Let Us Eff the Ineffable

What makes learning meditation hard is that the practice can’t be verbalized. Right? It is like explaining how my experience of the color blue differs from yours. Words fail.

Or so it can seem. Meditating is mostly non-verbal, yes. The same is true of riding a bike, though, and yet you can still explain how to ride a bike. At any rate, I can.

The real problem is cultural. In the West, meditation is grouped with astrology, Mother Nature personified, and other New Age myths. If you’re an American, if you meditate in the company of other Americans, very likely, people around you are attached to some very weird beliefs. “My cosmic number today is 8.”

There is something wonderfully technical about meditation. What is the difference between subtle distraction and peripheral awareness? Why is the breath a better meditation object for beginners than reflections on life? What is the difference between the self that is an illusion and the self that is not? Real questions have real answers.

The mortal enemy of mythology is making sense. Try to picture being a teacher of this stuff when you’re expected to help people pretend that they have a spirit animal. Poeticism wins, plainspokenness loses.

To make matters worse, clarity in English is a skill, earned, not free. Being good at finding spiritual insight does not make a guru eloquent any more than it makes her good at liver transplants.

Let me offer the following tale to illustrate the depth of the problem. It’s a parody, but not a gross one.

You’ve genetically engineered a vaccine for cancer. Congratulations! Get ready to win a Nobel Prize.

One problem. The vaccine has a flaw that gives people pneumonia.

Fortunately, it so happens you have a pair of bio-savvy friends, old Bob and young Alice. Bob is a good bet because he cured Alzheimer’s last year. Alice is not as accomplished, yet.

You email Bob and Alice the flawed DNA sequence.

“Cure cancer by curing it less,” writes Bob.

You ask for elaboration.

“What you seek is already at hand,” he replies.

Alice writes, “The problem stems from the usage of genes BRCA8 and ASRT2. You don’t need them. Just use LRTZ1 instead, like so.”

Bob’s way with words is the norm. It is as bad as that. Sometimes Bob is a non-English-speaking guru whose words are mistranslated. Sometimes he’s forgotten what used to be challenging back when he was a novice. Contemplative confusion culture doesn’t help.

Bob is as enlightened as they come. He just sucks at explanations.

We’re all sort of in love with Alice. She’s a very, very rare find. The author of MCTB2 is a bit of an Alice. The author of The Mind Illuminated is another.

Whereas Alice clearly knows her shit, I do not. I’m in stages 3-5 of the practice laid out by Culadasa. In other words, I am not writing as a meditation expert, just a run-of-the-mill human. But like Alice, I care a lot about clarity.

Every time I see a meditation riddle, it has turned out so far, what I’m actually seeing is an explanation fuck-up. Some of these fucked up explanations are frustrating and important.

Here on Meditate.wtf I intend to unfuck the fucked. I have unfucked one thing already, I’m happy to say, and that is the topic of the next post.