Though I’ve been meditating for over half a century (before I even knew what it was, since the phenomenon occurred before the word and philosophy), I’ve had no urge to teach meditation. So it’s been dismaying to witness how in recent years the global capitalistic system, which monetizes everything, has found a way to teach “many paths” to purported transcendence.
Twenty-five years ago if you advertised yourself as a “meditation teacher” you would have been seen as a crank. Now there’s an entire industry devoted to teaching innumerable traditions, and peddling idiosyncratic methods of meditation.
That’s resulted in the signal-to-noise ratio with regard to meditation becoming so heavily weighted in favor of noise that the word has lost nearly all meaning.
Beneath the noise of the meditation industry, is there a widespread stirring in human consciousness to stop, or at least slow the whirring of the machinery of the mind?
Perhaps. At least people interested in meditation aren’t obsessively externally focused, foolishly attacking “the system” rather than looking to end the source of division, power and gross economic disparity within.
Action from the motivations of the self tends to add to human fragmentation. One can instead draw attention to the source of human division, which is the ancient habit of separating the observer from the observed.
Most traditions of meditation have made attention to the mind their cornerstone. But the various traditions of meditation had meaning and value within the context of the cultures in which they arose. Transplanting these traditions to western society and turning them into a smorgasbord of systems for people to choose from has been a failed and often counterproductive project.
For example, I read a well-established meditation teacher in one of the world’s greatest cities who wrote a piece entitled, “Why ‘watching your thoughts like clouds passing through sky’ is the worst meditation advice ever.”
According to him, “watching your thoughts like leaves on a stream encourages a kind of bypassing.”
In making the dreaded charge of “bypassing,” he maintains “you’re probably observing thoughts through a filter, judging them, wishing they were different, hoping they’ll go away. So your relationship to the thoughts doesn’t change at all.”
Frankly, the claim that passively observing one’s thoughts “doesn’t help you question the validity of your thoughts, and doesn’t help you dismantle the assumptions underneath them” is absurd.
Why? Because his first and most important unexamined assumption is that there is an observer/self that’s separate from ‘my thoughts.’
The meditation teacher attests that he doesn’t understand meditation by opposing attention and insisting: “In any moment, there are thousands of things you could pay attention to. You can’t be aware of everything all at once, and you’re going to miss a LOT.”
Who or what is the “you” that is “going to miss a LOT?” It’s the separate self, with its vaunted ability to concentrate — a very different action than attention. Decrying and denying the brain’s latent potential for passive awareness and unstructured attention is meditation malpractice.
These largely unstated suppositions reflect a widely held but deeply mistaken philosophy of meditation. They conflate attention with concentration, and set up the straw man that attention to the movement of thought is impossible because it means being “aware of everything all at once.”
They also uphold the separate self and the imperative and efficacy of inclusive, non-directed attention.
The meditation teacher’s confused background of unexamined assumptions is confirmed with his claim that “insights into your thinking can only happen in hindsight, through reflection,” and “how you learn is by looking back over what was happening when you were meditating.”
Such an approach privileges the recollections and reflections of the self over actually experiencing meditative states, during which separateness and the chattering, reactive mind falls silent. Thus it sustains the very psychological division, conflict and suffering that true meditation completely neutralizes.
The fact that it may not do so irrevocably simply means that one must diligently do the daily spadework of observing one’s thoughts with as little judgment, choice and interference as watching leaves passing by on a stream — whenever one can beside an actual stream!
Reflection has its place, but transformation doesn’t occur through reflection, but through the insight that attention brings in the moment.
So it’s a wrong question to ask, “What do I want from meditation?” And it’s nonsensical to answer: “The kind of insight that changes the relationship I have with thoughts, so that I’m no longer thrown off balance by them.”
Right observation begins the moment one sees, at the emotional level, that the separate observer is inextricable from the movement of thought en bloc.
One may be able to point people in the right direction to meditate, but meditation cannot be taught, only discovered and practiced alone within each person. Group meditation is an oxymoron. Questioning and igniting insight together is the social equivalent of solitary meditation.
There is no such thing as good meditation advice versus bad meditation advice. Therefore don’t follow anyone’s meditation teaching (including mine), much less advice, but question and experiment with undivided observation within oneself.
Insisting that there are “many ways to meditate” gives primacy to the futility of using methods of thought to control thought. That’s the unexamined premise and unseen trick that meditation teachers rely on.
So what do I mean by meditation? Mindful that the definition is not the thing defined, meditation begins when the separation between the observer and the observed ends. The observer is the filter of judgment and choice that prevents direct observation of what is as it arises within one.
Observing without the infinite regress of the observer allows the brain to gather sufficient non-directed attention to effortlessly quiet thought.
In short, meditation is not a positive action requiring concentration and effort toward some goal, but a completely unforced action of negation through choiceless awareness gathering unwilled attention.
As meditation deepens, it means not just the ending of the observer and effortlessly gathering non-directed attention to quiet the mind as thought. It also means ending psychological time, and entering into the wholeness and holiness of the unknown beyond thought, knowledge and experience.
That is our deepest and truest birthright as human beings.
