Notes on meditation

My influences

My yoga journey began at least 30 years ago when Bonnie, my first US friend, introduced me to yoga at one of the multiple studios in Boulder. At that point, it was a nice addition to my workouts, and I treated yoga as pure physical exercise. Later, when Bikram yoga became very popular, I decided to try it and almost fainted at my first class. I couldn't say no to any challenge and dove into it. It's interesting how everything changes: now, due to the controversy about Bikram's behavior towards his students, people don't even call this practice Bikram yoga anymore. Teachers in Boulder refer to it as the 28-step sequence or just hot yoga. It's a shame because, despite whatever they say, Bikram created this very nice sequence, and it's used all over the US.

I happily practiced hot yoga for many years until I attended the Bikini Bootcamp in Tulum. They practiced Vinyasa (Flow) yoga. I was unpleasantly surprised by how challenging I found Vinyasa. The new physical challenge, combined with the sweet and calm mood of the flow, made me restart a more traditional practice and abandon hot yoga for several years (although I started doing it again, as the heat and discipline of this sequence are still very appealing to me, as long as it's not exclusive).

Vinyasa led me to the classes of Jeanie Manchester in Boulder, who brought chanting and long savasanas into my practice. I found myself craving space and time with fellow yogis, happily chanting together on cold Colorado winter mornings. I started following Jeanie and attended a couple of her retreats in the zen center of Crestone. She was the one who introduced me to the Blue Throat (Neelakantha) meditation. This practice consists pretty much of repeating a short one-word mantra and is easily available for a person following the "householder path". Jeanie gave me my mantra, and I started devoting 25 minutes a day to this practice. It helped me tremendously to face some challenges at that time (I thought I had cancer, which I did not, but I was anxious for several months). At that time, I knew very little about meditation practice. The information from Jeanie was a passionate eclectic mess of her impressions from yoga/vedanta/Buddhism sources. But this meditation created a nice time slot in my day devoted just to me. Twenty-five minutes during which nothing else mattered. I just repeated my mantra and was ready for my life challenges after that.

At that time, I found helpful the book "The Inner Matrix" by Joey Klein, which formulated my first understanding of meditation as a practice to observe your thoughts, thus detecting patterns in your thinking/behavior leading to an ability to change them to more desirable patterns. But I could not understand how repeating mantra and observing thoughts work together and can be logically combined into a concept.

Eventually, as my health concerns died out, I dropped out from this practice, but my interest in meditation persisted, and I stumbled across the classes of Igor Boudnikov (https://welcomebackhome.academy/). His first class, now transformed into the course called "Just start," was very interesting for me at that time and gave me a refreshingly structured introduction into meditation, which could be understood in conjunction with the ideas from "The Inner Matrix" (notice your thoughts and let them go). In general, Igor takes his teaching seriously, and all his classes are prepared with high quality and bring high energy and good mood. In fact, his courses are better than his marketing approach, which I find somewhat too aggressive and simplistic. His other course, "Just continue!" presents a deeper introduction to me into the Vipassana/Satipatthana practices. I personally went through all his meditation and Pranayama courses, but still, the underlying principle and understanding of meditation were not clear to me. How noting and categorizing mental phenomena helps me to reach "enlightenment" (which I heard is the ultimate goal of the practice)? What is enlightenment?

To add to the confusion, Igor's mentor, Anthony Markwell, gave a scary lecture on inevitable Vipassana results (https://www.vipassanadhura.com/sixteen.html) , including the destruction of the wholeness of the world perception and the disappearance of "I" altogether. This Vipassana path is in such contrast from the image of Igor: a well-fed, super-confident, and well-trained businessman. How does this work together?

A little bit later, I drifted to the meditation school of Georg Kovalev (https://www.meditation-school.ru/), where I received a diploma of the instructor of the basic Jain meditation. During this period, I was strongly influenced by Georg's mother, Anima. She was an amazing, even extraordinary person, who evolved from an active communist party member to one of the esoteric gurus combining various Eastern practices and theories with her own interesting, poetic, and convincing approach. I wish I could have attended her school in person, but unfortunately, she passed away last year. Her death surprised me very much because somehow she seemed immortal to me. Her long, passionate engaging lectures explained to me the idiom of Chakras and made me interested in formalizing my desire for self-evolution and self-realization through one lifespan.

The next very important step in my journey was related to Andrey Tkachenko and his class "Assembly Point." I will probably devote a separate post to what I learned there as I am still digesting it.

Vipassana as meta-cognition practice (per M. Baranov)

The clearest explanation of the Vipassana meditation practice I found in the classes of Mihail Baranov (http://mahaihos.com/ and https://sostoyanie.su/). He relates this practice to the development of meta-cognitive abilities. The essence of Vipassana was described in the Vedas (many thousands BC) and was rediscovered later in Buddhism in the 6th century BC.

Goals of the practice

The official goal of this practice is to get rid of the state which is called dukkha through acquiring clear vision (vipassana is deep/clear vision). Dukkha is often translated as suffering. But this is more like mental languish or lack of mental satisfaction, lack of ease and calm. There are several assumptions here:

• There are mental phenomena preventing us from seeing things as they are.

• They lead to dukkha.

• One can perform a mental practice clearing these mental obstacles and diminish or cease dukkha.

Let's elaborate on these statements. Our vision of the world results from our brains receiving signals from objective reality through the five senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch), and our brains mix these signals with what we already have in our brains (the actual structure and state of our neuronal networks). This brain structure is partially inherited and formed through our experiences. Thus, our vision of the world is mixed with subjective aspects. When the signal arrives (contact with the brain, or sparsa in Sanskrit), the brain first (pre-consciously) classifies it as one of these feelings: positive (attractive, pleasant, safe), negative (unattractive, unpleasant, dangerous), and neutral. Even this first primitive classification results mostly from common human history and partially from personal experiences. Then, the brain formulates its mental impression (more detailed than feelings). This process is also conditioned by subjective experiences. Each impression is kept by the brain and called samskara (reflection or line in Sanskrit) or sankhara (Pali). The accumulation of them is called anusaya (Pali). It formulates the intentions of further reactions and serves as the foundation of our mental picture of the world (vikalpa). Based on them, one formulates thoughts and acts accordingly.

One can get rid of anusaya by performing practices of various levels of concentration of attention (Samadha) and a practice of contemplative observation (Satipatthana). These practices should not be contrasted because observation cannot be achieved without the ability to concentrate, and often one starts with concentration practices (with an object to return to) and ends with just observing all real phenomena (five senses and mental objects). While you watch what is going on in your brain, you attempt to apply the "correct" attitude to these phenomena: you allow them to arise and happen but not to feed them and follow them, losing yourself instead of keeping yourself planted into the objects of meditation (breath, etc.). Distractions will happen, but once you notice them, you return the focus to the meditation objects with an effort. You keep the focus of attention active and persistent.

These practices will lead to "clear vision" or objective understanding free of subjective aspects.

One of the results will be understanding these three marks of human existence (which are also assumptions used to formulate the practice):

• Impermanence (anicca): each object should be observed as a process in time: appearance, development, changing, cessation, and disappearance. Understanding of anicca allows us to accept and survive any internal state and external conditions. The observed process develops, and our attitude to it might change from unpleasant to neutral or even pleasant. One can experience the anicca enlightenment: for example, one can become more tolerant to pain or to any kind of clinging/obsession (positive or negative).

• Not-self (anatta): we start to understand impermanence of our own qualities and moods. This is especially prominent in dhyana, when emptiness (non-creation of mental content) is reached, and there is no supporting concept of "I".

• Dissatisfaction (dukkha). Dukkha appears because (1) our clinging/thirst cannot be sustained due to anicca; (2) we do not know how to break the automatic sequence consisting of sense signals and leading to automatic and probably not the optimal reaction. There are three aspects of clinging/thirst, which are entangled:

  • Desire to hold on to and keep pleasant basic things: food, sex, sleep, enjoyment for all senses.

  • Desire to keep and expand more complex pleasant experience: people respecting you, somebody loves you, you love somebody, self-sufficiency.

  • Desire to stop and reject unpleasant things.

When we observe our mental processes, we notice clinging first. Next, we try to let the processes go. If this does not work, we watch how they and our attitude to them change. Additionally, we learn how to build a gap between the stimulus and our attitude and following actions.

The growth of concentration in each separate session of the practice and in the development of your practice as time goes on is continuous, but one can define some stages/states of it as follows. The beginning stage is to withdraw from the senses connected to the external world. This is called pratyahara (one of the elements of Ashtanga yoga). This is done by moving attention from external signals to internal. But this does not work fully, as the brain can imagine external signals as if they were real. So there is internal pratyahara, which gets rid of these phantom senses. So it flows into dharana, or concentration of attention on one object. In fact, pratyahara and dharana are happening almost always together, as withdrawal from senses does not happen without concentration (unless it happens automatically in the flow, like when we watch a movie or play sports). The result is ekagrata (one-pointed attention).

At this stage when it works, one does not notice senses, space distractions (physical distractions, discomfort), and time distractions (thoughts about past and future, dreams). One reaches the state of calm, clarity, finesse of existence. This state is not very stable, though: one can return to feeling sleepy, dumb, or anxious, distractions. But one develops a taste of being aware, mindful, present, and self-watchful.

The next stage is associated with the beginning of dhyana (Sanskrit, dissolution of mind into the object of the focus) or jhana (Pali). One fully controls attention without distractions, making the attention stable there. This results in nirodha: setting the mind in one type of activity for a long period of time. This state is ideal for watching how your brain works.

Example of a practice

• Assume your meditation position: straight, balanced back in any sitting position. You can consciously and slowly change it, although rigorous Vipassana does not allow this. Most of the time, you sit with your eyes closed, unless you include a visual element in your meditation.

• Establish contact with your body, feeling its weight, firmness, volume, and temperature. Draw your attention into your body.

• Move your attention towards the breath. Some people use sensations in the stomach, but feeling it in your nostrils works better, I think. In general, you should try to feel the most fine sensation of your breath: for example, the sensation between your nostrils and upper lip. Notice temperature, moisture, friction, tickling, whatever. Start noticing how the breath makes turns from exhalation to inhalation and back. You might also notice a brief pause between them. Try to feel your whole body in this pause.

• One can add other objects for attention. Examples include listening to the space or inner "ringing silence," and/or using de-concentrated vision.

• An important object of attention should be "things" happening in your mental space. One should observe their occurrence, not follow/feed them, and return to either just an "empty" watchful state of observation or other simple objects like sounds and/or breath.

A little bigger picture

How perfect is one-level meta-cognition?

The key element of this practice is creating one mental process that can observe/control the other processes. That is why M. Baranov called this practice a meta-cognition practice. This observer is a mental meta-object that can separate/elevate itself from other mental phenomena and develop an objective view of reality. But, of course, this observer is not free and is subjective, so maybe his/her vision is clearer, but in no way is it fully objective. It will be natural to then ask: how many meta-levels are possible? Is each next level (observing lower levels of observers) getting closer and closer to clear vision?

In other words, if one stops at one meta-level, the objectivity stays very limited. It is a little bit different story if one goes beyond secular beliefs; if one believes that this original observer is part of the eternal soul, eternal Universe (here ideas of Atman and Brahman are relevant).

How does all this relate to the scientific understanding that consciousness is witnessing the most strong (through internal data processing ) mental processes? Do we train consciousness to notice weaker thoughts or make data processing more manifested?

Life is bigger and more fun than Vipassana and even Yoga!

Is getting rid of "I" and "suffering" are the only goals of our lives? Can I exist and be happy and not just not suffer? Of course:-)