What can Meditation do?

Meditation is an enormous world, greater in fact than anything we can think or imagine. This is because the mind that does meditation can make anything the subject of its meditation. It makes the mind in its very nature beyond the grasp of anything other than direct experience.

It is bewildering to try and grasp this without become acquainted with actual meditation practice. The tools at our disposal developed from schooling like thinking and imagining are not powerful enough. It is rather the other way around that through meditation we can get a grasp on what thinking and imagining are. We can ultimately get a grasp on what "we" are, in our entirety with no gaps and no mysteries. Well no mysteries other than the extraordinary fact that it is all just happening.

There are many, many types of meditation each strengthening some part of the mind, or elucidating some part of the mind. A meditation guide explained that after his experiences in America he thought that the West should put Metta meditation at its heart. This meditation aims to uncover the deep sense of connection and fondness we have for each other, breaking down barriers, liberating warmth and care into our relations with others. It is no less valuable than any other, but especially valuable in the West where competition, privacy, selfishness and distrust have rather soured over these connections for many.

I wanted to write this blog about a very specific fruit of meditation which is freedom from thoughts. Until we start to get a grip on thoughts we cannot imagine how much they control our lives. Literally every worry we have, every bad feeling, and every suffering and trouble begins with a thought. The real world does not have these things. A lemon is not bitter until we eat it. A thing is not how we think it until we think it that way.

Vipassana meditation is best for developing this clarity on thoughts.

The first thing to do is to focus the mind. Anything that draws the mind's attention will do and it will take work and effort. When I am tired I use a ticking clock and try to be aware of each tick for 1000 ticks. It sounds easy, but is very hard to do well. And when our mind begins to settle we can follow each tick in an unbroken chain then can go deeper and explore the sound of each individual tick, seeing how each is different and then keep decending into the experience as deep as we want. This is the mental equivalent of a zumba class. It isn't beautiful or pretty but it forces the mind to go deep into something. Usually focus is done more gently with anapanasati which is the most common yoga of simply watching the breathing.

In fact Anapanassati is a good starting point of any type of meditation, including viapssana, since mental focus is the brightness we need to achieve anything. It can be effort to start with, but once we get to a certain level then mental focus starts to become very natural and simple. It is the same kind of thing we get when looking into a lovers eyes, or deeply engrossed in a book of film. Time changes, we forget about the outside world and we absorb effortously and without even knowing we've done it into the object of interest. We need to be pure hearted, good willed and full of pure energy to achieve best results. A genuine vow of purity and good will from the heart, a promise to do ones best and be good and to forgive both ourselve and others for the past is a great booster.

So we have attained some energetic focus, now comes the vipassana. It is simply the practice of noting things. So we hear a sound we simply acknowledge the sound, perhaps have a thought that it is a sound, give it a label and then let it go and move on. We can anchor on our breathing like in anapanassati so we return to this as the core when nothing else is being noted. We can see the breath come in and go out and we can note that this is what is happening. Nothing more. But we can then start to look deeper at all the things going on, just watching them. The most intriguing is the thoughts.

In the modern multimedia age we have lots of metaphors for thoughts. They are like voice overs in films, or cut-aways to little clips within a film, or pop-up notifications on our mobile phones. The world is carrying on and then we get a pop up that tells us something. It can be "I don't like this person", or "I am afraid of that", of "this feels bad" or it can be the opposite and positive. It doesn't matter, but it is fascinating to watch these things actually happening. Philosophically we can ask where does this come from, what is it, how does a thought enter the world in a way that only I can see. They turn out to be fascinating things, like we never really looked at them before, we aren't actually very familiar with what thoughts are at all. But questioning is not the point, it is enough to watch them and get a feeling for them. We are already far beyond Descartes "I think therefore I am" when we start to observe thoughts just as things that come and go like clouds across the sky - albeit very interesting clouds full of juicy details like pictures, feelings, attitudes etc that we must ignore in Vipassana.

Now why do this and what is the point of the blog? Well with practice we start to see thoughts happen quite discretely. It is obvious really. We can use Kondatta's insight from Buddhism. We don't think the same thing all the time, so thoughts must start some time and end sometime to allow new thoughts to come along. So we know that thoughts are made and are not permanent. This is why we are able to watch them come and go.

But when thoughts are gone what is left? Well that is actually a question. We can watch the arising of that question also, the feelings of excitement and curiosity associated with a juicy question. Just watch how the mind works, that is the whole point.

And when we get a more solid grasp of all this thinking mental activity we start to see that it is only a small part of the world. The breathing that we were concentrating on goes on all by itself even without us labelling or thinking about it. Indeed the world spins all by itself. Whether we start to think about that, and whether we get up and do anything about that are very much secondary things. So we train ourselves in meditation not to think or get up, but just to watch very closely. And we start to see how huge the non-mental world is.

One obstacle that may emerge is unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Habitually we run away from these. But this is as unhelpful as running toward interesting or nice thoughts and feelings. We need to be firm here and just watch things as neutrally as possible. With practice it becomes easier and easier. We find untilmately that both nice and nasty things are the same, and we can just let them come and go with complete freedom.

What we see of this non-mental world that is beyond thoughts and feelings is that it is completely free. It is not full of good and bad, likes and dislikes, must dos and must do-nots, it is not even full of neutral thinks like clouds and stars and breaths. It is just what we experience when we meditate. And when the thought "oh that is an in-breath" occurs that is just another thing... and thoughts come quick and fast sometimes... "oh look I just had a thought"... "That thought made everything seem great"... "Damn that one just spoiled it". This is what the world of thoughts is like.

Once we are strong in separating thoughts from the world we gain complete freedom. Nothing can touch us, because everything is just thoughts. Someone we were expecting to be nice is rude to us, we see the impact on us, the disappointment the hurt, we then start to think about it "I don't like that", "how dare they make me feel like this", "I want to attack them back". But if we see that in reality it is nothing like this, these things are just what the thoughts have made of the situation. We could have a completely different set of thoughts like "I wonder why they were so rude", "I hope they are alright". "Is there anything I can do to help them". "No, oh well I hope they feel better soon". But the point is that the things that are happening are free from thoughts, perspectives and attitude.

Dorothy Rowe I believe says that all mental illness starts in unhelpful thought patters. I can completely believe this. Thoughts are incredibly powerful, and for almost all of us are completely out of control and they totally control our lives. Buddha says "with our thoughts we make the world." It is true. If we think badly of something it will be bad, and vice versa. Now I always thought the solution was to think some more in the hope of fixing it. But I never thought that maybe before using this wonderful thinking tool I should first master it so I can put it down when it isn't needed. The more I study the mind the more I realise that the things we really want like Peace, Tranquillity and Happiness are not the products of thinking or mental attitude. They are quite the opposite. They are the freedom when we get outside our thoughts and mental attitudes.

It has been thought many times in history in both India, China and Europe that meditation is clearing the mind of thoughts. What I have said above might be seen to say this. We certainly can as we enter the Jhana where discursive thoughts stop. And in there we find the pure peace and tranquillity of which I speak. But we don't need Jhana for what I'm saying here. Thoughts are here, they are a fact of the mind, there is nothing wrong with thoughts. But the point is to be acquainted with thoughts and know the difference between what is a thought and what is real. When I am breathing that is real, I can watch that without a thought. But when I think "oh good look I am breathing" that is a thought. I can watch that thought also! Thinking is a real thing, but the thoughts themselves are not. Or more obviously when i think "what shall i eat tonight" that is clearly not happening right now, it is an imagination and thought. Realising that our world is entirely made up of these artificial mini-virtual realities inside our head frees us complete from them. What is really happening, if we stop and meditate is usually completely different.

European philosophy was right about one thing: all data comes from the senses. In meditation we turn our attention to these senses to check what is really going on. The feeling of breath on the nose, the colours in our eyes, the sounds in our ears. Perhaps a slight smell and taste also. And now we have discerned the existence and nature of discrete thoughts we have a new sense - the thoughts. This makes up the 6 senses from which the world is really made. Being fully acquainted with that means that no sense, especially the thoughts, comes to rule the world. And being acquainted fully with our senses we can start a new relationship with them in complete freedom, tranquillity and happiness.

That is what meditation can do.