Transcription
I'm a bit of a meditation skeptic, uh-huh, in that I, so like, I've never actually meditated. I've never done it. I've never tried it. It feels to me a bit like when somebody says to me, "Have you ever tried praying?" and I think to myself, like, like, "Sure, I'm not like anti-praying. I just feel like I could sit down, I could put my hands together, and I could, you know, say words to the sky." But I feel like unless I already have some in this, actually being something, I, I'm literally unable to pray. Yeah, because I don't believe in the necessary, you know, prerequisite, uh, assumptions that one needs to have to, to make it an actual prayer.
And I suppose I feel similarly about meditation. Like, I, it's not something that I've ever, but, but it's different because it's not, it's not assuming the existence of something that you are disposed to doubt, right? So with prayer, you doubt that there's an invisible God that you could be addressing through any kind of propitiatory prayer. So it's, and that's why I'm saying, you know, I don't make this, this move into metaphysics where I say that because I can experience my conscious mind free of a sense of self, that means consciousness is the substratum in which everything is arising, including this universe, and I'm, I'm experiencing the thing that preceded the Big Bang. I mean, there are people like, people like Deepak Chopra will say things like that as a result of having an experience in meditation, and that that's totally unwarranted, right? It's just not scientific. It's, I, you can't even know that you have a brain by meditating. Like, like, like paying close attention to your experience doesn't tell you anything about your brain, even that it exists, right? Which, which is a pretty big lacuna in, in your, you know, self-understanding. So meditation is good for some insights, but it's not good for making contact with, you know, what I'm calling the, the metaphysics or even the physics of things.
Um, so you're right to doubt, um, prayer on that basis, but it's just not an analogy because the meditation I would recommend you do is just pay attention to your experience. Like, so, so very much in the spirit of scientific hypothesis, which is, if you want to understand better what it's like to be you, it would make sense to pay attention. So what does that mean? What, what would it mean to pay attention? Yeah, how does, how does that actually work? And, and what constitutes meditation in this respect? So then, so, so then you'd be given, in the very, in the beginning, you'd be given a very remedial device, which is, which, you know, in the, in the usual case of, you know, training in mindfulness, you would, you would just be given the breath, right? Just pay attention to the breath and just notice. And, and there's nothing, it's not because there's something magical or profound about the breath. It's just, it's a very easy object to notice. You can notice it, it's just as the feeling of, you know, the rising and falling of your abdomen or chest, or the sensation of air passing through the nostrils. And people tend to start out doing this with closed eyes, um, and you pay attention to that. And the reason why it's a good object is one, you don't have to presuppose any religious nonsense in order to do it. I don't, you don't have to, I don't have to give you a Sanskrit mantra and tell you about its significance, right? Just, it's just the breath. You're just paying attention to that. And, um, and what you'll notice eventually, this could take five seconds, or it could take five days on a silent retreat where you're just trying to do this for, you know, to the exclusion of everything else for 12 hours a day. I mean, you know, some people are harder cases than others. But what you will eventually notice is that it's, that's actually much harder to do than you were expecting, right? So you, you pay attention to the breath and you just feel, you feel the, the movement and tension and pressure and, and tingling and whatever you feel with, with the rising of each inhalation and the, and the falling of each exhalation. And then the next second, you're thinking about something and you've completely forgotten the project of you. You forgot you're in a room trying to meditate. You forgot this is something you even wanted to do. You're just talking to yourself, right? Helplessly. And it's very much analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming. It's like, it's like a daydream where you, you've actually lost contact with who you are and what you're about in that moment, and you have had no reality testing riding alongside it. So it's like all of a sudden, you're having an argument with someone who's not there, right? You're rehearsing the conversation you had with your girlfriend the day before, or the thing you're expecting to happen later today. And you're, and you're, and there's a, there's a voice in your head that is your own voice, and it seems to feel, it feels like you, it feels like yourself, right? And, and you're thinking, "Yeah, what, why did she say that? I mean, doesn't this, is, you know, we, I told her that." And you're, you're in the middle, you're in a medius race with a conversation that you've had with yourself probably 15 times in the last 24 hours, and it's striking you as new every time you have it. You, you're not impatient with yourself, you're not bored. If I, if you were having that same conversation with anyone else, they'd be bored to tears. But you have this endless appetite to just hear the next thing that comes over the transom that's in, in your voice, in your mind, saying, "Yeah, what the, what would she think? Okay, when, when, all right, the first thing I'm going to say to her is." And you're, you're the thing to realize here is that this is psychotic on two levels. One is it presupposes a kind of conversational structure that you're having with yourself that makes no sense because if you're the one to think the thought, "Why?" and also the one to hear the thought, "Why did you need to think it in the first place?" You know what you're thinking, right? You're thinking it to yourself as though you're, you're both speaker and audience, right? That split is bizarre. But two, it comes over you and you're, you're that, you're helplessly carried away by it, and you have no perspective on the fact that you're carried away by it. In the same way you have no perspective when you go to sleep at night and you fall asleep and you start dreaming. It's just a, it's just, it's astonishing that the first minute of every dream doesn't start with, "What the [expletive] is happening? How did I get here? I was just in my bed and now, like, how, what's, you know, this is impossible?" Right? You have no reality testing. And the same thing is happening every time you think a thought for the, if you're, for the most part.
So then now back to the breath, right? Now, okay, so you, you recognize you're thinking and you think, "Oh [expletive], I was, you know, I don't know how long I was gone for. Was that 30 seconds?" All right, back to the breath. And you, you feel the inhalation for a few seconds, and then you're going to be gone again with another thought about another thing, helplessly borne away, right? Now, this will seem normal. This seems normal to most people. It is totally pathological, right? The fact that we think this is compatible with human sanity and, you know, and basic well-being is just because it's happening to everybody. I mean, there are some people who claim not to have any inner voice or inner thoughts, and, um, we could talk about those separately. But for most people, if they try to pay attention to anything, I mean, the breath is just a useful object because it's just, it's there. They will find, mind, that it's hard to do. And it's hard to do because their attention on it is endlessly being submerged by this, this automatic product of, of discursivity, right? It's, it's, it's mostly linguistic, but for lots of people, it can be images too, um, or both. And it is a kind of light dream.
Right now, once you get some degree of concentration, you know, and the reason why you use the breath in the beginning is it's just an object upon which you can build a kind of a modicum of concentration so that you can notice the difference clearly between being lost in thought and being able to pay attention to, to an arbitrary object. And you can notice it so clearly, you, you kind of build this muscle enough so that you can actually pay attention for longer periods of time at will. And the thoughts either don't arise, or when they arise, you notice them as further appearances in consciousness and you can actually notice them without being carried away by them, right? So the thought still arises. The thought of the conversation you're about to have with your girlfriend still comes up, but you're not identified with it. You actually, you still, you're witnessing it as an appearance in consciousness in the same way that you're witnessing the sound of my voice as an appearance.
I was just thinking about that, how the way you're describing this, I have heard you talk about this before and, um, the, the idea of these things just appearing in your consciousness. And I suddenly realized that I can think of your words right now, right? Is that, in a way, without trying to open up the free will question, my own words, they just sort of, they just sort of appear and, and come out of nowhere. And I guess nothing's really changed except noticing that. And it's, it's, it's weird. It feels like you are sort of taking a step back from it all. And, um, and obviously the difference between my voice and your voice is that you're identified, or you tend to be identified with your voice. It feels like, it feels like a self. It feels like I, um, and yet that is a, that is on a subtle level, that's what it's like to be thinking without noticing. The present thought arises as an object in consciousness. And what meditation allows you to do, and again, this, this is all just a matter of paying attention. You don't have to believe anything. You don't have to take my word for any of this, right? You just have to pay closer and closer attention. And this is, many people bounce off this whole project because it's hard to do. Like, in the beginning, it's hard to do, right? Like, you just find, "[expletive], just doesn't work. I, yeah, I tried meditating, didn't work for me, right?" So, but most people in the beginning, they just, they close their eyes and they're essentially just, you know, they think they're meditating, but they're just thinking with their eyes closed, right? Just thinking. And occasionally they feel the breath for a second, but they're just thinking, "What, what good is the breath? And what's the point of this? And how long do I have to do this?" And, and they never, they never break the spell of identification with thought.
If you do, if you persist long enough to get some perspective on thought itself as just an appearance in consciousness, you begin, you can begin to feel that consciousness itself, this, this prior condition subjectively, in which thought and perception and emotion and everything else you can notice about your experience is appearing. It doesn't feel like "I," right? Because the feeling that you, you're intuiting as "I," the feeling of being a subject in the middle of your experience, that's not identical to to experience. It's actually just on the edge of experience or in the center of it, somehow appropriating experience. This kind of the unchanging center of gravity in the midst of whatever the experience, right? That sense is itself another experience. It's part of experience, right? That little wrinkle of, of, of me is something that consciousness itself has a perspective on. And that it doesn't feel like me, right? It doesn't feel, it feels impersonal. It does not, it does not feel like the, a subject is shining its light of consciousness on the various other, the other objects of, of experience.
And so if you keep, so meditation ultimately is nothing more than the, the task of, of paying close enough attention to the, to what consciousness is like moment to moment. Get it breaking this, breaking the spell of thought. The moment you notice you're lost in thought, coming back to noticing. It's not blocking thoughts. Thoughts are not a problem. They just are a problem in, in the beginning. But ultimately, it's not a matter of getting rid of thought or, or having less thought or having different thoughts. It's just having a perspective on thought, which is the point of view of this prior condition in which, this this mere cognizance in which thought and sound and sensation are arising. And it does connect with the free will, uh, conversation because from my point of view, it completely unravels the, the apparent mystery of free will because people think that, that the mystery is, we know we have it because we feel it very deeply, you know, subjectively, it's a truth about us. Yet objectively, it's hard to map on to the causality of things. But I'm, but if you pay close enough attention to what it's like to be you, that is, you, I.E., meditate, you can notice that it's not even a subjective truth about you because everything just arises. The next thought just arises. The next intention just arises. That, the, the intention that, that, that counters that intention, that, that stops you from doing the thing you intended a moment ago, that just arises. The willpower arises and it wanes. The thought, "Oh my God, I need more willpower," that arises and it's effective or not based on some mysterious principle that you can't inspect. It's all just springing into view out of this, this mi condition that is intrinsically mysterious, which you are identical to. It's not that you have it. You're not on the edge of it. You're not using it. Subjectively speaking, experientially speaking, there's just experience, and you're identical to it.
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