Discarding My Mental Tension

another meditation thing

Last week, I wrote about a transformative mental experience that occurred during my meditation practice. It was followed a few months later by another one, which I am documenting in this post. This one, which I call The Untensing, is significantly more difficult to explain, and probably makes me sound crazier.

In February, I had my first cessation experience. This is a weird thing that happens to some meditators—basically everyone who does a lot of meditating, at some point—wherein, as far as you can tell, you drop out of existence for a second. It’s not just that you feel floaty and vague, it’s that the film of your life stops for a moment. A couple of frames are dropped. You don’t have the experience of cessation, because it is non-experience. You just go, “hey what the fuck was that,” after it happens. It’s almost like when you fall asleep without wanting to and then wake up suddenly—that jolting feeling—but harder, more abrupt, shorter, and stranger.

Cessation experiences are typically followed by a tremendous feeling of clarity and relaxation. When life flicks back on, after an instant of being off, it’s more clear and vivid. This, too, occurred in my case. I had the sense that I could observe my mental life with unusual resolution: I was super, super aware of the appearance and disappearance of thoughts and feelings and sensations. Basically, the joint-work of my consciousness was more apparent, how it was all being stitched together. 

Resultantly, during the next few days, I was more phenomenologically introspective than usual. I was aware that weird shit was going on with my brain, and I didn’t want to miss any of the details of the weird shit. And on one of these introspective evenings, I was watching UFC, as I sometimes do, and I was enjoying Joe Rogan’s very entertaining color commentary, as I also sometimes do.

This time, I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before about this ordinary experience. I was—deeply, unconsciously—placing an interpretive layer over Joe’s words before I really even heard them. Like, even before I could decode the waveforms of his voice into semantic data, I was already primed with a story about how good his commentary was, or how bad, or biased, or unbiased. The experience was being pre-filtered in subtle but pervasive way.

In that moment, I perceived this as mental tension. I was tensing up in anticipation of the experience, by being ready to slot it into some narrative framework. I wasn’t just letting Rogan be Rogan.

During that moment, it occurred to me, as it never had before, that I could just not. I could simply allow Rogan to be as he was. So I did that. I let go of the mental tension I previously didn’t know was there, which was an option I couldn’t have previously understood.

It was nice: when I un-tensed, his voice took on a cleanliness and purity that I hadn’t heard before. The experience was both more and less than it otherwise would be. Without interpretive tension, it was sumptuous, and therefore larger, but also less freighted with the conceptual frameworks that mark my experience, and therefore lighter and more transient. It was a different kind of appreciation.

This was quite noticeable, even though it wasn’t a seismic change in my whole consciousness, like seeing the face of God or anything. It was like wiping the last little bit of schmutz off a mirror: even though the obstruction cleared wasn’t major, the totality of the clarity had a striking loveliness to it.

It was also scary. It occurred to me, instantly, in that moment, that much of what I thought of as my identity consisted of this mental tension, a matrix of stories and habitual thoughts I was ready to slap onto reality at all times. What would I be if I didn’t have that? Would I be anything?

I went to the bathroom, feeling slightly disoriented. As I sat on the toilet, my (now ex-) wife was moving around the kitchen, making herself a snack. I heard the sound of clanking pots, and I thought, just let those be pots, they’re fine that way. And thus they were. I looked at the shadows moving on the wall, and I thought, just let those be shadows, they are so neat and tidy. 

Shortly afterward, we went out to our hot tub, and I noticed that I could converse with her without this mental tension. My personality was still there, who I was didn’t disappear. I was just a little more relaxed, maybe, and the sunset was a little brighter, maybe. 

Before, during meditation, for years, I had engaged in efforts to experience existence in a ‘purer’ form. I’d tried to shut off the stream of thoughts, or tried to see the bareness of existence. These efforts sometimes yielded interesting results, but it did feel like an effort, like a somewhat artificial lens I was placing on reality. This mental relaxation does not feel like an effort. It just feels like I’m choosing not to do something that I, previously, did almost 100% of the time, but didn’t notice that I was doing.

Like the inversion effect described in the previous post, this ability has persisted. However, I am not in this state all the time. I don’t always prefer it to lassoing the world with concepts, so I don’t always forcefully relax out of everything. And, during moments of intense stress, anxiety, and ego injury, it’s much less intuitive to let go, so it takes some time to remember to do so.

But when I can remember, it’s really helpful. The timing of this contemplative breakthrough was good—shortly after this event, I had a bunch of life disruptions. There was divorce, car theft, moving around constantly, the hallucinatory insanity of some post-divorce dating, and so on. This entailed a significant degree of emotional violence, as you would expect.

And the funny thing is that, when I managed to un-tense, some of these moments of emotional violence were among the most beautiful moments of my life. When I wasn’t crowding the feelings with other mental activities, I was able to relish their sheer power, in the same way that it’s fun to play with a pressure washer and strip paint off stuff. Like, wow, look at this fucker go. (The fucker is the universe passing through me.) 

I think, traditionally, what I’m ‘supposed to do,’ as a meditator, now, is to make this my automatic mental reflex to the extent that I never live in stories. But I’m not sure that I want to do this. I find that there are certain moments in which getting lost in concepts is, to me, preferable to being awash in pure existence. However I don’t totally know what I’m talking about here, and I plan to seek a meditation teacher to help me navigate this question.

I can’t claim that this is useful at all, in a practical sense. It seems to reduce my stress a bunch, and it also feels like a creatively fertile state in which I can express myself more freely and less pretentiously. But is this actually true? No way of A/B testing, can’t tell you. However, I love that it’s an option for totally non-utilitarian reasons. There’s a liberated quality to this flavor of existence, a childlike quality that’s deeply enjoyable. I can vaguely remember what it was like to be a kid playing in the field, filled with raw feeling, digging up bugs from the dirt, not yet stumbling under the weight of stories about how life is supposed to be. This is kind of like that.