Notes on meditation
There's something important there, even if it's hard to be sure exactly what it is
One understanding of meditation is that it’s a tool or a skill, to be deployed when useful. A different understanding of meditation is that it’s a path to truth and knowledge, at least with respect to certain important domains of knowledge. A third understanding of meditation is that it’s an all-encompassing religion or lifestyle, a unique way of getting at the nature of reality and life.
These different views are not exactly incompatible: they all suggest that there is something potentially valuable to meditation, and that the activity can provide some kinds of comfort or insight. However, they have profoundly different implications for how important meditation is to either a person or society.
Commitment (or lack thereof)
There is a spectrum of commitment to meditation, from people who don’t know what it is at all to people who spend all their time meditating. My personal upper bound on meditation was a ten-day silent meditation retreat, a number of years ago. I found it to be an intriguing experience, but not one I am particularly interested in repeating. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with people who are either more interested or less interested in the activity: this is a classic kind of personal taste, “your mileage may vary” situation. In terms of ten-day retreats, I know people who didn’t get anything much out of it at all. Whereas I found one such retreat valuable, they didn’t even like it that much. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I also met people who were “frequent fliers,” for whom the one session I attended was just one of many they had attended. And of course, there are people like Zen monks for whom meditation of various kinds is effectively much of their life. I think it’s fun to read about such lives, but at the same time it feels very far removed from anything I can imagine myself doing.
Monkey mind vs. something deeper
Meditation allows you to become aware of your “monkey mind.” That’s the way in which your thoughts jump around from subject to subject, always moving, always with something to do. Meditation lets you understand that there is something deeper or calmer than the hyperactivity of the monkey mind. It’s hard to be sure what that something is: it’s what’s happening when you aren’t distracted by the monkey mind. Especially as a beginner, you only perceive it momentarily. However brief it is, it’s still a perception of something that’s clearly different from the monkey mind. That different, briefly perceived thing may be a real phenomenon, or it may be some kind of illusion. There’s nothing about meditation itself that would let you distinguish – and, indeed, the part of your mind that would be best able to think about the issue is one of the parts of your mind that you are trying to ignore, for at least the time that you are meditating.
Although it’s not clear what the underlying something is, it’s clear that meditation offers a semi-reliable way of accessing it. It’s also clear that exposure to that deeper element is a positive and pleasant, if low-key, experience. It’s not an altered state, it’s not a form of intoxication; it’s just… different, and calm.
Adjusting mental state
Is meditation just a way to adjust your mental state away from difficult feelings? If it is, is there any reason to be concerned about it? Let’s consider some possible points of comparison.
Coffee is mostly harmless, but with some potential downside from overuse (jitters, heart palpitations, sleeplessness) or withdrawal (headaches).
Masturbation is mostly harmless, with some potential downside from overuse, or substitution for sexual interaction with others.
Alcohol in current thinking seems to be mostly harmful, with no “safe” level of consumption. There are additional potential downsides from overuse or withdrawal.
Bearing in mind that these different techniques have somewhat different effects, meditation looks pretty good in the comparison.
Pragmatism vs. enlightenment
A pragmatic theory of meditation is that it’s valuable because it makes you more effective at whatever else you think you need to do. This is sometimes expressed in the saying that “you should meditate 20 minutes every day, unless you don’t have time; then you should meditate an hour every day.” The humorous reversal of time allocation reflects the reality that one’s effectiveness is dramatically reduced when one is in the grip of a monkey mind. Calming the mind via meditation improves focus, and can often justify the required time.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, perceiving everyday reality as an illusion is part of what motivates some approaches to meditation. If there is some kind of endpoint of a meditation practice, we would call it enlightenment: a grasping of the nature of reality. An interesting philosophical question here is: how would we know the difference between enlightenment as “being in touch with reality” vs. enlightenment as some kind of odd mental state that produces that illusion? How and why should we trust the reports of those who have achieved enlightenment or similar conditions, and how should we rank that pursuit compared to other ways we could spend our time and energy?
It appears that this judgment hinges less on the experience of enlightenment itself or any specific aspect of that journey, and more on what it’s like to interact with an enlightened person. That is, we are interested in enlightenment not purely as an activity or a goal; but rather because we have information (perhaps personal, perhaps written accounts) of the profoundly different experience of interacting with an enlightened person.
One relevant pop-culture reference here is The Matrix, in which the protagonist is pursuing his own semi-competent exploration into the nature of reality before encountering a much more sophisticated group. In the opening of the movie, Neo has only hints and half-seen insights about something not being quite right. Somewhat later, the entire scheme of reality vs. illusion is laid out and forms the backdrop for the rest of the action. From a meditation perspective, we could say that Neo starts with his own practice, but quickly attains enlightenment with the assistance of Morpheus.
A utilitarian view – meditation seen as a tool for improved efficiency and effectiveness in everyday life – may seem opposed to the idea of rejecting everyday life as an illusion, or at least drawing closer to that understanding. The pragmatic approach seems to be about accepting the illusion and just getting on with life.
On closer examination, though, the conflict disappears. It seems reasonable to say that one can both want to achieve enlightenment and also be more effective in everyday life. This is possibly related to the idea that “heroes still have to do their laundry,” or similar sentiments.