Healing Therapies: Meditation & Visualization
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
The
modern techniques of Cognitive Therapy as developed by Aaron Beck in the
1960’s can help us to overcome the automatic, unconscious visualizations
that can cause ailments and sabotage our efforts to envision health, happiness,
and vitality for ourselves and others. According to Jon G. Allen’s
book, Coping With Trauma (1995), “The basic principle of
cognitive therapy is simple: What you think can affect how you feel. Depression
and other problematic emotions are fueled by negative thoughts. These negative
thoughts are likely to be so habitual as to be automatic and virtually
unconscious reactions to situations.” Once more we find ourselves
stumbling over the old block of dissociative defense mechanisms, only in
this case we must try to eliminate thoughts of which we are not consciously
aware. Meditation techniques such as thought observation can be used to
identify and change negative thinking patterns. Concerning this thought
modification process, Jon G. Allen tells us that, “Cognitive therapy
enlists the help of the rational brain in controlling the emotional brain.
The first step is to start paying attention to your negative automatic
thoughts so they become more conscious. You may even practice jotting them
down to heighten your awareness. Then you start training yourself to substitute
alternatives—more objective or positive thoughts.”
If
traumatic experiences have caused us to block out large portions
of our mind’s contents from conscious awareness, we may find it
very difficult to become aware of our negative thoughts without first
integrating the horrors of our past. Dissociative or unconscious
thinking habits must be rooted out at the source. However, we can
rejoice in the knowledge that without traumatic experience we probably
would never have been motivated to become conscious of and change
the way that we think. Concerning this idea we read from Martha Stout
in The Myth Of Sanity (2001), “Only
the addictions, major depressions, suicide attempts, and general
ruination that attend the most severe trauma disorders can sometimes
supply motivation sufficiently fierce to run the gauntlet thrown
down by insight and permanent change. On account of our neurological
wiring, confronting past traumas requires one to reproduce all of
their terrors mentally, in their original intensity, to feel as if
the worst nightmare had come true and the horrors had returned. All
the brain’s authoritative warnings against staying
present for the memories and the painful emotions, all the faulty
fuses, have to be deliberately ignored, and in cases of extreme chronic
past trauma, this process is nothing short of heroic.”
The meditative techniques practiced by Zen Buddhists can help us to meditate
on and envision the horrors of our pasts without losing our mental equilibrium
in everyday life. In Thoughts Without A Thinker (1995) by
Mark Epstein we find that, “One of the great lessons of the Fourth Noble
Truth, and of the Buddha’s teachings in general, is that it is possible
to learn a new way to be with one’s feelings. The Buddha taught
a method of holding thoughts, feelings, and sensations in
the balance of meditative equipoise so that they can be seen in a
clear light. Stripping away the identifications and reactions that
usually adhere to the emotions like moss to a stone, the Buddha’s method allows the understanding
of emptiness to emerge. This is an understanding that has vast implications
for the field of psychotherapy because it promises great relief from even
ordinary suffering. As the third Zen patriarch, writing in the early seventh
century AD., articulated with great clarity: ‘When the mind exists
undisturbed in the Way, nothing in the world can offend, and when a thing
can no longer offend, it ceases to exist in the old way... If you wish
to move in the One Way, do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas.
Indeed, to accept them fully is identical with true Enlightenment.’”
According
to Buddhist thought, meditation can be like a raft that floats over
the river of “samsara” or worldly illusion. Our feelings,
memories, and thoughts about the world still exist during meditation, but
through a heightened level of awareness we gain the crucial perspective
necessary to let go of the fear and anxiety associated with these mental
and emotional “illusions.” Meditation can therefore be
seen as a process of mental development in which we gain superior
powers of observation and judgment, or wisdom. As Mark Epstein in Thoughts Without
A Thinker (1995) informs us, “Meditation is ruthless in the
way it reveals the stark reality of our day-to-day mind. We are constantly
murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath:
comforting ourselves, in a perverse fashion, with our own silent voices....
Much of our inner dialogue, rather than the ‘rational’ secondary
process that is usually associated with the thinking mind, is this constant
reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist. None of us has
moved very far from the seven-year-old who vigilantly watches to see who
got more.” Indeed, even our attachment to past trauma may be a symptom
of the attention getting mind-game played at our expense by a scheming,
manipulative “inner child” whose power comes from the
tensions produced by our repressions and fears. Meditation allows
us to dis-identify with all of the competing voices inside our heads,
and sift out the rational thoughts from the irrational ones.
Contrary
to popular misconception, the practice of meditation does not require
you to live on a mountaintop in India where nothing and no one will
disturb you. In fact, meditation can be practiced as part of ordinary,
everyday life. We can choose to observe our thoughts in any situation.
The trick lies in remaining detached from all thoughts that enter the
mind while maintaining full awareness of all sense impressions and
the mental reactions that accompany them. Mark Epstein tell us in Thoughts Without A Thinker (1995)
that, “Far from being a mystical retreat from the complexities of
mental and emotional experience… Its object is to question the true
nature of the self and to end the production of self-created mental suffering… Buddhism
has something essential to teach contemporary psychotherapists: it
long ago perfected a technique of confronting and uprooting human
narcissism, a goal that Western psychotherapy has only recently begun
even to contemplate.”
The narcissist,
like the neurotic, has become hypnotized by his or her own reflection
in the waters of the mind. This reflection might be called the false
self, since it is composed of the fond imaginings that we would like
to believe about ourselves. Narcissism, or the obsession with the false
self, can be cured by emptying the mind of false thoughts and images
about the self. Eventually, if we persist in this meditative process,
we find ourselves directly experiencing what physicists call the principle
of quantum inseparability, when that which we observe becomes identical
with the contents of our own minds. Some might call this experience
a mystical state of oneness with the universe. There is no “true self,” so
to speak, because the “self” does not exist at all. What we
fondly imagine to be our “selves” eventually disappears
like a shadow in the light shed by constant meditation. Instead of
remaining trapped in our identities, we can become spontaneous agents
of cosmic consciousness by virtue of the Enlightenment offered by
Buddhist meditation. This state of Enlightenment, since it implies
full consciousness and presence in the moment, can be equated with
the goal of healing therapy, as well as with the concept of complete
recovery.
When
thoughts disentangle themselves from emotions inside of us, we begin to
realize that our idea of selfhood, of who we are, derives entirely from
the imagination. We cannot conclusively prove our own existence to ourselves,
much less to anyone else. Not to mention the fact that we can enter another
realm of conscious existence by achieving a lucid dream state while asleep.
Alternate states of consciousness, also known as “realities,” can
be induced by means of drugs as well as by hypnosis. In light of
these facts, how can we be sure that any part of the world exists
apart from our own imaginations?
Fear of death seems to be the chief barrier that exists between opposing
states of mind and world views. In Thoughts Without A Thinker (1995)
Mark Epstein tells us, “The psychiatrist R.D. Laing, at one of the
first conferences on Buddhism and psychotherapy that I attended, declared
that we are all afraid of three things: other people, our own minds, and
death.” We fear society for its collective power to deprive the individual
of life and liberty. We fear our own minds due to the “unthinkable” possibility
that we are just making ourselves and the world up as we go along.
We fear death in consequence of our belief that the end of the physical
body spells the end of consciousness, or in association with the
anticipated loss of worldly ways and things, though neither of these
contingencies can be declared certain.
The real
terror, we might argue, derives ultimately from the complete and general
lack of certainty concerning past, current, and future earthly conditions.
We don’t know anything! When we realize the extent of
our delusion, we wake up to our senses and become conscious of the illusory
nature of individual separateness. The world becomes the mind, and the
mind becomes the world. The priestess or sorcerer who achieves this feat
of identification can move mountains, both literally and figuratively.
After all, what can a “mountain” be except for an image
in the mind conveniently represented by an arbitrary arrangement
of eight English letters, printed in ink on paper?