Here's more:JG: It may be increasingly relevant. Not to go too far out there, but people are using technologies like Hemisync or Holosync and inducing meditative states. But once you take the machine off, have you made any progress? Have you learned how to dis-embed in a way that becomes second nature?
KF: That is the point, right? So it may be that you can induce states by using the equipment that you’re talking about—I haven’t used it, so I don’t know—but some questions come up. Are you able to induce those states without the machine? And what is really being accomplished by inducing those states? Are you just finding another state to become embedded in?
This goes to the perennial concern about samatha meditation, about “concentration meditation” that leads to jhana. If all you’re doing is gaining new places in which to be embedded, that is not enlightenment.
The Feedback Loop: Staying on Track
14. Apr, 2010 by Kenneth Folk and Joel Groover“How do I know if I’m meditating right?” –Every Yogi
Kenneth Folk: Something I think a lot about is the pedagogy of enlightenment, because I am trained as a teacher and I am a teacher by nature, and I have always been a teacher—teaching one thing or another. And so when I look at how awakening is taught, I think there is a lot of room for improvement. We are basically doing it the same way it has been done for thousands of years.
Joel Groover: Yes. I could not help but notice parallels between the traditional “32 parts of the body” meditation and what you call “the bystander,” where all four foundations of mindfulness are noted as a kind of symphony as they arise. You’re doing something similar there, without getting into a long discourse that could bog people down.
KF: My sense is that most of what is done isn’t necessary. I’m always trying to strip it down to its bare essentials and to be as efficient as possible. One of the things I think a lot about is how to have a feedback loop so that you know you’re doing the practice right.
One of the things people talk about, one of the things people worry about is “am I doing it right? Am I making the most efficient use of my practice time?” To some extent it is a legitimate concern because what people are doing on the cushion… who knows what they’re doing? For a lot of the time they are just daydreaming or spacing out. If there were some way to keep people honest to make sure that they’re doing it right the whole time—let’s say you have half an hour of practice. Well, what if you were actually practicing that whole time instead of daydreaming for 90% of the time and only practicing for 10%?
And actually there is a way to keep people honest with a feedback loop. It’s very low tech. It has to do with two people meditating together and reporting out loud just as you and I did the other day. This is one of the things I want to experiment with. I want to set people up in teams and have them meditate together. Whether it’s on the phone or in person, it doesn’t matter. What is important is that for the entire half-hour you actually pay attention to something, you actually objectify something, whether it’s body sensations or feeling tones or mind states or thoughts, and report aloud in real-time.
If people really did that for half an hour a day, the power of that is beyond imagining.
JG: I did this [noting practice] for maybe 40 minutes this morning. It is really interesting territory to start exploring.
KF: Yes. You get the momentary concentration going, the khanika samadhi. So, we know that there is a relationship between samadhi or concentration and how much progress you can make in this practice, and there is this aspect of khanika samadhi where you become concentrated just by noting over and over. So if I am saying—if I am meditating with a partner and doing this aloud and I am saying, “pressure… tension… softness… coolness… pressure… unpleasant… pleasant… neutral… anticipation… investigation… curiosity… annoyance… amusement… joy… dread” [Kenneth is reporting his experience in real-time, about one note per second], I become very concentrated, very quickly because my mind does not have time to wander.
It makes me think of a story that Sayadaw U Pandita told when I was meditating at his monastery in Rangoon in the early 1990s. He said mindfulness has to—he was actually talking about the word satipathana—and he said it has to be very quick. Think of it like this, he said: you go to an event like a concert and there are no assigned seats. So you want to make sure that you get in there quickly and sit down in the best seat before somebody else sits down in it. Your mindfulness should be like that. You have to get in there and put mindfulness in that place before something else sits down there. So by doing it in the way that we are doing it now and reporting in real-time, there isn’t any possibility for anything else to sit down there. I had no time for my mind to wander while I was reporting to you just now.
And if wandering mind does become an issue then I can simply objectify thoughts. Once I have some momentum going, because I worked up from bodily sensations to feeling tones through mind states, now I’m going to objectify thoughts. So I will say “anticipation thought… remembering thought… imaging thought… worrying thought… anticipation thought… wondering thought…”
There just isn’t any time for the so-called hindrances to arise. And I can imagine people doing that as pairs and going much deeper in a shorter time. In terms of actually gaining insight and moving up through the Progress of Insight and the Four Paths of Enlightenment, I can imagine them actually making more progress than when they sit by themselves because there’s so much more scope for spacing out when you’re by yourself; there’s no feedback loop and nobody knows what’s going on in your mind. There is no way to evaluate what percentage of that time was actually spent doing productive work and how much of it was spent spacing out.
JG: It is interesting to hear you say that because I think it was a Tami Simon interview that I heard where she was talking with someone who was using actually biofeedback technology with meditators and what he said was that at a certain point with a person you might realize that actually this person has been sitting there thinking for 15 years. Neurologically or whatever they were able to tell that the person was not getting into a meditative state as we would think of it. So it was the absence of that feedback that you are talking about that was the problem. The person wasn’t actually doing it right.
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