mind back to their origins. While we may find this kind of scrutiny of motivation and behavior tedious, an understanding of it is an essential building block in Patanjali’s eventual solution. Here’s what the yogis discovered:
1. First of all, when they looked closely at our moment-by-moment experience, yogis discovered that “consciousness” (or citta) is constantly being bombarded by input from the so-called six sense doors. Whatever can this mean?
Let’s begin with Patanjali’s word citta, or consciousness. Patanjali’s meaning of consciousness is rather different from ours. We tend to separate mind and body and think of “consciousness” as more akin to mind, or awareness. Patanjali did not do this. Sramanic investigations had found that consciousness includes both the mind and the body. So, for Patanjali (and in the language of our last chapter) consciousness, or citta, includes all the sheaths of human experience, all koshas—the physical body, the energy body, the mental bodies, even the most subtle bliss body.
And what did he mean by “six sense doors”? The six sense doors include the five senses that we all recognize, of course—taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound. Consciousness is constantly being bombarded by sensations from these senses—bombarded by smell of the muffin; by beautiful sights; by difficult sounds; by painful touch; by delightful tastes. We can see that. But what we may not immediately see is that these “inputs” also include a sixth class of inputs called “thoughts”—which include thoughts, memories, and feelings. Every one of us has over sixty thousand thoughts a day,1 and it turns out that consciousness treats each one of these just like it does a bit of sensory input. Consciousness treats a thought just the same way it treats a smell. So in the meditation traditions these thoughts are referred to as “sixth sense doors.”
In any moment, then, consciousness is being zapped by multiple sensations, thoughts, feelings, and memories. Each one of these zaps (when an input—which is sometimes called an “object”—comes in contact with a sense door) involves a complicated chain of events in the mind-body.
2. The yogi’s next discovery is astonishing—and completely supported by contemporary neuroscience. Consciousness is constantly bombarded by input, as I have said. Then, in a rapid-fire sequence, consciousness evaluates each of these sensory inputs—each one of these zaps. Each input is first “recognized,” and then it is “appraised” as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Every single one!
This is a mind-altering discovery. Consciousness, simply doing its job, recognizes and evaluates each and every input—determining it to be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. So, as we sit hunched over the computer: Ah! Sensation in my right hip! Unpleasant. Or as we drive down a country road, and come upon an outlook onto a lovely distant lake. Oh! Vision of beauty. Pleasant! Each of the sixty thousand thoughts is appraised. Cowabunga. All input from the six sense doors is appraised: Pleasant. Unpleasant. Neutral.
3. Now another critical function of consciousness comes into play: after “recognition” and “appraisal,” consciousness reacts. Yogis found that consciousness reacts to each appraisal with attraction or aversion (or neutrality). To a stimulus it appraises as pleasant, consciousness reacts with attraction. To a stimulus it appraises as unpleasant, consciousness reacts with aversion. And to each stimulus it appraises as neutral, with neutrality. Ah! This sensation in my hip is most unpleasant. I hate it. Aversion arises. Or, Gee, that lake scene is lovely. I like it very much. Craving arises.
4. So, first appraisal: pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. Then impulse: craving, aversion, neutrality. Now, inevitably, comes the final link on this chain: action. In the case of aversion, we push away the object: I unconsciously shift my body in the office chair, and readjust my posture, attempting to alleviate the sensation (unpleasant!) to which I have now become averse. Or, in the case of craving, we reach for the object. I slow down the car, and pull into the outlook (pleasant!) so that I can drink in the lake scene to which I have become so immediately attracted.
Appraisal. Impulse. Action. This same process happens a gazillion times a day. As it turns out, of course, we are mostly oblivious of it. We have highly patterned and conditioned ways of handling all of this activity. Indeed, if we did not, it would overwhelm our capacity to function. However, as we shall see, the practice of meditation sharpens our awareness of this ordinarily subthreshold process. As mind becomes more concentrated, subtle internal events that were previously out of our perceptual range now become identifiable. We begin to notice that living in a human body is like living in an ongoing light, sound, smell, touch, taste show—with thousands of complicated reactions going on at every moment. No wonder we have Puppy Mind.
Cognitive psychologists, using sophisticated brain-mapping techniques, have observed the same sequence of events noticed by yogis. Just after the stimulation of one of the six sense doors, say psychologists, there comes a rapid-fire “appraisal” of that stimulus in terms of “affective tone” (whether it feels good, bad, or indifferent). Psychologists call this “hedonic appraisal.” It is not yet a “feeling,” but just an immediate evaluation of a perceptual stimulus. Immediately following hedonic appraisal, another discrete process happens—the so-called hedonic impulse. This is the impulse to approach the pleasant, or to avoid the unpleasant. This entire sequence takes place in nanoseconds—so quickly that it is entirely out of our ordinary perceptual range. As a result, these subthreshold reactions may imperiously drive us to actions we do not understand—an unconscious chaining of events of which we see only the last link in the chain: action. These contemporary discoveries support the ancient yogic views of the process with remarkable precision.
My muffin moment, of course, followed precisely the chain of events described by yogis: Appraisal. Impulse. Action. An object came into contact with my sense door: smell of muffin. I recognized the object. Muffin! I immediately had a pleasurable sensation in my consciousness. A simple biochemical event. And on the heels of this sensation, I had a reaction to it: I like it! This reaction (pleasurable!) was immediately converted into an impulse for action, as my energy was impelled toward the object. A thought formed out of the reaction, “I want the muffin.” And finally, of course—the action. Suddenly, I’m in the bakery, eating. Yum.
Yes, yum. But what of the consequences? Did I really want the muffin? Need the muffin? Was it a discerning choice? Yogis found that this chain of events—appraisal, impulse, action—runs our lives more than we would like to believe. They found, too, that it often leads to suffering, because we make poor choices while caught up unconsciously in its thrall. Or rather, we make no choices at all.
Yogis studied this chaining intensely. Was there a strategy that could successfully interrupt this chaining of thought, reaction, action? Could suffering be systematically ended? They kept returning again and again to their meditation laboratories—looking for the key.
In fact, they discovered a remarkably simple strategy for breaking the chain. Here it is: Even though we tend to collapse the steps in the sequence—appraisal, impulse, action—yogis discovered that there really are three discrete “mind-moments” here. Three completely different, and separate, events. A highly trained awareness can perceive them each in sequence, and thus can intervene, so that action does not tumble inexorably out of reaction, like the falling of so many dominoes.
This discovery is important: while “appraisal” is an inevitable response to sense-door stimulation, the impulse to approach or avoid is not inevitable. It is highly influenced by our habits and patterns. It is conditioned by our experience. It can, therefore, be de-conditioned. Impulse can thereby be de-linked from appraisal.
Action, too, then, can likewise be de-linked from impulse.
To the discerning and highly trained awareness, the chain can be broken either between appraisal and impulse, or between impulse and action. Of course, this breaking of the chain requires tremendous familiarity with the process of chaining, and moment-by-moment presence with the process—something most of us have not developed. Instead, we have the Stop & Shop moment, and the banana muffin moment.
Naturally, beginners focus more on de-linking action from impulse. The task here is to acknowledge, experience, and bear the experience of the impulse without taking it into action. Feeling the hunger for the muffin, but not eating the muffin. More advanced meditators, however, can actually de-link impulse from appraisal—becoming aware earlier and earlier of the impulse as it arises and muting the intensity of the impulse itself.
It is important to understand what a radical discovery this is: it is possible to experience pain and pleasure without being unconsciously driven to act upon them. Desire itself is not the problem. Attraction is not the problem. Aversion is not the problem.
When awareness is brought to bear on the visceral, biochemical experience of attraction and aversion, the chain can be broken, and a driven, unconscious reaction can be avoided. Here’s the brilliant strategy discovered by yogis: freedom comes through familiarizing ourselves with this chain of events—and eventually recognizing it as it is happening. This, obviously, requires a careful training of attention. And this training is precisely the role of meditation.
So, Patanjali’s advice? Pay close attention. Learn to be present for experience.
Close examination of the chaining of thoughts, reactions, and actions led yogis to another important discovery that concerns our relationship to the object world—a quite remarkable discovery I will introduce here briefly, and then expand upon once our understanding of Patanjali’s method is fleshed out a bit more. Again, we can experience this discovery in the muffin moment. After we devour the muffin, we discover something puzzling. The muffin (the object) doesn’t really completely satisfy me. I want more. Even though I’m not really hungry (I had plenty of breakfast just an hour and a half ago) nonetheless I want, want, crave, crave. Where’s the muffin? It’s gone! Now I experience devouring the muffin as the loss of the muffin. It’s not as though I now have it, possess it, am it. I’ve lost it. This pain on the loss of the object, this craving for more all creates another, and more subtle, loop of duhkha.
At some point in our own personal investigation of duhkha, we will begin to suspect that the relationship between objects (having them or not having them) and happiness is much more complex than we thought. The delusion that it is objects—people, places, things—that are the source of happiness is a subtle distortion in perception with which we will eventually have to grapple. As we shall see in future chapters, yogis found that it is precisely this confusion around objects that is an “erroneous belief” that keeps us at right angles to life.
Several days after her near slip, Susan and I were investigating her experience together, looking at each moment in the chain of events that had led to the parking lot.
“Go back to the moment just before you left for Stop & Shop,” I suggested. “You were standing by the window in your sunroom. You wanted to jump off the bridge. What were you feeling?”
“I wanted oblivion. I just wanted to get lost.”
She looked up for a moment and studied my face. “And, actually, I still do. Right this minute.”
There was a moment of quiet. It had begun to rain, and the only sound now was a steady plinking of drops on the metal roof of Susan’s sunporch.
Susan was breathing fast, almost panting. For a moment she seemed overwhelmed by feelings. But she was staying with them—not moving away from the feelings, but toward them. Into them. Investigating them. The chain was breaking apart.
Finally, Susan took a deep breath and settled back into her chair. She sat staring out at the birdfeeder. “You know,” she said finally, “no matter how painful it is, it’s a relief just to feel it.”
Yogis discovered that the possibility of freedom from impulsive, driven behavior exists in every single mind moment—but only through the practice of being present for experience. This requires that we familiarize ourselves with precisely how thoughts, feelings, and impulses arise in the stream of experience. This is, indeed, precisely what meditation is for. In fact, one word for meditation in Tibetan means familiarization. Meditation is a process of getting to know the mind. It turns out, as we shall see, that this “knowing” itself interrupts these chains of reactive thoughts and feelings.
We are freed from the prison of reactivity only when we can begin to be present for the sensations in the body that result from the stimulus of thoughts or senses. And in order to know the sensation before the whole chain of reaction and action has started, we must hone a subtle awareness at the level of the body.
Mere presence interrupts the “chaining” of thoughts and feelings as they tumble toward action. If, for example, as I was teaching my class that morning, I had noticed, “Ah, pleasurable sensation in the body—muffin,” and felt that sensation fully, observed, allowed it to be present—the attraction would have passed away eventually. The chain would have been broken right there. And I could have chosen more consciously. The stage would have been set for me to explore my reality. How is it, really, right now, in my body? What are these sensations like? What does this craving feel like? I could then have asked the all-important question: Do I want to choose the muffin? Or not?
In their subtle form, these causes of suffering are subdued by tracing them back to their inception,” says Patanjali. Here, then, is the winning strategy discovered by strivers:
~ Train awareness to familiarize itself with the internal chain of events leading to the arising of craving and clinging, aversion and hatred.
~ Let awareness penetrate the experience of craving and aversion in its visceral fullness.
~ In the light of awareness, the experience of attraction or aversion is revealed to be permeable—not dense and solid as we first experience it, but fleeting, impermanent, like the weather.
~ Finally, exposed to the light of the Witness, craving and aversion evaporate.
In her experience with her near slip, Susan had come to understand a central discovery of the yoga tradition: pain that is not resisted begins to soften. “No matter how painful it is,” said Susan, “it’s a relief just to feel it.” As our reactivity softens, we see a subtle distinction between pain and suffering. We each have pain. It comes with the territory of being a human being. And, pain that is fully experienced is, of course, painful. But suffering—duhkha—is something different. Duhkha is the resistance to that pain. Duhkha is the reactivity to that pain. Duhkha is what Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called “the pain of pain.” As the Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein says, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”2 For now, Susan was just learning to be with “bare pain.” It was hard. But it was OK. “A relief to feel it,” even. She had broken the chain between impulse and action.
This was a wonderful moment. Suffering is created by wanting things to be other than they are. It’s that simple. As soon as we relax into how they are—as soon as we stop the War With Reality—happiness and sweetness begin to subtly arise, dusting our insides not with craving and aversion, but with equanimity. This miracle can happen even in the midst of the most difficult of human vicissitudes.
Repeated exploration of reality reveals the incontrovertible fact that it is the attempt to hold on, or to push away the flow of life that creates duhkha. The reactive mind is itself the source of suffering. Pleasure can be fully experienced, but must be allowed its impermanent nature. It will pass away. “Kiss the joy as it flies,” said William Blake. Pain can be fully experienced. But when we resist it, react to it, push it away, we simply get an intensified version of pain. We get both the pain, and the “pain of pain.” The reaction to the pain.
Putting this discovery into practice will require us not to tune out our experience of attraction and aversion, but to tune it in even more deeply. As the Tibetan meditation tradition exhorts us, we will have to “stare into” the bare experience of the discomfort. If we could learn to train our awareness enough to acknowledge sensations as they arise, to experience them fully and to bear them, we would no longer be bound by our conditioned responses.
Susan and I, in the hours after her near slip, had a lesson in understanding Patanjali’s view of hidden motivation, volition, and action. But we had only begun to scratch the surface of his surprising teaching. There would be more lessons to come.