Four Noble Truths: Part 3

The Developing and Evolving Sense of Self

Bare Attention

What we have been calling ‘true meditation’ (Adyashanti), or ‘shikantaza (Zen sitting meditation) can also be called ‘bare attention’, the term used by Mark Epstein, in ‘Thoughts Without a Thinker’. “Defined as “the clear and single minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception, bare attention takes the unexamined mind and opens it up, not by trying to change anything, but by observing the mind, emotions and body the way they are.”

In sitting, we find ‘bare attention’ also involves observing how the immediate sensations that are arising often trigger layers of reactivity that seem to come out of the unconscious. Here the unexamined ‘unconscious reactivity’ is now seen as separate from the immediate sensation. The process of meditation allows a space to open by recognizing that awareness or ‘seeing’ is also separate from both what is arising and the reactivity, revealing three layers to our immediate experience; observing, sensation and reaction. By not getting entangled in our conditioned reactivity, the immediate clarity of what is arising stands out in the open spaciousness of awareness. Most of the time, our reactivity has a large emotional component which makes this process challenging and the reality of this is succinctly presented in the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.

The Four Noble Truths

Buddha’s ‘First Noble Truth’, the reality of suffering, is first truly seen and known when we realize that we are not living, breathing and feeling the fullness of life as it emerges, through us and around us, moment to moment from Ultimate Mystery. The reality is that we are living primarily in an emotionally confused and separate world inside our own heads. Beginning very early in our overall development, and for a myriad of complex and intertwined factors, we come to believe ourselves to be fundamentally small and separate. This self identity of inadequacy leads us to spend vast amounts of psychic energy, anxiously and neurotically attempting to resolve this existential crisis.

Buddhas ‘Second Noble Truth’ states there is cause of suffering and it is the reality that the roots of our neurotic mental activity are unconscious, unexamined and self-perpetuating. This leads to a life of continuous striving to fill the unfillable void of our existential crisis. Our life force is wasted grasping after pleasure and avoiding unpleasantness, all the time missing the magic of the infinite present. These life choice patterns are dynamic and thus open to the possibility of change and transformation, but this is anything but simple. Our conditioned reactivity has lifetimes of momentum, as our patterns of thought, belief and action are passed down across generations through parenting and culture, with the imprinting beginning in preverbal infancy.

Buddha’s Third Noble Truth, that it is possible to tame and transform our neurotic habits, offers us hope. As these habits are deeply ingrained in the body-mind, a relaxed patience and open curiosity are required to begin the process. As we sit, we begin to notice small pauses where our attention is not entangled in our emotions and thoughts. Here we can feel our breathing relax and we can rest a moment and allow our curiosity to open. The pauses are a natural aspect to the ebb and flow of life in the present moment, and in relaxing, we invite them to reveal themselves, in their own way, in their own time. Striving to find them, unfortunately, is more suffering and this is a trap to be wary of.

Buddha’s Fourth Noble Truth , the ‘Eight Fold Path’ (see below) recognizes that all aspects of our lives must be included in the process of healing. As our practice deepens, there is an awakening of an underlying, open curiosity about just how and why the body-mind acts and reacts the way it does as we live our lives, as well as when we sit. Our practice becomes 24/7. When we begin to see how these habits begin, and the layers of embodiment they span, our innate intelligence can begin offering clues for healing. And they often begin with the emotional challenges of our vulnerable infancy.

The Attachment Process and the Attachment Profile

“Attachment is a deep and enduring emotional bond that connects one person to another person across space and time.” John Bowlby.
“Attunement, or sensitivity, requires that the caregiver perceive, make sense of, and respond in a timely and effective manner to the actual moment-to-moment signals sent by the child.” Dan Siegel.

Because emotional energy is the primary ‘food’ for our developing self sense, I am including a very basic introduction to attachment theory. In the quotations above, attachment refers to the emotional linking and attunement the process by which understanding of self and other arises. In other words, it is very possible to have emotional strong attachment to another but have minimal attunement. These dysfunctional relationships can run the gamut from mild to dangerous.

The skills of healthy attunement allow: the ability to find and feel emotional safety; repairs of inevitable emotional disruptions and the re-establishment of emotional coherence and harmony; the capacity to differentiate one’s own emotions from the other; and the ability to safely explore the fullness of the emotional field. These skills are especially crucial in this time of cross-cultural trauma and upheaval.

Emotions are intense and overwhelming, even to adults. The two key components to the development of an emotionally mature self sense in adulthood, emotional self regulation and emotional differentiation, actually begin in infancy. The infant/baby, with no inner relational/emotional compass needs a strong attunement with another human to begin the process of learning trust in self and others.

Healthy attunement, that is parent(s) who are loving, caring and soothing, first help the infant/child begin to develop the capacity to successfully navigate, often with the help and trust of others their own emotional ups and downs. As the infant begins to develop their own individual self sense, healthy attunement helps them differentiate their own emotional states from those of others. Because of the power of emotional resonance, this is a skill that evolves over time with nuance and complexity.

By adulthood, most of us have developed with is known as an attachment profile or attachment style, which represents in a general way how we handle our own emotions and the whole spectrum of our interpersonal relationships. Of the four, there is one style that is ‘secure’ and three that are ‘insecure’. These styles are not rigid or absolute as we may have had experiences with several of these scenarios, but usually one dominates. Fortunately, the insecure ones can be transformed with therapy and meditation. If we look deeply, we may find the origins of our attunement/attachment experiences in infancy and childhood and, from the present moment, bring love and compassion to the emotional wounds of our much younger selves.

Adult Attachment Styles

Secure Attachment: Fortunately, the most common. Research estimates that somewhere between 60 and 65% of the population have this style. In secure attachment, our primary caregiver(s) has reasonably responded to our needs and emotions as infants and children and mirrors back that understanding to us. They have allowed us as infants/children to ‘feel our feelings’ and honor us with a strong flow of emotional support and love. We have felt safe, loved and valued. When the inevitable emotional disruptions and disagreements occur, repairs are eventually made and healing takes place. Caregivers are relatively predictable. We have developed a healthy self confidence and by adulthood, we have a reasonable sense of self reliance.

Avoidant/Dismissive Attachment: (15% +/-)As infants/children we experienced very little attunement and never develop a sense of trust that emotional connections can be healing. Our parents/caregivers have either been absent, self centered and negligent or rigidly strict. Because of the emotional field we carried, we may have had similar experiences with our childhood peers and eventually become independent emotional ‘loners’. As adults, we often take unusual pride in our ‘independence’ and dismiss intimacy because as children we never experienced it.

Anxious/Ambivalent Attachment: (15% +/-) Our parent/primary caregiver was inconsistent and unpredictable in their attunement with us. Sometimes they were able to be present to our infant/child’s emotional needs, but more often than not, they were either unable to recognize our preverbal signals, misread us entirely, or interjected their own neediness onto us. This unpredictable attunement’ and periodic emotional disconnect may have led to unconscious feelings of shame and humiliation around our feelings. Much inner confusion is beginning to develop. In adulthood, there is often a mistrust and misreading of the emotional cues of others in our intimate relationships and a lack of clarity about our own feelings. We are often impulsive, anxious and needy around being liked or loved, with a strong fear of abandonment, as we don’t trust our own worthiness.

Disorganized Attachment: (5-10%) Alcohol is a major player here. Too often our parent(s) responded with rage or anger to our needs. The desire to emotionally bond with the person who is a source of danger led to a terror without resolution. In our very young and still developing brain, this constant unresolveable terror sends the nervous system into major disarray. The powerful emotional disconnect between our raging parent/caregiver and our terrified childhood sets up traumatized defense mechanisms that continue into adulthood. As adults, we often fly into rages of our own and have no feelings or connections to the damage we are doing. This is the ancestral karma of violence that many families and cultures carry in the present moment.

For more insight, you can download a wonderful Dan Siegel presentation of Attachment here.

Mirror Test Levels and Commentary

When I recently ‘discovered’ the mirror test, ‘light bulbs turned on’ about the multi-dimensional possibilities of transformation and healing. I hope you find some of these suggestions as fascinating and helpful as they are to me and are encouraged to find your own ways of exploring consciousness and its manifestations in energetic forms. The ‘ Mirror Test, introduced in a recent post, describes five basic psychological/emotional stages, riding along on the waves of the attachment process, in the development of our self-sense. These offer us a treasure map for examining our relationships to ourselves and the world.

Through our meditation practice, and then in our daily lives, we are looking to recognize these basic psychological/emotional shaping structures when they arise, separate them from the layers of story that have emerged, and feel them in the raw vitality of their primary phase. In the following, the original descriptions of the levels are a paraphrasing of Dr. Rochat’s descriptions. Then, in purple italics, I transform these stages to the first person and add my own commentary.

Level 0: Confusion: This is the level of zero self awareness or self-obliviousness. The mirror does not exist and the reflections are seen as a continuation of the world and not reflections. A bird flying into a window, or a parakeet singing to a mirror believing he has a companion are an example of level 0.

Level 0: Confusion – Resolution: In spiritual maturity, there is a dissolving of the sense of a separate me, at all levels. In Buddhism, this is often called the realization of ‘no-self’. There is no ‘self awareness’, just Awareness. The body mind still remain and function at a high level of coherence, but the sense of separateness is gone. As the great mantra at the conclusion of the Heart Sutra states: gate, gate paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha, or gone, gone, gone beyond, completely gone, so be it.

This self-less-ness is not to be confused with the undifferentiated infant’s sense of bliss in merging with the mother. That is regression. Spiritual maturity includes simultaneously integrating all of ones experiences, seeing their inherent emptiness, and living from a fullness of love and wisdom.

Level 1: Self-World Differentiation: At birth, a baby intuitively knows her body is differentiated from other objects. She recognizes the physical mirror, as well as the images in the mirror are separate from herself, but she won’t recognize the image in the mirror as herself. We can summarize this as “There is a mirror.”

Level 1: Mirror test: As we sit, we feel the seat underneath us, if we are inside, we recognize the walls, and other objects in the room. If outside we recognize the world as it is presented to us. This immediacy of perception has no need for words, concepts or memories. We can also bring this primal sensing off the cushion and into the world.

Our attachment/attunement begins with the intimacy of skin to skin touch, the feel of our mother’s heartbeat, and the exchange of sounds and eye contact. Over time this can evolve to what we might call an emotionally psychic link which transcends space and time. In the first two or three months, we do not seem to favor any one care giver. Anyone who stays near by and responds will satisfy our attunement needs.

Level 2: Level 2: Situation: At 2 months, a baby becomes more physically interactive with the world. He can reach for things and his image in the mirror now becomes a source of curiosity, but there is no recognition that ‘the image is me’. He has situated himself in the world. “There is a person in the mirror.”

Level 2: We are able to physically interact with the world, not only with our hands, but our legs, our senses and whole body. We all have developed some levels of proprioceptive (my body in relationship to itself) and kinesthetic (my body in relationship to the outer world) intelligence.

Any somatic practice such as athletics/sports, music and dance, martial arts, or yoga refines these self-organizing possibilities and they can be cultivated at all ages. The challenge is to not be too ‘self-conscious’ (level 3) in practicing, as this type of mental activity disrupts embodied flow. Even the most highly trained and skilled athletes have this as a challenge.

We are still totally dependent on an an attuned adult for everything. We continue to communicate through facial expressions, vocalization and our heart energy field. Between the ages of 2 and 7 months, while still accepting care from others, we begin to shown preferences and more positive responses for our primary and secondary caregivers. Trust is beginning to emerge that they will respond to our needs, but this process may or may not be going smoothly.

Level 3: Identification: At 18 months toddlers will begin to recognize the image in the mirror is ME!, although this ‘knowing’ is still very unstable. “That person is me.”

Level 3: Here is where the challenging work begins. We all have this objective self sense, an inner ‘me’, that strives for love, acceptance, emotional connection, acknowledgement, and praise. Our emotional attachment experience is really feeding and guiding this inner development. The voice of this insecure inner ‘me’ is still lacking a center so we begin the process of trying to ‘find ourselves, which continues into adulthood. ” This is the neurotic inner voice that we want to begin to recognize, moment to moment, as it arises, while bringing a large amount of compassion and humor as did George Harrison.

All, through the day, I me mine, I me mine, I me mine
All, through the night, I me mine, I me mine, I me mine
Now they’re frightened of leaving it, ev’ryone’s weaving it
Coming on strong all the time
All, through the day, I me mine.

I-I-me-me-mine, I-I-me-me-mine,
I-I-me-me-mine, I-I-me-me-mine.

Level 4: Permanence: Between the years of two and four, the toddler is navigating between ‘the image in the mirror is me’ and ‘the image in the mirror is someone else looking at me’. An example is a young girl looking in a mirror and asking “why is that girl wearing my clothes. As you can imagine, this is an emotionally volatile time in their development! At the completion of this stage there is the recognition that even baby pictures of me are still me. The sense of me has become permanent across time. “That person is going to be me forever.”

Level 4: Transition: At this crucial stage, not only are we trying to stabilize our self sense or ego through our emotional attachments, but we are also refining our use of our bodies in movement and language through the development of our personal narrative. These three intertwined dynamic processes become the food for our meditation practices.

Somatically we can revisit the stored memories of this age in the tissues of our bodies. Simultaneously, the voices of that age may arise. And we can access the narrative integration component of the ego as we retell our own story. Troubling emotions such as shame, fear, anxiety and even terror may arise from the field of our explorations and we can hold them in presence by realizing their origins in our wounded childhood. We may begin to discover which of the attachment profiles fit our inner experience and use this insight for further understanding and healing.

Level 5: Meta Self-Awareness: Somewhere between four and five the child finally realizes that not only is the image in the mirror ‘me’ (Level 3), and always me (Level 4), but also the ‘me’ that everyone else sees. At this stage children can become mirror-shy and be rather unsettled that everyone can ‘see’ me. Bouts of embarrassment, pride and acute self-consciousness can manifest. “And everyone else can see me.”

Level 5: ‘The Emergence of the Relational Self.’ As we have seen at levels three and four, our self sense or ego has been developing in a complex relational field with our primary caregivers and siblings. We now begin to expand our field to many others and our self-consciousness now includes needing to ‘please/fit in/relate’ with cousins, neighbors, schoolmates and other peers. Our self sense continues to evolve and change relatively steadily until puberty when a huge jolt of hormonal energy blasts us into a whole new dimension of self consciousness.

At this time in our development, our need for emotional linking with our peers is powerful and still quite immature. We can be both the giver and receiver of emotional trauma and distress as we try to navigate this new world. Adults can be seen as ‘the enemy’, as there is much emotional confusion around developing independence. By relying on our still emotionally immature peers for guidance and advice during this transition, we often suffer even more.

These are broad maps of development energy patterns that continue to circulate in our human energy field. As we are linked emotionally and cosmically to the the whole, we can feel the collective field as well as our individual personal one. As the collective field is still in its infancy, we often confuse the personal with the collective, just as we often did in infancy with our own feelings and those of our caregivers. When fear arises, we can remind ourselves that we are also having a universal human experience with an infinite amount of space to hold this in compassionate awareness. The same goes for all of our emotions. Have fun with this!

The Eightfold Path

The Eightfold Path can be seen as eight spokes emanating from the hub of Awakening, and like Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga, the first five are more outer practices involving our relation to the world, and the last three more inner, involving our meditation work.

Right View (especially the Four Nobles Truths)
Right Thought
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort (in healing our dysfunctional mental patterns)
Right Mindfulness (expanding awareness to the body, feelings, thoughts and the impermanence of all phenomena)
Right Concentration (Samadhi, single mindedness)