Some Lessons From Meditation.

     When my trip to Myanmar was complete, I flew to Kuala Lumpur to attend and 10-day Vipassana Meditation retreat, of the fabled “ones where you can’t talk” variety. I had done a few of them beforehand so I knew what to expect, and in a way, I looked forward to it. They are challenging, but are by no means impossible. Eventually, they end.

     Before going to my first course I had never meditated before. I wasn’t interested in religion or anything mystical. I had red scientific studies on the benefits of meditation, and they were all promising. I did minimal research on the techniques of meditation available, and eventually settled on Vipassana, as taught by S.N. Goenka, for no other reasons than convenience of location, and admiration of their donation only model.

     There are many techniques of mediation, and I’ve primarily practiced Vipassana. Most meditation techniques have the practitioner focus their attention on one thing. I could be a phrase, or a visualization, or a bodily process such as the breath, or as in the case of Vipassana as taught by S.N. Goenka, the object of meditation are the bodily sensations. It’s a banal process. Yet it leads, without any religion or mysticism, to divine realizations. For me, meditation has been a been a means of logical inquiry. It has given me tremendous insight into how to behave as a human being, nothing more.

     The first thing I learned was how fleeting my attention was. In an hour of meditation, I may have been keeping my awareness where I was supposed to for a handful of minutes. The second thing I learned was how useless anger was. Sitting eyes closed for hours on end, trying to fix my attention to a particular place, my mind would wander. Over 10 days it often wandered into the land of imagined conflict. While there, my mind would have arguments with people. My mind was architect and director: ‘First: they will say this, and you will then throw a disparaging counter-argument at them, to which they would probably respond thusly, and you would outwit them with…’ and on it would go. Madness. Eventually, I would return to my practice, but could detect noticeably bad sensations. I concluded: ‘Being angry makes me feel bad, clouds my thinking, and causes me to treat others poorly. Anger, is useless.’ The power of simple observation.

     This realization did not rid me of my anger, not even close. It all has to be worked out properly. However, it was a helpful experience for me. Whenever I’m angry now, I know from both reason and experience that I’m making a bad decision in continuing to be angry.

     I talked to several people afterwards, and had talked to friends in the past about such imagined conflict. The vast majority of people are both aware of, and willing to tell me, that they have fantasy conflict. Many of my guy friends, including myself, talked about the standard ‘what if 10 gunmen suddenly entered this building’ daydreams. Women, particularly those I was dating, tended to argue with men, which was of course me in most cases, about personal relationship things that actual men are terrible discussing, which is to say we discuss them like men. They would often add that they are actually angry with the person, again often me, with whom they had an imagined argument when they saw them later that day. In all seriousness, this was how I found out all such ridiculousness was going on!  

     

     It’s a universal feature of mind’s to do have imagined conflict, but it’s a dangerous thing. The human brain processes about 12 million bits of information per second. Only 40 bits per second make up our awareness. That seems to fit well with long term meditators insistence that these imaginary fights are going on around the clock; wars are being waged in our capacious subconscious. Having jettisoned much of my fantasy anger, I am indeed a happier person. I quickly learned that all negative mental states are useless. Even basic worry is logically useless. Maintaining awareness of a situations if a good thing, but worrying about it is counter-productive. Like all else, the end of worry must be worked out.

I’ve learned that most, if not all, therapeutic traditions have different but effective ways of extracting the same basic flaws. I once spent several months living with a shaman in the Amazon rain-forest  and found the principal to be the same, though the symbols used were radically different. For me, the meditation has been the most powerful medicine, and the insights keep coming.

     As a strategy, it has taught me that there are two ways to solve life’s apparent problems: attain the apparent solution outside or dissolve the problem from within. I may be able to construct a life where I’m unlikely to encounter phenomena that cause me anger, but I’ll still stub my toe. It’s better to un-learn anger. If there are things I want to buy, then I can either do what it takes to buy them, or I can teach myself to un-want them. If one is skilled enough at un-wanting things, eventually they’ll want no-thing. Billionaires are not so content. One can attain the status of the person they want to be seen as, or they could get rid of an identity constructed by others, and be themselves.