Learning to meditate is a gradual process. Each week, this course has tweeted new techniques and facilitated new insights. The techniques either address particular problems that may arise when you meditate, or provide progressively more advanced methods which deepen your experience. It is recommended that you start by going back to week one's techniques and begin your weekly course at that time. The earlier exercises are not mere preliminaries. They are central methods in their own right to which you will return repeatedly - no matter how advanced your practice becomes.
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Thoughts, Experience, and Reality
Like psychoanalysis, meditation produces insights through observing thoughts – but this similarity is superficial and misleading. Psychoanalysis is concerned with the meanings of thoughts – and analyses those meanings conceptually. During meditation we adopt an unusual attitude: the meaning of thoughts is irrelevant. We do nothing with their conceptual content. We are interested in the direct experience of the thinking process, regardless of meaning.
It is not that conceptual analysis is bad, or unhelpful – but in meditation it distracts you from the meditation method. The insights discovered in meditation are primarily non-conceptual. They concern the nature of experience – and to the extent that this can be expressed, only poetry or metaphor will serve.
The counting method of meditation works by disrupting the thinking habit. Attention is divided between thinking, counting, and breathing. This gives your mind two-thirds less attention for thought.
Whatever happens in meditation—whether good or bad, ordinary or peculiar—simply experience it. Attempting to ascertain meaning is counter-productive. Do not judge thoughts, or the quality of meditation. Adopt this attitude: During meditation there are no profound or good thoughts. There are no unworthy or bad thoughts. There are no blissful or good meditation sessions. There are no boring, grumpy, miserable or bad meditation sessions. Allow good experiences to pass as they will. Allow bad experiences to persist as they will. Observe clearly the neutral experiences which you might prefer to ignore as uninteresting.
From meditation, you will learn to suspend the automatic process of interpreting and judging every moment of your experience. Going beyond interpretation, you gain the rare ability to experience reality raw – as it is, here and now.
Trains of Thought
What happens when you are caught in a train of thought? Often you do not notice you are thinking until you suddenly ‘wake up’ and return to count your breaths: you are not having thoughts – thoughts are having you. Despite your best intentions to follow the method – you are captured and driven by thoughts.
See if you can observe this occurring. Ultimately, you are the locomotive of the train of thought. Sometimes you push it – sometimes you pull it after you. Sometimes it pulls you downhill as you try to tug it back. The need to lead and follow thoughts is itself a habit—an addiction. In meditation you learn to give up this addiction. The aim is not to eliminate thinking from life – but to be freed from its domination. Meditation facilitates a relaxed lucidity in comparison with which your customary state appears claustrophobic. A vast creative space appears when thinking becomes choice rather than compulsion.
Obstacles and Antidotes
Sometimes—when sitting—a constant stream of urges arise: to scratch, fidget, plan work, jump up and make a telephone call, or change position. These seem compelling – but it is not difficult to sit still when watching television. The mind often behaves like a monkey – chattering inanely, jumping at random, and refusing to settle.
Meditation means going cold-turkey from our addictions to doing and thinking. Chaotic impulses are magnified by the vacuum of inactivity in meditation – prompted by boredom. (Have you noticed that meditation is sometimes boring?) In boredom, we perceive empty space as sterile, unpleasant, and threatening. To escape, we desperately stuff anything shiny and varied into the empty space to fill it. That is the function of entertainment – such as the often mindless entertainment of television. When deprived of packaged entertainment, we substitute almost anything. The most ludicrously pointless thoughts and covert activities seem preferable to just being here, now.
We wrongly suppose that meditation is boring because there is nothing to do. It is, in fact, only boring when we stuff boring thoughts into the emptiness. If you can face emptiness squarely and stare into it – you will not find boredom there. When you break through the self-imposed barrier of boredom—the terror of nothing happening—you discover the vast brilliant space of unlimited creative potential. If you are fully present in your attention – experience is never boring.
A step toward this freedom begins with itches and fidgets. If you feel real pain – move to avoid hurting yourself. In mild discomfort, no harm will come if you choose to wait 60 seconds before scratching or shifting. Maintain your breath counting. Watch your mind during the minute of resistance to your impulses. The judgements, emotional textures, memories, and reactions which arise will illuminate the nature of your compulsion in a ‘safe setting’. By choosing to break tiny compulsions you train yourself to break free from compulsion to think – and from the emotional compulsions that limit your everyday life.
This Week’s Meditation Technique
This week continue as before. However, rather than obsessively checking your posture every minute or two, see if you can maintain a general light background bodily awareness.
Fifteen minutes meditation per day would be a good aim.
Another Experiment
This experiment is related to last week’s. Again, it is useful only once – and only when you are feeling emotionally stable. It will occupy about an hour. The experiment has two phases. The first is identical to last week’s:
Sit in your customary meditation position.
Whatever thoughts arise – cut them off immediately. Whatever thoughts are in your mind – force them out.
Remain without thought.
Try that for ten minutes. Take a short break to stretch your legs.
Then enter the second phase:
Sit comfortably in a position you can manage for at least half an hour.
Close your eyes, or open them just enough to let in a little light.
Think continuously and actively about anything you like. Try not to allow any space at all between thoughts. If you become aware of the slightest gap in your thought process – fill it immediately and try to ensure that no further gaps occur. Fill your mind with as many thoughts as you can.
Try not to go to sleep.
Try this for at least thirty minutes. Keep it up for as long as you can.
Write as much as you can about your experience of the two phases in your notebook.
Preview
Next week I will explain the purpose of these experiments. I will also introduce a new meditation technique that works more directly with empty space.
Recommended Resources
See our meditation resources page for a range of learning methods.
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