Chapter 1 from High Altitude Meditation
Chapters on line: Description and Table of Contents / Introductory Notes / 1: Evolving Motives / 8: Ordinary
From far away a mountain looks solid, organic, and whole. The roots and peak are fundamentally connected. But as we approach it and start climbing, the views from different heights look like different universes. There are not a lot of people at the top of the mountain. There are no paths, no buildings. The air is a little thin. Things seem simple and ordinary. Yet the view can be breathtaking.
Down the mountain there are lots of people, activities, abodes, paths, and vistas — some gorgeous and some mundane. There’s a lot that can be said about these.
But at high altitudes, it’s hard to know what to say. It’s like trying to describe a beautiful sunset: “The sun sits on the horizon. The sky is dark in places and light in others. There are lots of colors. … Well … why don’t you just come and look for yourself?” So we do. And as we take it in, we say, “Wow,” and fall silent.
Similarly, high altitude meditation can be simple, breathtaking, and hard to describe.
This book focuses primarily on high-altitude meditation starting with the evolving motives that get us engaged in the first place.
Plenty of writers and teachers have emphasized beginning and middle stages of practice. I certainly have. But there are few who explicitly describe advanced practices. There are fewer teachers and meditators near the mountain top. And the practice gets much more individualized in the upper reaches because the difficulties and gifts of one person may differ from those of another person. And different meditation traditions use different vocabularies and understandings.
But I feel drawn to address these higher issues in hope of starting conversations that will be helpful to all of us, including me.
As noted, the view can change radically as we climb. And so can insights, attitudes, principles, intentions, and more. But view gets them all started.
The beginning of the Buddha’s eight-fold path is called wise view. Everything flows from it. Our intentions or motives arise from how we see the world. How we feel about ourselves and about the path also flow from our views. At the same time our emotions (vedana) have a strong impact on view and motives. View, motive, and feeling are entwined together.
So let’s start this exploration with the question: What moves us to climb this mountain or engage in meditation and keeps us going? I’ll suggest four motives which evolve as we climb. To help get a bird’s eye view of the whole mountain and the general principles that infuse this practice, let’s look at the story of the Buddha’s journey as an example.
Siddhartha Gautama was born on the Indian subcontinent two and a half millennia ago. It’s unlikely that everything we hear about him is literally true. He lived in a far-off age and culture where the technology and values may feel foreign to us. Yet the impact of his life reverberates down to us today. There is some wisdom in trying to unpack what might have happened to him, who he might have been, and what these impressions can illuminate about our lives.
Legend has it he was born in Nepal to royal parents. But his dad was more of a clan chief than a king. A prophecy foretold that the baby would either become a great ruler or a great spiritual teacher.
His dad preferred the former and immersed him in beauty, art, power, and culture to shield him from the harshness of the world. Yet Siddhartha was exposed to harshness as he traveled with his charioteer, Channa. Today we’d call Channa his chauffeur and bodyguard.
The legend says that on these excursions Siddhartha was exposed to an old man, a sick woman, and a bloated corpse. With each encounter the naïve prince was shaken and turned to Channa with many questions. Channa did his best to explain aging, illness, death, and more. Siddhartha became disillusioned with the depth of suffering in the world and the shallowness of his sheltered life. But he didn’t know what to do about either.
Finally, on one excursion they happened upon a wandering renunciant. Channa explained that the robed monk was seeking answers to life’s deeper mysteries.
Siddhartha was so touched that he eventually withdrew from the life of a prince and took on the robes of a homeless monk himself. He wandered to explore the rawness of life and meditated to see wisely into pain and difficulty. The sources of suffering were easy to find, but their alleviation was elusive.
Siddhartha was a naturally gifted meditator and came to understand that even though physical discomfort was inevitable, suffering was not. Anguish ultimately had more to do with inner aversion than outer circumstances. If we can be at peace with hunger, injury, disease, and even death, then deep equanimity becomes possible despite what’s going on around us. If we can see deeply enough, we will know what to do.
He meditated on all this with an open heart and mind. From time to time, wisdom and a deep and genuine peace and wellbeing arose. He suspected he had found a path.
To make it last he knew he had to see the depths of what life really was — especially inside himself. He couldn’t hide from his own mind. He needed humility and clarity to recognize the truth in this moment— not what he wanted, believed, or hoped for, but what was actually most true.
Gradually he recognized that what was true was not as important as how he related to it. The ancient term for heartful relating was “metta.” Today, “metta” is usually translated as “kindness” or “loving kindness.” But the root of the term is “friend” or a humble friendliness toward all. It suggests a befriending attitude.
As this fierce clear mind and soft open heart merged inside, he realized that we are not truly separate beings. Yes, we have different personalities, bodies, and proclivities. But they are superficial. Just as the foot of the mountain is connected with the peak, we are all essentially connected to one another through the world in which we all live. We are directly or indirectly a part of one another. Traditionally this is called paticcasamuppada or “Dependent Origination.” Thich Nhat Hanh calls it “interbeing.”
With this insight he woke up completely and became a Buddha.
Twenty-five hundred years later, the essence of Siddhartha’s story and the urges that motivated him are still with us. We could also call these urges “attitudes,” “views,” “principles,” “insights,” or “intentions.”
A journey up a mountain is a common metaphor for this spiritual evolution. In the remainder of this chapter we’ll explore these attitudes, views, and principles as motives. To do this, let’s step back into our century and our own language.
Like anything else on this journey, views, motives, and feelings may initially seem to have nothing to do with each other. Yet they are intimately tied together and have influenced our practice quietly from its beginning whether we knew it or not. With more experience at higher elevations, we may pick up nuances we missed earlier. Briefly the four motives that draw us are:
1. Suffering: the urge to alleviate sorrow and grief
2. Seeing what is: the urge to see with fierce clarity so we understand what can truly help
3. Welcoming What Is: the love that befriends and connects
4. Surrendering into the Expanse: connections to self and others merge into oneness
If we can grasp the centrality of these four, we’ll be able to see how they unfold in high-altitude meditation. So let’s look at them one at a time.
The initial motive is the urge to alleviate suffering. Without this, our actions could be helpful, but they would not resonate with Buddhism. So suffering is where we begin.
“Alleviating suffering” implies “cultivating wellbeing.” They point in the same general direction. Yet my gut sense says that the urge to relieve distress is more powerful and immediate than just helping people feel good. We can imagine Siddhartha giving up his life of privilege because he wanted to find a resolution to the deep anguish he witnessed. But it’s harder to imagine him making this sacrifice just to make people happier. Suffering touches a visceral place in us. Nevertheless, there is a spectrum in all of us that goes from alleviating suffering to cultivating wellbeing.
In truth, the urge to help is wired into all mammals. It’s especially strong in humans because we are so helpless in our early years. Without support from others we would not survive a few days, much less long enough to reproduce.
Sometimes the motivation is obvious. Other times it is hidden or disguised. In the Buddha’s story these motivations were displayed dramatically as aging, sickness, and death. The same motivation is alive in all of us even in less intense situations.
For example, I’m sitting at my computer re-organizing and re-writing this chapter. I’ve done this so many times I wonder, “Why do I keep doing this?”
Pausing to look inside, the superficial answer is, “I want to help or inspire others using as few words as I can and still be effective.”
This begs the question: “But why do I want to do that?”
If I look deeper inside, I admit that there is no reason. I just do. It’s just wired into me.
If we look through our days and ask why we wash the dishes, play with the kids, scratch the kitty’s chin, talk with friends, read a book, feed the birds … there are many surface answers. But somewhere in all of those is the urge to alleviate suffering or cultivate wellbeing. It quietly pervades everything we do, consciously or unconsciously.
To be sure, sometimes we yell at a child, insult a friend, feel an urge to punch someone. We act out of mixed intentions all the time. If we contemplate those situations for a few moments, it’s easy to recognize this mix of motives. Perhaps we yelled at the child to quiet her so we could get the rest we needed. Our friend had made a comment that hurt, and we were trying to release some inner disturbance.
Here's a more extreme example: Jimmy was a teenager in a program I ran for street kids years ago. He would hammer nails through a baseball bat and use it to chase police! It took me a while to get to know him. But as I did, I recognized that he was trying to relieve some of the pent-up frustration that came from years of abuse. In fact it worked, but just for a few short moments. In the long run, attacking police made a mess of his life.
The motivation to feel better may sometimes encourage us to act out of violence or revenge, to stick our heads in the sand, or rationalize distorted thoughts. But the motive to relieve suffering by itself is less likely to get entangled in conflicting emotions. So it is a clearer expression of this motive and less likely to get distorted.
The second motivation and the heart of meditation practice is seeing what is. Seeing lucidly is needed especially when emotions are mixed and distorted. The Buddha said the main purpose of training the mind is to see what is with a fierce and penetrating clarity. Then we can know how to wisely alleviate pain or cultivate wellbeing. We can’t solve a problem we can’t see clearly. As Byron Katie puts it, “When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.”
The more open we are with ourselves in acknowledging the various motives in us, the less we’ll get blindsided by them and the more gracefully and effectively we can live with all of them. Otherwise we’ll spend a lot of time fighting reality.
As we see more clearly, we see that life is a vast matrix of causes and results in which suffering is sometimes a good thing. For example, if my stomach is uncomfortable, it could be a signal that I need food. If my hand hurts after picking up a skillet, it could be an alarm that the metal is hot and I should release it quickly to prevent more damage. Or if my head hurts it could signal a bacterial infection and I need rest, medicine, fresh air, exercise, or some other counter measure.
Everything arises out of causes and conditions and is a potential cause or condition for other things to arise. They are not just a line of dominos falling on each other one at a time, but a complex web of sensations and actions that can intermingle in many directions at once. This is hard to see at the base of the mountain but starts to become clear as we get a broader vision of what is.
In Buddhism, this is called paticcasamuppada or Dependent Origination or Dependent co-arising where everything potentially effects everything else directly or indirectly. This is considered the center of the Buddha’s teaching: we are so interconnected that believing we are independent beings is a delusion.
Most people can understand the first two motivations: alleviating suffering and seeing what is most true. Particularly meditators appreciate their importance. But the third motive — welcoming what is — is trickier. It gets at the importance of how we relate to what is.
As practice goes deeper, we begin to see that merely understanding how life works and what goes on inside is not enough. By itself it can be a dead end. Looking with cold detachment leaves us cold and detached. We need friendliness. We need a way to blend a clear mind with an open and receptive heart.
It turns out that what we see is less important than how we relate to what we see in others and ourselves. We need to be willing to look at all our mixed motives and feel how they truly work together.
For some people, this realization emerges slowly as they travel up the mountain. For others, it emerges in a flash. But without this attitude, we get stuck fighting reality.
In her early thirties Byron Katie was so depressed and stuck in self-loathing that she was often not able to get out of bed for days. One morning in a flash of insight, she realized her suffering came from her thoughts about her situation rather than the situation itself.
Her thoughts were, “I don’t deserve happiness” and “my life is horrible.” She asked herself with a fierce honesty, “Are those thoughts true? Can I absolutely know they are true?” She couldn’t say “yes.” Rather than struggle to work out a true answer, she looked at her relationship to those thoughts: “How do I react?” “What happens when I believe those thoughts?” “Who would I be without them?”
She was smart and intuitive and not only brought herself out of depression but turned her questions into an inquiry process she calls “The Work” and became a famous author and often-sought speaker.
Her questions run deep enough that varieties of them can be used in meditation to see through the delusions of a suffering mind by merely changing the focus from believing our thoughts to examining how we feel when they are active.
There are lots of ways to not fight with reality. Byron Katie’s way uses dialogue, writing, and contemplation. This book focuses mainly on meditation practice. For meditators, welcoming is especially important because so many traditions suggest that it is possible to take control of what we feel and bend it to our will. But habit and biology are stronger than will. We cannot control our emotions. They arise unbidden out of causes and conditions. And some of the conditions are in our neural wiring.
We have some influence over how we explain, express, or act on emotions. We can also push them under the waves and turn away. But that is more like holding a beachball under water. If we try to prevent ourselves from knowing them, our meditation will grind to a halt and we may never know why.
So let's pause and look at the neuroscience of emotion and why welcoming is a prerequisite of deeper freedom.
You should not be concerned whether you have good or bad experiences. You should only be concerned about your attitude toward these experiences.
-- U Tejaniya, “The Daily Tejaniya”
March 29, 2025
compiled by Doug McGill
Neurology of Emotions
Jaak Panksepp was an Estonian-American neuroscientist who spent his career mapping emotions in the brain. For example, he found that if he delivered a tiny electrical shock to a precise location in the subcortical brain of a cat while it was sleeping, the animal would jump to his feet with extended claws, arched back, wide eyes, and deep growls. It would go from somnolence to rage in seconds.
On the other hand, if he surgically removed that same small area, it would be impossible to make the cat angry.
Or he could place the probe in another specific spot and the electric pulse would put that cat into a panic: it tried desperately to run away and hide. Removing that same area made it impossible to elicit fear.
His well-documented conclusion was that some primary emotions are genetically wired into our brains by DNA. They don’t come from learning but from genes. Panksepp and his colleagues mapped the location of seven primary emotions found in all mammals. If they surgically removed all those seven, the creature dropped into a coma and could not be awakened. Without these seven areas, they had no signs of consciousness at all. When we are conscious, some of these primary emotions are active.
Here are the seven along with a brief description of each. They are listed in the order in which evolutions probably created them:
Seeking: pleasant curiosity. If a creature goes into a well-known territory and finds something different from what it expected, a little dopamine goes into the brain to give it extra excitement to explore what changed.
Rage: violent, uncontrolled anger with little or no conscious thought behind it. Normal anger seems to have this primal subcortical rage mixed with neocortical thought.
Fear: an intense urge to get away. Like rage, there seems to be little thought active in pure fear. Non-primary, complex emotions like anxiety and worry have thought mixed in.
Lust: strong sexual urge.
Care: nurturing instincts. This is the emotion that typically emerges when we see a baby. Since we are so helpless at birth, without this visceral feeling, our children are less likely to thrive. Through the ages there have undoubtably been mammals without a strong urge to care. Their DNA was taken out of the gene pool because their offspring were less likely to mature.
Connection: the instinct to reach out for attention. A well-fed, comfortable infant left alone for a half hour will usually start to cry in panic. This evolutionary instinct attracts adults to look after them. If no one comes, the panic drops into a grief or depression.
Play: the rough and tumble we see in young mammals. This is not game-playing that requires careful thought and strategy. Interestingly, these same circuits are active when we are asleep and dreaming. Both play and dreaming allow alternate realities to flow though the mind.
Again, these primal emotions are wired into us; we have no direct control over what we feel. We can push them out of consciousness, but they will still be alive within us without our permission. On the other hand, we can befriend them. Gradually we see them less as enemies and more as colorful friends. And life feels gentler.
There are hundreds of other emotions that are not wired in at birth. We learn them as we interact with the world. We may be able to train them out of our system, but not the primal emotions. And the strategy of welcoming “what is” can work with the non-primal emotions as well.
Again, we do have some influence over what we do or say when we feel them. But we can’t control the feelings themselves. They are triggered by causes and conditions, not by our willpower. If we welcome them — or even better yet befriend them — it is easier to work with them and give them expression so they can dissipate. In this way we go through the feeling rather than try to duck around it.
This is especially important in high-altitude meditation when the mind is growing quiet and only the faintest of impressions are left.
Ancient Hidden Tension
For example, I was doing a long sitting the other day. My mind-heart was relatively still and clear. As I sat, a faint sense of congestion arose in the middle of my chest. I could have brushed it aside. But I knew better. The feeling had already come forth so to try to sideline it would be pretending it hadn’t. I would be trying to change the past — that’s a little crazy. So I just welcomed the feeling that was already here. I sat gently with the sound of the birds in the yard and this slight heaviness around my breathing.
Then a memory of my father and older brother flickered through. My father had been a Boy Scout and made it to the highest rank: an Eagle Scout. My brother was three years older than me and near that high rank as well. I was new to Scouts, and enjoying it, particularly the camping. In that flicker of a memory my father was smiling and telling my brother and me that he would give his fancy Eagle Badge to the one of us who got to the Eagle rank first.
My brother had a three-year head start on me. Inside I had raged and wanted to run far away. But I dared not say or do anything. I stood there mute as a cloud congested my chest.
Sixty years later in the meditation I was amazed that that old memory was still floating around in there in those wired in emotions. My father had his own issues and had died many years before. My brother was now weak with aging. So I no longer needed that cloud for protection. But it was still buried under years of emotional habit.
As I felt that old cloud it seemed more like an old partner beside me than a core identity within me. As I welcomed the heaviness, it loosened a little, my eyes moistened, and my spirits lightened.
In higher altitude practice it is emotions are fainter, older, and entangled with our identities. It becomes important to not push anything away. And at the same time it helps to know that what we think about ourselves or others or the world is not so important. It’s what we feel in the moment and how we relate to it that matters most. Can we welcome what is? Whatever we see or feel, can we turn towards, relax into, and savor or smile? That is more freeing then stuffing down negative emotions and hanging desperately to an image of perfection which is not yet organic to us.
Natural Process
It can sometimes be hard to wrap our minds around the thought that we are not separate entities. Perhaps there is an evolutionary survival advantage to believing we have a distinct self that is important to take personally and keep intact.
However, at least in the West, we have a strong understanding of science and nature as treating us impersonally regardless of how we feel about ourselves. So rather than think “I have no self”, it is easier to think, “This self is a natural, impersonal process.” That can bring some clarity.
Sometimes, when relating to the mind or body, it is not helpful to say, "This is not me or mine," because the mind finds this very hard to accept. In such cases, saying, "This is a process of nature," is much easier to accept.
-- U Tejaniya, “The Daily Tejaniya”
February 28, 2025
compiled by Doug McGill
Before we move into the last motive — surrendering into the expanse — it might be helpful to review how we got to this point.
Wanting to alleviate suffering and cultivate wellbeing leads to the fierce and humble drive to see life clearly. And the drive to see clearly reveals the centrality of kindness — befriending ourselves and others. This opens the heart to the goodness inherent in everyone and shifts our attitude from abstract thinking to befriending. Despite the superficial differences around us, in essence we are all deeply entwined. In fact, we have no separate essences.
Sometimes this recognition is exhilarating. Sometimes it’s frightening. Often, it’s both. At best, our sense of self is a faithful friend. But we have no independent existence. In Buddhism this is often called “anatta” or “non-self.”
My understanding of non-self started years ago and reminded me of the first movie I saw in a theater. It was a sci-fi called, The Incredible Shrinking Man.
In the 1957 film, the main character, Scott, was exposed to a radioactive cloud of pesticides that caused him to shrink gradually. First, he noticed his clothes were too big. As he got smaller, he had to battle the family cat, kill a spider with a needle, and combat ants. He shrank to the size a dust particle and even tinier until he disappeared into the subatomic world.
It was a scary movie!
When I first heard about the Buddhist view of non-self, it reminded me of the incredible shrinking man. Yikes!
Of course, this is not what the Buddha was suggesting at all. It was the opposite. Our sense of self spreads and thins out until it dissolves into everything; there is no fundamental difference between you and me and everybody and everything. We can still say, “I am going to the store,” and know what we mean. But those are social conventions rather than expansive reality.
We don’t shrink out of existence. We don’t get gobbled up. As the tension relaxes deep inside, older, fainter tensions are exposed. If we relax into them, they eventually disperse. And so does our self-identity. The distinction between being the viewer and the viewed fades. What was felt becomes what is feeling. The knower becomes the known.
Without active self-identities as a separate being, our motive to change or evolve dissolves. We feel at home as things are. This feels like where we have always been.
In the next chapter we’ll look at how we go beyond the theoretical into actual practice of attuning more deeply to the mind-heart and the oneness of everything.
Copyright 2025 by Doug Kraft
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How to cite this document
(a suggested style): "High Altitude Meditation: A Practical Guide to Advanced Buddhist Practice,
1. Evolving Motivations, by Doug Kraft, www.easingawake.com/?p=HighAltitudeIntro."