In my experience, meditation seems to be an almost detrimentally misunderstood practice. It seems that in the wake of the recent self-help movement, the practice has been adopted with a hobbyist’s enthusiasm, and as a result has been watered down and out of its fundamental element. People seem to be meditating without a clear intent, without understanding to what end they are meditating. I have heard people say “I meditate for the practice in itself”, but that seems only to display an ignorance of the powerful psychological effect meditation has on the mind in the hours just after meditating. From what I have observed in the recent trend of meditation practices, it would seem that people enter into meditation with the goal of finding inner peace, but instead find yet another means of escape. I have also heard this phenomena once so succinctly put:
You Think You Have Been Meditating, When Really You’ve Been Disassociating
It is difficult to get meditation correct. The reason for this is that it requires a brutal level of honesty. One of the key features of meditation which separates it from other practices such as, let’s say, weightlifting, is that meditation occurs entirely in the subjective space. Now, contrary to common usage, the word subjective does not mean “one’s opinion”, it does not connote an infallible property of human thought which cannot be incorrect, this usage of the word is wrong and dangerous as it impedes ones ability to achieve higher levels of thought.
The word subjective actually means something more akin to “that which is experienced in the mind”. That is to say that, the subjective interpretation of a box is the box as seen and understood from a particular angle, determined by the relative position of the viewer (the subject), as opposed to the objective interpretation of a box, which is the box itself, containing all its elements, and is something which is imperceivable by a single person at any time. Another way of thinking of the word subjective is to think of it in terms of grammar: English follows the structure Subject -> Verb -> Object, and as such the statement “I pick up the box”, is a subject oriented sentence, or an active sentence. By contrast, “The Box is picked up”, is an object oriented sentence, or a passive sentence. It might seem confusing at first, but understand that the subject/object differentiation is one that your brain makes constantly without your conscious realization, and that differentiation is important when we talk of topics such as meditation
And so, because of meditation’s subjective nature, the only way to ascertain if you’re doing it correctly is to acknowledge some manner of standard to which we can measure our own success against, and it is in the selection of this standard (most often decided upon unconsciously), that the mistakes in meditation are made.
Indeed, the barriers to understanding the nature of correct meditation are so large that the masters of zen were compelled to write seemingly cryptic and unanswerable riddles known as “Koans” in order to test the knowledge of their students. These statements appear as nonsense to the unenlightened, but those with a deep understanding of zen, as informed by their meditative practices, will be able to answer them easily. In effect, they were a way of gauging whether or not a student has been correctly meditating and are, unfortunately, a vital component missing from hobbyist practices.
To illustrate the power of a koan, I will share with you a short story which demonstrates humorously the difference in knowledge:
A young student of zen approaches a master atop a bridge over water, and jokingly asks him, “how deep do the waters of zen flow?” In response the master hurls the student off the side of the bridge.
The student’s folly is that he or she believes that the answers can be achieved through the imparting of knowledge from master to student. As such, the student has failed to understand the nature of zen, that it is something to be experienced sensually, and cannot be expressed in words. Indeed, words are merely labels for real things, and no matter in how much detail you manage to capture the sensation of water touching the skin, (and by extension, the sensual ecstasy of enlightenment) in words, it will never match the vivid realization of the actual sensation, which much be achieved subjectively.
The Tension Between Nothing and Everything
The second biggest folly engaged in by modern practitioners of meditation, and one which was touched upon in the above story, is the fixation on a sensation of nothingness, an “empty mind”, achieved through a rigorous and consistent practice of meditation. This “empty mind”, or “heart of no heart” as it is, perhaps ungraciously, translated from Japanese, is a daring realization, often seen as the direct combat to emotional disorders such as anxiety. In actual fact, this is a wild misinterpretation of the meditation practice, and it is rooted in an erroneous understanding of the word “peace”. One does not murder the lions and declare peace for the gazelles.
In the same way that we flee for cover during a torrential storm, and in the same way we seek shade from the heat of the beating sun, meditation seeks to allow us to sit comfortably within the torrent of our emotions. We do not seek to end the clouds, or blot out the sun due to our inconvenience, but yet we aim to dampen our emotional sensations due to the pain they bring us?
What seems to have arisen, at least from my experience, is that modern practitioners of meditation are setting out to achieve a state of nothingness, when really they should be achieving a state of everythingness. Ideas which are fundamental to meditation practices, such as the oneness of all things, are being misinterpreted to mean “co-operate with all things”, or more broadly “be nice”, or worse still “we are all connected”. By contrast, the true idea of oneness only comes about when one has reached a deep enough meditative state to realize that all that is within their sensory organs are inextricably linked to one another: that the tree only exists with the sky as its backdrop, and the wind exists only alongside the fluttering of the leaves. This is not the “cause and effect” chain of deterministic philosophy, nor is it the logically derived conclusion of a biological understanding of the earth and its evolution, it is instead the understanding of the limitation of all things, and of knowledge. Go try it, and do it right.
To reiterate with another example: an artist uses a pen to create a masterpiece, but the artist can not achieve their art by focusing on the hand that holds the pen, for the artists vision of the art is thus obscured! The artist can also not maintain focus on the pen alone, for although the tool must necessarily be maintained, filled with paint or ink as sufficient, it is only part of the whole structure. The artist can not focus on the lines, for the lines only make a part of the whole picture, and the artist can also not just focus on the canvas, as the canvas is blank and does not contain the art.
The only solution is for the artist to be aware of all things at all times. So many things are there to be aware of, that the number could not be listed as it is unknowable. The artist must also be aware of their own thoughts, but the artist must not fixate upon them urgently, lest they become distracted from their masterpiece. As such, we can understand that the pen as held by the artist is in the same category as the thoughts that are held by the artist, necessarily for the being to function properly, but if obsessed upon, a detriment to the whole!
And so the terrible relationship between the modern mediator and their own thoughts is revealed. The hobbyist seeks not enlightenment, but self-harm and murder. To seek to end the flow of ones thoughts is a tragic misunderstanding of the practice, and to do so is to cut of an important part of ones consciousness. Indeed, the flow of thoughts is as valid an observable phenomenon as the leaves of tree as they blow in the wind, to aspire to cut them out is, ironically, a fixation which detracts from the whole. Hence the above quote: “You think you have been meditating, when you’ve really been disassociating”.
Just a quick end to this article, some of you might be wondering: “Why is the first thing we learn we start to meditate to avoid our own thoughts?” This is because for many people, their thoughts are the first and most difficult impediment to a proper meditation. It is important for the beginner student to learn to drink the nectar of their surroundings without conceptualizing and translating those surroundings into thoughts; the tree deserves to be seen as a tree, not as the thought of a tree. However, the tragedy begins when mediators take this first success as the final step of their meditative journey, and continue with this practice forevermore. This is the meditative equivalent of achieving a yellow belt in karate and calling it black, and undoubtedly a harmful practice in the long run.
