The Mind Is A Wandering Ghost

The phrase Equanimity of Perception came to me soon after a ten day Vipassana meditation retreat in Kelseyville, California last year. Ask most Californians if they know where Kelseyville is and they’ll shrug. It’s one of those rural towns near the hillier central areas of the state, a viticultural region that doesn’t get enough credit for making the grapes that end up inebriating your hapless Wednesday nights. But the spirit which I came to investigate couldn’t be plucked from a vintner’s vines. The spirit I hoped to encounter was my own.

The retreat is by design free of a variety of vices and illusions. No caffeine, no meat, no mixing of the sexes, no praying, no chanting, no yoga, no exercise, no cell phones, no speaking whatsoever. In fact, some would argue, though Buddhist in nature, there really is no religion, either. A thoroughly prudish affair, rightfully so, otherwise the mind tends to be consumed by sensual pleasures and insidious distractions.

The roots of Vipassana meditation are thousands of years old. The contemporary training has adapted to the demands of modern life and is compressed into an utterly doable ten day session. The retreat teaches a practice that is equivalent to what many Buddhist monks practice daily for life. In fact, for the ten days that one attends a Vipassana retreat, one conducts one’s life with all the austerity and humility and quietude of the monastic life. Devoid of the externalities that frame the modern world, the novice has the opportunity to observe oneself. Simple, right?

But observation of the mind is not simple at all. It turned out to be the hardest thing I have ever done.

Sessions begin at the crack of dawn. Correction: sessions begin before the crack of dawn. Since we were in farm country, I was waiting to hear a cockledoodle-doo or two to confirm how early it was that first morning, but nothing. Even the chickens thought it was too early to be up. 4:15am! That’s when I woke up! What an ungodly hour. But that’s the point, see. Without deities to distract you, you can finally get around to listening to your own mind, to discovering the self without any intrusion.

The first couple of days, I learned Annapanna meditation, a prerequisite for the harder course material to come. I began by observing my breath, beginning with a few bellowing inhalations to awaken the tactile sensors in my nasal passages in order to recognize the subtleties of the air moving past them. Is it warm or cool? Is it coming or going? Does it tickle or is the sensation flat? Can I sense my pulse in the region? Are there any subtle vibrations in the tissue nearby?

At least that’s what should have been going through my head as I witnessed my breath. In reality, what occurred during my quiet respiratory observation was more like: Is it warm or cool? Is it coming or… man my knees hurt. How am I going to be able to sit like this for the next hour? And then the hour after that? What about the next ten days!? Is that my stomach growling? I’m hungry. They probably don’t have anything good for lunch. Is it lunch yet? How is the guy next to me staying so still? God, my knee hurts. I have to extend it. But if I move it I’ve failed. Jeez, is it lunch yet?

In the ensuing days, I would learn that the thoughts jumping into my head like flashcards are an entirely expected and thoroughly human experience. The mind is a wandering ghost. We have very little fundamental control over so many of the thoughts that arise within us. But the trick is not to silence them, not to suppress them, but to observe them, witness that they are occurring, then let them go.

Annapanna is not even mastered before the second phase of practice is petitioned. By day two, I was asked to observe just a one inch square area under my nostrils on my upper lip. Every breath should be felt passing over this otherwise negligible cutaneous real estate, but now the mind should become aware of even subtler sensations. When the focus is deep, single hairs on the lip can be distinguished and sensed moving in response to the tidal flow of my breath. The challenge is to maintain this attention for longer than a handful of seconds. Things that would interrupt this activity: hunger, pain in the knee, Donny Osmond for unclear reasons, thoughts of my spouse sitting on the other side of the room, pain in my back, the need to pee, the state of America, life regrets, thoughts of ice cream, Marie Osmond now, and whether I left the stove on back home.

The fourth day, I was introduced to Vipassana meditation, essentially an extension of phase two that now includes momentarily and sequentially observing the sensation on every one inch square throughout my body. I would usually start at the crown of my head, feel what I could feel there (numbness, pain, warmth, tingling, vibration, itchiness), acknowledge it, and then move on to the next one inch square area. More often than not, I would feel nothing in a given locale. There were regions of my body where sensations were more readily felt (my face, my throat, my hands) and regions where it was nearly impossible to feel anything (my chest, my abdomen, the backs of my thighs).

But as the days went on, as I scanned my skin from head to toe to observe the sensations occurring on the surface of my body and learned to treat my responses to those sensations equitably, I began to realize the profound power of the practice. If so much of the pain we feel in this life, so much of the displeasure and hate and regret and annoyance and fear is caused by a misattribution of the meaning of our perceptions, then perhaps meditative practice will engender a sort of stillness in the practitioner that has the capacity to eliminate or at least attenuate the negative realities we construct in our lives.

Now, I glossed over the fact that I would acknowledge the feeling, but I need to unpackage the acknowledgement in detail because what happens in that moment is the core of Vipassana practice. Since some of these sensations are troubling (itchiness, pain), there is an immediate tendency for the mammalian brain to assign a judgement to the sensation. In its simplest form: itchiness - uncomfortable, pain - bad. The same goes for more pleasurable sensations: vibration - good, warmth - nice. These reactions happen so instantaneously and so reflexively that initially it was very hard to avoid applying a value judgement on my sensations. But the practice teaches that we should not be so reactive to what we perceive. Much of what we call sensations is in fact an overapplication of learned evolutionary behaviors (to actual physical threats). In reality, I know that a moment of itchiness on my scalp isn’t likely to kill me, but I assign it a meaning beyond what it deserves, as if it were an army of ants clawing at my head. If I was just to observe the itchiness, reassure myself that it, like all sensations, will pass, I will free my mind from its obsessive focus on my response to sense realities.

The Equanimity of Perception is the idea that we can achieve a more balanced relationship with reality, with truth, by understanding our roles in shaping reality. Truth eludes us in daily life. We are encumbered by constructing versions of the world that very often are untethered to truth. This also means that I have to shift my relationship to what I call truth. I can never possess truth myself. I am merely an explorer of its vast territory.

Spirituality, metaphysics, neuroscience, modern medicine, behavioral evolution, science fiction, transhumanism, life extension, space exploration, the future of humanity, and simulation will be some of the topics I address in these posts. Others will include posthumanism, meditation, how technology shapes our realities, the boundaries of technological progress, the limitations of language, medical education, ecology, air pollution, environmental decay, the Anthropocene, space exploration, dying, death, and cats. One cat in particular really, the one my wife found on the Santa Monica freeway three years ago and we adopted and named Highway. AKA the Professor. AKA Fuzzpants 5000. I’m hoping to throw in some movie and book reviews too at some point as well add to some of my photography on the site. I’ll be posting weekly.