Part I: A Threat is Known
You fear meditation because its lens threatens to bring into focus what is draped in ancient caution signs, bitterness and bright warning colors of poison, marking danger to the coherence of the psyche. The meditation gesture itself is a near-perfect distillation of pure looking. It is a deliberate peering into a sample of the event-continuum vortex. But it’s neither the vortex itself nor its observation that seems hazardous. Our disturbance comes rather from the expectation of consequence—fear of what this observation might do to us.
This is true only of actual meditation, of course, and not of the self soothing, calming of nerves, or forced preoccupation with focus-tasks which often passes for meditation today. These cannot even be called false forms of mediation because they meet none of the central criteria [outward posture does not count as one of these] of looking-for-looking’s-sake. Though these non-meditations can have many good uses, it is misleading to file them in the same catalogue with introspective practices. In some cases they might even be called anti-introspective, wherever they obstruct or distract from pure inward observation. We can tell when behaviors are something other than meditation by the way they feel and function: when they serve as catharsis or soothing balm, or when they enable and prolong dysfunction through such temporary soothing; when certain actions are used to distract from thought and force presence-in-the-now; when any of the artifices used to facilitate introspection becomes a goal in itself.
We can even see fear of meditation fossilized within many meditative traditions themselves: the fixation on dwelling in a state ‘free from thought,’ and positing this state as the highest source of truth; the love affair with nothingness and its ecstatic repose; the autistic repetition of rite and ritual, numbers, procedure, measurements, and how these reveal a profound reliance upon the artificial to create order. Less charitably, one could even suspect nihilism here. Philosophies which preach states of nothingness as the ultimate path to salvation expose their secret fondness for nothingness itself as desideratum above all else.
Everywhere are signs of aversion to pure looking: anti-meditation paths betrayed by broken branches, hurried footprints, occasional droppings. The animal has darted this way in desperation, instinctively zigging and zagging to deceive any pursuer. The fears compelling these aversions to meditation, though, are mostly misguided.
The event-continuum, when glimpsed introspectively through the meditation lens, does not offer any explanation for its nature. It simply moves. And it moves at startling speed. Once one is able to overcome the initial frantic flailing after being hurled into this vortex of thought and sense phenomena without ballast or anchor, I think this is what most find so disturbing: there is no space inside which constructs like ‘free agency’ or ’self’ might fit. These constructs—indeed all constructs, thoughts, actions, sensations—are part of the continuum of events which are themselves arbitrarily delineated. I decide, quite unjustly and conveniently, where each begins and ends.
A thought flashes into the foreground, then leaves. I did not choose this thought, and I did not choose when it left. Even if I think, I will now choose my next thought carefully and only according to my own will, did I choose that thought? And what about the thought that precipitated that thought?—and so on. This is available for me to see anytime, if I just watch closely.
An emotion arises in response to a thought, then morphs into another. I did not choose that emotion, and I did not choose when it changed shape. Even if I think, I will intervene here and not react to this emotion, that itself is a reaction which arose out of a continuum of events stretching back to an unknown beginning. I can see this for myself, first hand, if I just watch.
An event occurs. A bird chirps to my left. But does the chirp really begin and end where I say it does? Is the sound vibration itself really the only factor deciding this? Does my need to draw these boundaries around events decide objective occurrences? Of course not. The chirp, like my thought or emotion, has been isolated—subjectively selected based on my own preconditions for consciousness and senses—vivisected from the living, moving event-continuum to be used for my own purposes.
It’s not that I don’t ‘decide' anything; it’s that even my decisions are part of the event-continuum, and I did not feely decide what to decide. It’s not that I don’t exist; ‘I’ does exist, but as a construct, as a useful perception, as a software program running on the brain of the organism. And that construct is, unexceptionally, one more part of the event-continuum.
The event-continuum we call ‘reality’ as a braided rope: time, space, and substance weave and move together. The braid functions as one rope; any attempt to see these strands as independent or distinct elements is merely theoretical, as this is not how a braid behaves. Tug on one strand, and you tug on the others.
I have no more ‘free agency’ or ‘control’ over time than I do over substance or space itself. I can change my perception of time, how it seems to me. From one perspective it seems to slow down, or even evaporate for a time; from another it seems to gain speed. It might even seem as if I have done something to time itself as my perception fluctuates; but I have not. My influence over space and its substance also seems to shift with perspective. If I view any one of my actions, from one angle it seems I’ve exercised strong agency in my act; from another it seems I have chosen nothing. And thus it might appear as if I have freedom to exercise more or less agency in some objective sense; but I do not.
Or it might seem I am capable of exercising more or less awareness. I did not know the way to drive from the west side of the city to the east side before, and now I know the way. I was standing on a train platform, lost in thought one moment, then jostle myself back to alertness and notice hurried movements of people around me on the platform. Yesterday I had forgotten to apply a technique while running, but today I remembered. We might say each of these cases of increased awareness demonstrates an increase in my ‘control’ or ‘agency.’ But am I in control of the factors which led to these increases in awareness? Even if I told myself, I will make a point to study the map today and remember a course to the east side, was there nothing that compelled me to this thought of exerting focused effort? Or if I thought, I will shake myself from this daydream and pay attention to what’s around me here on the platform, was there no motive at all driving this decision to snap to presence? And if there were, did I choose that motive too? My point is this: if I’m only willing to look, my agency delusion will break down somewhere.
Eventually I will arrive at a place where I look upon the origin of my actions not in some perfectly suspended locus of ‘free’ choice within myself, not in my ‘self’ as a first cause, but in the giant, terrible movement of all action. As ripples on the water’s surface appear in a moment of contrast, so too do my actions arise from mysterious winds. Strangely, I also catch the hand of my own bias in noticing the ripples and calling them thus. Those areas of surface which appear to be non-ripples—those smooth, even stretches of glass between and around the abrasions—are no less actions than the ripples. It’s only my preference and sense-necessity that would have me say, ‘that is a ripple,’ as if this is any more of an event than non-rippling.
Once this has been glimpsed, a part of the psyche will always remember what was there. I am not special in the way I had believed. The subjective ‘I’—along with all of its thoughts, feelings, and actions—does not stand as an agent outside of the continuum, acting upon it. It can make no change to the continuum because it is itself composed of changes arising from it. It is a ripple within the continuum: one arbitrary shimmer of the total movement. My belief in the self as free agent, prime actor upon a world of objects, origin of changes, was a hallucination and a bending of the light. And there, in the dissolution of the last heat waves distorting the self and its agency, I find the source of my resistance to this insight.
Part II: You Can Take Your Finger Off The Trigger
The threat is not what it seems. Even if I go deep into this insight, it still might as well be that I am I am a first cause and the independent locus of my own actions. I will continue to act as if I am, regardless. This is just the nature of the operating system: bound up in a practical mirage that permits effective thinking and action. Something does change with what I see there. I feel different for having seen it. But the effect is not the absolute and permanent disintegration of self and action in the world. This is the perceived threat: everything will fall apart, life will lose meaning, actions will lose their drive, I have lived a lie, and the truth comes now as a poison my organs cannot process. So naturally, as we approach, our finger drifts to the trigger in anticipation of hostile movement. But this is not the effect. Instead, this insight has a curious ability to morph the quality of my experience, add additional texture to it, without crippling agency or identity.
Eyes closed, I listen for sounds. A car door shuts; a bird’s wings beat the air; I adjust my posture and the fabric of my pants rustles between my leg and the floor. I hear these sounds and take note as my mind forms a concept, an organizational label to apply to the raw sense stimuli. There it is: car, metal, rubber, latch, person, hand, arm, bird, wings, feathers, air, pants, fabric, friction. So fast. I try to slip my awareness into the space between the raw sense stimulus and the mind’s concept. I don’t even know if space is available there. Maybe it’s only a fraction of a fraction of a second, but I try. And as I look for this space, I notice a distance growing. A distance can indeed be found between the sound and the concept. But I also see I was wrong. This distance does not exist as a quality of time, but rather as a quality of mind. With each observation the concept-mind fades into the distance, blurred and muffled, as curiosity grows around the raw sound. Strangely I find that without the concept there, bullying its way into the foreground, the sound doesn’t really sound ‘like’ anything. It’s just nondescript noise. There are brief moments of humming, but not a sound. It’s more like the humming of matter, somehow. Then snap! Like a shock of static electricity the concepts returns. It was only a small thing: an itch on my shoulder. But in that moment, the meditation was fractured into a trillion pieces, and the mind was back to its default as if nothing had been done.
But something had been done. And I did feel different after seeing what I saw. I had seen a piece of myself, grasped a little about the nature of a mechanism within me. And it was… funny! I found it hilarious, and mysterious. I felt a sense of awe and excitement, as looking onto a new landscape from the heights. I wasn’t sure what this insight would come to mean for me, as it explained itself in my perception and action over time. But of course I knew I would not stop hearing things. Of course, I would not stop placing labels on these sounds. I had this reassurance. I saw how quickly the conceptual labels snapped back into place, the force and speed with which they screamed into the foreground from subconscious depths. So the defaults would stay. What I had gained, though, was something like levity. I felt different about the way I heard things, and saw things, and decided things. I had found a certain irony and comedy in my own mechanisms; at the same time, awe. And I thought, if this kind of change in the quality of experience is available to me anytime through this space of pure observation, I will visit this space often.