Why? Meditation and Practices

If Hemisphere-lock, falsity, abstraction and attention are our problems, what's *your* solution?

Why do I meditate?

One somewhat radical idea to save the world is to start with yourself, airplane oxygen mask style.

If all us arm-chair (and just Chair) cognitive and social scientists think we’ve become massively left-brain dominant and are “drowning in bullshit,” the recommended salve from Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke is to develop an “ecology of practices” for ourselves. Why? From Vervaeke’s “Awaken to Meaning.”

“Because we all lack the fullness of wisdom, especially in the 21st century. Our cognitive machinery is shaped by a culture that is increasingly adrift without wisdom institutions. Our spiritual traditions have gradually lost traction in our lives. We tend to become mired in self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior. Few of us are attuned with our emotions and beliefs, or experience a calm and peaceful mind, or have relationships that are rich with presence and authenticity. We feel a hunger for connection that often goes unsatisfied, a longing for a richer way of being.”

That probably sounds like Woo nonsense to some of y’all and that’s fine. If you don’t want to meditate because it’s woo, meditate because it’s a Silicon Valley brain hack. Sam Harris’ Waking Up carries a subtitle that might as well be the theme of the next decade: “A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.”

So here’s my “spirituality without a religion” path over the last 5 years or so. This is now personal history stuff, so ignore if you don’t care for it, the books and recommendations are bolded for easy scrolling.

I want to state up front that it’s nearly impossible to talk about a personal spiritual, consciousness or religious experience without offending someone in the modern world. I accept the responsibility for any offense I cause, but I’m just recounting my own, personal lived experience. I am not a theologian, expertmeditator, neuroscientist, therapist, priest, monk or anything other than some random dude in the woods of Western MA. I speak from authority about only one thing — my experience.

What I’ve Tried, What Works For Me

Once I decided to actually learn about my own brain, a few books really helped me put things in perspective. YMMV, and I haven’t read what I haven’t read.

Intro: Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright

Once you start looking at mediation, you’re gonna get the hook from Buddhism. Of the worlds major contemplative traditions, I haven’t found any more focused on Meditation than Buddhism, generally.

Wright’s intro is designed for the western skeptic. He balances out some good solid science on how our brains and bodies to work, and then connects the dots to various meditation practices and core precepts of at least Western-style Buddhism. It’s an easy read that doesn’t ask the reader to do or believe anything. Sam Harris’ Waking Up is similar in a lot of regards, but WBIT is usually my first recommendation.

Consciousness: Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

A banger from Anil Seth that lays out the current understanding on what “we” are. It’s a little pop-sci, but he’s very good at that, and he cites things well enough that I was able to use this book as a directory for where to go next. Fundamentally it states the hard problems of consciousness and self in western terms using western terminology, and that was important for me, before I dove into anything that reeked of “woo”. Even if you don’t care about spirituality or meditation, I recommend it, because it’s partly an owners manual for having a brain. It is a shallow end of a VERY deep pool I could write a whole book about. If you really want to catch up on the neuroscience, there’s no substitution for Frontiers in Neuroscience, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and a Nature+ Subscription.

How-To-Meditate Basics: Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Masterclass

Reading books is great, but there’s a difference hearing someone speak from their own voice while sitting on the cushion with you. An early mistake I made — because of course I did — was assuming I could just figure all this out on my own. While Jon’s not going to come to your house, I found this series to be really helpful early on, and certainly make me feel less weird and alone. Alternatively, while it wasn’t my path, I have talked to many folks who are sold on the simplicity of 10 Percent Happier and their approach. Plus it’s an App, if that’s your thing, there you go.

How-To-Meditate Classic: The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa (John Yates, PhD)

I’ve now bought this book three times because I keep giving it away (and it’s better on paper). I heard a Zen Monk refer to this as “ahhh… THE TOME” once, and indeed it is, 800 pages of extremely practical advice on sitting down and doing nothing. It’s got checklists and how-to’s and callouts and framing metaphors and illustrations — perfect for the achievement obsessed American mind. Which is also my biggest caution: many meditation manuals or systems or teachers have rigid and often confusing ways of describing the phenomenology of meditation, and I would have been better off if someone had ripped out the first 100 pages or so and kept the rest in reserve. But I have found no other book that has as much specificity on what gets in the way of meditation and how to overcome it, from mind wandering to sleepiness. I keep coming back to it. There’s also a reddit just for the book that’s very active.

Frame Shaker: On Having No Head by Douglas Harding

In my early attempts at meditation, I would close my eyes, and all I would get was racing thoughts. I’d try to follow my breath, maybe counting (in … one, out … two) or whatever, and by the second breath I was remembering to take the garbage down or replaying that time on the bus in 7th grade when I winked at Liz and got bullied for it for a week. Doug Harding’s shtick is to use visual perception to “aha” your brain into a more thoughtful place. In that sense, I see him as a kind of maker of “visual koans” — nonsensical observations that can create insight. It’s practical. And fun too.

Zen: Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryo Suzuki

Once you get past the initial phase of developing a practice, the question then becomes “what kind” of practice you have. I was drawn to Zen early largely because it dispensed with a lot of stuff like reincarnation, karma and merit that I found confusing and challenging in my initial reading about Buddhism. Suzuki brought Zen to the West in the 1950s, and the book is a classic bridge for Western thinking.

Soto Zen — a specific largely-monastic discipline — is the closest thing to “my” version of meditation I’ve found. I feel comfortable with the “smells and bells” of high-church that comes with Soto Zen, and it’s hard in a way that feels right. The specific practice I use most days is called “Shikantaza.” Which means, and is, literally “just sitting” and seeing what happens.

Kasina: firekasina.org

After a year or two of steady Zen-style practice, I started exploring different modalities, and one that really stuck with me is simply staring at a candle. It’s a great practice by itself — keeping visual focus, laserlike, for half an hour at a flickering candle flame is hard at first, but having a bright visual object actually makes it easier for me to get into the early stages of deep concentration. And that’s really the point of Kasina meditation, sharply honing your ability to concentrate, both on the candle, and on the afterimage when you close your eyes

Kasina meditation can also be a great frame shaker. My own experience has been that once I developed strong enough concentration, the afterimage on closing your eyes gets incredibly interesting. Closed eye visualizations go ballistic, and the experience verges on psychedelia. Whenever I feel like my time on the cushion is chaotic and disordered, I light the candle.

Hardcore Concentration: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram

Once I was able to hold on to deep concentration for more than a few minutes, the question became “now what?” The simple act of paying closer and closer attention starts to dissolve your perception. I might be deeply focused on the sensation of my breath, but, say, can I identify the precise moment in time where one breath starts and stops? If I am feeling the breath in my belly and an itch on my foot, how many times a second does my awareness move between them?

These kinds of nuts and bolts make MCTB an almost weekly reference for me. He’s not for everyone, because he’s SO specific (and I think pisses off a lot of Buddhists), but his specifics have largely matched my own experience enough that when I stumble across something weird (which happens to everyone on the cushion eventually) he’s likely to have something hyper specific to say like:

Some will notice the slow variant of the A&P and may plunge down into the very depths of the mind as though plunging deeply underwater to where they can perceive individual frames of reality arise and pass with breathtaking clarity, as though in slow motion. It can even feel as if we have been partially sedated with a strong, opiate-like drug and submerged in thick syrup.

At the bottom of these depths, however they present themselves, individual moments may sometimes have a frozen quality to them, like garish snapshots of the bottom of a well, as if sensations were stopping completely in the middle of their manifestation for just an instant, and this way of experiencing reality is unique to this stage.

Which sounds like absolute nonsense and made up bullshit or someone describing an acid trip, until it’s happened to you and you are wondering if you’ve lost your mind completely.

No-Self and Non-Duality: Awareness by Anthony de Mello and the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

When you get your brain calmed down enough to really pay attention to something, you’ll stumble across the big question soon enough.

Who or what is it that is paying attention?

And that’s kind of the point — investigating perception to learn more about what’s real, and what you are. Woo-land.

Once you cross into Woo-land — really getting some of that wordless, directionless calm and concentration — you’ll find the same messages of ego-death and the demise of the subject/object relationship over and over and over again. To some extent that means this is pick-your-poison territory. de Mello and Tolle are very popular amongst the anxious seekers of Western rationality for a reason: they’re hopeful and calm and help override the crushing nihilism real introspection delivers, while ultimately still pointing to the uncomfortable truth that we know absolutely nothing, our framing of self vs. other is arbitrary, and we are slaves to an evolutionarily useful egoic mechanism that isn’t any more “us” than fairy dust.

If you want the nastiest, most nihilistic form of this — the hard medicine as it were — there’s Jed McKenna waiting for you, but honestly, you’ll find it if you need it, and there’s no point in reading him until you’re too miserable and despondent not to.

Embodiment: Yoga with Adriene

My other major practice is Yoga (with a little Pilates and Qigong on the side). Learning to feel my own body was really hard for me. It wasn’t until I started meditating that I realized how massively numb I was. Initially, I started doing some Adriene videos just to improve my seated posture. Over time I discovered that my body had become so contorted from a life of desks and weekend-warrior athletics that I had to start from scratch, learning how to stand all over again.

Adriene and her crew of helpers did it for me, but lots of folks look to more visualized or mindful practices like Tai Chi or Chi Gong to develop this internal concentration. I honestly think the ability to be “in my body” has been equally as important to my wellbeing these last few years as the ability to “calm my mind.” The more body work I do, the longer I’m able to sit without significant discomfort that breaks my concentration. The more concentration I develop, the more effective and enjoyable my Yoga and Pilates sessions are.

The best days are when I’m at home and just roll off the cushion and onto the mat, eyes closed, without missing a beat.

Dave’s Story

Religion

I started off pretty academic atheist. My parents were largely academic hippies. We put a Seagull on the top of our Christmas tree in the 1970s, and when I was old enough to ask Why? I was handed a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. (Not a bad start for a kid, honestly). But my best friend’s family down the road went to the Episcopal church in town, which was run by a fantastically engaging British father figure and included all sorts of music, incense and costumes, which I loved. So I started tagging along as a pre-teen, and have been a member of that Church ever since.

But I wasn’t “spiritual.” I rarely prayed outside of the Pews, and even then, I largely went through the motions, mumbling the words and hymns.

As I entered my 50s — Obama era — I felt the need to live a little more honestly and transparently, and tried to find a real spiritual and emotional connection that was lacking. And I found a lot! Christian Mysticism is incredibly rich. Key thinky books for me were:

• The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila

• The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross

• Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton

Merton, in particular, really hits on “it’s worth doing the interior work, because the internal becomes exterior change,” and it resonated with me in a way that traditional Christian prayer never did.

And then some random piece of Television I was watching mentioned “Franny and Zooey” by JD Salinger in a throwaway line and for weeks I couldn’t get it out of my head that I’d never actually read it. Having now read it, I actually think it’s one of the best books about spirituality ever written, and you should read it, but these two lines stick in my head to this day:

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s.”

And I just decided I had to start being a nobody, from square one. Square one, in my brain, is not an simple place.

Neurospicy, Brain Damaged and Epileptic

As I re-started learning who I am (spoiler: I’m not), I was building on a lifetime of knowing I was just a little different. In the 1970s they didn’t really diagnose kids with neurological differences unless the had major functional issues. I didn’t. I was highly verbal, aced tests, and was a largely spherical and ignored nerd through my teens. If my mom was concerned with my weird and cyclical obsessions with everything from physics to politics, she never let on. When I asked for a subscription to the economist and U.S. News and World Report at the age of 11, the only discussion was “which one” because we absolutely couldn’t afford both.

But lots of signs were there. I was emotionally dysregulated, didn’t handle groups or social situations well at all, failed to hold eye contact, and had strange obsessions. I had eerily good recall of some kinds of information, and complete amnesia for others. It was blindingly obvious to me I was different, because different got bullied. So I learned to play a character called “Davey Nadig” that other people seemed to get along with and could pretend to care about the same things his peers did, based loosely on who people thought I might be, but absolutely at cognitive remove.

By my teens I’d been diagnosed with a vague Vagus nerve disorder that manifested in local spasms, which was medicated for a few years in adolescence. But mostly, I figured things out, and got very lucky until my 20s, when I had a pretty bad climbing accident in Lover’s Leap California.

A few hundred feet up, and 100 from the peak, and I was upside down, unconscious and dangling for a few minutes as I woke up from hitting my helmetless head on the rocks. Because my climbing partner was an incredible young badass woman in fantastic shape, we self-rescued (meaning, she literally Jumar-hauled my ass out), and, being a macho douchebag of the kind only 1994 San Francisco could dish out, I didn’t go to the ER or anything! ‘Cause I was tough, and that’s what tough guys did!

But my personality changed, almost immediately. I don’t know any other way to put it than to say that I softened. All of the sudden I cared about things with an emotional valence pretty unusual for me. Within a year or two, I had quit my job at BGI to go do my own thing, married the woman of my dreams, left San Francisco to go back to the woods of New England (or at least the Boston suburbs where I could get there fast), and generally became a slightly less jerk version of me.

In roughly 1999 I started having seizures. Scans picked up a little something in my left temporal lobe, but nothing they wanted to look at too hard. My EEGs pointed to the same place. I’d bonked my already weird brain too hard, and this was the price.

The seizures sucked, but the Aura’s were amazing. Before every seizure — and at peak, another dozen times a day just for fun — any sense of verifiable reality disappeared. My sense of time got wildly broken, I smelled powerful smells, heard noises, and had full on daylight hallucinations and synesthesia. At one point I watched aliens landing on the roof of our apartment building. It was always very clear that this wasn’t “real” — I didn’t think aliens were actually landing. But it was a wild ride, and it shook my sense of “reality” to the very core.

Thankfully, I’m one of the edge cases for whom CBD is a magic cure all, and I’ve been seizure free since Medical Cannabis passed in Massachusetts in the 2010s. But I’ve never lost the sense that the difference between mid-aura reality and what everyone else saw was entirely a function of my brain.

Why I Thank the Ticks

But the reason I started meditating — like, really, in a daily practice, seriously meditating — was the ticks. Early pandemic I caught two things ticks around here carry that isn’t Lyme disease: ehrlichiosis and babesiosis. I was in bed for a week, running a fever, delirious, terrified of Covid (which I didn’t have). I lost a dozen pounds over two weeks. And because it was the pandemic, I was in quarantine in my bedroom, unable to read because the fever blurred my vision, too anxious to even listen to music.

So I stared.

For most of a week I lay in a bed going in and out of consciousness, lost in panic-loops when lucid, aching with generalized anxiety when delirious. And at some point I said to myself “I gotta figure me out.” So I stared at the white walls, at the white ceiling, and tried to just be.

That’s when I’d mark the real start of this Rabbithole, where my "special interest” has become my own brain and thus, the nature of reality. I’m not sure it’s got an end date.

Does it “work?” It absolutely helps me navigate the day to day world better. I am certainly calmer most of the time, less reactive, and quieter. But more importantly, I actually feel more in touch with “the real world” - specifically nature and people - while at the same time discounting it’s hard certainty more than ever before. Perhaps I should say I am both more in the world, and less, than I have ever been

The Warning

Before I end I feel like I have to at least acknowledge that meditation isn’t a panacea of any kind. I believe the vast majority of people who take up a meditation practice will get positive benefits in their day to day life, but if you’re a bit more like me — broken, prone to rabbitholing, determined, whatever it is I am — there are pitfalls here. I’ve been through long stretches of strange and weird cognitive and emotional states, and these states aren’t unique to me — they’re massively well documented over thousands of years. Most honest meditation teachers and writers pepper their work with warnings over and over again. The universe is a big place. You’re brain has more access to it than you think. It’s not hard to get lost, and if you’re meditating to find Truth, Enlightenment or Awakening, my strongest advice is to be careful what you look for. As Uncle Jed says:

The price of truth is everything, but no one knows what everything means until they're paying it.