Research, mainly in the area of neuroscience, is increasingly showing that meditation changes how the brain functions. What I find interesting is how this harmonizes with the work of psychologists who look at the importance of early relationships or those who write about the unconscious. One of the most stimulating writers in this latter area is the modern psychoanalytical author, Christopher Bollas. Jon Kabat Zinn likes to say that meditation allows us to step out of “doing-mode” into “being-mode”. This strengthens our capacity to rest with experience rather than always conceptualizing it. As Ajahn Sumedho said in a recent post, we simply recognize, without going into the need to analyse. Bollas’ quote here may suggest a link. Maybe getting in touch with silence may allow us reconnect with our earliest experiences which were processed without the use of language and thought. We may even say that sitting in silence and holding whatever arises may possibly, slowly, heal these early experiences, if they were somehow lacking. His words also allow us see how our emotions contain a deep truth which may be outside of conscious thought, truths which may be “known” without being “thought”.
Some moments feel familiar, sacred, reverential, but are fundamentally outside cognitive experience. They are registered through an experience in being, rather than mind, because they express that part of us where the experience of rapport with the other was the essence of life before words existed….the aesthetic moment constitutes part of the unthought known. The aesthetic moment is an existential recollection of the time when communication took place primarily through this illusion of deep rapport of subject and object. Being with, as a form of dialogue, enabled the baby’s adequate processing of his existence prior to his ability to process it through thought. The mother’s idiom of care and the infant’s experience of this handling is one of the first if not the earliest human aesthetic.
Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object
The process of practice is to see through, not to eliminate, anything to which we are attached. We could have great financial wealth and be unattached to it, or we might have nothing and be very attached to having nothing. Most practice gets caught in this area of fiddling with our environments or our minds. ” My mind should be quiet”. Our mind doesn’t matter; what matters is non attachment to the activities of the mind. And our emotions are harmless unless they dominate us – that is, if we are attached to them- then they create dis-harmony for everyone. The first problem in practice is to see that we are attached. As we do consistent, patient practice we begin to know that we are nothing but attachments; they rule our lives. But we never lose an attachment by saying it has to go. Only as we gain true awareness of its true nature does it quietly and imperceptibly wither away; like a sandcastle with waves rolling over, it just smooths out and finally Where is it? What was it? …
