Chapter Notes: Part III, Chapter 3

Primary Source Extracts & Notes to Self

NB: When writing a history, the hours spent in research tend to outweigh those spent shaping the narrative itself. Along the way, you collect all kinds of material — primary sources, theoretical reflections, marginalia — that never make it into the final cut. These “Chapter Notes” are for readers who want to know more about the people and events behind the story, and who don’t mind wandering down a few adjacent corridors.

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The arguments in Chapter 3 are built on the back of meditation practice, and I mention several times in it that grasping the illusory nature of the self is less about intellectual knowledge than experiential understanding.

I’ve gone through many phases of intense meditation in my life. During my second such phase, back in the mid-2010s, I wrote a meditation primer for a friend and published it on a small blog.

In the interest of supplying some practical advice to supplement the intellectual arguments in the main chapter, what follows is a lightly trimmed version of the primer I wrote in 2016:

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Push-Ups for the Mind

I like to think of sitting meditation as doing “push-ups for the mind.” Simple sitting meditation is as fundamental to training the mind as basic bodyweight exercises are to improving the body. If you can’t do five push-ups in a row, or sit still and calmly observe your mind for five minutes, then you aren’t beginning to fulfill the basic potentialities of being human.

And like push-ups, sitting meditation is a simplified exercise that spills over into strength in other, more practical areas of life. Also like push-ups, it’s something you don’t naturally want to do — your brain and body evolved to be fundamentally lazy and energy-conserving, and exercises like these force you to push beyond impulsive laziness towards a higher, more long-term goal.

You’ll see some initial benefits almost immediately with just daily sessions of 3-5 minutes. But the real benefits come when you can do longer sessions regularly. Being able to easily negotiate a 30-minute meditation session is a good goal, attainable within a few months if you follow my advice below.

Benefits

The initial and most obvious benefit of regular meditation is that it becomes easier to concentrate in other areas of life, such as reading a challenging book or working through a difficult problem. If you can maintain focus on something as boring as your breath for 10-15 seconds at a time before your mind slips, then maintaining focus while working or reading becomes a breeze. This is a benefit you’re likely to notice after a week or so of daily practice of 5 minutes or more.

There are also well-established physiological effects: meditation activates your parasympathetic nervous system and reduces cortisol levels and other markers of stress. Extended regular meditation even makes the prefrontal cortex in your brain bigger — effectively strengthening your “executive function” muscle.

But this stronger “prefrontal cortex muscle” relates to two deeper benefits: freedom from automatic reactions and the ability to take a “watcher’s view.” After you overcome the initial difficulties (your brain screaming at you like a spoiled two-year-old with endless thoughts you can’t stop) and settle into truly focusing on the breath, you’ll begin to notice that you’re actually watching thoughts form.

You’ll get glimpses of this at first, but as you become capable of longer meditations with a more settled mind, it becomes evident that thoughts are simply forming without direction from you. Within the meditation session, you slowly become better at recognizing thoughts as they form and letting them dissipate instead of getting wrapped up in them.

This ability to notice thoughts as they form, and then let them go, leads to the far more important capability to notice thoughts arising in daily life and act on them (or choose to ignore them) with more detachment and objectivity. This skill is useful in “heat of the moment” situations, when being able to pause before reacting in a way you’ll regret later. It’s harder to recognize “thought-formation” in such situations, but becomes more possible as you get more skilled in meditation.

Watching thought formation also develops a “watcher’s view” of yourself. As this “watcher” becomes stronger — first in meditation sessions, then in daily life — you become more able to detach from automatic judgments about how things affect you and more able to accept what life happens to offer in the moment, which can lead to a deep form of happiness/satisfaction that can be recalled in most situations.

However, since getting these later-stage benefits takes years of practice, and because part of making meditation “work” involves not pushing too hard for definable results, I think it’s best to treat meditation as more of a self-control exercise geared towards increasing your ability to focus. Allow the other benefits to come as side-effects.

A Simple Practice: Focusing Exercise

What I’ll detail below is a simplified, secularized form of Vipassana meditation, also called “insight meditation.” I’ve done other forms as well, but given my experience, I think insight meditation is the best starting point because it’s truly fundamental to all other forms of practice, as well as theoretically simple (though in practice very difficult). All you do is sit down and focus on your breath.

This should be considered first and foremost a focusing exercise. The self-awareness benefits will paradoxically come only if you aren’t fixated on them: you must let them arise naturally by simply focusing on the breath and considering the exercise one of self-discipline in being able to sit still and focus.