Last month,
after finishing Why
Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright, I decided to do a little experiment. In the book, Wright looks at Buddhism through
the lens of evolutionary psychology. The
Buddha taught that desire is the cause of our suffering; modern evolutionary
biologists, according to Wright, have validated the Buddha’s hypothesis. The evolutionary argument goes that the human
brain was designed by natural selection to be guided by those perceptions,
thoughts and feelings that will ensure that our genes get passed onto another
generation. So we’re programmed to chase
pleasure through things like eating, having sex, besting rivals, etc. However, this pleasure is fleeting and
marginally declining, so our brains need to play tricks on us – to delude us –
to keep us desiring those things. We
end up stuck on what a psychologist would call “the hedonic treadmill,” and
what a Buddhist would call samsara. This is all kind of abstract, but one need
look no further for concrete evidence than the opiate epidemic in my home
country, or a subway car full of people all staring at their smart phones. The practice of meditation, Wright argues, is
a means of appreciating what’s going on here, of seeing the world as it really
is, and, ideally, of finding a way out of this vicious cycle. I’m not doing justice either to Robert Wright
or to the Buddha here, and there are a bunch of other complicated ideas like
emptiness and not-self that I’m not going to get into, but hopefully you get
the main idea.
I happened
to finish the book on June 30th, so I decided that, starting on July
1st, I would try to do mindfulness meditation for 20 minutes per
day, every day, for a month. Practically,
I followed a basic technique that Wright describes: I set the timer on my phone
for 20 minutes (“Slow Rise” is a good alarm tone for this purpose, by the way),
and I would try to focus my thoughts on my breathing. When I found my thoughts drifting to something
else, I would try to observe where my thoughts were going (and perhaps ask
myself why they might have gone in that direction), and then gently guide them
back in the direction of my breathing.
And repeat. I also tried to write
down some notes after every session to capture whatever insights I might run
into while they were still fresh.
Beforehand,
I had dabbled a bit with meditation but never really tried to do it seriously
or for any length of time. By the end of
July, I didn’t encounter any great truths during the month, and my life didn’t
change dramatically (both Wright and the Buddha would argue that expecting
those things to happen after a month would be missing the point). But, slowly, and without my fully realizing
it at the time, a few things started to become clear, or at least clearer.
1.
If you make even a small effort to
think about what you’re thinking about (or rather, what you find yourself
thinking about when you’re trying not to think about anything), you may learn a
thing or two about yourself.
Whenever I
had tried meditating before, it was always when I was alone, usually on an
airplane or in a hotel room. So my first
observation was that for some reason I was hesitant to meditate at home, and
with other people around. Why was
this? Fear of feeling vulnerable, of being
perceived as one of those “people who meditates?” I felt this even more clearly when hearing
footsteps down the hall during my session: tension in my neck/throat and upper
chest at the thought of someone seeing me.
Once I recognized this feeling, it went away (Wright describes this as
well).
“Shallow
Grave” by Elvis Costello was playing in my head as I was thinking about my
breathing becoming shallower. 20 minutes
felt like they went by fast. I felt more
relaxed, gentler, more open toward people and things directly afterward. (July 1st,
Geneva)
The
thoughts that take you away from your breathing almost always have to do with
the future or the past. Most of mine
tend to focus on obligations: things I need to do, like my taxes, or work
things, or money things. I may have had
a fleeting moment of “observing myself” today: I thought of the fact that I am,
like many Americans who live overseas, a bit delinquent in the filing of my US
tax returns. This thought triggered a
kind of twitch, at four points in my lower and upper back.
One notices
the birds a lot when meditating in our guest bedroom. (July 2nd,
Geneva)
I had seen
a story on my phone about a fight that had broken out during a basketball game
between Australia and the Philippines, and I thought about how I would mention
it to Gerard, the guy who cleans our apartment who happens to be Filipino, when
I saw him next on Saturday. It got me
thinking about people’s motivations: mine, in this case, and in many others,
was about being liked and accepted, in this case by the Filipino guy who cleans
our apartment.
Near the
end of my 20 minutes today, the guys and the truck showed up outside to pick up
the garbage, and the usual sounds ensued: motors, banging of metal, guys
yelling. It’s easy to imagine this being
perceived as an annoying or unpleasant , but I didn’t experience it like
that. They were there, at that time,
doing their work, which is pretty important work in terms of the overall
functioning of things. An easy example
of Wright’s point about things being how / what we perceive them, or rather
having whatever significance we choose to give them, not significance (essence)
in themselves. (July 3rd, Geneva)
2.
Meditating can be the gateway to
more empathy, which is categorically a good thing. (Or: Your thoughts are not all bad.)
Wright
develops the argument that our thoughts “think themselves:” that our brains,
programmed to motivate us to get our genes to the next generation, can very
often give us a distorted view of reality.
One of the “goals” of meditation is to see these illusions for what they
are. Taken too literally and too far,
though, one can conclude from this idea that every thought that comes into your
head is somehow illegitimate, which can quickly lead to feeling like you’re a
character in a Kafka novel. Indeed, this speaks to one of the criticisms
of Wright’s work: that he binds himself too tightly to a strict, mechanical
view of how our minds work (see paragraph 1 above), and that he ends up boiling
down an ancient, complicated mystical tradition into a self-help seminar.
In any
case, today I found myself remembering of a hole-in-one that I once made in
Greenville, Maine. The train of memory
went from hot summer day à the sound and smell of Maine on a hot summer
day à
that particular summer day in Greenville.
I must have been around 12 or 13, because I remember my father was on
the balcony holding my sister Amanda who was a baby at the time, and he was watching
me play the par 3 behind our condo over and over again, and I remember him
cheering when one of my shots bounced onto the front of the green, rolled about
25 feet, and dropped into the cup. And I
thought about my thinking about this memory, and I didn’t think of it as dukkha / desire for past glory. My thoughts instead went to how proud my father
must have felt to see his (quite young) son do that. A similar pride that I feel when I think
about my daughters girls doing the things they do and being the people they
are. In other words, experiencing this
memory while meditating made me experience it through a more empathic lens. (July 4th,
Geneva)
3.
Meditating when you’re really tired
or sleep-deprived is pretty much a waste of time.
You would
think that it might be okay because you’re all “relaxed,” but all you do is
spend 20 minutes trying not to fall asleep and feeling that electric jolt in
the back of your neck every time you fail and your chin bounces off your suprasternal notch. (July 7th, Geneva)
4.
However, meditating when you’re a
little bit tired can be kind of cool, even if it’s not so “productive.”
In that
situation, even if I don’t fully fall asleep (which definitely happens
sometimes), the experience is less like mindful awareness and more like the kind of lucid
dream you sometimes experience in peri-sleep.
Not the really cool kind of lucid dream where you can control your dream
experience and fly around and stuff, but instead one where the brain symbolically
sorts out the experiences of the day. Since much of my experience for the past few
days has been about cat food / medicine in small ceramic dishes (one our cats
had surgery last month; she’s much better now), these were the types of images
flashing through my mind. (July 8th,
Geneva)
5.
Mortification is not all bad either.
Meditating
immediately after running 5 miles in 90 degree heat is a different
experience. My exhales were sharper and
deeper, not like the slow breaking of waves they usually are. Once the air conditioner turned off, I acutely
noticed the cacophony / symphony of sounds in my apartment, and I could make
out several unique ones. There were, in
stereo, sounds like an engine idling at a distance. There was the ringing of my ears. There was a kind of subtone, like a faint,
low-pitched moan. Every once in a while
the oven would snap as it preheated. And
every once in a while footfalls would thud from somewhere else in the building.
(July
11th, Cambridge, MA)
6. Meditating on a moving TGV to Paris
is difficult, especially when the other three seats of the four-seater
compartment you’re in are occupied by French guys speaking excitedly about the
World Cup.
7.
When entering a meditation center,
remember to remove your shoes.
I left the
apartment at 6:30 to take a Blue Bike to the Cambridge Insight Meditation
Center near Central Square. Taking the
bike was not the best idea, as I had broken a healthy sweat by the time I got
there, but fortunately there was at least one dock left at the nearest Blue
Bike station thing so I didn’t have to rush the rest of the way and I still
arrived a little early.
The Cambridge
Insight Meditation Center is located in an old Victorian house veiled by
several low-limbed trees, on Broadway in a cluster of New Agey establishments: next door is the office of Jungian therapist I saw for a while, and is also home to several other “spiritual” type outfits: studios for yoga, and
Pilates (which for some reason gets lumped in with a bunch of New Agey things,
but really doesn’t deserve to be), and something called “Authentic Voice
Finding” (which almost certainly does).
I thought
the place might be closed, as it looked pretty dark when I walked up, but the
front door was open, and there was a light on, so I walked in. There was a 70-something woman with long grey
hair in a bun kind of pacing around. She
stood in front of the stairs for a while, and I thought she might be blocking
the way so no one went in early (?), but then she said she was considering
whether to take the stairs or elevator.
She ended up taking the elevator, and I walked up to the third floor,
where the “morning drop-in meditation” was scheduled to take place. The temperature got hotter as I went up, but
mercifully there was AC in the large meditation hall on the top floor of the
house. A big open space under vaulted
ceilings. Polished wood floors with a
small stage in the front, on which sat a mid-sized Buddha statue (there were
smaller ones on the windowsills at each landing on the way up the stairs), and
a bell gong (is this what these are called?
I say “bell gong” to show that it’s big and hollow and heavy, and to
differentiate it from the big round flat gong that rock drummers used to have
behind them in the 1970s), and a couple other small objects which I forget now. Emanating from this small stage were several
rows of cushions, arranged in an arc and facing the stage, and hemmed in by a
back row of chairs. At the entryway
there were a bunch of cushions and small wooden stool-like things that I
couldn’t immediately identify the function of.
I was the first one in the room.
I had realized
on the way upstairs that the woman with the bun had had no shoes on, and it
occurred to me that I had probably committed a faux pas by not taking my shoes off right at the front door. I quickly took them off and put them under a
chair at the side of the room under my backpack. I did a couple tours of the
room, looking out the windows on three walls.
A couple minutes before 7, people started arriving. A tall fit-looking guy in cargo shorts and a
t-shirt, probably in his 50s. Another slightly
older guy, smaller. A couple of
middle-aged women who looked like they belonged in a meditation center.* A younger guy with a bald head and a beard
and thick-rimmed glasses. A younger
woman with her hair in a ponytail who wouldn’t have been out of place at Orange
Theory, except she seemed to move a little more gracefully, but maybe I
projected this onto her. Anyway I had
already taken off my glasses in anticipation of meditating (I’m not exactly
sure why I do this, but since my eyes are closed they serve no purpose), so I
couldn’t really see anyone well. No one
greeted anyone else.
I was kind
of waiting for someone to show up and kick things off, but people just started
sitting down, so I did too. Everyone
seemed to have their own particular system: the younger guy sat on a chair to
my left, with a pillow placed behind his lower back. One of the middle-aged women was in lotus
position on a cushion on the floor.
Another was on one of the wooden stools, kneeling with her calves under
her (I believe this may be called “Japanese-style”). The other men just sat in chairs, so that’s
what I did, thinking that 45 minutes on a cushion on the floor might end with
me unable to stand up and walk. At one
point the fit guy reached forward to touch one of the mats, and I thought he was
going to relocate down there, as if his time on the chair was just for warming up
or something (?), but he only straightened the mat so it formed a neat arc with the
rest of the cushions in that row. It was
already a minute or so past 7, so I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my
breathing, as I’ve been doing for the past two weeks.
Almost
immediately, I heard to my right gurgling sounds emanating from the midsection
of the old woman from downstairs, who had taken the chair next to me. My initial reaction was annoyance, as if this
was going to be “a distraction from my meditation.” But almost right after that, I had the
thought that there was nothing for me to be annoyed about. These noises were not her fault obviously,
and her stomach was just doing what it should be doing.
I noticed
the other noises in the room. The
Dopplered shoosh of cars going by. The
low whoosh of the air conditioning.
Higher-pitched hissing from the ringing in my ears (perhaps I should get
this checked out). The occasional gentle
noise of the other meditators shifting around or clearing their throats.
At some
point I noticed the weight of my feet on the floor, as if I could feel
gravity’s pull more profoundly. I
noticed this in my ass too, but maybe it was just starting to hurt from sitting
on the chair for so long. I didn’t
really try to pay close attention to time.
My thoughts drifted to things I needed to do that day, or sometime soon,
or to other things other than now. And
then I would try to guide myself back to my breathing again. I don’t remember much other than that.
I started a
bit at the sound of the gong: an abrupt metallic ping that quickly dove
underwater and sustained. It rang three
times, and seemed to get quieter each time.
I opened my eyes and saw that a middle-aged woman with curly hair and
loose-fitting clothing was now sitting Indian-style on the stage. She had a small wooden stick in her hand,
which she had evidently used to strike the gong. The other meditators started to stir
slowly. After a moment the woman on
stage put her hands together namaste-style and everyone else followed
suit. Then everyone did a small bow. I quickly followed along, feeling like I used
to feel on one of my rare trips to the Catholic church as a child, unsure about
which gesticulations to do when. The
curly-haired woman said a few words in a quiet voice which I didn’t completely
make out, but I inferred that her point was that Meditation Center Members
could hang around if they wanted to, but that guests like me needed to vamoose.
Down on the
first floor, I picked up a couple of pamphlets and added my name to the email
list. I sat on one of the chairs next to
the front stairs to put my shoes back on, and I saw some shelves on which other
people had put their shoes. The
curly-haired woman sat down next to me to put her shoes on too. She asked me “How’s it going?” I said, “It’s going well, thanks. How about you?” She replied, “So far so good.”
* The irony
of describing these women this way (in terms of their stereotypes, their
conceptual beings, rather than their actual beings – there’s a term for this
that I forget) in the context of a Buddhist activity is not lost on me. (July 12th, Cambridge, MA)
8.
Use caution when meditating on an
airplane when seated behind some guy who wants to offer his views on
“spirituality” to the guy sitting next to him.
I tried to meditate
on the plane to Milan this morning, while sitting a row behind a French guy who
was speaking English loudly to the guy sitting next to him, saying things like:
“spirituality…can help you bring the things to you in your life that you
want.” It took every ounce of discipline
I had to contain myself; and I occupied myself by trying to mentally construct the
French phrase for “Would you please shut the fuck up.”
A problem
with meditation sometimes is that it makes you more acutely aware of what’s
going on around you, and in that period after you’ve become more acutely aware
but before you can see things non-judgmentally, annoying things like the guy in
front of me become even more annoying. (July 18th, Air Europa flight
1065, MadridàMilan)
9.
Meditation may or may not improve
your tennis game.
I played 6
sets of tennis over the weekend, but I felt better physically that I would have
thought. I happened to win all six, and
the small internal tournament at they organized at my club over the weekend, so
maybe that helps. I spotted the The Miracle of Mindfulness on the
bookcase in the guest room the other day and brought it down and started
rereading a bit. I think I might like Thich
Nhat Hahn’s approach to meditation better than Wright’s, especially his advice
that one shouldn’t try looking “for” anything for the first 6 months of
meditation, just focus on breathing and being aware of the mind. Maybe that’s as far as one can go with only
20 minutes a day for a month. And maybe
that’s actually pretty far. (July 23, 2018, Geneva)
It occurred
to me while running this morning that perhaps meditation contributed to my
tennis performance last weekend.
Obviously sitting for 20 minutes a day doesn’t directly do anything for one’s
first serve percentage, but I did feel myself much more mentally focused during
my matches. Actually, “focused” is the
wrong word, as it implies kind of a concentrated effort. What I was doing was not thinking about things like the score, or winning, or losing, or
the fact that I’m up a break and it would be a missed opportunity if the other
guy broke me back. In other words, I was
in the moment. I found myself repeating
a mantra of “play *this point* well.”
And this is
actually contrary to what I had been thinking: that meditation would make me
too detached or spaced-out or uncaring to do competitive sports well. Go figure. (July 24, 2018, Geneva)
10.
When meditating directly after showering,
it’s a good idea to Q-tip one’s ears beforehand, or else the water in there can
get pretty distracting.
11.
Practice.
I’d been
fighting a nasty gastro for the last few days, so I hadn’t found the energy to
meditate again until this morning.
Perhaps it would have helped to have at least tried, but it was tough to
find the strength and motivation, and, given my GI condition, a little dicey
sitting cross-legged for an extended period of time. I realized this morning that, as with anything,
you get out of practice (that term itself being pretty rich and significant)
when it comes to focusing on your breathing.
But then again there is a certain freshness when it comes to
rediscovering basic things which start to get taken for granted when you do
them every day. And this applies to so
many things: the very basic Pilates exercises that our teacher has us do after
holiday breaks. The whole-stroke drumming
rudiments that Joe
Morello taught me. Indeed there is
something holy in the true practice of anything, whatever that anything might
be. This is a good thing to pass onto
one’s children.
Maybe the
main benefit of all this comes from the discipline of just doing something
healthy for 20 minutes. It could be
walking around the block, or knitting, or doing pushups, or something else. (July
28th, Geneva)
