Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing

This article was enhanced and updated 19 June 2020, 8 April 2021 and 1 October 2021.

"Now, it is clear that we cannot resolve any human problem... without understanding ourselves, and the understanding of ourselves is possible only when we do not condemn or justify that of which we are aware. To be aware without condemnation, justification or comparison, of every thought, of every mood, of every reaction, does not demand the approximation of an idea. What it does require is... going into it fully, completely. Most of us... would rather escape... through an idea, through approximation, through comparison or condemnation, and... we never solve the issue in front of us." -- Jiddu Krishnamurti, lecturing in Paris, 7 May 1950.

  

The redditor on r/Krishnamurti asked, "How do you, personally, practice choiceless awareness?" So I answered the only way I could, which is based on my own experience of it: 

While I began (45 years ago) with the interoceptive body inventory meditation that was popular then, and later moved on to various forms of vipassana insight's unrestricted awareness of whatever just is, it wasn't until I had 1) read many of Krishnamurti's and other author's books on this list, and 2) learned in 2013 how to use the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing that I began to actually understand experientially what K. was talking about when he used the term "choiceless awareness."

Whatever comes to awareness via vipassana observation comes to awareness, and I allow it to be noticed, acknowledged, accepted (as being), owned, appreciated (for why it's there), "understood" (as K. used that words so many times) and then allowed to be felt interoceptively as what seems to be "neuroemotional energy" sometimes equating to the Fight / Flight / Freeze / Faint / Feign (or Fawn) Responses that can lead to Fry and then Freak if left unprocessed. Which is why one needs to practice interoceptive meditation -- perhaps assisted by those 10 StEPs in the manner described at the link below about the 10 StEPs + SP4T -- on a regular basis: Do that and CA not only becomes available when one is emotionally triggered... it becomes increasingly habitual and automatic.

Having read about K.'s "process" in several of his own and others' books (including Jayakar's, Holroyd's and Vernon's, all listed right here), it does seem to me that what K. himself went through may have been the painful release of emotional or autonomic "blockage" (or repression or even dissociation) similar to what I experienced for long periods of time in the 1990s and early '00s. And later on learned a lot about from reading gobs of material by all those mentioned in the first paragraph of this earlier post on reddit.  

But that process is only painful when we resist it, when we fight it, when we don't want it.  Because just allowing the feelings (or, for example, grief, anxiety, shame, guilt, worry, remorse, regret, resentment, rage, etc.) to be there in "choiceless awareness" turned out -- for me, anyway -- to be the key to working through Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief processing with a minimum of "resistance" thereto (noticing that as well).

See also More on Krishnamurti's "Choiceless Awareness."  

Or just get THE BOOK.

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Additional Resources on this Topic

Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing in Polyvagal Resilience Therapy 

Critical Thinking, Logical Fallacies & the 10 StEPs

"HOW," the 5 Stages & the 10 StEPs (in ProcessFiend's reply to the original post on that reddit thread)

The 10 StEPs + SP4T

Understanding & Recovering from the Consensus Trance using the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing 

How Self Awareness Works to Digest Emotional Pain

Acceptance (in not-moses's reply to the original post on that reddit thread)

Western "Mechanism" and Eastern "Spirituality" -- A Joint, rather than Exclusive, Venture

The Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Library

Dread: The Essential Emotional Experience of Complex PTSD

See the definitions.

I just spent 45 minutes in vipassana (insight) meditation looking at -- meaning feeling -- the body's affective, sensory experience of dread. I just used the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing along with Pat Ogden's Sensorimotor Processing for Trauma to sit and feel the sensations... as well as observe the thoughts that came up and the impulses to act upon the thoughts and feelings. The entire pantheon of autonomic affects came up, including the Fight, Flight, Freeze, Faint, Feign and Fawn Responses that -- if left ignored, repressed or dissociated into diverse "compartments" can lead in time to the sympathetic branch's awful Fry and Freak syndromes.

I am a very motivated meditator. I spent a total of 30 months in segments as long as eight on two occasions, and eleven on a third, in Fry and Freak Complex PTSD during the nine years from 1994 to 2003. When the "Hindu Goddess" physician recognized it for what it actually was and changed my medication package 180 degrees from what it had been to the very simple regimen that actually worked to relieve the worst of the terror, I vowed that I would find The Door once and for all. This earlier post summarizes that process and the arrival at the 10 StEPs + SP4T six years ago. I have never looked back, so to speak. But actually, my "Observing Self " has looked back -- or at least in -- a lot.

There are other paths, and they should be noted. Because "one size of shoe never fits every foot." The other psychotherapies listed in section seven of that same earlier post were helpful to me on my path, and one or more of them may prove to be the "magic bullet" that puts another on The Path.

But regardless of which path (or collection thereof) one elects to take, it does seem to the "alter" in my mind today that is the result of having used the 10 StEPs and SP4T for these past six years... that "exposure" -- or direct observation -- is the starting point. For me, at least, followed by...

noticing (of what is observed),

recognition (of what is noticed),

acknowledgement (of what is recognized),

acceptance (of what is acknowledged),

ownership (of what is accepted as being "what just is"), appreciation (of what is accepted and owned), and

experiential -- rather than merely intellectual or conceptual -- understanding thereof is what sets the mind at the elective doorstep of

interoception that facilitates the

digestion and discharge of the neuroemotional (or neuroaffective) energy of dread

that is stored in the enteric and default mode neural networks that include the limbic emotion regulation system in the mid- and fore-brain.

- - - - - - 
Someone asked, "Can you expand on the sympathetic branch's fry and freak syndromes? I have not encountered this language before, and a quick Google search for 'fry and freak syndrome' has yielded nothing."

I answered, "Frying is akin to the process of allostatic loading as described by Bruce McEwen, Sonya Lupien and others. Freak is being in a very high SUDS state of abject terror recycling -- or "fear of fear" -- that may not abate with medication and can ultimately only be treated with one or more of the cognitive-behavioral therapies like those listed in section 7a of this earlier post, often requiring the addition of one of the mindfulness-based CBTs like those listed in section 7b."
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Resources & References

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That's just the first four letters of the alphabet. 

Parallel Histories in the Development of Abrahamic Extremism?

Social constructionists (like Assman, Berger & Luckman, Berreby, Burrow, Cooley, Durkheim, et al; see the bibliography below) have argued for decades that almost all major religions have been co-opted for political purposes, including "real estate" and wealth acquisition or protection. In the brief essay that follows (originally composed to answer a question about extremist Islamic cults on a Reddit sub), I try to summarize the history of such co-opting since the advent of the western, Abrahamic religions about three millennia ago. 

From the perspective of one who's read a lot (so far; still reading) on both cult dynamics and cult history, it looks to me (as well as Huston Smith, Bart Ehrman Thomas Cahill and Karen Armstrong; look them up?) like Islam is on a track that parallels the other four major institutionalized, Abrahamic belief systems: Judaism, Roman Catholic Christianity, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and reformist Protestantism.

All five schemes have moved through periods of assertive (often quite aggressive and truly violent) and emotionally charismatic, evangelical fundamentalism. All of the Abrahamic belief systems have sponsored major efforts to subjugate or eradicate the populations of non-believing "savages" in the regions into which these religions expanded: Judaism largely during the post-Exodus period and the establishment of the first Temple, Roman Catholicism in the 3rd through 6th centuries (and again in the 11th through 16th in response to the the perceived threat of Islam in southern Europe), Eastern Orthodoxism in the 5th through 16th both "originally" and later in response to the same Islamic threat, and Protestantism in the 18th through 21st centuries both "originally" and in response to the Islamic threat.

It is very useful to look into Islam through the eyes of historians like Peter Frankopan, Jay Rubenstein, Barnaby Rogerson, Kevin Phillips, Barbara Tuchman and Daniel Yergin to wrap one's mind around the long history of the reciprocal reactivity between the various Abrahamic religious establishments. Like Judaism, Islam was not created to be a "spiritual" belief system. Several "social constructionist" authors among those in the bibliography below have asserted that both Judaism and Islam were devised from the outset to be hierarchical mechanisms for cultural organization and elitist wealth accumulation, and that Roman Catholicism was utilized by such as Ferdinand & Isabella to finesse colonial expansion in the Western Hemisphere. (Quran author Muhammad of Mecca was married into a very wealthy trading family that appears to have sponsored his writing. And Moses was a cultural Egyptian raised in the house of the pharaoh, an elitist accumulator of wealth if there ever was one.)

That said, Muhammad and his devotees were originally quite disposed toward fair treatment of the Jews, Catholics and Orthodoxists despite Islam's very aggressive political expansions across North Africa and into southern -- and then northern -- Europe in the 8th through 14th centuries. But as the Catholics, Orthodixists and Jews began to push back against Islamic political expansion, the fair treatment policy went away in favor of "full-on smiting," pretty much as the Jews themselves had done in Canaan during the post-Exodus era.

Things quieted down in the late Ottoman era and might have remained that way had it not been for the discovery of petroleum in the Islamic Middle East in the early 20th century... and (from the Islamic point of view) the "economic rape" of the Middle East by the oil-thirsty Jewish and Christian European colonialists, especially during the period that began with World War I and ended right after the Vietnam War. (In fact, say some historians, it was the first "oil crisis" that forced the US out of Vietnam.)

The Israeli, British & French intervention into Egyptian politics and the US CIA's intervention in Iranian politics in the mid-1955s was the major flash point for what has become "The Situation" ever since the 1970s: An uneasy detent at official levels with a series of flare-ups fostered by leveraging existing Islamic evangelism, fundamentalism and charismatic emotionalism and oil money to fuel the development and maintenance of such extreme "political cults" as Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the PLO, Al Queda, and ISIS to push back against Western Jewish and Christian economic dominance in the region.

References & Resources:

Karen Armstrong: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; New York: MJF Books, 1993.

Steven Arterburn & Jack Felton: Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming Religious Addiction; Nashville: Oliver-Nelson, 1991.

Jan Assman: Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism; Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1998.

Aaron Beck: Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility and Violence; New York: Harper-Collins, 1999.

Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckman: The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge; New York: Doubleday, 1966.

David Berreby: Us & Them: The Science of Identity; U. of Chicago Press, 2005.

Boethius of Rome: Consolation of Philosophy, somewhere in what is now Switzerland or southern Germany: The Holy Roman Church, c. 524.

Jean Bottero: The Birth of God: The Bible and the Historian; orig. pub. 1986; Philadelphia: Penn State Press, 2010.

Trigant Burrow: The Social Basis of Consciousness; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927.

Thomas Cahill: Mysteries of the Middle Ages and the Beginning of the Modern World; New York: Random House, 2006.

Robert Cialdini: Influence: Science and Practice, 4th Ed.; New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Charles Cooley: Human Nature and the Social Order; Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1902, 1986.

Arthur Deikman: Them and Us: Cult Thinking and the Terrorist Threat; Berkeley, CA: Bay Tree Publishing, 2003.

Emile Durkhem: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; orig. pub. 1912, London: Allen & Unwin, 1915.

Jacques Ellul: Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes; orig. pub. 1965; New York: Vintage, 1973.

Bart D. Ehrman: The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Peter Frankopan: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World; New York: Vintage, 2017.

Sigmund Freud: The Future of an Illusion; orig. pub. 1927, New York: Norton, 1961.

David Fromkin: A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922; London: Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1989.

Erich Fromm: Psychoanalysis and Religion; orig. pub. 1950, New Haven CT: Yale U. Press, 1973.

Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (ed.): The Invention of Tradition; Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1983.

Eric Hoffer: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements; New York: Harper and Row, 1951, 1966.

Ralph Hood, Jr.; Peter Hill; W. Paul Williamson: The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism; New York: Guildford Press, 2005.

Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.

Philip Jenkins: The Great & Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade; New York: HarperOne, 2014.

Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad: The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power; Berkeley, CA: Frog , Ltd., 1993.

Gustav LeBon: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind; orig. pub. 1895, Minneola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002.

Daniel Lerner: The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East; Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958.

Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince: On the Art of Power; orig. pub. 1512, New York: Bantam Classics, 1984.

William Manchester: A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance -- Portrait of an Age; Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1992.

Walter Martin: The Kingdom of the Cults; Minneapolis: Berthany House, 1967, 1977, 1987.

William McDougall: The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology; orig. pub. 1920, North Stratford: Ayer Company, NH, 1973.

Jack Miles: God, A Biography; New York: Random House 1996.

Jack Miles: Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God; New York: Random House, 2001.

C. Wright Mills: The Power Elite; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956, 2000.

Franz Neumann: Anxiety and Politics, in Maurice Stein et al (editors): Identity and Anxiety: Survival of the Person in Mass Society; Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960.

Richard Overy: The Times Complete History of the World, 8th Ed.; London: The Times of London, 2010.

Elaine Pagels: Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelations; New York: Viking, 2012.

Talcott Parsons: Social Systems and The Evolution of Action Theory; New York: The Free Press, 1975.

Kevin Phillips: The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, & The Triumph of Anglo-America; New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Kevin Phillips: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money; New York: Penguin, 2007.

Kurt Riezler: The Social Psychology of Fear, in Maurice Stein et al (editors): Identity and Anxiety: Survival of the Person in Mass Society; Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960.

Barnaby Rogerson: The Last Crusades: The Hundred-Year Battle for the Center of the World; New York: MJF Books, 2009.

Jay Rubenstein: Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse; New York: Perseus - Basic Books, 2011.

William Sargant: Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain Washing, orig. pub. 1957, Cambridge, MA: Malor Books, 1997.

Victor Sebestyen: 1946: The Making of the Modern World; New York: Pantheon, 2014.

Huston Smith: The World's Religions: The Revised & Updated Edition of The Religions of Man; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Wilfred Trotter: Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War; orig. pub. 1916, New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005.

Barbara Tuchman: Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour; New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1976.

Barbara Tuchman: The Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

Max Weber, Talcott Parsons (translator): The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1930.

Daniel Yergin: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Daniel Yergin: The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World; New York: Penguin Press, 2011.

One may look over synopses and reviews of these books at this location.

One may also look over a selection of books on cult dynamics at this location.