A Brief (and Funny) Note About The Primitive Behaviour of Human Animals

A Brief (and Funny) Note About

The Primitive Behaviour of

Human Animals

Human behaviour is more primitive than we might want to admit. We are capable of creating art and show compassion for strangers but at the same time we also act like undeveloped simpletons, blindly following drives and needs such as survival, procreation, eating and sleeping in our daily life. When our most basic needs are not met, our animalistic nature is shown. In untrained and ethically poorly defined mind, greater potential and subtleties are nonexistent.

We look and measure other people, just like animals do and label them safe or unsafe, desirable or undesirable, attractive or unattractive. Here's a funny story.

Several years ago I used to go to a restaurant that was attached to a gas station. I frequented that place every day, as did about a dozen of male manual labourers. I used an entrance that was just next to the dining area. I opened the door and stepped in. Hearing the noise of the door and seeing someone come in, these guys always raised their heads from their plates to see who came in. At first, I didn't think much of it until I figured, that them probably not realising it, they were measuring me to find out whether I was alpha, someone tough and potentially dangerous or if I was weak and no threat to them. For few months, every day that I went there, I stepped onto their territory in a relaxed manner, wiping my shoes gently into the door mat, not making a number about myself. As I came in appearing like someone who didn't have much power, the guys just shrugged their shoulders, maybe even chuckled at me. Then one day I came up with a social experiment to test whether my perception of the situation was correct or not. The next day when I stepped in, I hit my boots strongly against the mat, pretending to shake snow off of them, and coughed loudly with chest broadly opened chest. With my strong masculine habitus I sent these guys a message that I was not someone they could fuck with and their reaction about me was instantly different. They put their heads down quickly, instead of taking a long judgemental look at me. They quickly returned to mind their own business, instead of passing a judgement of my inferiority. I was amused. I thought of pushing my experiment further, by walking to someone's table, looking them straight into their eyeball and taking their plate. This is a pronounced example but similar things happen every day. My point is that animal behaviour is very much part of our human life. I recall another example.

Even a neanderthal finds it funny.

Once I was travelling from Helsinki to Northern Norway to do a retreat there and had to change planes at Oslo airport. I had time, so I went to a cafe to have lunch. I sat down and noticed that there was a gentleman, dressed up in a very fancy suit on the table in front of me. I overheard from conversation he was having with his friend that his name was Frank. Funny thing about Frank was that even when he clearly was someone who had money and taste, and therefore likely life and lifestyle that reflected his wealth and class, everytime he took a bite of his food, he hunched over it and in a strange, bit of aggressive way glanced at his surroundings, as if someone was after his sandwich. I was looking at this man, probably in his 60's, with a stylish haircut, dressed in what might have been a 2000 dollar suite, act like an aggressive lion over its prey. It was both absurd and extremely funny! I played with a thought of going over and grabbing that sandwich but I think Frank had bitten me in the neck, if I had! I had never before seen human being act exactly like an animal.

-Kim, 3.7.2019

Going Back To The Source Of Looking

Going Back To The Source Of Looking

Dr. Jordan Peterson,

”Our eyes are always pointing at things we are interested in approaching, or investigating, or looking for, or having. We must see, but to see, we must aim, so we are always aiming. Our minds are built on the hunting-and-gathering platforms of our bodies. To hunt is to specify a target, track it, and throw at it. To gather is to specify and to grasp. We fling stones, and spears, and boomerangs. We toss balls through hoops, and hit pucks into nets, and curl carved granite rocks down the ice onto horizontal bull’s-eyes. We launch projectiles at targets with bows, guns, rifles, and rockets. We hurl insults, launch plans, and pitch ideas. We succeed when we score a goal or hit a target. We fail, or sin, when we do not (as the word "sin" means to miss the mark). We cannot navigate without something to aim at, and while we are in this world, we must always navigate.”

Dr. Jordan Peterson

Animals, most of them anyway, remain attentive of their surroundings. They do this to know whether they are safe or not. Human beings also go into this primitive mode, for example in stressful situations. Soldiers of special forces, such as SEALs, are taught how to disengage from tunnel vision caused by fearful reaction by returning peripheral vision by looking left and right, which is a classic meditation exercise in the buddhist tradition. Our gaze reveals and reflects our mental state, whether instinctual, habitual or meditative.

Seeking from Outside

In the above quote, Dr. Peterson describes what in yogic teachings is called seeking from outside. Yogic tradition says that unsatisfied beings seek pleasures and relief to their existential confusion outside of themselves, rather than from within. It is an instinctual habit for humans to seek happiness and acceptance from outside. We try to fill the void within with foods, drinks, love, sex, money, possessions or by asking affirmative responses from our boss or parents. We go about our life by trying to fill the void within. However, the nature of all experiences, pleasant or unpleasant, is that they pass and therefore cannot make us permanently content.

The tragedy of habitual seeking is that it takes a lot of repetition and a solid belief in the material world, until people begin to realise that pleasures are fleeting. A new car or an amazing orgasm won't keep us happy for long. When relief and satisfaction vane, again, we begin to seek from outside and so it continues. We blindly follow our wants and desires. This is cyclical existence, going around in circles, bumping our head to the same wall again and again. This is ignorance of our true condition.

Becoming Aware of the Origin of Looking

Teachings of yogic meditation are primarily interested in breaking the vicious cycle of seeking. It is unsatisfactory so why keep repeating it? When we manage to do that, stop seeking from outside, our mind comes to rest in its natural condition. When that happens a recognition of our natural state takes place. At that moment, our mind meets and merges with its source. This source is called by many names in religious and philosophical traditions. The name for it is irrelevant, may those so inclined debate on that. However, the actual experience of it changes lives and liberates. There is nothing more satisfactory than knowing oneself without a narrow identity and a storyline. The thought of this experience might be scary but the actual experience is very pleasant, imbued with freedom, clearmindedness and creativity.

So, we aim our attention to our externals. We project our gaze to things. We looks at things, one after the other, we seek, we seek, we seek... When we do this from morning until night, we become tired because our vital energy gets scattered. What happens here can be compared to beacon that projects its beam of light outwards. As mentioned, this is seeking from outside that can never make us happy.

A simple way to stop looking outside is to bring our attention back to the physical eyes and the area behind the eyes inside our head. When we become aware that we have gone into the searching mode, looking at things external to us, we simply bring our attention back into the head or back to the source of beacon's light. This can be learned after a little bit of experimenting.

What happens with this is that becoming aware of the source of looking, interrupts seeking (1) and makes us aware of our natural mind (2) that is effortlessly aware and knows things, experiences and events appearing in the mind.

Fulfillment

Tradition of yoga is very old. It has specialized in solving existential problems caused by the sense of us having a self or me within us, in our thoughts, ideas and emotional reactions. Through the valuable teachings and meditative exercises such as the one above, it offers to solve our internal conflicts by making us aware of our liberated condition. Numerous generations of female and male practitioners have verified, that such methods are effective in solving neurotic and deluded behaviour. By becoming aware of our instinctual and habitual human animal behaviour, yogic practice helps us become clearminded, satisfied and realistic human beings, not by adding anything to us but by recognising what we already are.

Thank you for reading,

-Kim Katami, 29.6.2019
Open Heart Sangha,

www.en.openheart.fi

What Is Depression And How To Heal It?

What Is Depression And

How To Heal It?

By Kim Katami

Open Heart, www.en.openheart.fi

This short article views depression and ways of healing it from yogic or meditational, as well as existential perspective.

What Is Depression?

Depression, like all other forms of mental illness, is a vicious impediment and many in the modern societies suffer from it. Western psychology and modern medicine offers aids in the healing of it as do various methods of yogic meditation.

Depression is a state of mind that causes partial or complete paralysis of one's mental and emotional functions. Severe depression makes one unable to exercise one's own will power. In cases of lesser depression, one is still capable of momentary exercise of will which makes the healing of the illness quicker.

To someone depressed, distraction due to great volume of thoughts or out of proportion emotions are not a problem. In fact, a depressed person has few thoughts and emotions. Depressed person is not restless.

According to yogic psychology, depression is caused by something called substrate consciousness or simply, subconscious mind. Typical for this aspect of the human mind is emotional flatness and dullness from lesser to greater degree. Normal functions of thinking, feeling, enthusiasm and happiness are clouded by grey veils of the subconscious mind. These mind-fogs put the concerned person into a state of paralysis and meaninglessness.

The psychological anatomy of man can be categorized in the following way(*):

1. Subject-self. Me, I.

2. Object-selves. Thoughts and emotions.

3. Substrate consciousness. The basis of all phenomena.

4. Awareness. Buddha-nature.

(*) from What's Next? On Post-Awakening Practice

Before discussing ways of healing depression, I'd like to consider the cause of depression from the existential perspective.

Why Am I Here? Life Without Deeper Meaning

Jordan Peterson, clinical psychologist and author, from Advice for People With Depression,

”People who don't have enough order in their life tend to get overwhelmed. If someone comes to see me and says they're depressed, I always ask them a standard set of questions. Do you have a job? If you don't have a job you are really in trouble in our society. First of all, your biological rhythms tend to go off the rail because there is no reason to go to bed at any particular time and there is no reason to get up... They also don't have a purpose. People aren't good without a purpose... We absolutely understand the circuitry that underlies positive emotion, we know how it works. Almost all the positive emotions that any of you are likely to experience in your life will not be a consequence of attaining things. It will be a consequence to see that things are working, as you proceed towards a goal you value. That's completely different and you need to know this because people are often stunned... So if you don't have a job, you don't have structure. That's not good, plus you tend not to have a point, so you are overwhelmed by chaotic lack of structure and you don't have any positive emotion... Sometimes you see people who are depressed who have no job, no friends, no intimate relationships, they have an additional health problem and they have an alcohol-drug problem. My experience has been that if you have three of those problems, it's almost impossible to help you. You're so deeply mired in chaos that you can't get out... One of the things I tell people who are depressed is to get a job. You need a job, find some friends, get out in the dating circuit, see if you can establish an intimate relationship. Put together some foundational pillars that your life rests on. That's the practical thing to do.”

Dr. Peterson also mentions the helpfulness of anti-depressants for those severely depressed.

What I would like to add to this rather typical, and I am sure often helpful set of practical advice, is to consider whether the depressed person is miserable due to existential reasons.

Personally, I suffered from depression for many years in my youth. It wasn't diagnosed, and therefore not correctly understood by people around me, which is why I often got the same advice as Dr. Peterson offers above: just get a job, get friends, just do this, just do that and if you can't do that, start taking drugs and then do it. By this statement I do not mean to misinterpret Dr. Peterson who I greatly admire. I am simply formulating the way depression is typically viewed.

Problem with this advice is this.

What if the person in question finds no value in getting up in the morning to get to a meaningless job? What if she or he finds no value in pursuing the common options of education, career or intimate relationships, that others do? What if these things mean nothing to her? What if her problem is more foundational than that?

Having been a professional meditation teacher for over 10 years, I have met hundreds of people who, like me, suffered of depression, had no meaning in life and were existentially lost. If this is the cause of depression, then the only way to become healed of it, is to recognise oneself not as the human storyline with its successes and failures, but as boundless freedom, devoid of the sense of me-ness. It is deeply unfulfilling and unsatisfactory to only know oneself as an entity tied into one's physical body and whatever culture and people we are surrounded with. This existential crisis cannot be fixed with common worldly solutions, for the only way to solve it is to go beyond time, place and the personal storyline, and access the ground of being that is nameless, ageless, timeless and groundless, ever fresh, brimming with liveliness and common to all living beings. Different main streams or vehicles (skt. yana) of buddhism look at this task from their own perspectives but common to all of them is to offer ways to quench this fundamental existential hunger. This is what dharma is for, to give experiential answers to existential questions.

How To Heal Depression?

Substrate consciousness, that part of the human psychology that causes depression, is not at all foreign to yogis, professionals and masters of meditation. It has been discussed by adepts and practitioners for many hundreds of years and therefore yogic traditions have ways of dealing with it, in other words, they have ways of dealing with the part of mind that causes depression.

Here, I would like to present one and very effective way for healing depression by recognition of the natural state, one's natural innate stress-free condition. It is called Dynamic Concentration, which is an uncommon form of concentration practice.

Concentration practices are commonly taught with low intensity. For example, when mindfulness of the movement of the breath (p. anapanasati, skt. prana apana smriti) is taught, the student is instructed to keep his attention gently on the breath and return the attention back to the object when distracted. In a similar way, when mantras are recited, they are always recited with gentle concentration, never with high intensity, with stronger or even explosive focus.

This light or gentle focus can be compared to a volume knob of a stereo system. In this example light focus is analoguous to low level which produces low but still audible volume of music. This would equal perhaps 5-10% of the total volume output. However, the volume knob can be turned higher. It goes up to 30%, 60%, 90% and with each level we hear a corresponding change in the volume. Turning the volume high has an immediate effect. In this analogy, zero would equal not having concentration at all, yet not being distracted either, i.e. the natural state. 90% would already be very loud and not very enjoyable for an extended period of time. However we all have times in our lives when for a moment we want to turn up the music. And how wonderful it is! The neighbours maybe don't like it but it is fun nevertheless.

Regardless whether we follow the breath or chant mantras, the same can be done in yogic practice. Dynamic focus greatly changes the effect of the concentration practice. With light focus, as in commonly known shamatha, with constant distractions it takes time to calm the monkey mind. Whether an exercise of light focus ever cuts through the layers of the subconscious and substrate minds is rightly questionable. It takes years of long hours of daily training to build the muscle of concentration to get the benefits of shamatha meditation (tib. shine). This approach is followed by a large number of Buddhist methods. I think that there are better and more effective ways of doing the training, especially for householders whose daily time for practice is limited.

Concentration can be momentarily heigthened, like turning the volume knob high suddenly to create a short (0.3-2 seconds) explosion-like, momentary peak. This creates a quick punch of sorts, like an explosion that can be controlled. This punch hits through all of samsaric mind and reveals the natural state in a very short period of time. We are discussing an exercise that indirectly has been used in Buddhism and many other yoga and dharma teachings for centuries through meditation, recitation, religious art and yogic exercise and yet very few schools have realised the immense value of dynamic concentration to give it a central place in their teachings...

Dynamic concentration can be adapted to fit the view and practices of any yogic approach... It is very easy for anyone to test whether dynamic concentration really works. All you need is a few minutes of time and a comfortable place to try it(*).

(*) from What's Next? On Post-Awakening Practice

The Effect of Dynamic Concentration In Pictures

From these pictures you can observe what Dynamic Concentration, sharp use of focus, actually does in one's mind and how the explosive power disperses the greyness and foggyness of mind that the substrate produces, to reveal the natural clarity of the normal state.

Bird seen naturally, without depression or other forms of distraction.

From left to right: 1. Bird seen naturally. 2. Bird seen during mild depression. 3. Bird seen during strong depression. 4. Bird seen during very strong depression.

From left to right: 1. Bird seen partially naturally after some Dynamic Concentration practice. 2. Bird seen even more naturally after more Dynamic Concentration practice. 3. Bird seen almost completely naturally, without the grey layers of substrate mind, after a proper and decisive use of Dynamic Concentration.

Conclusion

I guess all humans question their existence at some degree in some stage of their lives. For some, it passes quickly and doesn't grow to become a great issue or even the most important issue in one's whole life, while it does for some. Whether one considers her- or himself to be on the spiritual path or not, one can have illnesses and ailments, both physical and psychological, according to one's karma and genetics. 

In this short article I have tried to convey the basic understanding of depression and the structure of the human mind, and described a simple exercise how depression or many other types of mental obscurations can be dealt with.

Thank you for reading,

-Kim Katami, 27.6.2019

Open Heart Sangha,

www.en.openheart.fi

Read more about Dynamic Concentration from What's Next? On Post-Awakening Practice and watch video examples of this exercise on this playlist at YouTube.