Lost in Meditation
You might be better off if you did not meditate. Ignorance is bliss. If it was not for meditation we would be immortal… well… but for self-awareness and the understanding that we are impermanent, we would be already living in the present and have no burden from the realization of mortality. We would live in a state of flow that is in harmony with nature. Meditation brings us out of our total engagement with life and makes us self-conscious or worse it can utterly destroy the self and the world. Meditation is about the exploration of consciousness, the facts about impermanence and also, it is the breaking down of the world and the contents of the mind, in order to see them for the illusion that they are. It is about discovering what is real. Meditation is not therapeutic, it is traumatic.
It is incredibly lucky that, built within the human animal is the natural ability to distract ourselves from the terrifying existential truths that lie beneath the surface of things. Our compulsion towards activity, our rumination, and the irresistible storylines that we follow that make up the reality of our lives are what save us from acknowledging the disturbing truths of existence. Meditation chips away at this ignorance and confounds the automatic distraction mechanism. A life that is truly unencumbered by self-reflection is capable of entering into a harmonious equilibrium with nature and culture… if it were possible for the cognitive human animal to be active but not conscious; to be more engaged as a non-human animal would be, just living in the moment and following intuition, then the true potential of the human could be observed. Or not… What is consciousness anyway?
Consciousness probably evolved as a damage mitigation tool. In the presence of acute pain from an injury, and animal will respond to the damage by either tending to the wound, in what ever way they do, or by becoming inactive and thus mitigating further damage, but at the same time being in direct communication with the pain. Enlightenment about the burden of pain mixed with the peak experiences of fight, flight or chase could account for the origin of consciousness. It truly is a mysterious state. Consciousness seems to be intangible and disconnected from objective physical reality. However, it seems also to be the case that larger brains are more conscious, that the contents of consciousness are very much influenced by what is going on in the environment as well as the state of the body, and that it is in fact a physical manifestation and not something we control over. Consciousness is what meditation seeks to come to terms with.
Do magic mushrooms (psilocybin) and you will see what the mind is capable of… Yes, within subjectivity there is a relativity of time, experience, care and attention that is very difficult to pin down and describe or measure… Control it if you think you can. It is not magic, however.
There are three types of meditation
1 – Superficial meditation
2 – Deep meditation
3 – Active meditation
Superficial meditation was imported to the west in the sixties, and is about sitting quietly while the drugs run their course. It is about being peaceful and content. It is about feeling like you are becoming enlightened and that you have a connection with all past lives and the world, as well, you gain all the other impressions that make you feel that you are becoming spiritually advanced… just kidding… sort of. Superficial meditation is very useful for calming the surface of the pond, which can be made rough by the turbulent winds of life’s competing forces acting on the mind.
The first form of meditation can be therapeutic, since making oneself sit still rescues attention from rumination, which is calming. One can realize that all of the crisis of the mind that steal away our attention and burden our well-being are mostly illusory and that we attach an unrealistic amount of significance to the stories that propelled us.
There is a conflict that arises when we try to force the waters to be calm by not forcing them. We restrict the body, and with the mind and body tightly wrapped in straight jacket, we coercively tell it to “just relax, calm yourself”… The body would rather be moving! That is what life does, it moves forward, this is why children find meditation difficult but the elderly find it easy. Life wants to move and be engaged in all the things that keep us moving forward. Our biology naturally keeps us in a state that distracts us from the ‘reality crushing’ truth one can find in ‘deep meditation’. There are benefits to practicing concentration, being present, calming oneself down, and not getting caught up in unimportant habits of thought – which is called mindfulness. Mindfulness, or ‘active meditation’, which doesn’t require a straight jacket, can allow the senses to become sharp and make our experiences richer.
The second type of meditation is deep meditation. This isn’t about calming the superficial surface of the pond, it is rather about going under, into the deep where there is no oxygen, no light, not much of anything, but is the basic truth underlaying everything. When the subjective realities of the world become too much, when the difficulties arise where the competing beliefs of all beings within the environment drive complexity to unmanageable levels, one will prefer to just retreat deep into mind by denying the world and the ‘self’ that constructs it. Alternatively, one might chose deep meditation as a deliberate path to getting at objective truth. The truth about existence can be found in the depths of the mind, at the ocean floor, where the nature of consciousness is most apparent. What one finds is NOT peaceful, calming, serene and so on and so on. What is found is that there is no self, no freedom, nothing that is real in any meaningful sense, the past and future do not exist, only the present which is an impossibly fine point which itself can not possibly exist. The list of hard truths and paradoxes is vast. If one takes these facts seriously and internalizes them, the ‘person’ begins to disappear and no longer resembles a human being. A person will shatter and burn and evaporate in deep meditation. You don’t just come back from this and move on to dance class or whatever god damn self-help or online psychotherapy is next in your popular health regimen.
The only people that can truly benefit from and understand the value of meditation are the hard determinists – the ones that accept that everything just is a fact of the matter, and that there are no magical influence in the world. These are the people most capable of looking intently at conscious experience to find out how they must be wrong about objectivity. These investigators want to find the truth. In an attempt to understand, they cultivate the most rich and refined subjectivity, trying with every ounce of insight to show how anything can exist, how to stay human, and how the illusions must somehow be real. All other angles of inquiry are self-righteous spiritual guruism… which is fine I guess. Letting go and drifting away into the sands of subjectivity, oblivious and free, might be a better path for some.
Meditation can be done by sitting on ones ass all day… or, one can instead practice the most powerful form of meditation, the third in the list – Active meditation. Also called mindfulness, it is the practice of going about ones day always in the moment, totally engaged. This is a ‘deliberate’ practice and so is inferior to the non-conscious engagement that a non-human animal in the state of flow would have access to but, with practice, active meditation could be habituated into a perpetual state of being, and thus resemble the flow state.
How can one ‘see’ anything of the world if they are not in the moment? When we are able to ‘see’ clearly, we will know that we are doing it right. Mindfulness gives our biological senses room to shine, we can experience the world more richly and the quality of our experience is improved.
We are living in our minds at all times. The world ‘out there’ is not out there, it is a construct within the mind that we move around within. Sure, our projection is influenced by facts of a physical truth, but the total quality of the projection is generated within the mind. If we are unable to become functionally ignorant, and we don’t feel like sitting on our ass all day, and we aren’t interested in utterly destroying our ‘person’, then mindful, active meditation, which gives us the moment, brightens the senses, improves the colour, texture, sound, affect and overall quality of the projection, is the way to go.
Beyond these three types of meditation there is a fourth, or the ‘end point’. The end point of meditation is the ability to click it off. No feelings, no enlightenment, not even truth… nothing. This ‘clicking it off’ is not sustainable for very long but really is what completes the practice.
If you want therapy, look elsewhere.
(okay… perhaps this is just one way of looking at it. The point being that maybe it’s good to look at things differently in order to test if one is under the influence of dogma. Certainly, meditation gives us the ability to see what really matters, and to be more aware of longterm realities that we can loose sight of when we are hopelessly caught up in present concerns.