Post three of seven, in section Hard Truths
One of my biggest criticisms of Buddhism is that it often focuses on the mind as the primary source of both experience and suffering. Embracing this perspective gives rise to one of the core insights of Buddhism – that everything is empty of inherent existence. There is some truth in this, and it can be incredibly liberating to connect with this truth in experience, but it is far from the whole truth.
On a deeper level, you also have a subconscious experience through which you are sensing the embodied and emotional aspects of life that have nothing to do with ways of looking. There are ways of sensing, being, feeling, and doing that never even necessarily touch the conscious mind.
Unlike thoughts and ideas, which can meaningfully be described as empty, these other ways of being do have something of an essence about them – an innate nature that they are expressing in the world. The innate nature is somewhat flexible and nuanced, but it can’t really meaningfully be described as totally empty of inherent existence.
In this blog post, I go into the details of these two aspects of experience – the subconscious and essence. I talk about why it is important to include an understanding of both of these things in how you relate to experience.
The Subconscious
The term subconscious was first used in 1889 by the psychologist Pierre Janet. It was popularised by Sigmund Freud and has become an inherent part of how modern science and psychology understands humans.
The subconscious is defined as the parts of you that operate or exist outside of consciousness. Underneath your critical thought functions lies a powerful level of experience that accounts for a large portion of how you function. There is a limit to what can be held in conscious awareness, and the subconscious is everything beneath this.
According to cognitive neuroscience, the subconscious mind makes up 95 percent of the brain’s processing.
A very simple example of the sort of thing you might store in your subconscious is if your parents were kind to you when you were growing up, you learn that you can trust people and that you are safe, whereas if your parents were abusive to you, you believe that people are bad and inherently can’t be trusted.
What is stored in the subconscious isn’t information that you are aware of; it is ingrained in your implicit assumptions about the world, and you won’t be able to see or work with these assumptions unless you actively engage with the emotions, intuitions, ideas, and instincts that are stored below the surface of your conscious experience.
A lot of meditation practices and systems were created before we had the understanding of the subconscious mind. The practices are primarily designed to work with the conscious mind.
Lots of them use ritual, metaphor, and myth to understand, describe, and engage with what we now know to be subconscious materials; these rituals can be a really rich and meaningful way of working, but they can also create more reification.
Unless people are given the tools to connect with, understand, and unpack their subconscious assumptions about the world, they will continue to proliferate and stay in place. Even incredibly unhelpful ones.
Essence
There is no doubt for anyone who has done either some serious meditation practice or some impactful therapy that the way that you look at things can fundamentally change how you experience them. This is such a powerful insight that can run incredibly deep and create a huge amount of spaciousness in experience for relating to the world and others from a place of love and openness.
But this isn’t the whole truth.
The other side of the coin is also incredibly subtle and can also open up endless layers of depth, understanding, and insight. And this is that things do have an essence of some sort.
A very simple example of what I mean is illustrated in the Kiki/Bouba test in the image above.
The fact that almost everyone calls the spiky one Kiki and the round one Bouba is a very basic way of demonstrating that there is a degree of inherent and collective nature in how things are. This inherent nature goes beyond what you as an individual are seeing in this moment; there is an innatteness to the qualities of what is being experienced.
This exists outside of the idea of something and lives in the embodied nature of it. Of course it’s logically possible for there to be a world where everyone calls the round one kiki and the spiky one bouba. There’s nothing rationally stopping this from being true, but it’s not how things actually are in this reality we’re in.
Aspects of Experience
When both of the subconscious and the inherent essence of things are included in what you understand experience to be, then there needs to be a more multi-dimensional model for relating to experience than just ways of looking or what you are aware of.
There needs to be a richer model that brings in these different parts of experience and demonstrates how experience arises from multiple sources at once. That there is no single source of truth.
There are a number of different ways that the different aspects of experience could be sliced and diced.
I have created the following model, which splits reality into its most simple underlying building blocks and then extrapolates this to the part of human individual experience it correlates to:
- Mind: Ways of Seeing
- Body: Ways of Doing
- Heart: Ways of Feeling
- Soul: Ways of Being
Example
To illustrate how these different aspects emerge in your experience and why it’s important to engage with the full spectrum without collapsing into one as the single source of truth, I’d like to spend a bit of time imagining the example of someone walking through an art gallery together.
We’re going to explore each aspect – ways of seeing, doing, feeling, and being – and how that part contributes to the construction of overall experience.
To start the example, pick one of the people below to be the character in your journey.
The Story
1. Ways of Seeing
Your character (you can give them a name if you like) is standing in front of a piece of art. The way that they look at that piece of art impacts what they are seeing.
For example, they could be an art student who is looking at it from a very technical perspective of how it has been created. This will cause them to see the materials and style of the image in a more pronounced way.
They could be a lifelong lover of this particular artist, who is looking at it from a very appreciative perspective. They will notice the subtleties of the artist’s unique style.
Or they could be a tourist who is looking to be entertained by it. They will be making quicker judgements about good, bad, interesting, or dull.
Which way is your character looking at the art, and how does that impact it?
2. Ways of Doing
Depending on who the person is, they will behave differently as they move through the art gallery. This could be impacted by habits, physical constraints, age, purpose, and time limits. It will also be impacted by the environment they are in.
Depending on the person, they may spend an equal amount of time at each image or spend the whole time sat in front of two or three paintings.
They may stand dead still and have endless capacity for concentrating, or they may fidget their whole way around and run out of energy within half an hour.
When they stop at the cafe for lunch, they may wolf down their food in two minutes, or they may linger and spend an hour nibbling their way through a salad. These things usually aren’t conscious decisions that people make; they’re habit energies or the subconscious structures that create how they naturally behave in the world
What they do will also be impacted by the physical design and constraints of their environment. For example, how much time they have to spend there and what the layout and features of the gallery are.
Imagine the layout of the gallery and the way that your character moves through it. Notice how this will shape their experience.
3. Ways of Feeling
This is the subtle emotional aspect that your character brings to the time in the gallery.
When they are standing in front of one of their favourite paintings, are they allowing it to impact the depths of their being? Perhaps they are moved to tears or laughter by some of the artwork.
Or are they curiously open to being drawn to the subtle details that attract and interest them?
Or are they disinterested in the mood of the paintings and more interested in the shared emotional experience of being in a gallery with one of their loved ones and what this feels like?
Or are they emotionally closed and purely there for the conceptual understanding of the images?
All of these will impact their experience of the gallery.
Imagine a way of feeling through which your character is engaging with the experience and how that shapes their experience.
4. Ways of Being
This is about the essence of who you are and how that fits into the world and your social context.
In most people, their essence and deepest held beliefs are subconscious, but what makes people feel most alive and feels most meaningful and purposeful to each person is an incredibly unique thing.
Think about the values and qualities that your character holds and why this might have inspired them to visit the gallery.
Is your character there because they believe that art is sacred and they want to feel deeply inspired and connected to the sacred in life?
Are they there because they love creativity and want to feel inspired by other artists?
Are they there because they are a consumer and they believe that this is a good way to entertain themselves for a few hours?
What is the essential relationship between the person, the art gallery, and the collective that describes why that person is there?
When they are there, do they assume that this environment is welcoming and hospitable to them? Or do they believe that they are an outsider who has to fight for their place to be there? These last questions demonstrate how other people’s beliefs can also impact how people relate to themselves. For example, when you are treated as if you don’t belong, it is easy to start believing this yourself.
Why This Matters
Hopefully this example has shown how the way that people experience things is not solely created by the way that they look at things.
This exercise may have also highlighted the way in which this understanding is important.
Beliefs, behaviours, feelings, environments, and cultures dictate your experience as much as your mind. Would a different character have experienced this differently? What if they were in a different gallery?
An outcome of this exercise for me was thinking, who the hell decided that all galleries should be designed basically the same and primarily for white middle- and upper-class adult tourists?
Probably all the white upper-class people with lots of leisure time who designed them.
Off the top of my head, why aren’t there serious art galleries designed primarily for kids that are laid out like a fun assault course that you have to find your way through? Or pop-up street galleries in underprivileged neighbourhoods. Or gallery buses that can tour around the world and visit people during their lunch hour or in schools.
Who says that art needs to be something we look at rather than something we interact with? Who says that it needs to be purely decorative rather than something functional? Couldn’t we turn our bridges and public spaces into pieces of artwork, for example?
What are the fundamental beliefs about what art is, what its purpose is, and who it is for that we can shake up?
What physical infrastructure needs to be put in place for people to have the time and space in their lives to be able to appreciate and engage with art?
When we embrace and connect with all these different parts of our being, we are open to a whole new world of possibility. One that is spacious, wholehearted, and ineffable, but still grounded in reality.
Closing Disguised As Opening
Awakening is really about opening to experience; to meeting more of it directly as it is and being able to see, feel, and embody this sense of clarity.
One of my biggest frustrations as a teacher is seeing people teach things that I would describe as ‘a closing disguised as an opening’.
‘Closings disguised as openings’ are the teachings that, on the surface, seem as if they are opening things up for people but are actually subtly shutting the door to lots of experience.
Emptiness can be a good example of this, when the mind gets a too rigid idea of what emptiness means. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there is a much broader and fuller range of experience to open to beyond there just being lots of different ways to look at something.
It can be useful to embrace things being empty of inherent essence when focusing on loosening up the mind aspect of experience, but it’s important to integrate this back into a more holistic perspective.
One way to include this broader understanding when relating to experience is to come back to these questions:
- What lens are you seeing this through, and why?
- What implicit habits, behaviours, and physical factors are shaping what is here?
- What are the underlying feelings you have in this situation, and how does this express what you care about most deeply?
- What is the essential description of who you are and what you’re interacting with?
These questions give you the perspective and clarity to be able to understand that there is no single source of truth from which experience arises. The questions help you recognise how experience is always a multi-dimensional thing that is coming from a combination of many different sources, some of which are embedded in the depths of your embodied essence.
