Depression and Meditation, Part 2 — WTF Just Happened?
On my return from the 2019 retreat I spent the next few months in a dazed euphoria. The immediate effects of the change in mood and outlook were so encompassing that I mostly just enjoyed what it felt like to be happy. There was an ease to everything. Where in the past the idea of getting out of bed everyday was a chore, I was now getting up every morning for an hour of meditation. I still felt like the same person. I had the same habits, compulsions, frustrations and fears, but they didn’t have the same weight as before. With the cloak of depression, everything was heavier. When I was getting out of bed, I wasn’t just fighting sleepiness, I was fighting sleepiness and depression. When I was trying to make dinner, I wasn’t just fighting fatigue, I was fighting fatigue and depression. With the cloak gone, even when things got difficult, I was just dealing with the thing itself, not the added weight of the depression. Of course when things were good, I could fully feel them too, and things mostly felt really, really good.
It would have been easy to interpret this as THE ANSWER. I had wanted happiness for a very long time, and here, through a combination of perseverance, work and luck, I had found it. And yet, I had been around long enough, read enough stories and experienced enough of my own hope and disillusion to hold off making any final pronouncements. First of all, there was the question of how enduring the change would be. It felt as if my depression was gone, but how would things look six months later, a year later? Second, while what I had experienced was amazing, I was left with a sense of confusion about what had happened. It just didn’t fit with any of the tools I had accumulated for making sense of the world. I had discarded most of my tolerance for non-rational explanations bit by bit as I left LDS Mormonism, and yet here I had experienced something that certainly felt completely non-rational. Clearly there could also be some sort of scientific understanding of what happened. I remember thinking, moments after the experience, “I wonder what a neuroscientist would say about this.”, but there was nothing within my limited knowledge of any of the related fields to help inform it either.
The facile interpretation would be to mistake the experience as some sort of run-of-the-mill eureka moment, as an epiphany. This was not the result of an intellectual thread that culminated in a novel conclusion. As an artist, and a guy that is generally not able to turn off my brain, these eureka moments are fairly common, and as my wife can attest, usually not that meaningful. This was far different. This was so dramatic, so intense, so transformative — there had to be something more going on here. Upon asking both my personal therapist and marriage counselor, they both confirmed that discrete transformative moments like this are rare. The explanation given my teacher at the retreat wasn’t entirely satisfactory either. It gave an excellent explanation for why the depression was there in the first place, but it didn’t explain why, at the moment in particular, the dam had broken. What was it about my practice, at that point in time that had facilitated such a radical shift in perception?
The question of my depression is an issue I’ll address in another post, but the combination of these two outstanding questions inspired in me a voracious appetite for any resource that could provide answers. I read, listened to and watched anything I could find on the subject of contemplative practice (or as people in the meditation scene like to say, “the Dharma”). It consumed most of my thoughts, and much to the annoyance of my family, spilled out into most of my conversation. (Kids love talking about the nuanced and varied English translations of Pali words.)
It should come as no surprise that one of my areas of interest was Ajahn Cha, the Thai monk who was the subject of the anecdote that preceded my experience. It was during one particular session of Wikipedia rabbit-holing that I stumbled upon a passage in a Wikipedia article on the Thai Forest Tradition that mentioned one of Cha’s teachers, Ajahn Mun. It said something to the effect of: “On this particular occasion, Mun is thought to have attained the status of Anagami (non-returner)”. This was peculiar because the attaining of Anagami somehow happened while he was meditating alone in a cave. In other words, it wasn’t some title bestowed on him by an authority figure, but some type of solitary, meditative accomplishment, and one that was familiar enough to others that they could give it a name.
After a bit more searching I discovered the concept of the four stages of enlightenment. Within Theravadan Buddhism (of which Cha and Mun were a part of) it is believed that there are four discrete phases a meditation practitioner will reach on the way to enlightenment. This was interesting to me since, up to that point, I had considered enlightenment to be this mythical and likely entirely symbolic concept that pointed to some vague human concept of benevolence. The idea of enlightenment was about as concrete to me as going to a grove of trees to have your prayers answered and having God and Jesus appear to you. And yet, here was a figure within recent history claiming attainment of a stage of enlightenment and doing so within a tradition where the concept was normalized and recognized as being a real thing, aka he wasn’t some charismatic, lone guru claiming enlightenment in order to get laid.
It still mostly sounded woowoo to me, but recent events had increased by tolerance for woowoo. That combined with a personal fascination with ancient myths and exotic faith traditions, I looked up more information on the topic. The stages of enlightenment, in order, are: 1. Sotopatanna (Stream Enterer), 2. Sakadagamin (Once Returner), 3. Anagami (Non Returner), and finally, 4. Arahant — someone who is basically fully enlightened.
The Wikipedia article on Stream Entry seemed the most logical place to start. There was something about it that sounded very similar to what I had experienced. In general, my experience had this feeling of crossing a threshold that led inevitably to some end. The term Stream Entry suggests something similar. It is basically saying that at a certain point of progress you have entered the stream of the Dharma, and enlightenment is then only a matter of time. You will be carried by “the stream of the Dharma” to its end destination. (According to tradition, an additional perk of being a Stream Enterer was that you would only be reincarnated 7 more times, all within earthly or heavenly realms. Not bad to lock that in too.)
Over the course of the next few days and weeks I returned and did a bit more poking around on the concept of Stream Entry, this time over the internet where I landed on the r/streamentry subreddit and the Dharma overground forum. Regular people in a contemporary, Western setting were talking about Stream Entry and some were claiming to have attained it. There was still some woowoo here and there, but there was also an acronym that kept coming up — MCTB. After a bit of a search, I found that the acronym referred to Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. The author of MCTB claimed to be an Arahant, aka, someone who is fully enlightened. It was right there on the title page “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by The Arahant, Daniel Ingram” and Ingram wasn’t some sagey, guru hanging out in robes in the Bay Area. He was an emergency room doctor practicing in Alabama, only a few years my senior. It was apparent from the text that he was a fairly normal, rational, and intelligent dude. He also referenced Raising Arizona and A Wizard of Earthsea throughout the book, which was a sign that, at the very least, he had good taste.
MCTB immediately consumed all of my time and attention. The entire text was available free online. I absolutely hate reading online, and yet I spent the next week devouring every word of MCTB. Not in my free time, I mean literally, I went to work and just read MCTB all day, every day for a week. If my obsession with the Dharma had been annoying before, I had crossed the line into insufferable. I would nod as my wife would tell me about her day, literally not paying attention to a thing she had said and then at the first moment I had I would snow plow her with an unending stream of unintelligible Dharma jargon. This was my first inkling, that for all the good it does, meditation practice must be balanced with other moral practices — like not being a dick. Fortunately, for the sake of our relationship, the intensity of the obsession was at least short lived. By the end of the week I had purchased a hard copy of the book, finished it up and started to process what I had learned. What was so compelling about MCTB? Why did it inspire such obsession?
MCTB offered a candidate for what I had been looking for, it offered a story, a potential explanation that I could use to make sense of this life-altering transformation. What’s more, it offered a compelling purpose, a point to the practice of meditation.
I had meditated for 12 years, read books by various prominent teachers, and attended classes and group sessions, and never during that time did I get a good explanation of what the point was. To be fair, I had reason enough when I started to motivate myself, but it was always fairly vague — you meditate to feel better, and with more meditation you would…feel more better? Apparently the power to motivate also happened to be proportional to the power of the story, and it was no surprise that I spent years in lax and inconsistent practice.
MCTB made things much clearer. While you can do many things with meditation, there is a specific family of practices whose purpose is to lead to Insight. Not surprisingly, these practices are often referred to as Insight Meditation, or commonly as “Vipassana”. It’s important to explain what is meant by “Insight” in this context. Within common parlance, the word insight usually refers to the eureka moments I was describing earlier. You are working on a difficult mental problem and “boom!” lighting strikes and you figure it out. Insight within the context of meditation is similar in form, but different in a very important way. Where eureka-type insight is conceptual, meditative insight is perceptual. You pay attention to your moment-by-moment experience long and enough and “boom!” you suddenly perceive it differently. In my previous post I used the analogy of seeing through the charm of a magic trick, but Ingram uses the very good analogy of an optical illusion — the one in particular where you see the beautiful young woman, but when looked at in another way you see the old hag. What you are looking at has not changed, but how you perceive it has.
As described by MCTB, these perceptual changes happen in somewhat predictable patterns that with enough time (aka thousands of hours of meditation) can lead to discrete, unmistakable changes in fundamental perception that eventually lead to…enlightenment.
I should acknowledge here that the word “enlightenment” is a very charged and controversial term. It might be off-putting to the more rational minded readers who are encountering it, and for those that accept its traditional uses, there are many different ways that it is interpreted and understood. Within the context of MCTB, it is being used in a limited way, much divorced from many of its traditional understandings, and examined with a good-faith degree of rationality, considering it is such a highly subjective experience. The simplest, most general way I can describe it — acknowledging that I’ll likely err on being too reductive here — is a complete disidentification with the sense of self. Why this might be a good thing is profoundly non-intuitive, and it takes some experience with meditation and some lengthy explanation to understand. That being said, Frank Heile’s Model of Spirituality and Consciousness does a great job of explaining why this might be and using the best current research to support it.
A Model of Consciousness and Spirituality — Frank Heile
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAu7lDgjAZg
Even more intriguing and pertinent to my particular experience was learning that along the path to enlightenment there are predictable phases that practitioners pass through. Within the framework presented in MCTB there are 15 discrete phases that you pass through just to get to Stream Entry. Within the Theravadan tradition, this is called the Progress of Insight (the POI). It was while reading about the fourth stage that I got a potential answer to one of my lingering questions: What had I experienced that summer?
The fourth stage of the POI is called the “Arising and Passing” (often abbreviated as “the A&P”). The name can be a bit off-putting as it is a somewhat technical description of specific phenomenological perceptions that practitioners may experience at this phase, but it is more commonly typified by its loud, bombastic qualities. From MCTB:
“An overall general point about this stage is that it tends to be very impressive. When people say to me, “I had this big experience …”, ninety-nine percent of the time it is almost certainly related to the A&P.”
“Reality may be perceived directly with great clarity; great bliss, rapture, equanimity, mindfulness, concentration, and other positive qualities arise. Practice is extremely profound and sustainable, and there may be no pain even after hours of sitting.”
“Bright lights tend to arise for the meditator, sometimes first as jewel-tone sparkles and then as a bright white light (“I have seen the light!”).”
So far this was sounding familiar, but it was this section that really made me laugh out loud:
“That said, if you are reading this book, you very well may have crossed the A&P event already even if you don’t know you have, as reading long and esoteric tomes on meditation while searching for something is the sort of thing that people who have crossed the A&P are much more likely to do, though this is not diagnostic, just highly suggestive.”
It was startling to find a resource that described so accurately what I had experienced, but what made this explanation most compelling was that it also described the type of meditation I was doing immediately preceding my experience. According to MCTB, Insight comes from very particular types of meditation practices and in particular recommends a practice called “noting”. It simply means sitting quietly and noting whatever you experience as it arises. You hear a sound and you note it with a mental label, “hearing”. You feel an itch on your chin and you note it, “itching”. And you just continue doing this with whatever you see, hear, feel, taste, smell, or think. (For a fantastic noting method check out Shinzen Young’s See, Hear, Feel.)
Through whatever combination of instructions I had received in the past and my own mindset, I had unintentionally developed a noting practice. This is precisely what I was doing when I had my big, life-changing moment. According to MCTB, the content as regarding Ajahn Cha might not have even been relevant to the generation of the Insight experience (although I like to think it was crucial to how the experience was understood, which I believe is also important). MCTB not only described what I experienced, but the particular practices I was doing that brought it on. This was a very clear signal to me that there was something valid within the POI model.
At this point, I had two mindsets in tension in regards to this discovery. First, I was still riding such a high from my A&P experience, and was so hungry for a sense of understanding that I was ecstatic to find something like MCTB. Had I been a younger man, without commitments to family, I would have cleared everything aside to hit the next retreat and start working up the POI. It was incredibly exciting and motivating to see this path appear and to see it described so clearly and confidently.
At the same time, I still had the skeptical part of myself that was working its way through the descriptions and claims in MCTB, with the awareness that my particular state of mind at that point could be temporary, and with the desire to not get hoodwinked in one way or another.
As I have worked through the issues, I think there are good reasons to take the POI seriously. The maps it is outlining aren’t original to MCTB, these were maps outlined by monks practicing this stuff over thousands of years. That a tradition has existed for a long time is not enough to justify its value, but it should at least give us pause in consideration, particularly when it is a tradition that is mostly about describing direct experience that is reported over and over again across time and across the Buddhist diaspora. This is further reinforced by the existence of a contemporary community that is trying the same techniques and describing the same effects. Some are doing this explicitly, but part of what has reinforced the validity of the POI for me was seeing all the places it was implied. After reading MCTB, l was suddenly seeing all the ways that previous accounts that I had read by other prominent teachers implied everything that POI mapped out. I had been listening to quite a few talks by Joseph Goldstein before reading MCTB and could suddenly map everything Goldstein had described in his talks to some point on the maps. The unspoken truth is that every prominent meditation teacher in the West has attained at least some degree of enlightenment, according to the POI, and it becomes obvious once you know what to look for.
It was also a model that I could see applied more broadly to other spiritual traditions, and indeed Ingram and others (Shinzen Young in particular) have done a decent amount of work of investigating all the diverse spiritual traditions and finding similar patterns in their various practices. You see it within contemplative Christianity, Sufism, and various veins of contemplative Judaism such as Kabbalah and Hasidism. Personally, I could look back at my own spiritual tradition of Mormonism and fit many of my own and other experiences into the framework. Perhaps Joseph Smith didn’t literally see God the Father and Jesus Christ in a grove of trees, but that he experienced an Arising and Passing is highly likely.
This can also be incredibly empowering to the individual. As I have experienced within my own tradition of Mormonism, and as I can see is clearly the case in many other faith traditions, the powerful experiences that accompany serious spiritual practice are often understood vaguely and used narrowly, not to empower the practitioner, but to justify the authority of the institution they are practicing within. Within Mormonism, all of these experiences are grossly categorized as “feeling the spirit”. To be fair, there are many healthy ways these experiences can be integrated within a traditional faith like Mormonism. One of Mormonism’s great strengths is its ability to teach simple morality. Spiritual experiences are often used as a motivator to this end, but I would be remiss to not also acknowledge how spiritual experiences are often used to justify greater obedience to a hierarchy and to the paradoxical discouragement of the actual spiritual capacity of the individual. There is much within Mormon doctrine and tradition to counter this trend, but sadly it is often suppressed in preference of institutional loyalty.
There is also this important role that the POI plays to put experiences in perspective. Ingram and others seem to go out of their way to emphasize that the experience of the A&P, in the grand scheme of things, is NBD. This is clearly due to the tendency of such a powerful experience to be interpreted as more than it is. I thought for a moment that I had attained Stream Entry. Certainly others have interpreted the A&P as enlightenment. Mix the A&P with a heavy dose of narcissism and you have the perfect recipe for a cult.
Equally important, the maps also describe rough terrain. The stages that follow the A&P are characterized by the quality they share of being, to a greater or lesser degree, unpleasant and are colloquially known as the “Dark Night” stages. There are very few meditation teachers out there openly discussing these inevitable consequences of serious practice, and many students end up blind-sided by experiences they didn’t sign up for when they decided to chill out with meditation. This is MCTB’s real claim to fame. There is a general taboo in the Wester Dharma scene about discussing things like maps and attainments openly, and MCTB is unusually frank and straightforward about challenging this taboo.
In these regards, the POI has the potential to be a powerful explanatory tool for understanding experiences that are universal to being human. It can bridge the gap between interpreting spiritual experiences within a mythical framework or dismissing them as non-rational woowoo. Clearly more rigorous academic work has to be done for that potential to be reached. Fortunately, some of that is already taking place. Ingram is working on developing a diagnostic version of the POI, and others like Willoughby Britton are working on a better understanding of the downsides of meditation.
Fortunately, the POI as presented in MCTB comes decoupled from any dogma or necessary commitment to any one club (although it is clearly informed primarily by Buddhism). Ingram is part of a group of contemporary meditation teachers who have been generally categorized as the “Pragmatic Dharma” movement. Their aim has been to tease apart the essential from the traditional (no easy task). If they err, it is in abstracting the practices too much out of the culture, but it does empower me and how I choose to relate to the Dharma. I have the luxury of holding on to a degree of skepticism, even as I rely on the POI as the best model I have found so far for understanding my spiritual progress within the domain of Insight.
What Now?
It has now been about six months since my initial A&P experience. Much of it has been a feverish blur of trying to make sense of what has happened. In retrospect I can now say this about it:
First, the concept of the POI allows me to celebrate the event of the A&P without clinging to it. The cool stuff I experienced was not the path, and my job is not to get that stuff back. I can be at peace with moving forward and letting go of the euphoria, tranquility, abundant gratitude and all that other amazing stuff I experienced in the process. My practice now is not about trying to get to a place of bliss or tranquility, but primarily about developing equanimity — learning to totally accept whatever it is I experience whether pleasant or unpleasant.
Second, the experience has been a powerful generator of faith in the practice. If there is one thing people get wrong about meditation, it is that they vastly underestimate its power. I have had the opportunity to experience that directly, and according to the POI, I’ve only just begun. If the A&P is one thing that the mind can do, how many more fascinating, fun, liberating and healing things are possible with the same tool and with further practice? Reading and listening to the vast and varying accounts of experienced practitioners has further increased this faith.
It wasn’t just the intensity of the experience alone that has increased my faith but also the specific Insights into the Dharma I gained through the experience. I saw clearly how I was creating suffering in my life through ignorance, clinging and aversion. There is far more clarity about the useful places to focus my attention and where I will just make things worse. I may not currently be feeling super-happy like I was right after the A&P, but I am able to see the hard stuff in an entirely different way, and I am emboldened to face it rather than turning away or covering it up.
Third, during the course of my A&P window, practice came incredibly easy. It allowed me to build a strong meditation habit that persists even as the good vibes fade and as I dip into what might be the infamous Dark Night stages. My practice is bumpier and less “fun”, but I have continued with an almost daily, hour-long practice, and I feel more capable to practice (and really engage in every other part of my life) than I ever have before.
Last, while I am excited about the potential for meditation to increase my personal well-being, It is clear that it is not enough by itself. Oddly enough, having had such a powerful experience via meditation has motivated me to focus on self development via other means as well. Fortunately, MCTB and many other sources within the Pragmatic and more general Western Dharma scene emphasize this point. Working on living a good life, being moral, therapy, physical fitness, professional and intellectual development, and investment in healthy relationships and community all play a critical part in living a meaningful, satisfying life.
It’s an intriguing personal project, but it also one that convinces me that something like religion ought to play a role in tying all those things together and giving us a context with which we can support one another our in well-intentioned desires for happiness and meaning. I say this recognizing that most, if not all, traditional religions appear to be unfit to do this in the face of our particular contemporary problems.
To make a third and final reference to the founding myth of Mormonism. When Joseph Smith asked God the Father and Jesus Christ which religion was true, their answer was “None of them.” I think that declaration still applies. And yet, we need some sort of alternative to the vacuous consumerism that defines most of Western contemporary life. That’ll be a large part of the project that follows — figuring out what that means for myself and my family, and what kind of alternative we will build.
P.S.
Maybe you’re wondering if you should read MCTB. I don’t think it’s for everyone, and I think there are few things to consider before checking it out. Of course, If you’re already convinced you want to read it, you can start out here:
If you’re not totally sure, maybe read the section on the A&P. If you find this resonates with your experience, it might be a good fit:
If you’re interested in starting a meditation practice, MCTB is NOT a good beginner manual. I’m not even sure it’s a good intermediate manual. Perhaps start with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living or Sharon Salzberg’s Real Happiness. The only really important thing you should read from MCTB is the Foreword and Warning as it is likely to be the only text you will find that will be responsible enough to warn you of the potential downsides you might run into in the practice of meditation.
https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/foreword-and-warning/
MCTB can also be seen as a big reference manual. If you’re interested in poking around and reading the stuff that interests you, check out the TOC. (This is how I read through the first time.)