Conceptual Hardening: Daniel P Brown identifies a risk to meditation

8 hours ago
4 min read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psYo9U-1pP8

If you want an AI generated 7 minute take of the topic!

TLDR: The post describes Daniel P Brown´s warnings of "conceptual hardening", shows it in practice and relates it to his attempts to keep the teachings secret

Dan Brown identifies a major risk to meditation: conceptual hardening

Dan Brown identified "conceptual hardening" as a major risk to meditation. This major risk is a lack of pliancy of the mind - pliancy is the ability to follow the pointing out instructions without hindering thoughts. It is one of the 5 core pillars of meditation skill. Ideally, the meditator does exactly what the pointing out instructions tell him to do in his mind: for example, imagining the specific metaphor, taking a specific view etc. This process of fluid following is made harder through thinking and conceptualising. Such hindering thoughts could be comparisons, or ideas about what should be, or about the difference to the last retreat, or how a specific result should look like etc.

This warning has a long tradition in Mahamudra:

"Analyze and a poisonous snake bites, that’s all"" (Saraha, quoted in Tashi Namgyal, Moonbeams of Mahamudra - one of Dan Brown´s primary sources)

How students understood the "don´t think" suggestion

In the retreats, Dan Brown often recommended to "not think". This was very obvious in the post-meditation Q/A. Here is one typical reply.

The reason why this realization isn't open to you is because you're thinking too much. So you have to use automatic emptiness to clear the thoughts. ... You're not following instructions. You're just going off on your own thing with thinking. It's going to preclude awakening. It's going to make it harder to realize. Stop it. Just follow what we're saying. Give up all thought. Let it go.

There were reviewers who were sceptical of the "don´t think" approach, equating it possibly to some cult-like "trust me" equivalent.

The teachers use very particular language, repeated over and over again, including phrases like "stop thinking", which is both a warning sign of a cult and the entire point of meditation, so it's understandable both why they say it and why I have a hard time with it (Source)

This reviewer noted the ambiguity in the instruction and in his own reaction.

My own take of it is this: retrospectively I can agree - to a degree. I had come to the retreat with literally zero preconception, as I had never been on a meditation retreat, and had never heard of Mahamudra or Dzogchen. My only spiritual tradition were some books by the Nisargadatta disciple Stephen Wolinsky, who I read more through the NLP lense.

Thus, I had no yardstick or "theory contamination" (Thomas Metzinger) to deal with. My mind was "fresh" in Dan´s definition of the natural state as defined in "Cloudless Mind":

When you have what we call a natural state of freshness, it means that all conceptualization settles out of the mind, so whatever you perceive is immediately fresh without an overlay of conceptualization about it.

Conceptual Hardening and Keeping the Teachings Secret

Conceptual hardening is one of the aspects behind Dan Brown´s attempt to "protect the teachings".

Dan Brown tried very hard to keep his teachings under the cover. For example, he never published a book distilling the essence of his own teaching system and concepts.

One reason among others was what he identified as risk of conceptual hardening: if the teachings are released openly, without guided instructions by a teacher, they are actually a risk to the future student.

If you try and conceptualize and do methods without having that natural state, then it becomes conceptual, and it actually hardens the mind and precludes awakening and makes it harder to actually have the experience of awakening, which is why this stuff is kept secret. It's to protect you from fucking it up (Cloudless Mind Vol 2)

Obviously, there is an unresolved tension between these warnings, and the later translation and publication of eight so far major secret books of Bon Buddhism.

Each of the Shardza books carries the editorial warning:

These advanced practices should only be practiced after getting the appropriate transmission, and done only by practitioners with appropriate qualifications, permissions, and pith instructions. Without such qualifications, permissions, and instructions these practices can be dangerous, so do not put yourself at risk.

Here is my problem: the conceptual hardening is likely not only to occur when practicing from the book: it already occurs when just reading it. So, I think this warning is in vain in this respect. Logically speaking, not one should read these books before attending a retreat by Dan Brown or his teachers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hChKxUxxgI

So, like the reviewer of the nonlinear function blog quoted above, I am a bit of a split mind: yes, conceptual hardening may be a burden. And yet, I love to read Dan´s translations leading exactly to it. I think this is an unresolved issue: how to deal with the tradition in times of immediate accessability of all text, and with a limited supply of teachers in a tradition.