rebalancing/balancing effortlessness and doing
(draft, experimental)
This is a bit of an experimental section because there's an empirical component, in the meditator population, of how much it makes sense to emphasize this, depending on how likely people are to encounter things related to it. This section might be really good to have here in "far reaches" or it might be better in "lists and more" and/or also better operationalized in the auxiliary practices (possibly forthcoming).
Some people claim that one of the dimensions of "the far reaches of meditation," and perhaps also the most important one, has elements of centerlessness and agencylessness (no-watcher, no-doer). (See also "luminosity" / "in the seeing just the seen; in the hearing just the heard.") See Daniel Ingram here and elsewhere:
https://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/2718243 [Last accessed: 2023-02-17]
So there's some distinctions to make, and I feel like the conceptual ontology isn't quite right:
So say there's something like effort, effortlessness, willing, doing in addition to, say, "no-watching" and "no-doing." Perhaps we could say no-self = no-watching and no-doing, at least in this section. And then there's also karma or layering. And then maybe there's also deliberateness.
And then finally, currently, throughout this document, I make a big deal of effortlessness and non-pushing as really great heuristics. And/but, there are times when latent "effort" and "pushing" "come up," to integrate, metabolize, burn-off, etc., as part of redo to undo. And, it can even make sense to deliberately effort or "push" under limited circumstances, or so I've generally maintained. This also factors into my position around letting breathing untangle itself and take care of itself, rather than controlling the breath. And, finally, I make points about eventually the whole bodymind system takes care of itself.
And/but, at the moment, I think there can be a thing where everything is "fully luminous, nondual" AND there's also a self, so sort of a Ken Wilber transpersonal thing, maybe. And, also, in any case, lots of people have a self for a large part of their meditation practice at the very least. Selves are very useful.
So anyway, people have pointed out to me that there are times when "efforting" feels good and seems good, like at times while exercising, cardiovascular or weightlifting, etc., or playing sports or learning something, and so on. (Call this maybe "conditioning," cf. "deconditioning"---which refers to karma and layering and samskaras and etc., conditioning in the sense of conditioned propensities---whereas here "conditioning" is meant in the "get stronger muscles, increase aerobic capacity, increase neurological efficiency, etc." senses.) And some people claim that deliberate control of the breath, like breathing exercises or deep breathing, etc., can be long-run beneficial (as opposed to my claim that this is very, very prone to accidental layering). (Ditto for concentration practices, jhanas and jhanic factors and cultivating the brahmaviharas---my claim is these are very prone to accidental layering, very prone to being counterproductive even if practiced in some sense "correctly," though not all senses of correctly.)
Whether or not we take centerlessness and agencyless as a stable, long-run asymptote, (now-ish think) there's at least a mediate situation where there has to be something like "non-karma-generating deliberate action." So, like, it's at least deliberate or intentional or something, or it can be, even it isn't always---like, it's an agentic act or an act of the self, which could be bottom-up or shade into bottom-up (i.e., it arises spontaneously) but also it can be deliberately or intentionally done, non-spontaneously done (in some sense), top-down. And it might or might not qualify as "doing," depending on how conceived. And it might or might not have some "effort." And it might or might not have some "will." But, in any case, critically, there are versions of this that are either perfectly non-karma-generating, perfectly non-layering, or any karma or layering that is generated is immediately dissolvable in principle.
Like, it now/currently seems to me that there has to be something like "(deliberate/non-spontaneous/self-laden)doing" that is both deliberate and non-karma-generating, no layering, no technical debt, as an in-principle possibility. So that "admits," under some conditions and regimes and qualities, striving(?) during exercise and competition and play and learning and "conditioning" etc., including like pranayama and autonomic regulation/relaxation/heart-rate-variability-enhancing-type breathing, and so on. A lesser claim might be something like, long-run or locally, such things are net-de-layering but contain all of layering, neutral, and delayering within them---and I think that's generally the case, especially pre-far-reaches. But I'm making a "stronger" claim that under some long-run, if not even-longer-run, conditions or regimes that one can have a self AND take actions that don't generate karma, at least in principle.
Anyway, I'm still trying to tease apart some good-enough phenomenological combinatoric possibilities and (held loosely, concepts are fake) conceptual distinctions, because different people will experience some things in different orders, and it's relevant to practice in terms of reducing the likelihood of getting jammed up or being in unpleasant or debilitating territory for too long.
So, say, you have a post-viral syndrome or something really stressful happened and for whatever reason your autonomic nervous system is disregulated in a way that's due to unhappy neurons or glands or is otherwise sticky somehow, and your sympathetic tone is too high or something. Or, meditatively, you're in a situation where it seems like every available direction is "uphill" AND it truly, truly, truly seems like patiently waiting is not the right option. Then, in the autonomic nervous system case, it might make sense to do some sort of "balanced breathing" or something. And in the meditative case, it might make sense to do things like (I still don't like these wordings; not quite...):
(Perhaps when every direction is effortful or when all directions seem to involve uphill doing or pushing:)
- Effortlessly effort
- Effortlessly seek effort
- Effortlessly allow effort to arise
- Effortlessly inclined towards effortlessness while allowing a latent effort to effortlessly arise and work itself out
- Effortlessly allow effort to arise and eat itself
- Surrender to mere efforting
In the meditative case, a reason why these distinctions or possibilities are important: So to partly summarize, "prior to far reaches, at least" heading in direction of X will be a combination of (a) delayering and burn-off and (b) suppression/pushing-away, the latter, (b), inadvertently because of implicit/unknowing error propagation. And then, eventually because of redo-to-undo, one has to constructively find/"raise" remaining latent X for burn-off, without also adding new X. So one sort of needs a delicate increase/find/raise for integration/burn-off/redo-to-undo instead-of/without also entrenching/increasing X. X might be effort, muscle tension, and other "bad" stuff, except that there might be such a thing as non-karmically-generating effort/self-ing and also general muscle tone and/or strong muscle contractions are part of life and living and exercise and etc.
Anyway, I think there are (greather than usual?) conceptual tangles, still, but there's something here.