3. The Logic of Practice

In his apology, Plato attributes the following now famous words to Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. Now whether or not that’s strictly true, the unexamined life is certainly needlessly painful, both for oneself and for others. And painful or not. The unexamined life is certainly less interesting. We really spend our lives learning how to live. And this isn’t necessarily as absurd or as tragic as it sounds. Most of us find a pattern of living that makes approximate sense. And we tinker with it for decades. If you’re lucky, you’ll discover that you can live more or less the way you want. But even if you’re lucky, you’ll find that it’s possible to want the wrong things to be lowered into squandering your time and attention to be bewitched in a way, by things that don’t really matter. Even if you’re lucky, happiness can be surprisingly elusive. So why meditate? The basic logic is quite simple. The quality of your mind determines the quality of your life, or happiness and suffering, no matter how extreme our mental events, the mind depends upon the body, of course, and the body upon the world. But everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad situations, because changing how you respond to the world is often as good as changing the world. Of course, you can try to change the world, you can try to get everyone around you to behave exactly as you want. You can try to never get sick or injured, you can try to keep your favorite possessions from getting damaged or lost. But try as hard as you might. The sources of stress and disappointment and embarrassment, and self doubt will always be there. Happily, there’s another game to play. And not everyone knows about it. Rather than trying to change the world. In each moment, there is another move open to you. You can look more closely at what you’re doing with your own mind, and actually cease to respond to life in ways that produce needless suffering for yourself and those around you. When we’re lost in thought, there are certain things we tend not to notice about the nature of our minds. For instance, every thought or feeling you’ve ever had, good or bad, has arisen and then passed away. The anger you felt yesterday, or a year ago, isn’t here anymore. And if it arises in the next moment, based on your thinking about the past, it will once again pass away when you’re no longer thinking about it. This is a profoundly important truth about the mind. And it can be absolutely liberating to understand it deeply. If you do understand it deeply. That is if you’re able to pay clear attention to the arising of an emotion like anger, rather than merely think about why you have every right to be angry, it actually becomes impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments at a time. If you think you can stay angry for a day, or even an hour, without continually manufacturing this emotion, by thinking without knowing that you’re thinking you are mistaken. This is an objective claim about the mechanics of your own subjectivity. And I invite you to test it. And meditation is the tool you would use to test it. Well, I can’t promise that meditation will keep you from ever becoming angry again, you can learn not to stay angry, or fearful or embarrassed, etc. for very long. And when talking about the consequences of negative emotions in the real world, and in your life, the difference between moments and hours, or days and weeks, is impossible to exaggerate. This is not to say that external circumstances don’t matter. But it is your mind rather than the circumstances themselves. that determines the quality of your life. Some people are content in the midst of real deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world. And there are practices that allow us to break this habit of being lost in thought, and to simply become aware of our experience in the present moment. And the main one that I’m teaching in this course, is a technique known as Vipassana, which is generally translated as insight meditation. And this comes from the oldest tradition of Buddhism known as the Tera vaada. The quality of mind cultivated in Vipassana practice is almost always referred to as mindfulness. There’s nothing spooky about mindfulness.
It’s simply a state of clear, non judgmental and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. This practice has been shown to produce long lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception. And these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain. Mindfulness is now very much in vogue Of course, but it seems to me that there are still many misconceptions about it. It’s often taught and marketed as though it were merely an improved version of an executive stress ball, where it is really more like the Large Hadron Collider. That is a method for making profound discoveries, in this case about the nature of our own minds. And there’s nothing passive about mindfulness. You could even say that it expresses a certain kind of passion, a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in each moment. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience. It is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. One of the great strengths of this technique of meditation, from a secular point of view is that it doesn’t require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified beliefs. It simply demands that we pay close attention to the flow of our experience in each moment. So as you progress through this course, notice that what you’re being asked to do more and more is to simply recognize what is already arising in consciousness in each moment, without modifying it without grasping at what’s pleasant or pushing what’s unpleasant away. In some basic sense, meditation is the act of doing less than you normally do is the act of being less distracted in the midst of everything that is already happening on its own. And once one is less distracted, one finally has a tool with which to notice truths about one’s mind that otherwise would never be discovered directly.