Practice
Unclenching, Part 4.1: How to escape a trap
This post is part of a series.
After reading the paper on robust reaching, I began to use "clenching" as a metaphor: not only to speak of lingering tensions of the muscles, but also tensions of the mind—when I lean in and fake it a little too long and hard. And also to refer to situations where, looking in from the outside, a person or a group appears to be trapped1: doubling down, neglecting what might free them, often scarcely even able to look for it.
So, how can we unclench? How can we see from the outside?
Most of us are falling in most of the time. We wake up and we’re immediately pulled onto the tracks, onto a train of feelings for the people and things around us. Our eyelids lift, our ears alert, and we’re carried forward by sensations, one after another, on automatic. Feelings, into motions, into sensations, into feelings—I want, so I move, so I see, so I want, so…
We go back to sleep filled with expectation—an inertia, more or less subliminal—for the next episode2.
It’s easy to forget that comfort is not a literal property of a lover, nor satisfaction a property of chocolate, nor pleasure a property of porn. Comfort, satisfaction, and pleasure are feelings we have. They happen inside our heads, where our subjectivity actually lives, where a simulation of the world blazes along, fed by our senses. We easily confuse the simulation with the outside world it simulates—the map with the territory. Because it’s convenient. Because it would be a disorienting burden on our limited attention, to be always and viscerally reminded that we don’t experience the rest of the world directly. Instead, evolution has seen that it’s robust for us to lean right in to whichever simplifications bring us those feelings. As much as we can get away with it, anyway. So we keep falling, keep pushing buttons, keep forgetting they’re buttons. And before long this fails, inevitably, and leaves us shaken and disappointed.3 The world is always one step beyond button-mashing story-logic. My lover is a real person. Chocolate isn’t a balanced diet. Porn isn’t living sex.
How can you become wise to these property illusions? How can you see from the outside? By practicing not falling in, like any other skill. By taking regular time to intentionally redirect attention back upon itself: to learn what it really means to give attention, and to stop giving attention. To make room, and witness as it fills with something new.
With practice, we can learn to change how attention and feelings move, for the better.4
I can still keep the patterns I want to keep—still feel comfort from people, and satisfaction from food. Of course I don’t want to abandon everything, to jettison all meaning and enjoyment and success. I want to notice a little sooner when willing attachment starts to turn to willful captivity. To see beyond the familiar playground-prison of my room, my home, my neighbourhood, my school, my workplace… To learn what other movements could be possible.5 To be ready to act (or not) at the first spark of evidence or opportunity. To be empowered, and walk in a wider world. And to find out just how deeply and smoothly and vastly my feelings can work.
What is meditation? Maybe, the practice of not just falling in. But the meditative practices that people actually follow are much more varied and messy than that little summary suggests.
Buddhists and meditation nerds seem to refer to pretty much any intentional activity that’s relevant to personal or spiritual development as practice. I want to take some time to share my current thoughts about practice, and how they could relate to the other things we’ve discussed in this series.6
Romeo Stevens suggests three types of practice:
Concentration practices are about intensifying certain states of mind, and unifying attention. These states include metta, or feelings of benevolence towards others, as emphasized by “loving-kindness meditation”. They also include absorption in the jhānas, which are states of detached bliss—mental euphoria, bodily pleasure, and ultimately equanimity—that can be reached when we are freed or isolated enough from familiar objects, and the distractions of falling-in. On the surface the jhānas might seem kind of dangerous. We’ll return to that that shortly.
Insight practices are about picking apart states of your mind—contemplating aspects of them, and witnessing patterns and conflicts. An example is vipassanā, which is based in the contemplation of the fleeting nature of experience.
Integration practices are about relating and connecting your insights to your entire life. Many of these practices don’t look like “meditation”. For example: seeing therapists, having conversations, writing online, changing habits (including meditation practices)…
The three kinds of practice are mutually strengthening:
Better concentration creates the conditions for insight. Mindfulness practitioners emphasize concentrating on the present moment to enable a clear, non-judgmental awareness of mental events. In vipassanā, concentrating on the breath is a basis for insight into the transitory. And the concentrated positive vibes of metta and the jhanas are powerful vantages from which to contemplate goodness, love, and happiness, from above the clouds of petty inclinations and grievances.
Insight provides material for integration practice. Knowledge of our conflicting patterns—mismatched predictions, “cognitive dissonance”—helps us to make good decisions about when to change, and when to stay stubborn.
The more integrated we become, the easier it is to concentrate, which creates even better conditions for insight, and so forth.
Sounds pretty good, right?
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Like pretty much everything, meditation is not completely safe. Some practitioners claim emphatically that it’s dangerous, at least once you’ve reached the scale of hundreds or thousands of hours of practice.
As we grow and learn across our lives, our minds build up structure. Our mental movements come to weave among each other like so many threads. As Mark Lippmann7 has pointed out, this process of accumulation of structure is like the concept of technical debt in software engineering, “the implied cost of future reworking required when choosing an easy but limited solution instead of a better approach that could take more time”:
When a mind is really surprised, or things are happening too fast, or something is just too hard, or a mind enacts ingrained bad habits, in all these cases a mind takes on technical debt in order to keep dealing with the world in real time. The more technical debt a mind has, the harder it is for that mind to solve problems moving forward, so technical debt begets more technical debt.
To put this in terms we’ve already used: when we cannot predict what will happen, when we have no time to try out new models or respond precisely to disturbances, we find simplifications to lean into. We fake it ‘til we make it. But our fakery will inevitably be inappropriate to our changing situation—like pulling on a finger trap isn’t the way to escape it. We ought to replace the old simplification with something wiser, which would work in both the old situation and the new. But before we think to do that, we’ve often gone through other trials and layered other fakery on top of the original fakery.8 This makes a larger mess that is even harder to backtrack.
In the short term, it’s easier to add just one more patch to deal with the newest challenge, than to untangle the whole mess and rebuild things more sensibly. And how can I even start to take an outside view of what “more sensibly” could mean, when all the ways I can experience the world are already embedded in a monstrous patchwork that no longer even registers as a mess to me?
Let’s say a person has 10 different mental constructs (beliefs) that they use to make sense of their situation and employ strategies for getting their needs met. That these beliefs strongly resist updating in light of new evidence makes perfect sense in the context in which any one of the beliefs changing makes the whole structure worse than before. The idea that there is a much better way of being somewhere far away in mind architecture space requires quite a bit of faith. Or, as weird sun twitter put it: “‘That way lies madness’ He said, pointing in all possible directions from the center of the attractor.” So the beliefs resist change by virtue of being load bearing, by having had lots of important structures built on top of them. To change them would feel like invalidating the suffering that one (or others) underwent to attain meaningful outcomes within that framework.
- Romeo Stevens, “(mis)Translating the Buddha”
When I finally try to untangle my mess, and gain insight to loosen some tension or untie some knot, I also alter the tensions in the surrounding weave. Unexpected things may happen. Sometimes a load-bearing beam9 or a section of scaffolding collapses, and I have to put in the work to restructure, or risk a larger collapse.
Dissolving the constructs that lead to you prioritizing exercise, eating well, and sleeping should be seen as dissolution of the goodness of the means, not the ends. e.g. you were using fear based motivation to keep you exercising, which you subsequently saw through. This doesn't mean exercise was bad, it means your method was bad and you should find an upgraded one.
- Romeo Stevens, “Why do contemplative practitioners make so many metaphysical claims?”
The jhānas are worth dwelling on for a moment. On the surface they seem kind of concerning. You’re saying if I just step back from all the other stuff I do with my life, I can manufacture extremely pure and potent positive vibes for myself? Yes, pretty much. Isn’t that just wireheading? No, not quite. Why not? Won’t I get addicted? Well, in principle these vibes can be abused, but according to Romeo Stevens: “every teacher who I trust reports that this is pretty rare, and much more likely to happen to people who practice without the feedback of a teacher and community”.
I’ve not reached the jhānas yet, but I’m also not particularly worried about them. Why?
Because of the nature of falling-in, and my tendency to treat feelings as essences of whichever familiar objects or situations “give” me the feelings, there’s a tyranny those objects10 can hold over my mind. The jhānas make it plain that this is an illusion. The pure feelings were in me all along! Freed from the need to pursue any particular object, I can learn about the feeling itself, unconditionally. In doing so, I’ll tend to grow further beyond the compulsive grabby quest for pleasure, and into the peace of the realization that enjoyment can be everywhere and nowhere—and that nothing can hold me hostage to it. This isn’t the usual kind of easy trick I could abuse to get a hit of feeling, only later to be left wanting.
The jhānas take patience. I expect them to deepen and purify my appreciation and capacity for joy. From the vantage of the jhānas I expect to be more able to cultivate insight, clarity, and the motivation to share in the freedom I find. But I can’t share this freedom simply by dwelling in positive vibes. I have to stand up and head back into the world—there are still problems to solve, and I don’t want to ignore them for feelings of boundless rapture and tranquility.
What if vulnerable or corruptible people find the jhānas? Oh… but what if we don’t find the jhānas?
Life is everywhere life, life in ourselves, not in what is outside us.
- Dostoevsky (letter to his brother, on the day of his mock execution)
How might we squeeze the different types of practice into the categories we’ve already seen in this series? This might not be absolutely correct, but maybe it will yield some insight.
Concentration practice kind of looks like leaning in to certain mental states, and making them more stable or robust. Practitioners would tend to say this shouldn’t look effortful—fine, okay.
Importantly, this doesn’t usually mean leaning into just any mental states, like Taylor Swift earworms, Sunday brunch FOMO, or fantasy league planning. These would all count as fallings-in. They don’t fit our purpose. We want to practice entering states that it might be useful to enter again later. But perhaps more importantly, we want practices that are meta-unclenchy.
… what? Well, practicing concentration means flexing certain states, and in principle this could turn into pull-too-hard-on-the-finger-trap style clenching. But we can choose a type of narrowing that tends to lead back into a widening. This is kind of like cleaning your room11: the act of cleaning itself is narrowing, and might be stressful at first, but the context it creates is freeing. Cleaning can be a bit clenchy, but it’s also meta-unclenchy.
In contrast to concentration practice, insight practice is more about directly leaning out from any particular mental state that could inhibit the emergence of patterns to be observed, noted, or contemplated. Just unclench, and let things happen. Don’t contract too long or hard on any of them, but watch how they move and disturb and relate to each other. Practicing insight means fishing for the position of our thoughts in their larger context, and for those “Aha!” moments that reveal the patterns we’re trapped in. To continue with an imperfect and too-small metaphor: insight is like looking at your room, and letting your imagination run wild about how you’d rearrange the furniture12.
Concentration helps with insight because there’s much more clarity and pleasure in reimagining and disrupting the order of things, when they aren’t covered in dirt and cobwebs. Cleaning and rearranging are synergistic.
So there is a kind of duality between concentration practices and insight practices. One seeks to purify our attention, the other to unsettle it. And kind of like there’s a trade-off between exploit versus explore, and a trade-off between structure-forcing stubbornness versus structure-fitting science, there is a balance between concentration and insight.
Stevens mentions that too much concentration practice can cause “stuck” feelings. Well, concentration practices exploit certain focused states, which creates room for exploration. But if we don’t eventually use that space for exploration… that’s like always cleaning your room, but never rearranging anything. Living in the same sterile space, forever.
And too much insight practice can “[stir] up trauma and not [deal] with it”, which is what happens when we explore too much without creating a context in which we are happy to exploit the results of our search. This is kind of like pacing around your dirty room every week, thinking of how to rearrange it. Mostly you just eat dust and become discouraged.
Should we expect things to be quite so binary? Healthy behaviour often isn’t. Still, specific meditative practices may be kind of lopsided, at least in the beginning.
Most meditation systems are depth-first: you plunge, deeply, into one area of your mind—by, say, learning how to concentrate on your breath with heroic clarity—and then you take the mental machinery thus developed and try to iron out your life with it.
A role of integration practices is to monitor the usefulness and moderate the balance of the specific meditative practices we pick up, by keeping them in contact with the rest of our lives. Of course, different sets of practices will work better for different people with different problems at different times. We should want to choose practices that form tight feedback loops and bring noticeable improvements to our problems. If we can’t see this happening, we leave those practices behind, or try to balance them better.
No surprise, but too much integration practice can also be problematic, leading to “endless analysis and working on oneself but never really getting to big shifts”. On its own, non-meditative integration doesn’t provide enough intensity or clarity to overcome our mundane inertia—it happily settles into just another activity we can fall into.
We can reflectively apply our insight about property illusions and not-just-falling-in, to our meditative practices themselves13: Useful change is not a literal property of a meditative practice, but something a practice might accelerate. “Meditation” isn’t just a button I can push to get a desirable result. My practice is built up of little behaviours—sit there, close eyes, breathe deep, observe thoughts—that I can clench on and over-emphasize just like any other behaviours, even when the immediate consequences of my practice might seem especially calming and virtuous. If I neglect to keep making this reflection—what am I really using this for, what direction am I moving, and is it staying relevant?—I might stagnate, or worse, fixate on the delightful power of a newfound accelerator until I accelerate right into a wall, or off a cliff.14 In less extreme terms: a practice can become a fakery like any other. There’s no guarantee it won’t worsen my mess, my technical debt. I should keep reflecting.
[Mark Lippmann’s meditation system15] is breadth-first: he wants you to mindfully do a whole bunch of different little things—small intentional changes in your thinking, exploration of different states, reflection, reverie—and thus take a million little steps towards the goal of understanding the way you function.
But meditation […] will give you some extra tools and perceptual clarity around negative patterns. It won't magically eliminate the work you have to do to tinker with those patterns and implement better patterns. It does have a tendency to make that work feel less aversive.
- Romeo Stevens, “Orientation on the Contemplative Path”
The usual “social animal” advice applies: keeping up with friends is a superior source of motivation to continue with practice, and to do it well. The most important antidote to meditation risks may be participation in a community of teachers, “noble friends”, and therapists. It’s not difficult to set a trap for yourself that’s all-but-invisible to you alone. A small conversation with an honest and perceptive person can be a powerful seed for insights. Let’s cover each other’s blind spots.
Not all community is equal. There’s danger in applying powerful accelerants of self-alteration when the feedback you get is overconfident (everything will be better if you do X, it worked for me!) or isn’t really feedback at all (you do you!!). It’s important that the friends and communities you relate to in your practice should value pragmatism and skepticism at least as much as metaphysics and spirituality.
In my personal opinion, shooting openness sky high without a balancing increase in healthy skepticism reliably lands you in whacky belief town. Most practitioners are not starting with solid prerequisites about map-territory distinctions, probabilistic over binary reasoning, and strong ability to demarcate is and ought (positive and normative) claims. Most schools are not, in my experience, emphasizing the very skeptical nature of the Buddha's inquiry into his own mental processing.
- Romeo Stevens, “Why do contemplative practitioners make so many metaphysical claims?”
It’s easy to forget that our feelings are intrinsic to us, and not the things and people that are most familiar to us. So we keep falling into our lives, and into a kind of private tyranny.
Confronted with urgent or difficult problems, we find good-enough solutions even if they are patches atop patches. This makes a mess of our minds, until the mess becomes familiar and forgotten.
Meditation is about spending some time not doing these things—mentally “cleaning your room”, and finding a clarity in which it’s a pleasure to witness how things are arranged, and then to imagine rearranging them for the better.
We might consider three categories of practice: concentration, insight, and integration. Too much of any one of them could be problematic.
We want to actually solve problems. Sometimes, meditative practices can accelerate that. But what are we accelerating towards? It’s crucial to continually, reflectively judge our choice and balance of practices, and the direction we are heading. Being part of a community of skeptical practitioners is invaluable for covering blind spots and keeping up motivation.
I haven’t described how to engage in specific practices in this post, which is only a survey of ideas. I’m no expert, and you can find much more detail elsewhere, e.g. from Shinzen Young.
In the next part: the language of Buddhism.
Who am I to say anyone is trapped? How do I know what they’re going through, or what they want?
Well, why do I think a child caught in a finger trap might eventually want to escape? Except the child is now an adult, and perhaps offended or embarrassed to consider they might still be ensnared. They might even have some inspiring stories about the virtues of living in prison.
In this case, I choose to be stubborn: trauma and spite can complicate people in ways they never would have chosen freely. Is our submission to these complications an equally valid aspect of freedom? In fact the desire for freedom is a rebellion against them. But of course, it doesn’t help to try to coerce people to stop rationalizing themselves back into their predicaments. I can’t force people to be free, but I can gesture at the absurdity.
Some traps we can simply be helped out of. Others are up to us to notice, in ourselves. Good words are one way to begin.
What about depression, self-loathing, “I hate my job”, etc.? The situation is not so different, except in the specific patterns of inertia—a kind of inertia-killing inertia. Rather than excitement, the “expectation for the next episode” is some more dismal prediction.
Perhaps you’re fortunate that your life has settled into harmony without this happening much, and everything you keep falling-into is just fine with you. If so, I’d merely ask how you know how you’d react, if all of that fell apart? And how do you know it won’t?
This is kind of analogous to certain techniques of clinical psychology, like cognitive behavioural therapy—which begin with witnessing how feelings and actions lead into each other.
To let go, in a sense. But what if letting go means I lose? Well, it doesn’t generally mean that, or you never would have learned how to win in the first place. You’d never have pushed inward on that finger trap, and found out how to escape.
It does feel scary to stop pulling on something you’ve always pulled on. Am I making a mistake? Pulling has always worked for me. Well, it is possible you’ll make a mistake. Changing yourself isn’t risk-free. More on that in a moment.
I recognize the irony in using stories to explain practices that might help us to escape from stories—and to use language to talk about the limits of language. This is inevitable and it’s OK, as long as we don’t grasp at any particular story for too long.
See Sasha Chapin and Autodereify for a reviews of Lippmann’s book-length website.
Weirdly, this is kind of like how evolution accumulates changes in our biology—it tends to move forward, elaborating incrementally on what is already there, and not making sweeping erasures.
I ought to be careful with these metaphors. The mind is often shaped in many more dimensions than textiles or buildings are.
In this case “object” includes people—we’re discussing a phenomenon of objectification.
It also includes rewarding substances such as alcohol, cannabis, stimulants, and opioids.
This metaphor is kind of layered, since cleaning your literal room can help set up the unburdened sensory states that are useful for meditation; and if you do not practice entering concentrated meditative states (and especially if you are depressed) it can be harder to notice or care that your literal room is dirty.
I’d actually rather talk about entropy than use the cleaning metaphor, but that will have to wait until a little later in this series.
One of the imperfections in this metaphor is that in an important sense, the furniture is your imagination.
Mark Lippmann calls this kind of reflection the “meta protocol” and provides a bunch of explicit questions that could help with tight feedback.
Importantly, he notes that you can reflexively apply the meta protocol to itself to get a “meta meta protocol”. Of course, it is generally good to take the reflective skepticism about practices as far as you can, without wrecking your ability to problem-solve.
Maybe there’s a little analogy here with stimulant addiction. Stimulants can be empowering: they can bring a clarity and precision of thought. But with overuse they can cause problems like depersonalization and psychosis.
I lack the experience to specifically endorse his method over others. In principle I see how making the integrative loops as tight and local as possible would help with any risks arising from practice.