Here is a mini-meditation guide with the aim of achieving a better relationship with the sometimes-difficult fact of existence, of being alive in the world.
Originally, I was going to put off sharing my thoughts on this kind of topic. I thought maybe decades from now, when I’m wiser and my life is close to over, I could start talking about this stuff in earnest, with lots of detail and references and maybe more of a specific lineage or tradition to back me up instead of being based mostly on idiosyncratic ideas. But there’s no way to know what the future will bring, and I wanted to get this down sooner rather than later, just in case it helps someone, no matter how imperfect these words may be.
Feeling better1 is possible. I mean in a baseline, day to day, non-temporary way.
It takes only some time, some commitment, and a place to sit quietly.
Meditation as a daily practice to calm down and center yourself is great. However, there is also meditation with a specific goal. Some people are resistant to the idea that meditation should have a specific “thing” you are trying to make happen. Making meditation goal-oriented seems to undermine the point and turn it into some kind of outcome-based activity. Aren’t we trying to get away from that in the first place?
Yes and no. I am going to describe a kind of meditation with a goal to make a specific “thing” happen, because the thing I’m about to describe was the single best improvement to my mental health that I ever experienced. I think it’s important for more people to know about. It is totally achievable— not exactly easy, but not ridiculously hard either. It employs meditation not as an open-ended and never-ending practice, but as a specific, targeted activity. Perhaps surprisingly, you do not need to keep meditating afterward to continue to have the benefit it confers.
Now I will introduce two specific Buddhist-derived concepts related to meditation. One is called concentration, single-pointedness, or shamatha, and the other is insight, wisdom, or vipasyana2. If you have looked into meditation before, you may have encountered these terms. You may have also seen there is a lot of argument about them, what they mean, how important they are, who invented what, when, and so on. As always with this stuff, there is no need to get too attached to the words themselves.
Here is my personal, unsanctioned take on shamatha and vipasyana and why I think it can be helpful to think of your meditation journey through this lens. Say you are stuck in a forest in a deep valley. You don’t have a map. It’s dark. You don’t know where you are, or where you’re going. Even if you could get out, you don’t know what might be next. In order to get a better perspective, you need to climb— the higher the better. You decide you should climb the highest mountain around and look from there.
Unfortunately, you might not be in great shape. You cannot simply decide to walk up the mountain one day and expect to succeed. Instead, what you need to do is to train for a little while, to strengthen your body. In this analogy, shamatha is like the strength of your body. It’s what gives you the ability to climb the mountain so you can gain the insight, vipasyana, that comes when you take in the view at the top. In other words, you need to develop enough concentration power so you can meditate long enough on a single subject to come to a certain realization about it.
To continue the analogy, this is not to say you have to become a professional mountain climber and dedicate the rest of your life to the practice. You only need to develop enough strength to make it to the top of this particular mountain. Even if you are gasping for breath and collapsing at the top, you’ve reached it, and that’s what counts. Of course, some people train so hard they can practically run up the mountain. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s what you want to do. Extreme training is possible with shamatha. Like a yoga instructor who easily contorts into painful-looking shapes, you can develop it to the point of being able to take your brain into all kinds of unusual states3. But this is not necessary for the one goal we have right now, the most important goal, which is to climb the mountain and experience the view at the top.
The first important milestone is to be able to sit for forty-five minutes.
When you start meditating, you can only let your mind wander. That’s normal. Don’t get mad at yourself. Start with some self-awareness, what I will call oversight, for a little bit: watch your thoughts as they rise, develop, and then fade as other thoughts take over. Very soon, however, the self-awareness will slip away, and you’ll catch yourself only thinking without oversight. When you notice that’s happened, turn on the oversight again. Keep doing this, patiently, like correcting a child or a puppy.
There are lots of meditation methods. You can count your breaths, one to ten. You can try to determine the exact point your breath turns from breathing in to breathing out. You can pay attention to the minute sensations of different parts of the body. You can silently recite a mantra, or contemplate a huatou4. You can “cut off your head and just sit.” There are all kinds of guides and teachers out there. Use them if they help. The book The Mind Illuminated is a very thorough guide to this process, though it is a bit dry and forbidding at first. Remember you are not meditating to stop your thoughts. You are meditating to practice and develop shamatha, increasing your concentration, or the single-pointedness of your mind.
After a while of practicing meditation, you might not feel like your mind is any less “noisy,” but hopefully you are at least seeing the noise of your mind more clearly. You might even see first hand that what you thought was simply a string of thoughts in your head, one after another, is actually more like a bunch of people at a party all speaking at once, and there is a central coordinating part of the mind that decides which of those conversations to listen to at any given moment. Much more can and has been written about this, but we’ll leave it there since we have other places to go. To return to the analogy, someone who exercises and trains their body sees benefits in everyday life: they feel better about themselves, they don’t get winded climbing stairs, they might be healthier overall. For many, this is the entire point of meditation. That’s fine!
Just don’t forget there’s that mountain out there.
What to do about the mountain? The climb is still pretty daunting. There is the possibility of climbing the mountain only to the middle, and getting a nice view but not a commanding one. In practice, you might end up doing this a lot. When you start developing meditation, you may get to a few different states where things become buzzy or numinous. It can feel nice, like you are dissociating in a good way. Some people get to this point and feel no ambition to go farther.
Also sometimes, for some people, strange states and mystical-seeming experiences can happen in meditation. You might hear voices or see images. Almost every serious meditation guide mentions this and goes on to say you should not make a big deal out of these. It’s true. If they happen, cool, but don’t confuse them or for the ultimate goal: to one day reach the top of the mountain.
Past the mid-way point on the mountain, there will be three routes to the summit. They are: contemplation of impermanence, contemplation of no-self, and contemplation of unwanted stimuli (traditionally called “suffering”5). Any of these three paths will get you there. You just need to pick one, and use the shamatha power you have gained to meditate on that topic until you reach the summit and something specific happens.
In Buddhist philosophy, impermanence, no-self, and unwanted stimuli are called “the three marks of existence.” But they aren’t objective truths of the world, so much as they are subjective truths that your brain has tried to prevent you from realizing. To obscure them, it has built these three illusions in turn: that there is something knowable that will last longer than you, that there is a central fixed “self,” and that it is somehow possible to avoid unwanted stimuli. These illusions come from a well-meaning place, a place of not wanting you to get hurt. Unfortunately, they are very expensive to maintain and ultimately do more harm than good. It’s better that you see the truth for yourself.
That last sentence is important. You may have read about Buddhist philosophy and thought, “yes, I agree, everything is impermanent.” That’s not enough. Even if you read a book or listen to a lecture and feel like it really helped you, there will still be a big part of your brain that persists in believing there is permanence, and which gets upset when things seem to contradict this. The same goes for no-self and unwanted stimuli. So, even if you are on board with these concepts in an abstract or intellectual way, you won’t see the full benefit unless you address the illusions all the way to their roots, which run very deep.
You will have to fight your brain to do this. People who have decided meditation is only about being peaceful and calm sometimes have a hard time processing this idea. If you don’t like “fighting” as a metaphor, think of it as a hike through difficult terrain instead. The point is, there will be friction. These illusions are extremely powerful, and your brain is doing a lot of work to maintain them behind your back.
What you need to do in order to take their power away for good is use the shamatha you have built up, climb to the top of the mountain on one of those three paths, and pass through its gate at the top. You do not need to pass through all three gates. Once you get past one, the other two will also unlock, since they’re all interrelated and lead to the same place anyway. Not so bad, right?
Get yourself ready. You will be sitting and meditating for up to two hours, maybe more. If you can do forty-five minutes regularly, you can probably go all the way if you promise yourself not to give up. Use all of your shamatha power to stay seated, meditating, and stay on the topic you have picked.
If you contemplate impermanence, apply it to everything you can think of. Nothing is safe from impermanence, is it? The instant any object crosses your mind, see how impermanence applies to it. Note how things are thoughts, and thoughts don’t last at all.
If you are contemplating no-self, ask yourself where the self resides. Really try to answer this. Follow a molecule of water as you drink it and it passes through your body. Did that water ever become you? Where exactly does the thing called you end and something else begin?
If you are contemplating unwanted stimuli, think how a desire for a certain stimulus often leads to an unwanted stimulus. Think how wanted stimuli become unwanted and vice versa. What is the actual difference between wanted and unwanted stimuli?
If you need more guidance, you can find exhaustive treatments of each of these topics. The point is you must pick one of these illusions and pound on it relentlessly. Think it all the way through. Examine every angle that could possibly be examined. Don’t think idly or in a wandering way, but an active, directed way. Be ruthless, almost aggressive. Whatever your brain does, keep bringing it back to the fundamental point.
If you are doing this right, after the initial meditation stages which should be familiar by now, you will soon want to get off the cushion. Your brain will try to make you. It will propose that you did a fine night’s meditation and let’s pack it in for now. It will make you sleepy, tempting you to lie down. It will make you hungry, or unbearably thirsty. It will create phantom itches and aches. It will try to distract you with every intrusive thought you’ve ever had. It will suddenly bring up old wounds or embarrassments. It will make you paranoid: did you lock the door? Is that someone at the window? It will try literally everything and anything it can to get you off that cushion, to stop you from destroying the illusion. Remember that all of these are a sign you are on the right path. You have to keep going. You have to commit to yourself that you will keep going for longer than you want to, or would have thought possible.
Thankfully, a lot has been written about what this is like. The best modern description is found in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram, which I recommend. The Theravada tradition and its derivatives break this path into sharply defined discrete stages, whereas the Mahayana and particularly Zen traditions purposely avoid doing this, leaving you to figure it out for yourself. Both approaches have merits. In the end you will have to figure it out for yourself either way.
Anyway, your brain will fight back, trying to maintain the illusion. You have to ceaselessly and continuously prove that the illusion is based on a false premise. But the defenses built around these illusions are extremely strong. The meditation gets very difficult to maintain. You feel like you are plunged into darkness. Slowly, with difficulty, you crawl out from the depths. Things seem to get better for a while, but just when you think you are near the end, you face even greater difficulties. You start to feel like the thing that is you, whatever it is, is falling apart. You are barely keeping it together. Naturally, just before the end is the worst. It feels like a wall, a wall that may or may not be screaming at you. You have to hold throughout all of this.
Finally, something happens. I don’t want to create expectations or false positives by talking about it, though Ingram’s book has detailed descriptions based on his personal experiences and others who have shared theirs, if you care to spoil yourself.
I know it sounds like I’m speaking mystically, but I’m not. I believe everything I’ve just written here is completely explainable within a scientific materialist framework. In my view, you’ve just come to a realization you wouldn’t have gotten to unless you deliberately focused on it for that amount of time. You used the concentration powers you’ve been working on to pin down your brain so it can’t escape, and watched it squirm until it finally gave up every single last excuse and redirecting tactic that it had available to it, so that it finally had to accept reality for what it truly is. That is to say: impermanent, without a fixed self, and filled with unavoidable stimuli.
It takes a little while for the new knowledge to be integrated into your life. The truth has to settle into the grooves of your already existing mind. Take it easy for several days after you experience the summit of the mountain.
So, what was that? Was that the first stage of the four-stage awakening model? Something less? Something unrelated? It’s difficult not to wonder, but I would try to not worry about it. The only thing that matters is if it makes a difference in your day-to-day life. Pay attention over the next few weeks, months, years and see if it does.
Sometimes I talk to people who are afraid of pursuing this kind of thing because they think they will lose their personality or their creativity. Please don’t worry. You will still be you. The realization of impermanence doesn’t mean you believe nothing matters. The realization of no-self doesn’t mean you walk around in a depersonalized haze. The realization of unwanted stimuli doesn’t mean you resign yourself to infinite suffering.
You will still get angry, sad, frustrated, and disappointed. You will still love good food and friends and alcohol and drugs if you do them. You will still get horny, if that’s a thing you do. You won’t turn into someone you aren’t, and, sadly, it will not change anything about the world around you either. The only thing it does is make existing in this absurd place just a little bit better, life just a little more tolerable. But isn’t that worth pursuing, given the way things are? This is something I wish for all of us to have, so we can survive the future together.
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“Better” means just that. It does not mean feeling great all the time, solving all your problems, unfortunate facts about the world becoming untrue, etc. It just means better.
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These words are most often associated with Theravada Buddhist traditions and their derivatives, so are usually written in Pali as samatha and vipassanā. The correctly accented Sanskrit versions are śamatha and vipaśyanā.
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For meditation nerds, I mean things like nirodha samapatti, which is not something I would say is important for large numbers of people to achieve.
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A huatou is a Chinese word for a specific sentence or phrase you can contemplate as an object, and often the core part of a koan.
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The short version of why I call it that: People hear “life is suffering” and conclude that Buddhist philosophy is pessimistic or nihilistic. It’s not, so I want to re-frame what’s traditionally called “suffering” with something more like “unwanted stimuli,” and “the mark of suffering” as “unwanted stimuli are unavoidable.”
