Meditating Successfully

Purpose-Riddled Practice

Don’t think in terms of results, progress, or goals, say many experienced practitioners. The sound of “meditating successfully” may grate on their ears. They may add to this admonishment a supporting statement about, say, the path itself being the only goal.

I confess, I do have reasons for meditating. I do it to enter blissful or wacky mental states. To discover insights into consciousness. To appreciate the sameness between myself and other conscious entities, better to attend the things I care about in each moment, and less to suffer needlessly. Also, to achieve enlightenment, whatever that is.

In my mother tongue, English, these desirable results would be referred to as “goals,” which are bad. I’m clearly doing it wrong.

Oddly enough, having discouraged goal-speak, practitioners turn around and advertise these same outcomes themselves. At face value it’s very confusing. It seems like a riddle.

Motivating this riddle are two legitimate ideas. Both ideas are coherent, riddle-free, even straightforward. When you know them, you know where people are coming from, you understand their failure to put their thoughts into words, you forgive them, you are filled with loving kindness, you stop trying to eat your fist, and you become the Buddha.

In no particular order, then…

The Big Insight Takes Little Effort to See

(Although learning where to look is another matter.)

Once you’ve fully perceived the illusion of self as a direct experience, which I for the record have not, it is readily available for observation no matter the context. When you’re exchanging cash for hand sanitizer under blaring florescent lights in a drug store you can observe your no-self just as easily as when you’re achieving some tremendous bliss through concentration on a pillow. It as accessible to perception as the optic blind spot (as Sam Harris analogizes) - if but you know where to put your attention.

What does this cool fact have to do with our riddle? Well, words like “result and “progress” and “goal” reinforce the perception of a significant distance to be bridged. The language of intense effort makes the illusion of self sound really hard to see. And that’s not correct. It’s not hard to see, apparently, if you’re looking in the right way, because it’s hiding in plain sight. “Progressing” makes it sound like some voyage towards a far-off place. Gurus don’t want to reinforce that misperception.

One solution: discard the language of goals wholesale, confusing everybody. Yikes!

In summary, seeing is easy - when you know how to look and where to look. Our path towards that knowledge may, however, be long and arduous. It’s like a Magic Eye picture. You might fiddle with the image for hours trying to figure out what you need to do with your eyes. Once you know, you can do it at will. If you understand that concept, you understand the entirety of what enlightened but inarticulate gurus mean by discouraging goal-speak.

Another popular way to confuse everyone is by speaking in vague metaphor. When experts make sparkly, vaporous statements like “the journey is the destination,” they are taking the above point, something very straightforward, and hiding it inside of a poem.

That’s one of the truths at play. Next up…

Letting Go

The mental action of meditating - moving attention away from thoughts and onto the breath, typically - is an in-the-moment, impermanent relinquishment of other goals. For example, you might have a bill to pay, but when you’re meditating, you don’t pay it. You can stop reading now because that’s the entire idea of letting go.

Much confusion arises when the microcosm and the macrocosm are spoken about at the same time. They needn’t be. They’re two different scopes.

Think about when you’re watching a movie. Say, during the movie, it occurs to you to put an upcoming event on your calendar. You’re watching a movie, though, so you don’t. In that sense - a very limited sense - you do release the goal: your intention to edit the calendar is temporarily dismissed, let go, just in that one moment, in favor of your intention to finish the movie. Two hours later you still go ahead and enter the event in your calendar.

So did you give up your goal, or did you hold onto it? Here’s a better question. Why are we even discussing such vague language in the first place?

If we must, then here is the answer. Small-picture, immediate-only, narrow scope, we drop the goal. Big-picture, over-arching scope, we keep the goal. That’s it. If you comprehend that, you grasp “letting go of the goal.”

The real mystery is why people are so lazy in their choice of words. We get incredibly, almost majestically incoherent discussion on this topic all because a simple distinction is not made between the quantum-particle niche proximal scope in which “let go of a goal” has a meaning and the broader normal everyday scope in which it does not.

There are examples seemingly subtler, and they may sound different, but they really do come to the same word crime. For instance, your goal might be to experience bliss during your morning meditation. To accomplish that, what do you primarily focus on in one discrete moment of the practice? Your primary focus remains your breath, not the feeling of bliss (at least at first).

In that respect, yes, there is a sense in which you’re “letting go” of the goal of sustained bliss, I suppose, but that’s a misleading, muddy way to put it. From a (slightly) broader perspective, you absolutely do still intend to feel bliss, much as you still intend to pay your bill and plan your day. It’s just not front and center under the spotlight of your attention in a given instant of the session.

Imagine there’s a cute puppy who is shy of direct eye contact. You look at him with only your peripheral vision. That way, he doesn’t run off and you still get to enjoy his cute appearance. Would you call that “letting go of watching the puppy in order to watch the puppy?” If you’re trying to be confusing, then yes. There’s a technical, very particular way in which you’re letting go of watching the puppy and there’s a broader sense in which you’re not.

…and It’s Everywhere

Let’s name this riddle. We’ll call it the Anti-Goal Hindrance!, or “AGH!” for short.

AGH! comes up in various forms all over. Here’s one example.

An expert in meditation will tell you that being mindful can eliminate the suffering that comes with physical pain. It doesn’t eliminate the sensation, but it does eliminate the anguish. They tell you this extraordinary fact because it’s a desirable result of meditation, something you would find appealing to achieve.

In the very same book, paragraph, or breath, the expert goes on to advise that you must accept mental anguish rather than resist it. Just note it. Don’t oppose it. By not resisting or opposing it, you can successfully resist it and your opposition to it will win the day. (While we’re at it, why don’t we go fuck ourselves?)

If the person on the receiving end of this verbal fiasco happens to be a human being, she will immediately experience the mental anguish known as “wanting to hit something” or simply “despair.” Or, if she’s fuzzy-minded, she’ll think, “Ah yes, the deep mystery that is spiritual insight.”

Nope.

See if you can spot the solution to the AGH! in this example.

Hint: it’s the micro / macro thing again.