Novice Meditator's Notes, Late December
I have some thoughts about sitting around and staring off into space
Meditation is, right now, one of the most meaningful parts of my life. But I’m not an expert; I’ve probably practiced for somewhere between 500-1200 hours in my life, which is, like, one-twentieth of what people do before they get called Roshi, or start a sex cult, or whatever. So I share these reflections with you in a spirit of curiosity, rather than authority. These are some opinions I have after sitting down and doing nothing. Take them for whatever you think they’re worth.
If You’re Having Trouble Meditating, Maybe the Problem Is Not Your Meditation Skill
Over the last year, I greatly improved my self-esteem, partly with chemical help. One weird side effect is that I can suddenly meditate. My ability to achieve deep contemplative states increased instantly.
It turns out that a huge amount of my mental buzzing was composed of inner reputation management, consisting of intrusive thoughts like, how did that conversation go two hours ago, am I likable, am I doing this right, what does it say about me that I’m meditating. I was doing my level best to still the waters of my mind, but it was tough when the waters were constantly worried about whether they were worthy of stillness.
But now they do not. And, now that I’m in a more forgiving state of mind, it’s much easier to gently allow my attention to return to an object when my mind wanders, which is a much better route to improved focus than chastising your brain for doing the natural things it does.
This is something I almost never see mentioned in meditation texts, which is super, super weird. It’s a total lack of focus on what seems like a really important bottleneck. Many people in our culture suffer from self-hatred or at least a lack of self-compassion. And, while meditation can be a great crucible for destructive thoughts, it can also provide a canvas for those thoughts to operate unopposed.
So, if meditation really frustrates you, perhaps there’s a different bottleneck you should address: your lack of comfort with yourself. (Maybe look into this, or this, or this, or the chemical help mentioned at the top of this section.)
It Should Feel Good, Dumbass
In my early 20s, I put hundreds of hours into Zen meditation, and it fucked me the hell up. Thus, I was a little nervous about getting back into Buddhist traditions, until I encountered the work of Rob Burbea, which I would highly recommend.
I don’t want to get too into his deal here, because you could just read this post by Tasshin Fogleman for a thorough, heartfelt introduction. However, I will say that one particular aspect of Rob’s work made meditation feel like a safe territory for me again: his emphasis on good feelings. Roughly, Rob’s attitude seems to have been that the Buddhist tradition is about liberation, and that liberation should feel good, otherwise, what kind of liberation is it?
This doesn’t sound like an earth-shaking proposition. But it’s weirdly heretical in a lot of contemplative circles of the “enlightenment jock” mode, in which your mission as a meditator is to hurtle towards the complete destruction of your reality, without, seemingly, much regard for the consequences for your short-term happiness or the effect of contemplation on your life as a whole. On meditation forums, you see people insisting that you shouldn’t make yourself feel good, because your self doesn’t exist, so what the fuck are you doing, you self-indulgent lotus-eating piece of shit???
It’s not that Rob preaches that every moment of meditation should feel warm and pleasant. Some of the practices in his fantastic book, Seeing That Frees, are disorienting. Some feel like reaching back to the projector that produces consciousness and flicking a bunch of important switches on and off. But, taken as a whole, Burbea reminds you that your practice ought to feel freeing and positive.
Paradoxically, this permission to optimize for pleasure has made me more adventurous as a meditator; I feel more at ease poking at the weirder edges of my consciousness knowing that my goal, overall, is liberation.
Some Thoughts on Metta
We now live in a meditation-industrial complex, where millions are made off apps promoting mindfulness, often with the stated goal of increasing your performance and focus. It’s a shame that this is the main benefit extolled, when there’s a whole meditative tradition centered around making your heart softer and more generous. The world could use a little more focus, but it could use a lot more compassion.
But loving-kindness is hard for a lot of people. The classical approach involves repeating phrases like “may you be happy” while thinking of people in your life, and this can feel like you’re beating your heart with a rolled-up newspaper and trying to demand it burst with light. I used to feel this way. Loving-kindness used to feel like punishing myself for not being loving enough.
However, I’m having a lot of fun with it lately, partly due to a shift in framing. Instead of thinking that I’m creating compassion when I meditate, I now consider my goal to be increasing the salience of what’s already there.
When I relax and think about how cool it is that I’m here in an eyeblink of consciousness between two eternities, it’s natural that I feel gratitude. When I reflect on other human beings, it’s normal to feel compassion, or at least the desire that they’re given the opportunity to make the best of their brief lives. It’s not always an overwhelming tidal wave of emotion, but something is usually there.
So now the procedure, for me, is something like this: I achieve whatever relative calm is available at the moment, and turn my thoughts towards the direction of gratitude compassion, and then pick up on whatever intensity of feeling naturally occurs, whether it’s a faint spark or two, or something bigger. And then, without judging the intensity of the feeling, or lack thereof, I start trying to apply it to myself, and then others, with the phrases.
For me, this feels way less artificial. It’s not like I’m pretending to like a song that I don’t. Instead, it’s like I’m listening to some beloved music a little more deeply than usual, which tends, naturally, to increase my appreciation for it.
And, as I proceed onwards, on this path of not trying to be more loving, and not measuring the level of affection I feel, I find myself being more loving, and feeling more affection. Meditation is filled with weird non-doing paradoxes like this, and I try my best to not try to understand it.
Variety Is Fun
Maybe this is just a reflection of my low-grade autism, but I have this lust for rigid specifications for how my life should be lived. At times in my life, I’ve wanted to wear one outfit every day, have one meal for breakfast every day, and so on. Meditation is no different: in the past, I’ve tried to establish rules like “I will do Zazen and only Zazen,” but I inevitably grow bored, and then blame myself for growing bored, etcetera.
Now, I’m trying to take the opposite approach, and it’s more fun. I do have a minimal routine: every day, I do one medium dose of loving-kindness, and one shorter dose of some other thing. But otherwise, I play around a lot whenever I feel like it. I’ll do random exercises from Seeing that Frees, I’ll frame my perception in fun ways while I’m driving, I’ll try to play with any loving-kindness I feel towards random people in Home Depot, stir my drink in a non-dual fashion, etcetera.
This level of playfulness has brought me a bunch of unexpected sensory insights, and it’s improved my more formal meditation as well. If you’re not fucking around with your consciousness for fun, I would highly recommend it.
Jhānas Are Amazing, Academic Psychology Is Ridiculous
Okay so there are these eight bliss states that Buddhist meditators teach themselves to access, called jhānas. I have achieved jhānas 1-4, thanks pretty much to Rob Burbea and Nick Cammarata. And I no longer believe that positive psychology is a real field. Because, guys, what the fuck.
For 2,000 years, meditators have been casually discussing their ability to achieve mental states that are as good as drugs with no side effects that are totally non-addictive. And they’re telling the truth. And this isn’t widely known, and we don’t have systematic information on how to do it. It’s just not well-studied in the West. Instead, positive psychologists, at great expense, spend their time coming up with thrilling insights which are basically identical to what your grandma would tell you, like, positive relationships increase happiness, or, children increase the amount of meaning in life but parenting is hard.
And as for the jhānas, what do we have instead of systematic study? Some great stuff, some bad stuff. Different traditions argue constantly over what the right method is. There’s a whole genre of Jhānas Policing where some monks appear to spend all their time telling novice meditators that they aren’t getting Real Jhanas yet. (To the tune of Karma Police: “Jhāna Police / get all the joy you can it’s not enough…”) Some authorities insist that jhanas are Bad and Not Real, and that you should focus on Real Reality.
And this is all normal, a beautiful natural part of the dialogic search for truth. But humanity’s ability to achieve endless non-addictive bliss shouldn’t rest on an individual person’s ability to stumble upon the right MP3 of a dharma talk. If we’re studying anything in human happiness, this should be near the top of the list.
It almost makes you think that academic psychology is a LARP, more focused on polishing existing paradigms than on exploring the full breadth of conscious experience that’s possible. Almost.