Yakkity Brain Therapy Tries to Fix It
Can therapy take us beyond the mind?
Much of modern spirituality is about trying to fix what we call the left brain; trying to fix what we call the mind. Trying to fix this yacky yacky thing in our head that goes on all the time.
This thing can’t be fixed because in its very essence it’s dual. It’s constantly changing. In fact, it’s way beyond dual. It’s way, way bigger than dual. There are billions and billions of thoughts a person can have throughout their whole life. There are millions of emotions. That’s dual on steroids.
On top of the insatiable yacking brain we have life. Life itself keeps moving on. There are so many experiences that can happen to you. A million things happened when you were a child. Right?
It’s really kind of crazy, if you think about it. A couple decades of your life are spent being a child, and then the whole rest of your life is spent trying to overcome that. That in itself is a little bit crazy.
But one thing we can know. If you spend time looking at your mind you will find out, first of all, that you can’t control it. You can improve it. You can make some pretty big leaps and bounds and improve it. You can make it worse. You can certainly make it worse. That’s what meth does to it. Anger does that to your brain as well, it makes it worse and worse.
You can stop learning and your mind will get old and stuck. You can make it worse out of sheer neglect. You can definitely also work to make it better, but you can’t completely fix it, and you can’t really get rid of it.
This is one reason why meditation is so helpful, so powerful. Through meditation you can learn about your mind. You can become intimate with it, and hopefully eventually give up on the thing all together.
Some good therapy
Therapy isn’t useless. It’s a good thing to help us live good lives. Many spiritual practices are wonderful as well: yoga, Reiki, dancing, singing. These things are great unless we believe they are an ultimate cure.
One of the things we try to do with therapy or spiritual practice is to replace our unhappiness with happiness. That can never work because happiness is a result of things that that go on. It’s a moving target.
Something wonderful happens, and you’re going to be happy about it. Something terrible happens, and you’re going to be sad about that.
You can’t fix the outside world, and from the viewpoint of Nonduality the mind is the outside world. It’s not you.
We can improve the mind. But we can’t fix it.
It’ll never stop. It’s going to constantly be chatting on and on. It moves faster than any therapy. You can literally add trauma faster than you can work through it.
So there’s got to be a better solution.
Doesn’t Exist so it Can’t Heal
If you tried to touch your mind, your thoughts, you would find that you can’t do it. They don’t actually exist. You could drill through your skull, I suppose, and touch your brain. But you can’t touch your thoughts.
Because we’re trying to rewrite our story of spirituality and nonduality I’ll tell a story about dynamic meditation.
Dynamic Meditation
So, way back when I was young, and I was studying spirituality. (It was a dark and stormy night…)
Swami Yogino, says to me, “You’re very manipulative. You should do dynamic meditation.”
Of course (makes a face) I didn’t like that too much, especially the way it was framed, but I agreed. “OK, I’ll go do dynamic meditation.”
Dynamic meditation was created by Osho, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. It’s this super wild meditation where you jump on your heels while crazy music plays. I had it on a cassette player (I told you it was a long time ago…), so I went into my room with a cassette tape. I put it into my cassette player and started.
The way it works is you jump, jump, jump going, “Hu hu hu hu.” It goes for quite a while to thoroughly mix up the brain and then, all of a sudden, the music stops.
You sit down fast.
What happened to me was I jumped jumped jumped, getting nice and scrambled. The music stopped. I sat.
Boom.
The only way I can describe it is that I had a brain vomit. My mind spit out in a puff of smoke. All the nasty feelings, thoughts, and memories in my brain vomited out. Interpretations of everything that had ever happened to me in my whole life bubbled up and spit out in this huge stinking horrible mess.
It was like stories we hear of the near death experience where your life flashes before your eyes. I think it was similar to that. It was extremely detailed. That’s what “life flashing before your eyes” is like.
The detail was incredible. Literally every detail of everything that had happened to me in my life and my thoughts about it just came up in this huge brain vomit. It was quite horrible.
Yuck.
The next step in Dynamic meditation is to just sit quietly. And it was nice. Everything was cleared out and I felt restful. Then a sound chimes and you stand up and dance to some fun music. I did that and I came out of my room figuring I was fixed forever.
I’m like, “OK, I did it. That’s good. Let’s get on with our day.”
Then, the next day Swami Yogino comes up to me and says, “You’re still very manipulative, you need to go do Dynamic meditation again.”
Uuuurrrrrgh!
But, off I go.
I go into my room. I put the cassette tape in the cassette player. Jump. Jump. Jump. Sit. And again, I just have this huge brain vomit.
What was so interesting was the incredible detail of it… AND to the finest detail the same thing I’d seen the day before. With one big change, the addition of everything that I’d added into it that day.
I clearly saw myself waking up in the morning, literally putting this thing on, and becoming it. Like, I consciously, on purpose did that. Clear as day, flashing before my consciousness in a second.
I looked at that and I thought, “That is nuts. This thing is not me. And yet I get up and I put it on every single day.”
So, I just simply decided I’m not going to do that anymore. And I have never done it since then.
It was just that simple. We think we have to hide from ourselves, but the opposite is true. If you can ever actually see this thing you can decide, “No, I don’t want that.”
You can choose not to do it.
It was an especially easy decision since I saw myself putting it on. I saw exactly how I did it, and I decided not to do it anymore.
Maybe I’m not completely deluded because Swami Yogina never once again told me to go do dynamic meditation again.
The Thing
The point is that this thing that you think is ‘you’, that you think is so important, is not really you. It doesn’t even exist. You make it up. We make it up every day.
Picture it. Think about me jumping in my room to a cassette tape. All that craziness in my head. I was allowing things other than myself to be in charge. As soon as I took charge those things were not needed any more. That’s why true eastern spiritual teachings are about self-mastery.
Self-mastery is the key, but our new age spirituality teaches us to control and manipulate rather than master. Or it teaches to search for a nebulous healing that may come over us.
This is what modern spirituality and psychotherapy are trying to do. You’re constantly trying to heal. But that brain vomit can’t be healed because it’s not actually real. It’s all imagined stuff that you’ve attached to all the things that happened to you in your life.
You can’t heal it. Choosing against it is a way better strategy.
What About Emotions?
So what about emotions? They certainly feel very real, don’t they? It would be so wonderful to heal our emotions, so that we only feel happy emotions all the time and never feel any negative emotions. Right?
But that’s unlikely to happen.
Like thoughts, emotions are not real. As a matter of fact, emotions are usually generated by thought.
Jill Bolte Taylor, who is our neuroscientist of the day, says that a thought creates emotion and that emotions are chemicals that go shooting through our body. She says we continually shoot out emotion chemicals by thought triggers.
If feels real. We then recreate the emotions by thinking the same thought over and over. It’s a loop. Emotions generate thoughts and thoughts generate emotions. You keep making it happen. Jill says that if you can go 90 seconds without re-instigating an emotion, then it just goes away.
90 seconds is a long time to stop triggering thoughts. You’ll find that out if you ever try to do it when you’re in the midst of a really powerful emotion.
The Mystic Rose
Here’s another little story about a meditation technique that helped me deeply see that I create my emotions as well.
This one is called The Mystic Rose Meditation. It takes three weeks to do it. You have to practice an hour a day, consistently, every day for three weeks. Ideally at the same time each day. So you must be relatively in control of your schedule to be able to do this.
During the first week what you do is laugh for a full hour. Then the second week you cry for a full hour. In the third week, for a full hour every single day, you are just silent.
So, what happens?
When I started out I was pretty confident about the laughing. “Oh yeah,” I thought. “I can do this.”
I actually thought I was cheating to choose this meditation because I knew I’d be good at it. It started out with laughing and that was my thing because I consider myself to be this really happy, upbeat person.
So a week of laughing? “Oh yeah. Bring it on! I can laugh every day. I’m good. I got this thing,”
I worked out my schedule and when I got to my first day I sat down at my time and started to laugh. I was right. It was easy. This was no problem. For a whole hour I laughed away until I finally got to the end of the week.
I was full of it for sure then. I’m like, “I’m completely transformed now. Certainly I have discovered the true me. This is me… this wonderful, happy dynamic person.”
My energy was great. I felt great all week. Best week ever. There was no question that this cool, wonderful, happy person was the real me.
I had definitely arrived.
But had I?
Suddenly I realize I’m in the second week. I was gonna have to cry for a whole hour at the same time every day. And I’m like, “How in the world could I even do that? A happy wonderful person like me has nothing to cry about!”
But I was gung ho so I determined to give it a good try. I asked myself, “What’s the worse that could happen?” More than likely I was going to fail at crying, and prove how wonderful and happy I am. There is no downside to that.
Along came my first hour. I sit down for my very first crying time and put on a big frown to show I was trying. I started thinking sad thoughts and was surprised at how they came up. Sadness started bubbling up fast and easy the second I called for it. I found I was able to easily work myself into crying. Much easier than I thought it was going to be.
So a whole week, a whole hour, every single day, worked myself into sobs. Tears flowed.
I realized by the end of the week that it was literally a bottomless pit. A bottomless well. There was no possible way to cry yourself out of sadness, because sadness is created. So if you constantly create it, you’ll constantly have more and more and more of it.
You can imagine it was a relief to get to the third week where I could just sit silently doing nothing for my hour. Every day.
Looking back, I can see that, even though I identified with the laughing part of me, I was still exactly the same ‘me’ during my crying hours. The laughing was created. The crying was created. Neither thing was real.
And frankly, honestly? The silence was equally created. During the silence I was the exact same ‘me’ as well.
I was creating all these things.
How does this apply to our razor of non-duality? This means I am not the happiness because I’ve created right? I am not the sadness because I can create it. And I’m not the silence, either. Because. I can sit down and make that happen. As well.
So with all of this. Who am I there? What am I?
Apply the Razor to Emotions
Let’s apply our razor of Nonduality to about emotions. Remember one of our rules from before: if you can name it then it’s not you because it’s something separate than you.
So happiness? You’re not happiness. Happiness isn’t you.
Sadness? You’re not sadness. Sadness isn’t you.
If it’s something that changes, if it’s something that comes and goes then it’s not the singular you.
Remember, what we’re looking for is the solid reality, the absolute ground of being, the thing that never changes. The thing that you still always are. We are looking to experience ourselves as this singular “that” that you have always been. Eastern mysticism tells us you were that before you were born.
Remember when we were thinking about ourselves as a child? That sense of “Me” as a child? Yeah, that.
That kind of aliveness. Maybe… Maybe we’re looking for life itself.
What is life embodied inside you? It’s none of these dual things. It’s not thoughts. Thoughts come and go, emotions come and go.
Very much like you can get a cut on your arm. The cut is there, and then the cut heals and it goes away.
Even your body. They say that every seven years we completely replace every cell in our body. I don’t know that for sure. But “they” say it, so must be true, right?
If it’s true I’m sitting here in a completely different body than I had seven years ago, and yet I’m still me. I can remember 7 years ago. I was walking around doing stuff, thinking I’m me.
If it can change it’s not you. Slice it with the razor.
If you can name it? If it has a name? It’s not you. Slice.
This is the thing that makes nonduality and Eastern mysticism so hard to talk about, because if you can talk about it with words, it’s not truth. Nisargadatta used to say, “How can I talk about the thing that was there before words?”
It’s the same for us here today. How can I use words to talk about the thing that was there before words?
We have all these Zen stories, Zen Koens, like: What’s the sound of one hand clapping? What’s that sound? It’s nothing.
What’s there? Nothing.
Our razor can slice away everything until nothing is left. The simple non-duality razor: if you can name it, it’s not you: if you can see it, it’s not you. If you can feel it, it’s not you.
What are you?
The Veil is Thin
The veil that separates us from truth, from beauty, from life and reality is very thin. It actually doesn’t exist at all; it’s composed of very light misconceptions we have about who we are. Working through these can feel disconcerting because we hold on to those things as if that is what’s giving us life, when actually life itself is actively bubbling up inside us all the time.
So, as you read, if ever you start feeling confused, just pause and know that the veil is very thin. It feels like it’s holding on tight, but it’s not. All we need to do is see through it for even a brief moment.
As you work through ideas of non-duality, always stop and pause and feel the beauty that is there and know that what we’re working on is very, very doable.
We’re seeing through this veil by first admitting that it’s there (which is the disconcerting part). We’re paying attention to the words and the wisdom that have come to us from people who have removed it, slowing gaining our own wisdom so we can see it for what it is.
When you become ‘you’, the simple act of knowing who you are, the veil goes away. At that point, you are the master of your life. This veil is very thin. Relax, let the beauty of everything come through while you’re working on it.
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