Treat Autonomic AND Cognitive Conditions in Psychopathology?

A student of such experts on the stress response as Herbert Benson, Joseph Wolpe, Hans Selye, Bruce McEwen and Robert Sapolsky as I have become in recent years, a new concept hit me while answering a post from a person with bipolar + CPTSD a bit ago: I'll call it "autonomic dieseling," at least for the time being. 

I did some hunting on the Internet, but was not able to locate anything that fit either the experience or the physiology of the syndrome I experienced for eight, then eleven, then two, then eight, then one (for a total of thirty) months across nine years from 1994 to 2003. 

All of the "AD" took place on the heels of long periods bipolar hypomania and job- or financially-driven, environmental stress driving increasing anxiety and panic attacks. Once in the "dieseling," however, the panic no longer subsided. My autonomic nervous system had shot past "fight-flight-or-freeze" into "freak and fry" that commenced like an electrical shock upon awakening and only abated in a state of exhausted passing out at night. Every. Single. Day. 

Back then, I called it the "terror tunnel." It was like having a panic attack that could not be stopped for days, weeks, months, and even almost a year. The emotional engine would not shut off... even with combinations of both "major" and "minor" tranquilizers like Risperdal risperidone, Geodone ziprasidone, Klonopin clonazepam, Ativan lorazepam, Xanax alprazolam or Valium diazepam. (In time, we figured out why: I was being dosed with anti-depressants, as well. Bad idea. Really bad.) 

I am beginning to sense that this syndrome or something very similar is what I am reading about in the reddit posts of many with CPTSD, BPD and/or BSDs of one sort or another. And because the education I got as the result of someone else paying for the mistake of mis-medication over those years, I tracked down over the past 14 years what is now increasingly common knowledge about the misuse of anti-depressants for BSDs... but still not so common knowledge about the role of chronic and/or re-triggered stress -- and allostatic load -- in "AD." 

The remainder of the article here was posted just about a year ago. I was struggling with a whole bunch of concepts that were much newer to my experience then. I have attempted to re-edit the original post substantially to make it more understandable to lay people. Bear with it if you can, and the result may well be pretty rewarding.


After reviewing the email posts of several hundred people who inquire about and describe their various symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder -- including depression, anger, mania, anxiety and panic attacks, as well as their cognitive orientations -- I am pretty much convinced of the following:

CPTSD is an ongoing condition of autonomic pendulum-swinging from relative homeostasis into either 

1) extreme parasympathetic pitch -- or "freeze -- as the result of the cognitive triggering of Seligman's learned helplessness (depression), or 

2) extreme, sympathetic pitch -- "fight or flight" -- as the result of attempts to cope with cognitive triggers (everything but depression, meaning... mania). 

The "pendulating" CPTSD patient (temporarily) stuck in parasympathetic freeze will be "learned helpless" and unable to take meaningful action, and "fry" (neurologically) in a state of frozen anxiety and/or depression. The CPTSD patient (temporarily) stuck in sympathetic fight-or-flight will be "learned dysfunctional" (in mania), and "freak" (behaviorally in an attempt to discharge the intolerable energy) and "fry" in so doing. Excitotoxicity and resulting synaptic and neural degeneration are expectable results. (See Heller, Levine, Lupien, Ogden, Sapolsky and van der Kolk.)

Cozzolino's and others' functional brain mapping demonstrate that such "heterostasis" -- which is not the same as (though not quite exactly the diametric opposite of), but nevertheless very relevant to McEwen's & Lupien's allostasis -- looks to be the result of cognitive distortions affecting neural transmission from the insula through the amgdala and onto the pre-frontal cortex, hippocampus, hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal cortices, also know as the HPA. It is well-know that the HPA is the driver of sympathetic and parasympathetic pitch in the autonomic nervous, as well as the primary neural force back of "allostatic loading" in the feedback from and to the entire limbic system. (With respect to all this, I had originally intended to at least list all of the lead authors in the references below, but there were so many...)

I may be re-inventing the wheel here, of course, but I do not recall "getting" this in lecture or seeing it in any of my biological psych textbooks. And I didn't begin to "get it" until I dug into Bessel van der Kolk's, Bruce McEwen's, Sonya Lupien's, Patricia Ogden's, Peter Levine's and Robert Sapolsky's excellent texts, all listed in the references hereto. But I now suspect that DBT inventor Marsha Linehan had her mind at least somewhat wrapped around all this with respect to psychotherapeutic treatment, as well as Ogden after some period of time using Ron Kurtz's HBCP. Growing grasp of ANS function and role in psychiatric disorders began at least with Joseph Wolpe and Hans Selye in the 1950s. Herbert Benson got in on it in a significant way in the 1970s. But a complete connection of the dots by any of the above-named has somehow eluded me for 15 years. 

Linehan's approach rests on four basic sets of skills, including mindfulness and emotion regulation. Having learned them from the books (including her own, Marra's, Dimeff & Koerner's, Chapman & Gratz's, Pederson's and van Dijk's) it is clear that they are all directed toward Margaret Mahler's and Daniel Stern's notions of self-soothing and integration of maternal attunement from Donald Winnicott's "good enough mother." (One must also give major credit to Alan Schore, who, along with Stern and Daniel Siegel at UCLA, have been making a loud noise about all this since the late '90s.)

Stanley and Carolyn Block developed a much simpler schematic for cognitive restructuring or emotion processing in the early 2000s. Their MBBT rests on grasp and utilization of a combination of four quite simple concepts (the ego as "I-dentity system," ego ideals or "requirements," Seligman's learned helpless "depressor," and the compensatory "fixer"). I have observed this mindfulness-grounded, meta-cognitive system in use by more than 30 people and have come to think that it works because of its relative simplicity.

Stephen Hayes's ACT is another of the Asian-inspired, mindfulness-based, awareness-inducing, post-CBT (or mindfulness-based cognitive therapy) systems. And it works almost diametrically opposite to the Blocks' MBBT. While it seems to me from several years' observation that MBBT appeals to the more verbal-symbolic left brain hemisphere of most right-handed patients, ACT works better with those whose "doors" to recovery are in their more sensory-affective right brain hemispheres. (And respectively somewhat more male vs. more female, as well.) I suggest that this is the case because of the mountain of work done on hemispheric function weighting and trans-corpus-callosul connectivity by Michael Gazzaniga and Iain McGilchrist -- as well as Ogden's and Levine's observations --  with which one would have to be familiar in order to make such an assertion in the face of some of the currently popular, pseudo-scientific belief to the contrary. That and the fact that Shapiro's EMDR is one of the very most successful psychotherapies for trauma resolution. 

Jon Kabat-Zinn at U. Mass. Medical road in on the horse of Tibetan Buddhism at about the same time. And punched a hole in a dam against Asian solutions that is now pretty much gone in the flood of empirical-research-authenticated literature on mindfulness meditation by Seigel, Daniel Goleman, Stephen Hayes, Mark Williams, John Forsyth, Thomas Marra, Victoria Follette, Antonio Damasio. Charles Tart, et al. As well as heaps of well-intended -- and often functional -- but sometimes crassly commercial and plain old "pop-psych," mass-market material by the likes of Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Sam Harris, Thich Nhat Hanh and the usual list of suspects. 

Fortunately, the tsunami has induced some publishers to dust off decades old work by some of the real experts on this stuff like S. N. Goenka (whose vipassana style of meditation is really the methodological grandpa of this entire movement), Ramana Maharshi, Chogyam Trungpa, Pema Chodron, Tara Brach, Jean Klein, Stephen Levine, Stephen Batchelor, Arthur Deikman, Joel Kramer, Anthony de Mello, Richard "Ram Dass" Alpert, Alan Watts, G. I. Gurdjieff, and even the redoubtable Jiddu Krishnamurti (though JK was ostensibly anti-method). 

I want to make a quick note here: Psychotherapeutic mindfulness meditation is not TM or any other form of "thought suppression," or escapism by means of "awareness exclusion." MM is about seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and otherwise sensing what is in the present moment. Anything that is escapist may produce stress response symptom reduction in the short run, but will not serve the purposes of cognitive restructuring or emotion processing in the long. 

To that end, and after having studied and experimented with the post-CBT psychotherapies I described above, as well as several others (including the CBTs, Albert Ellis's REBT, collegiate critical thinking and Jeffrey Young's schema therapy as upshots of Alfred Korsybski's, S. I. Hayakawa's and Noam Chomsky's essential work on semantics), I devised a distillation called the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing several years ago. I have taught it to several people, who have in turn taught it to several others. The system was not designed to be a psychotherapy so much as a distress tolerance and emotion regulation mantra. But it has turned out to be psychotherapeutic for some because it promotes inter-hemispheric communication that appears to integrate fragments of sensorimotor experience similarly to Levine's SEPt and Ogden's SP4T.

More relevant to the combination of topics here, the 10 StEPs appear to impact both the autonomic and cognitive components of the depression, anger, mania, anxiety and panic attacks as they are experienced in the present moment. Familiarized use of the mantra appears to reliably bring autonomic imbalance back to homeostatic balance, as did Benson's "relaxation response," as well as (to some extent) Wolpe's earlier "reciprocal inhibition." But what the 10 StEPs seems to do -- at the same time -- is reorient the practitioner to reality on both the sensorimotor and verbal-symbolic (or cognitive) levels, thus integrating the experiences of what is with what is believed... and that brings the functions of both brain hemispheres out of cognitive dissonance or conflict into agreement, allowing autonomic homeostasis to be sustained over time. 

Further -- and on the level of behavior modification via positive experiential feedback -- as result of using the mantra and getting relief via homeostatic rebalancing, the practitioner has the direct and memorable experience of managing his or her own emotions with a simple device that can be summoned at any time he or she is agitated or depressed. 

One can look into the use of the 10 StEPs for various psychotherapeutic objectives in the following articles:

Critical Thinking, Logical Fallacies & the 10 StEPs

Romantic Love, Being with What Is, and The 10 StEPs

The 10 StEPs to Freedom from Emotional Blackmail

The 10 StEPs for Recovery from the Consensus Trance

Stress Reduction for Distress Tolerance& Emotion Regulation

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© 2016 by Rodger Garrett; all rights reserved. Links are permitted. Please contact not.moses@outlook.com with comments or questions. Thank you.

From Pseudo-Spiritualism to Scientific Secularism in 20 Minutes

Just too good (for those who appreciate such) to pass up. 

The Enlightenment: 

The Rise of Modern Paganism

Vol. 1 - Enlightenment, an Interpretation, Peter Gay, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995

From the amazon.com review at

https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Rise-Modern-Paganism-Interpretation/dp/0393313026/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469163019&sr=1-1&keywords=peter+gay+enlightenment

by The Spinozinator 

[with explanitory links added to the original]

Book One: The Appeal to Antiquity 

Chapter One: The Useful and Beloved Past

1. Hebrews and Hellenes: As the philosophes of the Enlightenment saw it, the world was divided into two irreconcilable patterns of life: superstition versus the affirmation of life; mythmakers versus realists; priests versus philosophers. The historical writings of the Enlightenment were all part of their comprehensive effort to secure rational control over the world and freedom from the pervasive domination of myth. The most glaring and notorious defect of the Enlightenment was its unsympathetic, often brutal, estimate of Christianity.

2. A Congenial Sense and Spirit: Rome belonged to every educated man. Classic antiquity was inescapable, therefore, some of the philosophes' seemingly pagan ideas were simply the property of thinking men in their time. The philosophes identified with their favorite ancient philosophers, especially Cicero, who had contempt for the fear of death, contempt for superstition, and admiration for sturdy pagan self-reliance. Modern historians no longer think of Christianity as a complete swamp, but the reliance of the Enlightenment on ancient classicism has withstood two centuries of criticism.

3. The Search for Paganism: From Identification to Identity: The philosophes had been born into a Christian world. They knew their Bible, their catechism, their articles of faith, their apologetics, retained many of their Christian friends, and even had clergy in their families. Gibbon was not without anxiety when he wrote his notorious chapters on the origin of Christianity in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The German philosophes were reluctant to completely abandon the religion of the past. Diderot, the most ebullient of the French philosophes was driven and harassed by doubts. In a letter to his mistress, he cursed the atheism he accepted as true that "reduced their love to a blind encounter of atoms." Even David Hume, whose good cheer was celebrated, had to brood and struggle his way into paganism.

Chapter Two: The First Enlightenment

1. Greece: From Myth to Reason: The philosophes' historical thought was closely tied and deeply, if unconsciously, indebted to the Renaissance. Pious historians during the Renaissance and in the 17th century aided secularization by refining techniques of research, throwing doubt on extravagant tales of Hebrew prophets or Christian saints. The Old Testament, which had served countless generations as authoritative was in decline. The philosophes used it as neither authoritative nor historical, but as an incriminating document. Petrarch removed the label "Dark Ages" from classical pre-Christian times and fastened it instead on the Christian era.

2. The Roman Enlightenment: The Greeks were the teachers of the Romans, but the Romans were the Greeks made plain. The philosophes' two most reliable sources of literature were the Romans Lucretius and Cicero. No propagandist ever conducted a battle of science against religion more exuberantly than Lucretius. Religion was [in his view] just superstition maintained by terror. Science was reason, offering a complete and coherent account of the universe. Cicero gave them even more - a philosophy of the public servant was that of humanism. Not far behind was the historian Tacitus, who was Gibbon's source of much of what is in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. These and other Roman Stoics and Epicurians gave the philosophes much fuel for their political and religious criticisms.

Chapter Three: The Climate of Criticism

1. Criticism as Philosophy: Hume proclaimed philosophy the supreme, indeed, the only, cure for superstition. Diderot [asserted t]he philosopher should not be the inventor of systems but the apostle of truth. Adam Smith [said c]ultivation of philosophy is "the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition." For the Enlightenment, the Age of Philosophy was also... the Age of Criticism... and there were plenty of liberal Christians ready to allow the new philosophy elbow room, provided it stopped barely short of the holiest of matters.

2. The Hospitable Pantheon: Each philosophe took what suited him from the Romans (or from anywhere) and added their characteristic touches, leading to eclecticism - the school that denied being a school. The eclectic "makes a philosophy for himself, individual and personal, one that is his own." The favorite theft of the philosophes was from the stoicism of Cicero, but since they addressed their propaganda to a largely Christian audience, they also quoted the founders of Christianity, including Jesus. Such adroit posturing barely concealed the philosophes' convictions that Christianity was the worst of fanaticisms.

3. The Primacy of Moral Realism: The philosophes' practicalities were worldly, designed to translate into reality Bacon's and Descartes's grandiose vision of man controlling nature for his profit and desire. In a culture in which men believed in God and yearned for salvation, the study of His nature were matters of intense blessed concern, but during the Enlightenment, they seemed more like verbal games. Nor could the philosophes separate the study of nature from the study of morality. They were confident that the public needed to be educated and it was their calling to educate them.

4. Candide: The Epicurean as Stoic: Voltaire wrote a reality tale - a dialogue on behalf of Newton's empiricism in a world that had discarded myth; and one that caricaturized and satirized Leibniz. Candide is essentially a declaration of war on Christianity.

Book Two: The Tension with Christianity 

Chapter Four: The Retreat From Reason: Educated Romans had at least made a serious attempt to construct a civilization based on reason, not myth. Then came Christianity, which claimed to bring light, hope, and truth. But its central myth [according to Gay] was incredible, its dogma a mixture of older superstitions, and its sacred book an incoherent collection of primitive tales. Once the church had discarded its apocalyptic expectations, it settled down to the business of organizing a Christian community and eventually a rigid hierarchy.

1. The Adulteration of Antiquity: In the callous hands of Christians, Greek and Roman literature survived, but barely, and at great cost. The church fathers could not deal generously with secular literature; they were at war for a higher cause. However, there was a minority that maintained an interest, and Christian policy ran somewhere between these two extremes. The great compromise, in the fourth and fifth centuries, was to adapt from paganism whatever could be adapted to religious purposes and to throw the rest away. They invented pious meanings for secular passages, converting and allegorizing meanings... but at least it kept the classics from extinction, though at the price of covering them with pious legends. Cicero was persistently misread into the thirteenth century.

2. The Betrayal of Criticism: Medieval philosophers believed the advent of Jesus had subordinated the need for higher degrees of insight. Abelard devoted much of his ethical and theological speculation to the disappointing thought that his favorite pagan philosophers had been born too early for Christ, thus missing out on salvation. The philosophes saw this as despising and abusing the resources of the mind.

3. The Rehabilitation of Myth: In the Christian millennium, myth was preserved, transcended, and raised to a higher level. The philosophes liked to deride medieval categories as infantile or vicious, but the myths merely followed inevitably from the medieval mind bent on finding religious significance everywhere. Science was done, but like philosophy, it was guided by man's search for holiness and salvation. The enormous distance separating the philosophes from the medieval world view is proof that the Enlightenment was the terminal point of a long process of alienation that had begun centuries before, in the Renaissance.

Chapter Five: The Era of Pagan Christianity - For all their enormous but gradual contributions to secular thought, Europeans were still overwhelmingly religious - religious fervor attenuating slowly and uncertainly.

1. The Purification of the Sources: Humanists of the Renaissance began to correct the corrupt interpretations of the Greek and Roman philosophers. Many [original] manuscripts, stored in monastery libraries and guarded by monks, were uncovered, although covered with dust, torn, and mutilated. Unknown copies of Cicero, a single copy of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, a single copy of Catullus, and whatever we have of Tacitus were uncovered by persistent humanist effort bordering at times on thievery. Gradually, classic after classic was reborn, and humanist scholars purified them of the corrupt accretions of centuries. The veil of pious interpretation was pierced.

2. Ancients and Moderns - The Ancients: The protestant heresy persisted and thus stripped Christian Europe of one of its most tenacious myths, the myth of a Catholic commonwealth centered at Rome. Exploration discovered strange cultures which raised disturbing questions about the souls of heathens and the value of Christian civilization. The Copernican revolution in cosmology began to reverberate among educated men. The printing press and translations, the book trade, the growth of science, and the explosion of interest in accurate interpretations of ancient Greeks and Romans all questioned the authority of the papacy. As Voltaire put it, "a corner of the veil was lifted. The nations, aroused, wanted to judge what they had worshipped."

3. Ancients and Moderns - The Moderns: By the force of its logic, science began to cut its ties with philosophy and to assume a posture at first equal, and then hostile, to theology; less by literary than by scientific means. Even so, the Church first took the findings of Gallileo, Boyle, and Newton as evidence of faith rather than as a threat. Locke called for liberation from the shackles of antique and medieval rules of thought and his impact was huge, the last in a long line of pagan Christians. The philosophes, arrogant as they were, still displayed great reverence for this Age of Genius.

Chapter Six: In Dubious Battle

1. The Christian Component: Locke and his disciple, Toland, both wrote books in 1695 and 1696. Locke tried to prove that Christianity was acceptable to reasonable men; Toland, that what was mysterious and miraculous about Christianity must be discarded - and within those two years the essence of revealed, dogmatic religion evaporated. The philosophes took advantage, striving to maintain a separation between reason and religion while well-meaning Christians continued to try to unite them. This was the beginning of deism, which maintained a healthy respect for Jesus as a teacher, but held that his teachings were distinct from what resulted as the Christian religion.

2. The Treason of the Clerks: Clerical establishments didn't collapse, but every part of life became more secular - there was a subtle shift where religious institutions and religious explanations for events were slowly being displaced from the center of life to its periphery. The evidence for a growing critical rationalism among educated Christians is overwhelming, with a decline in religious fervor. They were thus open to the antireligious propaganda of the philosophes, as Sunday sermons simultaneously grew less severe and more accommodating to an easier life. As the Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists fought amongst themselves, the philosophes triumphed over them all.

Chapter Seven: Beyond the Holy Circle - the philosophes appropriated Christian labors for their own purposes.

1. The Abuse of Learning: This was a time of the beginnings of Biblical critical scholarship. Diderot, Voltaire, and Gibbon each took particular advantage of a different scholarly friend, and applied that scholarship where it could be devastating to Christianity. The philosophes were missionaries: for the sake of their calling they were ready to exploit the best their enemy had to offer, without mercy or gratitude.

2. The Mission of Lucretius: Lucretius was to Epicureus what the philosophes were to the Enlightenment, purveyors of savage, brutal, and relentless diatribes against superstition and religion. Religion retreated to the extent that philosophy and science advanced.

3. David Hume: The Complete Modern Pagan - Whatever misgivings the philosophes had about their passion, Hume had the least. He thought all houses of faith were houses of infection and that a rational man must escape, after exposing, the squabbles of theologians. His philosophy embodies the dialectic of the Enlightenment at its most ruthless. Without melodrama, Hume lived cheerfully and without complaining, with no supernatural justifications, demanding no complete explanations, no promise of permanent stability, with guides of merely probable validity. He was a cheerful Stoic.

Masters of Meditation

"In true meditation there is no ambition to stir up thoughts, nor is there an ambition to suppress them. They are just allowed to occur spontaneously… The become the expression of the precision and the clarity of the awakened state of mind.

"The exciting, colorful, dramatic quality of the emotions captures our attention as if we were watching an absorbing film show. In the practice of meditation, we neither encourage emotions nor repress them. By seeing them clearly, by allowing them to be as they are, we no longer permit them to serve as a means of entertaining and distracting us."

-- Chogyam Trungpa in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Shambala, 2002.

"The understanding of what you actually are is far more important than the pursuit of what [you think] you should be. Because in understanding what you are, there begins a spontaneous process of transformation. Whereas in becoming what you think you should be, there is... only a continuation of the same old thing in a different form. ... [It] is only the pursuit of a self-projection [and] a postponement of understanding what is." 

-- Jiddu Krishnamurti in This Matter of Culture, Victor Gollancz, 1974.

"Although the variety of meditation procedures seems infinite, most writers on the subject divide them into two principle categories: concentration and mindfulness (or insight). Concentrative meditation focuses attention on a single target, such as a candle flame, a series of syllables spoken aloud or silently (a mantrum), an emotion such as reverence or love, or sensations such as those accompanying breathing or walking. Most Yogic [Hindu] meditations are concentrative.

"Mindfulness or insight meditation makes no attempt to control the mind content but endeavors to maintain an even, uninvolved attentiveness to whatever thoughts, sensations, or emotions appear spontaneously. Most Buddhist meditations are of this type.

"Some forms of meditation combine the two approaches, as when a sensory focus on breathing is coupled with noting distractions that arise. But in no form of meditation does anyone engage in discursive, analytical thought. ... Meditation is designed to counter the usual use of the mind for problem solving and conceptualization, activities especially marked in the West."

-- Arthur Deikman in The Observing Self: Mysticism and Psychotherapy, Beacon Press, 1982. 

"The route to mindfulness is present-centered attention. Mindfulness is being 'willfully passive.' We deliberately decide to observe present experience without interfering with it... [B]y bringing theses experiences into consciousness, we will be able... to transcend them, to know them, to complete them and to move on." 

-- Ron Kurtz in Body-Centered Psychotherapy: The Hakomi Method, LifeRhythm, 1990. 

"Chogyam Trungpa... stressed that... to return again and again to the immediacy of our experience... uncovers a complete openness to things just as they are without conceptual padding. It allows us to lighten up and to appreciate our world and ourselves unconditionally... to become one with it rather than split ourselves in two, one part of us rejecting or judging another part... His instruction on how to relate with the thoughts was [to]... leave them free to dissolve back into space without making meditation into a self-improvement project." 

-- Pema Chodron in Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears, Shambala, 2010.

"Don't battle with inattention, don't try and say, 'I must be attentive' - it's childish. Know that you are inattentive, be aware, choicelessly, that you are inattentive. What of it? But the moment in that inattention there is action, be aware of that action.

-- Jiddu Krishnamurti, from a public talk in San Diego, California, 1970.

"The practice of self-observation begins with a desire and resolution on your part: 'I want to know what really is, regardless of how I prefer things to be. ... In its most general form, the practice of self-observation is simply a matter of paying attention to everything, noticing whatever happens, being open-mindedly curious about all that is going on. This everything will almost always be a mixture of perceptions of external events and your internal reactions to them. ... Whatever is, is an appropriate focus for observation.”

-- Charles Tart in Waking Up: Overcoming Obstacles to Human Potential, New Science Library, 1987.

"To practice insight meditation, one should restrict one's attention to the bare notice of sensations and thoughts. One's attitude should be completely receptive to whatever contents arise in the mind. ... [D]istracting thoughts or feelings may be noted, registered, and left behind. As this process goes on, the meditator has a succession of realizations about the nature of mind and self."

-- Arthur Deikman in The Observing Self: Mysticism and Psychotherapy, Beacon Press, 1982. 

"We have not come together to satisfy our intellects. This we can do through books and second-hand information. We have come to satisfy the inner need to know ourselves, to share our oneness, to hear directly what life is. To receive life we must be open to it. Life can only be understood by life. The means that being open is itself life. ... Nothing that can be known has existence in itself. It depends on a knower. The knower is consciousness. Only consciousness never changes. We must find out what never changes in us."

"The mind cannot go beyond itself through its own will. At a certain point it can no longer stay in the realm of thinking and there comes a moment when we find ourselves at the threshold of being. It is only a spontaneous giving up. You will find yourself in a state of waiting without waiting. Then you will be open to the openness. But this is not a process of will. What you are looking for can never be asserted, can never be objective, can never be affirmed. ... It is better to say, "I don't know." In this not knowing there is real knowing."

-- Jean Klein in Beyond Knowledge, Third Millennium, 1994.

"So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. ... The though then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of compulsive thinking."

-- Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, New World Library, 1999. 

"While the mind may try to escape from conditioning itself through meditation, Krishnamurti says, it simply creates in the very attempt another prison of methods to follow and goals to achieve. He opposes techniques of every kind and urges the putting aside of all authority and tradition: From them, one can only collect more knowledge, while understanding is needed instead. According to Krishnamurti, no technique can free the mind, for any effort by the mind only weaves another net. He ... emphatically opposes concentration methods:

"'By repeating Amen or Om or Coca-Cola indefinitely you obviously have a certain experience because by repetition the mind becomes quiet ... It is one of the favorite gambits of some teachers of meditation to insist upon their pupils learning concentration, that is, fixing the mind on one thought and driving out all other thoughts. This is a most stupid, ugly thing, which any schoolboy can do because he is forced to.'

"The 'meditation' Krishnamurti advocates has no system, least of all 'repetition and imitation.' He proposes as both means and end a 'choiceless awareness,' the 'experiencing of what is without naming.' This state is beyond all thought; all thought, he says, belongs to the past, and meditation is always in the present. To be in the present, the mind must relinquish the habits acquired out of the urge to be secure... One must let go of at thought and imagining. ...

"'You have to watch, as you watch a lizard going by, walking across the wall, seeing all of its four feet, how it sticks to the wall, you have to watch it, and as you watch it, you see all the movements, the delicacy of its movements. So in the same way, watch your thinking, do not correct it, do not suppress it -- do not say it is too hard -- just watch it... When the mind realizes the totality of its own conditioning ... then all its movements come to an end: It is completely still, without any desire, without any compulsion, without any motive.'"

-- Daniel Goleman introducing and quoting Jiddu Krishnamurti in The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience, Puttnam & Sons, 1977.

"We must be willing to be completely ordinary people, which means accepting ourselves as we are without trying to become greater, purer, more spiritual, more insightful. If we can accept our imperfections as they are, quite ordinarily, then we can use them as part of the path. But if we try to get rid of our imperfections, then they will be enemies, obstacles on the road to our 'self-improvement.' ... The attitude you bring to spirituality should be natural, ordinary, without ambition. ... And the same is true for the breath. If we can see it as it is, without trying to use it to improve ourselves, then it becomes a part of the path because we are no longer using it as a tool of our personal ambition."

-- Chogyam Trungpa in The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation, Shambala, 1976.

"We seem to have numerous 'I's. There is the I of 'I want,' the I of 'I wrote a letter,' the I of 'I am a psychiatrist' or 'I am thinking.' But there is another I that is basic, that underlies desires, activities, and physical characteristics. This is the subjective sense of our existence. It is different from self-image, the body, passions, fears, social category -- these are aspects of our person that we usually refer to when we speak of the self, but they do not refer to the core of our conscious being, they are not the origin of our sense of personal existence."

"Awareness is something apart from, and different from, all that of which we are aware: thoughts, emotions, images, sensations, desires, and memory. Awareness is the ground in which the mind's contents manifest themselves; they appear in it and disappear once again. ...careful introspection reveals that the objects of awareness -- sensations, thoughts, memories, images and emotions -- are constantly changing and superseding each other. In contrast, awareness continues independently of any specific mental contents."

-- Arthur Deikman in Meditations on a Blue Vase, Fearless Books, 2014.

"While meditation may be cultivated as a formal practice once or twice a day..., the aim is to bring a fresh awareness into everything we do. Whether walking or standing still, sitting or laying down, alone or in company, resting or working, I try to maintain that same careful attention. ... Awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. It is neither a cold, surgical examination of life nor a means of becoming perfect. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance. ... But to embrace hatred does not mean to indulge it. To embrace hatred is to accept it for what it is: a disruptive but transient state of mind. Awareness observes it jolt into being, coloring consciousness and gripping the body. The heart accelerates, the breath becomes shallow and jagged, and an almost physical urge to react dominates the mind. At the same time, the frenzy is set against a dark, quiet gulf of hurt, humiliation, and shame. Awareness notices all this without condoning or condemning, repressing or expressing. It recognizes that just as hatred arises, so will it pass away."

-- Stephen Batchelor in Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening, Penguin-Berkley, 1997.

"Then -- this being a retreat and me having spent much of each day observing my feelings -- I immediately, almost reflexively, examined the melancholy. And right away the feeling was drained of force. It didn't immediately disappear, but it now seemed like nothing more than physical waves, neither good nor bad, moving slowly through my body."

-- Robert Wright in Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Buddhism and Enlightenment, Simon & Schuster, 2017.

"...if we watch the mind as though it were a film projected on a screen, as concentration deepens, it may go into a kind of slow motion and allow us to see more of what is happening. This then deepens our awareness and further allows us to observe the film almost frame by frame, to discover how one thought leads imperceptively to the next. We see how thoughts we took to be 'me' or 'mine' are just an ongoing process. This perspective help break our deep identification with the seeming solid reality of the movie of the mind. As we become less engrossed in the melodrama, we see it's just flow, and can watch it all as it passes. We are not drawn into the action by the passing of judgmental comment... or impatience. When we simply see -- moment to moment -- what's occurring, observing without judgment or preference, we don't get lost thinking... [and] we begin developing... choiceless awareness. We see intention, out of which action comes. We observe the natural process of mind and discover how much of what we so treasured to be ourselves is essentially impersonal phenomena passing by."

-- Stephen Levine in A Gradual Awakening, Anchor-Doubleday, 1979.

"Awareness and equanimity -- this is Vipassana meditation. When practiced together. they lead to liberation from suffering. ... We must become aware of the totality of mind and matter in their subtlest nature. For this purpose it is not enough merely to be mindful of superficial aspects of body and mind, such a physical movements or thoughts. We must develop awareness of sensations throughout the body and maintain equanimity toward them. If we are aware but lack equanimity, then the more conscious we become of the sensations within and the more sensitive we become to them, the more likely we are to react, thereby increasing suffering. On the other hand, if we have equanimity, but know nothing of the sensations within, then this equanimity is only superficial, concealing reactions that are constantly going on unknown in the depths of the mind. ... We seek to be conscious of everything that happens within and at the same time not to react to it, understanding that it will change."

-- William Hart channeling S. N. Goenka in The Art ofLiving: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S. N. Goenka, HarperOne, 1987.

"The reason [point of concentration] meditation... is so popular is because people really want something mechanical that will change their state of consciousness. There are many things that can do it, but it's really very different from living awareness. Most of what goes on in the name of [point of concentration] meditation is just another tranquilizer. It's a way of cooling oneself out, removing oneself from what is, removing oneself from seeing totally the living moment... so that one gets lost in the projections of one's own mind. ... Concentration, which always involves effort, is not meditation. Concentration is a narrowing of the spectrum of awareness, a strengthening of thought. ... Real meditation is a widening of the spectrum of awareness that excludes nothing; there is never effort or force."

-- Joel Kramer in The Passionate Mind: A Manual for Living Creatively with One's Self, North Atlantic Books, 1974.

"...the brain changes physically in response to experience, and new mental skills can be acquired with intentional effort, with focused awareness and concentration. Experience activates neural firing, which in turn leads to the production of proteins that enable new connections to be made among neurons, in the process called neuroplasticity. ... The implication is that neuroplasticity is activated by attention itself, ... [and] by sensory input.

"At the heart of this process... is a form of internal 'tuning in' to oneself that enables people to become their best friend. ... You can have those thoughts and feelings and also be able to just notice them with the wisdom that they are not your identity. They are simply part of your mind's experience. ... The aim-and-sustain skill developed during observation enables you to hold your attention steady, to stabilize the mind. The next step is to distinguish the quality of awareness from the object of attention.

"Without preconceived ideas or judgments, this mindful awareness, this receptive attention, brings us into a tranquil place where we can be aware of and know all elements of our experience."

-- Daniel Siegel in Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, Bantam, 2010.

"...so long as I do not understand myself, I have no basis for thought, and all my search will be in vain. I can escape into illusions, I can run away from contention, strife, struggle; I can worship another; I can look for my salvation through somebody else. But so long as I am ignorant of myself, so long as I am unaware of the total process of myself, I have no [accurate] basis for thought, for affection, for action. ... Without knowing yourself, without knowing your own ways of thinking and why you think certain things, without knowing the background of your conditioning and why you have certain beliefs about art and religion, about your country and your neighbor and about yourself, how can you truly think about anything.

"The more you know about yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end -- you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless  river. ... Only when the mind is tranquil -- through self-knowledge... -- only then, in that tranquility, in that silence, can reality come into being."

-- Jiddu Krishnamurti in The Krishnamurti Reader, Penguin-Arcana, 1954.

"Meditation originates and culminates in the everyday sublimes. I have little interest in achieving states of sustained concentration in which the sensory richness of experience is replaced by pure introspective rapture. I have no interest in reciting mantras, visualizing Buddhas or mandalas, gaining out-of-body experiences, reading others people's thoughts, practicing lucid dreaming, or channeling psychic energies through chakras, let alone letting my consciousness be absorbed in the transcendent perfection of the Unconditioned. Meditation is about embracing what is happening to this organism as it touches its environment in this moment."

-- Stephen Batchelor in After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, Yale U. Press, 2015.

"The expansion of consciousness does not lie in the quantitative accumulation of experiences, but in a qualitative change in the person experiencing... Each time you climb to a higher vantage point the range of your vision is enlarged and your understanding of your entire situation is altered. You see things from a more encompassing perspective which allows you to be less concerned and anxious and enables you to relate to your environment in terms of how it really is rather than how you imagined it to be from a more limited point of view."

-- Swami Rama and Swami Ajaya in Creative Use of Emotion, Himalayan Institute Press, 1987. 

"Real meditation is the highest form of intelligence. It is not a matter of sitting cross-legged in a corner with your eyes shut or standing on your head or whatever it is you do. To meditate is to be completely aware as you are walking, as you are riding in the bus, as you are working in your office or in your kitchen; completely aware of the words you use, the gestures you make, the manner of your talk, the way you eat, and how you push people around. To be choicelessly aware of everything about you and within yourself, is meditation."

-- Jiddu Krishnamurti in The Collected Works, Vol. XIII, Krishnamurti Foundations, 2014.

"'How come nothing happened for me? What a dud I am!' ... But often it is those who said they didn't 'get it' so easily who later display considerable insight into that which blocks the qualities they were attempting to cultivate. They may well have seen the nature of that which limits forgiveness or mercy or letting go or healing more clearly than one who 'in a lucky moment' was able to get some depth of experience of the qualities they were examining. It is often when it 'doesn't work' that the work to be done is most clearly seen." 

-- Stephen Levine in Healing into Life and Death, Anchor Doubleday, 1987. 

"Meditation is inquiry into the very being of the meditator. As human beings we are all capable of inquiry, of discovery, and this whole process is meditation. Meditation is inquiry into the very being of the meditator. You cannot meditate without self-knowledge, without being aware of the ways of your own mind, from the superficial responses to the most complex subtleties of thought. I am sure it is not really difficult to know, to be aware of oneself, but it is difficult for most of us because we are so afraid to inquire, to grope, to search out. Our fear is not of the unknown, but of letting go of the known. It is only when the mind allows the known to fade away that there is complete freedom from the known, and only then is it possible for the new impulse to come into being.

-- Jiddu Krishnamurti in The Collected Works, Vol. X, Krishnamurti Foundations, 2014.

"Because awareness is a view of reality free from ideas and judgments, it is clearly impossible to define and write down what it reveals. Anything which can be described is an idea. ... I shall therefore have to be content with talking about the false impression which awareness removes, rather than the truth which it reveals. The latter can only be symbolized with words which mean little or nothing to those without a direct understanding of the truth in question. What is true and positive is too real and too living to be described, and to try to describe it is like putting red paint on a red rose.

"Understanding comes through awareness. Can we, then, approach our experience -- our sensations, feelings, and thoughts -- quite simply, as if we had never known them before, and, without prejudice, look at what is going on. ... There is no experience but present experience. What you know, what you are actually aware of, is just what is happening at this moment, and no more."

Alan Watts in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, Random House-Pantheon, 1951.

"There is no other way to succeed than to draw the mind back every time it turns outwards and fix it in the Self. There is no need for meditation or mantra or japa or anything of the sort, because these are our real nature. All that is needed is to give up thinking of objects rather than the Self. Meditation is not so much thinking of the Self as giving up thinking of the not-Self. When you give up thinking of outward objects and prevent your mind from going outwards by turning it inwards and fixing it in the Self, the Self alone remains."

"Whenever a thought arises, do not be carried away by it. You become aware of the body when you forget the Self. But can you forget the Self? Being the Self how can you forget it? There must be two selves for one to forget the other. It is absurd. So the Self is not depressed, nor is it imperfect. It is ever happy."

-- Sri Ramana Maharshi in Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, Arkana, 1985.

"Meditation is not the repetition of the word, nor the experiencing of a vision, nor the cultivating of silence. The bead and the word do quiet the chattering mind, but this is a form of self-hypnosis. You might as well take a pill. ... If you say, ‘I will begin today to control my thoughts, to sit quietly in the meditative posture, to breathe regularly,’ then you are caught in the tricks with which one deceives oneself. Meditation is not a matter of being absorbed in some grandiose idea or image. That only quiets one for the moment, as a child absorbed by a toy is for the time being quiet. But as soon as the toy ceases to be of interest, the restlessness and the mischief begin again. Meditation is not the pursuit of an invisible path leading to some imagined bliss. The meditative mind is seeing, watching, listening, without the word, without comment, without opinion... attentive to to the movement of life in all its relationships."

-- Jiddu Krishnamurti in The Only Revolution, Harper & Row, 1970.

"We are blind and crazy most  of the time... although we do not know it. Our abstractions swirl through our heads, creating phantom worlds of their own in which we stumble around enchanted, seeking to escape by constructing more rooms within more mental rooms. The rooms are our theories... what is good [or bad], what is man [or woman], time, death and god. Most theories were learned so long ago we forgotten they are theories; we think they're real. Yet every thought we have is unreal, a selection, an abstraction. In the abstract rooms we cannot see the world. It is a perceptual problem; the answer is not more thought but more perception." 

-- Arthur Deikman in Personal Freedom: On Finding Your Way to the Real World, Viking / Grossman, 1976. 

"No need to 'improve' yourself, no need to accept stoically your 'existential despair.' No need to drink the poison of "Each person is alone." No need to swear allegiance to the strange world you've been taught and learned: The road of time, isolation, meaninglessness, and the confinement of your consciousness to the little box, labeled with your name, out of which you peer. No need to push aside your inner sense that says, 'Something is wrong.'"

-- Idries Shah in Thinkers of the East, Jonathan Cape, 1972. 

Zoo Station

I'm ready
Ready for the laughing gas
I'm ready
Ready for what's next
Ready to duck
Ready to dive
Ready to say
I'm glad to be alive
I'm ready
Ready for the push, uh huh

In the cool of the night
In the warmth of the breeze
I'll be crawling 'round
On my hands and knees

Ready
Ready for the gridlock
I'm ready
To take it to the street, uh huh
I'm ready for the shuffle
Ready for the deal
Ready to let go of the steering wheel

I'm ready
Ready for the crush, uh huh

Zoo Station
Zoo Station

Alright
Alright, alright, alright, not alright
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright, it's alright

Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass

-- Adam Clayton, Dave Evans, Larry Mullen, Paul Hewson • Copyright © 1991, Universal Music Publishing Group

A Meditation Book List

The 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing via Self-Observation Meditation