Meditation Isn’t about Silencing the Mind
Reading time: 2ish minutes.
My early years of meditation (20+ years ago) were fraught with all sorts of misconceptions.
I believed meditation would not only be a way for me to discover the true nature of Reality, the true nature of myself, but also it would somehow magically shut down the monkey mind permanently. End all suffering. Some called it spiritual awakening, liberation, enlightenment, heaven on earth. If the Buddha could do it, why not me?
Why. Not. Me, Me, Me.
Excited about the possibility of one day living in perfect calm and shooting laser beams from my eyeballs, I sat down in silence every day (er, most days; some days?)…
Only to (temporarily) toss meditation into the recycling bin a few years later. No one can permanently quiet the mind, I concluded. Not me, not you, not anyone. The people who say they can are lying. (Sit quietly with your eyes closed for 5 minutes with the goal of having no thoughts. See how it goes. Report back.)
Did I feel profound bouts of stillness, lovely ecstatic states, and deep temporary peace? For sure. But I couldn’t stop thoughts from rising. More importantly, sitting in silence, no matter how long, didn’t seem to translate into less suffering in real life. I could easily leave an hour-long meditation session and find myself stressed out two minutes later, like the people who leave church only to honk and flip each other off in the parking lot on the way out.
(Of course, I was missing the point of meditation, which is to realize there is no meditator, but most of us seekers miss that because we are too busy seeking. This is why some say—wake up to what you are first, then meditate. Awaken, then do practices.)
Anyway, momma didn’t raise no quitter, so there was only one thing left to do: swap meditation for a hodgepodge of other spiritual rituals and teachings… and keep on keepin’ on.
Only, I found these practices equally fruitless in terms of delivering the kind of peace I was looking for.
Not until years later did it finally dawn on me.
The point of meditation, or any spiritual practice, isn’t to shut down the mind but to see the futility of trying to do so. The point is to see the illusion, the utter failure, the futility, of a “me” trying to find peace by manipulating or rearranging external circumstances. The point is to twig the futility of believing happiness can be found by controlling, changing, or grasping onto, whatever happens to show up on the life TV, whether it be wanted or unwanted emotions, wanted or unwanted thoughts, wanted or unwanted situations. The point is to realize the awareness that’s aware-ing the thoughts is what you are, which is the very same energy as the rising thoughts themselves. THIS, one eternal mysterious movement—peace, stillness, consciousness, awareness—can never be found in the so-called future, but only, ever, NOW.
In my case, ultimately, the seeking of said peace, and not finding, through various pursuits led to the kind of surrender that needed to happen in order for me to see that what I was looking for was always right here.
It’s the big cosmic joke.
THE END OF THE SEARCH
And, THIS, ultimately, is the shift in perception that can reduce stress, psychological suffering, and quiet the mind, so to speak. The end of the search is seeing through the illusion that there’s a separate “me” here doing a life “out there.” It’s understanding that the movement of life, the interconnected flow of it—all of it—no matter what shape or form it happens to take, zen or not zen, is what we are. The energy, or impulse, of swerving to miss an oncoming car is no different from the energy, or impulse, of grass growing, a dog barking, thoughts rising, these fingers typing, the sun shining, a horn blaring, tears falling. Life and all of its seemingly separate thoughts, sounds, sights, and sensations is one boundary-less ocean of flow. We seem to easily accept the fact that we can’t control a thunderstorm but we desperately want to believe there’s a “me” here who can, and should, control the rest of life. This misidentification of the egoic mini-me as searcher, doer, and controller causes tremendous suffering. It did for me.
Perhaps some are able to realize, and further embody, this understanding through meditation by seeing they are the silent awareness within which thoughts, and all other phenomena, come and go. For me, it was more about experiencing the futility of trying to find peace in order to faceplant into realizing it can’t be found this way, or any other way, because how can you find what was never lost in the first place?
There’s no place like home 👠,
KB
Footnote: I sometimes still meditate to connect into stillness and/or to down-regulate my nervous system during stressful times but it’s no longer a practice I use as a way to get something I don’t already have. As I see it now, life itself is an ongoing meditation.
“If you want real control, drop the illusion of control. Let life live you. It does anyway.” ~ Byron Katie
“How do I integrate spirituality into my everyday life? Throw out the concept of 'spiritual life' and 'everyday life.' There is only one life, undivided and whole.” ~Adyashanti
“I see that the cage called myself is nothing solid at all, but an imaginary construction based on a misunderstanding of who and what myself is. Since that is the case, if one really desires freedom—and one must desire it more than anything else, otherwise one does not really desire freedom—one needs to clear up the misunderstanding by seeing things as they really are.” ~ Robert Saltzman
