In this chapter I set forth the grounds for my general perspective on the main issues in this book ā Buddhist philosophy, meditation, free will, mental freedom, agency, and the status, if any, of the agent-self. In section 1.1, I elaborate on how my interests in Buddhism and free will were sparked by my meditation experiences, and on some of the important elements of my meditative experience, as that significantly informs my view. In 1.2, I offer reasons to think Buddhist thought about free will is a valid philosophical inquiry, contrary to those who think the free will issue is so orthogonal to the impersonal Buddhist orientation that the very idea of a Buddhist view of free will constitutes faulty comparative philosophy, a category error, or a non-starter. And I show how a number of puzzles in the Buddhist conceptions of action and agency resemble the free will problem. In 1.3, I address the alleged historical silence within Buddhism on the issue of free will, often thought to evidence the impropriety of the topic, but I argue that the Buddha himself rejected several then-prevalent forms of what amount to free skepticism. In 1.4, I preview elements of the free will problem in Western philosophy to sketch points of contact with Buddhism. Throughout, I note where ideas under review are relevant to my main argument.
1.1 Meditation experiences as grounds
My first meditation experience, 45 years ago, triggered a great sense of mental freedom, a feeling that has ever guided my thinking about the relationship between meditation, mental freedom, and free will. Thus, I will share what itās like when I practice meditation, and why I think it counts as evidence of free will, despite the fact that some think Buddhism must negate free will.
At the end of an otherwise fairly innocuous yoga class, my first one, we practiced meditation, and I had an out-of-body experience. I was immediately convinced my previous model of reality was incomplete. I spent the following months reading whatever I could about yoga and meditation, teaching myself, and having similarly bizarre experiences, until I found my first three meditation teachers: (1) Hilda Charlton, a woman who studied in India under various meditation masters, including Swami Nityananda, Satya Sai Baba, and Yogi Ram Surat Kumar (Charlton 1990), (2) Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, originally a housewife from Brooklyn who had sudden mystical experiences while practicing yoga and seemed to become an overnight saint (Pechilis 2004), and (3) Ram Dass, the ex-Harvard psychologist and psychedelics researcher (Richard Alpert) and associate of Timothy Leary who became a yogi after bringing LSD to an Indian yogi and holy man, Neem Karoli Baba, who he accepted as his guru (Dass 1971). Once I connected with these teachers, it was as if Iād joined a monastic community, attending meditations, yoga sessions, and related contemplative gatherings on a daily basis for a number of years, until this trio of teachers parted ways, years later.
In the course of this intense sadhana (spiritual discipline) with this satsang (the Hindu term for ātruth communityā; Buddhists call it a sangha), I developed intense meditative skills. I quickly became such an intensely disciplined and accomplished yogi that I experienced daily mystical experiences in a league with the first one, enough that I have often thought that, if I were to dole out one such experience to each non-believer in the paranormal, I would convert thousands. However, once my three teachers parted ways, for various reasons, and I was no longer supported by the collective power of that spiritual community, I decided to downsize my spiritual sensitivity by reversing certain elements of my sadhana and narrowing my yogic practices down primarily to Buddhist meditation (mainly, concentration and mindfulness, and, secondarily, loving-kindness) and yoga, which I could maintain without remaining what may be described as supernaturally super-charged.
Once my simpler meditation practice became established, it would only take a few moments to enter a meditative state. I will describe this in a way that generalizes over many sessions, each session being different. But I have experienced many thousands of hours of meditation like this over the course of 45 years of practice.
After connecting with the present phenomenology of my body, senses, and a few breaths, stilling my mind, I take a metaphorical step back, let go of engagement with what I was just thinking and feeling, and separate my awareness from its contents. I let go of one sort of control, bringing about another: I slip out of the ordinary state of mind and its sense of control as situated within the matrix of dis-cursive thought and intentionality (which manages voluntary embodied engagement with the world), and allow awareness to just abide, to rest in a natural, fluid state in which the rhythmic flow of breath spontaneously relaxes my mind/body.
There is a subtle, different sense of control here, describable loosely as merely the cultivated intention of remaining globally aware, awake, alert, attentive, mindful, conscious of whatever is going on within the mind-body, and remembering that intention when it seems to fade into the phenomena that are arising in awareness: some call it āopen monitoringā, ābare seeingā, āmindfulnessā, or āchoiceless awarenessā. Thoughts, sensations, emotions, cravings, expectations, memories, sounds, images, and other items of experience enter and exit consciousness of their own accord, along with what may be described as meditative feelings, such as a sense of opening, releasing, loosening, depth, energy, and stillness. I feel an increasingly palpable aspect of awareness that is detached from the items and processes that arise and fade within awareness ā that awareness functioning as an aspect of my being that need not act on the contents of experience, that is free from them. It feels like a huge relief, the letting go of a burden. From this vantage, experiential phenomena seem dream-like ā not as real as they seem when Iām not in this spacious awareness. It is as if I have become awareness, uncoupled from the things that typically grab, push, pull, move, trigger, color, shape, and dominate my experience. I feel significantly free, uncoupled from concerns, a deep ease of mind/body/breath/being, an open emptiness. The words used to describe these experiences are inadequate to the task. As this mode deepens, there are no words. It is trans-effable, so to speak.
This is something I experience increasingly more as something that is happening than as something I am doing, but it clearly seems to happen the more I invest energy, intention, and effort in maintaining that mode of being, in remembering while I catch myself slipping out of clarity into mind-wandering ā which process of forgetting and remembering characterized the first years of my practice. Now, increasingly, it just happens, both on and off the meditation cushion.
Sometimes, conscious, directed effort seems necessary to even approximate the meditative state. When that happens, I shift out of the above-described strategy, to a more targeted, narrowly defined object of focus, typically the breath, which āone-pointednessā practice tends to concentrate, calm, and anchor the mind, restoring the conditions under which āopen monitoringā may be sustained effortlessly. For these reasons, many traditions advise beginners to cultivate it first.
In the first years of my practice, I focused on cultivating one-pointedness, to great benefit. My understanding of its power is simple: each time (1) attention wanders, (2) one notices attention has wandered, and (3) one returns attention to the intended attentional-target, one has performed what may be understood as a one-pointedness ārepā (repetition), analogous to a resistance-training repetition (e.g., push-up, sit-up, etc.), thereby strengthening the attentional-focus āmuscleā. In this sort of āmental resistance-trainingā, the greater the tendency to mind-wandering, the greater āresistanceā there is to maintaining focus, but that greater resistance is analogous to lifting heavier weights, which cultivates bigger muscles, so itās a win-win for one who persists in the training. But the best effort is sometimes not the greatest effort, but the wisest one. For example, when the breath is not strong enough to bring about a calming of the mind, I may shift to a mantra, or a loving-kindness technique (imagining and intending well-being for others), as these activities engage the distractive, discursive mind in the practice, enlisting the opponent as an ally, so to speak. Another wise strategy is to invite the opponent in for tea: if, say, a nagging thought, loud sound, or painful sensation continues to āinterruptā oneās attempts at maintaining focus on some intended attentional-target, then it is prudent to convert that distraction into the intended attentional-target. These are but a few such mental resistance-training strategies. Another is to simply switch to open monitoring, where whatever arises is simply noticed, and then there are no ādistractionsā.
Iām abstracting from the peculiarities of countless meditations, setting aside mind-blowing, transcendent, nondual, and related trance-states and other āexceptional human experiencesā (EHEs),1 however fascinating they may be, and glossing over many experiential and methodological differences that may or may not have come into focus, intentionally or spontaneously, over 45 years of practice. Likewise, Iām abstracting from the times when meditation is more of a ho-hum experience of mind-wandering, daydreaming, falling asleep, rehearsing to-do lists, and related mundane experiences of wrestling with scattered attention, low energy, and the whole variety of encounters with all the narratives, internal dialogue, mental chatter, undigested psychosomatic wounds, traumas, shadows, fantasies, anxieties, and related elements of ordinary human existence that sometimes become the psychotherapeutic dredging aspect of long-term meditative practice, interspersed with and sometimes indistinguishable from mental resistance-training. This is not to imply this is a downside to meditation, as quite the opposite is the case: dredging, examining, understanding, and releasing the stuff that weighs us down constitutes the bulk of mental-freedom-oriented discipline or effort, and is the wisdom-birthing stuff of enlightenment on the small scales, so to speak.
Another way of putting it is that seeking the ephemeral highs is less effective than working with the entrenched lows. There is no Manichean difference between angelic and demonic mental states, blissful and boring ones, highs and lows. They are all forms of experience to digest, sources of insight and freedom. The difference involves a shift of perspective. When a space of meditative freedom opens up such that coming and going mental contents are not experienced as āmeā, are not pulling and pushing my attraction and aversion, then the mental contents cease to become primary, cease to function as determinants of my attention, and cease to trigger my engagement in them ā even the sort of wholesome engagement characteristic of a psychotherapeutic look āunder the hoodā, to borrow a metaphor from Siderits (2016), at my own stuff.
The longer one practices, the more likely it is that the psychotherapeutic processing either just happens spontaneously as one notices what arises and what emotions and intentions arise with it, or that sort of stuff becomes so abstract as to lose any specific meaning. For example, early on one might notice anxiety about āxā, āyā, and āzā, e.g., if x happens, then y and z might happen, but I worry I may not be able to handle z, and practice noticing rumination about the details connected with x, y, z, and oneās emotions connected with them. As practice deepens, one might just notice the momentary arising and passing of elements of uncertainty, anxiety, etc. One sees more forest, less trees, so to speak, on one hand, but one can also get a better look at the trees themselves, depending on choice of focal range, but, on the other hand, one is able to identify anxiety, for example, as a cocktail of emotions, blending excitement and apprehension or fear. By steadily investigating and analyzing the patterns of oneās own mental phenomena, such insights increasingly arise spontaneously.
My meditations in recent years have been increasingly of the serene type, dropping down into being mode, as opposed to doing mode, regardless of current stresses. The reason is that I did the meditative dredging, peeling the onion-layers of the psyche, confronting the otherwise-undigested experiential stuff ā the doing, the work, the mental resistance-training discipline.
One key value of meditation is visible when lifeās preoccupations have eclipsed my regular practice, at which times an accumulation of undigested experiences results in suboptimal functioning. From this perspective, meditation functions as an antidote to āexistential indigestionā, particularly when stuff comes up to distract us while we try to focus: we notice what the mind is still holding, and we process it from a slightly more sagacious meditative space. The mere fact that one is sitting still, meditating ā with muscles relaxed, breathing slowed, devoting attention to being clear-minded, open-hearted, and contemplatively curious ā is enough to create a space within which the substance of oneās existential indigestion resolves itself. Cultivating such states of mind ā gleaning insights from them into the nature of this or that aspect of the mind/body process, and internalizing them ā becomes what may be referred to as a āvirtuous cycleā that reinforces and improves itself over time, opposite a vicious cycle.
Let me tie some of this to free will. In this quiescent meditative space, I feel increasingly free from the psychosocial narrative that otherwise frequently colors and interprets my experiences, the agendas that frequently co-opt my time, energy, thought, intention, and emotion, all my self-imposed scripts about who I am, what my issues are, where I am headed, what I hope to or must accomplish ā all my personal biographical baggage. From this spacious vantage, itās all significantly optional, malleable, requiring my assent and buy-in in order to become activated ā but Iām free not to assent, not to buy into it, not to see it as who I am, as me. That malleability I associate with mental freedom, with some elbow room in terms of my own volitions and mental states, an element of what in the Introduction I called āthe Buddhaās mental-freedom claimā. Recall, he said the meditation virtuoso is able to have or not have whatever thought or volition he prefers (AN II.36ā7).
While Iām in this spacious awareness, Iām significantly free of it all, and I frequently spontaneously remember how asleep and bound I often am when Iām not in this spacious awareness, when Iām habitually identifying with all these psychophysical phenomena, experiencing myself as if I am all these things or as if Iām the doer of them ā though knowing from this spacious awareness that they each may be more the doers of me, so to speak. Examining the direction of this causality ā whether intentions ...
