NONCONCEPTUAL AWARENESS
Nonconceptual wakefulness totally overcomes conceptual thinking. If nonconceptual wakefulness were merely another thought, it could not overcome thoughts. In the very moment of recognizing it, thoughts are cut through and overcome. Is there anything more wonderful than that?
TULKU URGYEN RINPOCHE1
In recent years, scientists have begun to research and document nonthought-based intelligence. Countless people experience non-conceptual awareness every day while sitting still in nature or meditation. The amazing thing about the various types of nonconceptual awareness is that they can also be experienced with our eyes open, in the midst of our active daily life.
In his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner expanded the definition of intelligence that had previously been based mainly on conceptual thinking, in particular as related to memory and IQ. Gardner added seven different modalities or lines of development in the following areas: musical, visual-spatial, verbal, mathematical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.2 We all have different strengths and weaknesses in the various lines of development, and we develop each line at different rates. From experience, we know that an individual can be highly developed in one area, such as intellectually, and less developed in another, such as emotionally. Nonconceptual awake awareness is foundational intelligence to which each of these lines of development appears.
Recently, three types of nonconceptual intelligence have been recognized and studied: flow, the hypo-egoic stage, and the adaptive unconscious. Understanding these is a stepping-stone toward understanding the subtler, foundational type of nonconceptual intelligence based in awake awareness.
BEING IN A FLOW STATE
Flow is one of the most important modern areas of research in the field of psychology. Many of us know flow as “being in the zone”; it’s the way I felt playing hockey in high school. In 1990, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, published his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, based on years of research. Csikszentmihalyi and his team studied the ways people enter an optimal flow experience, which leads to deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement in the “now.” We can enter this flow state by bringing a type of awareness to our activity.
The seven qualities of flow Csikszentmihalyi’s research identified are:
1. Knowing an activity is doable: that our skills are adequate to the task
2. Being completely involved in and focused upon what we’re doing
3. A sense of ecstasy
4. Great inner clarity: knowing what needs to be done and how well we’re doing
5. Sense of serenity: no worries about oneself; a feeling of going beyond the boundaries of ego
6. Timelessness: being thoroughly focused on the present so that hours seem to pass in minutes
7. Intrinsic motivation: whatever produces flow becomes its own reward3
Going beyond the boundaries of ego with a sense of clarity, ecstasy, and serenity is essential to the experience of nonconceptual awareness. However, the term “flow state” is often used to describe two very different experiences. The first type, which I call absorbed flow, occurs when you’re so concentrated and immersed in a task that when you finally look up, you discover hours have passed in what seems like minutes. In this absorbed-flow state, your focus narrows and you have a kind of tunnel vision: you’re unaware of what’s going on around you. Examples of people in an absorbed flow include an artist deep in his own world while painting, a student writing a paper, and a carpenter hammering a nail.
The second type, which I call panoramic flow, happens when you’re doing a task and are aware of every detail of your environment. Your focus is open, and you’re panoramically aware of everything around you. You are in the “now,” which means there is a timeless quality, yet you’re simultaneously aware of events as they arise, moment by moment, in relative time. In contrast to absorbed flow, this experience feels as if time has slowed down. Consider the basketball player who sees the whole court, as well as each player’s movements; she notices the time on the clock and the cheering crowd as she dribbles the ball across the court and throws a no-look pass to her teammate to win the game. In the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance, the main character, Junuh, gets into a flow playing golf, and Bagger says that he had learned “how to stop thinking without falling asleep.”
BEYOND EGO
The famous quote from the Tao Te Ching, “When nothing is done, nothing is left undone,” is sometimes misunderstood as “don’t do anything.”4 Mark R. Leary, a Duke University psychologist, has researched what he calls “hypo-egoic self-regulation,” a state in which people accomplish their goals more easily by relinquishing conscious control. He noted that some of his subjects who’d been struggling to recover from addictions reported that their strong, willful egos—which they were using to try to stop their addictive habit—actually prevented them from recovering. Leary’s study concluded: “The ultimate self-regulatory goal is to reduce deliberate self-control and to function hypo-egoically.” Surrendering and letting go of ego-identification need not lead to regression or childish behavior but can instead open us to greater resources and a new foundation of identity. Leary argues that letting go of efforting can help people achieve difficult goals more easily.5
ADAPTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
Some psychologists call the adaptive unconscious the natural capacity of the human mind to know without referring to thought. In his 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell likens the adaptive unconscious to a “kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”6 Gladwell gives the example of an art dealer who immediately and accurately knows that a particular sculpture is a forgery, although he can’t explain how. The dealer’s adaptive unconscious processes myriad details about the statue and compares them with details he’s gleaned from years of experience in the art world. All of this processing is done so fast that the art dealer isn’t consciously aware of it.
Everyone has had experiences with the adaptive unconscious, a kind of intuitive way of acting without overthinking. You probably know a great cook who doesn’t measure or use recipes, but mixes ingredients and adds spices relying on this kind of adaptive unconscious—a mode of functioning like an airplane’s automatic pilot.
This intuitive capacity could be called adaptive awareness, rather than adaptive unconscious, because going unconscious is not the only alternative to conscious thinking. You can be aware that you’re doing something well without consciously thinking about what you’re doing. When you’re operating from nonconceptual awareness, you are not dumb, ignorant, zoned out, or blacked out. You’re relaxed, alert, and able to draw on information as needed. Therefore the adaptive (so-called) unconscious is really a form of higher consciousness that uses nonconceptual awareness.
UPGRADING TO NONCONCEPTUAL AWARENESS
Nonconceptual doesn’t mean irrational or the regression to a prerational stage like a baby—nor does it require stopping your thoughts. In fact, even a calm meditative state is not necessary. When one of my teachers, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, first came to the United States from Nepal, he noticed that many meditators here seemed to be practicing what he called “stupid meditation.” He was referring to the practice that leads to the comfortably numb feeling I call the “sauna state.” This kind of meditation suppresses chattering thoughts, but it reduces your alertness and ability to fully function. Although such meditation is relaxing, it’s not based in the alert intelligence of awake awareness.
Moving from conceptual knowing to awake awareness is similar to learning to type. When you started, didn’t you have to look at the keyboard? Then, with practice, you grew beyond thinking about where your fingers were going. Now when you type, you don’t monitor your fingers or consciously remember the position of the keys. This new kind of knowing doesn’t need to go to thought to check on your typing. In nonconceptual awareness, you don’t need to keep looking at the screen of your mind, checking every pop-up or open file. Instead, thinking becomes useful as an instrument of awake awareness.
Our ability to swiftly process all the information coming to us through our senses is imperative for survival. However, it’s now common knowledge that what appears to be multitasking is actually your attention alternating very quickly among several tasks, as opposed to doing these tasks simultaneously. This shows the limits of attention as a mental faculty. However, in a flow state, you are coordinating multiple aspects of one activity without being consciously attentive. We use this ability whenever we drive a car in fast-moving traffic. Although you may not have noticed, you’ve likely already applied your ability to make high-speed decisions without consciously checking in with thought every moment.
“Intuition,” “pure instinct,” or “gut feeling” are some other terms for short moments of nonconceptual knowing. In our culture, we’re not educated to trust the myriad types of intuitive, nonconceptual intelligence. Awake awareness is like continuous intuition.
We often associate the head with thoughts and the heart with emotions. When nonconceptual awareness becomes fully developed and embodied, we operate from open-hearted awareness, a subtler way of knowing that includes both thinking and feeling, head and heart, and being and doing—and goes beyond them. Open-hearted awareness has a quality of knowing that is completely different from dualistic thinking. One reason people often have difficulty transitioning to awake awareness is because it’s an intelligence that uses paradox. Our everyday, conceptual minds can’t really understand two seeming opposites as simultaneously true; our conceptual minds are designed to use the dualistic thinking needed to judge if the streetlight is green or red.
This way of knowing may initially feel paradoxical or slow compared to the fast-moving dualistic mind. In my classes, people answer the question: “What does open-hearted awareness know?” One person will say “emptiness,” another will report “fullness,” and a third will exclaim, “I agree with both of them: emptiness and fullness.” Then the first two say at the same time, “Yes, that’s it! Emptiness and fullness. That is what I meant.” The linear logic of our trained, dualistic knowing could say, “That’s illogical. It’s either empty or full. It cannot be both!” But it is both, and the awakened heart perceives and embraces what looks like a paradox to the linear mind.
Open-hearted awareness doesn’t consciously reference thoughts but instead rests deeply within an intelligence that is intuitively connected with all we know. When we take ourselves to be the ego-identification that is looking out of our eyes, the first thing we see is separation, difference, and judgment. Open-hearted awareness begins by sensing our oneness, unity, and connectedness, and then also acknowledges and appreciates our uniqueness. Open-hearted awareness can make distinctions without splitting itself into a subject and object.
For most of us, awake awareness is currently hidden in the background, but we can learn how it can become our primary mode of knowing and our new operating system. When we do, thought will return to its natural role, and we won’t regress to the thought-based operating system that is our typical mode of knowing. You don’t need to intellectually understand how awake awareness works any more than you need to understand how your body balances when you ride a bicycle. You need only to learn how to shift into awake awareness as the way you know. Then you live from it.
It’s often easier to enter flow when we have mastered the basic skills of an activity to the point that they’ve become second nature. My hypothesis is that walking, talking, relating, and all the basics we learned from school and by growing up in our culture are already programmed into our brains. Once these functional abilities come naturally, we can shift out of conceptual thinking and self-consciousness and into awake awareness as our foundation. With practice, we’ll be able to shift into flow and begin functioning from awake awareness. People in a flow state are not necessarily operating from awake awareness; however, people operating from awake awareness are in panoramic flow.
The open-hearted awareness approach to coming back to our senses is a way of moving local awareness away from being overly involved with one sense (thinking) to awake awareness, which includes all of our senses. This results in a few important changes. First, awareness is freed of its identification with thinking, which creates a false sense of self, tremendous stress, and dissatisfaction. Second, we’re able to experience the real sense of being in our bodies. Embodiment is not about stretching, strengthening, or bringing our attention to bodily sensations. Awake awareness embodied—also called presence—is actually feeling our bodies directly from within using awareness, rather than looking to mental images of our body or looking from our heads at our bodies using attention. When we feel our bodies from within, we discover that our bodies feel mostly like space, awareness, and changing aliveness—with some pressure where we’re contacting the earth or a chair. When we feel embodied, our bodies feel light and alive, like a limber cat, but we also feel boundless on the level of identity and interconnected to everything on the level of awareness. Embodiment does not mean that awareness is in your body, but that you experience your body as appearing from and supported by awareness.
Embodied presence will change the way you know your body. As you shift to knowing the body directly from within, you’re no longer filtering the body’s experience through conceptual thoughts and images. When you know your body directly from within—without concept, image, or memory—it’s not experienced as solid the way it appears to your eyes. You begin to feel a connection to all of life—a subtle sense of bliss and a support from awake awareness that relieves you of fear and shame. You feel your body as presence, as alive energy, as contracting and expanding sensations, as awareness, and as unity with all life.
Emotional intelligence requires the capacity to feel our emotions, the ability to express them effectively, and the ability to distinguish between emotions related to the present and the past as well as those created by the cravings and fears of ego-identification. This level of awareness requires discernment between needs that are genuine and require satisfaction, in addition to awareness of desires based on ego-identification’s cravings that cannot be satisfied.
We wake up from the mind by disidentifying with our thoughts, stories, and beliefs. By contrast, to have freedom from the grip of emotional identification, awake awareness has to wake in and embrace our emotions. Like thoughts and physical sensations, emotions are part of the subtle consciousness of the body. Emotions help us pick up information we need to survive, relate, and empathize. When the emotions aren’t being confused and exaggerated by mistaken identity, they’re returned to their natural condition and we are able to be sensitive and open-hearted. Emotions are like skin. Just as our skin is sensitive to physical contact, our emotions are sensitive to contact with other people. From open-hearted awareness, we do not transcend emotions but remain sensitive without shutting down or getting lost in the vicious cycle of thoughts and emotions that create ego-identification.
The brain can be imprinted by trauma involving strong emotions of loss, abuse, fear, violence, and tragedy. Emotional signals like fear and grief are meant to be strong, just like physical pain signals, so that we can avoid danger. Ego-identification, however, creates a vicious cycle of secondary suffering. Feelings of hurt and anger stemming from a single incident can turn into trauma or resentment that lasts for years. As a side note, there are two nonconceptual techniques that help heal trauma: EMDR (Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reintegration) and SE (Somatic Experiencing).
Awakening from emotional trauma cannot happen from an ego-identified point of view. Therefore, the psychological technique of intellectually understanding the history and causes of emotional issues does not by itself lead to their full resolution. Nor can we rely on merely observing our emotions from a mental or meditative distance, because this restricts us from experiencing life fully. Both mindfully witnessing and intellectually understanding the traumatic incidents that created our wounded feelings and subpersonalities is helpful, but we must keep going. We have to find a way to return to inhabiting our lives.
One of my longtime students lost her husband in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and she went through a process of shock, sadness, and rage about her loss. With the support of open-hearted awareness, she allowed every feeling to arise and be felt until she opened to what she called “the all-connected, all-loving, living grace.” This experience brought up emotions she’d been keeping inside all her life. While supported by the ground of Being, she allowed the shell covering her heart to break. Subsequently, she grew to become a loving, accepting, and creative resource for all her friends and relatives who were going through loss.
Another example is a professor who’d lived in the tower of his head all his life, making the decision to—intentionally though reluctantly—shift into open-hearted awareness, only to discover what he described as “a wisdom and love that I had not imagined possible with all my studying.” The professor couldn’t help laughing when a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet popped into his mind: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”7
The important distinction here is not just a positive experience, a change of attitude, or even healing for these people, but the discovery of a way of knowing and being that’s not dependent on past experiences or future achievements. The experience of recognizing who you originally were is a deep, authentic sense of Being from which you feel a sense of wellness—free from fear, shame, and dissatisfaction.
When we begin to awaken, we discover that emotions like sadness, happiness, anger, and fear are simply signals that are part of our nervous system. They are important and vital parts of our full human experience now that they’re untied from the stories of ego-identification. All basic emotions continue to rise to Being, but none becomes a vicious cycle of worry, anxiety, or resentment, or the basis of a continuum of dissatisfaction. We are already neurologically wired to feel the communication of our feelings without dwelling upon them. Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes the biochemistry of emotion, saying, “My anger response is a programmed response that can be set off automatically. . . . Within ninety seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over. If, however, I remain angry after those ninety seconds have passed, then it’s because I have chosen to let that circuit continue to run.”8
When they drop their knowing from head to nonconceptual heart, many people describe a new feeling of “sweet sadness” or tenderhearted intimacy. Others describe going through a period of feeling like their hearts are breaking. When they look closely, however, they discover that their hearts are not breaking! Rather, the protective layers around their hearts are breaking apart to reveal a more tender heart underneath. For sure, there is real pain, but it is like the pain we feel when our hands are thawing after being outside in the freezing cold. With the support of open-hearted awareness, we can feel the grief of this transition and remain open-hearted.
There is also a deeper feeling of essential wellbeing, awe, wonder, unity, freedom, courage, and unconditional love that is an essential emotion, not based in thought. When we live from open-hearted awareness, there’s an internal structure of essential qualities that are deeper and more primary feelings. These essential qualities are the foundation of a new emotional life that leads to more engagement and intimacy.
GLIMPSE 1 Emotional Wisdom
When you start this exercise, you’ll be invited to bring your awareness within your body and find any emotion that is there now. You can do this exercise with an emotion, pleasant or unpleasant, but for the first time, please use an unpleasant emotion. If you don’t have an unpleasant emotion available, choose your emotional “flavor of the week” or the unpleasant emotion that you deal with most often. If needed, you can go to a memory or a recent situation in your life to bring up an unpleasant emotion. You will learn that you can feel sad without being sad.
1. Find an emotion—fear, anger, jealousy, etc.—and begin by feeling it fully. (I’ll use sadness as an example in the following steps; you can substitute whatever emotion you choose.)
2. Silently say to yourself, “I am sad.” Fully experience what it is like to say and feel “I am sad.” Stay with this experience until you feel it completely.
3. Now, instead of saying, “I am sad,” take a breath and say, “I feel sadness.” Notice the shift from “I am” to “I feel.” Experience this shift and the new feeling of being. From here, feel your relationship to the feeling.
4. Now, shift again by saying, “I am aware of feeling sadness.” Experience awareness of feeling sadness fully. Shift into an observing awareness. Notice the different emotional quality that comes from this.
5. Now, say, “Sadness is welcome.” Starting from awareness, experience what welcoming the feeling is like. Feel the awareness embody and embrace the feeling. Notice the different emotional quality that comes from welcoming without reidentifying. Sense the support that welcoming brings.
6. Finally, say, “Awareness and sadness are not separate.” Feel awake awareness around and within, permeating the emotion fully, but without identifying with the emotion or rejecting it. Feel awareness present with emotion fully from within. Feel the awareness, the energetic aliveness, the deep stillness of presence. Notice the feeling of looking out at others and the world from this embodied, connected, open-hearted awareness.
GLIMPSE 2 “Om Sweet Home” in Your Heart
Here’s a glimpse practice that begins with making a sound, then feeling the vibration in the middle of your chest. This can be a helpful way to invite awareness to unhook from thinking and know the aliveness and awareness directly by using sound and vibration as support.
1. Place your hand on the middle of your chest. Feel your chest expanding under your hand as your breath comes in, and relaxing as your breath goes out. Sing, tone, or chant the sound “Om,” “Amen,” “Home,” or “Shalom”—or just “Hummmmm.” Focus on the feeling of the vibration in the center of your chest. Continue to gently make this sound.
2. Now unhook local awareness from your thoughts and allow it to be drawn down to the vibration and awareness in the center of your chest. Feel as if your heart space is the new home of knowing from awake awareness.
3. Now, without using thought, become aware of the stillness, vibration, and awareness that is pervasive within; then open your awareness past your body’s boundaries to mingle with the support of spacious awareness all around.
4. Allow the awareness of your heart space to know itself and then open to connect to all else as well.
5. Hang out and marinate in this continuous field of aware, loving presence.
6. Now relax into the silence that includes sound. Know from this open-hearted awareness without going back to your head to know.
GLIMPSE 3 Embodied Presence
In the “Experience Attention” glimpse in chapter 3, you moved local awareness to experience one of your hands directly from within. In this glimpse, you’re going to move local awareness to experience the entire body at once, directly from within. If you’ve ever done a body-scan meditation, this is similar, but you’re not scanning your body from your everyday mind using attention. This is an “ultimate-level” body scan that begins by unhooking local awareness from thought and knowing your whole body directly from within.
1. Unhook local awareness from thought.
2. Let local awareness drop down, feeling its way down through your face to your neck.
3. Be aware of not looking down from your head to your body. Notice what it’s like when local awareness feels and knows awareness and sensations directly from within your body.
4. Now allow the local awareness to remain aware from within your upper body and continue to fill your entire body from head to toe.
5. Feel the local awareness scan from within your neck to include your shoulders, arms, and hands, and then further expanding to be aware within your chest, upper back, belly, and lower back.
6. Allow local awareness to continue moving downward to include and know your hips, waist, backside, and thighs from within.
7. As your awareness moves down the length of your body, notice the release from holding, and a deep relaxation. Be aware of the space, awareness, and aliveness within your knees, calves, shins, ankles, feet, toes, and soles of your feet.
8. Feel local awareness knowing and feeling your entire body from within, from the bottoms of your feet to the top of your head. Feel both a soft, boundless quality and a grounded embodiment.
9. Feel your breath happening by itself like waves in the ocean.
10. Enjoy the feeling of the natural, boundless freedom and awareness embodied.
11. Rest in the emptiness and fullness of embodied presence.
This is a good practice for helping you wake up out of your mind. You may also find this is a good practice to help you fall asleep at night.