Just sit – The do something meditation and its built-in dilemma – More ways to fail – Let the mind meditate itself – Lost again – Resistance to the spectacle as part of the spectacle – Why bother? – Non-reactivity off the cushion – Primary pain, secondary suffering – On dullness – On passivity – Making the unconscious conscious – How far does it take you? – Meditation and depression – Judgement as suppression – Meditation as individuation – Concentration and distraction – Boredom and craving – Downsides to the do nothing approach
Just sit
When I sit down to meditate nowadays, I don’t try to do anything in particular with my mind. I don’t focus on the breath, I don’t investigate my emotions, I don’t mentally zoom in on the minute details of some visual sensation, I don’t scan my body for tensions and try to relax them. Instead, I just sit and allow my mind to do whatever it wants. Now, you might ask, does this even qualify as a meditation technique? Isn’t this what most of us do all day long anyway? And why did I stop doing concentration meditation and switch up my technique in the first place?
The do something meditation and its built-in dilemma
If you’re familiar with meditation, at some point you’ve probably been given some variation of the following instruction: Try to stay with the breath and whenever you notice that your mind is lost in thought or tangled up in some sensory distraction, gently bring it back to your chosen object of meditation. At the same time, let arise whatever arises, try not to strive, don’t try to achieve anything, don’t get mad at yourself when you forget your intention or when you get distracted by thoughts, just gently bring back your attention and continue. Over time, you will train your ability to focus like a muscle which will benefit you in your daily life and your contemplative practice alike.
While this all sounds well and good, if you’re like me, this instruction contains one essential contradiction and it is this: The instruction “focus on the breath” basically separates all the possible experiences that can arise during meditation in two classes. The first class contains all those experience during which you are focused, the second one all those during which you are not. Now, the instruction “focus on the breath” could be reformulated by saying “Try to have more experiences of the first class and fewer of the second class”. At the same time, however, you are not supposed to make a judgement such as “This is an experience of the first class, which is good. And this is one of the second class, which is bad.” You’re supposed to accept all experiences alike and to let them unfold just as they are. Do you see the dilemma? Any attempt to do something defines some outcomes as success and some other outcomes as failure, where success is inherently good, and failure is inherently bad. But you are not supposed to judge any experience as either good or bad. In this sense, the instruction “Try to do X, but don’t judge the outcome of trying to do X.” is a contradiction.
More ways to fail
Inevitably, as I set the intention to stay present with the breath, I judge myself whenever I fail. And usually the story doesn’t end here. As soon as I notice that I’m judging myself for not being with the breath, I form a meta-judgement about the fact that I just judged myself: “You shouldn’t judge yourself!”, which is, of course, itself another judgement and thereby yet another violation of my intention and another potential occasion for self-judgement. “You shouldn’t judge yourself for judging yourself!”, I think self-judgingly. There is no limit to the kind of self-referential mental confusion this kind of meditation instruction can cause me to have.
Note that this doesn’t seem to present a problem for everyone. Some people manage to make good progress using this kind of technique as they manage to walk the thin middle way between over-efforting and sloppiness. In his very pragmatic and detailed meditation manual “The Mind Illuminated”, Culadasa even encourages you to rejoice whenever you notice you’ve been lost in thought because doing so will positively reinforce your brain to notice mind-wandering more often. If you reward your brain for coming back, it will start doing this on its own. For me, however, this extra instruction just adds one more thing to the list of things I could potentially do wrong in meditation. “Fuck, I’ve been lost in thought, but wait, don’t get mad, rejoice! Why can’t I rejoice? I’m doing this rejoicing thing wrong! Oh no, and now I’m judging myself for doing it wrong, this session is a mess!”
And it is not merely the specific type of concentration meditation that can cause this kind of mental confusion and self-judgement. Any attempt to do any particular thing in meditation can potentially cause this practical dilemma to arise. Try to do X, but don’t bother if you don’t manage to do X. Try, but don’t try. One straightforward way of avoiding this dilemma is the do nothing meditation I sketched in the beginning.
Maybe this sounds like a cop-out to you. If you’ve trained in concentration meditation for a while, especially if you’ve made some progress towards an ever more stable attention, this suggestion might sound like pure heresy. “What, I’m supposed to just indulge in the sexual fantasies, the mental gossip, the narcissistic reveries, and the self-righteous arguments with the imaginary straw-man version of my partner?”
Let the mind meditate itself
Implicit in this skepticism might be the following assumption: My mind is a boring or annoying place, unless I discipline it to make it do something cool like focus on the breath or deconstruct sensory experience into its wiggly pixels or what have you. Not only does this assumption seem to be in line with much of our everyday experience, it is also congruent with the fundamental psychological diagnosis that Buddhism makes about the human condition: Your mind is ridden by the forces of craving and aversion, it is operating under the illusion of a separate ego that pretends to be in charge of things and all of this is causing your mind to suffer a great deal so you had better work your way out of this mess by discipline and work in order to reach enlightenment or some other state of being that’s a little less painful to inhabit. Merely sitting around doing nothing won’t get the job done.
But what if it did? If you try it out for a few sessions, you might be surprised what happens when you stop intervening with the natural succession of mental states that your mind spontaneously comes up with. While it is true that, at least in the beginning, you will spend more time thinking, there is much more to the process that unfolds during do nothing meditation. For me, the pattern goes something like this: I sit down and close my eyes. As a consequence, my bodily sensations become much more vivid. Presumably, this is because the brain’s capacity for sensory perception or the bandwidth of the working memory is no longer taken up by processing all the visual input. This allows for a much more detailed representation of bodily sensations. Due to this increased perception, I begin to notice small and big tensions here and there, usually first in my shoulders and in my face. Now, here is the interesting thing: These tensions dissolve merely in virtue of being perceived. I don’t have to set an intention for this to happen, my mind just does it on its own. As they disappear, ever more subtle tensions emerge in awareness and dissolve in turn.
Lost again
Sooner or later, the inevitable happens. I find myself lost in thought. But noticing that I am thus lost is likewise a spontaneous event. The mental movie can run only for so long until my mind catches up with it and becomes aware of the thought as thought. I don’t have to willfully perform the action of pulling my attention away from the content of thought and direct it back to the present moment, it all happens by itself.
In my experience, this thought, that is experienced like a little mental movie, usually brings up some emotion that can now be felt in a particular part of my body, mostly in the chest and throat. This emotion manifests as a muscular contraction that feels like it is somehow charged with energy. As this tension makes its entry on the stage of awareness, it starts to dissolve. This doesn’t happen right away, it might take a few moments but sooner than later, you can notice a shift in the pattern, some movement in the contraction until it slowly unfolds and disappears. Once again, your mind is calm until you get lost in thought again and the process repeats.
Now, the tricky part is to just let your body be as tense as your mind wants it to be when an emotion comes up. Don’t interfere with the tension, don’t get involved, just let the natural succession of thinking, noticing the thought, experiencing the tension, and witnessing its gradual relaxation unfold at its own pace.
Resistance to the spectacle as part of the spectacle
Now maybe, despite your best intentions to not interfere with this cycle, your mind reacts to the tension and your ego kicks in to find a way to escape this emotionally unpleasant state of mind. In this case, there is nothing to worry about and nothing to do, because the same process takes place as before. At some point, your mind spontaneously becomes aware that your ego is trying to take over. In other words, your mind notices that there is some train of thought that purports to be you and that feverishly tries to come up with a plan to make the possibly uncomfortable tension go away. Now, your ego manifests as just another mental story that your mind gets lost in. Then it notices that it has been lost and becomes aware of the thought as thought, just like before. You can rely on the process, your mind just snaps out of it sooner or later and when it does, you become aware of a new tension in your body. (For whatever reason, tensions that are produced by ego thoughts mostly appear in the eyes.) Once it has emerged in awareness, this tension, too, gradually melts away like ice-cream in the sunlight. A new calm, a new thought, the cycle repeats.
Let me finish this section with some vague and worn-out metaphors: Go with the flow, allow the natural and spontaneous succession of contraction and relaxation, of absence and presence of mind to unfold as it does. But don’t make a conscious effort to somehow “synchronise” with this cycle, even if your meditation feels kind of clunky and weird at times. Just let yourself be carried by the wave. If you notice any mental resistance to the wave, know that this is part of the wave, too. Your resistance to what’s going on in your mind is just another thing that’s going on in your mind.
(Note that Shinzen Young uses the
term “do nothing meditation” in a slightly different meaning. In his version, you are supposed to let your
mind do whatever it wants, but as soon as you become aware of an intention to
do something, you drop this intention and put yourself in the position of the
passive observer once again. However, this does not mean that you constantly
monitor your mind for intentions. You’re not supposed to look for them, but
when you notice them spontaneously, you let them go. The technique discussed
here diverges from Shinzen’s approach insofar as you’re not even supposed to
interfere with your intentions for conscious action. Just let it run its
course, don’t consider it a problem when you catch yourself trying to fix things.
Likewise, don’t consider it a problem when you do problematise this. Just let unfold whatever unfolds, the whole
situation will resolve itself sooner or later without you having to make a
conscious effort.)
Why bother?
So, why bother with do nothing meditation? What’s the point of this perpetual cycle of contraction and relaxation? Surely, it doesn’t train your attention muscle like focusing on the breath would. Isn’t this technique equivalent to just standing around at the gym and looking out of the window instead of smashing some reps? This is at least partly true, although there is an argument to be made for the positive influence of do nothing meditation on concentration skills and I’ll return to this point in a later paragraph. But the question is legitimate. Why bother?
The first reason is that it makes the meditation session itself feel much more enjoyable. When I use this technique, my mind feels like the stage of a drama in which different sensations and thoughts appear, interact, and disappear again, an ever-interesting interplay of conscious experiences that is somehow very beautiful in its utter ordinariness. In contrast, during concentration meditation, I basically ignore most of what was going on in my mind to the benefit of a few breath sensations (and a lot of frustration sensations, as it turns out) whereas now, I get to enjoy the whole colourful spectrum of conscious experiences. My mind is no longer the mere scene of a slightly tedious and future-oriented attentional exercise, it is the site of a natural spectacle and I get to sit in the front seat.
Non-reactivity off the cushion
There is also a positive spill over effect to my off-cushion every-day life. When I used to do concentration meditation, every instance of my daily life would present an occasion to practice mindful awareness of the present moment. At every instance of my waking life, I could either do the right thing and focus on being here now or fail to do the right thing and lose myself in thought. Needless to say, that this caused me a whole lot of self-judgement because I would be absent-minded more often than not. Nowadays, however, I’ve come to trust that my mind will drop back into awareness of the present moment sooner or later, no matter how turbulent the stream of sensations grows. Difficult emotions and tense situations don’t automatically activate my brain’s ego mode quite as often anymore. Less and less often do I get the impression that I somehow need to manage the emotional or social situation to make it acceptable again, I can just accept it as it is.
Presumably, in this regard, on-cushion meditation works as a kind of exposure therapy, where you purposely confront yourself with a certain emotion and thereby desensitise yourself to it systematically. Much like people that get closer and closer to a spider over the course of several therapy sessions and lose their fear in the process, you become more and more comfortable with your feelings.
Not reacting to tensions on the cushion trains the brain to show the same non-reactivity in daily life and this has proven very advantageous for my psychological well-being. It is one of the weird mechanisms of the human psyche that an averse conscious experience only grows stronger if you try to get rid of it and that, as soon as you accept it fully, it simply disappears. You get rid of the experience the moment you stop wanting to get rid of it. Therefore, not reacting to the negativity of your mind is a pretty efficient strategy to minimise this negativity as much as possible. This seems highly counter-intuitive and this is unsurprising if you consider that trying to escape from averse stimuli works pretty well in most other circumstances. The way to get rid of the sabre tooth tiger is not to accept its presence full heartedly, but to get the fuck away from it.
Primary pain, secondary suffering
Training in non-reactivity is also in line with a central tenet of Buddhist psychology which claims that, while conscious experience will always be painful to some extent, it is possible to reduce the amount of psychological suffering that results from it by adopting an appropriate attitude towards this pain. For example, imagine you’re having a conversation and try to make some funny remark, but your joke completely falls flat. You become ashamed, but then you start to worry that your shame might be apparent to others. As a consequence, you make an effort to keep a straight face and posture and to control your voice accordingly, but then again you don’t want to seem stiff or forced either. Meanwhile, the conversation has moved on, but you are reluctant to contribute as you are now afraid of further judgement or you try to suppress your insecurity by excessive talking. Either way, you’re not really focused on the content of the conversation anymore, you’re missing out on the occasion to connect with your friends.
One averse experienced has triggered a whole chain of successive experiences, each more painful than the preceding one. However, if your mind stays non-reactive to the negative state of shame, the whole chain reaction is short-circuited. Of course, you don’t need to suffer from social anxiety to benefit from non-reactivity. Any painful event usually elicits an egoic response from the mind that somehow tries to manage the pain and produces further painful mental events in the process. This is also, I presume, what Jordan Peterson means when he says that we don’t become less fearful with age, only braver. The pain stays the same, but you relate to it more skillfully and this reduces the psychological suffering caused by it a great deal.
As a consequence of all this, my mood has increased a lot, I’m generally more joyful and less stressed about difficult experiences. I’m also more sociable because interacting no longer feels like a difficult task that I have to master; it has become a hypercomplex and multi-faceted process that just takes place according to its own laws and at its own pace. The key to this wholehearted acceptance is being willing to go to some emotional places you wouldn’t normally want to go, to really feel the whole awkward spectrum of interpersonal feelings without rejecting any of them, including your resistance to said feelings. Judgement of self and other has become a less pronounced aspect of my social experience and no longer stands in the way of connecting to others, or at least it does so to a lesser extent.
Apart from this, it seems like my mind goes into a mode of aesthetic appreciation much more often than it used to. Again, I don’t have to initiate this mode, it arises spontaneously. This has made nature and music, but also the very mundane routines of everyday life much more enjoyable. Not resisting my mind’s natural tendencies has also freed up a lot of energy to the point where I often feel a kind of jittery euphoria, the kind you felt as a kid on the eve of your birthday. It turns out that stepping on your mind’s gas pedal and breaks at the same time all day long takes up quite a bit of energy than you could also use differently. I should mention, however, that even though this energy allows me to get more work done and be more active in general, it also keeps me from falling asleep at times.
On dullness
The beautiful thing about this practice is that you can’t do it wrong, precisely because you’re not doing anything. This makes it sometimes feel like you’re only pretending to meditate and like what you’re really doing is just chilling with your eyes closed. You’re getting a lot out of it while your mind is doing all the heavy lifting.
There is, however, one mental quality that is much more likely to arise with this technique compared to the many do something approaches: dullness. It is maybe best understood as a precursor to sleep. Hanging out in dullness states for too long brings about so-called hypnogogic hallucinations where “hypnogogic” is just a fancy way of saying that they lead you to sleep. And indeed, you probably know them as the weird and nonsensical thoughts you get before your brain shuts down. Nothing makes sense but you only notice a few seconds later that this is the case. When you’re having hypnogogic hallucinations, you’re already deep in dullness territory. Also, when you get up from your meditation and feel kind of dizzy and out of it as if you had just napped on your couch, you’ve probably experienced dullness. The more you meditate the better you recognise its characteristic texture and the earlier you notice it.
Dullness is not a problem as such, but when you meditate, it makes things vague and decreases your sensory clarity, by which I mean the resolution or level of detail with which your brain represents your sensations. Dullness states can be pleasant in the same way snoozing is pleasant, but they are generally not recommended for meditation where what you try to do is get some clue about how your mind is working. There are several effective antidotes to dullness like sitting with a straight back, not laying down, breathing in suddenly and deeply or even standing up. You can also open your eyes ever so slightly to let some light fall onto your retina and tell your brain that it’s still day. Personally, my favourite antidotes are getting enough sleep and drinking coffee before meditation.
On passivity
Perhaps you are now worrying that do nothing meditation might make you into a kind of spineless, passive zen zombie who is okay with any situation he is confronted with and never puts up any kind of resistance. After all, you train in not getting involved, in not taking action. Couldn’t this be a spill over effect that you had better avoid?
Implicit in this worry is the presupposition that you are in charge of things, that you need to make a conscious effort every moment of your life to keep the whole thing going and as soon as you stop, it all falls apart. I’m not going to bore you by reiterating the Buddhist commonplace that the self is an illusion yada-yada-yada. I’ll simply challenge you to try the technique out and see for yourself. In all possibility, you’ll find that you’re more active because you’re less inhibited. Not getting involved doesn’t mean suppressing your reactions to what’s going on around you. It mean’s not interfering with your reactions and this can make you quite expressive and engaged rather than inert and passive.
Making the unconscious conscious
Now, you might wonder, what exactly are those feelings that come up as you’re doing nothing? Why would your brain produce all these seemingly random thoughts and emotions? Of course, you can often derive pleasure from merely thinking about pleasurable things, which is quite a peculiar ability of our mind when you consider it. But this can’t be all that’s going on because not all thoughts and feelings that come up during meditation are pleasurable.
It could also be that your brain is using this moment of idleness to review some unpleasant past experiences and run a causal analysis to find out what had caused your pain and how to avoid this type of event in the future. This seems to be in part what’s going on and it manifests as a phenomenon called mental time-travel during which you imagine yourself in some past and future situation and recapitulate or anticipate what would have been or will be the best way to deal with it.
But I think that there is more to the process and that we can only understand it thoroughly by adopting the psychoanalytic point of view. When you sit down, the first thoughts and feelings that come up usually stem from recent events that took place that very day. Maybe you’ve just worked for some hours on a project, talked to different people on the phone and then had lunch with some friends. The conversation was agitated and now as you sit down alone and tune in to your body, you notice all kinds of tensions and feelings that have been stirred up by all of this and that are still floating around in your chest and throat. It is as if you hadn’t digested them properly yet, so your brain goes through them one by one, produces a corresponding thought and relives the feeling you had at that moment.
At some point, you’re done with the material of your day. Now, up comes something more general, maybe a personal conflict that is a bit less recent, a bit older, nothing acute, but you’ve been carrying it around for a while. Likely, your brain will now create a mental simulation of an argument with that person and you can hear yourself say the things you ought to have said in the moment, but which you didn’t know how to express or weren’t even aware that they were what you really thought. Again, your brain goes over the whole memory and then starts digesting the half-digested feeling that is connected to it. This will probably be unpleasant or even painful, especially because going through it once often doesn’t suffice. Much like a cow, your brain has seven stomachs and needs to regurgitate everything several times in order to digest it properly.
How far does it take you?
Until now, the do nothing technique has yet to yield the kind of breakthrough experience you would expect from a really effective therapy session. There has been no sudden outburst of trauma and pain, no violent emotional discharge, nothing of the kind. However, I don’t know how far you could take this process in a retreat setting. Nonetheless, even with this tamer technique, it feels like integrating old memories and experiences that you didn’t fully take in when they happened. And there is some really random seeming stuff that comes up. The cafeteria being closed on a school trip in third grade, for example. Or some racist remark by one of my opponents after a football match ten years ago. I don’t exactly know why my brain would bring this memory up (let alone store it for all those years), but it does feels like self-integration.
I’ve also noticed that my dreams become much more intense when I do the do nothing meditation more often. The mechanism seems to be quite similar to that of being lost in and waking up from thought: I have a dream that is either an abstract mix of sensory qualities or a figurative scenario or memory. This dream is emotionally so heavily charged that I wake up and then lay awake witnessing my body sense and relax the tensions and emotions in my chest and throat. I wouldn’t go so far as to conclude that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious or that this is all that happens in dreams, but the parallel it bears to meditation is quite conspicuous.
There is a really nice analogy for the more general process of do nothing by Naval Ravikant. Imagine you’re permanently receiving emails over the course of your life. However, you have only so much time to go through them each day and so some of them remain unopened. Over time, the unread mail is piling up, until one day, you decide to devote a certain part of your day exclusively to the project of reading your old mail. As you progress, you’re reaching older and older messages, until one morning, you reach the magical inbox number zero. Now, all that disturbs your peace of mind is of recent origin and also short-lived. This is the good news of do nothing meditation: The process of going through your unread emails is finite (and it’s mostly an interesting read!)
It remains to be seen how far this self-therapeutic approach goes, how far the spontaneous self-healing abilities of your brain will take you. In all likelihood, in people with severe trauma it would need to be supplemented by some other treatment. However, I’m not trying to advertise the ultimate panacea here and some skepticism is definitely in order when someone claims that his or her technique is a fool-proof one-size-fits-all solution to all of your psychological and spiritual problems. Indeed, I’ll be talking about some downsides of the do nothing technique below.
Meditation and depression
While some people come to meditation because they are simply curious to experience the wonders of the mind (possibly after having had a strong psychedelic experience, as might be the case), many people come to it looking for a self-empowering tool to cope with their mental health issues. In depression and related conditions, the do something meditation can indeed prove very helpful. Whenever strong feelings of worthlessness, anxiety and helplessness, thoughts of self-denigration or even suicidal ideation arise, do something meditation gives you the ability to just put the focus of your mind on something neutral like your breath of the sensation of the air brushing over your hands as you’re walking. It helps you notice when you’re getting entangled in repetitive depressive rumination or spiraling down the bottomless rabbit-hole of felt meaninglessness and it offers you a quick and effective escape, as if someone had mounted a handle to the melancholy monolith that is your mind.
If you’re in dire straits and the do something approach has worked for you in the past, you probably shouldn’t experiment with switching up your technique. However, not all melancholy feelings are alike in intensity, so you might want to try out the do nothing meditation when you’re sad, but not overwhelmed. Just sit with the juicy and rich quality of sadness and you might find that your mind takes it up in just the same way in which it has taken up the unpleasant feelings of previous sessions. To me, the do nothing approach feels like I’m really listening to what the emotion has to communicate and it disappears after it has delivered its message, so to say. In contrast, when I make an effort to focus on neutral sensations in times of emotional upheaval, I get some short-term relief, but it also feels a bit like I’m suppressing the emotions that have emerged. It feels like an act of force or violence against the natural tendencies of my mind.
“But aren’t the natural tendencies of the depressed mind to just dig itself deeper and deeper into the depression?”, you might now object. This is a legitimate question, to which I don’t have a black or white answer. On the one hand, a depressed mood does indeed seem to spontaneously give rise to depressive rumination and indulging in these thoughts, giving way to their seductive quality certainly doesn’t improve the situation. On the other hand, I think that your brain automatically applies the same self-healing mechanism as in the cases discussed before. This might not happen when you go about your day because of the many distractions that don’t let you see clearly what’s going on in your mind, but it might indeed happen when you allocate enough processing power to the detailed representation of the depressive sensations by sitting down and closing your eyes. It’s the same old story, your mind notices the depressive rumination, it snaps out of it on its own at some point and then it starts to feel the feeling and relax the underlying tension. As I said, this might not work if the melancholic seduction is too strong, so if you experiment with this, maybe try it out first on some weaker sensations.
Judgement as suppression
There is another interesting observation to be made from the psychoanalytic perspective. Many of the fantasies that your mind produces if you let it just run free are quite narcissistic in nature. You imagine yourself to say something smart or accomplish something impressive, mostly in front of some audience of quite attractive people. Or you indulge in juicy sexual reveries. So far, so ordinary. Now, here is the interesting thing: The stronger the felt need to judge yourself for having a particular fantasy, the stronger the feeling that it stirs up in you. In other words, there is a positive correlation between the felt need to judge and the intensity of the emotion.
However, when you intervene with your mind (as you would in the do something meditation), you would shut down the fantasy halfway through and, therefore, you wouldn’t experience the feeling in its full force. This means that judging yourself for the fantasy actually suppresses the feeling, it keeps the feeling from emerging in awareness in its full form. In this way, self-judgement functions as a defense mechanism in the Freudian sense. If, on the other hand, you let your fantasy run free as it pleases, you will be able to fully experience and integrate the feeling it produces. As you get more and more used to this particular feeling, your need to judge yourself for the fantasy will grow weaker and weaker, simply because there is no reason for you to suppress it anymore. This is precisely why fully experiencing the feelings stirred up during do nothing meditation will decrease your tendency to judge yourself and, as I will claim later, others, too.
It also means that having a judgemental mind is not necessarily caused by a condemnable world, as many a youth would have it. Rather, it might be a strategy of the mind to avoid feeling certain painful feelings. Granted, the world is a bad place in many regards. But acknowledging this doesn’t necessarily imply that judgements about it and its inhabitants are arising in your awareness constantly. Judging an object allows you to not fully feel the feeling that is triggered by the judged object. On this view, your judgement is caused by your fear of your emotional reaction to the object, not by the object itself.
However, this doesn’t mean that the long-term meditator must necessarily adopt a relativist or quietist stance towards moral questions. As I said before, you can realise that most people have some narcissistic or “phoney” tendencies without obsessing about it like the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye. You can recognise that there are moral and political issues worth fighting for without having your mental life be completely taken over by your judging mind.
Noticing when you judge other people can also serve as a useful indicator for what aspect of yourself you haven’t fully integrated yet. Presumably, for every behaviour you judge in others, you could find a rudiment in yourself if you were to look closely enough. Homophobia is, I think, quite an illustrative example.
(Where does this symmetry in the judgement of self and other come from? Why would you judge others most severely on traits that you don’t acknowledge in yourself? Presumably, when you see this kind of trait in another person, your ability for empathy allows you to know how they feel. But this empathetic knowledge doesn’t seem to have a purely abstract form. Rather, empathy creates a feeling in your own body that is a dim copy or a sort of echo of the feeling the person is having whom you empathise with. Therefore, whether you see the trait in question in yourself or in the other person, it is your own feeling you react to in both cases.)
Meditation as individuation
There is also a Jungian point to be made here. Broadly speaking, Jung presumed that the therapeutic process consists in making some unconscious aspects of yourself conscious and then integrating it into your self-image. This, he called the process of individuation. For instance, you would first become aware of a huge amount of suppressed anger and violent fantasies that you hadn’t been aware of before. After some period of resistance to it, you would come to accept the fact that you, too, are capable of violence and inflicting pain on others. You, too, are capable of ending someone’s life when push comes to shove. By accepting this fact, your potential for aggression is integrated into your self-model. Note, however, that this does not mean that you act out your aggressive fantasies. Quite the contrary, the fact that you have integrated them makes it less likely for you to act aggressively, not more. Your aggressiveness is much more difficult to regulate when you are not aware of it and when it bursts out from deep down and takes you by surprise. When you know it’s lingering inside, you can keep a watchful eye on it should the conversation become heated.
Concentration and distraction
The metaphor that is usually used for increases in concentration ability is that of a muscle that is trained by repeated intentional movements (aka coming back to the breath). At some point, the story goes, this muscle will be strong enough to resist the many distracting thoughts and sensations that pull us away from our chosen object of meditation. As doing nothing won’t train this muscle, can we expect to improve our concentration skills simply by doing nothing?
We can indeed, but instead of increasing our capacity to focus, we decrease the pull of distractions by “listening” to them systematically. Every distraction is your brain’s way of telling you that there is something you should perhaps take a closer look at. Not all, but many distractions result from the fact that you haven’t properly “digested” your past experiences yet (sticking to the regurgitating cow metaphor here). Therefore, as you work through these memories, the arising distractions lose their grip, and your attention becomes ever more stable. Indeed, I ask myself if this is not what is going on during the do something meditation, too, where teachers constantly advise against the brute force approach of focus. Maybe, as you are coming back to the breath over and over again, what is really improving your concentration is spending time with your distractions. Be it as it may, do nothing meditation has increased my concentration when I meditate (or study) a lot, precisely because I have fewer distracting thoughts that I feel like I somehow need to counteract. A decluttered mind is a focused mind.
Boredom and craving
There is a closely related phenomenon I’d like to talk about next. If you’re like me, you spend a whole lot of time with your mobile devices – possibly more than you’d like to. My personal vice is watching videos on YouTube, mostly on topics I’d never have dreamed of finding interesting, sometimes for hours on end. It feels like I need to discipline myself actively to keep myself from indulging in digital entertainment. There is a parallel here to the goal of concentration. In both cases, it looks like you need to exert a conscious effort to achieve your goal (not wasting time on the internet, not indulging in your fantasies). However, both problems can be remedied by the same means. When you start decluttering your mind, things like memes and YouTube videos will gradually lose their appeal, until reading a book or taking a walk will naturally appear like the more attractive option when you think about how to spend your evening.
Why does this happen? Different people might watch online videos for different reasons, but in my case, I’ve made the following observation: I mostly feel drawn to YouTube when I’m feeling agitated, for instance when I eat (I have a subtle aversion to eating for some reason.) or when I return home from a long day at uni and my head is spinning with thoughts. In other words, whenever I want to distract myself from my feelings, whenever I want to escape the present moment with its unpleasant sensations. You can probably tell where this is going. As soon as you have gone through your emotions doing nothing, there is nothing in the present moment from which to escape anymore and therefore, the need to distract yourself with online media simply disappears. This doesn’t mean that you will develop an aversion to it, I still watch YouTube occasionally, but you won’t feel the urge to spend your evenings binging away on Netflix.
(If you’re unsure whether you use electronic entertainment as a way of distracting yourself from the present moment, I propose to you the following experiment: After having watched a couple of videos, pause and tune in to your body. How does it feel? Could you stay here and hang out with yourself for five minutes? What stands between you and being at ease? As a related exercise: As soon as you notice yourself unlocking your phone, close your eyes and tune in again. Stay here for as long as necessary doing nothing until almost all your tensions and emotions have relaxed. Now open your eyes again and ask yourself whether you’d rather be on your phone or do something else with the newly re-established receptivity of your mind.)
These unpleasant feeling might not be apparent as such, they might rather manifest as boredom or fatigue. At first glance, it might seem as if boredom and fatigue are the absence of something, namely interest and energy, respectively. If, however, you close your eyes and let your mind work its magic, it will probably become clear that there is a whole bunch of tensions hovering around in your body that keep you from being interested or energetic.
Downsides to the do nothing approach
In concluding this essay, I’d like to at least briefly touch on some of the problematic aspects of the do nothing technique. First of all, I’m not fully convinced that this is an appropriate technique for beginners. I suspect it is, but I’m not certain about it. Before adopting this technique, I had already trained my mind for some time in the basics of concentration meditation: being aware of what’s going on in my mind, noticing mind-wandering, coming back to the present moment, perceiving sensations clearly, noticing dullness in time etc. I can’t say for sure what results this technique would yield in a beginner, but if you are and try it out, please get in touch!
The second major downside is that this approach is no guarantee for moral behaviour. Of course, unacknowledged drives and unintegrated parts of your personality constitute a large source of immoral behaviour which is systematically reduced by means of the do nothing meditation. In this sense, the technique has some inherent moral value. However, there are plenty of empirical examples of yogis and dharma teachers that have sexually abused their students which sheds a bright light on the limited influence of meditation on conventional morality. Less extreme examples of skilled meditation coupled with unethical behaviour concern Allan Watts and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, both of whom are advocates of a let it flow-approach to meditation and died an early death caused by their excessive alcohol consumption.
Defenders of meditation might now object that these people couldn’t possibly have done the right kind of meditation, that they weren’t really enlightened and so on. In other words, the technique is pure, it has only been wrongly or not thoroughly applied. (Notice the parallel to the way most communists defend communism. The central philosophy, ideology, or spiritual technique in one’s life must remain flawless in order to fulfill its meaning generating function.) I don’t think this is the case, though. There is possibly no one technique or philosophy that will shield us with perfect reliability against moral misconduct and this is just a fact of life we have to live with.
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