Niffe Hermansson

The insight journey into the nature of mind can feel like a process of realising seemingly deeper and deeper fundamental identities, as your consciousness becomes more transparent to itself; eventually opening up your energy field, until there is no centre and no sense of solidity to experience. Then the existential question of what ultimately are you becomes moot; and instead, understanding the nature of mind becomes less of a 'what is' question (to be answered as or by any thing) and more of an open ended, evolving exploration as life reveals itself.

There is almost no meditation technique I’m aware of that >50% of people don’t turn into an exercise in dissociation. People will use jhana techniques to hide from their pain in bliss. People will prematurely "dissolve" sensations in vipassana to avoid fully feeling them, instead of seeing sensations more clearly *by* feeling them. People will use open awareness meditation to simply space out. People will mistake emptiness practices for trying to contact an obliterating nothingness rather than contact the unfixed nature of phenomena. People will even use metta practice to coccoon themselves in a kind of warm fuzzy feeling that protects them from experiencing emotions they find challenging. Or to cartoonize others into 2-dimensinal objects of an abstract love rather than connecting to their actual suffering. For most people, the fancier and more complex the dissociation the better, as complexity provides fertile ground for the misdirection that dissociation thrives on. But when done properly, each of these practices should be a vehicle for contacting reality, not numbing it out. The bliss and concentration of jhana creates a safe and clear container for investigating our suffering. Vipassana provides tools for feeling our suffering so deeply that we come to see something of how its constructed. A truly open awareness will be open to everything - including the messiest parts of our suffering. Emptiness practice won't paint over suffering with nothingness, but rather bring fluidity, malleability and aliveness to it. Metta will connect us to our sufferings and the sufferings of others in ways that give us greater capacity to feel - and practically respond - to them with compassion. There's this image of meditation as an exercise in blissing out. And obviously accessing bliss can be an empowering part of it. But actually, accessing pain, suffering and a tangible felt connection with our body, our life circumstances and the people around us is even more empowering. I think a healthy attitude to meditation is to *assume* that we probably will not entirely escape this tendency to hi-jack it in service of our mind's habitual tendency towards dissociation. By remaining vigilant to it, we can start to notice what the mental motion of dissociation looks like. And by noticing what the mental motion of dissociation looks like, gradually we can learn and master the mental motion of reassociation. The mental motion of making uncompromising contact with the fullness of our experience. There are not many more fruitful skills to learn than that.