Re: Mindfully Bypassing Feeling, Contacting Prior Insight (Better Formatting)

[Guest guest]

Simone,I don't think there's anything in Rato's formulation that precludes having a playful attitude towards the delusive cognitions. The contrast between their seeming authority and their patent absurdity is something that can be acknowledged with a smile. Then like you said, it's a good idea to turn attention elsewhere so they don't keep dictating the terms of this and all future conversations. 

Jim

 

Hi Rato,

 

Interesting. I like how you explain things this time around. I get it.

I particularly like the quote from Rev Flavel.

Our minds are so much like weather patterns, we believe when it rains, it will rain forever, when the sun shines that the world is good. I see this so much in myself. I latch on to the mental weather pattern and live and become it. Possessed almost by it's strength. But I am seeing the delusion more and more and more. It really is laughable.

What I find difficult is having enough mindfulness to break the loop. Sometimes I am caught before I know it, becoming the rain, even enjoying the drama of the downpour! Sometimes I do catch the pattern, ( more and more these days) but I sometimes do like to change it - or at least experiment with trying.

These feelings are nothing more than energy. Energy changes, morphs into something else if you wait long enough. But if I wait for the energy to change on its own, I could be waiting a long time! And this makes me feel stuck. Stuck energy in the body.

Recently I have been experimenting a bit with Laughter Yoga. Nuts I know - but I thought I would give it a go. Feeling fed up one day, I made myself laugh for no reason, exercising my diaphragm and breathing muscles in the process and naturally releasing feel good hormones. The more I faked the laughter, the more real it became. I great defusing exercise! It shifted the energy. The depressed mood lifted.

What I am trying to say, in my not very articulate way, is that sometimes rather than try to bypass, or short circuit this energy, these feelings, we can work with them. Make them more pliable. Rather like riding a wild stallion, we can't stop it bucking, but we can harness that energy and use it. Like my forced laughter, or a yoga class, or a jog, or a dance - whatever it is that moves that energy-we can sit with those feelings, mindfully acknowledge them, and then experiment with dancing in the rain,  or the storm, or with whatever set of mental and phyical events you are experienceing. Being with the energy, the feelings - but dancing with them, rather than trying to cut the energy that feeds them.

If I allowed  feelings to sit without any intervention - they seem to grow, like mould, over everything else. Blotting out any clarity, and dragging me down.

I'm not sure I'm being very clear here ( even to myself!) - but do you get my point?

 

Simone

 

To: ACT_for_the_Public Sent: Sunday, 4 March 2012, 19:57

Subject: Mindfully Bypassing Feeling, Contacting Prior Insight (Better Formatting)

 

***This is a new version of the previous essay I posted on " Faith. "  In response to feedback, I have taken that word out.  Thanks to all who had comments, and please share any new comments you might have.***

" Are sense and feelings suitable to judge of the dispensations and designs of God by?  Can their testimony be safely relied on?  Is it safe to argue thus: `If God had any love for my soul, I should feel it now, as well as in former times; but I cannot feel it, therefore it is gone?'  May you not as well conclude, when the sun is invisible to you, that it has ceased to exist? "  

— Rev. Flavel, 1627 - 1691

 

Abstract:  When our feelings are distorted by psychological forces such as depression and infatuation, and we know this is happening, we often try, through an act of will, to counteract their persuasiveness and believability, render them less compelling.  But this doesn't work.  To transcend them, we need to understand them from a higher level, as unreliable outgrowths of a specific state of mind, rather than as signposts to reality.  We need to expect them to be persuasive and believable, let them be such, and yet proceed to not believe them even despite.  We need to bypass them, dismiss them in favor of our prior, more reliable insights, those realized during periods in which we were not under their delusive grasp.

 

When I was depressed, I would experience certain intense emotions.  These emotions would paint a somber, tragic picture of my life.  They would tell me that at my core I was weak, needy, pathetic, inferior, alone, unlike everyone else.   They would remind me of the optimistic hopes and dreams that I had as a child, and emphasize how ashamed that child would have been if someone had shown him how his life would eventually turn out: the sad disappointment that he would eventually become.  I had let myself down.

In the wiser, more rational parts of my being, I knew that these emotions were just the dramatic delusions of a depressed mind.  But they felt real.  Because they felt real, they would break me down.

I tried to reason with the emotions— " C'mon, you have no reason to believe these things about yourself " —but that rarely worked.  The emotions felt too true not to believe.  Ironically, my effort to argue them away, to stop them from feeling so true and justified, would aggravate them, make them more intense.  I would end up in an exhausting and counterproductive struggle with my own mind, a struggle that I would consistently lose.

The depression would get worse when I was under stress or deprived of sleep.  One day, during a period of heavy stress at work, and after a particularly unpleasant episode of insomnia, I came to the following realization:

" I know, in the calmer parts of my mind, where I am wiser and more rational, that these emotions are just symptoms of a temporary state of mind.  The neurochemicals in my brain are firing them off not because they are true, or because they reflect on me, but because I'm stressed out.  I got no sleep last night.  As a result, my mind is extremely sensitive, prone to charged emotional reactions. "

" The problem is that even though I know this, I can't seem to make the emotions stop feeling so true.  I can't seem to weaken or undo their persuasiveness and believability.  They have me sold, hook line and sinker. "

Ultimately, I concluded that there was nothing I could really do about the emotions.  They were there, they were going to continue to arise, and when they did, they were going to feel incredibly true and right.  So I took a different approach.  I gave up on the attempt to change how they felt.  I gave up on the effort to counteract their allure, their persuasiveness, their believability.  I started to expect them to feel alluring, persuasive, believable—that was part of the trick, how they operated.  This expectation reframed my understanding of them.  They lost their ability to convince me, even as they continued to feel convincing.  It

was as if my mind, given its past experiences, was able to get a few steps ahead of them, and take them out of the circuit through which they would otherwise drive my beliefs.

I remembered the many times that I had felt the emotions and bought into them, only to realize, after the depressed state of mind had lifted, that I had been sucked into a delusion.  " Wow, where did that come from? "   I embraced what I had seen so clearly in previous undeluded states of mind: that I was neither good nor bad, a success nor a failure, but just a person struggling with circumstances, doing what anyone else in my shoes would do.  I contacted this insight and went with it, even as the emotions themselves continued to bubble up.  Rather than fight to neuter the emotions, I let them continue to be alluring, persuasive, believable.  I stepped back and raised my awareness to a level at which I could understand their allure, persuasiveness and believability in a different light, a level at

which I could gently dismiss them even as they continued to feel that way to me.

Surprisingly, in response to this approach, the emotions gradually lost their intensity.  I was able to see past them and confidently move on.

What I employed was a type of mindfulness, a way to transcend the mind's present delusions by accessing its prior insights.  In the piece that follows, I am going to discuss and clarify this form of mindfulness, and hopefully give the reader tools to put it into practice.

Mindfully Bypassing Feeling, Contacting Prior Insight

Normally, when we believe something, some thought, we believe it because our feelings tell us that it is true.  It feels true.  We follow that feeling.  The problem is that our feelings are often distorted, warped by the many variants of mental delusion: depression, infatuation, anxiety, the list goes on.

When we realize that our feelings are distorted, what do we instinctively try to do?  We try to " fix " them.  We argue with them, plead with them, suppress them, try not to feel them, try to feel other more palatable feelings in their place.  But this approach does not work.  It rattles the mind and leaves the feelings that much more entrenched.

When our belief system operates on their terms, consults them for guidance, direction, they always win.  They always suck us in.  What we need to do, then, is bypass them, short-circuit them, take them out of the process through which they govern our beliefs.  They are, after all, broken aspects of our mental machinery.

Now, this does not mean that we need to change how they feel.  Again, we can't change how they feel.  Regardless of what we try to do with them, they will always feel alluring, persuasive, believable to us.  What we need to do is process the way they feel—process their allure, persuasiveness and believability—in a different light.  We need to expect them to feel alluring, persuasive and belieavable.  We need to " chalk up " that quality to its cause: the delusion.  Then, we can dismiss it.

Instead of embracing their messages, we need to embrace what we know in the wiser, more rational parts of our minds.  We need to contact the insights that we've gained by going through the delusions and then having them lift, seeing after the fact that they were just delusions.  In a type of leap, we need to go with those insights, without demanding that our feelings confirm them.

Consider the example of a person that experiences bouts of depression followed by periods of mental normalcy.  The person cycles through the following states of mind:

(a) Normal: emotions calm, senses clear.

(aa) Depression hits: experiences tragic, judgment-laden, guilt-ridden, self-persecutional emotions.  View of world and view of self painfully distorted.

( Depression lifts: emotions calm, senses regained, clarity and insight emerge, " What was that all about? "

(bb) Depression returns: experiences tragic, judgment-laden, guilt-ridden, self-persecutional emotions.  View of world and view of self painfully distorted by emotions.

© Depression lifts: emotions calm, senses regained, clarity and insight emerge, what was that all about?

(cc) Depression returns: experience tragic, judgment-laden, guilt-ridden, self-persecutional emotions.  View of world and view of self painfully distorted by emotions.

The question is, what should a person in (cc) do?  She can't fight the emotions.  They are too powerful.  Regardless of her efforts, they will continue to feel persuasive and believable to her when she considers them.  What she needs to do is shift the way that she sees them.  She needs to see them as feelings, mental events, outgrowths of a depressed state of mind.  She needs to expect them to feel persuasive and believable precisely because of what they are.  She needs to " chalk them up " to their cause,

and then dismiss them.  In their place, she needs to recall the prior insights that she gained in ( and ©, where she was able to see the depression lift, the lie exposed as such.  She needs to go with those prior insights, without demanding confirmation from her presently distorted state of mind.

" I know these feelings are just delusions.  I was able to clearly see that fact when I was not under the throes of this mess.  So that's what I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with that prior knowledge, even though right now the feelings feel so incredibly compelling to me, and even as I relax on them and allow them to feel that way.  Moving on…. "

This shift is very difficult to clearly describe, and so if it confuses you, don't worry.  It confuses most people.  Rather than try hard to put it into practice in your life right now, just let it be a fuzzy idea, something that may eventually blossom into a deeper realization.

Two Conditions

The approach described above works particularly well when the following two conditions are met:

(1)  Basis – obviously, there has to be a prior insight.  To use the example of depression, you've been through it before, you've seen it and been fooled by it many times.  It is for that very reason that you are able to contact your prior insights and avoid being fooled again.

But if there are no prior insights, if you are someone experiencing depression for the first time, then there is nothing for you to contact.  Your world has suddenly shifted, but you don't have the experience to know that it's all in your mind.  Thus, you will not be able to make much use of this approach.

(2)  Subjective with No Real-World Impact – the approach is especially powerful when applied to something that is subjective and that has no real-world impact.  To again use the example of depression, the claims that the depression makes—that you are pathetic, inferior, worthless, hopeless, whatever—are subjective value judgments.  They are opinions, not facts, and therefore they cannot be true in the literal sense.  Whether they are taken to be true has no impact on any aspect of reality.  The only thing that is impacted is how you feel.

The approach works best with things that are subjective and that lack a real-world impact because the mind doesn't have as much reason to doubt them and worry about them.  If you try to contact prior insights with respect to issues that have a real-world impact, you could be wrong.  Your mind will recognize this risk and may express doubts.  If you are wrong, it will matter, and so your mind will stay on the issue.

But if you are working with something about which you can't be wrong, something that is subjective and that doesn't impact anything, your mind has no reason to worry.  You can set aside the worries, let them go, because they have no way to come back and haunt you.  The issue is entirely mental.

Depression, and its close cousin romantic infatuation, where a person gets caught up in grand negative delusions about himself, or grand positive delusions about another person, meet these conditions perfectly.  That is why the approach works very well as a way to transcend them.  The approach also works for anxiety and OCD, but not as well, because the mind will always come back and ask " What if you're wrong, what if you're missing something? "   In the case of depression and infatuation, you can't be wrong, and that simplifies

things significantly.

Summary

To summarize, if you are suffering from depression (or infatuation, or anxiety, or some other form of mental delusion), and you are experiencing the associated feelings of shame and persecution, try this.  See if you can recollect on and follow your prior insight, the realization that that these feelings are just feelings, just outgrowths of a depressed state of mind, not truth or reality.  See if you can take that approach even as you relax on the feelings and let them continue to feel persuasive to you.  See if you can understand and anticipate their persuasive aspect, " chalk it

up " to its cause, without trying to challenge or change it.  You may not be able to, and in that cases, other approaches  may be more helpful.  But if you can, you may find that the feelings lose their ability to dominate and oppress you, and that you are able to rise above them.