My mind transformed completely, and there were some tradeoffs

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Perhaps the greatest gift I’ve ever received is the total change of my consciousness via long-term meditation. I don’t think people really understand what is possible here. I think they conceive of meditation as a useful vitamin that will increase calm and openness, and they think of more meditation as taking a lot of that vitamin. That is true up until a point, but after a certain moment, a process of inner upheaval begins that leaves your mind radically different. Your basic perceptions of time, space, self, other, universe, meaning—these all transform. Even though you are recognizably experiencing the same mundane life as everyone else, your interface with it is completely rearranged, such that the most basic shit seems pretty miraculous and strange. And this transformation deepens until you die, or so I am told by teachers I trust.

The term “awakening,” which is often used to describe this process, seems to imply that the default state is a delusion, and the post-meditation state is the reality. From here, I definitely see why people say this. I’m not claiming to be fully awakened, or close to whatever that is—there are many, many contemplatives who are much further along this path than I am. But from my half-awake vantage-point, my experience does feel “realer” than it did before. It feels less like I took some strange drug, and more like a bunch of clutter was cleared out of my consciousness, making way for the essential mystery of being.

However, despite how “real” this feels, I’m not comfortable making the claim that there is something essentially wrong with default consciousness, or that one should characterize the default as a delusion. My present-moment feelings of authenticity don’t imply anything conclusive about the past. Default consciousness seems to work well enough for most people. In fact, I don’t think this post-meditation flavor of consciousness would be agreeable to everyone, or even the majority. It certainly takes some getting used to, and there are elements that could be regarded as downsides, or at least tradeoffs.

In this post, I thought I’d describe the tradeoffs — partially because I realized that describing the downsides is a decent way of explaining the experience itself.

Everything is vapor

Life used to feel like a complicated math problem that I was terribly afraid of getting wrong. There were chunky abstractions in my head about how a person ought to be, how an upcoming conversation ought to go, what I should blame my family for, et cetera. These specters of past and future were weighty and substantial even though they were purely internal. For example, I would regularly experience a deluge of palpable emotions about how my life would be ruined if I struck out with this particular woman, which I certainly would, et cetera. Mostly, my experience was that of a person dancing in a thin slice of time between the shame of my youth and the perils of the future.

That has all become vastly lighter and thinner. I do not mean this metaphorically. I mean that the sensations that compose activities like “dreaming of the past” or “thinking about the future” or “imagining what could’ve been” are smaller in consciousness, like the present moment is a bigger desktop space and they are smaller icons. I can still narrativize about past and future, but the narratives are obviously illusory thought-wisps, making up part of the stagecraft of the present moment, not reflective of any truthful prognostication or recollection. They have the same truth value as birdsong—neither true nor untrue.

And that is also true of every other sensation. The sense of “Sasha” presents itself as another floating sensation. So does the sense of time passing. Ditto emotions. There is a radical equivalence between all of these sensations—they are all vivid, clear, and insubstantial. Emotions are felt powerfully but have a translucence, like a refreshing breeze sweeping over a stale room, whereas they used to have a “stickiness” that caused my mind to latch onto them and turn them into fanciful stories about my identity.

I find it to be a much more aesthetically beautiful way to live. Simply sitting in an idle moment with coffee and beholding this quivering, ephemeral world is extremely pleasurable. But it also feels disorienting. We are accustomed to judging the world by these mental constructs that seem so solid: our fears, our dreams, our notions of personal identity. Without the ability to take those yardsticks seriously, life is much more dreamlike. Earlier in my life, I sometimes had the feeling “aha, I have found the course of action that will save my life”—like there was some prescribed solution for my life and I had to carefully find it, as if obtaining this one pair of concert tickets or earning a particular grade would change everything. That was fun sometimes. I can’t imagine ever feeling that again.

Instead, stuff is just happening—God left my life here, so I am living it. It feels like a marvelous, inexplicable coincidence that my existence keeps elapsing within this same theatre of consciousness, over and over again. It’s not “meaningless,” but meaning is different: It’s an emergent function of the events I find myself participating in, rather than a complicated story about my personal saga.

And occasionally, I feel nostalgia for the complicated, dramatic stories I left behind. I thought I was going to save literature! I was so worried that I wouldn’t get everything right! What a wild, cinematic way to live! It’s kind of like remembering how boldly I acted the first time I got drunk. I wouldn’t want to live there, but there is a kind of appealing frenzy to it that I now cannot return to.

You have a cool hobby that you think everyone should do, but nobody does it, or thinks it’s cool

You know how in a realist oil painting, objects are less visually differentiated than they are in real life, so it’s easier to appreciate how they complement the other objects in the composition? Meditation makes real life look more like that! I don’t know why—but it seems that, by default, our minds project a conceptual overlay onto the world around us, so we see the concept of “chair” along with the chair itself, and this diminishes the visual richness of underlying reality. When that conceptual overlay disappears, which it does at a certain moment in the contemplative path, everything is more visually immediate. Isn’t that cool?

No, it is not cool. Not really. Not cool like playing violin beautifully, or being extremely muscular, or making the perfect coq au vin. It cannot be shown off at parties, unlike the fruits of many other hobbies. Unlike mountain climbing, meditation is pretty boring to talk about. Sure, maybe in Berkeley or Bali, you can parlay a certain spiritual vibe into getting laid. But it just doesn’t get you much in terms of material output to display. If you consider opportunity cost, meditation is likely to materially reduce the number of goodies you can boast about.

And then there’s the whole suffering angle, by which I mean, the fact that meditation vastly reduces your suffering, and then you become aware that so many of your friends are suffering horribly, when they don’t have to. You love them and you don’t want them to be in pain. Shouldn’t they all just become serious practitioners like you? On one level, sure. If they did, they would probably benefit. But they’re not going to because you tell them to. (Many people don’t actually believe that you suffer much less, and many other people just kind of tune out this information, or can’t believe it could apply to them.) And the amount of meditation it takes to vastly reduce suffering is comparable to the amount of time you’d put into a graduate degree—so recommending that someone adopts the spiritual path because they’re having a rough week is sort of like telling someone they should go get a master’s or a PhD because they don’t like their current job. You’re not always wrong, but it’s usually pretty silly advice to give.

I am talking to myself here—I have been very guilty of trying to push serious meditation on friends. I have now gotten over it, but it was difficult for me to develop the micro-skill of realizing that the spiritual path will not attract the majority of people and that is probably fine. And it is still a weird experience to see people in a lot of emotional pain and to understand that, by pure luck, you are in much less of it, because you happened to encounter good teachings and good teachers, and happened to be in a receptive state of mind.

You still have normal emotional problems, confusingly

Imagine being quite strong, like the kind of absurdly strong person who can flip giant tires with ease. Then imagine one day a cashier hands you a bag of groceries, and you try to take it but it is impossibly heavy in your hands—it crashes to the floor and a milk bottle explodes and everyone looks at you, this big muscle-bound freak gazing down helplessly at a spreading pool of milk.

This is sort of what the robust but imperfect emotional health of an advanced contemplative practitioner feels like. So many mental burdens that plague most people are basically gone. Fear of death? It’s a fun spicy meditation object. Awkward silences in conversation? That’s just God talking. Negative emotions still exist, but they can be experienced without resistance, or even savored. Last night, I felt depressed, and I’d perhaps have preferred not to, but I just let it pass through me, and today I am fine. This is a big contrast to my youth, when depressive spells lasted for weeks or months.

But then sometimes you get triggered in a completely normal way, and most of your emotional skills just abandon you, and this can feel incredibly disorienting. For example: during the last year, I was triggered by two subjects that tend to make people emotional, AI safety and Israel/Palestine. In both cases, I tweeted stupid shit and experienced full-body rage and panic, and this felt utterly involuntary, like the kind of purely reactive behavior I meditated so much in order to get away from. It was as if I’d never meditated. The only difference was that I recovered more quickly: in each case, within a day or two, I calmed down, deleted the tweets, and temporarily deactivated my Twitter, realizing I wasn’t in the right state of mind to be trusted with a megaphone. This was an improvement from my previous decade, when I’d get sucked into days-long internet fights in similar circumstances. Still, it was disorienting and a little humiliating: I thought I was better than that.

It’s really unfortunate that you can experience oceanic bliss and still be an embarrassing normal person, and this discrepancy can make it hard to confront your shortcomings honestly. In my marriage, I was baffled by some difficulties Cate and I were having, until I realized that I was facing standard attachment issues—this is my first time being the more anxiously attached partner in a serious relationship, and I didn’t have inner software built for that. I think before realizing this, I wasn’t looking at my behavior objectively because, well, I experience cosmic unity every day on the cushion, I am not supposed to have wounded child shit going on still! But of course I do.

This same dynamic seems true of every other experienced practitioner I know: they have tons of serene equanimity, but they still encounter rough patches. Moreover, I have noticed that many spiritual non-profits are dysfunctional, and I think a major source of this is gurus not wanting to admit that they have normal human emotional blind spots that cause management issues, like fear of conflict, or excessive desire for control, or fear of negative feedback. With meditative skill, it is easier to hide this from yourself, and since your baseline mood is so high, it can be hard to want to plunge into negative emotions.

The background tendency for pretty much every person, awakened or no, is to shrink from growth and avoid harsh feedback. Awakening just gives you more mental plasticity, and more fun avoidance tricks. This is why I think it’s actually kind of dangerous to do long-term serious meditation without some sort of skin in the game of life—like a career or cause or relationship that requires ongoing change.

Opting out of the collective internal screaming

In spite of what I just said about how serious practitioners do get triggered, it’s also true that the shape of your mind changes such that you are not default worried. And when this happens, you realize that most people are default worried. Like, most people have a free-floating existential worry drive that latches onto any signal that things are going wrong. If you look for it, you will notice that most people you meet have a large amount of background inner tension, as if part of them is constantly screaming internally, and all the other parts are trying to ignore the screaming, or drown it out.

Losing that has some large interpersonal upsides. When you are no longer default worried, you have a lot of inner space to absorb other people’s emotional energy. I feel sometimes that I have a nearly infinite capacity for the emotions and discomforts of others. Sometimes people talk to me about their problems and then apologize for dumping their stuff on me, and I’m like, oh you didn’t hit 10% of my total capacity, would you like to keep talking?

But there is also a really interesting downside, which is that lots of people will find it alienating that you are not default worried. Collectively freaking out about things is a big part of human bonding. People enjoy worrying together, whether it’s about the latest election, or climate change, or the ravages of aging, or the possibility that a big venture will fail—people will share their worries with you, and they want and expect you to be similarly freaked out. This is totally reasonable! It is a really great way to feel like you are not alone! But I cannot be freaked out about the world the way I once was, though I dearly hope for things to go well. And sometimes people dislike that I can sympathize with their worry but I palpably don’t feel it the same way. It feels sociopathic, or like I’m not taking them seriously.

One open question I have about the contemplative path is whether it would be bad for people who are motivated to do great things by a sense of dread. While I believe that it’s entirely possible to contribute great deeds to humanity from a place of joy and ease, I’m not stupid enough to presume that this is true for every person. Learning to be humble about this has been its own journey—when I started having big meditative openings, it seemed insane that everyone didn’t want the same thing as I was experiencing, like they must just be misinformed about their interests. With a little time and experience, though, it’s become clear that suffering can be load-bearing. It would be nice if I’d found the truth that everyone should live by, and, for a time, mystical experience seemed like that truth. But unfortunately, it seems like the more potent, enduring lesson of mystical experience is the narrowness of my own perspective.