Train of Thought: Recent Episodes
Ethan Hill
Essays written and read by yoga instructor, engineer and breath coach Ethan Hill as he enters the terrain of yoga and modern-day living.
Are you finally ready to transcend your suffering? To overcome your misery?
Read along with Ethan as he integrates the lessons from his most-recent meditation retreat.
https://ethanhill.org/tot/cell-3
This work is designed to be both listened to and read simultaneously. Click here for the written version of this essay.
Are you finally ready to transcend your suffering? To overcome your misery?
Read along with Ethan as he integrates the lessons from his most-recent meditation retreat.
https://ethanhill.org/tot/cell-2
This work is designed to be both listened to and read simultaneously. Click here for the written version of this essay.
Are you finally ready to transcend your suffering? To overcome your misery?
Read along with Ethan as he integrates the lessons from his most-recent meditation retreat.
https://ethanhill.org/tot/cell-1
This work is designed to be both listened to and read simultaneously. Click here for the written version of this essay.
Are you finally ready to transcend your suffering? To overcome your misery?
Read along with Ethan as he uncovers the lessons from his most-recent meditation retreat.
https://ethanhill.org/tot/cell-intro
This work is designed to be both listened to and read simultaneously. Click here for the written version of this essay.
At bottom, suffering is identification with desire, and is caused by attaching to the idea that Reality should be different from how it actually is.
An example: you really want to be eating a scone at your favorite coffee shop…but instead you’re in an ill-lit, tiny closet trying to follow the breath: suffering. You desperately want this old Indian dude to end his off-pitch, foreign chanting and singing…but you can’t mute the speaker: suffering. In either case, your frustration (suffering) stems from a mismatch between fantasy and Reality. And that mismatch creates a desire.
Duh.
Desire can be broken into two categories: craving and aversion. Likes and dislikes, in a way. Either you want Reality to include something you believe it lacks — i.e. scones. Or you want Reality not to include something you believe it already has — i.e. singing in foreign languages.
Again, duh.
Every experience of suffering includes both. Every craving for a scone hides an aversion towards not having it. Any aversion towards an old Indian dude singing in Pāli implies a craving for either silence, or a different sound.
A little less obvious, but still…duh.
These are still only surface-level truths, so let’s dig deeper.
You believe you want a scone, but really you want the sensations that arise from eating the scone. The absence of a scone does not cause suffering. It is merely a thought — more symbolic than literal. That is, the scone is actually a psychological stand-in for something more physiological.
Wait…say that again…?
You don’t really want the scone, you want the rush you get in your body from smelling, tasting, and ingesting the scone. You don’t really want the old Indian dude to stop chanting, you want the feeling of restlessness in your chest to go away.
This can seem like an arbitrary and unimportant distinction at first — I certainly used to think so. But now I’m convinced that it’s not. In fact, I’m convinced that this understanding, once fully embraced, changes the context of all human experience. It adds a new dimension to every single preference we have, every single decision we make, and every single interaction we partake in.
Oh...and it provides a loophole out of suffering. More on that later.
ethanhill.org/tot
Ethan's Instagram: @ohhillyea
They say the modern human’s attention span has been reduced to that of a goldfish: about 8 seconds or less before we get bored and inadvertently turn our focus towards something more immediately gratifying. Now, I don’t know who “they” are that discovered this, nor am I even sure if “their” 8-second number is scientifically accurate…but I can certainly confirm it anecdotally. That is, I’ve been noticing my mind flickering in and out of the present moment like static more often than I’d prefer.
Selfishly, our culture’s dwindling attention spans concern me, because most of the content I create and share requires serious focus to understand and implement. Half-assed concentration just doesn’t cut it when it comes to something like stress reduction, or self-improvement, or finding meaning in this unfathomably wide Universe, or learning to appreciate what you already have.
Everything important in life requires attention. Without it, we’re sentenced to repeat our pasts over and over and over again — doomed, really, to live by everyone else’s rules and standards. Worse still, mindlessness — the opposite of attention — exposes our raw emotional state to the world, making us vulnerable to hijack, click-bait media tossing you and me around like rag dolls until we’ve completely lost our originality. Until we’re no longer quite sure exactly what we stand for.
Unfortunately, there’s not a lot I can do about all of this, besides ask that you take this content seriously. Commit to it. Read and/or listen intently. Challenge your assumptions. Poke holes in my logic. Find what’s true! Expand your horizons. Ditch what no longer serves you. And…of course, have fun with it all.
Just be aware? That’s it…!? That’s the Buddha’s brilliant insight!? Bullshit. Too simple.
Simple? Yes. Easy? Not even remotely.
For example let’s say…oh, I don’t know…the loaded and vivid memory of your beloved high school girlfriend dumping you randomly arises. The thought triggers a lot: grief, burning rage, numbness, a little bit of nausea. Running in parallel to these sensations are craving, aversion, desire, and suffering. It’s all there. It’s all uncomfortable. It’s all unpleasant. Please for the love of God make it stop.
Aha, but then you remember the Buddha’s claim! If you are fully Aware of an unpleasant sensation, then it will cease to be a source of suffering, because you no longer have preferences for what happens to it.
“So all I have to do,” you think to yourself “is place my undivided attention on these sensations — the kind of attention that is free from all clinging and fear — and the suffering will supposedly disappear!”
So you give it a go! First, you try pinpointing exactly where these sensations are occurring, down to the millimeter. They can crop up literally anywhere on the body, meaning there is a lot of area to cover. Where do you even begin? In your chest? Eyebrows? Gallbladder? The hypothesis doesn’t say…
It could take a long while to locate their precise latitudes and longitudes, but for argument’s sake let’s say you quickly track them all down. Maybe it’s grief towards the center of your left shoulder socket, burning rage within the upper-half of your descending colon, numbness in your Adam’s apple, and nausea near your eleventh thoracic vertebra.
You can’t focus well on all of the various sensations at once, so instead you choose just one of the pain’s structural centers, zoom in with your attention, and wait. One second passes. And wait. Two seconds. Nothing happens, still uncomfortable. Five seconds, ten seconds. The suffering doesn’t seem to have stopped. How long should it take? A minute? An hour? The hypothesis doesn’t say…it only claims that it will disappear the moment you are fully mindful of the sensation.
“What was she wearing that day?” Oops…the thought comes out of Nowhere and is just interesting enough to capture your attention.
If you aren’t careful, like a full-blown schizophrenic you will continue this psychotic narrative with yourself all the way back down into the inferno: “Oh God, her outfits were so cute. Ahhhh, I loved her so much. I would’ve done anything for her. Fuck, I can’t believe she cheated on me with that ROTC guy! How could she!? And then I forgave her!? I had no self-respect. God, I was so desperate for love and handjobs. And then she dumped me!? Me!? In front of so many people!? Humiliating. Why didn’t I have the balls to dump her first!? And then I cried like a fucking pussy! Fuck her. Fuck me. Jesus this hurts. Wow this hurts bad. Oh wow this hurts REALLY bad.”
At this point the trickery of the mind has caused you to totally abandon the experiment by unconsciously lasso’ing you back into craving and aversion. It has done so through a series of perfectly compelling thoughts which play off of your unique emotional vulnerabilities.
These trains of thoughts happen in a fraction of a second — so quickly and habitually that they often don’t even register as being vibratory. As if the thoughts were written by and belong to you, instead of just being witnessed by you. As if any thought actually mattered in the grand scheme of things!
This is a real issue, because again — left to its own devices — the ego will persuade itself to ditch the experiment over and over. The mind will repeatedly convince itself that Presence isn’t the answer; that unhappiness can only be solved through more gratification, complaining, and fantasizing.
ethanhill.org/tot/
Ethan's Instagram: @ohhillyea
To summarize the problem:
- Desire for either unpleasant sensations to end, or for pleasant sensations to begin leads to suffering.
- Desire is a thought formed from the Unknown.
- Thoughts trick the brain into creating pleasant and unpleasant sensations in the body.
- Pleasant sensations in the body always give way to unpleasant ones.
Here’s the problem spelled out differently: the entire physical Universe is vibration, attachment to a specific sensational vibration causes suffering, and attachment itself is a thought that is also vibration. Oh and by the way, you have no real clue why you desire it in the first place!
Can you see the dilemma? The infinite regress of misery? Everything is made up of vibration, desiring vibration ultimately spawns misery, and you can’t help but desire vibration! This must be some kind of cruel, sick joke!
All of these facts are even more disastrous given the world’s current technological and political landscape. Billions of us are scrolling aimlessly through our own unique digital reality, only dimly aware that what we are seeing is prescribed to us by an unconscious algorithm that “knows” and prioritizes our most private wants and deepest fears.
This means that in the information age’s current form, reality is more or less organized towards your suffering, because almost every piece of content — both online or in-person — has at least some intention of generating thoughts in your mind. Each thought then sets off a flood of pleasant and unpleasant sensations, with each sensation planting a seed of desire, and each desire eventually blooming into misery. Thought diffuses into suffering, and then suffering crystallizes back into thought.
To make matters worse (good news coming soon, I promise), it’s a cycle that gets progressively more sinister over time. For how do we tend to respond when a wave inevitably bottoms out? Here are a few: we gratify, complain, or fantasize.
Here’s a hypothetical example that has definitely never happened to me. Let’s say that habitually and out of Nowhere the vision of having mind-blowing sex arises in the mind. The thought is so powerful — so seemingly realistic — that it actually tricks part of your brain into believing it’s happening. The result of this mental mirage is a concoction of pleasure-inducing chemicals that avalanches down into your genitalia. How incredible! What a time to be alive!
This is a “vibratory high” — your sensational upswing.
Now let’s say the fantasy lasts a full 7 seconds, upon which you sober up to find yourself quietly huddled in fetal position for the 6th straight hour in your meditation cell. Alone. On a Friday night. The blip of vibrational pleasure disappears and is replaced by feelings of loneliness and shame. How pathetic! What a sad existence you live!
This is a “vibratory low” — your sensational downswing.
What now? Well, typically we (I) either:
- Have sex or masturbate (gratify)
- Whine about how unfair this particular situation is (complain)
- Take our minds off of it by thinking about something else pleasurable (fantasize)
All three responses momentarily solve the problem, because they all induce vibrational upswings; however, they are bandaids.
In fact, it’s worse than that: gratifying, complaining, and fantasizing only dig us into deeper holes, since they all double down on sensation. They solve suffering with more sensation, which can only create more desire, which can only create more suffering!
ethanhill.org/tot
Ethan's Instagram: @ohhillyea
Click for full essay
Ethan's Instagram
Over the last ten days I spent approximately 120 hours with legs crossed and eyes closed. No speaking, no reading, no writing, no technology, no distractions. Wake up at 4AM, sleep at 9PM. Two meals a day: one at 6:30AM and another at 11:00AM. Do your best to remain aware of bodily experience at all times.
About 100 of these hours were spent sitting alone in a meditation cell. A meditation cell — if you’re unfamiliar — is a more charming way of saying ‘small, pitch black closet’. How small? 3 feet by 3 feet, give or take: barely enough room for a bum and a cushion. Besides a blanket to comfort yourself with, the most exciting thing about the space was a speaker on the ceiling corner from which an old Indian man with a thick accent repeated instructions for how to practice Vipassana meditation:
“Start again.” “Sweep your attention from head to toes; toes to head.” “Begin with the understanding of annica — this, too, shall change.” “Observe reality as it is, not as you wish it to be.” “No me, no mine.” “Annica, annica, annica.”
If you are currently picturing a miserable young man sitting in the dark, legs tucked in an upright fetal position, you have the right idea. This was effectively solitary confinement — our justice system’s most malevolent idea for criminal retribution. God forbid anyone be truly alone with themselves for any significant amount of time.
Granted, this was voluntary and thus can’t technically be described as punishment. But when you spend that much time being tricked by your own mind, it doesn’t take much to convince you of damnation. That these 10 days are retribution for your accumulated sins. That somehow, someway, God really is punishing you.
Why would anyone do this to themselves? A lot of reasons: curiosity, desperation, maybe a little bit of masochism. The main one, though (for me at least), would be to find out why one suffers. How does unhappiness work? What are the mechanics of misery?
And why would it be helpful to know that? Because if you truly understand the root cause of your suffering, then you are one step closer to its solution: stop the cause, stop the effect. How elegant and simple it appears on this page. How painful and arduous it is to put into practice.
But that’s why this particular experiment can be so illuminating. Take away almost all pleasures and distractions for 240 hours, gather as much raw unhappiness data as possible, objectively analyze the information for patterns, and then triangulate on an explanation for your misery.
Luckily, I wasn’t starting these tests from scratch. I had some (a lot) of help. Seekers have been exploring the nature of suffering for millennia, perhaps longer. And some of them — most notably Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha — have had the compassion to freely share their findings with the world.
Unfortunately, just reading their lab report is not enough. It’s impossible to intellectualize your way to peace, happiness and enlightenment. You must put in the work. The best these brave and wise trailblazers can do is to provide you with hypotheses. The rest is up to you: run the experiments; find out what’s true; dump the rest.