From Bruce Nevin 971007.1908
Vladimir Jojic 971007.1130 MET --
... you don't stop controlling. You stop being upset when you experience
error. That's what non-attachment is about. Changing addictive demands to
preferences. ...
What you say sounds ok, but how do you eliminate "becoming upset".
It's called meditation. There are all kinds of approaches to this, but the
fundamental techniques involve attending to some circumscribed domain of
perception. The classic vipassana technique described by Gautama aka the
Buddha starts you out with a practice called anapana. To begin with, you pay
attention to the sensations within a triangular area of your face that
includes your nose and your upper lip; with practice, you narrow this area
until you are focussed just on the sensations of the breath entering and
leaving the nostrils.
Of course you are distracted. Other perceptions seem important. Sensations
in the body seem to demand attention. Thoughts arise. Memories arise.
Imaginings arise. Feelings arise. The practice is to notice that your
attention has wandered and gently return your attention to the sensations of
the breath in that very small area.
After enough practice to be able to hold one's attention in a disciplined
way (at minimum 3 days of a 10-day course, or 1 week of a month course), you
begin to focus attention on other small areas of the body, moving
systematically through the body from head to foot, head to foot. If this
becomes too difficult, return to anapana until the focus of attention is
sharp again, then resume moving attention through the body.
One side effect of this practice over time is much more acute and immediate
awareness of perceptions as they arise, even when not meditating. Another is
an awareness of impermanence, aniccha, how these perceptions arise and fade.
Another is non-attachment -- not getting roiled up if a preference is not
met. I will say in a moment how I believe these are related.
These are side effects: it appears that if they are made aims, they don't
happen. So the direct answer to "How do you eliminate `becoming upset' is
that you don't. It falls away by itself.
How do we become upset? My guess is, ...
It may be that attachment -- the emotional and physiological turbulence that
happens when an addictive demand is not met, the addictiveness itself -- is
a side effect of not becoming aware of sensations until they become
prominent enough to demand attention, or, perhaps better, it is an effect of
the process whereby a sensation is made more acute until we cannot ignore
it. This increase in prominence appears to be brought about in a feedback
loop within the body, such as I sketched in the post to which you replied.
Perhaps it happens this way: An error signal somehow has distressing
affects. The distressing affects are themselves perceptions that we attempt
to control. Error from failure to control them has distressing affects. And
so on in a kind of mounting reverberation until we pay attention--quite
likely not to the original perception at all. Anyway, that is how I
understand certain writers on Buddhist psychology, and it is how I have
experienced it; and it explains why when one simply attends more immediately
to perceptions as they arise (and pass away), attachment stops happening, as
I mentioned earlier.
In the classic vipassana (vipasyana) technique the focus is at the sensation
level, but the chosen focus of attention can be at any level.
If this is of interest, I can look for a clearer description by a qualified
teacher of these disciplines.
I. Kurtzer aka myrexsw, all of this is available for experiment by
individuals (that's what these 3,000-year Buddhist traditions are, really,
and other traditions of teaching and practice we could talk about,
experiment and discourse about how the experiments go) but I wouldn't know
how to model it.
If you don't want to become upset, you eliminate the control system
controlling the performance of your control systems
I don't think there is any control system controlling the performance of
control systems -- are you suggesting that a control system might take the
error signals of other control systems as perceptual input? Wouldn't fly.
Now some rampant speculation. Readers offended by lack of experimental
grounding may want to discard this message at this point, if you have not
done so already.
It appears likely that error has physiological effects (maybe local chemical
and/or electrical effects) that result in reorganization, and that
reorganization is distressing, or the effects of error that trigger
reorganization are distressing. This is my interpretation of subjective
experience; I have no physiological research to back me up, but I would just
bet that things like adrenaline, endorphins, and all kinds of other stuff go
in the biochemical soup in the intracorporal environment when there is
prolonged error in our control of perceptions. We get angry, impatient,
depressed, all kinds of stuff goes on.
So it seems to me likely that the occasion for some little neurons changing
what they control as cells (maybe affecting the gain in a control system, or
after a longer time changing neural connections, but these are side-effects
from the cell's point of view) might just be some chemical contributions to
the shared intracellular environment by the cells of a control system that
is unable to make its perceptual input match its reference input. As these
cellular byproducts of error in a control system diffuse more widely, the
cells that make up other control systems begin to change what they control.
Affects of such changes through the control hierarchy would be more immediate.
This is wildly speculative, of course. But it seems clear that the
behavioral byproducts of these little neuron critters just carrying on their
tiny lives as cells somehow constitute a control hierarchy in process of
reorganization. The cells aren't aiming to do that--they cannot control a
perception of being part of a multi-cell control system, they cannot even
perceive a perceptual signal or reference signal or error signal at that
level of multicellular organization-- but that is an effect or result of
what they do control as cells. How does that happen?
At a gross level, where we cannot ignore effects like elevated heart rate or
mood changes, biochemicals like endorphins and adrenaline are obviously
involved. Perhaps they are also involved at more subtle early stages of the
process, before the process of reverberation that seems to make things
unignorably distressing.
Bruce
