How Not to Cheat Yourself with Meditation

Some time back I wrote a short guide to concentration meditation. Reception was positive and some people wanted me to write more.

So, let’s talk about one way to divide meditative accomplishments:

1. Takes Effort.
2. Doesn’t take effort.

When I was 18, I could run ten five-minute miles in a row. It was great. When I stopped training a lot, that ability went away.

The second type is a change from one state to another. When you’ve got the new state, it doesn’t take much effort, if any, to sustain. When you learn to ride a bike, it sucks. But if you don’t ride a bike for 20 years (as I didn’t) then get back on one, you don’t have to go through days or weeks or months of training again.

A lot of valuable meditative accomplishments are like being very fit. Being able to go into the various Buddhist concentration Samadhis is a learned skill. To maintain it, you need to meditate about two hours a day, and if you don’t you’ll lose access to them. These Samadhis are very worthwhile, lovely to be in, and can make your other meditative exercises much more powerful.

But they go away if you don’t maintain them.

The Buddha famously learned the concentration meditations to the highest level and decided they didn’t solve the problem of suffering. The issue with all of these sorts of accomplishments is that they end, and they’re likely to fail you when you need them the most. When you’re too ill to meditate multiple hours a day is exactly when you will need, say, the bliss that Samadhis provide, and it won’t be there.

I already knew this, but I had it illustrated in my recent surgery. The shock of the (very major) surgery lost me all of my meditative abilities from the first category. It was about a week before I got the first bit back, and a month before I got the rest back. So there I am, in a lot of pain and so on, and most of the tools that would help me make it better are gone.

Anything which requires force or conscious action is temporary. It can or will be lost.

This is why most schools don’t consider these sorts of abilities to mean someone is enlightened or awakened. If you can go into Samadhi for days on end, that’s great, but it’s just a skill.

The second set of accomplishments are more or less permanent. You can lose some of them, with extreme brain damage or if you deliberately go out of your way to do so, but basically, once you have them, they’re sticky and they don’t require maintenance beyond not self-sabotaging.

This includes the Buddhist 4-part model, starting with Stream Entry, when that doesn’t refer to energy bodies (which in some schools, it does). It includes things like “I am everything” where everything feels like part of you. It includes “not an actor” and “no self” or “witness self.” It includes substantial changes to personality, where previous binding conditioning stops controlling you. (Truly ending an addiction would qualify, IF you aren’t running around still saying “I’ll always be an alcoholic.” It must truly be gone.)

Complicating this is the fact that a lot of the shifts I listed in the second category can be learned as abilities in the first category. You can learn to shift your perception into no-self, or “I am everything.”

If doing so requires sustained effort (if it isn’t an easy mode shift requiring no effort to maintain once you do it), it belongs to category one. You can lose it and when you need it most, it probably won’t be there.

For the more esoteric stuff, like energy bodies, this gets complicated. (But most readers won’t believe this stuff exists.) For example, the great Chan Buddhist criticism of Theravada Buddhism is that the energy body Arhats can obtain isn’t permanent. It lasts eons, but it slowly loses energy and in fact, contra what the Theravada guys say, you have to eventually reincarnate. (Is this criticism valid? No idea.) So the Chan guys want one energy body up, which they say is permanent. You don’t have to come back, ever, if you don’t want to.

The stuff that sticks can come from a number of things. Classically it comes from cessation experiences, where the data going to consciousness hits zero, you blank out, and when you return, the way you interact with the world changes semi-permanently.

How it changes depends on what you were doing that led up to the cessation. If you want particular changes, you have to do particular exercises.

Basically exercises like this are meant to narrow the brain’s attention to one particular part of experience: Say that there is only a witness that is never changed (Buddhist “no self”), keep hitting it with that over and over again, and then, in cessation, lock it in.

Multiple cessations are often required to really lock it in.

But there are other types of awakenings. I once had a completely mundane awakening, no spirituality involved at all.

I drank too much one night. Way too much. The next day I was nauseous all day. (I hate nausea far more than most pain.) Didn’t stop until the evening.

I’ve never over-drank like that since (been slightly hungover, but never seriously. I drink maybe three times a year.) The desire to do so just isn’t there. For an entire day, my brain was pounded with “This is NOT worth it.” Perfectly mundane, classical awakening structure. (For the record, I wasn’t an alcoholic before that.)

The key is that there is no effort. I don’t have to use willpower. I’m not gritting my teeth thinking, “I shouldn’t drink.” I just don’t want to drink most of the time, and on the rare occasion when I do there is no difficulty in stopping when I have had enough. (Now, Coca-cola is binding conditioning for me. I have to use effort sometimes to stay off that soda.)

What “enlightenment” is, is a long debate. I could spiel off a dozen definitions. But what I do agree with the Buddha on is that if your enlightenment requires you to maintain effort, it isn’t enlightenment.

That doesn’t mean effortful abilities aren’t worth having. I’ve been in fantastic physical shape at various points in my life, and it’s sure nicer than being in bad shape. I had moderately high concentration accomplishments at one point, and they were very nice to have.

They are also useful in pursuing the non-effortful accomplishments.

But don’t confuse the two, or you will cheat yourself.

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