Consider this exercise from MCTB:



Suppose a Spanish-speaking person keeps thinking the thought "quiero queso". How will they approach this situation during meditation? Following this advice, and supposing the thought is auditory, one would try to perceive "QUIE-ro QUE-so, QUIE-ro QUE-so" or something like that. If done well, one might manage to perceive the thought sound-by-sound: "Q-U-I-E-R-O-Q-U-E-S-O, Q-U-I-E-R-O-Q-U-E-S-O". One is approaching a perception of the thought as "meaningless little blips, little vibrations of suchness".

One theoretical difficulty with this approach is that it isn't exactly asking the meditator to ignore "content"; more specifically, it's asking the meditator to pay attention to the auditory sense that makes up the experience, and to ignore the mind sense that makes up the experience. A Spanish-speaking person continually thinking "quiero queso" in an auditory way isn't merely hearing a bunch of syllables, but is hearing syllables that are meaningful. A non-Spanish-speaker, by contrast, only hears "QUIE-ro QUE-so", and does not experience any of the meaning associated with the syllables. Should the meditator ignore the mind sense involved in their experience? Is it a universally good meditation technique to reduce a meaningful thought in a language one comprehends to a string of sounds as heard by someone who doesn't speak that language?

It's possible to sketch out three variant practices at this point:

1) The meditator follows the practice outlined above, noticing the auditory sense, ignoring the mental sense, and not being swept away into unmindfulness by the ignored mental sense. The meditator continues to mindfully experience a variety of other sensory phenomena.

2) The meditator experiences the thought, engages discursively with the mental sense, and possibly gets swept away by the content of the mental sense.

3) The meditator experiences the thought, notices the auditory sense, and also pays attention to the mental sense, thinking: "Yes, I want cheese." By doing this, they may come to realize: "Yes, I am hungry." And perhaps further: "Yes, I am angry that, at this retreat, food is not available as I desire it, but only on a schedule.", i.e. observes many things in their experience, both in the mind sense and in other senses, which they could not observe before. They may also continue to mindfully experience a variety of other sensory phenomena.

The first is MCTB-style practice, or the "hardcore" style practice generally. The second is a kind of practice which is often associated, rightly or wrongly, with "IMS-style" practice or "psychotherapy-style" practice. But what is the third? To me it seems like a way to engage with high-level issues (what the meditator wants, what the meditator believes, what the meditator feels) while continuing to engage with low-level sensory experience, and all that's required to do it is not to ignore the mental component of experience.

Indeed, I would guess that, rather than being shockingly benighted, the IMS folks and the rest of the "psychologized" Buddhist world would count the third approach as a commendable high-level practice, and the second as a transitional step towards something else. Theoretically, the advantages of this third approach are that all the MCTB attainments (and more) are made available by it, and a great number of psychological and therapeutic understandings are likely to be attained as well (the kinds of understandings and therapeutic results prized by psychologically-minded people, from psychotherapy patients to actualists).

Speaking from experience, I can say that there is a great deal of mental experience which happens moment-to-moment, which is normally hidden, and which can be made visible by very sharp mindfulness along with an open attitude and attention to whichever mental sensory experiences happen to present themselves. Powerful concentration can also reveal some or all (?) of it, but powerful concentration is hard to attain, whereas basic mindfulness, an open attitude, and engagement with the mental sense should be fairly easy for any serious meditator. Drugs can also reveal some or all (?) of it, but there are many downsides to drug use, and it's unclear whether they would reliably result in any sort of permanent beneficial mental change anyway.

Practically-speaking, I would suggest this technique: sit and observe sensations in the body for awhile (as one has done previously), and then change one's attitude towards discursive thoughts; any discursive thoughts that come up are now interesting, and instead of ignoring them or noting them, one should ask an interested question such as: "Why do I feel that way?", "What do I think / how do I feel about that?", "What does that remind me of?", etc. as appropriate. As more discursive thoughts occur, simply keep following them with one investigatory question in mind or other, without censoring them. If you start having a "first-person" relationship towards them, that's fine, but don't let your awareness get too mucked up. Keep body sensations in awareness as much as is practical. After awhile (generally with stronger concentration, or after getting "deeper" into things) it may be possible to drop the interested questions, and merely have an interested attitude. I found it best to assume that the point of engagement with discursive thoughts is to bring subconscious material into consciousness, so according to that assumption, there's no need to build any grand theories, or employ too much grand theorizing about what one "really" thinks, unless enough hidden material has been revealed to make some psychological truth or other about oneself blatantly obvious (and in this case, the grand theorizing may just be epiphenomenal to the therapeutic effect).

I can write in more detail if anyone wants, but just messing around with this intersection of meditation and psychology is probably more helpful than reading about it. The key points are an interest in one's "stuff", openness, a modicum of concentration, and (maybe?) traditional mindfulness of the body.

(NB I don't actually know what "quiero queso" means, I relied on the internet for a translation.)

This is partially what I'm doing. If there's some mental stress I look at the perceptions that have occurred before and then challenge whether they are logical or not. Then I move onto some positive thoughts I choose and this can be another challenge to negative thoughts when they are proven wrong. I have not tried to treat thoughts 100% as sensations but I believe that it could make the mind even quieter.

I asked "Why?" when mind-states showed up as discursive thoughts... and the answer was the stilling of the mind. Maybe the subconscious is comfortable in stating "truths" but shies away when challenged to give an answer I'll give a try to this practice , insert it in my noting practice, to see what happens. Thanks for sharing.

Don't think of asking interested questions as a way to challenge your thoughts or beliefs or feelings. It's more like this: when someone first begins to meditate, most phenomena are not very interesting, but that person can practice noting as an artificial way to build interest in those phenomena. Once they has a sufficient level of interest, it's possible for them to just stop noting and experience all the little vibrations and tingles and pulses and so on, because with that interest, attention doesn't wander much. After someone has meditated for awhile, they may have gotten the idea that discursive thoughts they have are not valuable during meditation, and so lost interest in them. So the idea here is to ask questions as an artificial way to build interest in discursive thoughts, to see if it eventually develops into something more substantive than random mind-chatter. If the questions I suggested aren't building interest, maybe thinking "awesome, what's next?" would be good.

Another way to think about this is that "interest in discursive thoughts" is really just "interest in my experiences, attitudes, etc. from a first person POV: what I think about things." (Meditation techniques can de-emphasize this attitude.) Everyone already knows all about what they think about things, on some level; to make that level a conscious one may just be a matter of getting sufficiently interested in what one thinks about things.

3) The meditator experiences the thought, notices the auditory sense, and also pays attention to the mental sense, thinking: "Yes, I want cheese." By doing this, they may come to realize: "Yes, I am hungry." And perhaps further: "Yes, I am angry that, at this retreat, food is not available as I desire it, but only on a schedule.", i.e. observes many things in their experience, both in the mind sense and in other senses, which they could not observe before. They may also continue to mindfully experience a variety of other sensory phenomena.


"It is absolutely essential to try to figure out how you experience thoughts, otherwise you will simply flounder in content. "

3 sounds like you are just getting caught up in the content - wallowing in the past and future

cheers
Jeff

If one is experiencing content, then it could be quite useful to know it, rather than not to know it. So I would say that you're right about 3) in a way, except that the main point is to reveal it, rather than to add to it (= wallow in it). I take it to be uncontroversial that people often experience many things without recognizing them. (In fact, I would say that in most cases this is happening all the time.) When some of those things are tied up with suffering (such as, in my example, anger), there could be a great deal of value in revealing what is hidden, in revealing what one's already unknowingly caught up in.

Content is how everyone experience thoughts: any visual or auditory concomitants are merely concomitants. That's why e.g. we don't understand Russian, while Russians do; we both hear Russian speech, but Russians experience content that we call "linguistic meaning" along with it. Not knowing how you experience thoughts could mean not recognizing that "quiero queso" means something, and what it means could be part of a great big tip-off that anger is present, which one might not otherwise recognize, yet would have just the same. (EDIT: And the real point of investigating what one thinks in the way I described is not just to discover relatively superficial things, such as in my example, but to discover deeper things which might, depending on the person, only be figured out by other methods in a much more laborious and time-intensive way.)

In my opinion practicing to be alinguistic, or pre-cognitive, or however the state of being oblivious to the content of thoughts would be characterized, is a good idea for hardcore concentration, where one tries to obliterate all kinds of cognitive activity, and so may or may not not find any purpose in attending in a substantive way to whatever thoughts there are. The rest of the time? A useful practice sometimes, but maybe not always.

Thanks for clarifying the idea, EIS. I guess it's a practice for advance yoguis then, not my case. At least I probably need to have a stable EQ, isn't it?, to have the need to trigger discursive thoughts to search for hidden issues.

I'm not really certain how much meditation experience is required. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that a person's ability to stay with their experience of their own body is the main useful skill here. If you can experience most of your body at once (like in Equanimity nana) at a decent level of resolution, I think it's unlikely that you'll get totally swept away by content (as the body, and all the reactions to content felt there, are like an anchor), and so will be able to look at content more aggressively. In other words, the more hardcore (expansive, precise, detailed) your regular vipassana practice, the more you can incorporate content into that kind of practice, I think.

In the end I'm really just speculating. But if you do play around with this kind of thing at some point, let us know how it goes!

Will do, thanks for sharing!