Transforming Internal Formations pt. 7
Let’s briefly review what happened here: from the perspective of Jim Bootman, he has just transformed a peripheral formation, something that popped up and situated itself between him and his anxiety. Should we climb up upon this accomplishment, throw our hats into the air, jump up and down, hoot and holler, pull out our revolvers and fire six celebratory shots into the sky? Sure! But Jim himself is structurally incapable of celebrating in the usual sense. Let’s say that one evening he’s upstairs listening to his son recount with zest an incident from his day at school, and he realizes that this is exactly the kind of intimate moment that is only possible thanks to the recent change in his way of seeing things. It does not occur to him to step up onto the risers to accept his Best Dad in the Universe award, because what we may call from our vantage point the recognition of insight, Jim calls the recognition of a long-standing ignorance and all of the needless suffering that went along with it. Yes, it has an endpoint now, but its legacy continues, including in Jim’s feelings. These feelings are what we might call tender feelings, and Jim does not do anything with them. When he thinks back about the situation, he gets in touch with the feelings, and nothing else needs to be done. This is a very stable kind of insight, one in which the entire situation has become unsuitable for appropriation as I, me, or mine.
This would not have been possible if he had stepped off of the transformation bus at any of the possible interpretations that arose along the way. The peripheral formation, much more clearly than the root formation that he is working with, presented itself in terms of an obvious story of self and other: me and my wife. Prior to the practice, his rationalization for the enduring conflict rested firmly upon an unrecognized, fixed perspective about his wife. It’s tempting to make perception itself the central thing here, but as I’ve said before, bare recognition of perception is kind of an advanced practice. Jim didn’t just suddenly “see that he was wrong.” His perception lost credibility in the face of a mounting body of direct observations, most importantly of his feelings. If we want to be more technical and precise, we can say this was compassionate recognition of the vedana and of the craving, aversion, and ignorance that operated conditioned by those vedana. But in the moment, when Jim was waylaid by a hurricane of thoughts and emotions, he wasn’t defaulting to technical terminology. He was just “taking care of feelings.”
Two important things changed here in Jim’s felt sense of how the world works: he now knows that he can change, and he now knows that when his views change, the world changes. Even if his wife’s behavior never changed subsequent to his transformation, he would never view her the same way again. But her behavior does change. There are many shifts that happen downstream of Jim’s departure from the usual script in their relationship. This is where Thay would say that transformation is not an individual matter, but a collective one, and isn’t that wonderful news? You finally have a way to change all of those things that you hate about the people around you!
Outside of a community practice environment, there are real downsides to the emphasis on collective transformation. To me, it only makes sense to think about it interpersonally. If you want to see what people are capable of, it helps to stop dictating the possibilities through your way of viewing them, your way of interacting with them. That doesn’t mean that you transform them. You’re just changing the conditions. This is the same as Thay’s story of the man in the boat, our Joe Boatman, except you can be the empty boat. A lot of interpersonal strife flows out of assumptions about intention. When you have no agenda, potential conflicts just fail to assemble. You can play a big role in determining what conditions are available for collective proliferation. However that doesn’t mean that the other person transforms. This is the subtlety that is lost with Thay’s emphasis on collective practice. You can only know that these interactions transform. Just because you consistently have pleasant interactions with someone doesn’t mean that everyone will. You cannot put out a fire that is burning in another person’s heart, but you can remove fuel. The tricky thing, the thing that can only be learned through exposure to suffering, is that any agenda, any standpoint whatsoever, is fuel. This is where personal agendas self-exhaust.
So let’s transition from the personal perspective to the perspective of the Yogacara where everything is just the reconditioning of seeds, their conditioning-patterns, and the corresponding change in the manifestations of manas and mind consciousness. To remove all mystery about this, let’s look at the transformation of this formation in terms of the exhaustion of the accumulated conditions that support the arising of manas, ie let’s pretend that Jim is trying to get enlightened. How does Jim’s practice of dwelling happily in the present moment look when framed against the first four of Thay’s six characteristics of manas?
- Manas seeks after pleasant vedana. Jim has been doing the opposite, especially with regard to narrative thoughts that are satisfying to his self-view, or just the subtle satisfaction of having a grasp of the situation. If he hadn’t gone against this conditioning, his views could never have rearranged themselves.
- Manas avoids unpleasant vedana. He was already doing this with regards to his anxiety, but now he has been able to do it in a much spicier context. If the self-satisfied views were tasty, the latent accusatory self-views were that much more bitter, not to mention the accompanying emotions of shame, guilt, frustration, anger, etc, but he didn’t turn away from them. He gets a big green check-mark here.
- Manas is ignorant of the dangers of the pleasant. Jim’s recognition of the downstream effects of “feeling good about himself,” in the sense described in #1, goes directly against to this bias.
- Manas is ignorant of the goodness of the unpleasant. I want to take a closer look at this one.
There is something a little misleading about how Thay frames this list. It makes it seems like manas is a someone or a something that can know, but doesn’t. If you think about it that way, you might conclude that manas can learn, but it cannot. What we can say is that mana operates in a way that does not take into account the actual repercussions of cutting off contact with the unpleasant. This leads me to a reflection question for next week: with respect to the peripheral formation that he transformed, what was the goodness that Jim Bootman lost contact with when he unconsciously rejected the unpleasant? Is it one thing or many things? What did he restore contact with in going against that aversion? Some of these things are explicit in Part 6, but there are many others that are implicit. What might they be?
