Category: Meditation Page 1 of 3

People meditate because they want something from it. Most serious meditators I know, the people who made real progress, were miserable.  The two main benefits from meditation might be classified as “capacity” or “exercise” and “insight.”

When I was younger, I could run 10 miles in 50 minutes and not be exhausted afterwards. I can’t do that now because I don’t run regularly.

Some benefits from meditation are like this. Concentration meditation, where you hold your attention on something like your breath or a mantra, or the spot between your brows or a candle is “mind exercise.” The more you do it, with proper technique, the better you get. If you stop doing it you lose the benefits: being more relaxed, more able to focus on anything and more able to ignore stuff like pain and anxiety.

The other main set of benefits are like learning to ride a bicycle. At first it’s impossible, then you get the knack for it, and from then on you have the benefit. Most of these are insight benefits: if you truly realize that you aren’t the body, say, then you let go of it and suffering is permanently reduced. If you see thru conditioning and realize you don’t have to obey it, you become free of it (often this goes in steps, by types of conditioning.)

Some other similar benefits are skill based. If you practice bringing up emotions on demand after a while they become “on tap” and you can just experience them at will.

Now meditation methods tend to work in concert. The reason Shamatha (concentration/mental exercise) is often done alongside Vipassana (insight) is that if you want to see the mechanics of how sense objects like emotions and thoughts work, being able to concentrate: having a focused mind make it a lot easier.

Of course there’s some overlap: I know how to run properly. I know how to get in shape. If I were to take up running again, those would make it easier for me and even when I’m in bad shape I run better than people who have never learned proper running technique (plus I’m used to the suffering of pushing myself.) Same is true of concentration: I’m out of practice, but I know how it’s done and I’m better than someone who’s never done a lot of concentration meditation. But I’m nowhere as good as someone who’s kept up a practice of an hour or two a day. (Two hours is about the minimum to be able to get reliably into certain states.)

Whatever it is you want from meditation, and there are lots of different possible achievements, you need to know what you need to do to get them, and how to keep them. But no matter what you want, meditation is either like exercise (for capacity) or like learning a skill.

Know what you want and find out how to get it.

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The functional chassis of all real spirituality are metaphysical statements, often called views. Each view is a way of understanding reality. Every view in real spirituality is connected with a “way”. The way is the path to being that view.

The “I am awareness” view is that of chunks of Hinduism, especially Vedanta and its various offshoots. The best book written from this perspective is “I Am That”, which I recommend highly. A good one, especially the first forty percent or so is “The Essence of Enlightenment” by James Swartz.

The “I am awareness” argument is that the only thing which always exists is awareness, and therefor that is what we are. We are not our bodies, or even our consciousness: both can be absent and awareness still exists.

Everything I am aware of is an object in consciousness. This is obvious. All of these objects change over time, often appearing and disappearing. Whether they exist or not, I always exist: they are dependent on me, I am not dependent on them.

One may suggest this isn’t true by two methods. The first is “I’m not aware when I’m in deep sleep.” With enough meditation of the right type you can prove that wrong: you can be aware that you are deep asleep and if someone yells near you while you’re in deep sleep you wake up, so awareness appears to still exist.

The second is that awareness didn’t exist before birth, and won’t exist after death. This is a more serious objection, but it’s not proven, and certain experiences on the spiritual path where you appear to exist without the body suggest it may be wrong. Instead you simply don’t remember before your birth.

To many this will seem like utter nonsense, but most people haven’t done the necessary work to have an opinion worth caring about.

There are a few ways or paths towards this view. The main one is simply examination. Is it true that objects come and go and I remain? Watch sense objects and see what happens. This is meditation. It’s part of what Buddhist Vipassana does, actually, though only part.

A second is to simply concentrate on the sense of “I am” and don’t pay much attention to anything else.

A third is the Vedantic super-imposition method: you learn the view and apply it. Whenever you think “I am the body”, you simply correct the thought to “I am awareness.” (There’s more to it than that, I’m simplifying vastly.)

Our normal view is something like “I am the mind, which is produced by the body, and I live in a world that is not me.”

Most spiritual paths say that the body exists in the mind (it does, though that doesn’t have to mean that it isn’t produced by the brain).

So what’s the benefit of having this view, of grounding it in?

First, you let go of sense objects. You don’t push bad sense objects away (pain, fear, etc…), and you don’t try and grasp good sense objects (love, happiness, etc…)

If you leave sense objects alone, what happens it that the bad ones bother you less and the good ones last longer.

Second, when you don’t regard the body and mind as “you” suffering drops massively. It’s not happening to you, you don’t have to care. Suffering is basically pain times attachment.

Third, your conditioning weakens. Every time a conditioned sense object comes up, if you react to it with anything but detachment or detached love, it is renewed and usually grows stronger. Say you were once burned and are now scared of fire. Every time you see or hear fire you are scared. You try and push the fear away. The fear is renewed, and may even grow stronger. If you don’t care, if you don’t react or you counter-act the fear with love or another positive emotion, the conditioning weakens.

Fourth, your general level of fear grows lower. Over time your ambient anxiety drops. Almost everyone has some anxiety, even if it’s below the threshold of consciousness. As fear goes away it is replaced by a directionless detached love. You feel love all the time. When this starts, it’s intermittent. You feel happiness or love for no reason you can determine. Over time it becomes more and more steady. (I’ve spent fairly substantial time in this state. It’s not theoretical.) As best I can tell, human nature when truly not scared IS love.

The more solid your identification with awareness is, and the less you identify with consciousness, sense objects and the body, the better your experience is. This seems to be what the Hindu types are talking about when they say that the nature of the self is bliss. You no longer rely on getting things, having things or circumstances in order to feel good. You just… feel good.

There’s more to all this, of course, rather vast volumes have been written about it, often in allegorical language which is hard to understand if you weren’t trained it. But this is the essence: you are awareness, and fully knowing that frees you of the need for objects at any psychological level. Of course, if you want the body to stick around you’ve still got to take care of it, but you are no longer subject to the tyranny of running from desire to desire and away from fear after fear.

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Here’s the thing, everything you experience is your consciousness. When you see or hear another person or any object, what you’re experiencing is a representation.

Again, what you’re experiencing is yourself;  your consciousness. This the heart of all of the “I am everything” spiritual forms. You have never known anything directly except yourself and you never will.

This is one reason why most spiritual systems emphasize positive emotions towards even difficult people and situations. “Love thy enemy” is about loving yourself, and it is intensely protective. When the Buddha said that a monk being sawed in half by bandits should feel love towards the bandits, that wasn’t to protect the bandits (who in Buddhist metaphysics, will get theirs eventually due to karma), it’s because if you’re feeling love, you don’t feel much in the way of fear: the two emotions are opposed.

(Relatedly, if you get rid of background fear and tension, what happens is you start feeling love all the time, though the feel is somewhat different from romantic love: it is not needy (this is not theoretical, I’ve experienced it, though I don’t live there right now.)

With something like Metta you start by sending out love to people you already love, move to neutral people and then move to people you hate. It’s the last step which is most important, though it is last for a reason: it’s hard.

What stops most people is the fear that if they don’t hate those who are dangerous or immoral, they won’t protect themselves or be considered part of the tribe. The key to dealing with this is having standards: not needing emotions to tell you when someone is acting badly. IF you don’t have those standards, then you can indeed get into trouble, and this is a problem in some spiritual communities, especially when people try to act as if they have attainments they don’t have and suppress negative emotions. You aren’t suppressing if you do loving-kindness or other emotion correctly: if you have the attainment, the emotions either don’t come up or they come up briefly.

Loving-kindness, compassion and so on are also useful because when something negative does happen, or does come up from your memory, the positive emotion is protective. Traumatic formations reduce over time, negative conditioning and fears reduce and if something new bad happens you are far less likely to wind up with a new trauma.

There are a lot of benefits to other people from being around someone who is constantly loving, but the Buddha and many other spiritual teachers didn’t suggest love just because of that: they did so because being loving is good for the person who is loving.

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For most of my life I was pretty miserable. There were good reasons for that: alcoholic parents, serious illness and rather a lot of poverty, among other things.

So I started meditating. That helped, after a while (quite a while, though many people get faster results.)

One of the things that came up is that bad emotions are, well, bad. By “bad” I mean, emotions that are unpleasant. There’s a lot of advice around emotions, and negative emotions aren’t 100% evil or anything. Anger tells you something is unacceptable; hatred that someone is a long term threat and so on. Now emotions aren’t always right, you can be angry inappropriately. You can hate people who aren’t a threat (Nazis hating Jews) or who are only a threat because of how you treat them (Israeli Zionists and Palestinians), and so on.

Still, a negative emotion in the affective sense; in the unpleasant sense is bad in the same way that pain is bad. Sometimes pain is useful because it tells you to do something or stop doing something, and sometimes it’s just pain: there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it and it’s pointless.

This realization, really grinding it in, is important. That the emotion itself is unpleasant and, as importantly, that you don’t want to have it.

Most of us wander around thinking “I should be angry”, “I should be sad”, “I should hate”, under certain circumstances. Someone said something mean or cut us off in traffic or hurt us and we are angry. But if the emotion of being angry is unpleasant, all we’re doing is compounding our suffering.

But then the next thought comes up, “if I don’t get mad, I won’t protect myself.”

And this can be true. Sometimes we need the unpleasantness to spur us to action, to tell someone they shouldn’t hurt us, or to remove ourselves from a bad situation.

But it doesn’t have to be. The old saying “I don’t get mad, I get even” rather covers it. If you’ll take action to fix the problem without the emotion, then at most you need the emotion briefly to tell you something is wrong, and then you don’t need it any more.

And if you have firm rules about what is acceptable or not, you may not even need the emotion. “My boss made me work overtime then didn’t pay me, that’s unacceptable and I will find a way to stop it.”

Much of why we have certain emotions is because we think we should have them. If you think  you should be angry or sad or scared or whatever, it’s very hard not to be.

One way to get past this is pure self-concern. Just look at the emotion, and realize “this emotion is unpleasant. I don’t like feeling this way.” Do that often enough, and you’ll start feeling the emotion less often, and it will go away sooner when it does arise.

But to do this you have to believe the emotion isn’t necessary for your well-being, because if you feel it is, your mind will keep bringing it up.

You aren’t here to suffer, whatever some religions may say, and it’s OK to do what you can to suffer less.

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Words are always a problem, and never more so when discussing spirituality/meditation/cultivation.

There are many, many different types of meditation, designed to do very different things. There are forms of breath meditation whose primary purpose is to calm the body. When you do so, you may notice certain things about reality/yourself, but knowing “how to meditate” doesn’t mean you have achieved any level of insight or awakening; it’s just a technical skill.

But almost all of what I would consider real spirituality is about “knowing thyself.” This is primarily about observation; about noticing facts about yourself that you hadn’t before, and then noticing them over and over until something clicks and you start perceiving your existence in different ways than the norm.

When teaching “meditation” one of the main questions is how much to signpost; how much to point. If you tell people what they’re looking for, they’re more likely to see it, but the power of the insight is weaker than when it takes them by surprise.

That said, I’m going to “point” to something: almost nothing exists.

If you either calm the chatter of your mind or learn to disregard it (it doesn’t matter much which) and rest your awareness lightly over the sensations you’re feeling, what you may notice is that there isn’t a lot there. Mostly there’s a lot of nothing, with some sensations floating in space (which is also a construct, but that’s a later thing).

It’s an odd thing to notice, that you aren’t solid. You think of  yourself as solid: a body, but the actual experience isn’t that and that you believe it is is because you’re filling in what you “know” is there, stitching together a reality which doesn’t actually exist.

Try it sometime. Just be still, calm the mind or ignore the chatter, close your eyes, and see what’s actually there. (You can do this with eyes open, but it’s easier with eyes closed.)

You may be surprised.

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Jiddu Krishnamurti was a lecturer and teacher for almost 50 years. He was famous, there are a lot of books transcribing his talks, and he maybe got one person enlightened.

Jiddu was the anti-guru, guru. He didn’t want to give concrete instructions, because when people follow concrete instructions they aren’t free: they’ve got a system and they’re just enacting the system.

Reading him is frustrating. I’ve read his lectures multiple times over the years, and each time understood a bit more of what he was saying.

One main point is that everyone is acting according to conditioning: religious, social, family, school, philosophical, etc… They’re in chains, and they regard those chains as themselves.

But none of that conditioning is you. You aren’t your personality, and beliefs you got from you religion, nation, schooling, family, etc… are not your beliefs.

Krishnamurti is famous for “choiceless awareness”: his only real recommendation was to watch the movement of one’s mind (which includes impulses to do things, emotions and what your body is doing) without judgment. Don’t think “I shouldn’t be like this” or “this is how things are” or “this is how it should be.”

No judgment.

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His point was that if you are tying to change, if you want be kinder, or richer or less greedy or anything, you’re acting because of conditioning. You’re pushing one set of conditioning, say Christianity, against another, say “get rich because only people with money are worthwhile”. (Or maybe you think money is bad, it doesn’t matter: that didn’t originate with you.)

You push two sets of conditioning against each other, and even if you change it’s not real, there’s usually still conflicting sets of conditioning and in any case, you were acting out of conditioning, which is not something you chose.

All of this sounds very nice, but if you don’t do the work, you don’t get it. What works is actually looking at your conditioning, which comes up as thoughts, feelings, impulses and actions. Every time you feel resistance, every time you want to do something and also don’t want to do something; every time you feel something and believe you should feel something else, you’ve two sets of conditioning in conflict.

You can feel this, and you need to feel it and, often, repeatedly perceive it happening. If you do so with judgment, say, being angry or guilty because you’re angry then you’re just adding to the conditioning and it’s just conditioning fighting against each other.

If you do it without judgment, however, what often happens is a release of the conditioning. This isn’t a theoretical release, conditioning in conflict will make your muscles tight. When release happens you will feel it: muscles will relax. In some cases you’ll be shocked, you didn’t even relize they were tight, and had been tight for years or decades.

Krishnamurti was concerned with real freedom: he wanted you to become free. You don’t have to, you can eliminate all conditioning except one set, the way certain fanatics and true-believers do, and give everything to that set, and you’ll release a ton of the tension and feel better and a lot more peaceful.

You won’t be free, though.

Find the conditioning, feel it, watch it without judgment. When I say this works, I am not speaking theoretically: it does work.

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