Ideas on Meditation, Part 1

A little over a year ago, I read a book which, I can now say, changed my life.  It was called The Antidote, by Oliver Burkeman, to which he cheerfully added the tagline, 'Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking'.  

It is a funny, thoughtful, and irreverent look at various ways people have tried to be happy through the centuries.  He shares amusing observations on everyone from the stoics in Roman times to the Mexican celebration of the 'Day of the Dead' in our own.  Although it wasn't a book on meditation, what I found captivating, and changed my life, was his description of meditation.

I had tried meditation and couldn't get it. I was too busy. Or, as I’d heard things like washing dishes could be meditative, perhaps I was already doing it. Mr Burkeman helped me to realise I had just fundamentally misunderstood it.

Since reading his book, I've meditated for about 250 hours in the last year and recently completed a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Whilst no expert, I understand it more than I did and, most saliently, I understand it very differently than I did.  In this post, I’m going to share some of the ideas I enjoyed in The Antidote a year ago, which helped me begin this journey.

Firstly, Mr Burkeman invites us to consider that we might have two types of mental energy. There’s a ‘thinking’ layer, used to solve problems, formulate sentences, remember the past and project into the future, and then a deeper layer or what he calls our ‘conscious' layer.  

The thinking layer is usually dominant - it's the voice we hear in our heads - and its constantly trying to ‘fix’ things.  That's its job.  Clearly, this is often good, as many things need fixing, but not everything.  In fact, most things can't be fixed, but that doesn't stop the voice from trying.  Often, it directs us to try to control outcomes, for instance, when none of us can, or makes us into the hero or victim of our past, when neither are true. So this voice, while useful, has limitations. And it's biggest limitation is that because it is an evolutionary problem-solving mechanism, it has to focus on problems. 

This was a massive a-ha moment for me. The very nature of our minds, what makes us homo sapiens, is this problem-solving ability.  It's what's allowed us to rise from apes.  Thinking is problem-solving. The jammy bit is how 'thinking' talks to us.  Our thinking voice presents its solutions as the 'big fix' to our lives.  'As soon as 'x' happens, all will be well', I've heard my mind say this countless times.  By its core purpose, the thinking mind will find problems, invent problems, when none are available - creating drama and sabotaging the harmony already there. So its the constant striving or "clinging to a particular version of a happy life, while fighting to eliminate all possibility of an unhappy one", that is the cause of unhappiness, not its solution.  

The other layer Mr Burkeman calls our 'consciousness' - the wellspring of our being.  It's the part of ourselves that would be the same even if we'd been raised by apes in the jungle, like Tarzan.  It lacks any of the artifice of our particular culture, language or environment. Its the life force inside of us, beyond our ego, our personalities, and the particular events of our lives. It's hard to define, because it can be a part of any moment of any of our lives, but there are a few times we are more likely to experience it: when we happen along a majestic sunset, when we're running and feel that effortless second wind, or just about any time life surprises us so much we stop thinking about our connection to it and just experience it. This layer is the source of contentment, joy and peaceful harmony with life. 

In short, he explains, if we're going to be happy, we have to work out how to fix stuff AND how to harmonise with life. Both layers are important.  The problem is one can't access the conscious layer by thinking.  In fact, one has to let go of the compulsion to fix stuff to access it.  This make consciousness both paradoxical and non-linear.  Its just different. If you think you've thought about it well enough to understand conciousness intellectually, you haven't got it.  It has to be felt.

The purpose of meditation is to create a gateway for convening with this conscious layer, to introduce us to an intelligence that is more in our bodies than our minds.

The challenge of meditation is that the thinking layer is like a spoilt child. It doesn't want to play along. So when we sit to meditate we soon get frustrated that we can't quiet our thinking. The thinking layer yells, stop this!

A relief is to learn that we are experiencing what every single person who has ever learned to meditate has experienced. And as we'll see in Part 2, the struggle is endemic. For this post, let's just note that finding access to that conscious layer is not a thinking process. Being conscious requires a different approach, which starts with realising that 'thinking' is part of our being, not our being.  We have to get over this hurdle (only, in this case, getting over the hurdle requires us to let go of a need to hurdle).  If we are going to develop the awareness that will bring the joy and harmony to our lives that we crave, we must persist (only, in this case, persisting means stopping our craving to fix our lives and its perceived / manufactured problems).

Yes, it all gets paradoxical, like some sort of ancient riddle, which is why so many people bail at this stage.  But don't stop; we're getting to the good stuff.

Before we do, just two observations by Mr Burkeman on why so many of us actively avoid meditation - these hit the nail on the head for me. 

The first is that we're afraid that if we get good at accepting our world, we won't be able to change (i.e., improve) our world. This doesn't follow, says Mr Burkeman. In fact, the opposite. The more we are connected to both layers, the more we realise which things can not be changed, the less energy we waste attempting to change things we can't. So the energy we spend changing our world is more effective. Even better, as we're not trying to fix as many things, we start to genuinely enjoy things that previously bugged us, because we accept them. More happiness in our lives? Check. Able to change more by trying to change less? Check. By being more conscious, we help the thinking layer do its job better. 

Here we get to add a dash of irony in all of this. Most of us get this argument at an intellectual level, i.e., at the thinking layer. However, as the ego is just problem-solving when considering this dilemma, it can both accept it intellectually, and in the VERY NEXT THOUGHT, observe something it can't fix, come up with a strategy to fix it, and convince us we'll be happy when this is done. We know one thing but do another. The ego is just crap at letting go. It's like asking a pack of hungry lions to choose meat not to eat. This is why the intellect can't solve the 'happy' question.  Fundamentally, its job is to problem solve, and its hard to be happy when we're focused on a problem.

The other concern people have about meditation is this talk of ‘getting rid of their ego’. We fundamentally like who we are, mostly, we like what we like, mostly, and we don't want to become some bland version of ourselves. This is a misunderstanding. Nobody is suggesting this, and for good reason - we can't get rid of the thinking layer of the brain. Its impossible. What we can do, he says, is to become aware of it, to hear its voice, to know when its speaking, and to observe its influence.

Meditation is the practice of listening to the ego, not erasing it, by giving waking dominance to the conscious layer.  Its method is to use a variety of techniques which strengthen certain parts of our mind, so that when we’re not meditating, we don’t react.  We learn to respond.

Finally, we come to the most fascinating part of all this (at least to me). Because while reading this you have to use the thinking part of your brain, neither this blog nor anything else written can ever truly explain meditation. It's a Catch-22. You have to learn enough about it to get motivated to do it, but that knowledge is useless once you start doing it.  Consciousness has to be experienced, like a sunset. It has to be wrangled out of our senses, our experience of the world.  One might say that meditation is the process of training our mind to find a beautiful sunset in the most mundane moments of our lives, and it's that training which keeps us at peace in the volatile, difficult moments of our lives.  

But that's not quite it, either, because being conscious is not always peaceful!

See what I mean?  This is why meditation is so fascinating - it’s impossible to sum up in a sound bite.  And why there’s all these cloud and sky, or pond and ripple analogies. To be conscious, it’s something each person has to experience for themselves. 

Fortunately, there are a few ideas I've learned that are helping me, that I will share in the next post.

For now, let me just share this. I'm sleeping well. I hadn't slept really well in about 15 years. Most people I know would love to sleep better.  For no other reason than this, I wish I'd learned about this stuff sooner.