Thanks for your post. I found your approach very interesting, and appreciated the methodicalness and precision of your experimentation. Bravo on that.

Also, assuming that you are sharing this to get feedback from other practitioners who have also conducted the “experiment of meditation”, so as to consider alternative perspectives and to perhaps fine-tune your own approach I offer the following for you consideration.

First, I think it’s an interesting parallel that you draw between fitness training and meditation. There certainly do seem to be many parallels here, and having been an athlete and completed several intensive periods of training (I’m currently in the midst of a 14-week strength training program that is quite rigorous) I thought I might take your points and dissect them a little further.

The parallel you seem to be making between over-training the body, and over-training through formal meditation practice seems good-and-well on the surface, but I would question this metaphor as these are categorically different areas of the training. Training attention is very different from training the physical body, as it has very different characteristics and qualities. That being said, I do think we could keep the over-training distinction, but instead should frame it in this way: Instead of seeing training the mind in terms of meditating vs. not-meditating, where if you meditate too much you will over-train, I would frame it instead in terms of “right effort”.

Having sat for as little as 30 minutes a day, and as much as 12 hours a day for months on end, I’ve found that insight and concentration are developed most effectively not by trying to modulate between meditating and not meditating (as clearly on a retreat one is meditating the entire time, nearly non-stop), but rather by modulating one’s amount of effort in practice. The over-training dichotomy then becomes laxity vs. over efforting. For example, when I am on retreat–or sitting in practice–I have a clear intention to remain mindful throughout that period. I never try and cultivate non-mindfulness (though one can’t be perfectly mindful, obviously), but instead try and notice when there is too much effort (in which case I relax) or when there is too little effort (in which case I wratchet up the interest and energy). I have over-efforted during practice before and it did lead to a kind of over-training where I felt completely zonked out, tight, and there didn’t seem to be much value in that practice. Then when I quit practicing and released the effort a bit I did find that there seemed to be progress. But I wouldn’t attribute that to meditating vs. not meditating but rather to not yet knowing how to modulate my effort through mindfulness.

You see, mindfulness–as is seen in the fantastic teachings on the seven factors of enlightenment–can never be over-developed as it is always working to balance out the other 6 factors (the 3 tranquilizing factors and the 3 energizing factors). The other 6 factors however can be over or under developed and so with those we must watch out how they are balanced. The great thing though is that mindfulness of whatever is occuring just naturally leads to the missing factor being strengthened. When our mind is dull and we’re mindful of it, the mind is inclining towards clarity. When the mind is over-energized and we are aware of it, we are holding it all in a wider space and can thus relax.

The danger of the approach that you mention, seems to me, to be that you could be intentionally cultivating non-mindfulness and undermining the powerful continuity of attention which brings about great depths of concentration and insight. Since you’ve read Daniel’s book I assume you’ve seen what a huge emphasis he puts on continuity, and how strongly he correlates continuous, strong practice with the developments of insight that each of us (presumably) are here to develop. I’ve certainly found this to be the case, and have seen with pretty much every meditation practice I’ve undertaken (insight, concentration, metta, etc.) that continuity is always stressed and for good reason.

That being said, I am quite open to being proven wrong on this point or to at least re-evaluating the importance of continuity of mindfulness in practice.

all the best,

-Vince H.

What David perhaps doesn’t realize is that being isn’t the same as inactivity (or not-doing). Rather it is the connection with a fundamental, and formless aspect, of reality. That connection can happen during relative inactivity or during the most intense activity. The sages of all of the world’s wisdom tradition have recognized this. In the Taoist tradition we see references to the phrase “effortless effort”, in the Christian tradition we see a deep concern with the integration of contemplation and action, and in the Buddhist tradition we see the activity of the Bodhisattva, who does not forsake the world for some sort of pure being, but rather commits to helping all beings realize that same being. In short, there is absolutely no contradiction between being and doing, and many people throughout the millennia have recognized this.

But let’s not be too hard on David Allen. Being isn’t his main focus, and for what he has done in the world of doing, he has helped a tremendous number of people. Some of those people (like me) have even used his system to deepen their connection with and recognition of being. Thanks David!

That being said, if David, or any other productivity nuts are reading this, I want you to know that just as there are some great methodologies to help us do, like his GTD system, there are also many great methodologies for being. Indeed, just as David suggestions systematic instructions for how to become more organized, effective, and attentive to our life’s activity, there are many systematic instructions for helping one come to find deep levels of being, of stillness, and peace, in the very midst of doing!

Meditation techniques like Vipassana, Zen, Centering Prayer, Raja Yoga (not just the physical poses but the whole system of yoga), Vedanta, Sufi meditation, etc. are all methodologies for revealing the deepest truths about who we are. This truth is not opposed to the world (as many spiritual seekers often believe) but is rather something that deeply transcends the world, while also being intimately connected with it. It is both immanent and transcendent.

When one begins to awaken to their true being, their engagement with the world can emerge from a place of much greater stillness, peace, and clarity. Certain confusions can drop away, and we are free to engage our lives with a greater sense of freedom. This can be a tremendous compliment for mastering productivity, and as far as I can tell, one without the other can actually be a great disservice to our highest potential as human beings.

Question: People can be pretty skeptical nowadays about people who claim to be awake, and it may appear to many that you’re setting yourself up for an awful lot of criticism.

Adyashanti: And isn’t that telling? I think it’s unfortunate that a person can spend hour after hour, day after day, year after year, lifetime after lifetime dedicating their life to enlightenment, and yet the very notion that anybody attains enlightenment is taboo. We’re all going after this, but God forbid somebody says they’ve realized it. We don’t believe them, we’re cynical, we have doubt, we go immediately into semi- or overt attack mode. To me it highlights the fact that people are chasing an awakening they don’t believe could happen to them. That’s a barrier, and the biggest one.

This is such an important point, one I harp on constantly here on my blog, as well in my interactions with other dharma practitioners. Our models for what enlightenment is, to a large degree, seem to determine our success in waking up. If we cling to perfection models, which are unrealistic and unachievable, then we’ll constantly be distorting reality with expectations and assessments which are out of focus and unhelpful. When we relax our models, investigate the thoughts surrounding them, and use everything that arises as something worthy of investigation, then insight naturally happens and awakening is assured. Of course, we still have to re-engage our models and continue to grow and evolve as human beings. On the personal side of the things, this is an endless process, but awakening is not “endless”.

I’m glad that more teachers like Adyashanti are getting this message out there, are challenging the dark shroud surrounding enlightenment, and are bringing it into the realm of the achievable. In the same article Adyashanti claims that, “when people have breakthroughs and talk about them in public, awakening loses its mystique. Everyone else can see that it’s not just special people who have deep awakenings, it’s their neighbor or their best friend.” Here’s to more transparent dharma, and to more people actually getting it for themselves!

There’s no way to grasp what is always happening, because as soon as you do you’re unable to open your hand fast enough to receive the next gift of god. So, how to grasp something with your hands always open, this is the paradox of prayer. - Father Thomas Keating

An amazing video where Father Thomas Keating explains the dynamic between the universal and personal dimensions of reality…

Props to the Global Oneness Project for the video.

Thanks for your reply and for your thoughts on the difference between these two perspectives. Though I do disagree with the removal of defilements model, I do think that Jack Engler (from what I’ve read of his) has perhaps one of the more down-to-earth takes on it.

The main problem, as you know, is that there aren’t any westerners (including Engler) who using that set of criteria have attained arhantship. I wrote about this in my undergraduate thesis, in a section called “the glass ceiling of enlightenment” and quoted Joseph Goldstein, from two sources, supporting this view. The first was from an interview he did with some Spirit Rock folks, where he claimed that no Westeners had yet achieved full enlightenment, but that once they did he thought that several others would follow (kind of like when the 4 min mile was broken), hence my use of the glass ceiling metaphor. Then, when I was on the 3-month course with him a couple years back he made a comment that if anyone was an arhant in the crowd they could have the retreat center, IMS. It was a half joke, but also very serious. Everyone laugh and I cringed. hahaha.

The problem is that if we can’t find a single arhant out of all of these amazing folks who have spents year after year on retreat, have plunged the depths of the Buddha’s teachings, and have presumably sat with many asian arhants, then something is terribly wrong. And what is wrong, isn’t us, but the models we have about arhantship. We want it to be the final cure-all, an emotionally perfected state, and yet there isn’t a single westerner (or I would argue asian) example of someone who has clearly achieved that. There are however, some pretty smart people, who having attained what they can only presume is the end of the road–including Daniel Ingram and Jack Kornfield, but many others as well–who have deconstructed the models and have offered something far more human, attainable, and worthwhile in their place.

That being said, I have a great sense of sympathy with the appeal you mentioned around the development of compassion and presence, that certain great people seem to have. One way I think these two approaches can be integrated, is by differentiating between Buddhahood and arhantship. Arhantship being the untying of the knot of perception, and the dissolution of a separate doer, perceiver, or knower. In essence it’s the full realization of a fundamental non-dual identity, which while supremely important in terms of identity doesn’t necessarily change any of the human difficulties that came before it. Buddhahood on the other hand, is the ongoing path of one who has committed themselves to cultivating all of the different parami qualities, knowing that their development is really an endless endeavor, though it can have amazing results. After the ecstasy, the laundry and after enlightenment, the further cultivation and development of skillful ways of being in the world.

Sangha is a really interesting phenomona, because it doesn’t just apply to contemplative communities, but to pretty much any endeavor where there is a path of mastery. One of the most striking examples, of where I’ve seen sangha make an incredible difference in my life, was during my teen years when I was an avid bowler. Every weekend, for many years, I would go bowl for several hours as part of a teen league. Over the years I progressively got better, learned new things, and eventually averaged around 170/game. This was fairly good for my age group, but my bowling game went to a whole new level when I met a young fellow named Ted.

Ted was several years older than me, and he was one of the best bowlers in the region. His average was probably around 210-220 and he was on the regional PBA tour. In other words, he was a pro. I started hanging out with Ted a lot, watching him bowl, bowling with him, and going to tournaments where he’d compete with a bunch of other professionals. I did that for a couple of months, and then he encouraged me to join the single men’s league at the bowling alley we hung out at. This was the cream of the crop league, and I was pretty scared to join, as I thought I wouldn’t be up for the challenge. But since I’d started hanging out with him my game had increased dramatically, and I was now regularly bowling 200+ games. In fact, my average, in the teen league, had jumped at least 10 points since I started hanging out with him. I decided I’d take the risk and join the men’s league, and with his recommendation, I was accepted. Amazingly during that season my average jumped above 200, meaning that of all the games that I bowled I was consistently bowling at least 200 a game! Looking back I am in utter awe of how powerful sangha, and the appropriate challenge, was to my game.

When I apply this insight to meditation practice, the correlations are somewhat startling. I realize now that by speaking, studying, and practicing with the “meditation pros” I have had a similar jump in my practice. I’ve been able to master certain states and stages of the path, have been able to recognize and overcome subtle obstacles, and have quickly come to understand many aspects of the dharma that seemed completely shrouded to me only a few years ago. I owe almost all of the credit for that to the fantastic people with whom I’ve associated, who have encouraged me with extremely high standards, and who have challenged me to really put these things into practice, and who have shared the results of their own journeys with me. Teachers like Daniel Ingram and Jack Kornfield have supported me in so many ways, as have the numerous other teachers and practitioners I’ve spoken with.

Had I not met these people, and had I not associated with the most competent sangha I could find, I’m sure that things would not have been the way they have. I suspect I would have made progress, and learned things about practice, but I very much doubt it would have been at the same rate. And at some point I may have actually stumbled off of the path, accepted way less from myself than I was capable of and plateaued, or simply lost interest in the path. This is what happens if we don’t have uncompromising aspirations, don’t spend time in the time chamber, and discover what the mystics throughout all the ages have been pointing to. Of course, we don’t have to have this as an aspiration, but for those that do, let’s not forget the power of real sangha.

Instead of practicing for awakening as a real possibility, we hold enlightenment up as a remarkable and rare attainment, the highest ideal of the spiritual life. But enlightenment doesn’t work as an ideal. As an ideal for a few, it distances us and discourages us. At the same time, of course, this puts it comfortably out of reach where we can venerate it without feeling we have to do anything about it. And then we have to defend ourselves against our disappointment that it will never be ours. So we take the opposite position that it doesn’t really matter anyway—all that matters is being awake in the moment.

This may be true, but here it is used as a rationalization. By minimizing its importance, we make our own self-doubts and insecurities easier to live with. Idealizing awakening and minimizing its importance are both defensive, and repeat what has already happened in the history of Buddhism. Awakening was a common occurrence in the beginning if we believe the suttas; over the centuries it came to be viewed as a rarer and rarer event as it took on more of a mystical aura, and most Buddhists eventually abandoned the aspiration for awakening in this lifetime. Is this coincidence?

This is kind of what I was trying to get at here and here, but coming at it from a different angle. This point, I think, is super critical to our understanding of the spiritual path. If we don’t know that awakening is possible, and it isn’t our deepest aspiration and resolve, then the likelihood of actually waking up becomes almost nil. Engler, later in the same article puts it this way, “Without this will or desire or intention to awaken, awakening will not happen.” Clear enough.

(Hat tip to Dave Lovas for sending this article my way.)

One of the most fascinating elements of the show was a building called the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, whose Japanese translation is also The Room of Spirit and Time. In this room, which only a couple of warriors could enter at time, time flowed at a much slower rate. One day of normal time in the outside world was actually a full year of time in the hyperbolic time chamber. This room became a refuge for many of earth’s greatest warriors during their times of need, when they were about to face an adversary who was much stronger than them, and so needed to make extremely quick progress. Often as a result of their training in the room, they were able to emerge only a day later having made huge transformations in their abilities, and thus defeat their opponents.

The parallel I’d like to draw, and which seems so obvious having spent much time doing intensive meditation, is with meditation retreats. Meditation retreats, much like the hyperbolic time chamber, allow one to make a significant amount of progress in their meditation practices in a relatively short amount of time. I don’t know that 1 day of retreat is equivalent to a year of daily practice, but I would say that a week of retreat can often be as profound as several months of daily practice–and sometimes more so.

The reasons for this are manifold, but just as with the warriors who entered the room of spirit and time, meditators who enter retreat with a great resolve and deep spiritual need often find the fruits of their practice accelerated considerably. These spiritual warriors, if they do the practices wholeheartedly, continuously, and with a deep commitment will find that enlightenment becomes not some distant ideal, but an actual event (or series of events) that can happen in the here and now.

Just as an example, Joseph Goldstein’s teacher Munindra-ji often said that the average amount of time it takes a meditator to achieve stream-entry (or the 1st stage of enlightenment) is around 9 weeks of retreat time. The late Bill Hamilton, in a similar vein, suggested that a 3-month retreat is a reasonable amount of time to expect to be able to do so. He also cautioned that the time it takes can vary considerably. This is certainly true, as I have know people that have gotten stream-entry in as little as a week, and have also known people who have spent many months of retreat and not had this initial awakening experience.

The point then is not to set a time limit on how long it will take us, but rather to know that it is possible, and to be inspired by that possibility. At that point we can have real aims and aspirations in our spiritual practice, one’s that can be realized, confirmed, and deepened. No longer do we need to float in a state of ambiguity with regards to the practice. Because, as one of my early teachers often told me, “If you do the Buddha’s practice you will get enlightened.” With that kind of confidence and faith in the practice, we can create the proper conditions for realizing the unconditioned, and come to know that which we’ve been long searching for.

Firstly, I’ve made the site a little less “Vince-centric” and more about the content itself. As such, I’ve changed the title of the site to Numinous Nonsense, though the website address is still vincenthorn.com. The reason I’ve shifted toward Numinous Nonsense is because while I’m certainly the driving force behind everything that is written here, the “brand” that I’m trying to communicate has more to do with the weird confluence of interests that I have which seem to converge mostly around 1) Integral Thinking, 2) Meditation, & 3) Technology. Though I write about other things, and will continue to share that stuff here, I’ve highlighted those 3 categories of writing, as being the most essential to what I’m trying to communicate here.

Also, I’ve highlighted the different “articles” that I write, which may or may not be on these topics. I do this because my blogging has shifted in the past several months, away from shorter posts toward more full-length articles that are fairly well researched and thought out. It’s a shift in quality and in quanity—I write less frequently due to the fact that I put much more into each post.

In terms of the back-end technology, I’ve updated to Wordpress 2.5 (I love WP!), and a brand-spanking new theme which I love. I’ve also re-designed the logo—though I’ll admit I’m not graphic designer! All in all, I like the new look, feel, and emphasis and I hope it serves my readers well (all 20 of you).