Transforming Internal Formations pt. 5
Progress
In time, George Reginald Bootman the Third, Jim for short, enters into a phase we shall call progress. This is a very, very superficial designation. It is not that, from our perspective as outside observers, familiarization wasn’t progress. It is that before Jim began to practice with his internal formation, his point of reference was vague. He knew he was, “high strung,” that it was bothersome, and not much else. The first-time accumulation of direct experience with the formation has created a new baseline. This baseline, provisional as it is, makes changes in the felt experience of the formation perceptible, hence: progress. Because the formation has been found to be quite pervasive in Jim’s life, the impacts of even small changes are surprisingly far-reaching. I will describe these impacts in terms of the Five Aggregates, although I will present them slightly out of order.
Body – Jim Bootman is fearless in the face of practices that make him feel silly, and so after reading an article on the Plum Village website, he mechanically adopted the following procedure for when he recognizes the arising of his internal formation: he smiles and breathes three deep breaths, relaxing his belly and reciting the following phrases, one for each breath:
- “Hello my little internal formation!”
- “I know that you are there!”
- “I will take good care of you!”
Remember, Jim is not mindlessly relaxing here. He is present, and so is able to see directly what the effects of tension and relaxation are on his experience of the present moment. He finds that tension correlates directly with mental proliferation, the cloud of ruminations that he has frequently engaged with rather than experiencing his anxiety directly. Relaxation, now accessible only thanks to the presence of compassion, brings him more in touch with his discomfort, but also with his felt experience of the body, and he discovers that he has a taste for it. Jim is a craftsman, and although his work is always lauded, he is rarely satisfied with the results. This doesn’t immediately change, but it recedes slightly into the background as he begins to take more pleasure in the physicality of his work: the rhythmic movements of the brush, the carefully controlled pass of the heel knife, the feel of the shears in his hand. This quiet enjoyment of embodiment slowly spreads into other areas of his life, including activities that he has habitually rushed through because they “keep him from his work.”
Karmic/Volitional formations – This is the fourth skandha, which we haven’t talked that much about. In Yogacara, the functions of this aggregate are divided up between the store consciousness and mind consciousness. Store consciousness we have already discussed. In terms of mind consciousness, this is the felt sense of volition: intention, inclination, compulsion, etc. For this reason we are hard-pressed to settle on a single translation for this aggregate. Both karma and volition carry important nuances.
In terms of our man Jim Bootman, he is getting “more compassionate.” Technically speaking, this is not an attribute of Jim. The tender, non-reactive awareness that Jim is consistently applying to the unpleasant feeling tone of his anxiety is imprinting itself on the conditioning-pattern of the whole formation. Until Jim began practicing, this pattern had only been imprinted with aversion, resistance, and proliferation. The habitual volition, the one that says, “get away from this,” still arises, but it is now accompanied by a quiet, “stay with this.” It is this latter volition that will eventually work its way to the root of the formation. From Jim’s perspective, “more compassionate” means that he is more capable of sustaining presence in the face of unpleasant feelings, whether they are his or those of the people around him. This has begun to enter into his relationship with his wife.
Jim has the benefit of a very brief commute. His workshop and storefront are in the ground floor of his apartment building, and despite this proximity and Mr. Bootman’s good intentions, he is very nearly always late to return home from work. Considering that he would never delay the completion of work for a client, this is a curious lapse in Jim’s perfectionism. His wife, Priscilla, has long since abandoned the hope of finding a resolution to this problem through discussion, argument, or negotiation, but occasionally, when the boys are rowdy and her obligations unavoidably land in the evening, she intervenes. She enters the workshop through the rear entrance, and after closing the door behind her, takes two steps into the room, and waits. Jim shows no indication that he has registered a new arrival, but after about a minute, he pauses, sighs, and says, to cite a brief example, “I knew you’d get impatient. Look, I need to get these clamps set tonight. If I don’t, there’s no way these are done on time. You know that if it wasn’t important I wouldn’t still be down here. I’ll be up when I’m finished.”
To which she replies, “I figured it had to be something important.”
She then mounts the rear stairwell to the apartment, and no matter how emphatic, elaborate, or convincing was Jim’s justification for his tardiness, no matter how essential and unavoidable the work was claimed to be, she invariably hears his footsteps following her up the stairs before she makes it to their door. This is just one of the many little indignities that Priscilla endures in the name of her love for her husband, but from the very first moment, the moment that she realized that her love would lead her ultimately to be known as Prissy Bootman, she knew she would have to be strong.
Jim, having gone through this routine several times accompanied by a certain amount of mindfulness and compassion, has a dim feeling that there is something to discover here. The first change though, the thing that we will call progress with relation to Jim’s volitional formations, is not a great transformation of the dynamic with his wife. It is simply the recognition that of all of the feelings that he has recognized and embraced, the ones that arise as he hears his wife’s hand gently turning the workshop doorknob are by far the most unpleasant, and he is now able to meet them with awareness.
Feeling tone – Because the impulses that steer away from his feelings are growing softer and the habit of staying present is growing stronger, Jim has a little more bandwidth to get curious about the subtle flow of feeling tones that accompany the different modes of his formation: those associated with the bodily sensations, the emotions, the thoughts and images, even distinct feeling tones conditioned by the aversion itself.
He discovers that the aversion, when unrecognized for what it is, takes on the shape a vague sense of urgency, and in the face of this sense of urgency, any action taken is accompanied by a very subtle pleasant feeling tone. This goes a long way toward solving a little mystery that has been bothering Jim Bootman for years: why am I always thinking and re-thinking the same thoughts? It also leads to an unexpected development. Jim is beginning to see the felt-sense that his ruminations are productive as highly suspect.
Perception – The big change here we could call “softening.” Actually this is more of a change in the character and orientation of Jim Bootman’s attention, but it has a big influence on how he sees the world. His body is more relaxed. He’s more receptive to feeling what’s happening in the moment, and so his experience is much less unilaterally defined by what he thinks or how he sees things. His perceptions now share space in a more expansive inner world. Jim may have a vague sense that something is changing here, but for the moment it is hard for him to see for himself.
Perception is fairly invisible when you first enter into the practice. You practice mindfulness of “things” and the thoughts and feelings that come up in relation to those things. That’s already a big adjustment. During this period, the things themselves appear stable while the mind familiarizes itself with tracking the unceasing flow of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. Later, perceptions themselves, the bundling of the raw material of the sense consciousnesses into recognizable “things,” will come under the scrutiny of awareness, and their apparent stability will be radically challenged. Until then, for Jim Bootman, things are just things. He is changing, but the world is not. When big changes in perception happen, he will know it. He will call it “insight.”
Consciousness – We have discussed at length the way that the practice of awareness slowly reconditions the latent tendencies of store consciousness. Jim’s progress, described above, details changes in the character of mind consciousness. There remains one stone unturned, one which I am only going to briefly jostle for the moment: manas, the seventh consciousness. Manas is the habituated ignorance and self-grasping that co-conditions all of the afflictions, all of the internal formations. It accompanies every moment of mind consciousness and structures it pre-conceptually into subject and object, self and other. Thay breaks this down into what he calls the six characteristics of manas:
Manas…
- …seeks pleasure (or pleasant vedana).
- …avoids suffering (or unpleasant vedana).
- …is ignorant of the dangers of pleasure (or pleasant vedana).
- …is ignorant of the goodness of suffering (or unpleasant vedana).
- …is ignorant of the law of moderation.
- …grasps onto the flow of the manifestations from store consciousness as I, me, mine.
But surely a discussion of manas is out of place in the tale of Jim Bootman and his internal formation. He has no conception that he is trying to exhaust the root conditions for the arising of I-consciousness. He is not seeking enlightenment. He’s not worried about whether or not he is a separate self. Surely Jim Bootman, very simply put, has a problem with shoes.
