This is a page of short essay-ish opinions about long-term deconstructive meditation, which is to say, meditation aimed at the change of perspective that is sometimes called “spiritual awakening”. These opinions are based on my experiences, and my obsessive questioning of other meditators, and obsessive reading of the meditation literature. Generally, they are for people who are already taking meditation seriously.
If you are not one of those people, but you’d like to learn more about meditation of this sort, I’d recommend reading:
Original Love by Henry Shukman
The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young
These resources are good if you’re just starting a meditation practice:
Some people find this essay I wrote helpful
This short essay is incredibly good
If you’ve started having profound spiritual experiences, and you haven’t read End of Your World, do yourself a favor and go read it. It’s pithy, fun, and deeply helpful, perhaps the only really accurate book about the deep end of meditation practice. Adyashanti is one of the most important humans in my life even though we’ve never met, and I know a bunch of other meditators who feel the same way.
The following short essays are written in the spirit of this great/bizarre meditation resource, which I partially agree with, but, moreso, admire. (It’s huge and forbidding, but has some amazing passages—search for “The state, process, and physical environment of the system are also its plans and goals.” for the beginning of a particularly inspired moment.)
The keep it up game
Sometimes, I think the spiritual path is really complicated. There are all these diverse skills to master, layers of ego to work through, constant opportunities to attempt a more ethical life, or wonder how to do so.
And then sometimes I think it’s actually very simple. What you are trying to do is lose a game.
You know those keep-it-up games that all children naturally reinvent? Where the floor is lava and you need to keep hitting a balloon or a ball so it doesn’t hit the floor?
The vast majority of humans are wired to play a game like this with experience. Raw experience is scary. There might be a lot of emotions down there. Perhaps there’s less control than you think there is. Perhaps you are a little fucked up inside, and not living up to your values. There’s also the fact of ever-present transience, which reminds us how soon we will vanish, along with everything we hold dear.
Reasonably, we avoid going there. And so we play a keep-it-up game. We kick the balloon of mind away from bare experience. Masters of this game spend days relitigating arguments that already happened, or arguments that haven’t happened yet. Or watching short form video constantly, or compulsively optimizing themselves in some fashion. Whatever it takes to get away from the gritty immediacy of being here.
Perhaps this is unsatisfying to you. And so you take up meditation, or another form of slowing down, and get a little worse at the keep-it-up game. You get closer to bare experience, and start noticing how painful and tight your avoidance mechanisms are. You start having more and more interactions with the fullness of emotion, which is wrenching and wonderful.
Some people then wonder: hey, how deep does this go? And they read a bunch of books about spirituality, and master a bunch of meditation techniques. Experience becomes amazingly psychedelic, and you find out that this psychotechnology has endured through millennia for a reason. It is undeniably potent.
But at this point you are still playing the game. The balloon is allowed to get pretty close to the ground, but every time it almost drops, there is a reassertion of identity. Like: “I’m so open to my emotions now, wow, it’s a shame that not everyone is like me.” Or: “My awareness is so expansive and beautiful, surely this is the spiritual awakening that I’ve been told about.” Each of these assertions is a subtle tap on the balloon that propels it upwards just long enough. This is a reasonable place to hang out.
But perhaps, one day, by the grace of God, you lose the game. The balloon hits the floor. Which feels like it should result in annihilation—the destruction of your precious identity as a meditator, along with the destruction of everything else. You lost the game! Isn’t the game all there is?
Strangely, though, life does not end with this annihilation. Instead, life is beautifully renewed by the hilarious knowledge of this game you’ve been playing, the whole time. It becomes extraordinarily funny how much your default setting was to flee from beauty, relief, and joy. Your whole life was about making yourself happy and you were not even good at it.
From then, you can do whatever you want. My life looks pretty similar to what it was before I lost the game. I am just more eager to help, because I’m aware of how painful the game is, and now that I’m not as busy playing it, I have more energy for other people.
I still kick the balloon around, because you sort of have to, to get along in society. But it feels lighter and easier when it’s not life and death, it’s just a balloon.
You actually do have to want it
Occasionally you will hear someone spiritual say, “spiritual ambition is dumb, you shouldn’t be meditating to get things,” or “just accept how everything is now.” To which I say, lol, lmao. Like obviously you actually want something out of spiritual practice, right? You want to have a completely different relationship with this life, and building this relationship requires real work. Without a spiritual yearning, you would not be practicing (or paying attention to my opinions about practice, certainly). “The secret is not wanting anything” is nonsense.
…On one level! But on another level, statements like this are extremely helpful: as practice pointers. The aim of statements like these is to avoid the failure mode of future-oriented meditative practice. In future-oriented practice, which is typically destructive, you are trying to aggressively bend your bodymind into a different shape, the shape you think it ought to be when you become spiritual, rather than lovingly meeting your bodymind where it is, thus changing your relationship to it.
So how do we find the synthesis between these points of view? It’s actually simple. The spiritual yearning, the desperate want for something else? Treat these as present-moment phenomena to be welcomed, opened to, examined, lovingly encountered. That want to be somewhere else is fascinating, if you start looking at it, really looking at the sensations composing that yearning. Where do you think you’re going?
A mundane view of the powers
Here’s a message I heard from serious meditators: “hey, you might get spiritual powers from meditation. But they’re a peril and a distraction more than anything. Just keep sitting.” I always thought this was woo-woo hogwash. And then it happened to me, but not like I expected. And it turned out to be an important warning.
How do I understand this now? Well, let’s say that on the meditative path, you are switching between two reward functions, two ways of gaining satisfaction.
Default reward function: “I have to get what I want to get! I just have to. That’s the important thing.”
Spiritual reward function: “All will be well. All manner of things will be well. Implicit in this is the realization that me and my wants are not so ultimately important, this identity is just an outfit.”
Since the meditative path gives you real benefits—like increased emotional intelligence, a greater ability to be present with people, etc—sometimes you will unlock an ability that makes it much easier for you to fulfill your default reward function. Like intense powers of concentration, or greater charisma, or something like that. This will create a natural temptation to become a cool spiritual person who is good at fulfilling your wants that way. And there’s nothing wrong with this, as a phase to hang out in for a bit, maybe a few years if you want. But it’s much less pleasant, in my experience, than moving to the latter reward function, which involves deeply interrogating your wants, in a way that requires humiliating self-honesty.
A huge amount of the New Age scene is people stuck in this cul de sac.
Your ego structure just will co-opt the spiritual path
You might read the above essay and think, “aha, great, I just won’t let my spiritual search be hijacked by my ego-level wants!” The bad news is it doesn’t work like that. How it works is that your ego structure will co-opt the spiritual path, and in the process, you will learn so much about the pain inherent in that way of being, and thus become increasingly willing to choose something else.
For example, as an Enneagram 7 with a side of 3, I was after two things in the spiritual path, not always consciously:
To always have fun/good experiences
To be a cool shiny spiritual person
And meditation gave me some of those things! But imperfectly. Oh no! You cannot always make your experience good, no matter how skilled you are as a meditator. And the more validation you get, the more you’re aware of the pain of lack that’s driving the search for validation. So I was brought into deeper and deeper contact with my stupidity, until release felt like a more tempting option than carrying on the way I had been.
I think there is no escaping this kind of self-confrontation.
In favor of insane Southeast Asian high standards
The phrase “enlightened” or “awakened” is, confusingly, used to refer to these two things.
Someone who has been through a particular mental event—a massive reduction in the part of consciousness that could be called “the separate self,” typically resulting in a shocking increase in well-being, and a dramatic change in perspective on life.
Someone who has reached a state of unusual moral perfection.
Being 1 is rare, but less rare than being a chess grandmaster—certainly tens of thousands, and maybe hundreds of thousands of people qualify, by my estimation. I’ve now met dozens of people who meet criterion 1, and I am one of them myself. Some are unusually wonderful people. Some are more neurotic than average, or complete lunatics.
2 is obviously much rarer. Sometimes, 2 is formalized in a title, as in the “arahant” in Buddhism, which I roughly understand as designating someone who is never superfluously an asshole, ever. People whose opinion I trust have told me that there are maybe a few of these people alive at any given time, like under ten. I know a few elder teachers who I’d guess are approaching the zip code.
From this perspective, I’m in favor of 2 being the goal, and 1 being considered a laudable credential, like a PhD, that prepares you to do serious work. If you have experienced the abundant joy and ease of the separate self departing, and you’re not actively concerned about how to give your gifts away—in whatever way that means for you personally—I’m really confused by your priorities.
I think sometimes people downplay the idea of working towards unusual moral perfection because the idea can invite neuroticism. But this is, as the kids say, a skill issue. We can all acknowledge that it’s possible to be much more loving, kind, skillful, patient, wise, etc, than we are, and that there are concrete steps we can take in this direction, without constantly chastising ourselves or being dishonest about our remaining flaws. We can also acknowledge that we can be much better without opting into all of the trappings of what exactly that means in a renunciate religious context. (I like Chapman’s nobility.)
1 makes 2 more possible, in my experience, by making it more painful when you’re an asshole. The freedom of the spiritual path is a freedom from the desire to do massive amounts of self-interested clinging. However, sometimes people become dharma teachers, accumulate acolytes who fawn over them, and cut off the possibility of receiving real feedback, and stagnate or worse.
Anything can be a defense against any other thing
Sometimes, people who notice how their minds work start thinking: “Aha! Thoughts are so tricky and elusive! As long as I’m staying with my embodied emotions, I won’t deceive myself.” Alas, the ego is tremendously good at avoiding things, and can use anything as a defense against any other thing. You can use a thought to defend yourself against an emotion, or an emotion as a defense against a thought. Or an emotion as a defense against another emotion. Or you can put an emotion outside, into the world, as a defense against feeling something inside (projection.) Etc etc etc.
Thus, woe unto the meditator who believes that the key to awakening is “embodiment” or “emotional release” or “attunement” or “samadhi” or “memory reconsolidation” any specific state or attribute or benefit. Sure, these are nice precursors, and accessing them will likely be part of the trip. Memory reconsolidation, specifically, can clear up everyday cognition to a shocking extent. But the trip isn’t about any of that specifically — it’s finally about something so terrifyingly simple that you don’t want to see it. Extended periods of samadhi will make it likelier that you see it, but not if you fetishize concentration. The thing you’re looking for is part of every state, but it transcends all of them.
And any state can be used to avoid awakening. And you will avoid awakening, because it is terrifying to the ego structure. That is part of the journey—the terror, and the resistance. The resistance that tends to naturally decrease as you get increasingly sick of your own shit, and thus desirous of an alternative.
The switchback
There is a really weird property to the meditation arc. It is unlike anything else I know of in skill acquisition.
Let’s decompose the meditation path into two steps.
Get really good at skilled state cultivation. Really relax for the first time in your life. Develop equanimity, fill yourself with bliss, absorb the cosmic pain and transmute it into pure love, tune into spaciousness. Wow yourself with how psychedelic experience can become. Maybe get some fun side benefits, like telepathy-level empathy, or a reduced need for sleep. Do self-inquiry until self/other duality falls away.
Radically let go of thinking that states are important at all. Let the spirit do whatever it wants with you. (You might notice that you were always doing this, you just didn’t know it.) Give up on getting anything from the meditative path except your completely normal life. Accept death completely.
Notice how weird this is? It’s a complete reversal! In an interview with Michael Taft, Tucker Peck analogized this movement to how a musician starts out playing scales, but graduates to “just feel the music, man.” This comparison is helpful, but it’s weirder than that. It’s as if becoming a great racer, at some point, involved getting out of your car and joining someone else’s pit crew.
I don’t imagine that there’s an exact recipe for deciding when it’s time to make the switch. Some people quite quickly acquire the insight necessary to understand what letting go actually means, and the resources necessary to do it. Some people, like me, take a much longer period of time.
For me, it was a somewhat disturbing change in direction—I was really indignant that no particular state held the key, that there was nothing I could do, but simply let go until the letting go worked its way through my entire bodymind, as my life fell into alignment with the path (or vice versa). The phrase “nothing needs to be done” was deeply upsetting to me, and deeply moving. I held it as a mantra in all of my waking hours.
This is also where it helped, personally, to be unafraid of the G-word, which is to say, God. It was helpful to take the perspective that none of my spiritual path was my work at all—this made it easier to allow the remaining work to do itself.
The waiting room
Anyway, related to the switchback: after the stage when it mostly becomes about letting go, many meditators arrive at an odd time in practice before the self-making engine is unmade. In this phase, there’s a high level of meditative skill, and a lot of insight, but it’s not clear where to go next. Like: self/other duality is nearly gone, there is a fairly relaxed sense of doership, emotional experience is high-definition. But you know you still haven’t experienced the Great Unmaking. You maybe try and talk yourself into thinking you’ve got it. But then you chat with people who have been through it, and there’s something in their eyes, like the quality of someone haunted by war, but the opposite of that. And you know you aren’t quite on their wavelength yet.
What to do then? The traditional advice is to simply do a bunch of shikantaza and wait for the thing to unmake itself. Or to go on retreat and get your concentration revved up. But I was rewarded by a different approach. I started assuming that the sense of self was hanging on for a logical reason, and I started to ask terrifying questions about that reason.
Questions like:
Hey, have you ever managed to successfully avoid suffering for even one day? Really, if you’re being honest with yourself?
What is your worst motivation for spiritual practice, and what if you will always have corrupt motivations like this?
What if you still don’t understand the basic nature of suffering?
What are you hoping spirituality will let you get away with?
What part of your identity depends on being a spiritual person, or someone who is seeking?
What if you got absolutely nothing from the spiritual search?
These questions surfaced psychological resistance to work with directly.
Obviously this is not the only approach. One person told me he got out of the waiting room by simply hearing and really trying to understand the phrase “you are trying too hard.”
At this stage, the path itself is often used as a defense against letting go.
Sexuality is an under-discussed piece of the puzzle
Assuming that the whole of the path is habituation to openness, to paraphrase Andrew Holecek. Like being open to what is, and dropping all of your resistance to what is going on. For many people, “resistance to what is going on” will include some number of sexual hangups. This can include being ashamed of one’s sexuality, shame around prior sexual experiences, excessive attachment to the idea of sexual conquest or one’s attractiveness, and many many others.
To put it another way, disembodiment is an intelligent strategy if you have some automatic rejection of sexual energies, urges, and associated feelings. Those are a substantial component of embodied experience! Being in presence is threatening if your sexuality is even a little bit alive and you’re not okay with it.
I’ve found it extremely powerful to simply work with sexual hangups and feelings the way I would work with anything else. Like: greeting sexuality with more equanimity, treating sexual feelings as doorways to jhanic states, bringing open loving awareness to sexual shame, et cetera.
Many meditators don’t talk about how powerful and important this can be. There are three reasons, I think:
Sex is awkward and taboo to begin with, and there are some Buddhist cultural hangups in the meditation world.
If you introduce sexual stuff to your meditation group, it’s easy to accidentally do a sex cult. On the 1:1 level, introducing sexuality into a teaching relationship requires care, and many teachers, reasonably, do not want to go there.
Few of us want to be confused with the neo-tantra nerds, for whom sexuality is a Special Interest, who always have horny energy. I happen to like a lot of these people, but they are not normal, and thus not aspirational for many meditators.
And so, the possibility of bringing sexuality into practice is under-discussed (in some circles). But if you don’t want to be a monastic and go for the “shut it off” option, you are going to have to work with your sexuality. Which simply means trying to experience it without resistance, and also trying to incorporate it into an ethical life, as a vessel for connection, and a set of energies that bring us into contact with creation. (May I suggest marriage as a spiritual practice?)
What the happiness without conditions means
I’d always misread the phrase “the happiness without conditions.” I took it to mean a kind of happiness that persists no matter what life throws at you. I have come to a different conclusion. It refers to the happiness that arises if, and only if, you stop putting conditions on life.
Future essays to come, maybe, on request:
The shocking power of the Diamond Sutra
Non-dual glimpse practice as Legend of Zelda map destination
Some species of energy shit I’ve seen out there
Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.
I'll be re-reading this and savoring this. Thanks. And, Sasha, please write about the Diamond Sutra.
Uuuuuh I'll have the "Non-dual glimpse practice as Legend of Zelda map destination", please :)