Meditation
Introduction
There have been times when people have asked me about my meditation practice and what I get out of it. Answering that question in its totality in the moment feels practically impossible. To me, meditation has become so much more than sitting quietly on a cushion to silence the mind. At the beginning, it started with silencing the mind, but slowly it started encompassing every aspect of my life. Now it has become living itself.
At a fundamental level, meditation can be seen as a practice of mastering your attention. Things start to get complicated right away when we try to define attention. I would say attention is what we attend to, or what is in our conscious awareness in the present moment. From the things we see, feel, hear, think, smell, and taste, when we attend to all things in our conscious experience, what arises in the present moment is all there is; that is our entire reality.
Everything I experience at any given moment, the way things show up in my conscious experience, is both due to and part of my practice. Meditation has transformed from silencing the mind into an act of total and complete global wayfinding. Global referring to the fact that it involves truly everything in phenomenal reality, and wayfinding as the process of moving towards something better. It is an art of actively crafting the very nature of my experience to be better and more beautiful. A practice of the imaginal. As a friend of mine likes to put it, it is becoming perfection personified through a slow and infinitely progressing asymptote. Infinite since, at the same time my reality is changing, my definition of perfection is also changing and growing.
My definition is mostly inspired by Rob Burbea's Soul-Making Dharma and Mark Lippmann's Meditation Stuff. Everything involved in this practice is conceptually hard to put into words; Lippmann references the difficulty as "It's like you need to learn every single instrument in an entire orchestra, including the ones that, at least historically, very rarely get used, as well as how to be a conductor" (meditation.stuff). This topic as a whole is not very salient, but it is very important to me since it explains my relationship to life itself. So I hope this document can serve the purpose of clearly explaining meditation for the reader and also for myself.
Before I begin, I would like to make some things clear. This is my understanding of certain teachings with the addition of my own personal research and experimentation. I am not advising you to believe anything you don't want to, and I am not a teacher with any qualifications. You can view these as nothing more than my introspective muses. I will add resources at the very end if you would like to read more. Enjoy!
Seated Practice and Mindfulness
Most seated practice becomes the main training ground from the perspective that meditation and life are intertwined. The place where attentional faculty is improved to have more fluidity and meta-cognition (the ability to know what one is attending to). This is what is generally referred to as mindfulness and what I would refer to as 80 percent of the work. There are three dimensions this skill can be trained in: concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. Each of these is a massive topic that could cover hundreds of books, so I won't dive too deep into any particular one but will give an overview of each.
Concentration
The foundation, or maybe even most of meditative practice, is training the mind's ability to concentrate, or the ability to keep attention on one particular object or activity. Once attending to the breath isn't difficult, attention can be expanded to keep more than just the breath in awareness. While this idea will shift as one progresses, initially it is how long one can stay with an object or activity. Lengthening this time is extremely difficult without some meta-cognitive awareness, so in attending to an object, meta-cognitive awareness will naturally develop.
One might get distracted while attending to the breath, getting lost in a story or thought. When a part of the mind brings up a thought, "I was supposed to be attending to my breath," one goes back and focuses on the breath kindly and gently. As this muscle is trained, that reminder to attend to the object will come faster and faster. Yet, at the same time, the task of attending to the object will require less effort; it will slowly go from paying attention to attending to, eventually leaving part of awareness identified with the breath.
Once attending to the breath isn't difficult, attention can be expanded to keep more than just the breath in awareness. Doing this provides sensory clarity and [[insight]], which will be expanded on in future sections, but also increases meta-cognitive awareness. It will go from learning to respond faster to being lost in thought to keeping part of your awareness monitoring your thoughts and body-mind, so when something distracting arises, you notice it before you get lost in the first place. There is an aspect of concentration practice where the larger and more expanded the object, the more difficult it is to hold in awareness without training. At the same time, there is also an aspect of foreground and background objects, becoming aware of what is in what is another part of attentional training.
The more constricted the awareness, the more pure the concentration practice, in a sense developing stickiness but not additional meta-cognitive awareness. For example, just having your attention on the breath and not adding any awareness to mind and body will eventually lead to mind and body fully falling out of conscious experience altogether. This results in experiences like "The body disappeared, and I was just my breath." This will train the concentration faculty further, yet will provide less [[insight]] into fundamental reality and will not change anything day to day.
Candle gazing and other forms of visual concentration practice go further into the pure concentration space. Yet [[insight]] is unavoidable when looking at reality with that level of intensity. Once concentration progresses from training meta-cognition and the ability to recall activity, to mostly how long you attend to an object, things progress into the states of mental absorptions and eventually insight again.
Concentration has a felt sense to it. With enough sensory clarity, one can feel when in a state of concentration; if a part of the mind is watching the 'felt sense,' one can be aware of the feeling while in it. This is linked to and, in many ways, the same as being in a state of flow or being in the zone. As the concentration faculty improves, one can be in this state for most of waking life. It is a total trust of the subconscious and the task being done that results in losing oneself to a certain extent.
Sensory clarity
Another foundation of meditation is sensory clarity, a part of mindfulness in the Western sense of how much clarity one has on current experiences. Why are things happening the way they are, or how much of one's current conscious experience can be kept in awareness at a time? There are many ways to train to improve sensory clarity; following the breath as stated above can slowly expand to include body, mind, emotions, and thoughts.
The Goenka tradition trains this directly through the method of starting off with the breath, transitioning to body scans head to toe, toe to head, until you can scan the whole body with every breath. Once you are able to scan the whole body in a single breath, what the body is starts to expand. What the Buddhists consider the body are the 5 sense perceptions of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling, both internal and external. As you can keep all of that in your awareness at the same time, it will also expand to include the other 3 parts of the Satipatthana (the four foundations of mindfulness), which will be listed below.
Sensory clarity can also be directly trained through noting practice, developed by Mahasi Sayadaw. This involves clearly adding a label for each phenomenon arising in consciousness and, in some cases, even adding a label for phenomena no longer in consciousness. Usually, the technique is as follows:
Label an object
Hold on to the object of label for 1-3 seconds
Label the next phenomenon
Repeat
As you get experienced at this, you can turn up the speed dial of labeling, getting to even 20-40 labels per second. Speed isn't seen as that important, however, and usually labeling goes more into noticing all aspects of each phenomenon with high granularity.
There are many categories as well as levels of abstraction that can be used to train sensory clarity. Usually, the higher the level of abstraction, the more story and meaning attached. At high levels of abstraction, i.e., psychotherapy, the work is different and no longer a practice of sensory clarity. There are broad categories such as:
Expansion
Contraction
Noting gone (when phenomena disappear from conscious experience)
Noting valence (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral aspect of each phenomenon that arises in the body)
Noting self (when and where the sense of self feels to be arising and falling)
Shinzen Young has his see, hear, feel system:
See including:
See in, or working with mental images
See out, working with physical sight
See rest, working with visual rest or when this disappears
See flow or when images melt, morph, animate, or fade, flow is changing
Hear including:
Hear in, or mental talk
Hear out would be physical sounds
Hear rest would be when auditory talk or sound disappears
Hear flow, when sounds or talk changes
Feel including:
Feel in, or non-physical somatic sensations
Feel out, external physical sensations like touch
Feel rest, when sensations disappear from consciousness
Feel flow when sensations change
The Buddhists have the Satipatthana or four foundations of mindfulness:
Body phenomena - which include the 5 physical senses of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling. This is a prelude to an interesting concept where eventually the body and world are one and not two, intertwining as one.
Feeling-tone (valence of phenomena) - each body phenomenon as listed above has an inherent aspect of valence or vedana associated with it. So meditators can learn to have more clarity with this aspect of conscious experience by labeling pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral to all aspects of experience.
Mind states - This one is usually higher in levels of abstraction and goes into mental emotions and attitudes, such as annoyance, joy, wonder, shame, fear, anticipation, love, anger, and even uncertainty. Seeing all mind states clearly and as a natural aspect of human experience.
Thoughts - Even higher in level of abstraction are thoughts themselves. Usually, the buckets for this aspect of phenomenal reality can be made up on the spot. Examples would be fantasizing thought, processing thought, worrying thought, future thought, past thought, craving thought, aversion thought, mistake thought, and so on.
An increase in sensory clarity directly leads to insight territory, which can often be very scary and destabilizing. Each new insight often disproves your belief and your fundamental understanding of how reality works. This requires a form of constant updating of your priors/assumptions to match your clarity. Changing your fundamental assumptions and understanding of reality at that granular level requires a change in how you make decisions and show up in the world as a whole. This causes a feeling of disillusionment with reality, kind of like your brain melting, and requires neural plasticity to change and recrystallize in a way where the insight is integrated, and life makes sense again. This process often results in difficulty without equanimity.
States of mind with high sensory clarity also have a felt sense to them. It often feels like time has slowed down, and everything in life is crystal clear. While I haven't done it, I am assuming people who do extreme sports get this felt sense, when everything moves and happens in slow motion, and you have so much time to clearly understand the cause and effect for most things that could occur. Developing sensory clarity can provide this felt sense, and slowing of experience, on a permanent basis.
Equanimity
The final foundation of mindfulness is equanimity, also understood as impartiality, a state of mind that you develop to allow you to be open to all experience, a fundamental okay-ness with existence itself. In many ways, when one thinks of an enlightened mind, it is one of equanimity. To truly be equanimous, one has to allow oneself to be with the worst of the mind: fear, misery, disgust, or even the worst of physical phenomena as well, such as pain and discomfort, without judgment. Concentration and sensory clarity usually open the door for equanimity, as this is in many ways also the final training of mindfulness.
To be more specific, training equanimity is usually done alongside sensory clarity or concentration training until one is good enough at those skills that they happen automatically. Since sitting as an activity can be extremely painful, especially when extended for long periods of time, the act of sitting itself develops equanimity. Allowing the pain to exist without judgment develops a coolness to the pain, an acceptance of it that purifies the mind of pain and discomfort.
The Soto Zen tradition is heavy on training equanimity, with close to no instruction, the practitioner is thrown into a meditation of actually doing nothing during sits. Even the intention to meditate is dropped as practitioners are told to just sit, yet just sitting opens up the practitioner to be okay with all experience arising and passing in phenomenal reality. An opening up, and an allowing, that lets things unfold into what needs to be. The act of setting an intention, when we are trying concentration or sensory clarity for example, allows our mind to avoid certain phenomena. So the perfect training for equanimity is usually sitting itself and nothing else.
There is a wonderful quote by Ajahn Chah describing spiritual development that falls along this line, "Taking the one seat," he called it. "Just go into the room and put one chair in the center. Take the one seat in the center of the room, open the doors and windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come."
Training equanimity can also be done quite deliberately, such as through adhitthana or strong determination sitting, in which you make a strong determination to not move even a little through a set duration of time. Or maybe playing some extremely emotionally engaging news or movie in the background as you note visual space in your mind, attempting to be as detached as possible. These are just some examples. To train equanimity is to train oneself to be okay with the good and okay with the bad; this can take many forms. In many ways, life is a natural training ground for developing equanimity, as the old are wise to a certain degree.
Like the other two foundations of mindfulness, equanimity has a taste to it, a felt sense. It is referred to by some as the taste of purification, as going through the process and being in that state allows one to purify one's aversion to reality itself. It feels cold and like a hug at the same time. The jhanas (states of mental absorption) allow one to enter directly into this state, as does insight training.
Conceptualization and Meaning-Making
As we train our attentional faculty to the nth degree, we begin to see the constant arising and passing of sense perceptions in our conscious experience from the very fabric of consciousness itself. However, even close to the beginning of the path, we soon realize that attention is just the start. For each bit and dot of perception to be more than static, unintelligible information, it must go through a process of conceptualization.
To understand anything at all, our subconscious does a tremendous amount of heavy lifting, transforming the nearly infinite information we receive from the outside world into something that makes sense to us. The Buddhists refer to this process as the chain of dependent origination (Paticca-Samuppada). Through the creation of frameworks, perceptual concepts, stories, maps of meaning, and hierarchies of value, we make sense of everything we perceive. The conscious mind, our present reality, is constantly being co-created by the subconscious based on what it deems important, in addition to our contact with the outside world. Everything we experience, we experience because we have been conditioned to see it as valuable in some way.
The process of conceptualization itself can be transformed through the act of meaning-making. Reality, in its essence, is devoid of inherent meaning or value; things happen because they happen, without a predetermined storyline to tie everything together neatly. All meaning is a fabrication, and recognizing its emptiness allows us to re-tell our stories, to create our own fabrications that can be as beautiful as we desire. In most spiritual traditions, this act of meaning-making is considered divine, reserved for gods, elders, shamans, and the border-line insane. In this practice, we are partaking in this act of the divine, where some insanity is the entry ticket 😉. As Nietzsche famously proclaimed, "God is dead, and we have killed him...must we not become gods ourselves simply to appear worthy of it?”
This is where we transition from the mechanical skills training of mindfulness, as discussed in the previous sections, to the imaginal, the artistry required to construct reality itself. The concepts of soul-making and global wayfinding aptly describe this process, as the phenomenological reality we construct and the nominal reality of the outside world can be brought into alignment in any way we choose, a handshake with the universe that grants us the power of creation.
I won't expand too much on this section, as the practices of reading, writing, storytelling, and creating are deeply personal and varied. However, I encourage you to play with frames, to explore the little and big things that shape your reality. Read extensively and see what resonates with you, what inspires you to create your own meaning. As Ralph Waldo Emerson urges, "Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet."
Maybe start by keeping a journal, engaging in the arts, painting, music, dance, any medium unique to you that can help shape your reality in profound and interesting ways. The possibilities are endless, truly only limited to your imagination and willingness to engage in meaning-making.
In the pursuit of meditation there does come many dichotomies of values, a major one is alluded to by the origin of the meditation traditions I pull from. In Zen the concept of ‘Makyo’ and in general Buddhist sphere the concept of ‘Maya’, the illusionary. Aptly said by Wystan - “If all phenomena are inconstant, impersonally fabricated, and unsatisfactory as dogma dictates, best to leave all behind for the deathless, the unfabricated, nirvana, the end of birth, the end of experience. "There is nothing further for this world.", and all that.” So goes the renunciant cant in their pursuit of Arhantship or Buddhahood. Yet my argument goes if all things are equally empty, I see no reason to value the deathless more than the imaginal as long as one knows the emptiness of both.
Role of Memory
To partake in meaning making, one must first understand and grasp the basic mechanisms of memory. Memory is both the gateway to the subconscious and the nominal/physical world. In the act of learning to shape it, we can take the first steps in the art of constructing our reality. Similar to the mechanisms of mindfulness, these topics are vast, and only the basics will be covered in my writing. There are three categories through which I view memory: sensory memory, short-term or working memory, and long-term memory. Each works together to construct our world. Long-term memory is the gateway to the subconscious, and sensory memory is the gateway to the nominal. We have very little control over both in the moment. Working memory, on the other hand, is where the construction takes place, where we can do the work to shape our reality.
Sensory memory is loaded from the sensory information provided to us by the outside world. This information is held for brief periods and usually forgotten quickly if not transferred to short-term memory. Sensory information is only loaded to sensory memory if our attention is on it. The attentional training of mindfulness translates to understanding where our attention goes, but one basic insight of meditation is that we do not control our attention. We automatically attend to what is seen as valuable. Thus, what is loaded to sensory memory can only be changed by changing the value systems we embody. For example, imagine someone asks you the following: "Count all the red objects in your environment, and once you do that, close your eyes." So you do that, attempting to intentionally load that information into sensory memory and then short-term to long-term memory via counting. They then ask, "How many green objects were in your environment?" You will most likely not know; they might not have even been noticed, and if they were, they were most definitely forgotten. Yet, in the act of attempting to remember and failing, you restructured your values. The next time you open your eyes, you will immediately see all the green objects in your environment because their value has been primed.
The act of priming the value of reality is the first tool in imaginal artistry. From gratitude journaling to meditation on death, the act of reflection and attempting to remember what most likely was not valued changes what we see, what we remember, and how the world is constructed. Sensory memory can slowly be changed through the act of recalling what you want to value, and the failure to do so primes your future reality. I generally do this by journaling at the end of the day, reflecting on what I have done and the values I want to embody.
Working memory is the larger, older brother of sensory memory, able to hold more information and for a while longer. Yet again, if what is in working memory is not stored in long-term memory, it is also forgotten. Cognition works with working memory, and through a process called encoding, stores the bits of information it contains in long-term memory. Encoding usually happens automatically for information interconnected in our current understanding of reality. These mind maps of meaning allow us to trust that we will remember things that are important, yet for new, unconnected facts, the brain forgets. There is no way to link information if it does not have a place in our existing web of knowledge. Learning to create scaffolding for new information is a skill that helps the encoding process. A large part of learning anything involves creating maps of more and more complexity for the topic at hand, more on this topic can be found by looking at works from Kevin Collis and John Biggs and modern interpretations of SOLO’s taxonomy.
Lastly long-term memory, something we have very little control of. All we can do is our best encoding but it is an act of trust that the knowledge we want is stored in long-term memory. It could also be viewed with the following frame, long-term memory is the side effect of good encoding. In meditation, we open the tunnel between the conscious and the subconscious, working and long-term memory, observing this process unfold. While we can set an intention to get certain thoughts, how the process unfolds is completely out of our control. We can increase our trust and make memory a choice, however, through spaced repartition practice. A low cost efficient way to get the exact memory we want from the conscious, spaced retrieval is a pivotal tool in this practice.
Memory plays a key role, with the foundation skills of priming, encoding, and spaced retrieval we can slowly change the how reality shows up for ourselves. The process can also be speed up by more deliberate practices of nurturing positive.
Nurturing Positive
“Your mind is like a piece of land planted with many different kinds of seeds: seeds of joy, peace, mindfulness, understanding, and love; seeds of craving, anger, fear, hate, and forgetfulness. These wholesome and unwholesome seeds are always there, sleeping in the soil of your mind.” - Thich Nhat Hanh
A significant part of the practice is nurturing the positive mind we want. This is done through specific acts of meditation that make certain thoughts more likely than others. For example, metta practice, or the practice of loving-kindness, involves imagining, verbalizing, and feeling loving and beautiful thoughts for all beings. Through this process, you make your mind malleable and plant the seeds of loving-kindness. Slowly but surely, your mind becomes one where loving and kind thoughts are the first to arise.
Emotions and the Subconscious
Practicing active meditation and mindfulness also helps one become more cognizant of the subconscious. More than thoughts and thinking, instinctually my experience is that the subconscious communicates through the body, the vehicle of nonverbal thought. The body emotes and gives more information than words can in fractions of the time. I like to view emotions as somatic sensations that are non-physical. You can feel tingles, different tensions and tightness, heaviness, and lightness throughout your body based on the information your subconscious is conveying to you. Pleasure arises when these emotions or energies are allowed to move through your body, and you are open to the information they are conveying.
An emotion that is resisted usually creates discomfort, suffering, and displeasure. Emotional work is learning to find the resistance and embracing it. Every moment you resist emotion, you're resisting information your subconscious is conveying to you. This ventures into psychotherapy territory, but a lot of mindfulness practice becomes letting go of these resistances, allowing oneself to feel all feelings. The subconscious was conditioned to feel these things for a reason, based on your understanding of reality at the moment. In many ways, you trained yourself to feel these things to help you in the future.
If the emotions that arise are no longer serving you, feeling them is the first thing you need to do, allowing them to flow through you and being grateful for the purpose they are serving. If the information is wrong or incongruent, having felt it, you can recondition your subconscious through nurturing positive and meaning-making. Meaning-making is impossible if emotions are resisted, so this is a pivotal part of the practice.
Insight and Failure Points in the Handshake with the Universe
In the practice of meditation and meaning-making, we often come across insights into reality that explain the universe much better than we previously understood. This process of gaining insights can be extremely scary. These are the failure points in our current understanding of reality. Some insights are completely incongruent with our current predictive model of the world, causing us to enter a state of catatonic dissolution. Reconstructing reality from this state of disillusion is an intense and difficult process. The more wrong your model of reality was, the longer this reconstruction phase will take. You might find yourself in a state where no stories seem real, all stories are wrong, and all things are meaningless. It's a difficult state of mind to be in, yet it is part of the journey. Once the insight is integrated, you usually suffer much less due to a better understanding of the universe. In the process, you're able to construct more beautiful and imaginative phenomenal realities.
There are certain phenomenological truths regarding conscious experience itself that can be seen through, such as the model itself being a model, empty of inherent meaning. Our sense of self, satisfaction, or permanence are also constructed in our model. When these fundamental constructions are seen through, they can be extremely destabilizing, especially since we have an inherent fear of annihilation of the self, even if constructed. Thus, there are slight risks of having a psychotic break or going into a state of schizophrenia if we're unable to integrate this newfound insight into our constructed reality. The only solace I can provide regarding this is that the mind is extremely flexible, and recovery from these states of mind, while difficult, is possible.
That's why this practice is my practice and should most likely be undertaken under a teacher's guidance or done extremely slowly to avoid going insane. A teacher is recommended, even just for guidance during difficult times. I believe Mark Lippmann in Meditation Stuff had 20,000 words of warnings and potential pushbacks against starting this journey. It is scary, it is dangerous, yet after a certain point when the dissatisfaction of all phenomenological experience is seen through, there is an aspect of it being the only path. The choiceless path that one accidentally stumbles upon.
Developing Protocols
Meditation protocols are deeply personal endeavors based on what direction you want to transform your conscious reality. I will, however, list some fundamentals of my own protocols; they are simple yet effective.
Seated meditation - As mentioned in the introduction, this is 80% of practice, so building up seated meditation for an hour a day is a good start and what I do.
There is an aspect of contemplative fitness, similar to a workout programs, where one structures their sits to train the three faculties of mindfulness.
This can be done either through periods where one focuses on one particular section of mindfulness at a time or a weekly routine where each day a different part is trained.
Journaling - Reflecting on where you want to go, what you have done on a daily basis, and questioning whether you are embodying the values you want.
I personally believe writing is thinking, and the act of deliberately doing so will have a major impact on how things show up in your world.
Gratitude journals, value journals, reflection journals, and journaling on difficult emotional moments are all helpful in their own ways.
Spaced repetition system - Some sort of system for spaced repetition is essential; when reading or attempting to structure our subconscious, this is a foundational skill.
I barely remember my undergrad; I had learned so much during that time, yet what we don't use, we are more likely to forget.
Memory is a close-to-boundless resource, unlike attention; having a spaced repetition practice allows oneself to make memory a choice.
Reading - Generally, gaining more information about how other people have constructed their realities is a skillful and beautiful thing.
Something I would like to caution against is reading negative ideas and philosophies. With how much our subconscious influences our reality, infohazards are real. I'd recommend keeping away from the DSM-5 or learning more about mental illnesses as well.
Creative practice as a whole.
Something I’m still exploring would be movement practice, qi-gong, tai-chi, yoga, some sort of movement practice is missing from my practice specially and is something I hope to incorporate sooner or later.
Putting it all together
The inner work in contemplative practice, from the cultivation of concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity to the exploration of the subconscious and the art of meaning-making, is as vast as the ocean—another infinite journey that one can embark on. Some take it on by choice, while others feel a calling they cannot refuse. This article has been my attempt to share my own explorations and musings on this journey so far.
While the path of meditation and meaning-making is not always easy and may involve facing challenges and potential risks, the transformative potential and rewards of a more fulfilling and meaningful life make it a worthwhile endeavor. I believe most aspects of personality and personal reality are mutable; from happiness to success, when the work is put in, things can change, sometimes slowly, sometimes drastically.
Resources
Book recommendations:
https://deconstructingyourself.com/best-meditation-books-2020.html
https://www.shinzen.org/resources/articles/ → practically books, his articles are 60-100 pages
https://meditationbook.page/ - Mark Lippmann
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