Your experience, on present evidence. Dhamma teacher Howard Cohn’s phrase advises us to take the experience of the moment solely as the sum total of sensory perception, what’s actually happening minus the usual overlay of opinion, mental spin, or framework.
I’m at Market & Church Safeway; I despise this store and I’m unhappy and stressed and I want to get out of here as soon as possible and I’ll bet they don’t have half of what I want and I can’t buy most of the produce because it’s soaked in pesticides and the meat because it’s full of nitrites and I wouldn’t trust a dairy product from this store if my life depended on it. Get me out of here, I hate all these nasty people crowding in on me and all this noise.
That’s the overlay, the mental spin.
Light pressure on my left footpad; my left check is a bit cool. The pressure in the palm of my hands and a bit of wetness from gripping the handle of the shopping cart. Pain in my left ear. Prickly sensation on the top of my head. Heartbeat. Thoughts coming through…sounds coming through…heartbeat goes up a bit…step step step step step….left foot pressure…bright red color!
That’s the present evidence.
Howie’s stress-reduction technique (Vipassana insight meditation) got me through the day yesterday. For whatever reason I awoke in the grips of a stop-the-presses aversion attack, a.k.a. a snit. Ten years of dhamma practice have helped me to recognize and deal with a mental state that I used to experience on a regular basis. Nowadays, my basal emotional temperature runs sunny and warm, while my old-timey aversion attack/snit episodes have almost vanished.
But they haven’t ended altogether. Perhaps it was a lack of sleep or, as Scrooge says of Jacob Marley’s ghost, a bit of underdone potato. Or just a body cycle marking the end of another school year. A long afternoon nap plus a fairly decent night’s sleep has helped to burn out the snit, although frissons of it yet remain, brush fires flickering in the wake of a forest conflagration.
In snit mode, I become preternaturally sensitive to sound. The softest bloop amplifies into the deafening crunch of Godzilla stomping down Tokyo. About a decade ago I was sitting a Vipassana meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. At the time I was yet unaware of my propensity for aversion attacks, mental thunderstorms that arise out of nowhere, raise hell for a while, then dissipate. Instead, I interpreted my aversion attacks as justified annoyance in the presence of irritation—i.e., I looked for something to blame. In case of IMS, that was a heat-exchange pump somewhere on the premises, combined with the “phoebe” birds (named after their chirp) that set up housekeeping in the trees on the lawn. The pump was in particular driving me absolutely crazy: BOOOOOOOOOO …… YMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMP…………… BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ………… YMMMMMMMMMMMMP, over and over, on and on. It sounded like a sledgehammer, remorseless, unstoppable, and inescapable. Eventually I fled the building, stomped around in the surrounding countryside and discovered that, even when I was a half-mile away from my tormentor, I could still hear it, echoing off the placid waters of the reservoir: BOOOOOOOOOOO …….. YMMMMMMMMMMMMMMP.
Thus began my education re aversion attacks. The sound that was driving me bonkers was largely the product of my own imagination, amplified and distorted beyond all reason by the fun-house-mirror warping of an aversion attack. Equanimity began to return when I named the pump “George” and began thinking: oh, there’s ol’ George again. Hi George, old buddy! Before long George revealed himself as nothing more than an inoffensive soft hum, an acoustic sheep in wolf’s clothing if ever there were.
Not too long after I was on another retreat, this time at Spirit Rock here in the Bay Area. Three days into the retreat I watched my calm transform itself into snarling aversion in the space of a single breath. An innocuous thought, drifting up out of nowhere as thoughts do, paused on its wispy trail and morphed into ugly anger, for no reason, with no purpose. The thought had no basis in reality, no importance, just one of those flickery mental phenomena that make up the bulk of our everyday stream of consciousness.
For the next few hours I was fit to be tied, sitting there in outward yogi calm while my head seethed with anger, discontent, heat, vengeance, and churn. After a while the upset faded, but I was still feeling the effects later when I had an interview with a particularly insightful teacher with whom I’ve had a long-standing and comfortable rapport. It was that teacher who suggested I treat the aversion attack as mental weather—like a storm that blows in out of nowhere, rains like crazy, then fades away. (She knows I spent some years in Denver and used the analogy of those summertime early-evening storms so typical of the region.)
With that I was on my way to understanding that my aversion attacks were habitual behavior. Looking back over a substantial series of retreats, I noticed that three days was my average length before the blizzard hit. Once I knew that I was witnessing a distressing, but harmless, mental phenomenon, I could name it “oh, just an aversion attack” and eventually it would subside. More to the point, it had lost much of its power to influence my behavior. With that, aversion attacks of any duration or severity were soon a thing of the past.
That made yesterday’s attack—unexpected, sustained, and severe—all the more intriguing, while annoying. Sound, once again, became a major point of contention. I live on a surprisingly quiet side-street in an anything-but-quiet neighborhood. By using a decibel meter around the house I have determined that the average hovers in the low 30 dB area—remarkably quiet for an urban environment, about the same as a whisper-quiet library. By contrast, I can walk a block and a half over to Market Street and begin registering decibel levels streaking up near 90 dB as heavy traffic swoops by, with an average around 70 dB. Castro Street itself runs in the 60s. Keep in mind that the decibel scale is logarithmic rather than graduated, so a difference of a single decibel represents an order of magnitude. A normal conversation at a normal distance runs in the 50s to 60s, horns honking in stuck traffic in the 90s, while a power saw at three feet distance is 110 dB. A rock concert is likely to come in around 115 dB, similar to the sound of sandblasting close up. A jet engine heard from a 100 foot distance comes in at 140 dB and will cause permanent hearing loss with even brief exposure.
So my house qualifies as a blissfully quiet place, and yet I spent most of the afternoon wearing my Peltor Ultimate 10 AOSafety ear protectors, thick headphone-like affairs which guarantee 30-35 dB of sound suppression. That meant that I was effectively in a sound-free environment, broken only by a whisper of protruding sounds such as a truck passing by or hammering from the construction site across the street, but even those made it barely above the hearing threshold. Quiet, quiet, quiet. Mostly I heard my own internal sounds—blood rushing through my ears, my heartbeat, the occasional light pop of neck vertebrae. I’m free from tinnitus so I didn’t have to worry about spurious pitches or acoustic phenomena.
With sonic irritations safely banished, with my cat calm and sleeping in the crook of my arm, I concentrated on experiencing the moment on present evidence—pressure here, heat there, a tingle there, a quiet sound there. I read for a while then slipped off into dreamland, waking up several hours later in a much better frame of mind. This morning I recognized some storm clouds yet remaining but they continue to dissipate. It’s over.
Present evidence: warmth along my right forearm, cool along my left. Colors: white, blue, a flash of red. Slight burning sensation in stomach area. Pressure on the back of my neck, warm heat along bottom of shoulderblades in contact with the desk chair. Buzz from space heater to my right. Right foot pressure on floor, slightly damp heat in toes. In breath, out breath. Tickle in nostrils. Pulsation in left eyelid. Words come into head, thoughts flicker hither and yon. Some thoughts are worth writing down. Others aren’t.
Question: repeat “worth writing down” after “others aren’t” for the sake of clarity? Or omit “worth writing down” in the interest of style and prose rhythm? Omit “worth writing down.”
Pressure in soft palate. Exhale. Warmth at nostrils. Tremor near right cheekbone. Inhale. Coolness at nostrils.
Present evidence, and an ending.