Unlearning Meditation: What to Do When the Instructions Get in the Way

by Jason Siff

  The Buddha will use common words, such as person and self, while the Abhidhamma describes inner experiences in terms of elements and their characteristics, relations, and functions. The Buddha uses a variety of words to convey nuances of experience, perception, and understanding, while the Abhidhamma systematically reduces the meanings of words so that they can fit into doctrinally relevant categories. Where the Buddha describes an experience with the aid of similes, metaphors, and unusual word choices, the Abhidhamma provides the student with a single-word concept of the experience and includes it within a categorical system of pairs, groups of three, and longer lists. It is a system that suits abstract thinkers and those who seek order within themselves.

  The Buddha’s Language

  The Buddha used words, phrases, metaphors, and similes to talk about the meditative experiences he and others around him had. Some scholars believe that his original language was some form of ancient Magadhi, which was later combined with features of other neighboring languages and developed into the Pali language. Sometime later, the Buddha’s expressions were put into a hybrid form of Sanskrit. Over the centuries, the Buddha’s words have been translated into many Asian languages and, in modern times, into Western languages.

  The Buddha chose to name, describe, and express meditative experiences in his own words, occasionally borrowing words from the other teachings of his day, using those words as a native speaker would. He didn’t need to go to a dictionary, read divergent translations, or consult with learned pandits on the meanings and connotation of the words he chose, but that is what we have to do when we embark on learning his language. Our situation with the Pali language and the texts written in it is that we can only attempt to reconstruct what the Buddha meant when he said all those wondrous things, as there can be no one who knows that language as it was spoken and understood during his lifetime (especially considering that he spoke in a dialect that has essentially been lost to us).

  This does not mean it is futile to try to understand those teachings. What it does mean, however, is that the language he used in talking about his experiences in meditation is not the language each of us uses today. Just as he used his own language to refer to what he experienced and understood, we must also use our own language, for it is through our native tongue (or a second language we have gained fluency in) that we may be able to independently name and describe our experiences and have little or no question about the meanings of the words we choose.

  For this reason I have largely moved away from using Pali terms and their English equivalents in teaching meditation, though I sometimes use them in Dharma teaching, since in that context, I am relating a teaching given by the Buddha and translating his language to the best of my knowledge. But when it comes to talking about our own inner experiences and how we understand them, language that rolls off our tongue and conveys our thoughts and feelings with greater certainty and clarity is far better than one that we are struggling to learn.

  Drawbacks of Using Single Words to Describe Experiences

  We often use the words fantasy and daydreaming to describe periods when we are lost in thoughts about what at first seem to be purely mental situations, such as rehashing a conversation and rehearsing a reply; working on the solution to a problem; writing an essay, story, or book; imagining a future scenario of wealth, happiness, or success; sexual thoughts and fantasies; or those periods when our minds just create some kind of unusual or nonsensical scenario out of thin air.

  Noticing and talking about thoughts as “distractions,” “past or future,” or “monkey mind” often leads to a rejection and devaluation of one’s thoughts in meditation. These terms are used to describe thoughts in relation to how they fit with the instructions and concepts of the meditation practice. In a practice of trying to watch the breath all the time, thoughts will most likely be experienced as distractions. If one is trying to be in the present moment with awareness of the breath, then most thinking will be either of the past or of the future, except for that thinking which is reminding one to be in the present moment or to return to the breath. And monkey mind tends to conjure up an image of a monkey running amok in one’s head. I believe it is often used as shorthand for simply saying, “My mind is racing and I just can’t control it!”

  Words such as planning and thinking function like all of the above and, like the words you use for emotions, are the hardest to truly question, for you may seem to get close to what you’re experiencing when using such words. But that is because you have not gone into fuller, detailed descriptions of what is going on when you notice yourself planning or thinking.

  This brings up the whole area of not going into the content of your experience. Planning and thinking are general terms that are meant to indicate the process one is going through. But how can process be separated from content? When you try to look at thinking without noticing the content of the thoughts, the process of thinking (or act of thinking) becomes the object of your awareness and thus becomes the content of your experience. Meditators who practice noticing thinking as “thinking, thinking” may find that when they have been thinking for a period of time, they remember very little of what they were thinking about, for they have not been paying attention to the content. But they do recall that they were thinking.

  In the language of Vipassana meditation, they were attending to the mind door of experience, where the mind is supposedly operating like any other sense door with its objects of awareness. Just as the eye sees shapes, the mind thinks thoughts. One need not bother with the content of the thoughts, for Vipassana meditators are mostly instructed to shift their attention away from sense objects to the sense doors. So they learn to be aware of the activity of thinking and tend to regard all thoughts as equally undesirable. Thus, not only is what one thinks about deemed irrelevant, but attending to it, especially staying with it and examining it (yet more thinking), is considered a wrong form of practice.

  From the point of view of knowing, describing, and understanding your experience, what you are thinking about is as important as the process of thinking itself. In fact, the process of thinking may actually be affected by the kind of thoughts you are having. The same is true for planning. Say I am thinking about a particular person I am planning to meet after the meditation workshop is over and I am dreading seeing him, trying to figure out what I will say and do when I see him. When such experiences in meditation are described as just thinking or planning, there is really no knowledge of what was going on at that time, which, in this instance, was a period of dreading someone and figuring out what to say to him. But if you are asked what you were planning and give a description of the experience like I just did, then knowledge of what was going on in your mind can be recovered. This is where recollection can further your ability to know experiences that have previously been summed up by a single-word concept.

  How We Talk about Physical Experiences

  Meditation students are also generally instructed to talk about bodily experience using single-word descriptors. Sensations are hot or cold, sharp or dull, pleasant or unpleasant, vibrating or tingling. Your body feels light, heavy, porous, or spacious. The breath is coarse or fine, slow or fast, long or short, easeful or heavy.

  This seems to be the appropriate way to talk about our bodily experience. When we go to the doctor, we report our sensations using these same descriptive words. But when we are asked to go further into a description of our bodily experiences, we may find that we lack a certain vocabulary and have to resort to similes: “The pain was sharp and spread like splinters.”

  The same holds true when writing or talking about physical sensations in meditation. We often have to get creative or recall useful similes in talking about them in any detail. As we do, we are also developing a finer sensibility around our bodily experience. An experience one might have previously described as “heavy” becomes “grounded and solid like a mountain.” Such descriptions may sound as though you are moving away from the physical experience, but t
hat is not really the case. The added adjectives and simile in this description can communicate effectively to both those who have had similar experiences in meditation and those who have not.

  What I have said in this chapter relates to how language will be used when describing the experiences of meditators in this book. Instead of distilling people’s experiences into single-word concepts of the experience or placing interpretations on them, I will try to present you with their experiences as they were related to me (or to themselves in their meditation journals). As you read their experiences, I suggest you refer to your own experiences in meditation (or similar ones outside of meditation) and use this material to reflect on what goes on in your meditation sittings.

  7

  Personal Stories

  Many meditation practices that come out of the East discourage meditation students from paying attention to their personal stories in meditation while at the same time giving them stories about enlightened or awakened individuals. The emphasis is on learning the stories of the meditation practice or its tradition and using those historical figures and their experiences as models of higher development. The path and goal of meditation is sometimes stated as getting past your personal story, to transcend the ego. At the same time, your life history and concerns are often deemed somehow inferior, wrong, or deluded.

  Yet Western psychology tends to value our personal stories, as do most of us. So when Eastern meditation practices with an ideology of transcending the ego collide with psychologically informed Western meditators, what tends to happen is that personal stories are axed from the meditation practice in the pursuit of finding a transcendent reality.

  At first it does sound like a great idea to take a vacation from our worries, cares, complexes, obsessions, you name it, and bask on a sunny transcendent beach, lulled by each in-breath and out-breath or the hum of a mantra. Getting this taste of deep contentment on vacation, one naturally longs to move there, to merge with the transcendent One. “This is what Eastern meditation practice is really about,” I think to myself for a moment, and then I recall how many times I have visited this vacation spot before, and each time I had to return home. And returning home was never easy, as I hadn’t wanted to leave my vacation spot in the first place. I wanted to make it last forever. But, alas, it could last only as long as it would last.

  The Buddhist practitioner steeped in Dharma teachings may have a different story about this experience from that of the transcendentalist I momentarily slipped into. As a Vipassana meditator, the sunny transcendent beach is right there in my attention staying with each in-breath and out-breath. “This is all there is,” I tell myself, “I have no past nor future. Each moment is coming and going.” Within the flux of one moment of awareness vanishing and another arising, there is no self to be aware of, no self that is in the awareness. It is pure awareness knowing the impermanence of all things. And when I return from this vacation, wishing that I could have stayed there forever, I am comforted to know that everything is changing, though I still hold on to that experience of impermanence as the true mark of existence.

  The teacher of unlearning meditation now steps in and sees these two scenarios as stories about meditation, and personal ones at that. For some unknown reason, an acceptable story about meditative states, experiences, and realizations gets treated with greater validity and trust than your own, which is more honest and realistic. Do meditation students realize that they are trading in their personal stories of turmoil, growth, failure, fortune, and the like with the hope of arriving at someone else’s attainment? It may not look like that at first, because it sounds like the person is just uprooting the ego and merging with the transcendent, which sounds perfectly acceptable. But wait! This transcendence happened to somebody, not to an abstract entity. This enlightened somebody was a human being, a story maker like the rest of us, and frankly, he composed a personal story about his meditative experiences that, incidentally, had various ingredients found in his tradition’s stories of transcendence.

  You might argue, and I might do the same, that the person was radically and permanently changed by the experience captured in his story, proving the truth of the transcendent experience and the validity of the story. Such proof has to be tested in the course of time. Since we can’t get inside the person’s head, we can’t quite know what is going on there unless he tells us things. Those things he tells us are stories, though they may be couched as facts, truths, realities.

  We may clutch these stories as the core of meditation practice in a chosen tradition, hoping that by remembering them, and applying their methods, we will touch the truth within them. To do that, we must then believe that the stories of enlightenment, of awakening, of higher states of consciousness, do rest on an experiential truth, which human beings are capable of discovering. There has to be something real that the stories help us get at. That truth is not the story composed about it. It is the experience.

  Personal Narratives

  Our personal stories, however, have a distinct ring of truth to them. They are experiential but not the bodily or sense-based experiences one learns to appreciate and value in meditation. Personal stories have a running narrative, themes, characters, beliefs, plots and subplots, in short, all the ingredients of a story. As such, they can be dramatic, funny, ironic, fanciful, or realistically descriptive. They are open to investigation and critical analysis, as one would find when recollecting one’s narratives in a meditation sitting and writing them down. They tend to get replayed in our meditations and outside of them, and just like an endlessly repeated sitcom on TV, we enjoy the episodes we like and passively endure the ones we don’t, or we just turn the channel.

  So much time in meditation is taken up by our stories, so why not accept them into our meditation sittings? Why not let our internal narrators take the stage and perform? They will do it anyway, without asking our permission. And there may be things for us to learn about ourselves from enduring their performances.

  I often suggest that meditators notice the narrator’s voice, his or her speech patterns, the choice of words, and the emotional tone or flavor in the narration. The direction here is to move closer to who is doing the talking in your head. Is it your voice? Or are you using someone else’s voice for this particular story?

  Having a good idea of the narrator is one part of the equation. When we are narrating a story, we are talking to an audience. There is a particular someone, or a group of people, to whom the narrative is being directed. Your choice of words might give you a clue as to who that audience is. Another way to bring the audience out of the shadows and closer to the stage is to see this internal monologue as a performance for somebody, not just yourself. Maybe it is for somebody’s attention. You want a particular person to hear this story, not just anyone.

  Many narratives are not monologues. You might notice that you get into some pretty intense dialogues in your meditation sittings. Dialogues can be reruns of real conversations with different options and endings, or they can be completely new creations based on previous ones. They can also be debates, chitchat, or storytelling.

  In the meditation journals I receive, people sometimes report having conversations with me in their sittings. By knowing that I will be reading their journals, they speak directly to me in them, setting up a dialogue in the journaling process. Rather than ignoring this relationship that is formed between a student and me, I tend to want to talk about it. The story of your relationship with your teacher is an important one, and I believe it needs to be looked at in the process of unlearning meditation.

  Reality and Fantasy

  This brings me to the whole issue of reality and fantasy in our stories. If our real stories are considered to be a waste of time in meditation, then a fantasy must be an even bigger waste of time. It is generally much harder for meditation students to tolerate having a fantasy in their meditation sittings than a reimagining of an actual past event. I generally prefer not to use the word fantasy when talking about ima
gined scenarios occurring within meditation sittings, for fantasies are looked down on by most meditation traditions.

  In Western psychology, there is a history of looking at our fantasy lives and seeing what they can reveal about us, whether they are based on true events or imagined ones. Our imaginings are sometimes the very stories that perpetuate dissatisfaction with ourselves and others, being the burden that we carry with us. They are used to base our hopes and dreams on, and often, when unexamined, our concocted scenarios of the future are what we tend to follow. They can’t just be eliminated by trying to stop our mind from going into the past and the future. Such stories are often too deeply embedded to be put to rest by finding some temporary way around them.

  Meditation is a perfect place to sit with our stories and get to know them. They will come up often, so why not invite them in? With a growing tolerance of them and patience with the process of being with them, we may find it is not such a disagreeable way to spend part of a meditation sitting after all. It is quite possible, with the added quality of sincere interest in them, that we will find exploring them to be a valuable practice.

  Which Story to Follow?

  When meditating using one of the techniques that disallow thinking, the question about which story to follow doesn’t come up. But when we let ourselves think about things in our sittings, we may want to have some criteria regarding which stories we should pay attention to and which ones should be passed over. This must be learned through trial and error, by taking a risk and following a narrative to see where it leads.