We continue from our last blog: Five Mistakes (we) Beginners Often Make.
In that blog we identified two of them:
1) Misunderstanding the nature of spiritual practice;
2) Chasing an experience.
The third mistake beginners often make:
3) Thinking Our Experiences
We have five senses: seeing, hearing, sensing, smelling and tasting. Each of these is unique and mutually exclusive. We cannot taste sound. We cannot hear a sensation.
And, we have a sixth sense gate known as thinking that can be considered a form of internal hearing and seeing. This semi-controllable process serves to interpret and to give meaning to the other experiences. The other five senses tell us what is happening in the world around us and within us; thinking tells us what it means to us.
Unlike animals, the mind-patterns by which we interpret our experiences are not instinctual; they are not pre-installed in our psyche. For humans these mind-patterns are laid down in our early life. The patterns come to us from family and culture.
All of this is helpful for survival when we are young, but on the spiritual journey it imprisons us in the mind’s conditioned perception of the world. We see the world not as it is, but as we are; and we are seeing with eyes of the past.
To experience reality directly-- as it is--we need to practice bare attention: which is experiencing life directly through the senses rather than through the filters of our conditioning. This is the essence of mindfulness practice: direct awareness without mental analysis, interpretation or judgment. The tendency to conflate experience with interpretation may seem automatic, but with practice we begin to see a space between direct experience and the mind’s interpretation. We can then focus on the experience and set aside the interpretation.
#4) Trying to measure progress
The ego is programmed to get our needs met when we are young. It creates a particular goal and then works out a strategy to meet that goal. The goal is that of getting a particular need met. This process is reinforced by our education and by our culture; before long it is automatic. We unconsciously develop an internal “project manager” that monitors our progress toward our desired goal.
As we engage a spiritual practice it may seem quite natural to employ this same strategy--but this is counterproductive. Striving toward a spiritual goal keeps us focused on the future and keeps us from being fully awake in the present. Measuring progress toward a spiritual goal limits the benefit of spiritual practice because it imposes the ego’s standards of logic, quantification and measurement onto a process that cannot be quantified.
Has anyone ever asked you, “How much do you love me?” If so, you have realized the futility of trying to respond. Love cannot be quantified or measured-- and neither can spiritual growth.
Typically, when we first begin our spiritual practice we have some form of a goal—enlightenment, peace of mind etc. We have an image of what we want to become. But this image is meaningless, regardless of what it is. We cannot describe, measure or quantify Reality. Spiritual practice is about discovering the reality of that which is already here-- right now. There is nowhere to go, and nothing to do.
#5) Trying to “Do it right.”
I often hear students say, “I am trying not to crave, but...” “I keep trying to have equanimity, but...” “I know I should accept this, but…. ”Someone once said, “Every time we ‘try’ to do something we will always fall on our ‘but’.”
I encourage people to eliminate certain words from their vocabulary—at least when it relates to their dharma practice. One of these words is try.
It can be very helpful to set an intention, but that’s very different from trying. Trying is attempting to make something happen; it focuses on a future result. But, holding an intention is having a guideline for what I am doing—-or not doing—in the present moment.
For example, if I am “trying” to keep my attention on the breath, then there is the energy of willfulness and efforting--I am attempting to control an outcome. But if I am holding the intention to be aware of each breath, I simply notice where my attention is right now—in this moment. If attention is on the breath, I keep it there; if it is not, then I bring my awareness to the breath. And in the next moment I bring awareness to where my attention is ...etc. There is no “trying.” I am either on my intention or I am not.