The nature of meditation

In meditation, we train our capacity to pay attention. Specifically, we practice deciding to direct attention somewhere, then we direct attention to that place. The places we direct attention to can be very broad or very narrow. For example: sensations related to the breath, body sensations, auditory sensations, all sensations, and so on.

We train our ability to pay attention by practicing paying attention. We pick some place to direct our attention, then we sit and direct our attention to that object. When we notice that our attention has drifted, we return our attention to the object. By repeating this over and over, we develop the capacity to choose to place our attention somewhere and then in fact place our attention there.

This capacity is incredibly useful. All kinds of practical things can be accomplished by directing our full attention to their accomplishment.

We naturally run into the following problem: some sensations have a strong tendency to cause us to move our attention elsewhere. For example, the thought “shall I make myself a coffee after I finish meditation?” tends to be followed by thoughts like “yes that sounds great” or “no I don’t think so”. If we give any answer — “yes” or “no” or “I shouldn’t be thinking about this because I’m meditating” or in fact anything else — to such a question, then our attention has moved away from the meditation object. We become temporarily ensnared “inside” the train of thought. The solution is to notice that the thought “shall I make myself a coffee?” has arisen, allow it to exist in awareness, and then allow it to pass away, all without reacting to it. In this way we make subjects (things that we would normally be trapped inside) into objects (things we can look at clearly from the outside).

Another problem we encounter is that we don’t want to experience a certain thing (for example: anger). When such things arise, we try to avoid experiencing them by refusing to admit to ourselves that we are experiencing them. This doesn’t actually work very well as a strategy to avoid the thing, but it’s nonetheless a common instinctive pattern, and it can be ingrained into us very deeply. The problem now is not that we can’t notice our anger, but that we can’t accept it. So at this point we switch to a form of meditation that involves practicing accepting things, until we have that capacity, then we return to practicing paying attention.

The magic of meditation really opens up as we begin to pay attention to the workings of our own minds. This happens naturally, as a by-product of having developed the capacity to pay attention at all. Just as someone who recently acquired the skill of reading a new language will soon begin to notice words in that language where they exist in the person’s daily life, so a person who has developed the capacity to pay attention will begin to notice the workings of their own mind as they go through daily life.

It turns out that there are a lot of delusions embedded in the working of our mind. When we bring attention to these delusions, they are revealed as delusions and they fall away. This point is critical: it does not take effort or willpower to dispense with a delusion; once we see the nature of the delusion clearly, it cannot continue to persist.

Here is an example of a delusion I recently encountered in my own exploration: Sometimes in my life I take actions that I later regret. I noticed that when this happens, I would soon experience the human emotion of shame. I noticed that soon after this I tended to be gripped by fear that I might be a bad person, and that this might be found out by others. I saw that while it is most certainly possible for me to take actions that cause harm, it does not really do any good to spend my time adding up all the harmful actions I’ve ever taken and trying to work out exactly how bad of a person I really am. It became obvious that my instinctive reaction to shame was to dwell on questions of my fundamental badness, which was both unnecessary and chewing up attention that could otherwise be spent working out how to avoid such harmful actions in the future. As long as I was inside the question “am I a bad person?” — whether the answer was “yes” or “no” or even “no no no I don’t like this question” — I was using my attention in a way that reinforced the pattern. But by clearly seeing the pattern itself, I could not help but break it. Once the pattern was broken I naturally moved into a healthier pattern of evaluating past behavior and resolving to correct in the future those behaviors that I regretted.

This is a relatively simple delusion. According to the Buddhists, the delusions go really deep. The Buddhists talk about unraveling very deep instinctive patterns in which we turn out to be deluded about the nature of the thing we think as our “self”, the nature of our connection to the external world, and the nature of impermanence. We can speculate from a third person perspective about what the Buddhists are pointing to, but to really unravel these reactive patterns we need to directly see the delusions in our own minds from the first person perspective. We may then trust that once they are sufficiently illuminated by our attention they will drop away without need of further effort.

So meditation begins with the simple and highly practical act of training a capacity for paying attention, but as we develop this capacity we naturally bring it to bear on the workings of our own mind and begin to unravel deeply ingrained delusions. The overall experience of this unraveling is what I understand as the spiritual path, and one small but crucial piece of this path is the attention-training procedure that we call meditation.