Stories

Lately I've been thinking about stories, as a followup to my previous post on math. It seems people need to construct a story around something before they're ready to say they understand it. Take for example this.

Sometimes during particularly intensive retreats, I will get to the point where I don't have a lot of self-referential thinking. My sense of agency, that is that I am an agent and that the language in my thinking is coming from me, disappears. This is what some Buddhists call "not-self" or more technically, emptiness of self. But still there will be thoughts and sometimes they relate to my future plans or what I should do next or what would be best for me. This sense of a loss of agency is also accompanied by tremendous mental and physical energy.

Usually we ascribe some agency to thinking, in particular that we are the agent or that there is a self behind our thoughts, but in this case I don't have any. So my mind instead ascribes these thoughts to other people, mostly friends who aren't physically present (but who might be in the vicinity), animals, or sometimes to mythical beings (mostly devas and daemons). Instead of just seeing these thoughts as arising out of emptiness and passing away into emptiness, i.e. that the thoughts are agency-less, I ascribe the agency of these thoughts to others, not myself. I talk about this a bit in the book, in the penultimate chapter where I'm on a jhana retreat and end up in the psychiatric ward of the local hospital for 4 days.

Now, from the standpoint of someone experiencing reality in a conventional way, this kind of thing looks classically like schizophrenia. I'm "hearing voices", and if I had admitted this to the doctor during the 2011 retreat, I'd probably have been put away into a psychiatric hospital for a lot longer than 4 days. But there are two fundamental differences between the typical schizophrenic experience and what I experience.

The first difference is that for a typical schizophrenic, the voices are screaming abuse or howling at the person what a piece of sh*t they are, etc. In other words, the voices are abusive. And they don't stop, they continue to hector, cajole, and criticize so that the person sometimes can't sleep. In my case, the voices are giving practical advice, but often advice that is not in my best interest, or are telling stories. Sometimes, they are setting up mental tests or games that I play with visualized characters. And the stories, in particular, are elaborate Buddhist themed mythologies, often with a science-fiction subtext, in which I'm typically the star or at least play a leading role. Though I typically sleep less during an intensive retreat and sometimes also afterwards, the voices aren't the reason I can't sleep, it's just that I am so wired with energy that I don't really need to sleep.

The second difference is that about a month after the retreat, I start experiencing an agency behind my thinking again and the sense of the thoughts as "voices" disappears and instead becomes just my thinking. For most schizophrenics, the voices never disappear unless they take powerful medication for suppressing psychosis. That medication works in my case as well, and I took some after the 2011 retreat, but after the voices have disappeared, I don't need it anymore. And even beforehand, the voices are typically not harassing or scolding, they are just providing advice, but usually not very good advice unfortunately. Kind of like a stockbroker advising you to sell everything at the 5 year low for the market.

So, to pop up a level, this is a kind of story I've constructed to help me understand why my mind tends to construct these elaborate fictions when I have a particularly deep retreat. I think my task now is to see through these stories, and  to really experience thoughts as simply arising out of emptiness and disappearing into emptiness. From the standpoint of my conventional everyday experience of reality, I have a hard time seeing how I could take any action, in particular action towards my physical benefit, with this viewpoint, but others who have experienced emptiness say that it's really possible.  Action just seems to happen, they say, like thoughts simply arising out of emptiness.

Image courtesy of wikipedia.org