What does “being triggered” mean? In Western popular culture, being triggered is having a pathologic response to present experience caused by memory of prior experience. Provisionally speaking, the process of triggering, either pathologic or non-pathologic, is Zen’s daily “rice and tea”. Here we will explore “I” as the actual trigger, not the contents of sensation or memory.
We can imagine a ‘sentient being’ as having two constituent realms: physical and mental. The physical is the realm of sensation: sight, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. The realm of mentation is comprised of cognition (‘thinking’), emotion (‘feeling’), and memory (both creation and re-collection). Much of what occurs in the sensorial realm is outside of mentation, even as it shapes and is shaped by mentation…and vice versa. This provisional definition of sentience, or consciousness, is arbitrary, but useful.
When a stimulus appears in a sentient being’s sensorium, a sensation occurs. Almost immediately, before awareness of sensation becomes conscious, memory of similar sensations are re-collected and associated with the sensation. When consciousness catches up (an eternal fraction of a nanosecond later) the ‘raw’ sensation is not what is experienced. What is actually experienced is sensation + memory of prior similar sensations. And this sensation + memory appearing in consciousness has a valence, a value, affixed to it. The valence is positive, negative, or neutral. Due to this (usual) valence of associative memory much of raw sensation’s content is not experienced. What is experienced as sensation is actually valence laden mentation. This is non-pathologic triggering in the Buddhist sense.
In pathologic triggering, that which creates cognitive and emotional suffering, the stimulus-associative memory = sensation, is cyclical and self-perpetuating. The trigger, a valence loaded sensation + memory , appears in consciousness as a ‘new’ sensation. This ‘new’ (but pre-loaded) sensation has additional memory-valence added. If uninterrupted this process becomes repetitive, cyclical, and pathologic. Experience becomes increasingly dissociated from raw sensation. No matter the content of raw sensation, what is experienced is sensation + memory + negative valence. At its extreme, the raw contents of sensation become invisible to consciousness. A face, a sound, a smell, is no longer just that…it has been reduced to a negative valence. Some ‘thing’ to be avoided.
In Buddhism the valence associated with memory is called ‘preference’ or ‘aversion’. Both are a manifestation of the individuated self. The “I” which wants, doesn’t want, or is indifferent. The contents of sensation don’t trigger; “I”, the individuated self locked into preference-aversion, triggers. Sensation just is. One person loves coffee, another person hates it. Same coffee. The ‘in-here-ness’ shaping perception of ‘out-there-ness’. Coffee is not the trigger,”I” is the trigger.
Zen practice paradoxically embraces non-pathologic triggering. It sees preference-aversion as an opportunity to realize the self of no-self. One koan expresses this as, “the donkey sees the well; the well sees the donkey”. Baker Roshi summarizes it as “self on every percept”.
“I” is the Trigger
Do you like or dislike this essay? Does it trigger you? What is the donkey seeing? How’s the coffee?