Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctors week show where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues, aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Greetings from the West coast USA. I hope you're feeling well today, but if not, no worries. There's always a light in the darkness and a solution you can tap into mindfulness. Meditation is a method to develop neutral, nonjudgmental objective self-awareness. And for engaging your meta awareness, meta awareness means being aware of your awareness. So instead of just thinking or feeling something, you simultaneously observe yourself having this thought or feeling, and you're able to comment on it. Oh, look at the way I'm thinking about this. Or man I'm caught in this feeling again. I wonder why or I noticed that mood creeping in again, you're in the experience and simultaneously outside it, this is different from our usual state of awareness in which we're just sort of lost in the flow of our experiences without much self observation involved.
Speaker 0 00:01:32 It's like we're swimming in the sea of our own perceptions and can't quite see ourselves because we're so identified with them. It's like trying to see your own eyes in psychology. There's a term metacognition, which means the ability to think about your thoughts. Meta awareness is the same thing, but extends to all your senses. Seeing, feeling, hearing, moving as well as complex channels of perception, like relationships, the ability to stand separate and apart from your experiences, observe and comment on them as they're happening is a radically different way of living than just being in feelings, moods, thoughts, reactions, and so on. It frees you from the shackles of your own mind and gives you more choice in how you live and react to things doing mindfulness meditation for just 10 to 20 minutes a day can help you get a handle on your thoughts, emotions, cravings, and reactions, which in turn can help you manage and reduce anxiety and depression, improve concentration, manage stress, lower blood pressure, and it can increase your compassion for people and make you feel more calm and centered.
Speaker 0 00:02:59 But mindfulness is only the very first step in working on yourself. It's a basic awareness tool you need for processing. What's going on in your life. It's like learning the notes on the guitar, knowing them gives you the basic tools for processing music. But this alone doesn't enable you to actually play music to do that. You need to learn more things, scales, chords, rhythms, and so on. Similarly, mindfulness practice is an essential method for being aware, but it's not a method in itself for solving your problems. I've done mindfulness meditation for many years. During which time I also spent working with a number of clients who are longterm, highly experienced meditation teachers. My observations of my own experiences and those of these clients is that while this practice can help you gain some level of calmness, composure self-control and even tranquility, it doesn't actually facilitate transformation of a problem.
Speaker 0 00:04:13 It makes you feel better in the moment and bring some sanity to your life so you can deal with things better, but it doesn't enable you to uncover and integrate the meaning and purpose of your problems. It's more of a palliative than a change agent. Now, some meditation practitioners would disagree with this claiming that their practice has led to transformative experiences. And this is certainly true, but these experiences only transform your relationship to a problem, not the problem itself. And these are two different things. Changing your relationship to a problem like how you react to it does influence it, but only minorly. Like you become a bit less bothered by it, but to truly transform a problem, you have to process it. You have to do this in order to discover what is trying to wake you up about, and you have to work on your fears and blocks to making the changes being asked of you doing this requires patience, perseverance, and a bit of courage, which some folks aren't that into.
Speaker 0 00:05:25 I mean, people want the quick fix, the immediate mood change, or even the euphoric experience of non-attachment. The term spiritual bypass was coined a number of years ago to describe this use of mindfulness practice as a way of avoiding your problems. If you do mindfulness meditation as your sole method for dealing with your troubles, you're probably doing this to some extent you meditate. You feel a bit better than you feel worse than you meditate again. And so on. It doesn't go further than this. The core difference between mindfulness as a problem solving method in itself and processing your problems is that mindfulness practice views your troubles as something wrong and claimed that the solution is to get a better relationship to them, detach from them, or try to transcend them. Whereas processing views them as something, right? Because they contain meaningful information that aims to spark essential change a life problem.
Speaker 0 00:06:33 Isn't simply an error, a pathology, a mistake in your life. It's a change agent, an evolutionary catalyst. It's your life's crucible. One thing I noticed after years of working with these high level meditation teachers is that they suffer from the exact same problems. Everyone does depression, anxiety, unresolved, emotional wounds, relationship drama, the whole mess. Mindfulness meditation helps them manage these issues and gain some insight into them, but it doesn't connect them with the underlying message. The implicit changes trying to come forth. Like I said, it's more of a way to get relief and not feel so entangled, but it misses the deeper process. I was incredibly pleased when one of America's foremost meditation teachers, Jack Kornfield wrote an article several years ago, conveying the importance of psychotherapy and spiritual practice. He noted correctly that the deepest meditation practice done by the most experienced practitioner does not hit the places that psychotherapy can.
Speaker 0 00:07:50 Of course he didn't specify what kind of psychotherapy he meant, and it does make a difference, but he nailed a really important point. Namely, that when you meditate, what comes into your awareness is mostly what's already in your conscious mind or just below the surface. It's in the realm of what's already known to you, but it doesn't help you become conscious of your deeper unconscious processes because they simply don't come into your awareness. This is because the whole purpose of mindfulness practice is to distance you from the contents of your psyche. Not help you engage with them. Now, getting distance is an important first step because it makes you feel less overwhelmed and gives you some perspective on what's going on. But if that's all you do, you avoid your process. You don't connect with the underlying meaning of your issues. You climb out of the swamp to some extent and step onto dry land.
Speaker 0 00:08:53 Phew, what a relief, but the swamp is still there and it's influencing your life in ways you can't see and your problems keep coming back. Mindfulness meditation does take the edge off your problems, which is oddly very similar to taking a pill to feel better. I mean, it's healthier, but it's the same concept. And it makes perfect sense. If you view your problems as something wrong, meaningless and purposeless, meditating is a sort of way to get divorced women. Totally understandable. We all want to feel better, but just feeling better. Isn't always the most effective approach in the long run. You miss out on the powerful, transformative growth that your problems are trying to connect you with. They aren't just something to get distanced from or suppress. They're trying to change you in incredibly positive, empowering, uplifting ways. So why doesn't mindfulness, meditation incorporate processing methods?
Speaker 0 00:10:09 Why does it focus exclusively on self observation? Well, the notion of intervening in your problems, as opposed to just observing them or praying to a higher power to change them is a relatively new idea. It comes from psychology, which is only about 140 years old. It's a baby mindfulness practice is derived from Eastern spiritual systems, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism that predate psychology by thousands of years, the originators never had the benefit of psychology. The idea that our problems are malleable and can be changed through our own interventions is a paradigm shift from thousands of years of believing that our troubles are controlled either by an external power or in the case of mindfulness practice that they're caused by a pathological neurosis of the mind, which isn't something you should engage with. For example, in Buddhism, they say the self, the soul and your problems are all an illusion you should learn to see through and detach from the notion of observing detaching.
Speaker 0 00:11:26 And transcending makes sense if you have no psychology paradigm, but it's an incomplete understanding of the human condition because it misses the fact that problems are directive. They're purposeful. They aim at specific changes you need to make. So while reverence toward ancient spiritual practices is important. It's equally important to acknowledge how they need updating, changing and expanding human inquiry continues on, on a baited. And it brings us ever increasing awareness and knowledge. Don't get stuck on something just because it's ancient. In fact, that's a reason to not get stuck on it. It's a reason to look for what's missing in it. We're learners and growers and nothing will ever stop us. We now have the enormous benefit of understanding the subconscious mind, and we have tools for processing. It. We've studied behavior, cognition, development, personality, social processes, biology, relationships, and so on. And while a lot of what psychologists tell us about these things is complete bullshit.
Speaker 0 00:12:39 Just the fact that we've identified so many aspects of human functioning and are interested in how they work puts us way ahead of where we were before. The advent of psychology human consciousness increases over time. Now don't get me wrong. The old spiritual practices are mind-blowingly wise and have a lot to do teach us, but they also lacked certain things that we've developed since then. Another issue is that it's incredibly difficult to translate ancient Eastern systems of thought into modern Western concepts. And there's some crazy confusion out there. I'll give you two glaring examples. When meditation was introduced to the West, it came to us through two sources, language translation of Eastern spiritual texts and Asian teachers who came to the West to share their wisdom. There are two language translations in particular that are so bad. They've given Westerners a false and counterproductive idea of mindfulness meditation, and how to practice it.
Speaker 0 00:13:47 As someone who speaks several languages fluently, I can attest to the fact that different the languages are not simply different ways of saying the same thing. It's common to think that language just reflects reality. And so a foreign language expresses that reality, but uses different words. Nope. Linguistics have studied this extensively and have discovered that language doesn't reflect reality. It creates it reality. Isn't a preexisting set of facts we perceive and describe with words. It's a perceptual process. We create through our inner senses and language making capacity. I learned this firsthand. When I lived in Switzerland, I became fluent in Swiss German and discovered that there are German words that don't exist in English. You can try to fudge a translation, but it's always wrong in some way, but how could this be? How could there be a word in one language that doesn't even exist in another?
Speaker 0 00:14:51 The reason is because the perception doesn't exist. If I have a certain experience and have a word to describe it, but you have no access to that experience. You won't have a word for it. You might be able to use a lot of words to hint at the experience, but if it's something you've never even touched on in your life and have no awareness of it, you won't have language to express it. Language translation is much more complex, nuanced, and fraught with errors than you might imagine. There's a crazy story of a meeting between the Americans and the Russians at a summit in Geneva during the cold war, the American translators said something that angered the Russians, but he didn't understand why turned out. He had translated one word wrong, which changed it from a harmless verb into a threatening communication. Luckily, another bilingual person helped them clear it up one wrong translation.
Speaker 0 00:15:47 And we might not be here today when translating Eastern languages to Western languages, especially English, there are incredibly complex analysis. You need to make Eastern languages are far more different from English than our cousins, the romance languages of Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. If you speak Spanish or French, for example, you know how similar they are to English German, which comes from a different branch of Indo-European languages. That English is a bit more difficult to learn because of its different sounds and grammar. But Asian languages are like in a whole different dimension. For example, Japanese and Chinese don't distinguish between singular and plural, unless it's absolutely necessary. So the word for one cat is the same as the word for many cats, they also have no verb tenses. So to say that you'll run or already ran or are running now it's all the same.
Speaker 0 00:16:54 There are, there are no articles like, ah, or an, or the, and these are the minor differences. They don't even use an alphabet like we do. They use characters that convey meanings to speak the language you have to know at least three to 4,000 of them. And there are literally tens of thousands. Indian languages have a whole other set of attributes that make them totally foreign to someone used to dealing with English. Also Asian languages often have many more meanings for one word than we do in English. Add to this, the fact that their cultural and psychological realities are quite different from ours. And it makes it difficult to figure out exactly what a word means without a highly specific context. So let me tell you about two of these words, the bad translation is the word mind, because Westerners tend to associate the mind with thinking.
Speaker 0 00:17:57 We assume that's what Buddhists Hindus, and Taoists mean when they use the word. But if you know anything about Asian languages, you know that the words that have been translated into English as mind, don't mean thinking it's a bit different in each Asian language, but the commonality is that mind means a way of feeling heart, essence, spirit, psyche, vitality, vigor, a state of being, and other renderings that refer to your mood and state of awareness. It doesn't mean having thoughts. Yes. Thinking is a part of the mind they're talking about, but only a minor aspect. The result is that many Westerners who do these practices mistakenly think that their purpose is to quiet. Their thinking a whole self-help subculture has grown up around this idea. I recently watched a BBC special on Buddhism. And it said the purpose of meditation is to still the mind, which basically meant don't think so much.
Speaker 0 00:19:06 Well, no, that's not the original purpose of mindfulness meditation. That's the Western mistaken notion of it. And don't get me wrong. Even the bad translation is useful. It helps you build cognitive space between your awareness and your emotions. And this cuts down on pain and reactivity, but it's the wrong translation. The original texts state that the aim of meditation is to be aware of and observe your inner life to the point of transcending. The illusions you live under this in turn is said to free your heart from its constrictions and connect you to the deeper reality of life, death, nature, and humanity, the purpose isn't to get rid of anything like too much thinking. I can't tell you how many times I've heard this garbage about how thinking is bad thinking too much as your problem thinking is the devil. And of course the folks teaching this write books with volumes of thoughts about how to get rid of your thoughts.
Speaker 0 00:20:17 It's a self refuting concept because the more you explain it, the more you demonstrate its falseness and any way do you really want to live in a world where people don't think much we'd have no science, no technology, no modern medicine, no modern transportation or communication systems, no guitar apps. We'd be a society of zoned out zombies with no creativity and no ability to engage in critical analysis. The world would be a total mess. We'd live in caves. And if you're older than 30, you'd be dead. If you stopped all thinking, you wouldn't be able to take care of yourself. And of course you wouldn't even be interested in meditation or personal growth or working on your problems or podcasts like this in the first place. It's just stupid. It's a complete misunderstanding of what Eastern traditions say about the mind and thought the ancient texts rarely refer to thinking per se.
Speaker 0 00:21:22 And the only issue they mentioned is being over identified with your thoughts or feelings or any experience for that matter. Even the concept of excessive thinking is nonsense. I mean, how would you ever be able to identify the line between excessive thinking and non excessive thinking? Would it be an hourly thought quota? If you're thinking a lot, like your mind is racing or cotton a loop, it means your process is trying to communicate something to you. The thoughts aren't the problem. The problem is that you're not conscious of what your process is trying to communicate, observe your thoughts, listen to them. They're there for a reason they're driving you crazy to try to wake you up about something, process them. Don't try to get rid of them. That's just dumb thinking is one of our greatest gifts. And it's one of the keys to knowing yourself.
Speaker 0 00:22:21 All right, enough thoughts about thinking the other bad translation is the word ego mostly because the word didn't exist until the late 18 hundreds. And therefore it wasn't even around when these texts were written thousands of years ago, yet spiritual teachers in the West continually use the word as if it's actually in the texts and teachings. If there's one area of Eastern spiritual practice in the West, that's in a state of utter confusion. It's the issue of the ego and what it means for psychologists. This one is particularly annoying because ego in psychology has a totally different meaning from how spiritual folks use the word and to make things even more confusing. Neither the Eastern spiritual definition, nor the psychology definition have anything to do with the street, meaning of ego like being conceded and always right. And self-important. And so on years ago, Buddhist teachers in the West started using the term ego lawlessness to explain the state of mind that meditation aims to achieve the word is supposed to mean that humans make a fundamental error of perception by thinking that we consist of a lasting separate self, even though no such self really exists.
Speaker 0 00:23:47 And by making this air, we hurt ourselves and everyone around us by becoming selfish, getting embroiled in our passions and problems and so on. If we could only see the fallacy of our self centered egos and understand its bad effects, we would let it go and find true happiness in the interconnectedness. That's our true nature. Now, this idea is often communicated with vehemence teachers who are usually pretty gentle and nonjudgmental can turn almost vicious. When they talk about the ego, it's common to portray it as some sort of negative evil part of ourselves. They refer to it as being a neurotic, useless self-harming function. Others are even more extreme. They talk about it like a, some sort of tyrannical bureaucracy. We need to overthrow a nervous scheming, devious creature. We need to eliminate. The message is always that the ego is so tenacious and damaging.
Speaker 0 00:24:53 We need to be constantly vigilant about this human scorch and work to eradicate it. It reminds me of how we think of a virus or a crime, but if you're a psychologist and hear these attacks on the ego, you shake your head in disbelief because in psychology, the ego isn't viewed as being evil at all. It's not even a singular thing. You can attack. It's a cluster of activities, a set of highly important functions in the mind, every time you mediate between your raw desires or urges and what you know you should do in a given moment, you're using your ego function. It's a mental strategy for staying safe and being happy in the midst of all the conflicting demands, shouting in your mind, it enables you to say no to your desire to have sex with your neighbor's wife or to punch someone in the face or to take a crap in the street in the interest of your greater happiness.
Speaker 0 00:25:57 If your ego is healthy, it gives you a consistent sense of priorities helps you to find where your responsibilities are and aren't and shows you right and wrong. It also monitors your experiences. So you can learn from them from this perspective, Eagle and Snus would be a disaster. A person devoid of ego functions would be, self-destructive like a beast with uncontrolled impulses or a neurotic repressed robot with no mind of her own an infant tile monster. Anyone who tried to abandon ego functioning would arrest his psychological development and wouldn't be able to become a mature, responsible, trustworthy adult. Now, this isn't only the view of trained Western psychologists, Buddhist communities in the West have finally begun to recognize this problem and have coined the term spiritual bypassing to describe it. It refers to the way some folks try to avoid dealing with their problems by spending all their time in meditation retreats, using the mantra of Eagle thusness to short circuit, the hard work of developing a healthy ego that can help them navigate their lives.
Speaker 0 00:27:16 This also happens in situations where people suffer from extreme self hatred, the Dalai Lama isn't the only Asian Buddhist teacher surprised at the amount of self hatred found in the West. Hating yourself is incredibly painful because it prevents you from building a healthy ego. And some people deal with it by embracing the idea of ego lessness and using it as the Buddhists stamp of approval for avoiding their self hatred. I remember one client I had who was a highly experienced meditation instructor. And he would attend these year long meditation retreats, where for long periods of time, they wouldn't even speak. And he was an expert at it. He thrived there, but he came into the session with me, complaining that he had been caught in traffic for an hour. And his child was whining. That was difficult for him. The bottom line is your ego is incredibly important.
Speaker 0 00:28:27 It's the vehicle through which you navigate life. You need it. I mean, in a way, the whole thing is silly. It's your ego that decides that mindfulness meditation would be good for you. And that you should have the discipline to practice every day. If you had no ego, you'd sit on your sofa and do nothing. No, wait, you wouldn't have a sofa because he wouldn't have a job. The fact is the Buddhist and Hindu texts are full of recommendations for strengthening your ego. And there are no passages that recommend getting rid of it. The Buddha defines a wise person as one who knows the difference between what are, and aren't his personal responsibilities. Well, guess what? This is the first principle in any ego functioning. And this is based on another assumption that's necessary for a healthy ego, the teaching on karma, that we are responsible for our actions and we're going to experience their results.
Speaker 0 00:29:33 But the ultimate refutation of the idea that meditation is for losing your ego is the fact that the Buddha's own discourses on mindfulness very often describe the meditators. Self-awareness using the terms. I me, mine and so on. That's the ego. So how did poor mr. Ego get so confused on his trip from Asia to the West? The meaning of ego in Asian languages is actually quite similar to the street, meaning of ego in the West pride, narcissism, conceit, self-importance arrogance thinking. You're all that, but Asian, spiritual traditions don't use this word in their texts. As I said, it didn't exist yet. It's a psychology term from Sigmund Freud. And from John Dewey, before him, it comes from the Latin word, meaning I remember what I said earlier about the Buddhist idea that the self or the eye meaning your identity and even the soul are illusions.
Speaker 0 00:30:49 This is based on the idea that we have no permanent underlying substance or essence in us that can be called the self or the soul. People are always shocked when I tell them that Buddhism doesn't believe in the soul, Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism conceive of soul. But Buddhism says, since everything changes, there's nothing permanent or real. What we experience are fluid processes, not concrete things you can capture for all time, but this presents us with the perennial dilemma in Buddhism. If there's no soul, what gets reincarnated? When I wanted to figure this out, I read everything. I could get my hands on, but none of it helped. If you've ever talked to a philosopher, it's a bit like that. The beingness of non bigness BS in a non being sort of way of being, I just couldn't relate to all the fancy talk. It was nothing I could taste or feel, but I was frustrated because this dilemma is so fundamental to Buddhism.
Speaker 0 00:31:57 And Buddhism is one of the origins of mindfulness practice, which in turn forms the basis for a lot of self help and therapy in the West. Then one night I had a dream in the dream. The Buddha talked to me. I swear. He told me that the reason there's no self or soul is because people take them as things like something you can visualize. That's located somewhere in a defined way, but they aren't things, their processes. What gets reincarnated are processes, not you or yourself or even your soul. These are just words we use to name transient processes. It's completely impersonal. Your process is yours, but it isn't yours. It's given to you to work through in your lifetime. But then it's passed on to the next generation. I bolted up from bed and spent a couple hours writing about this. The whole thing made sense, karma and reincarnation.
Speaker 0 00:33:09 Describe how processes continue on after us. You don't get reincarnated. Your process does because it's not really your process. You don't own it. It's more like it owns you. You're born with it. You live it, you work with it. And then it discards you your process. Isn't some kind of thing in you that you can see or touch or locate in space and time. After writing this, I went downstairs and played my guitar for a while. Then I got hit with another bolt. Music is process and developing your meadow awareness is the same skill. You need to be a musician neutral objective self awareness is the way to disentangle from your life drama and oppress States of mind and witness it all from the outside. It gives you the possibility to process what's happening. It helps you stop being a passive recipient or victim of the events of your life and start to become an objective witness.
Speaker 0 00:34:17 An act of co-creator. As you develop this capacity, the knots and problems in your life, loosen and things start to feel more fun. More in the flow. Meta awareness is the key to psychological and spiritual freedom. Well, if you want the quintessential experience of this play music, or at least listen to it, and I mean actively, listen, don't just passively. Hear it. As background sounds, music is flow. You can't stop it and contain it. You can't even see or touch it. It's an invisible river of emotion and meaning that can bring you to your knees heal. You change. You make you feel to be able to write and play music. You need your meta awareness to observe and notice your thoughts and feelings. You can't just be caught in them. And to actively listen to music, you also need some kind of meta sensing of your experience.
Speaker 0 00:35:22 Music is fun. You don't work music, you play it. It gives you joy because it aligns you with the stream of life that's beneath and beyond your everyday problems. And what's this deeper stream of life. It's your process. It's your objective experience of yourself in life? It's nature unfolding through you. It's the opposite of your subjective experience of being caught in your daily personal dramas. There are a lot of names for this objective experience of life. The ancient Chinese Taoists call it the Dao T a O Buddhists, call it the Dharma physicists, call it the mathematical laws of nature. Spiritual traditions use various methods for attaining this more objective experience of life, meditation, fasting, prayer, and various pain. Inducing rituals have all been used to shock us out of our complacency. So we can wake up to the smart object of awareness, that capacity to observe yourself, instead of just being lost in the stream of your experiences is difficult to attain at first.
Speaker 0 00:36:36 But if you practice it over time, it becomes easy and liberating. You gain an acute awareness that your personal issues are subjective patterns of experience that you don't have to wholly identify with. You can observe them, question them intervene in them, process them. And music is a super highway into this experience. I've been to many rehearsals where everyone arrives in a crap mood. I, within 10 minutes of playing, we're all high on the vibes. No matter how bad life gets this underlying spirit of freedom and flow is always there. And can always be tapped into your meta awareness is your basic tool for doing this. Then you can begin processing your problems. Speaking of developing your mindfulness skills as your basic tool for working on yourself. I wrote a song and made a video called unborn voices. It's about how our unconscious processes can cause havoc in our lives, pain, depression, anxiety, relationship issues, phobias, psychosis, suicide, everything you can imagine, but within these destructive problems is the calling of an unborn voice within you, a new experience and understanding of yourself, your true process. You're more aware self trying to be born in your consciousness. The more this process is suppressed, ignored, or simply not known of the more it creates problems for you. It needs your mindful awareness to process it, transform it, birth it. The release date is Friday, September 18th, 2020. You can watch the video on my YouTube channel and stream the song on Spotify or wherever you listen to music. Here's a sneak preview.
Speaker 1 00:38:55 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 00:40:09 See you next time. Stay aware. You can follow me on social media at doctors' wig, and you can sign up on the mailing
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Speaker 1 00:40:31 Be well.
