I’ve been trying out this app called waking up.app, put together by Sam Harris. And while it’ s been very helpful in explaining what meditation is and why it’s helpful, and in helping me establish a baseline of practice, it is also has a self-critical, or at best, dispassionate view of the self.
In particular I found myself having to cut one reflection short because it was describing the mind in terms of such intolerance and disparagement that it felt harmful. In The Veil of Thought, a part of the introductory course in the app, Sam says the following
When you sit down to meditate you will feel yourself assailed by thoughts… The moment you attempt to pay attention to your breath, or to the sound of the wind in the trees, you will meet your mind. And your mind is the most rambling, chaotic, needling, insulting, insufferable person you will ever meet. It’s like having some maniac walk through the front door of your house and follow you from room to room and refuse to stop talking, and this happens every day of your life. It is possible to get him to stop talking for brief periods of time, and that can come with greater concentration in meditation. It’s possible to pay attention to the breath for instance, and to be so focused on it that thoughts no longer arise. But real relief comes when we recognize thoughts for what they are: Mere appearances in consciousness, images, bits of language. The fact that a thought has arisen does not give it a necessary claim upon your life. It need not have any implications psychological or otherwise. Of course, you will continue to think, and be moved to act by thoughts, but meditation gives you a choice— do you really want to follow this next thought, wherever it leads?
Why be so critical of the self? Why treat the activity of your one and only mind so callously? Perhaps the maniac is manic for a reason? Why is it following you around? Have you tried listening to it? P
By VK Cheong - Contact us/Photo submission, CC BY-SA 3.0,
Further, this callousness towards the self is backed up by other advice given in the app— when a thought arises while in meditation, we are instructed to view it with a vague, dispassionate curiosity. Where did it come from? What gives rise to thought? By zooming out we can make all problems small, all personal concerns insignificant next to the questions of consciousness itself. Never mind that the thought carried meaning, which might need to be considered and perhaps addressed, it doesn’t warrant our attention, coming as it does from non-intention.
All this inward callousness is in sharp contrast to another approach I’ve been experimenting with, Internal Family Systems, or IFS, as described in Richard Schwartz’s No Bad Parts. As I have been practicing it, the approach is superficially similar to what Waking Up recommends: In both you start by clearing the mind and focusing on the breath. However, in IFS, we’re excited to meet the mind. The “rambling, chaotic” person Harris describes is ordered into a family of personas, each an aspect of the self. Schwartz’s assertion, in summary, is that we each contain small villages of personas, some organized into family units, together comprising the whole person. The author compares the self to a head of garlic, divided into cloves, but forming a whole.
The parts are full of needs and faults. They interact with other with other parts in the space of the mind. Harris’s maniac becomes a part of the self in need of attention, who we’ve been insulting and disparaging at worst, and listening to with dispassion at best. IFS says welcome those so-called intrusions, it’s you talking to you, and you deserve respect!
In my experience so far, parts represent something very real— the balancing of our different priorities and capabilities, and the very real negotiation each of us do between them. By becoming curious about the parties to the negotiation, the characters (even Harris’s maniac is a character) taking up space in the mind we’re trying to empty, we can understand the context that gave rise to them, make form out of chaos, give meaning to form, and then take appropriate actions to sooth the parts of ourselves that have been acting out.
I write this not because I think the Waking Up project is bad— a lot of what Harris has to say still applies, but I reject the assertion that the mind is little more than the receptacle into which thoughts arise, at random, without meaning. It is self-effacing intellectual veganism which recoils quietly at any contact with the messiness of the world, trying to retreat from the work of making meaning into a dispassionate mile-wide neutrality devoid even of self. I have no doubt that achieving that neutrality feels pleasant, and I fully buy the argument Harris makes that meditation is a worthwhile activity full of health benefits besides. I’m also keenly aware that different folks have different strokes, as they say, so if it works for you, that’s great! For me, in practice, Harris seems to leave quite a lot of meat on the table: The mind is full of meaning, if you can make it, and I see no reason to elevate one part of the mind into mastership over the others. More harmonious, self-accepting arrangements are possible.