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)

The Four Noble Truths: Suffering and our Emergent Self Identity

As mentioned in the previous post, Spiritual transformation and Spiritual Awakening both involve a major shift in identity. This is a transformation of our ‘self-center’ from a limited and needy small self-sense, based upon fear and anxiety, to one of freedom, wholeness, love and wisdom, our True Self. The first awakening to, or ‘realization’ of our always and already present True Self is usually sudden and, depending upon how much preparatory training we have had, can be shocking.

What is fascinating about the Spiritual shift in perspective from seeing through the eyes of the limited self to seeing through the eyes of Unbounded Infinity is that it can come at any time. True Nature is always and already present, not the result of any developmental process. But we have become conditioned to only see from a limited view, and because all of our habits and behaviors reflect this, we become stuck.

To make our journey of awakening more complicated, all of these habits have an energetic momentum, which means that even if I am able to have a temporary breakthrough and “See” my innate wholeness, I still have to deal with my small-self habits. These will inevitably pull me back into my old anxious and fearful self and I will ‘forget’ that True Nature is who I am.

Richard Baker Roshi, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen center, has a wonderful observation about process of Awakekening. “Awakening is accidental. Practice makes us accident prone.” The key practice is just sitting, known as shikantaza in Zen. Our Spiritual identity is seen and known by resting in Stillness or Silence. ” All that is required to realize the Self is to be still.”  (Ramana Maharshi.) “When the mind has become quiet, the Seer abides stably in its own Nature”. (Patanjali, YS I-2 and I-3).

However, even with and after the first realizations of awakening, we still have to address the challenges of our ‘relative’ or small self. The small self is actually an essential, evolving and complex organizational process that runs throughout the length of our life. Its crucial role is the monitoring and modulating of the flow of energy and information, coming in through our senses and relational/ interpersonal neurons, and out through our actions. In its most healthy expression, the small self functions from an emotional maturity that embraces its inherent human frailty without forgetting its source in the True Self

Unfortunately, this ‘small self’, often referred to as the ‘ego’, often gets stuck in emotionally immature and dysfunctional habits and beliefs. These habits, rooted in fear and insecurity, embed the thoughts ‘I am not good enough’, I don’t have enough’, ‘there is something wrong with me’ or ‘I am not worthy of love’ deep into the psyche. Then, our self identity becomes defined by these thoughts, as they continue relentlessly throughout our lives. Patanjali describes this in Sutra I-4, (when not abiding in True Self) there is identification with thought. This is the personal manifestation of the First Noble Truth, ‘there is suffering’.

Over time this mindset, deriving from a sense of personal inadequacy, gives birth to an endless series of life decisions that are desperate attempts to acquire ‘anything’ that will ‘fill the void’ and avoid anything that reminds us of the pain of our own neediness and inadequacy. These actions, and the mindset behind them describe Buddha’s Second Noble Truth, the ’cause of suffering. The Buddhists and Yogis refer to these life long pursuits as ‘grasping’ and ‘avoiding’.

In addition to these dysfunctional lifestyle choices, grasping and avoiding area tangible experiences we can easily feel in an embodied meditation practice and have two primary manifestations. First is the actual sensation of grasping or contracting in the energy flow through the connective tissues in somatic meditation. More subtle is the feeling of the mind, as the process of attention, habitually grasping onto thoughts and sensations as you are sitting in stillness. ‘Avoiding’ is also felt as a contraction in the tissues as a response something unpleasant or painful, and emotionally, as the constricted armoring we all carry around our hearts.

Because the small self and its patterns of thought and behavior are developmental, with some patience, and perhaps some outside help, it is possible to go back in time somatically to uncover the roots of dysfunctionality and allow the process of healing to begin. This is an expression of the Third Noble Truth, ‘letting go of striving is the goal’. Allowing space for developmental sequences to reveal themselves, feeling their current manifestations in the body/mind during both meditation practice and life, and then holding them in Presence is the path, the sadhana.

Other skills and practices are also added, to adjust not only our inner landscape, but also all of our relationships in the world and we have the Fourth Noble Truth, the eight fold path.

In the next post, we will take a deeper look at some of the different ways to chart the developmental sequence involved in the emerging self sense, including the Buddhist ‘skandhas’, contemporary neuro-psychology and somatic embryology as presented by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Also, we will also look at how systems theory offers clues about integration across multiple components of a complex system such as the ego. These are living maps, offering guideposts to our inner explorations of the many dimensions of what it means to a human being, on Mother Earth, here in the early years of the 21st century.

Sadhana: Part 1
The Four Noble Truths

Sadhana: A means to an end. A discipline or a set of disciplines that go directly to the goal. A yoga.

This Sanskrit word is traditionally used to describe practices that lead to Spiritual Awakening, also known as Enlightenment, Moksha, Self Realization, freedom from suffering, etc. From a modern perspective we can see Spiritual Awakening as the beginning of the next level evolution, requiring a shift in self identity from a self-centric perspective (it’s all about ME!), to planetery eco-centric (it’s about Mother Earth and all living beings), to a Cosmos-centric (resting and rooted in Ultimate Mystery).

This shift in self identity is first and foremost personal, but as it evolves, we discover it is also taking place collectively and we can join with others for mutual nurturing and support on the journey. Awakening is also both instantaneous and developmental. It is instantaneous when ‘the light suddenly goes on’ and we ‘see’ from the perspective of the infinite. This ‘Divine Revelation, known as kensho or satori in Zen is an abrupt shift away from our normal point of view that can happen to anyone at any time. It can be powerful, shattering or both.

Awakening is also developmental because we still live in the finite world as well and need to integrate our inner vision into personal and social action. Spiritual Awakening is a multi-layered and ever evolving process. One can be stuck in emotional immaturity and still have an awakening experience. Much of the trauma around abuse in spiritual communities arises from this unstable situation. Needy students and predatory or emotionally unconscious teachers are a dangerous mix. This is a key reason to have an emotionally mature teacher and to trust your inner instincts when there is any doubt about this.

When we become clear that this is our path, our primary life motivation becomes the betterment of the world and the liberation of all beings. If enough people have Awakening as their primary motivation, then as a collective field, Awakening humans can begin to have more and more say in the actions of society as a whole. A collective “bodhisattva consciousness” would be very helpful in overcoming the immense problems modern culture has created.

Spiritual Awakening usually begins with the recognition that something is seriously off about my life and the world around me. At a deeper level, this is supported by an inner spiritual impulse to discover what is Real and True about myself and the world. At this point our sadhana begins and we seek out guidance on the necessary steps to take and how to proceed with them. There is no better place to start than the Buddha and the teachings known as The Four Noble Truths. They are:

There is suffering (in the world and in every individual, and we need to take this in to begin opening our hearts);
There is a cause of suffering (the mind’s neurotic activity that never lets us rest);
There is a solution to suffering. (letting go of striving to ‘solidify’ ourselves):
There is an Eightfold path* (sadhana) with tools that develop these skills. (See below)

The Buddha states very clearly that Awakening begins with the capacity to see and feel the immense suffering, both in ourselves and in the world. This involves seeing neurotic thought for what it is, pausing, and allowing a space where the depths of the heart can reveal themselves. Awakening does not involve accumulating more knowledge. Rather, the sadhana is learning to discover and let go of anything that obscures the immediate feelings of an open heart. The egoic structures are no match for the reality of sickness and death, but the heart is. Buddha’s first insight was that without a deep understanding of why and how the heart remains imprisoned in suffering, Awakening will only become an intellectual fantasy or a projection of our imagination. * (See the poems and commentary a few paragraphs below.)

With the beginnings of Realization, we start to directly feel and recognize the causes of suffering. Buddha describes them as craving and ignorance, but we can see these are survival strategies arising early on as we are establishing our self-identity in relation to the world. These strategies stem from establishing a thought based sense of self, while avoiding, at all costs, feeling the pain and wounds of the heart.

The vulnerability of infancy and early childhood, where we need and do not always have emotional safety and security, leads to all sorts of fears, traumas and emotional wounding. At that early age we do not have the emotional strength and groundedness to process the pain and grief that accompany the emotional wounds and they are relegated to the unconscious. Here they become trapped in the cells and tissues of the developing body and become forgotten. However, we are simultaneously developing language skills and interacting with others verbally. The beginnings our our neuroses are here.

As we begin to see the relationship between our self identity, our woundedness and our hearts, we can begin to see some of the actions we can take to begin the healing of our personal and collective wounds and deepen the Awakening process. Our self identity issues underlying our own personal suffering begin sometime around the age of 18 months when the ‘ego structures’ begin to emerge. The very young child is simultaneously learning how to: live in a body, understand and use language, become independent, and develop attachment relationships with the other beings in their field of awareness. They are very small and vulnerable beings in a very large and mysterious world and developing a sense of self actually appears to begin at birth.

Here are some simple and yet fascinating observations about the levels of emergence of our self identity which will offer us some clues to our own inner world. These come from the research of psychologist Phillipe Rochat working with the ‘mirror test’ and infant development at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Dr. Rochat describes the development of self awareness like the growth of an onion, layer by layer and the adult experience as a continuous fluctuation through these layers. For a more detailed description, check out his article: http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/Rochat5levels.pdf

As a preface, please note that these 6 levels also have a social dimension which is not included in this overview. Self awareness always emerges and develops in the presence of others, with others. It is not a solitary process but an amazingly complex one. At a later date we will examine the attachment process and some findings from the modern field of Interpersonal Neurobiology to help expand our field of awareness of self-awareness and mental health. Nonetheless, this model can give us some reference points for exploring our own embodied self awareness, and after this first section we will look at some adult manifestations of these levels.

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 1: Self-World Differentiation: At birth, a baby 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. “There is a mirror.”

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. He has situated himself in the world.
“There is a person in the mirror.”

Level 3: Identification: At 18 months toddlers will begin to recognize the image in the mirror is ME!.
“That person is me.”

Level 4: Permanence: The next few years 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 completion of this stage there is the recognition that even baby pictures of me are still me. The sense of me has become permanent. “That person is going to be me forever.”

Level 5: Meta Self-Awareness: Somewhere between 4 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 it.”

As adults, we can actually recognize some of these stages maturing in ourselves.

Level 0: Confusion / (Resolution?) The human experience of level 0 is complex. In deep dreamless sleep there is a total dropping of self awareness , and there are possible times when we ‘get lost’ in the story of a novel or movie. But also there are deep levels of meditation where the self, and the reflective mirror totally drops away.

This is delightfully described in one of my favorite books, Mark Epstein’s clear and powerful ‘thoughts without a thinker’. There is a short story he relates at the beginning of his section on ‘Right View, the first stage of the Fourth Noble Truth, that has remained with me for many years. Today I will call it ‘poems to Level 0 and will quote it here in full:

“Forever alert to the tendency of the human psyche to substitute some kind of imagined state of perfection for true understanding, Hueng-jen, the departing fifth patriarch, challenged his students and followers of the seventh century A.D. to compose a verse demonstrating their understanding of the Buddha’s teachings. The most satisfactory verse would indicate his successor. The foremost disciple , Shen-hsiu, who was expected to assume the role of the master presented the following:

The body is the Bodhi tree,
The mind is like a clear mirror standing.
Take care to wipe it all the time
Allow no grain of dust to cling.

A perfectly acceptable response. Shen-hsiu’s verse made a virtue of the empty and reflecting mind, a recurrent motif in Buddhist literature. But the clear mirror, like the true self, too easily becomes an object of veneration. Such a view merely replaces the concrete self with a more rarified version that is then thought to be even more real than the original. An illiterate kitchen boy, Hui-neng, grasped the imperfection of Shen-hsiu’s response and presented the following alternative.

The Bodhi is not a tree,
The clear mirror is nowhere standing.
Fundamentally, not one thing exists;
Where then is a grain of dust to cling?

Hui-nengs response, which was consistent with the teachings of Nagarjuna and the Madhyamika school in embracing neither absolutism or nihilism, avoided the trap of idealization that Shen-hsiu’s poem retained. Hui-neng avoided the common misconceptionof liberation as a mind emptied of its contents or a body emptied of its emotions. The mind or self that we conceive of does not exist in the way we imagine, said Hui-neng; if all things are empty, to what can we cling? If the mind itself is already empty, why should it have to be cleansed? If emotions are empty, why do they have to be eliminated? (see previous post on the Heart Sutra)

Even in a Buddhist community, this view challenged conventional thinking. The departing fifth patriarch, for example, found it necessary to praise Shen-hsui’s answer in public, while privately rebuking him. Publicly denouncing Hui-neng, the patriarch secretly named Hui-neng the sixth patriarch and then urged him to flee under the cover of darkness. Yet Hui-neng, in his own way, was articulation what has always been one of the major components of Buddha’s teaching, what has become known as Right View.”

Levels 1 and 2 are very embodied experiences. Level 1 keeps us from walking into walls and level 2 helps us refine movement skills, from basic walking to advanced athletics.

Level 3 is basic self consciousness and getting stuck in this level will interfere with the ability of my body to be in flow. In sports and other life endeavors this is called ‘getting in your own way’. This insidiously challenging ‘objective self’, the Me-Mine is explored in meditation and hopefully ‘seen’ to be ’empty’ of any substantive reality.

Level 4 allows us to reflect back upon the various stages of our lives and feel a continuity. We ‘know’ that my 3 year old self as well as my teenage self, and all the other phases are actually all me. More meditation is needed to see the transitory nature of our personal narrative. Once we see its inherent emptiness, the need to ‘get rid of it’ can be dropped and we enjoy it for what it is, an interesting story that is not the True Self, but not separate from it either.

Level 5 requires the capacity to imagine what others might be thinking of me, and this inevitably leads to all sorts of fantasies and distortions about ‘who we really are. If we are curious about the origins of suffering as ignorance and craving this is a great place to begin. For those who are curious, there are many parallels here to the Buddhist view of the construction of the self sense or ego known as the five skandhas. Find them here, and here, and here.

Self reflection is a key part of Patanjali’s Kriya Yoga, which begins his second chapter of the Yoga Sutras known as the Sadhana Pada, ‘On Practice’. We will pick up there in the next post.

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(from above)

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)