On discussion lists I often see questions from non-Chinese people who seem to want to "become" Daoists. Usually someone else with some sort of authority says one of two very different things. The first response usually boils down some variant of "if you want to be a Daoist, you already are one". The second comes down to "if you weren't born one, you never can". I'm not terribly happy with either one of these answers, and I hope that perplexed questioners might feel a little less confused if they read this post.
The "if you aren't born one, you can't be one" position is the easiest to dismiss and I have discussed it in previous posts. Primarily, it is the idea that a religious/philosophical lifestyle is totally bound up with one's ethnic identity. At its strongest, the idea is that no one who isn't Chinese can ever be a Daoist.
From that point there is a declining scale of rigidity. First, a non-Chinese person can be a Daoist, but he has to learn both ancient and modern Chinese, then devote decades of his life studying in a Daoist monastic setting. (That is, you don't have to be born Chinese---but at least you have to become one.)
From that position, one comes to having to at least be totally under the thumb of some rigid Chinese traditionalist. (Or, you don't have to be Chinese---but you have to be controlled by one.)
The key issue at play is a slavish concern about the "legitimacy of transmission". As far as I'm concerned, the only worthwhile thing someone seeks from a tradition like Daoism is a better way of looking at and being-in-the-world. Baldly stated, this probably doesn't seem like a lot to most people. But it does encompass a lot of things---from aesthetics through interpersonal relationships to how one treats the natural world.
Now some folks don't think of Daoism in terms of being-in-the-world, instead, they have some sort of slavish devotion to a religious tradition and a pantheon of Gods. If you look at the teachings of the Daoist scriptures---and I am not only referring to the "big three" of Zhuanzi, Laozi and Liezi---you will find a very wide and deep vein of skepticism about conventional piety. Indeed, you will find a very strong scepticism towards all conventional attitudes. The question then arises of how well we can say that these "fundamentalist Daoists" really do show any respect for their tradition. (How do you show reverence to the irreverent?)
Having said that, I also have problems with the other point of view, (i.e. "if you want to be a Daoist, you already are one"). I won't dismiss this position out of hand, because I do believe that at least this point of view does base itself on the irreverence that really is a key Daoist concept. But the problem here isn't that people are slavishly following an authority figure, but rather that the commitment is so minimal that the world "Daoism" ceases to mean much of anything at all.
The problem is that many of these people don't understand how very difficult it is to peel away the layers of conventionality in order to embrace our essential nature and become "realized men". Without a very keen eye and a steadfast spirit, it is very easy to see selfishness and greed as "spontaneity" and mere laziness as "wu wei".
Years ago I had a roomie who was one of these "natural Daoists". He was charming as the Dickens (the ladies loved him). He rather effortlessly cruised through life and managed to do quite well financially, romantically and so on simply by finding people who were willing to help him out. In the end, I got totally cheesed with him, (partially out of jealousy no doubt) because he was doing so well by being prepared to let others do all the work for him. He moved to another province and I lost all connection.
Years later, however, I met his ex-wife who informed me of how she had eventually begun to loathe him because she ended up doing all the child-rearing and housework, and had to work on the side too. I thought back to Liezi where his enlightenment came from buckling down to help his wife with her domestic chores and by being diligent as a pig farmer---. The point that the ancient author was making, I believe, was that being a follower of the Dao isn't based on being lazy and thumbing your nose at all your responsibilities, but rather that we shouldn't be slaves of convention. The two are sometimes the same, but often very different.
And who gets to decided what is real and what is merely conventional? If we reduce the distinction to some sort of formulaic text, then we fall prey to the mistake of the fundamentalist. They see the distinction as only being clear to someone who is a recognised member of some dynastic lineage and a specific ethnic identity. But life can't be reduced to a formulae. People get credentials who don't deserve them, and as they teach and appoint their own successors, the tradition becomes more and more corrupted with each succeeding generation.
But if we make things just a "free for all", people---like my old roomie---end up using "ancient Chinese wisdom" as an excuse to justify their bad habits. How is that being any less conventional than someone who's bad habits are not sloth and being a parasite but rather being self-righteous and obsessive?
Which gets me back to answering the question "How do you become a Daoist?"
I would suggest that anyone who is serious about it would not be terribly concerned by how they label themselves but rather about how they live their lives. And if you really want to live your life in a "Daoist groove", it makes sense to really study Daoism. This means study of texts, study of the lived tradition, and probably more importantly---, trying to live a life as a Daoist. This involves a lot of effort in learning Daoist-inspired disciplines such as martial arts, calligraphy, meditation, etc. If it is the case that a person can do this in a way that they begin to really merge with the Dao, then they will cease to be concerned about what anyone calls them. In other words, being a "Daoist" is about the way you live your life (which is often a lot of hard work), rather than a label you put upon yourself.
If at this point someone else calls some a "Daoist", then she might be on the way to building a lineage or tradition in her area. That is, either someone will come along and wish to become her teacher (which is what happened to me) or else someone will want to come along and be her student. Either path is fraught with peril, but if done with honesty and a good heart, it can be a step forward into a new definition of the term "Daoist", one that will create an indigenous tradition for the modern age and for people outside of the Middle Kingdom.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Meditation and Fear
People often have a shaky understanding about the relationship between meditation and the martial arts. They understand that people who meditate are almost invariably men of peace---yet people who are understood as great warriors are supposed to highly value the practice.
Part of it has to do with discipline and learning the "internals" of our mind and body, but probably the greatest element has to do with learning how to deal with our fears. There is a story about the Mongols invading a Chinese Zen Temple and an officer raging into the meditation hall where he met the Master sitting in a lotus posture. When he simply sat without showing any signs of fear, the warrior yelled at him "Don't you know that before you is a man who could kill you without blinking an eye?" The Master's response was "Don't you know that before you is a man you could kill without him blinking an eye?" Since the officer valued courage, he decided to spare the monk's life and left the hall.
Zhuangzi makes a similar point in several places. For example, he describes an archer who is capable of always hitting the target until he is standing on the edge of a cliff at which point his fear of falling destroys his aim. He also makes the point that the secret of learning how to be good with a boat is to become a good swimmer---at which point the boatman no longer fears falling in the water.
For most people fear is an existential issue. But for soldiers it is a very practical problem. Most people probably don't realize this, but for most of human history courage has tended to be one of the most powerful weapon in a soldier's arsenal. That is, all other things being equal (which, admittedly, they often are not), the most brave side almost always won the battle.
This was because a man who is running from battle is a lot easier to kill than one who is facing you head on. And a body of men who is standing shoulder to shoulder can count on each other to guard their flank. Men who cannot trust that their neighbour will protect them, cannot focus completely on their enemy and will be easier to kill. Indeed, in most ancient battles where great slaughter occurred, it did not happen when both sides were facing each other in battle but after one side had turned tail and was trying to run away.
So the practical paradox of warfare is that the man who is least afraid of dying often has the best chance of not dying at all.
There is a story in Japan that the leader of the military force that repulsed the Mongol invasion, Hōjō Tokimune, meditated to overcome his fear in order to lead the battle.
Warfare has changed dramatically since the age of Samurai, but the control of fear has continued to be a significant issue in warfare. The modern approach is to use intense training experiences (i.e. "boot camp") to raise recruit's confidence level both in themselves and their group, which in turn develops a sense of group identity and loyalty to the regiment. This trains men to put the good of the group ahead of the individual. The result is very different from Zen meditation, which is very-much focused on individual insight. But it is something that can be mass-produced and which produces very predictable results. It doesn't create "realized men", but the sense of solidarity continues long after military service has ended---which is what sustains veterans associations.
Where meditation's work with fear can still be of value, however, is in helping people deal with the terrors of everyday life.
And I use the term "terror" advisedly. Our modern lives are so complex and unpredictable that many of us find it pretty much impossible to maintain any sense of "comfort" for any length of time. People who are losing their jobs; who have to constantly adapt and retrain in order to stay employed; who live from contract to contract; who live in rough neighbourhoods; who have loved ones falling on hard times; who's life is dependent on complex, constantly changing, poorly understood technology; the complex interpersonal dynamics of the workplace----all of these can create the same sort of "organized chaos" that soldiers experience on a battlefield. Add to this a never-ending sense of impending social collapse due to things like global warming, peak oil or the economic collapse we are currently living through.
While the intensity of this stress is less than that experienced by soldiers, it's duration goes far longer. And just like soldiers, ordinary people only have a limited supply of courage to draw upon. Take too much out of the reserve, and even the most stoic will eventually collapse into quivering blobs of terror---sometimes for seemingly very trivial reasons.
I remember seeing a couple aquainences who had lost their last reserve of courage. These were both men who were extremely "macho" and who took great pride in living very independent lives and doing extreme work. Ordinarily, I suspect that they would be considered extremely brave men. They undertook to grow a large amount of marihuana to sell for easy money. Unfortunately, things didn't work our well and one of them was arrested and the other was terrified that he would be too. They both totally "lost it". Every last scrap of stoicism disappeared and they both descended into absolute terror. In a sense, I was watching the civilian equivalent of "battle fatigue".
And I have to admit that I too fall prey to the terror of modern life. It isn't so much that I am facing huge stressors (I've been pretty good at protecting myself), but the day-to-day struggle of having to constantly be at the mercy of other people and technology I don't understand sometimes wears me down and fills me with a vague, unending, existential dread.
And the only thing that I've found that can sustain me is to sit on the pillows and meditate---just like Hōjō Tokimune when he faced the immense might of the Emperor Kublai Khan. I may not have faith in myself anymore, or the world around me, but at least I still have some faith in the practice of meditation. I hope that this life-raft will take me past this current existential problem and carry me forward into some better place.
Part of it has to do with discipline and learning the "internals" of our mind and body, but probably the greatest element has to do with learning how to deal with our fears. There is a story about the Mongols invading a Chinese Zen Temple and an officer raging into the meditation hall where he met the Master sitting in a lotus posture. When he simply sat without showing any signs of fear, the warrior yelled at him "Don't you know that before you is a man who could kill you without blinking an eye?" The Master's response was "Don't you know that before you is a man you could kill without him blinking an eye?" Since the officer valued courage, he decided to spare the monk's life and left the hall.
Zhuangzi makes a similar point in several places. For example, he describes an archer who is capable of always hitting the target until he is standing on the edge of a cliff at which point his fear of falling destroys his aim. He also makes the point that the secret of learning how to be good with a boat is to become a good swimmer---at which point the boatman no longer fears falling in the water.
For most people fear is an existential issue. But for soldiers it is a very practical problem. Most people probably don't realize this, but for most of human history courage has tended to be one of the most powerful weapon in a soldier's arsenal. That is, all other things being equal (which, admittedly, they often are not), the most brave side almost always won the battle.
This was because a man who is running from battle is a lot easier to kill than one who is facing you head on. And a body of men who is standing shoulder to shoulder can count on each other to guard their flank. Men who cannot trust that their neighbour will protect them, cannot focus completely on their enemy and will be easier to kill. Indeed, in most ancient battles where great slaughter occurred, it did not happen when both sides were facing each other in battle but after one side had turned tail and was trying to run away.
So the practical paradox of warfare is that the man who is least afraid of dying often has the best chance of not dying at all.
There is a story in Japan that the leader of the military force that repulsed the Mongol invasion, Hōjō Tokimune, meditated to overcome his fear in order to lead the battle.
Tokimune was overcome with fear when the invasion finally came, and wanted to defeat cowardice, so he asked Bukko (his Zen master) for advice. Bukko replied he had to sit in meditation to find the source of his cowardice in himself. Tokimune went to Bukko and said: "Finally there is the greatest happening of my life." Bukko asked, "How do you plan to face it?" Tokimune screamed "Katsu!" ("Victory!") as if he wanted to scare all the enemies in front of him. Bukko responded with satisfaction: "It is true that the son of a lion roars as a lion!" Since that time, Tokimune became instrumental in the spreading of Zen Buddhism and Bushido in Japan among the samurai. (Wikipedia)
Warfare has changed dramatically since the age of Samurai, but the control of fear has continued to be a significant issue in warfare. The modern approach is to use intense training experiences (i.e. "boot camp") to raise recruit's confidence level both in themselves and their group, which in turn develops a sense of group identity and loyalty to the regiment. This trains men to put the good of the group ahead of the individual. The result is very different from Zen meditation, which is very-much focused on individual insight. But it is something that can be mass-produced and which produces very predictable results. It doesn't create "realized men", but the sense of solidarity continues long after military service has ended---which is what sustains veterans associations.
Where meditation's work with fear can still be of value, however, is in helping people deal with the terrors of everyday life.
And I use the term "terror" advisedly. Our modern lives are so complex and unpredictable that many of us find it pretty much impossible to maintain any sense of "comfort" for any length of time. People who are losing their jobs; who have to constantly adapt and retrain in order to stay employed; who live from contract to contract; who live in rough neighbourhoods; who have loved ones falling on hard times; who's life is dependent on complex, constantly changing, poorly understood technology; the complex interpersonal dynamics of the workplace----all of these can create the same sort of "organized chaos" that soldiers experience on a battlefield. Add to this a never-ending sense of impending social collapse due to things like global warming, peak oil or the economic collapse we are currently living through.
While the intensity of this stress is less than that experienced by soldiers, it's duration goes far longer. And just like soldiers, ordinary people only have a limited supply of courage to draw upon. Take too much out of the reserve, and even the most stoic will eventually collapse into quivering blobs of terror---sometimes for seemingly very trivial reasons.
I remember seeing a couple aquainences who had lost their last reserve of courage. These were both men who were extremely "macho" and who took great pride in living very independent lives and doing extreme work. Ordinarily, I suspect that they would be considered extremely brave men. They undertook to grow a large amount of marihuana to sell for easy money. Unfortunately, things didn't work our well and one of them was arrested and the other was terrified that he would be too. They both totally "lost it". Every last scrap of stoicism disappeared and they both descended into absolute terror. In a sense, I was watching the civilian equivalent of "battle fatigue".
And I have to admit that I too fall prey to the terror of modern life. It isn't so much that I am facing huge stressors (I've been pretty good at protecting myself), but the day-to-day struggle of having to constantly be at the mercy of other people and technology I don't understand sometimes wears me down and fills me with a vague, unending, existential dread.
And the only thing that I've found that can sustain me is to sit on the pillows and meditate---just like Hōjō Tokimune when he faced the immense might of the Emperor Kublai Khan. I may not have faith in myself anymore, or the world around me, but at least I still have some faith in the practice of meditation. I hope that this life-raft will take me past this current existential problem and carry me forward into some better place.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
What is Meditation?
In previous posts I've danced around this subject a fair amount without actually committing to a specific description or definition of what meditation really is. There are several reasons why I've been hesitant to do so, so I'll try to explain them before I get down to the issue at hand.
The Problem of Solipsism
"Solipsism" is the idea that ultimately we can never really get inside someone else's head. Rene Descartes illustrated this problem by making the paranoid suggestion that when we look out the window at a street scene we really have no way of knowing for sure that everyone else we are looking at is not some sort of mindless robot following the instructions of its maker. Without going that far, anyone who is trying to talk about the internal consciousness of another human being is forced to make at least a few "leaps of faith" since ultimately everything rests on the assumption that what happens in your mind is pretty much the same thing that is happening in mine.
A further complication is that even if we assume that everyone's internal consciousness is pretty much the same, it is very difficult to develop a language can clearly and precisely discuss what is happening in our minds.
The naive person may think that language isn't all that important, but they'd be wrong.
Just to illustrate how important this is, I have a neighbour who is a very skilled tradesman but who has a terrible time explaining things to people. I went to a building supply store with him once and he told me to go get a "jug" of expanding foam insulation. I looked and looked, and looked, but I couldn't find anything at all that looked like this.
He started getting exasperated and eventually walked over himself and got the container, which instead looked like this.
My neighbour is a really intelligent, well-read person, but he finds it very hard to express himself, which causes him problems when he is trying to explain things to people that they don't know much about. This is not a terribly rare thing amongst tradespeople, who I find often simply cannot explain what they do to lay people.
My confusion about what exactly a "jug" of expanding foam insulation looks like was easily resolved by simply pointing to an example. This sort of similar situation rarely presents itself with regard to internal mental phenomena. What can be done, however, is for a skillful teacher to try and artificially create a mental state in his student so the student can then see it in context explained by the teacher. I suspect that many Zen koans are examples of this teaching process.
For example, there is a story of a Samurai warrior who met a Zen master and asked him if Heaven and Hell exist. The master responded by insulting the warrior, who grew angry to the point of drawing his sword. At this point the master said "now open the gates of Hell". The warrior thought about this, and getting the point smiled and put his weapon back in its sheath. At this point the master commented "now open the gates of Heaven."
The Problem of Obscure Language
Another issue that needs to be remembered when we discuss meditation is that spiritual traditions have all grown out of cultures that are radically different both from each other and also the modern age. All the spiritual seekers in those cultures were forced---by the problem of solipsism---to use metaphors to point towards their very personal experience. That is to say, since they couldn't point to an object or process in the mind in order to describe something spiritual, they were forced to use analogies from the world around them.
And the metaphors these people used have tended to come directly from their religious traditions, which is hardly surprising since most of them were ordained monks. Even more confusing, most of the scholars who have translated their writings have been people who were not ordained into the same religious tradition, and who have devoted their lives to learning how to do scholarly translations---not follow a spiritual practice. As a result, the writings that they have left behind---and the translations that have been made of them---are extremely hard for modern people to understand. For example, my understanding from a lifetime of study is that the following all refer to the same key mental entity/state: "The One" (Daoist), "The Buddha Mind" (Buddhist), "The Christ Within" (Christian), and, "The Atman" (Hindu). The question for the naive reader is what exactly do these terms mean to you?
The Different Dimensions of Meditation
Because of the problems of solipsism and obscure language, the person who sets out to follow a spiritual path is stuck in a strange position. He may have a qualified teacher who is willing to help him along. But the teacher cannot readily explain to him what it is that he is supposed to be learning. That is because he cannot point towards a specific thing and say "this is the One", instead, all he can say is "you must hold onto the One" (or Buddha mind, Christ within, or Atman.) All the student can do is try to figure out exactly what this weird phrase refers to. So, one dimension of meditation is absorbing and learning a technical language about our internal mental processes, which will allow us to articulate both to ourselves and other practitioners what is going on in our minds.
At the same time that we are learning this new language, the seeker also has to develop a set of mental "muscles". That is to say, we have to learn not only that a specific type of mental activity exists, but that we can also learn to discipline and strengthen it. When we meditate we learn a great deal about boredom, sleepiness, depression, pain, the "internal dialogue" and so on. We don't only learn how to distinguish between them, we also learn how to control them. Eventually, some of them disappear. Others become constant companions that we can only force hold at bay for longer and longer periods of time.
These two issues would be difficult enough, but spirituality doesn't just deal with means to an obvious and simple end. People follow a spiritual practice because they are seeking answers to existential questions, such as "why do we exist?", "what is the right way to live our lives?" and so on. People who wrestle with these sorts of things are constantly re-assessing their life choices and a pretty significant life choice involves whether or not one follows a particular spiritual practice. So the practitioner is not only trying to develop a new language and strengthen her mental abilities, she is also constantly reassessing herself to see if the practice itself is worth pursuing. Any religious person who is serious about their path not only has to practice it with due diligence, she also has to submit the path itself to the same sort of rigorous examination that she is putting every other part of her life through.
Each one of these three dimensions is fraught with peril. People get tripped-up on language all the time, which can cause students to follow blind paths because they simply didn't understand what they were instructed to do. The discipline of developing the mind is also problematic, because the thing being struggled with is the same thing that you are strengthening. This means that at the moment when someone believes that they have finally gained the upper hand in the struggle with the distractions, base instincts and delusions of their mind, it can turn out that they suffer their final surrender to it! (I think that this explains why so many teachers with real attainment end up abusing their positions of trust.) And people can invest so much emotion, value and energy into a specific religious practice that they will cling to it long, long after it has proven itself to be an obstacle instead of a benefit. (And this is why so many reasonable people allow themselves to be take advantage of by those teachers who betray their positions of trust.)
A Definition of "Meditation"
At this point I will finally step out on a limb and offer my definition. Meditation is the process whereby we gain increasing awareness of our awareness.
This formulation is cribbed from Rudolph Steiner, whom I remember as having written about "thinking about thinking", which is one of those statements that I have indeed spent a great deal of time thinking about. But I have some concerns about what the word "think" really means. As a result, I'm happier with the term "aware", which I believe is a bit more immediately obvious and therefore easier to understand. In other words, the process of meditating is learning to be aware of how your mind operates.
If you put in your time trying to be aware of your awareness, you will notice some pretty interesting things. For example, as I mentioned in a previous post, we live our lives as individual "islands" of self-awareness where whatever continuity we have with our past exists only as ghostly memories---which resemble fictions more than reality. This is a point that the philosopher David Hume noticed back in the 18th century. It is also a key concept in Buddhist psychology, known as "anatta". Both Hume and the Buddhists came to this conclusion through the process of careful self-examination of their consciousness, although one cannot think of much larger a cultural divide than between an Enlightenment philosopher and an ancient Indian mystic. Another example that I mentioned in a previous post refers to general rules by which we grow in insight. In the case of Ignatian spiritual practice, through careful analysis the Jesuits have realized that there seems to be a relationship between depression and spiritual growth, or as their confusing language would describe it "desolation" and "consolation". There are other insights beyond these, and they continue to deepen the longer you work at your meditative practice. Learning from them---and changing your life as a result---is why we pursue this path.
The process of meditating, therefore, is that of carefully observing your awareness in order to understand the way it operates. It has the odd characteristic, however, of being such a personal process that you literally can only "learn by doing". That is, no matter how carefully you read books on the subject, you cannot really understand it unless you make the effort to follow in the path of others and put your time into carefully observing yourself. As such, it is much more of an art or craft than it is a science. No doubt many people of deep attainment are like my neighbour the carpenter---unable to express what they do to anyone else. (Indeed, I believe that I have a specific gift in being able to express this sort of thing more clearly than the vast majority of other practitioners, which is why I write this blog.)
The Problem of Solipsism
"Solipsism" is the idea that ultimately we can never really get inside someone else's head. Rene Descartes illustrated this problem by making the paranoid suggestion that when we look out the window at a street scene we really have no way of knowing for sure that everyone else we are looking at is not some sort of mindless robot following the instructions of its maker. Without going that far, anyone who is trying to talk about the internal consciousness of another human being is forced to make at least a few "leaps of faith" since ultimately everything rests on the assumption that what happens in your mind is pretty much the same thing that is happening in mine.
A further complication is that even if we assume that everyone's internal consciousness is pretty much the same, it is very difficult to develop a language can clearly and precisely discuss what is happening in our minds.
The naive person may think that language isn't all that important, but they'd be wrong.
Just to illustrate how important this is, I have a neighbour who is a very skilled tradesman but who has a terrible time explaining things to people. I went to a building supply store with him once and he told me to go get a "jug" of expanding foam insulation. I looked and looked, and looked, but I couldn't find anything at all that looked like this.
He started getting exasperated and eventually walked over himself and got the container, which instead looked like this.
My neighbour is a really intelligent, well-read person, but he finds it very hard to express himself, which causes him problems when he is trying to explain things to people that they don't know much about. This is not a terribly rare thing amongst tradespeople, who I find often simply cannot explain what they do to lay people.My confusion about what exactly a "jug" of expanding foam insulation looks like was easily resolved by simply pointing to an example. This sort of similar situation rarely presents itself with regard to internal mental phenomena. What can be done, however, is for a skillful teacher to try and artificially create a mental state in his student so the student can then see it in context explained by the teacher. I suspect that many Zen koans are examples of this teaching process.
For example, there is a story of a Samurai warrior who met a Zen master and asked him if Heaven and Hell exist. The master responded by insulting the warrior, who grew angry to the point of drawing his sword. At this point the master said "now open the gates of Hell". The warrior thought about this, and getting the point smiled and put his weapon back in its sheath. At this point the master commented "now open the gates of Heaven."
The Problem of Obscure Language
Another issue that needs to be remembered when we discuss meditation is that spiritual traditions have all grown out of cultures that are radically different both from each other and also the modern age. All the spiritual seekers in those cultures were forced---by the problem of solipsism---to use metaphors to point towards their very personal experience. That is to say, since they couldn't point to an object or process in the mind in order to describe something spiritual, they were forced to use analogies from the world around them.
And the metaphors these people used have tended to come directly from their religious traditions, which is hardly surprising since most of them were ordained monks. Even more confusing, most of the scholars who have translated their writings have been people who were not ordained into the same religious tradition, and who have devoted their lives to learning how to do scholarly translations---not follow a spiritual practice. As a result, the writings that they have left behind---and the translations that have been made of them---are extremely hard for modern people to understand. For example, my understanding from a lifetime of study is that the following all refer to the same key mental entity/state: "The One" (Daoist), "The Buddha Mind" (Buddhist), "The Christ Within" (Christian), and, "The Atman" (Hindu). The question for the naive reader is what exactly do these terms mean to you?
The Different Dimensions of Meditation
Because of the problems of solipsism and obscure language, the person who sets out to follow a spiritual path is stuck in a strange position. He may have a qualified teacher who is willing to help him along. But the teacher cannot readily explain to him what it is that he is supposed to be learning. That is because he cannot point towards a specific thing and say "this is the One", instead, all he can say is "you must hold onto the One" (or Buddha mind, Christ within, or Atman.) All the student can do is try to figure out exactly what this weird phrase refers to. So, one dimension of meditation is absorbing and learning a technical language about our internal mental processes, which will allow us to articulate both to ourselves and other practitioners what is going on in our minds.
At the same time that we are learning this new language, the seeker also has to develop a set of mental "muscles". That is to say, we have to learn not only that a specific type of mental activity exists, but that we can also learn to discipline and strengthen it. When we meditate we learn a great deal about boredom, sleepiness, depression, pain, the "internal dialogue" and so on. We don't only learn how to distinguish between them, we also learn how to control them. Eventually, some of them disappear. Others become constant companions that we can only force hold at bay for longer and longer periods of time.
These two issues would be difficult enough, but spirituality doesn't just deal with means to an obvious and simple end. People follow a spiritual practice because they are seeking answers to existential questions, such as "why do we exist?", "what is the right way to live our lives?" and so on. People who wrestle with these sorts of things are constantly re-assessing their life choices and a pretty significant life choice involves whether or not one follows a particular spiritual practice. So the practitioner is not only trying to develop a new language and strengthen her mental abilities, she is also constantly reassessing herself to see if the practice itself is worth pursuing. Any religious person who is serious about their path not only has to practice it with due diligence, she also has to submit the path itself to the same sort of rigorous examination that she is putting every other part of her life through.
Each one of these three dimensions is fraught with peril. People get tripped-up on language all the time, which can cause students to follow blind paths because they simply didn't understand what they were instructed to do. The discipline of developing the mind is also problematic, because the thing being struggled with is the same thing that you are strengthening. This means that at the moment when someone believes that they have finally gained the upper hand in the struggle with the distractions, base instincts and delusions of their mind, it can turn out that they suffer their final surrender to it! (I think that this explains why so many teachers with real attainment end up abusing their positions of trust.) And people can invest so much emotion, value and energy into a specific religious practice that they will cling to it long, long after it has proven itself to be an obstacle instead of a benefit. (And this is why so many reasonable people allow themselves to be take advantage of by those teachers who betray their positions of trust.)
A Definition of "Meditation"
At this point I will finally step out on a limb and offer my definition. Meditation is the process whereby we gain increasing awareness of our awareness.
This formulation is cribbed from Rudolph Steiner, whom I remember as having written about "thinking about thinking", which is one of those statements that I have indeed spent a great deal of time thinking about. But I have some concerns about what the word "think" really means. As a result, I'm happier with the term "aware", which I believe is a bit more immediately obvious and therefore easier to understand. In other words, the process of meditating is learning to be aware of how your mind operates.
If you put in your time trying to be aware of your awareness, you will notice some pretty interesting things. For example, as I mentioned in a previous post, we live our lives as individual "islands" of self-awareness where whatever continuity we have with our past exists only as ghostly memories---which resemble fictions more than reality. This is a point that the philosopher David Hume noticed back in the 18th century. It is also a key concept in Buddhist psychology, known as "anatta". Both Hume and the Buddhists came to this conclusion through the process of careful self-examination of their consciousness, although one cannot think of much larger a cultural divide than between an Enlightenment philosopher and an ancient Indian mystic. Another example that I mentioned in a previous post refers to general rules by which we grow in insight. In the case of Ignatian spiritual practice, through careful analysis the Jesuits have realized that there seems to be a relationship between depression and spiritual growth, or as their confusing language would describe it "desolation" and "consolation". There are other insights beyond these, and they continue to deepen the longer you work at your meditative practice. Learning from them---and changing your life as a result---is why we pursue this path.
The process of meditating, therefore, is that of carefully observing your awareness in order to understand the way it operates. It has the odd characteristic, however, of being such a personal process that you literally can only "learn by doing". That is, no matter how carefully you read books on the subject, you cannot really understand it unless you make the effort to follow in the path of others and put your time into carefully observing yourself. As such, it is much more of an art or craft than it is a science. No doubt many people of deep attainment are like my neighbour the carpenter---unable to express what they do to anyone else. (Indeed, I believe that I have a specific gift in being able to express this sort of thing more clearly than the vast majority of other practitioners, which is why I write this blog.)
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Straw Dogs Barking at the Moon
Even though I call myself a "hermit"---and I know that that is the path I tread---I still try to connect with ordinary folks. (Perhaps this foolishness will pass if I get older.) But many times these efforts only leave me feeling even more isolated than I did before. A few weeks back I attended a Unitarian church service that brought this unpleasant truth back to me one more time.
It was supposed to be a service devoted to the idea of "social activism". When I heard the people talk on the subject, however, what I heard was not too much more than a statement about ego gratification from the individuals involved. The folk singer talked about how he used music to promote the "good". The retired nurse talked about her "second career". The therapist talked about how to avoid "burnout". And the young woman Muslim talked about how it is to be a visible Muslim in the public eye.
No one talked about working to fix the world's problems.
Afterwards, the congregation formed a circle and people spoke of their reactions. Mostly all I heard was people's excuses for doing so little to get involved in the world. The visiting speakers mostly spent their time trying to make these people feel good about themselves. At one point the folk-singer said that "anyone who signs a petition is an activist".
When the microphone came to me and people asked for my reaction, I simply said "I have nothing to say" and passed it on.
What else could I do? If I had said what I really thought it would have created a riot. I could have said that it is absurd the these upper-middle class people with good jobs, vacations and fine educations didn't have time to be more involved in their communities. That all the privileges that these people have been given only make sense if they are used to help others. Or that they have so devalued the concept of "citizenship" and "personal responsibility" that they are reduced to the level of being not much more than irresponsible children.
It occurred to me, however, that the visiting activists, the discussion circle afterwards, and the church itself had absolutely nothing to do with making the world a better place. Instead, it was about forging the emotional chain that is essential to building a strong congregation. Indeed, even though I felt repulsed by the whole experience, everyone else remarked about how much they enjoyed the service. And why wouldn't they? It had turned into an exercise of relieving the guilt that many of these people feel for living in a world that is palpably going to pot without their having made any significant sacrifice in their own lives in order to solve its problems.
All of this comes down to the way people confuse their feelings with the world around them. At its simplest level, people indulge in the so-called "pathetic fallacy" and act towards inanimate objects as if they were sentient beings. For example, I had a neighbour who used to get so angry with his appliances when they didn't work that he would throw them out and smash them on the driveway. Other people swear at their car when it won't start, and so on.
What is at work is the idea that human consciousness exists in a stew of emotions---both within our own minds and when interacting with others. Indeed, emotional cuing is an essential form of communication. I first became aware of this fact while watching a very cheesy, Jerry Bruckheimer television show titled "JAG". This show pushes the stereotypes of American conservatism (the gruff, yet fair authority figure; brash and daring military hero; the brilliant, yet nerdy young support figure; the supportive, nurturing woman; etc.) It also uses very blatant musical cues to manipulate the emotional reaction of viewers. In particular, a trumpet solo is used repeatedly in all the episodes as a mechanism to alert viewers when some sort of patriotic appeal is being made by one of the characters so they can react appropriately.
One might think that using such creaky devices wouldn't work on a cynical, educated viewer like myself. But in actual fact, I respond just the same as the cheesiest worshipper of Ronald Reagan. The difference is that after the fact my conscious mind "kicks in", analyses what has just happened, and makes sure that I don't do anything foolish based on these emotional cues. But that is because of my own particular "kung fu" of trying to understand my mind through contemplation and meditation. The people in the Unitarian Congregation---who after all are not Daoists---do not do this sort of thing. As a result, they simply fly wherever their emotions take them.
The Old Masters who wrote the Dao De Jing understood this issue. That is why they say in Chapter Five:
The point is that everything that exists is totally indifferent to our feelings. There is no loving God up in the sky who cares about how we feel. Our sense of outrage against injustice, our sense of guilt over our many weaknesses, our love for the people in our life---none of that has any more value in life than the rage a person may feel when their computer crashes in the middle of writing an essay or when their car won't start on a cold morning. And all the good feelings that people felt towards each other in that Unitarian service will have zero impact on global warming, the war in Afghanistan or any other important issue facing our nation.
And as someone who aspires to being a sage, I have to learn to have zero concern for the feelings of those people. Something I am still far from achieving.
It was supposed to be a service devoted to the idea of "social activism". When I heard the people talk on the subject, however, what I heard was not too much more than a statement about ego gratification from the individuals involved. The folk singer talked about how he used music to promote the "good". The retired nurse talked about her "second career". The therapist talked about how to avoid "burnout". And the young woman Muslim talked about how it is to be a visible Muslim in the public eye.
No one talked about working to fix the world's problems.
Afterwards, the congregation formed a circle and people spoke of their reactions. Mostly all I heard was people's excuses for doing so little to get involved in the world. The visiting speakers mostly spent their time trying to make these people feel good about themselves. At one point the folk-singer said that "anyone who signs a petition is an activist".
When the microphone came to me and people asked for my reaction, I simply said "I have nothing to say" and passed it on.
What else could I do? If I had said what I really thought it would have created a riot. I could have said that it is absurd the these upper-middle class people with good jobs, vacations and fine educations didn't have time to be more involved in their communities. That all the privileges that these people have been given only make sense if they are used to help others. Or that they have so devalued the concept of "citizenship" and "personal responsibility" that they are reduced to the level of being not much more than irresponsible children.
It occurred to me, however, that the visiting activists, the discussion circle afterwards, and the church itself had absolutely nothing to do with making the world a better place. Instead, it was about forging the emotional chain that is essential to building a strong congregation. Indeed, even though I felt repulsed by the whole experience, everyone else remarked about how much they enjoyed the service. And why wouldn't they? It had turned into an exercise of relieving the guilt that many of these people feel for living in a world that is palpably going to pot without their having made any significant sacrifice in their own lives in order to solve its problems.
All of this comes down to the way people confuse their feelings with the world around them. At its simplest level, people indulge in the so-called "pathetic fallacy" and act towards inanimate objects as if they were sentient beings. For example, I had a neighbour who used to get so angry with his appliances when they didn't work that he would throw them out and smash them on the driveway. Other people swear at their car when it won't start, and so on.
What is at work is the idea that human consciousness exists in a stew of emotions---both within our own minds and when interacting with others. Indeed, emotional cuing is an essential form of communication. I first became aware of this fact while watching a very cheesy, Jerry Bruckheimer television show titled "JAG". This show pushes the stereotypes of American conservatism (the gruff, yet fair authority figure; brash and daring military hero; the brilliant, yet nerdy young support figure; the supportive, nurturing woman; etc.) It also uses very blatant musical cues to manipulate the emotional reaction of viewers. In particular, a trumpet solo is used repeatedly in all the episodes as a mechanism to alert viewers when some sort of patriotic appeal is being made by one of the characters so they can react appropriately.
One might think that using such creaky devices wouldn't work on a cynical, educated viewer like myself. But in actual fact, I respond just the same as the cheesiest worshipper of Ronald Reagan. The difference is that after the fact my conscious mind "kicks in", analyses what has just happened, and makes sure that I don't do anything foolish based on these emotional cues. But that is because of my own particular "kung fu" of trying to understand my mind through contemplation and meditation. The people in the Unitarian Congregation---who after all are not Daoists---do not do this sort of thing. As a result, they simply fly wherever their emotions take them.
The Old Masters who wrote the Dao De Jing understood this issue. That is why they say in Chapter Five:
Heaven and Earth are not humane;
They regard the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
The Sage is not humane;
He regards the common people as straw dogs.
The point is that everything that exists is totally indifferent to our feelings. There is no loving God up in the sky who cares about how we feel. Our sense of outrage against injustice, our sense of guilt over our many weaknesses, our love for the people in our life---none of that has any more value in life than the rage a person may feel when their computer crashes in the middle of writing an essay or when their car won't start on a cold morning. And all the good feelings that people felt towards each other in that Unitarian service will have zero impact on global warming, the war in Afghanistan or any other important issue facing our nation.
And as someone who aspires to being a sage, I have to learn to have zero concern for the feelings of those people. Something I am still far from achieving.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
The Dangers of Meditation
I rarely hear people mention that there are dangers associated with meditation and spirituality in general, but I have come to the conclusion that there are genuine risks associated with spiritual practice. I don't want to blow them up beyond their importance, but I think that it is important to know that they exist.
I've come to this conclusion partly from observing others directly, partly from reading on the subject and partly from self-observation.
Over the years, I've watched some pretty wild psycho-dramas unfold amongst people who are engaged in spiritual practices. One of the most bizarre involved a conflict between a Daoist priest and martial arts instructor that eventually resulted in an official complaint complaint being lodged with the police about "grand theft temple treasure"----for a framed poster that you can buy in China town for ten bucks. (I'm sure there were amusing anecdotes told in the coffee room of the police station.) In a more serious vein, many are the tales of broken hearts from the sexual misconduct of North American Buddhist teachers, at least one of which became a fairly well-known book: Shoes Outside the Door.
On a more serious note, I've noticed a couple folks who went "over the deep end" while obsessing about religion. I suspect that these folks had problems that existed long before they became involved in spiritual practice, but contrary to what some people might think, spirituality seems to have not only not helped these folks, it may have helped induce the madness that descended upon them. One person I know, for example, was very religious and went to the point of living in a Catholic intentional community. She had to give all of that up though, as it became clear to both her and her therapists that the schizophrenia she began to manifest was tied to religious symbolism. (She related to me a memory of being in a mental hospital, tied up in a straight jacket, while nurses and porters held her down so a doctor could inject her with sedatives. At the time, she said she was convinced that she was Jesus Christ.) Heavily medicated, she now avoids any sort of religious involvement like the plague.
My personal experience is that any insights I have gained from the practice of meditation and contemplation have been paid for by the development of a strongly introspective character that isolates me from other people. Lately this separation was brought home to me when I took an acquaintance out to the local farmer's market. She was totally enthralled with every vendor and asked for free samples from each and everyone. All I could think about was the fact that every free sample came with a disposable plastic cup or spoon that was instantly tossed into the trash. Moreover, I noticed that she was totally oblivious to this---to me---obvious problem.
I wouldn't trade the insights and sensitivity that I have gained from the practice of Neidan, but it does come at the price of losing one's ability to totally lose oneself in the sorts of child-like pleasures of ordinary people. The problem isn't so much that I can no longer get involved in things and enjoy myself, its just that those things that I do enjoy are rarely the same things that the general public does, and vice versa. This creates a barrier between the introspective spiritual seeker and his neighbours. Of course, this phenomenon explains the tendency of spiritual seekers to become hermits,recluses, anchorites and monastics.
In a way, these issues are pretty much the same as those experienced by anyone who decides to live a "counter cultural" existence. Many of us know people who "dropped out" from mainstream society and in return mainstream society dropped onto them like an anvil. Most of this comes down to the fact that society "protects its own" and people who "follow the rules" tend to have a support system to help them get over the rough spots. I once had a high-school friend explain this to me by saying "If you just do what THEY want, life can be pretty sweet."
But once you decide to make your own rules, you have to assume more responsibility for your life.
Consider, if you will, someone who decides to be self-employed instead of working for a large business. It becomes the individual's responsibility to line up customers, deal with suppliers, find some way of dealing with downtime due to sickness, etc. In contrast, people who work in a large, unionized business only have to think about what would happen if they get laid off.
Take this one step further and try to live without the discipline of either customers or bosses (which amount to much the same thing), and you end up living an economic carnival ride. I have an acquaintance who did this sort of thing for years until he ended up at an advanced age spending a Canadian winter in an uninsulated summer trailor with nothing more to eat than half-rotten pumpkins. (He escaped that scenario by giving up his confirmed bachelorhood to get married to a woman of financial means.) Many folks following the same path end up in much worse straights---they live on the streets of our cities. Indeed, there is a very popular book and movie titled "Into the Wild" that chronicles the way the wilderness killed a young man who attempted to drop out of society and live as a wilderness hermit.
In its way, anyone who treads the path of internal alchemy---taijiquan, "sitting and forgetting", etc---is even more of a rebel than the counter-cultural type who tries to live without "the man" breathing down his neck. That is because he is casting a critical eye towards the way his mind operates and the deepest level of assumptions that govern his life.
And once you start to look deeply into how the mind operates, and seriously question all of our assumptions, we can end up falling down Alice's rabbit hole.
I've mentioned above about how several North American Buddhist teachers have been involved sexually with their students. This makes sense once you realize that a large part of what both teacher and student are doing is trying free themselves from their socially constructed sense of self through intense self-analysis. Becoming in tune with the "Buddha mind" and "seeing the face you presented before you were born" leaves the rules pounded into your head by the school nuns behind you. At that point, "there are no rules', and it is hardly surprising that this has tempted a lot of people into infidelity.
Oddly enough, the opposite result can also occur. If sitting and forgetting can free you of social constraints, the simple practice like "mindfulness" can create a whole new set of problems. If a person really gets into the habit of carefully observing each and every moment of her life, what happens to the joyful and spontaneous things? Sex can become impossible if you develop the habit of being completely aware of everything you do (this probably has something to do with the celibacy that most monastic traditions manifest.) Indeed, if you seek to leave the "animal" behind, it is hardly surprising that our animal instincts disappear.
As a result of learning these lessons, I've come to a few ideas about protection against the problems of spiritual practice. First of all, I don't encourage anyone to meditate, do martial arts, or anything else spiritual unless they have a pretty good grounding to their life. A steady job, a normal place to live, regular work habits, etc, are pretty good indications that someone is not going to go off the deep end. Secondly, if you do follow the path, it is really important to use routine and conventionality as "anchors" to keep you from flying off into the wild blue yonder. There is a reason why monastic institutions have such a love of order and ritual---it helps keep the number of monks who go crazy down to a bare minimum.
Ultimately, however, "yah pays your money, yah takes your chances". Society is quickly going to Hell in a handbasket and lots of conventional people live lives of total lunacy. People who pursue a spiritual path are adventurers seeking a better life, and anything worth having requires taking risks. Just don't forget that lots of adventurers end up freezing, starving or being eaten by cogars.
So be careful!
I've come to this conclusion partly from observing others directly, partly from reading on the subject and partly from self-observation.
Over the years, I've watched some pretty wild psycho-dramas unfold amongst people who are engaged in spiritual practices. One of the most bizarre involved a conflict between a Daoist priest and martial arts instructor that eventually resulted in an official complaint complaint being lodged with the police about "grand theft temple treasure"----for a framed poster that you can buy in China town for ten bucks. (I'm sure there were amusing anecdotes told in the coffee room of the police station.) In a more serious vein, many are the tales of broken hearts from the sexual misconduct of North American Buddhist teachers, at least one of which became a fairly well-known book: Shoes Outside the Door.
On a more serious note, I've noticed a couple folks who went "over the deep end" while obsessing about religion. I suspect that these folks had problems that existed long before they became involved in spiritual practice, but contrary to what some people might think, spirituality seems to have not only not helped these folks, it may have helped induce the madness that descended upon them. One person I know, for example, was very religious and went to the point of living in a Catholic intentional community. She had to give all of that up though, as it became clear to both her and her therapists that the schizophrenia she began to manifest was tied to religious symbolism. (She related to me a memory of being in a mental hospital, tied up in a straight jacket, while nurses and porters held her down so a doctor could inject her with sedatives. At the time, she said she was convinced that she was Jesus Christ.) Heavily medicated, she now avoids any sort of religious involvement like the plague.
My personal experience is that any insights I have gained from the practice of meditation and contemplation have been paid for by the development of a strongly introspective character that isolates me from other people. Lately this separation was brought home to me when I took an acquaintance out to the local farmer's market. She was totally enthralled with every vendor and asked for free samples from each and everyone. All I could think about was the fact that every free sample came with a disposable plastic cup or spoon that was instantly tossed into the trash. Moreover, I noticed that she was totally oblivious to this---to me---obvious problem.
I wouldn't trade the insights and sensitivity that I have gained from the practice of Neidan, but it does come at the price of losing one's ability to totally lose oneself in the sorts of child-like pleasures of ordinary people. The problem isn't so much that I can no longer get involved in things and enjoy myself, its just that those things that I do enjoy are rarely the same things that the general public does, and vice versa. This creates a barrier between the introspective spiritual seeker and his neighbours. Of course, this phenomenon explains the tendency of spiritual seekers to become hermits,recluses, anchorites and monastics.
In a way, these issues are pretty much the same as those experienced by anyone who decides to live a "counter cultural" existence. Many of us know people who "dropped out" from mainstream society and in return mainstream society dropped onto them like an anvil. Most of this comes down to the fact that society "protects its own" and people who "follow the rules" tend to have a support system to help them get over the rough spots. I once had a high-school friend explain this to me by saying "If you just do what THEY want, life can be pretty sweet."
But once you decide to make your own rules, you have to assume more responsibility for your life.
Consider, if you will, someone who decides to be self-employed instead of working for a large business. It becomes the individual's responsibility to line up customers, deal with suppliers, find some way of dealing with downtime due to sickness, etc. In contrast, people who work in a large, unionized business only have to think about what would happen if they get laid off.
Take this one step further and try to live without the discipline of either customers or bosses (which amount to much the same thing), and you end up living an economic carnival ride. I have an acquaintance who did this sort of thing for years until he ended up at an advanced age spending a Canadian winter in an uninsulated summer trailor with nothing more to eat than half-rotten pumpkins. (He escaped that scenario by giving up his confirmed bachelorhood to get married to a woman of financial means.) Many folks following the same path end up in much worse straights---they live on the streets of our cities. Indeed, there is a very popular book and movie titled "Into the Wild" that chronicles the way the wilderness killed a young man who attempted to drop out of society and live as a wilderness hermit.
In its way, anyone who treads the path of internal alchemy---taijiquan, "sitting and forgetting", etc---is even more of a rebel than the counter-cultural type who tries to live without "the man" breathing down his neck. That is because he is casting a critical eye towards the way his mind operates and the deepest level of assumptions that govern his life.
And once you start to look deeply into how the mind operates, and seriously question all of our assumptions, we can end up falling down Alice's rabbit hole.
I've mentioned above about how several North American Buddhist teachers have been involved sexually with their students. This makes sense once you realize that a large part of what both teacher and student are doing is trying free themselves from their socially constructed sense of self through intense self-analysis. Becoming in tune with the "Buddha mind" and "seeing the face you presented before you were born" leaves the rules pounded into your head by the school nuns behind you. At that point, "there are no rules', and it is hardly surprising that this has tempted a lot of people into infidelity.
Oddly enough, the opposite result can also occur. If sitting and forgetting can free you of social constraints, the simple practice like "mindfulness" can create a whole new set of problems. If a person really gets into the habit of carefully observing each and every moment of her life, what happens to the joyful and spontaneous things? Sex can become impossible if you develop the habit of being completely aware of everything you do (this probably has something to do with the celibacy that most monastic traditions manifest.) Indeed, if you seek to leave the "animal" behind, it is hardly surprising that our animal instincts disappear.
As a result of learning these lessons, I've come to a few ideas about protection against the problems of spiritual practice. First of all, I don't encourage anyone to meditate, do martial arts, or anything else spiritual unless they have a pretty good grounding to their life. A steady job, a normal place to live, regular work habits, etc, are pretty good indications that someone is not going to go off the deep end. Secondly, if you do follow the path, it is really important to use routine and conventionality as "anchors" to keep you from flying off into the wild blue yonder. There is a reason why monastic institutions have such a love of order and ritual---it helps keep the number of monks who go crazy down to a bare minimum.
Ultimately, however, "yah pays your money, yah takes your chances". Society is quickly going to Hell in a handbasket and lots of conventional people live lives of total lunacy. People who pursue a spiritual path are adventurers seeking a better life, and anything worth having requires taking risks. Just don't forget that lots of adventurers end up freezing, starving or being eaten by cogars.
So be careful!
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Negative Meditation
I've been rather coy about stating what meditation exactly is, and I'm going to continue in that vein for this post too. I will end up offering a definition, but I think that it might help make the one I eventually give a lot more intelligible if I continue to offer suggestions about what it isn't. This actually isn't a very odd way to pursue this issue, as it is a path that has been very well-trodden by others. In fact, it has a name of its own---the via negativa.
With that in mind, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that certain practices that people do not associate with meditation are actually forms of meditation---but ones that are harmful to those who practice them.
Video Games
A lot of people take exception to video games because they are often so violent. It might be that this is a problem, but the thing that I find most damaging about them is the way they draw in people's concentration to a tighter and tighter form of concentration, speed people's responses up, and, cause people to manifest stress.
I think that this happens because video games are a perfect "Skinner Teaching Machine". These sorts of mechanisms give anyone who plays the game immediate feedback about success or failure. They also immediately escalate in lockstep with a person's increased skill at playing the game. By doing both of these things, they speed up and intensify the player's concentration the same way an engine does when it has had its governor removed. In effect, the mind races faster and faster until it begins to fly apart.
I first noticed this phenomena when I was a student playing one of the very first video games: Space Invaders. I found that after playing the game for a while I would end up holding onto the joystick with the "grip of death" and by the end of some of the higher levels I was almost having heart palpitations. (The soundtrack had a beat that was just like a heartbeat that kept speeding up as you advanced in levels.)
Since then I've noticed similar problems with other games. A few years back I got a copy of Populous for my desktop computer. It is a "god" game instead of a first person shooter, so it involves a different type of concentration than Space Invaders, but I found that while I didn't end up tight and panting after playing it, I did find it incredibly addictive. Ultimately, I found my quality of life degrading yet I found it almost impossible to quit. I ended up having to break the CD that it ran off of in half in order to stop wasting hours of time playing it. (I have a younger friend who said that it spread like the flu through his residence when he was at university and wasted enormous amounts of time.)
I am including video games as a form of meditation because they are based upon developing a specific type of consciousness---which is a large part of meditation. But they accentuate a negative, obsessive form of concentration that is damaging both to the mind and body.
Commercial Television
Again, many people complain about television's content, but I am more concerned about its form. The problem is that television asks the viewer to become engaged with the programming but jarringly interrupts the narrative every ten minutes or so to put in advertisements that almost always a little louder and more manic than the actual programming. If a person chooses to pay attention to the show and try to watch and listen intently, the commercials are extremely jarring.
I remember reading a short story by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. where some misguided future government chose to homogenize people's abilities through various technical innovations. Dancers had to perform with weights tied to their legs and so on. People with very high IQs had to go through life with devices that attached headphones to their ears and which would randomly emit very loud noises. This startled the people and robbed these people of the ability to concentrate, thereby robbing them of the advantages of having more innate intelligence than the general public.
In a same way, I think that the commercial interruptions of commercial television damages a person's ability to concentrate and "get into" drama. I rarely watch tv any more and I have found that when I do it very quickly gives me a headache. I think that if anyone does watch a lot of tv, they will inevitably have to learn to not pay much attention to their surroundings or else suffer a similar problem. I suspect that some of the many people I meet who seem to have the attention span of a gnat have developed this as a response to watching too much television.
Black Berries and Cell Phones
Where I work all the middle managers have been given blackberries and are forced to constantly wear them so they can always be "on call". At risk of biting the hand that feeds me (RIM is just down the road and pays a lot of taxes that in turn support my job), I would argue that this is a very bad idea.
I rarely have a conversation with my boss where he doesn't have the vibration function go off on his blackberry and he has to interrupt what he is saying in order to respond to it. Almost invariably, it is an email---quite often spam. Either way, the poor man simply doesn't seem to have the time to create a whole idea without being interrupted.
This is not only a bad idea, but unnecessary. My boss is a very low level manager in a second-rate academic library at a not-quite first-rank university. There is absolutely nothing that happens in his work life that cannot wait until he checks his email or telephone answering machine. It is just a question of status---his boss (and him, to be honest) want to think of themselves as being so important that they always need to be on call.
What is really bizarre, is how the university students have bought into cell phones. They constantly answer the darn things, even though it strikes me that university students are, as a class, the group of people who are the least likely to actually need to be chained to one of these things. Maybe they are cheaper than a land line, but surely they could turn the things off once in a while!
In my next post I'll talk about some non-meditation, meditation that is actually good for you.
With that in mind, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that certain practices that people do not associate with meditation are actually forms of meditation---but ones that are harmful to those who practice them.
Video Games
A lot of people take exception to video games because they are often so violent. It might be that this is a problem, but the thing that I find most damaging about them is the way they draw in people's concentration to a tighter and tighter form of concentration, speed people's responses up, and, cause people to manifest stress.
I think that this happens because video games are a perfect "Skinner Teaching Machine". These sorts of mechanisms give anyone who plays the game immediate feedback about success or failure. They also immediately escalate in lockstep with a person's increased skill at playing the game. By doing both of these things, they speed up and intensify the player's concentration the same way an engine does when it has had its governor removed. In effect, the mind races faster and faster until it begins to fly apart.
I first noticed this phenomena when I was a student playing one of the very first video games: Space Invaders. I found that after playing the game for a while I would end up holding onto the joystick with the "grip of death" and by the end of some of the higher levels I was almost having heart palpitations. (The soundtrack had a beat that was just like a heartbeat that kept speeding up as you advanced in levels.)
Since then I've noticed similar problems with other games. A few years back I got a copy of Populous for my desktop computer. It is a "god" game instead of a first person shooter, so it involves a different type of concentration than Space Invaders, but I found that while I didn't end up tight and panting after playing it, I did find it incredibly addictive. Ultimately, I found my quality of life degrading yet I found it almost impossible to quit. I ended up having to break the CD that it ran off of in half in order to stop wasting hours of time playing it. (I have a younger friend who said that it spread like the flu through his residence when he was at university and wasted enormous amounts of time.)
I am including video games as a form of meditation because they are based upon developing a specific type of consciousness---which is a large part of meditation. But they accentuate a negative, obsessive form of concentration that is damaging both to the mind and body.
Commercial Television
Again, many people complain about television's content, but I am more concerned about its form. The problem is that television asks the viewer to become engaged with the programming but jarringly interrupts the narrative every ten minutes or so to put in advertisements that almost always a little louder and more manic than the actual programming. If a person chooses to pay attention to the show and try to watch and listen intently, the commercials are extremely jarring.
I remember reading a short story by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. where some misguided future government chose to homogenize people's abilities through various technical innovations. Dancers had to perform with weights tied to their legs and so on. People with very high IQs had to go through life with devices that attached headphones to their ears and which would randomly emit very loud noises. This startled the people and robbed these people of the ability to concentrate, thereby robbing them of the advantages of having more innate intelligence than the general public.
In a same way, I think that the commercial interruptions of commercial television damages a person's ability to concentrate and "get into" drama. I rarely watch tv any more and I have found that when I do it very quickly gives me a headache. I think that if anyone does watch a lot of tv, they will inevitably have to learn to not pay much attention to their surroundings or else suffer a similar problem. I suspect that some of the many people I meet who seem to have the attention span of a gnat have developed this as a response to watching too much television.
Black Berries and Cell Phones
Where I work all the middle managers have been given blackberries and are forced to constantly wear them so they can always be "on call". At risk of biting the hand that feeds me (RIM is just down the road and pays a lot of taxes that in turn support my job), I would argue that this is a very bad idea.
I rarely have a conversation with my boss where he doesn't have the vibration function go off on his blackberry and he has to interrupt what he is saying in order to respond to it. Almost invariably, it is an email---quite often spam. Either way, the poor man simply doesn't seem to have the time to create a whole idea without being interrupted.
This is not only a bad idea, but unnecessary. My boss is a very low level manager in a second-rate academic library at a not-quite first-rank university. There is absolutely nothing that happens in his work life that cannot wait until he checks his email or telephone answering machine. It is just a question of status---his boss (and him, to be honest) want to think of themselves as being so important that they always need to be on call.
What is really bizarre, is how the university students have bought into cell phones. They constantly answer the darn things, even though it strikes me that university students are, as a class, the group of people who are the least likely to actually need to be chained to one of these things. Maybe they are cheaper than a land line, but surely they could turn the things off once in a while!
In my next post I'll talk about some non-meditation, meditation that is actually good for you.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Emotions and Meditation
In my last post I tried to explain my understanding of meditation and how the idea came about that one develops miraculous powers by regular practise. This post will be about the relationship between emotions and meditation.
I think that this is worth its own post because I regularly meet people who seem to think that all "meditation" is, is a method for channelling very strong, "positive" emotions. There are a lot of sources for this belief, but the two most common ones seem to be from the Christian and Buddhist religions.
The New Testament has some pretty strong passages that teach the important of "love". A very beautiful translation of a letter from St. Paul is often quoted to emphasize this point.
And it is true that love is very important to being a realized human being. But there is a very important point that I would like to make about it.
I often meet believers that act as if "love" is some sort of "thing" or "essence" that a human being hold in their hands like a talisman. Sometime I even meet people who seem to be "love intoxicated" and who walk around with a weird smile on their faces and who's answer to almost every intractable human problem is "love". In fact, the Beatles even wrote a song that just about sums up this world-view.
Now consider, if you will, the subtle difference between these two passages. St. Paul talks about a person's abilities distinct from their love: "if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing". He is not saying, like Lennon and McCartney, that "all you need is love". It is faith that moves mountains for Paul, not love.
Philosophers make the distinction between what they call "necessary" and "sufficient" qualities. The former is what popular parlance would call a "deal breaker", but it doesn't necessarily mean that it is "the whole deal". For example, Air is necessary for human life, but it isn't sufficient---we also need things like food and water. People suffocate without oxygen, but they can also starve, die of thirst, freeze, etc. St. Paul is saying that love is necessary, whereas the Beatles are saying that love is sufficient. This is not an exercise in hair-splitting, but rather something with very important consequences.
Love is demonstrably not all we need. We also need wisdom, equanimity, creativity, and a whole suite of other important qualities in order to live a full life. Moreover, love can be a tremendous source of dysfunction in people's lives. Having quoted St. Paul and the Beatles, now lets look at the lyrics of a song by Bessie Smith:
People routinely talk about "falling in love" or being "full of love". But what exactly does that mean? Does it mean that what people do when they are "in love" is better than when they are not? No, it doesn't because we are all aware of the situation where someone is quite selfishly in love. Infatuation---which is what being "in love" means---leads to all the sorts of crazy self-destructive behaviour that Bessie Smith is referring to.
It might be argued that this problem is just a result of the English language's use of just one word, "love", to describe a wide variety of emotions. In Greek, for example, there are a wide variety of words that describe a complex pallet of the emotion: "eros", "agape", "philia", etc. So the crazed stalker who will not leave a person alone because of their infatuation is simply someone who is in the grip of one particular type of love, probably eros. And, if we accept this line of argument, "eros" isn't really the sort of "love" that the Beatles are talking about.
I'm not sure if this distinction holds, though, as there are also equally unbalanced manifestations of other types of love. For example, it is possible to be so in the grips of religious love, agape, that a man is willing to do terrible crimes. For example, what were the hijackers of 9/11 but people who were in love with their understanding of God? Even if someone has not allowed their ideal of "love" to convince them to commit mass murder, it can get them to do some pretty crazy things that they would never do if they thought about it coolly and rationally.
Another distinction that philosophers would make is that between a substance and a quality. The former is a "thing" whereas the latter is something that we would say about it. An apple is a substance, whereas "red" is a quality that an apple may manifest. I would argue that "love" is a quality of human intention, not a substance. A person may bake bread with "love", but the love in this case has no existence without the actual bread.
This too might seem like hair-splitting, but it isn't. If "love" is something in and of itself, then it is possible to be "filled with love" without any reference to a specific activity. But if it is instead a quality, then our love only becomes manifest in how we are relating to a specific thing. And this, I believe, is an absolutely essential difference when it comes to meditation.
It is because people who walk around "intoxicated by love" are truly intoxicated---but not by love. That is, they are "emotion junkies" who have become intoxicated with the feeling they get when they are "in love". People who have fallen "in love" will know what I mean when I talk about the physical feelings that one gets from the experience. They are very similar to those of being intoxicated with a mild narcotic, like marihuana. And the emotion junkies are not really experiencing "love" at all, unless it is "love" of being "high" on love.
And this is where I get back to meditation.
When we meditate we can learn to manifest a great many different emotions and feelings. It is possible to learn how to turn on and off emotional feelings pretty much at will. If anyone doubts this, consider a scene from an episode of "The Simpsons" I once saw. In it, Bart needed to manifest tears in order to convince his mother that he was indeed sorry for a deed he had done. Just before he met her, he said to himself "OK, think about the day your cat died!" And indeed the tears did well up in his eyes. After his mother backed down and he was left to himself, he kept crying and said "Too effective! Oh poor snowball!" In the same way, it is possible to learn how to crank up one's positive emotions and waft through a large part of one's life in a emotional "high".
I remember the first time I recognized what real love is---and it too involved a cat. I got up in the middle of the night for some reason and was walking around my home in my bare feet. I stepped in a puddle of vomit and the absolute first thought that came into my head was "My cat's sick". Not a personally-directed feeling of "Yuck!", but an outwardly directed concern for another being. Totally spontaneous without a single moment or iota of self-examination according to some sort of external criteria. At that one spontaneous moment I was living wholly as someone who was concerned about the other as a subject in and of herself instead of as a secondary character in my own personal drama.
Now as I mentioned in the introduction to this essay, a great deal of the misinformation about emotion and meditation seems to flow from Christianity. When I wrote that, I wasn't referring to the quote from Saint Paul----which is not only great literature, but not substantially in disagreement with what I have written above. But there are forms of popular religious practices that are designed to be not much more than an attempt to ramp-up the emotional feelings of individual believers and put them into the habit of getting regular emotion "fixes".
Consider, if you will, the Christian tradition of "passion plays". These are dramatic performances that are specifically designed to get people emotionally cranked on the violence and pathos of the crucifixion of Christ. This dramatic tradition stretches back hundreds of years in Christianity and have recently undergone a tremendous rebirth, including the extremely popular movie by Mel Gibson, "The Passion of the Christ". It is very hard to understand exactly what role these dramatic performances could have other than to inflame the emotions of those who view them.
Another form of emotionalism is the "visualizations" that many Christians are taught to manifest when they meditate. Often this involves some sort of gruesome picture of an actual, physical human heart surrounded by thorns and pierced
by a spear wound. Sometimes the heart is presented by itself, but often it is part of a full picture of an especially sentimental representation of Jesus. While contemplating this representation, it is often suggested that some sort of prayer be offered that is also extremely sentimental and emotional in nature. For example, I pulled the following off the internet pretty much at random:
In actual fact, meditation is something completely different. But that is the topic for another post.
I think that this is worth its own post because I regularly meet people who seem to think that all "meditation" is, is a method for channelling very strong, "positive" emotions. There are a lot of sources for this belief, but the two most common ones seem to be from the Christian and Buddhist religions.
The New Testament has some pretty strong passages that teach the important of "love". A very beautiful translation of a letter from St. Paul is often quoted to emphasize this point.
The Way of Love
13:1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
And it is true that love is very important to being a realized human being. But there is a very important point that I would like to make about it.
I often meet believers that act as if "love" is some sort of "thing" or "essence" that a human being hold in their hands like a talisman. Sometime I even meet people who seem to be "love intoxicated" and who walk around with a weird smile on their faces and who's answer to almost every intractable human problem is "love". In fact, the Beatles even wrote a song that just about sums up this world-view.
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love. There's nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can sing that can't be sung. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game It's easy. There's nothing you can make that can't be made. No one you can save that can't be saved. Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time - It's easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love, All you need is love, love, love is all you need. Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love. All you need is love, all you need is love, All you need is love, love, love is all you need. There's nothing you can know that isn't known. Nothing you can see that isn't shown. Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be. It's easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love, All you need is love, love, love is all you need. All you need is love (all together now) All you need is love (everybody) All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
Now consider, if you will, the subtle difference between these two passages. St. Paul talks about a person's abilities distinct from their love: "if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing". He is not saying, like Lennon and McCartney, that "all you need is love". It is faith that moves mountains for Paul, not love.
Philosophers make the distinction between what they call "necessary" and "sufficient" qualities. The former is what popular parlance would call a "deal breaker", but it doesn't necessarily mean that it is "the whole deal". For example, Air is necessary for human life, but it isn't sufficient---we also need things like food and water. People suffocate without oxygen, but they can also starve, die of thirst, freeze, etc. St. Paul is saying that love is necessary, whereas the Beatles are saying that love is sufficient. This is not an exercise in hair-splitting, but rather something with very important consequences.
Love is demonstrably not all we need. We also need wisdom, equanimity, creativity, and a whole suite of other important qualities in order to live a full life. Moreover, love can be a tremendous source of dysfunction in people's lives. Having quoted St. Paul and the Beatles, now lets look at the lyrics of a song by Bessie Smith:
Careless Love :
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
You've fly though my head like wine
You've wrecked the life
Of many a poor girl
And you nearly spoiled this life of mine
Love, oh love, oh careless love
In your clutches of desire
You've made me break a many true vow
Then you set my very soul on fire
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
All my happiness bereft
Cause you've filled my heart with weary old blues
Now I'm walkin' talkin' to myself
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Trusted you now it's too late
You've made me throw my old friend down
That's why I sing this song of hate
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Night and day I weep and moan
You brought the wrong man into this life of mine
For my sins till judgement I'll atone
People routinely talk about "falling in love" or being "full of love". But what exactly does that mean? Does it mean that what people do when they are "in love" is better than when they are not? No, it doesn't because we are all aware of the situation where someone is quite selfishly in love. Infatuation---which is what being "in love" means---leads to all the sorts of crazy self-destructive behaviour that Bessie Smith is referring to.
It might be argued that this problem is just a result of the English language's use of just one word, "love", to describe a wide variety of emotions. In Greek, for example, there are a wide variety of words that describe a complex pallet of the emotion: "eros", "agape", "philia", etc. So the crazed stalker who will not leave a person alone because of their infatuation is simply someone who is in the grip of one particular type of love, probably eros. And, if we accept this line of argument, "eros" isn't really the sort of "love" that the Beatles are talking about.
I'm not sure if this distinction holds, though, as there are also equally unbalanced manifestations of other types of love. For example, it is possible to be so in the grips of religious love, agape, that a man is willing to do terrible crimes. For example, what were the hijackers of 9/11 but people who were in love with their understanding of God? Even if someone has not allowed their ideal of "love" to convince them to commit mass murder, it can get them to do some pretty crazy things that they would never do if they thought about it coolly and rationally.
Another distinction that philosophers would make is that between a substance and a quality. The former is a "thing" whereas the latter is something that we would say about it. An apple is a substance, whereas "red" is a quality that an apple may manifest. I would argue that "love" is a quality of human intention, not a substance. A person may bake bread with "love", but the love in this case has no existence without the actual bread.
This too might seem like hair-splitting, but it isn't. If "love" is something in and of itself, then it is possible to be "filled with love" without any reference to a specific activity. But if it is instead a quality, then our love only becomes manifest in how we are relating to a specific thing. And this, I believe, is an absolutely essential difference when it comes to meditation.
It is because people who walk around "intoxicated by love" are truly intoxicated---but not by love. That is, they are "emotion junkies" who have become intoxicated with the feeling they get when they are "in love". People who have fallen "in love" will know what I mean when I talk about the physical feelings that one gets from the experience. They are very similar to those of being intoxicated with a mild narcotic, like marihuana. And the emotion junkies are not really experiencing "love" at all, unless it is "love" of being "high" on love.
And this is where I get back to meditation.
When we meditate we can learn to manifest a great many different emotions and feelings. It is possible to learn how to turn on and off emotional feelings pretty much at will. If anyone doubts this, consider a scene from an episode of "The Simpsons" I once saw. In it, Bart needed to manifest tears in order to convince his mother that he was indeed sorry for a deed he had done. Just before he met her, he said to himself "OK, think about the day your cat died!" And indeed the tears did well up in his eyes. After his mother backed down and he was left to himself, he kept crying and said "Too effective! Oh poor snowball!" In the same way, it is possible to learn how to crank up one's positive emotions and waft through a large part of one's life in a emotional "high".
But is it "love"? It certainly isn't if it is an act designed to manipulate your mother. Nor is it if it is a life strategy that allows you to keep from confronting the difficult complexities that face you here and now. In fact, in some ways it is the exact opposite of real love because the real focus is not the "other", but rather the self. Bart Simpson triggered his emotions by thinking of his dead cat, but the situation was really all about weaselling out of the punishment he deserved. In the same way, someone who is high on the concept of "love in general" is not connecting with the person or situation in front of them here-and-now, but instead is trying to avoid the reality that confronts them. They are exactly like Bart Simpson, cranking up their emotions in order to avoid punishment.
In contrast, real love is a subtle quality of our lives that exists pretty much outside of strong emotions. It is not a strong feeling of the self, but instead a total "giving up" of the self in favour of the other.
I remember the first time I recognized what real love is---and it too involved a cat. I got up in the middle of the night for some reason and was walking around my home in my bare feet. I stepped in a puddle of vomit and the absolute first thought that came into my head was "My cat's sick". Not a personally-directed feeling of "Yuck!", but an outwardly directed concern for another being. Totally spontaneous without a single moment or iota of self-examination according to some sort of external criteria. At that one spontaneous moment I was living wholly as someone who was concerned about the other as a subject in and of herself instead of as a secondary character in my own personal drama.
Now as I mentioned in the introduction to this essay, a great deal of the misinformation about emotion and meditation seems to flow from Christianity. When I wrote that, I wasn't referring to the quote from Saint Paul----which is not only great literature, but not substantially in disagreement with what I have written above. But there are forms of popular religious practices that are designed to be not much more than an attempt to ramp-up the emotional feelings of individual believers and put them into the habit of getting regular emotion "fixes".
Consider, if you will, the Christian tradition of "passion plays". These are dramatic performances that are specifically designed to get people emotionally cranked on the violence and pathos of the crucifixion of Christ. This dramatic tradition stretches back hundreds of years in Christianity and have recently undergone a tremendous rebirth, including the extremely popular movie by Mel Gibson, "The Passion of the Christ". It is very hard to understand exactly what role these dramatic performances could have other than to inflame the emotions of those who view them.
Another form of emotionalism is the "visualizations" that many Christians are taught to manifest when they meditate. Often this involves some sort of gruesome picture of an actual, physical human heart surrounded by thorns and pierced
by a spear wound. Sometimes the heart is presented by itself, but often it is part of a full picture of an especially sentimental representation of Jesus. While contemplating this representation, it is often suggested that some sort of prayer be offered that is also extremely sentimental and emotional in nature. For example, I pulled the following off the internet pretty much at random:You, O Lord, I see in life. In everything surrounding me that is of You, I see beauty, wholeness, peace, joy and most especially love. Yours is a love that transforms, that reaches into the inner landscape of my soul. There is no mountain high enough or valley low enough that can keep Your Love from reaching me. No matter what I do or where I go, You will always be there, loving me, leading me home. You lead me to the desire of Your Heart, an inner Communion with You in Your Heart. Your desire is for an intimate, profound relationship with me and with each of the hearts and souls, which You created for the purpose of Love. As I sense Your Loving Presence in Life as a child, I awaken to Your Heart and am moved.
Buddhism also has a tradition that involves the artificial creation of strong emotions. This is called the "Metta", which is usually translated as "loving kindness towards all beings". Like the sacred heart practise of Christianity, it is aimed at creating a strong emotional experience that is aimed at no one in particular. It does this through the practice of trying to progressively create warm feelings towards oneself, one's friends, and eventually one's enemies.
There is significant differences from Christian practice, though, in that the Metta practice is focused upon the individual instead of an external God, and, that it exists in a wider Buddhist context that is very strongly oriented towards promotting self-awareness. As such, it should be viewed more as a temporary expedient---like a seditive for someone suffering from a psychotic episode---rather than a completely sufficient meditative practice. People who have a hard time controlling their anger will be told to follow the Metta practice until such time as they are ready for a less emotional meditation technique.
The problem for Westerners is that when they go to a introductory workshop on Buddhist meditation they usually do not tend to get much beyond the first level of practice. Moreover, the Christian context they come from prepares them to think that this sort of emotional "first-aid" is the total treatment. This means that they are ready to walk away from their limited experience with the belief that, like Lennon and McCartney would say, "All you need is love---".In actual fact, meditation is something completely different. But that is the topic for another post.
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