Meditation Without Bullshit

by Aaron S Elias

  You probably feel resistance from the hard floor or mattress you are sitting on. Therefore, your mind might be tempted to explore this sensation further, due to a lack of alternatives. What could happen is that your mind plays a trick on you and makes you feel as if you either sink into the ground, if the underground is somewhat soft, or that you feel more connected to the hard floor, meaning that the area you are sitting on feels larger than it is. One of the most startling perceptions I had after meditating with my eyes closed was to feel as if I had sunk into the ground. I felt as if I was sitting one foot or so lower than I was. I knew that it was an impossibility and I would have lost this perception quickly had I opened my eyes, but this was not even necessary because after spending some time arguing against this obviously impossible experience, I snapped out of it. Those sensations may appear to be mere distractions, but you could also consider them a test of your newfound ability to control your mind. Just don't focus too much on them, and you may be on the way to not just superficial sensations but deeper states of meditation.

  Before I go on, I would like to make a remark on the feeling of discomfort when meditating. When sitting in the lotus position, you probably feel some minor discomfort. As long as your meditation sessions are not especially long, maybe just fifteen minutes or so, this feeling may never go away. However, as you slip into deeper states, you will also stop perceiving any pain. This is only momentarily. Once the meditation is over and you open your eyes again, you quickly notice if your feet have become numb. But do not worry about your health too much. Deeper stages of meditation require significant amounts of practice. It may take years to reach them. Once you can sit for that long, you should have gotten used to meditating for prolonged periods of time, and it may even be less uncomfortable than sitting for fifteen minutes was when you were starting out.

  Disconnect

  Presumably, disconnect this is the last state. At the very least, it is the deepest state I have been able to reach during all my years of practice. You may never experience it, or only ever get a glimpse of it. It is also something I usually do not communicate. After going through a phase of feeling warmth engulfing your whole body, you may suddenly have experiences unlike anything you have had before. In fact, there are a number of possible experiences, which I am going to describe one after another. You seem to enter all of them after a somewhat lengthy period of feeling warmth.

  I call it a disconnect because you will feel no connection to the real world anymore. Afterwards, you may realize that you have sat for two hours — or maybe just twenty minutes. Almost quaint, compared to the sensations I am going to describe below, are out-of-body experiences. You suddenly slip out of your body and see yourself from above, meditating. At least, that's what you are imagining. I surely do not believe that your mind exists independently of your body, thus you cannot escape it. The first time this happens, you are probably frightened by it, or maybe you are intrigued.

  If you are meditating with open eyes, you may experience that the colors and shapes of objects in the room start to change and possibly bleed into each other. You may also stop hearing sounds, which is particularly startling if you are meditating in an environment that is not completely quiet. An even more extreme version of this is synesthesia, which might overwhelm you. Synesthesia is the perception of sensual data with other than the designated sensual organs. For instance, this means that you hear colors. Yes, I know, it sounds crazy. I do not think it is possible to describe this to someone who has not had synesthetic experiences. Apparently there are people out there that associate certain numbers with colors, but this is nothing compared to the full-blown effect you experience in deep trance-like meditation. To me, it is a complete confusion of the senses, where you feel objects on an emotional level, see noises, and hear colors. When I told some of my friends about those experiences, they told me that they sound exactly like some of their LSD trips. I have never taken LSD and do not feel like taking it to confirm this.

  When reading this, you may either think that I am completely bonkers or are intrigued and want to experience this, too. However, meditation is not to be seen as a way to seek those experiences. In fact, when I enter those states, I let them happen until they either pass and I reenter the state of clarity, but more likely warmth, or until I reach a point at which I am so overwhelmed that I reflexively snap out of it.

  Gateway to Serious Meditation

  While those drug-like states may sound appealing, they are a distraction in the end. You will benefit most from meditation when you reach a state of calmness, which I refer to as clarity, and maintain it. With some experience, you will probably be able to enter it quickly. I can enter clarity more or less straight away. The challenge then is to not focus too much on any other experiences you may have. Yes, you may feel warmth developing in your center. Try regulating it by synchronizing it with your breathing, so that it feels as if it grows when inhaling and shrinks when exhaling. As entertaining as this may be, it is still a diversion.

  Do not focus on even the warm sphere of energy you may feel. Just let it go. Once you learn to not engage any thoughts that may pop up and likewise don't focus on any sensations you may feel, you are on the right path. By doing so, you will learn to sit for a longer amount of time and to keep your mind clear while doing so. At this level, you will also start seeing profound effects on your daily life. Your friends may even start to remark on your calmness and your ability to remain unaffected by your environment. Of course, this too depends on the kind of personality you had when you embarked on your journey of exploring meditation.

  Real-Life Meditation and Mental Hygiene

  As fascinating, or off-putting, as the descriptions of meditative states in the preceding chapter may have been to read, for real-life purposes, they are somewhat irrelevant. You do not meditate in order to get drug-like experiences without the financial cost of buying drugs as well as the legal risk and physical harm associated with consuming them. Reliably getting people to have LSD-like experiences without side-effects would be quite a market opportunity, though. In all seriousness, the point of meditation, for the typical Western guy, is to use it as a tool for relaxation and clearing your mind, and that is more or less it. Consistently practicing meditation, even if just for fifteen minutes a day, over many years, will have positive effects on your life. Looking back at my life, meditation has been a tool for fundamentally transforming my personality for the better.

  There is a lot you can do to get more out of meditation. The most important aspect is to maintain mental hygiene. By this I mean to not expose yourself to useless information. There are many examples. To get you started: how often do you check your email or social media accounts? How often do you unlock your phone to idle away some time? Do you read any celebrity gossip sites? Do you obsess over sports? I am not saying that you cannot idle away some time every now and again. Instead, the problem is compulsive behavior, which is certainly the case with regards to the intimate relationship many people have with their smartphone.

  In general, try to minimize distractions. This means, for instance, not to pointlessly multitask. Some people constantly have a video or audio source on, no matter what they may be doing. Yet, if you try to get serious work done, that kind of distraction is counter-productive. There are also visual distractions. Personally, I dislike it when my home or workplace is in disarray. If you think visual clutter does not affect you, just try cleaning up your place. You may notice a difference. Even if you think you do not care and tell yourself that you thrive on chaos: have you ever looked for something for a lot longer than you would have liked to? Also, can you see a convincing advantage of having a messy desk, room, or apartment? Even if you work in a creative field, you can surely be much more creative if everything in your surroundings is exactly where it is supposed to be.

  There is also mental clutter, for instance trying to keep too many things in your head. This problem can be trivially solved by making a few notes instead of juggling your to-d
o list in your head. Indecisiveness is a related problem. Instead of making a decision, many people hem and haw over decisions, even sometimes rather simple ones, wasting copious amounts of time and mental energy. Just make a choice and move on!

  Let us now return to meditation proper. You now know everything you need about meditation, minus the bullshit, of course. I have covered all necessary techniques and also many of the positive effects of consistent meditative practice. The latter should be motivation enough for you to keep going. At least for the first six months, focus on meditating once or twice a day and incorporate it into your daily routine, similar to brushing your teeth.

  Previously, I stated that aiming for ten or fifteen minutes of daily practice is plenty of time. What I have observed in some people is a certain competitive streak that they can't seem to shake off. I used to be in the same boat as I wanted to explore for how long I could meditate. That is likewise a waste of your time as you surely have more important things to do. I suggest adding meditation to your daily rituals, but do not practice it excessively. You will get diminishing returns very quickly otherwise.

  To maximize the benefits of meditation, you can, after a while, try to reach the first proper meditative state, clarity, whenever you want to or need to. Say, you have an important business meeting coming up and are getting nervous. In this case, taking the proverbial deep breath can help, but it is even more effective to spend just one minute or two in the meditative state of clarity. Of course, it can be difficult to slip into this state of mind if there is some noise or other disturbances. Even if you have your own office, it may be difficult for you because, for instance, you want to avoid to seem sleeping or daydreaming at your desk. In this case, just go to the men's room and sit down for a moment. You may come back more refreshed than you ever were. Being able to clear your mind quickly that way and regain mental clarity is beneficial in many situations. If you manage to get to that point, then, quite frankly, you can consider yourself to have graduated and stop meditating in a ritualized way altogether.

  Appendix

  Serious Meditation

  Meditation Without Bullshit presents a simple meditative practice that can be followed by anyone. The amount of time required is rather modest. Fifteen minutes of consistent meditative practice will allow you to reap significant benefits. However, some of you may want to pursue meditation much more seriously. Only for those people have I added this appendix. Much of this information is impractical for most of you. If you have not been meditating in the lotus position for fifteen minutes for at least half a year, there is probably no point for you in even reading on.

  Meditating for fifteen minutes a day can give you decent results. While it is undoubtedly true that meditating for longer will allow you to progress much faster, making that statement early in this book would make most people reflexively put it away. Obviously, it is a very hard sell to tell people to suffer physical and psychological discomfort through meditation for one hour every day, with the possibility that they may not experience much in terms of positive effects. By setting the bar lower, people are much more inclined to give meditation a try.

  In the following, I assume that you are able to meditate without discomfort or with only negligible discomfort for fifteen minutes. Now that you have been meditating for a non-trivial period of time — half a year is not much in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly shows dedication — you may be eager to explore meditation further. Maybe my description of meditative states has piqued your interest. Still, your goal should not be to strive towards attaining those meditative stages. If you reach them, then let them pass you by instead of engaging with them.

  For serious meditation, set aside at least one hour every day. Of course, you can as well meditate for thirty minutes for half a year as an intermediate step. Yet, the difficulty of going from fifteen minutes to one hour is not much higher than going from fifteen to thirty minutes, so you may as well go all the way. The important step is to overcome the initial state of chaos. If this takes you twenty minutes, you don't have much time left in a thirty-minute session. If you want to push yourself even further, then keep in mind that I used to meditate for two times one hour every weekday, and up to two times three hours on the weekend for years.

  You know when to reduce the time spent meditating once you get to the point where you can very quickly advance from chaos to clarity. If you manage to reach warmth within moments of sitting down, there probably is less of a need for you to meditate for two hours every day. Once I reached that point, I began reducing the amount of time spent meditating as well, largely based on the observation that there was no discernible benefit in longer meditation sessions with that level of experience anymore.

  In particular for longer meditation sessions, it is of paramount importance to sit in the lotus position. Keep your spine straight and don't fidget. Sit completely still. I prefer lowering my chin at the start of a long meditation session as I find this more comfortable than meditating with a straight neck. The latter may lead to muscle tensions.

  For a very effective meditation session, you have to reach the state of clarity as soon as possible. An experienced practitioner should be able to reach it more or less the moment he closes his eyes. Let me repeat that you should not chase the attainment of particular meditative states beyond clarity. You will commonly enter warmth and if you decide to not let go of this state, you may enter even deeper states, which are largely a distraction. I used to meditate for as long as I could stay in warmth, which sometimes caused me to end my meditation session after five to six hours as I was feeling uncomfortable. It is a very pleasant state to be in, but there is no need to explore your physiological limits. Also, those are trance-like states you may find it difficult to break out of, sometimes even with an alarm clock, as they progressively take control away from you. It is easier to snap out of them as you are slipping into those states, as opposed to when they are fully underway.

  I sometimes extend the duration during which I stay in warmth by focusing on the center of the energy I feel, but I normally aim to exit this state and reenter clarity, sometimes with a detour to a deeper state. Reentering clarity after warmth happens, at least for me, with a completely empty mind. As an intermediate practitioner, you may move back and forth between chaos and clarity several times during a meditation session, while someone more experienced will not slip back into chaos.

  For practical purposes, I have the impression that your biggest benefits will come from clarity and warmth. The deeper states I mentioned earlier can leave you feeling confused for a while. You may even feel drained. Consequently, I consider it counterproductive to aim for those states and try to remain in them as long as possible instead of merely passing through them.

  Effects of Serious Meditation

  Moderate meditation of fifteen minutes a day has a positive effect on your life. However, seriously meditating for hours a day can have a profoundly life-changing effect. I got a glimpse of that when, as a beginner, I met a monk in his fifties who had been meditating for all his adult life. The serenity he exuded was quite astounding. Consequently, I become very skeptical whenever I meet an alleged meditation guru who does not exude much calmness. It's a wide spectrum, of course, but the worst I met was an alleged guru whose body language and antics would have been more befitting of a boisterous drunkard in the corner pub.

  People pick up on serenity very easily. I had complete strangers in social settings ask me why I am so calm. On a more humorous note, I have had it happen repeatedly that people in a meditation group I visited for the first time assumed that I am the teacher, or the replacement teacher, just based on how I carried myself. I have also encountered time and again that incompetent gurus were noticeably uncomfortable with my presence.

  Serenity is a manifestation of being at ease with yourself and the world, which is a state you cultivate through meditation. Entering clarity will help you to some extent, but the effect of the state of warmth is much greater. The ca
lmness that comes with this meditative state carries over into your daily life. I furthermore think that experiencing this often enough can lead to permanent changes in how you perceive the world.

  In particular, meditation helped me clear up some of my neuroses. For instance, I used to have the problem that, when I was hanging out with a girl who was into me, I just couldn't make a move, for instance taking her hand or leaning in to kiss her. As much as feminists claim that it isn't so, it is a simple fact of life that attractive women only very rarely make the first move. That is your job, bucko! I had found myself in situations where I was fully aware that the girl was very interested in me. I could tell that she wanted me to touch her or that she wanted to be kissed. Yet, I could not do it. To me, it felt as if there was a barrier separating me and her. It would make for a more relatable story if I told you that I gradually chipped away at that imaginary barrier, but instead the effect was immediate and permanent. I had gotten to a point where my passivity started to bother me to such an extent that it was frequently on my mind. Yet, one fine day, after getting up from a long meditation session I had largely spent in the state of warmth, the mere thought of an invisible barrier keeping me from getting intimate with girls all of a sudden seemed ludicrous to me. From then onward, interacting with women was easy.

  Let me mention one more example. The relationship I had with my father used to be a difficult one as I found him overbearing. This had the eventual consequence that I felt uneasy when he came back home from work. As soon as I heard him close the door of our house behind him, the mere knowledge of his presence started weighing on me. I do not want to insinuate that he physically abused me. That was not the case at all. Instead, he was a very authoritative father. I managed to get rid of the negative emotions associated with him by evoking memories associated with those emotions during the meditative state of chaos. My perception was that several such meditation sessions washed away the negative associations I had. Consequently, my relationship with my old man improved considerably.