A Meditation on Meditation

Lots of people say they have a hard time meditating. They tell me that they have a hard time quieting their mind. Quieting your mind is not meditation. Quieting your mind is quieting your mind. My favorite author, Alan Watts puts it perfectly:

When you realize that you have come to your wit’s end, you can begin meditation. Or meditation happens, and that happening is simply the watching of what is, of all the information conveyed to you by your exterior and interior senses, and even the thoughts that keep chattering on about it all. You don’t try to stop those thoughts, you just let them run as if they were birds twittering outside, and they will eventually become tired and stop. But don’t worry about whether they do or don’t. Just simply watch whatever it is that you are feeling, thinking, or experiencing – that’s it. Just watch it, and don’t go out of your way to put any names on it. This is really what meditation is.

So, meditation is not about doing anything. It is about stopping doing everything, well nearly everything. You sit or stand or walk and stop adding to the situation. Stop adding your commentary. Stop adding your predictions of what will come and stop adding your analysis of what has past. Just stop. That’s it. There is nothing special for you to do. There is nothing really special you can do. You are what you are and that’s it. In meditation we stop adding on so that we can experience what is here all on its own. What is here all on its own is our natural state. In this natural state we are in tune with reality because we are more clearly ourselves. Being more clearly ourselves, we are able to accurately understand and interact with what’s going on around us. We put on all sorts of filters and blinders to protect us from things we think are bad. We ignore natural filters and feelings to get things we think are good. In meditation you stop putting on all these apparata and experience the world as directly as you can. Meditation is stopping. You get still by stopping moving. Getting still is not something added on. It is something stopped. Meditation is stopping. It is stillness.

Your mind is going to chatter. That is what it is. You can’t use your mind to calm your mind any more than you can use a fire to cool something down. Your mind is going to chatter because it is a source of information. All those thoughts and memories are neurons firing off in your brain. You feel those neurons. All of your senses are just neurons firing. We feel thoughts just as we feel anything else. Quieting your mind is like numbing your foot. Disconnecting from a source of information doesn’t change anything. It just puts you more in the dark. In the deepest states of meditation I’ve ever reached, the mind is still right there chattering away. It is feeding me information, calculating – all the things it always does. The difference is that it is relegated to one of three hundred sixty degrees rather than the whole of my experience.

Most people suffer because they have confused the map with the terrain or the menu with the meal. What you think and what you say about the world are not the world. They are what you think and say about it. When you take action based on information that is a skewed perception of reality rather than reality itself, you screw up. Screwing up causes chaos and confusion. If you follow reality, even if you do something that seems like a huge mistake, at least you can learn from it. If you are bobbling around living in your head you have no bearings by which you can navigate. You are, in every sense, lost. Meditation is a way home – back to reality.