How to meditate

I was talking to an online friend recently who asked for input about meditation.  I'm not exactly an expert, probably closer to the opposite, just someone who dabbles a bit, but I have been meditating quite a bit lately, averaging more than half an hour a day for 2 1/2 months.  

I was ordained as a Thai Buddhist monk 16 years ago, and I received formal training in meditation in a center at that time (daily training sounds strong; I visited the center, at least, but their input was limited).  I was only a monk for a bit over 2 months, which might sound short, but it's nearly two months longer than the standard stay of two weeks for a younger Thai man to temporarily ordain.  That part is complicated; let's get back to the meditation theme, leaving out my background about a couple of other short term trial periods, the first of which was way back when.

That discussion and input covered what seated meditation is about, not intended as comprehensive background or complete practical advice.  I'll add some thoughts afterward, but never will cover either in lots of detail.  This is basically that input word for word, not adjusted much: 

Of course it's complicated, and people would say different things, and I'm not really some sort of expert.

Your experience would change over time, and probably your approach with it. Initial expectations could also vary, with people seeking different goals.

Probably it's best to set aside what benefits might occur, even though intention and perspective are the main starting points. Let's say that you want to experiment, and maybe increase mental clarity, patience, and a limited degree of insight into your own nature, and that of experienced reality. That works.

A main initial factor will be your tolerance for sitting, how it feels physically. If you plan to sit for only 10 minutes I think that won't be an issue, but within 15 to 20 it probably would be. Maybe adjusting by starting out with short sessions is good, so you don't have to work through too much related to that part. We all carry tension in our bodies much more than we realize and use constant movement to work through it, on a subconscious level. Being still triggers a negative response of tensing up more. For 10 minutes it should still be fine though.

Mentally, internally, there are different types of practices. I've trained some and the range of what I've heard and experienced doesn't narrow down well, but I'll narrow it anyway.

The idea is to still your mind, to an extent. It won't work to take up internal quietude, so next it turns to how to approach that, not to resolve the noise but to work through it. Watching your breath is a common technique, or focusing attention at some point in your body, often the stomach at or around your navel. To focus on breathing you can focus on a point where it moves, in and out of the tip of your nose, or for me focusing on relaxing and breathing from your diaphragm works better.

If your mind is a real mess of noise counting can help with that. As it settles some turning to focus attention on breathing at your stomach can work better. The mental practice is about how to deal with random thoughts, or daydreams. Common advice is to acknowledge thoughts and let them go, to not keep following them. That sounds more like stifling thought than it ends up relating to. You can't force your mind to stop thinking. You can gradually let it settle over time. In 10 minutes, even practicing for days on end, you might not seem to experience mental quietude, but it can settle some.

There is potential usefulness in the noise. You already know which lines of thought you continually return to, what your concerns are, but you might be avoiding directly experiencing these, and accepting them can be helpful. It's possible that insight could occur, a part that you haven't considered, but at first you experience noise, then acceptance of the issues can help quiet that some, then a more calm but still random thoughts based inner experience can seem different. It's at this point that a different form of progression begins. On the other side of that limited experience of mental stillness is possible.

One might wonder what the point of putting hours of effort into not thinking anything might be. It's about calming your mind, not just temporarily stopping it. That calm can and will extend to greater calm all the rest of the day. It's not magic, it only goes so far, but mental clarity and stability are hard to pursue in any ways. Exercise can help a little, and I think the two experience forms overlap more than people might expect. You take focus off your body by sitting motionless, but running for an equivalent amount of time also frees up space for internal focus, even though keeping yourself moving also uses some attention.

I've experienced stress--physical tension--moving from one place to another within my body as I've meditated over the past 2 months. I can't really place that as meaning something in particular, I'm just including it for completeness. I've experienced less mental or emotional change than I would have expected. Some, but not so much. Maybe I feel slightly more stable and grounded, even though I've been through a lot in the last 2 months.

a bit off topic, Keo ordained as a novice once too (covered here) 

Background context reference

There's a lot that I could add, about what my life context has been like recently, or what doesn't seem clear and developed in this.  

First I wanted to mention a background context reference.  A friend recently recommended this site for a lead on where to practice, as a meditation center (a large set of those, I think), promoting 10 day retreat practice, the Goenka organization (maybe not used as an organization title reference?), linked at dhamma.org.  It talks about background and covers limited information about practice, but of course most of the "how to" part is only conducted on retreats in person.  Let's sample a bit of context though.

To be clear what I was taught was described as vipassana, the form of meditation they describe.  It's hard to say if the two forms are quite similar or not; maybe the category name is the same but actual practice differs.  Their description:

Vipassana, which means to see things as they really are, is one of India's most ancient techniques of meditation. It was rediscovered by Gotama Buddha more than 2500 years ago and was taught by him as a universal remedy for universal ills, i.e., an Art Of Living. This non-sectarian technique aims for the total eradication of mental impurities and the resultant highest happiness of full liberation.

Vipassana is a way of self-transformation through self-observation. It focuses on the deep interconnection between mind and body, which can be experienced directly by disciplined attention to the physical sensations that form the life of the body, and that continuously interconnect and condition the life of the mind. It is this observation-based, self-exploratory journey to the common root of mind and body that dissolves mental impurity, resulting in a balanced mind full of love and compassion.

So far so good, but it doesn't say much about the purpose, in detail, or the actual practice.  This part goes further:

Therefore, a code of morality is the essential first step of the practice... 

The next step is to develop some mastery over this wild mind by training it to remain fixed on a single object, the breath. One tries to keep one's attention on the respiration for as long as possible. This is not a breathing exercise; one does not regulate the breath. Instead, one observes natural respiration as it is, as it comes in, as it goes out. In this way one further calms the mind so that it is no longer overpowered by intense negativities. At the same time, one is concentrating the mind, making it sharp and penetrating, capable of the work of insight.

These first two steps, living a moral life, and controlling the mind, are very necessary and beneficial in themselves, but they will lead to suppression of negativities unless one takes the third step: purifying the mind of defilements by developing insight into one's own nature. This is Vipassana: experiencing one's own reality by the systematic and dispassionate observation within oneself of the ever-changing mind-matter phenomenon manifesting itself as sensations. This is the culmination of the teaching of the Buddha: self-purification by self-observation...

More detailed, and of course that's as far as web page content is going to go.  Again I'm no expert, as I suppose the people guiding others in a meditation center probably would be, but I'll still get back to adding some clarification to that advice to a friend.

Another book reference, Mindfulness with Breathing, is good for outlining in very practical terms how our body and mind are linked by breathing patterns and mental state.  I'd recommend that even for people who have no interest in meditation; it's interesting, and fairly easy to notice and confirm--the initial parts--just by observing your own mental states and breathing forms.  

The basics are this:  when we are very calm our breathing is naturally very smooth, deep, slow, and even, based from our stomach / diaphragm, and when we are mentally agitated it is based from our upper chest, is shallower, faster, and the airflow is more constricted.  It mainly works the one way, with breathing reacting to mental state, but you can even turn that around, and breath slower and deeper to calm your mind.  Or to an extent you can breath faster, shallower, rougher, and higher in the chest to trigger a more agitated mental state (not that a need for that would come up so often, but it's interesting to try out).

Further discussion

I had never really did much with developing why one might meditate in that, although on a fast read it might seem as if I did, since I added a conventional possible set of goals within that.  That was there more as a place-holder than a likely list of potential benefits; one would probably meditate largely to experience the effects for themselves, with only vague expectations about potential benefits.  Or maybe within the context of other learning the goals could be quite clear and detailed, even including stages of expectations and varying levels of goals.  Maybe it would be just to remain more calm, be more focused, or control temper; there's no reason why goals would need to be elaborate or exotic. 

It could include a spiritual / religious context, or mental-state goals and expectations could vary broadly, so that the question "why meditate?" is too much to cover adequately.  Let's set that aside again.  

I didn't add much about what I've experienced, even though I've mentioned that I just meditated for over two months (almost 3 now), about the same time period I was ordained way back when, so I've been meditating for longer now than then.  There isn't much to say, really.  I feel slightly calmer and more stable, but I felt somewhat calm and stable before.  The way my body experiences retained tension has changed, but of course that was never an initial goal, and I'm not sure that it's helpful.  

In that website, for that meditation center, they describe how meditating for 10 days, many hours a day, is often experienced as transformative.  I've not experienced that.  Probably my own less informed practice wouldn't lead to that, even if I could somehow work up to comparable exposure, two work-weeks worth of practice time within a week and a half.

So shouldn't readers disregard this, and listen to a Goenka-trained practitioner instead?  Sure; you should probably do that.  I'm passing on discussion with a friend, based on limited exposure myself, and it's uncommon to hear from a friend in such a way, but if you can tolerate some reading in a limited sense you will have done so (someone acting in that role, at least).  

I tend to do that, discussing subjects I'm not an expert in.  I talk about fasting here, even though I've only fasted for about 25 days over the past year (water fasting, essentially, but I've also been drinking tea).  I mention experiences with running, and I'm not much of a runner, having built up to training for 20 miles or so a week this year, falling well off that for months now (first due to Bangkok heat, lately related to minor knee problems).  I don't even run races, although I have in the past.  10 years ago I started writing about tea here, and I'd only had limited exposure to the subject back then, only trying a couple of dozen versions of loose tea by then.  It's awkward looking back on those early posts.

Back to closing thoughts, what I've left out earlier.  It's a little odd moving so directly past why to meditate, what better goals might be, or later expectations, but given the context I'll have to.  I can say a little about what limited exposure has been like, I guess nearly 40 hours of trial over more than two months.

I might have understated what that body tension experience is like.  Meditating for 15 to 20 minutes might still be ok, but the tension in your body tends to collect in places and express itself more than one might imagine.  I'm sure that must vary a lot by individual.  For whatever reasons for me I feel fine for the first half an hour or so, and then tension issues become a problem.  The effects vary day to day.  Some days it's not really an issue, and some days I quit after half an hour because one leg is asleep or cramped.

In that temple training center I was discussing practice with guests and a young woman, who was a regular there, described the issue of discomfort while sitting, which stuck with me.  She said that she tries to make the pain experience seem smaller in her mind.  In a way that seemed to work, and it also missed part of how I saw it.  It had seemed to me that fully accepting the physical feeling helped you move through it, and any limited form of mentally rejecting it or setting it aside would make it worse, because it was going to remain a big part of your momentary experience.  Not wanting to feel it was worse than the actual feeling itself, in the same sense that it can be maddening to wish the planned time ended, because you absolutely can't affect the rate of flow of time.  Moving on...

  

The experience of patience is interesting, seeing the experience as unpleasant versus neutral or positive.  That fades as it becomes normal, over a relatively short time-frame, within a couple of weeks or so, but earlier on very trivial discomfort brings up an aversion to continuing.  That must vary by individual?  It seems normal before long, not positive or negative, although as physical discomfort increases that can shift. For the rest it will go without saying "that must vary by individual," just assuming that the context here is talking mostly about what I've experienced over the last three months, and less so related to the other two times I meditated regularly.

The experience of flow of time changes, a lot.

One might wonder about inner voice issues; to what extent would your mind become quiet, or not?  It does quiet down.  Early on it seems noisy as could be, then daydreaming and tangents replace that, and only then it begins to still.  I don't know that there's any sort of more positive condition associated with more quietude; it's interesting, but the experience seems to be about calming, not becoming calm.  The noises tell a story, or different stories.  For me the daydreaming part is more trivial than one might imagine; deepest fears or repressed goals, problems experienced in life, aren't turning up so much.  Some, sure, but it seems to include more noise.  Ego seems to drive a lot of it; random self-association, something like short-term goals or reactions.  Once in awhile an interesting idea gets mixed in.

It seems necessary to move past a constant daydream phase, the second part you experience, to get to deeper insights.  Noticing thought patterns and letting them go leads to this gradual calming.  There is a very pleasant, deeper calm that can occur, which you can't necessarily trigger intentionally; it's interesting when that happens.

This still lacks a lot of guidance about sitting on a mat or not, closing your eyes or looking at the wall, or even returning focus to breathing instead of thoughts (it's simple, but it might not seem so easy or natural in practice).  It's probably as well to leave all that vague.  It goes without saying that using a timer makes a lot of sense, otherwise you'd never stop thinking about how long it had been, or would look at a clock the whole time.

Between those parts about mental experiences, and another main outcome being body tension reducing and moving around it, it doesn't sound like time well spent, does it?  Maybe not.  Maybe I should free up 10 days and get some input on a retreat, although that's not something that could align with my life, for the next decade or so.  

I would never choose to spend 10 days on a retreat versus with my kids, unless I could expect far more dramatic positive results than I've ever had reason to expect.  It's my job as a parent to never make a choice like that, as I see it.  I'm separated from my kids for 4 months now, as things stand, but I'm also working to earn a living to support them, so dropping out for a long week would relate to missing a long week of time with them later.  It's a no-go.

That's pretty much it for background context too, as far as I need to go.  I live in Bangkok, working, although I will return to working remotely in January--I think--while living in Honolulu with them, where they are now.  The rest is complicated but not so relevant.  There was another story about problems related to a cat but I'll leave that out too (it is covered in a post here anyway).  I'm living with three cats now, and it's nice how they practice meditation along with me, only fighting each other, knocking things over, or asking for attention once in awhile.  They get it; they want to be supportive.

I would recommend trying out limited meditation, and then if it seems interesting or productive maybe looking into getting better guidance in a meditation center somewhere.  I'd recommend trying out fasting too, but running probably isn't for everyone, since there are less impactful ways to become more active and then get fit.  

If you have good faith in your joints then why not though; get on with running.  Walking quite a bit can help as an early transition, then running mixed with jogging while your body adjusts more, trying to ramp up distance and pace very, very slowly only later on so that you don't get hurt.  Wearing good shoes should help, and talking to a doctor if any part seems questionable.  Of course I wonder if I won't pay a price, having knee problems later on.  Never mind later on; it's been a rough month for one knee.

As for meditation I don't see much related to it being scary, dangerous, or even potentially negative.  Just as someone with a heart condition could drop dead if they try to run someone with a severe underlying mental condition might experience some serious problems.  You could get a doctor to check your cardiovascular health easier than mental health could be reviewed, but I think most people would be fine meditating, with limited trial exposure.  As with running practicing moderation in increasing duration would seem to make sense; there is no need to go straight to longer sessions.

I just saw something about a "quiet walking" trend on Tik-Tok, about a girl filming herself walking without any electronics (or simulating that, since the video recording is surely on a phone?).  If someone feels anxiety if they don't use their phone for 10 or 15 minutes I'm not sure how seated meditation would work for them.

Mindfulness practice versus meditation

For someone feeling like all this is running long and venturing into tangent after tangent this is a natural place to stop reading.  When I trained to meditate in that center they advised mixing seated and walking meditation practices, with walking practice more a mindfulness exercise, which really is something else.  They're two different parts of the eightfold Buddhist path.  Mindfulness is practice of expanding momentary awareness and presence, while meditation is what I've been going on and on about, an odd range of concentration exercises, basically.  Or maybe that still describes mindfulness better.

It might seem a little odd, this focusing on the present moment.  How could one not be present; where would they be?  Daydreaming, following random thoughts, immersed in the next thing they want to do or get, or a range of repetitive behaviors, pursuing anxiety or rejection of parts of experience, caught up in ego-related repeating cycles, on and on about how any given circumstances reinforces whatever repeating pattern makes them seem special.  Walking meditation and focusing on the present moment can help with all that.  

There's lots more to it, and this isn't going to branch into a second full treatment of that background, and practices that work to develop it.  It's all not really separate from meditation; the two themes naturally connect.  You might think that if you sit in quiet sitting meditation there is nowhere to be but the present moment, and then it's interesting how the opposite turns out to be more true, for quite awhile, and your mind wanders to anywhere else.  It's much easier to be mentally still and aware with a much higher degree of stimulus, for example out on a walk.

It's tempting to keep going, to add tangent after tangent.  Core Buddhist teachings about the experienced self and nature of reality come into play.  That context informs what meditation practice is about, what an expected outcome might be, how ideas and perspective make up an ordinary worldview, which can be adjusted to a more functional version.  It's unique how that's generally all a "negative" model, about removing errors included at the level of assumptions, so that you end up with a lighter and lighter final model of reality, that tends to function better and better.  Later functional approaches and acceptance tend to replace internal assumed modeling.

It's as well to not go there though; covering this much seems appropriate.  Good luck if you plan to try it out.  Again I'm no expert or authority on the subject but if you get stuck you can reach out to me to discuss part of it.  I'm definitely not into any sort of "life coaching," but you can imagine how embracing Buddhism tends to couple with being open to helping people.

The Buddhist rejection of a real self

I tried writing out a comparison of the Buddhist rejection of a single self with how that would apply to a case of multiple personalities, related to Dissociative Identity Disorder.  It really split into two different posts, because it required so much background about what Buddhist teachings are doing in rejecting a permanent, real self.  So I'll post it as two parts, with that DID related part following later.

Discussing Buddhism in relation to inner experience of reality can be difficult.  I'll keep the Buddhism resume limited here, but it is relevant, since I have experienced four significant contact points with the subject.  I studied Buddhism on my own for about decade, starting in my early 20's, initiated by a life change starting me on looking into the nature of experienced reality, what it's all about.  Later on that led to going back to school to study Buddhism as religion and philosophy in two academic programs, getting a BA and MA, but stopping short of the phD step that would've enabled pursuing that as a career.  

Then I also ordained as a Thai Buddhist monk at one point, for a limited time, for a bit over two months.  I have since lived in a Buddhist society in Thailand for over a decade, as part of a Thai Buddhist family, engaging in the routine religious practices they do.  To be clear to me Buddhism, at its core, is really a form of practical psychology, designed to serve a function of adjusting perspective and internal life experience, so the ceremonies and religion forms are kind of beside the point.

with a cat I now see as my oldest daughter, Nong On, at the end of 2007

Keoni ordained at that same temple, here with Kalani offering alms (food for the day)

It's not simple to summarize the core Buddhist teaching that rejects the existence of a real self, and different people could easily take that in completely different ways, even with significant valid exposure.  All of this is my own opinion and interpretation, which I'm not going to support by citing early core teachings or later religious school references.  It maps fairly directly to ideas from the Thai Theravada Buddhism forest monk tradition, but I wasn't really a part of that while I was ordained.  I was a "city monk" instead.  I did do a week long meditation retreat outside of Bangkok at one point, but it wasn't with that sub-group.

Buddhist rejection of a permanent, real self

Taken one way this main teaching relates to rejecting the existence of a soul, so it's all about rebirth versus a heavenly afterlife.  I really have no idea what happens after we die, and speculating about that isn't of interest to me.  I am agnostic about it, only really focused on what goes on in this life.  In religious scope this is really most of what it's typically taken to mean, that someone will return as a different person, and they should be selfless while "here," because we are all inter-connected.  That kind of works, to encourage ethical behavior, but I think it's not the main point.  Ethics / morality does support the rest, it is one part of the Eightfold Path. 

Taken another way it's a philosophical position, relating to the discussion of realism versus nominalism or idealism that occurs in that realm.  I've studied some academic philosophy metaphysics (not the same as use of the term to mean spirituality related, in fortune telling practices or crystal shops), but this is also not of interest to me.  It's really too long a story to explain how that works out, how academic philosophy never really completely connects to someone's form of experienced reality (most typically), and it's not actually supposed to.  That probably sounds more judgmental and like more of a slight than it's really intended.  Most of my professors tended to just take that as a clear starting point, that we working on "problems," not sorting out the nature of reality for practical purposes.  If we were doing that instead we would've been working towards wisdom, not knowledge, or at least that's how they sometimes put it.

Let's skip ahead to what I take the rejection of a real self to mean, versus crossing off the list of everything it might possibly mean.  I take it to be a practical point, something that ties to actionable practice.  It doesn't mean that a lot of internal reality is invalid in some sense, but only that upon examination a good bit of patterns in processing reality can be adjusted; they aren't as fixed as they seem.  This rejection is not part of a negative model, it's about a starting point for introspection.

Put in summary terms, experienced reality itself is a construct.  

It's something that we create through interpretation.  We experience everything as real, as objectively the same for everyone, from inner and outer reality, but even external objects are interpreted through the lens of our own experience.  Of course those external objects do tend to be fixed; if I see an apple you would see and experience the same apple in the same ways, beyond potential food taste preference difference.

Our inner self isn't completely different.  That seems like a fixed, objectively real thing, even though of course it's not tangible in the same way a book or whatever else would be.  If two people pick up the same book they have the same physical experience (essentially; philosophers love splitting hairs about everything, but it's the same).  The meaning of the book could be different, a feeling towards it, it's going to degrade a little over time, but it's still about the same.  We tend to see our internal interpretation of external events in a similar way, that something positive like a vacation experience or sports event, or negative, like a dropped ice cream cone, or mass killing we would all interpret in generally similar ways.  Of course those aren't objects, in any sense, they are events instead.

That self, and the related perspective and worldview, is really a set of habits, assumptions, and internal processes, the experience of continuity of experience itself, tied to personal history.  

All that occurs on a subconscious level, mostly.  It can be changed; it's not even difficult to do so.  Having a very bad experience changes the experience of an internal self very quickly.  Moving from one city to another or changing jobs also does, or having children, and so on.  Changing ideas enough would change the experience of self, for example, joining a cult, or even the military, or going back to college.  Taking up a religion is a different thing; it would be easy to not put that into deep enough practice to really make significant difference, to just trade out some ritual forms and personal connections.

Why would the Buddha tell us that self isn't real?  It's completely practical and functional, as I take it.  Per my understanding everything taught in Buddhism is, or else it's not a genuine part of it.  That serves as one idea and basis for re-examining the form of reality, and what is contributed internally.  Taken alone it would change nothing, but with significant introspection related to one's personal form of experienced reality even taken alone it might.  Other ideas support it, and other process, practices of mindfulness (developed awareness of momentary reality) and meditation (a tool for developing a capacity to understand your own experience, for dropping out some noise, or for seeing what the noise is, and other ordinary base forms).

It all tends to get oversimplified in common portrayals of Buddhism.  One form of that is suggesting that mental clutter is the issue, that we can sidestep that, and drop internal chatter, judgements, worries, and self-obsession simply by setting it all aside.  There's a lot to that.  Another form interprets impermanence as a central key, really a different idea scope, but it all tends to link.  The dropped ice cream cone works as an example; just after that occurs how one relates to it can be a personal choice.  It could linger as a negative bias to inner reality or let go of.  Hopefully someone wouldn't experience a bad day over something that trivial but experience does tend to cascade a bit, with us slipping into one type of context and not necessarily slipping right back out of it.  It's not experienced self in the same form as self-image, but perspective framework and internal self are parts of a whole.

One might confuse hearing that the self is not real with the idea that the experienced internal self is a bad thing.  There is no need to make that connection.  Continuity of personal experience is a pre-requisite for living as a person; that depends on some scope one could interpret as an inner self.  "Selfishness" is something else, and it's as well to not get too caught up in English word forms saying things that they really don't speak to.  Ego and self are two separate things, in different models, varying depending on what the related framework of ideas is set up to do.  It's easy to adopt parts of a Freudian internal model without necessarily thinking all that through (ego, id, superego), probably mapping parts to other terms, just assuming that it's all meaningful and real enough, or put another way is functionally descriptive.  That works, with some limitations; it works better if you are aware of what you are assuming in the first place, and what role that then plays in interpreting or framing reality.

Everyone is self-interested; they kind of have to be.  If you find your own self or your own life experience uninteresting or unpleasant things probably aren't working out well for you, and it's an impractical assumption.  Self-development would almost certainly work on developing positive life skills, not furthering some illusory image or agenda.  Materialism or focus on a broad range of negative sensory experience, like drug use, is kind of something to be avoided, but those are not exactly the point here either.  What is the point then?

Let's use self-image as an example (again without getting too caught up in that term including something that Buddhism seems to be rejecting).  It's not a negative thing, taken alone, to see yourself or present yourself a certain way.  As a social being it's necessary.  But it could be very beneficial for someone to consciously understand how and why they are putting energy into this pursuit, of adjusting external image, and tying expectations and planned future direction to all sorts of related patterns.  For that to go unexamined for someone's whole life would kind of be a shame, as Socrates kept saying.  

For someone succeeding at meeting a social norm (here used to describe a complex image, not one individual pattern), or even excelling at that, it may be the case that too much energy is going into that, with life unbalanced due to focus on appearance, clothing, ownership of items that frame an image, even something apparently healthy like focus on physical fitness.  Social status tied to wealth and career success, or image, is as significant as any of that, or potentially more so.  It would be easy to experience a severe crisis in your 40s when you realize that the pursuit you have been so successful at has robbed you of capacity to pursue other directions, and aging is going to take away a lot of what you have accomplished.  At least material success can span a duration of time, but expectations can make that kind of accomplishment a continually moving target.  

A different kind of negative side could be just as bad, related to gaps in expectations coming up.  Someone could focus a lot of their energy or attention on dislike of appearance or self-image aspects, which might not even relate to positive change themes, and life might just seem continually not so good.  No need to cite examples; people can get stuck in all sorts of loops related to identifying most with what they see as personal gaps in their own life experience.

It might seem like I'm just saying that one should be self-aware, and lead a balanced life.  That's definitely part of it.  Maybe moving further and examining changes that are possible beyond that could help frame the general point.  These really relate to the kinds of changes that happen once you start to unpack how you build up your own image of your self and your life, and what tends to change once you start making adjustments.  The process of that unfolding is complicated, and it would work out in different ways for different people.  Explaining the outcome rather than the process itself, the actual tools, might seem a little counterintuitive, out of a normal rational order, but it still makes sense.  Everyone's approach and what they turn up through forms of introspection would be different, just as the resulting changes would also be different.

Changes to experience of self

I'll use things I have experienced as an example.  It's not a claim to "success at practicing Buddhism," because that's not how it works.  It's not a contest, and there aren't really clear and specific goals.  Things get removed in practicing Buddhism, forms of error, or approaches, practices, or perspective that are flawed, not added.  There is no final positive model for reality or experienced form that one is striving for.  Removing most error would be pleasant, but that can't be interpreted as a positive goal, to win at being most enlightened, or even conventionally self-less.  That kind of goal--a concept or model of enlightenment itself, for example--would be rejected along the way as part of the practice, as just one more form of excess internal perspective baggage to be discarded.

It can be hard to relate this to internal perspective and form, to turn up specific examples.  I experienced something in a strange range once while meditating, that led to a change in experienced form of inner reality.  No need to add experiential details; those don't make much sense.  My internal voice essentially dropped out.  Later it resumed in a much quieter, less pronounced form, but it took time to, weeks or months.  Really it would be more conventional for anxiety and internal doubt and noise to gradually diminish over time, and this is a good example of removing error or forms that don't work.  Radically and suddenly re-working perspective of an internal self isn't how that normally goes, and probably in general it wouldn't be advisable.

Dropping out materialism would be an example of relatively lower-hanging fruit, and a more typical process.  Aiming for severe psychological change would seem strange, and is probably counterproductive.  

As consumers who are the subject of continual advertising we are more or less programmed to feel like we lack something, all the time.  We really should have those new clothes, a new watch, or phone, or car, etc.  Then when you acquire those things, or even just experiences, travel and such, there is a limited degree of satisfaction, but the process continues, and it's next something else.  In a lot of cases owing that new thing would bring up extra perceived lack, instead of fulfillment, since things that go along with that material item would then be desirable.  Owning one really nice watch could easily bridge into collecting nice watches, and so on.  Based partly on being poor at one earlier stage of life I got out of the habit of collecting or buying material things, and never really got back into it.  It really did help examining the role that material things were playing in my life to make peace with breaking that cycle.

Back to mental space--not that owning physical things isn't mostly about that--the experiences of anger, regret related to the past, anxiety in relation to the future, can all be interpreted and to some extent resolved by better understanding the nature of experienced reality.  One part is that we only really directly contact the present moment.  Our minds are not typically firmly grounded in present experience, and it's not so easy to even notice that, never mind adjust for it.

One might think all this is sort of related to "self" but it's really something else, just about the form of experienced reality.  Self is at the core of that.  Self-image grounds all of it.  Every personal connection we experience, every plan, and reaction, or goal, all tie back to who we see ourselves to be.  Even that relationship to a nice watch is more about self-image than anything else; how we present our external image to others, how we see it ourselves, what status issues tie to material ownership, and so on. 

That self isn't exactly an illusion, it's just not real, in the same sense that a book is actually real.  

Again it's a set of habits, assumptions, aspirations, internal connections, external associations, life practices, and so on.  All of those can be understood and adjusted.  You can't change your past or who your parents were but you can most definitely change your interpretation of your past, and how it relates to your present and expected future.  And your relationship with your parents, to some extent even after they are dead.  That's the kind of thing that isn't obvious; it would require sorting through your own sub-conscious framework for reality to really see what it means.

There is a conventional error or misunderstanding that Buddhism is about wiping out self, cleaning the slate, dropping all of it.  In a very limited sense this can relate to a range of some forms of Buddhist practice, but that is definitely not what Buddhism is.  Zen is about self-discovery through setting aside some of the internal noise and connections, but it's not valid practice unless it relates to reworking that experience to some form that's different but still related.  That kind of transition would be impossible without sorting out the prior definition of self and experience of reality; there is absolutely no chance of just dropping it all.  Anyone making that kind of claim shouldn't be taken too seriously.  Embracing quiet moments and more direct experience are something else; of course that can be useful, and pleasant.

Of course someone could easily protest that I've just made a related but conflicting claim, one based on personal authority, of how one should interpret Buddhism properly.  But I really haven't, as I see it.  The teachings of the Buddha tell us to examine our own life experience and internal reality, and that's what I'm advocating.  There is limited guidance for approach (not so limited for range; there's a lot of "Buddhism," maybe too much).  A lot of teachings relate to what will perhaps relate to specific forms of perception or worldview framing error, but it's not mostly about that.  

There is no positive description of a final end state (enlightenment, moving clear of problematic attachments), and not even much for what kinds of errors to try to remove, as much as one might expect.  Introspection turns up what is problematic within everyone's own case.  It's easy to use broad strokes as examples, for example drug and alcohol use act as hindrances, or too much focus on materialism, external image, or social status can be negative.  Those things aren't necessarily inherently bad though, taken in appropriate ways, except maybe for the drug and alcohol use.  Why that's an exception is complicated.

In my own case I consumed a lot of alcohol and drugs in the past.  It can seem pleasant, and can help to bring people together in social activities.  There's not always a steep price to be paid in terms of side effects or direct consequences.  But it does pull focus towards the experience of altering reality, and over time that naturally becomes more and more negative.  Even maintaining a low level turns out to come at a cost.  In my 40s I would most often drink one large beer a week, as a Friday evening ritual, an aid to unwinding from a work-week.  To some extent on Monday through Thursday I was experiencing not drinking alcohol in a negative sense, minor enough that I barely noticed it, but it did set up a faint underlying sense of lack.  It's nothing to worry about; the point here is that it still comes at a cost, so that limited drug or alcohol experience comes at a low cost.

Dropping self, or at least part of what relates

Is this possible, experiencing reality with no sense of self?  I want to keep this moving, originally towards getting back to tie-in with DID, about if it should be possible to adjust experience of multiple selves instead of just a single one, but this only finally starts to connect after considering "dropping self."  My own answer:  not really.  We continue to experience being grounded in a body, and we continue to experience continuity of a social self, that is, others expect us to be the same person we were yesterday, when they have social ties to us.  We take up roles, like that of an employee, or parent, or son or daughter.  That last roles we were granted before birth; we don't tend to pick it.  We could reject the role; that would work, or change the form of it.

An odd aside related to that:  my father and grandfather had a falling out, and in the end each decided to put aside their connection with the other.  In the end that rejection and that gap probably came to define them as much or more than the original relationship had, even though it didn't tie to an active interpersonal relationship.  They could never step aside from the rest of the family's self-definition as including that role, or completely resolve their own internal experience of a gap.  Of course they weren't so open with me about it that I knew of their internal experience, but one gets a sense.

One might wonder, am I also carrying around an internal experience of being separated from attachment to material things, a negative form or lack experienced as a restriction or special condition?  Maybe.  I tend to not see it that way; I just don't buy much.  For monks it's most definitely that; their lives are defined by a set of over 100 rules and restrictions that are set up to simplify their lives, but it turns into an ideological and functional code of conduct, a positively defined form of a negative, not a simple removal at all.  

It might be helpful to consider what other forms of removal we tend to carry around as negatives, not so much to link to Buddhist practices or definition of self, but just to see how these things do shape our reality.  Divorced people can come to define themselves through that prior connection that no longer exists, as widows can.  Being retired really should be about enjoying the lack of work demand, but it might also be experienced as a gap in definition of self.  It was interesting hearing about two work contacts' experiences in the past with losing weight, two people who were not overweight, who both confessed to me that they once were.  They seemed to carry this image of changed self with them, and even years later had trouble completely identifying beyond experiencing that lack (of a negative condition, to be clear, as they saw it).  Recovered alcoholics can be like that, can't they, prone to self-definition as what they see themselves to not be.

It's definitely possible to "thin out" experience of a self by dropping the parts we see as negative, I guess to some extent without retaining the lack.  Just doing that requires a high degree of introspection and "work."  Plenty of parts are always going to remain in place.  Personal preference across a broad range isn't really problematic.  There would be no need or benefit in eliminating all food preferences, for example.  If someone loves to live on McDonald's food that's an exception; there may be huge benefit in letting that completely drop.  The way to get there would be to take up an enjoyment of healthy food.  Or seemingly less balanced people giving up normal food entirely is an option, that Soylent meal replacement theme, but that also works as an example of why extremes don't work.  

For sure long term avoidance of food in place of drinking some complicated meal replacement shakes is a very bad idea.  That would be like embracing some body hack where you only sleep for 4 or 5 hours a day; it won't end well.  We really need to work within the constraints of having a physical body and being a social creature, not to drop related parts of that out.  This is common sense that we don't need Buddhist wisdom to recognize and accept.

Radical changes in forms of experience are possible.  Practicing moderation in terms of even considering those is probably advisable.  Original Buddhism absolutely doesn't advocate for people to give up their life and go sit in a cave, and re-emerge in a completely different form, although that context can come up in later stories, and that sort of was the Buddha's own approach.  A bit of Zen practice might be fine, or for the right person at the right time that social-isolation cave theme could be just the thing.  But in general that's just not Buddhism.  Don't take my word for it; read the core teachings, translations of the original received words of the Buddha himself.  Translation errors tend to skew meaning, with even the most basic core concepts not typically presented consistently or well (like that of attachment, self, or suffering), but one can read past that, while putting the ideas into practice within the context of their own life.

At the start it's as well to just think of Buddhism as introspection.  The more you notice what is going on in your inner reality the more problems and potential positive changes will become evident.

Conclusion

This kind of just ends, without really developing any one theme too far, doesn't it?  I've not started into methodology, about how it really works, so touching only a little on a starting point and end point seem all the thinner.  Maybe some of that will come through in writing further about DID, if it also applies as directly to multiple selves, but that won't be written as a "how-to" for Buddhism either.  I've never done a lot with that theme, even though I've had plenty of exposure to Buddhist practice, in addition to the background.  It seems like the kind of thing other subject experts might address better.

Then again the way that works in practice people would tend to pass on one person's worth of experience most often based on exposure within one narrow school.  That's fine, that's completely relevant, but it still seems to trade out depth of exposure to breadth.  It's back to a generalist versus specialist theme that comes up a lot in tea experience; it's hard to have it both ways.  From a distance greater specialization and in-depth exposure to narrow range should provide a lot more insight, since one could "get further," but in practice it's not that simple.  Related to both Buddhism and tea it would probably be nice to be able to split the difference, do the impossible, and cover both, to specialize in a narrow range and also have exposure to a broad range of ideas and experiences.

I'll take these ideas a little further in more practical application in that next writing, just not necessarily towards Buddhism in practice guidance.  Maybe eventually I will get around to saying more about that.