Jason: I had an experience, I wanna ask you about this because I’m wondering, sometimes when you’re learning something new, you want to feel like you’re onto something, but you also just completely may not be. And it’s better to know that you’re not so you don’t lie to yourself or trick yourself. I think it’s really easy when you’re new to trick yourself into feeling like you’re getting somewhere because you naturally want to be making progress.
So I was, it’s happened actually a few days ago, I was walking down a tall hill, sort of this like spiral way down around the hill. And as I was kind of coming down into the tree line, it was just me, by the way, it was a wonderful, beautiful day, leaves glistening, just perfect day. And I just had this sort of flash of this, I don’t know, thought, insight, whatever it was that like, I’m not even here. Like I’m looking out, I’m experiencing this incredible sight. I’m not in it. I’m not adding anything to it. There’s nothing about this moment where I am. I happen, of course, be experiencing whatever this is, but I felt like I just wasn’t there and I didn’t need to be.
And it was this wonderfully interesting feeling. And then like, I looked down at my shoe and it just like, the whole thing blew up, you know? Like, oh, but here I am here. Yeah, whose foot is that? Yeah, whose foot is that? Now, what’s been interesting is that I’ve been following the Richard Lang Headless Way stuff on your app and finding it extraordinarily interesting and it really connects with me. It snaps in and I was sort of in this sort of, I felt like this kind of headless moment or whatever. But then I looked down at my shoe and it all just fell apart. It like collapsed immediately into this like, wait a second, was I just like tricking myself? Or is that kind of experience where you’re in some place and you’re just observing or whatever you’re doing and you realize that you’re not even there or not even in the scene yet.
Of course, something is there to experience this. Is there anything there or am I just sort of like grasping for, gosh, I hope this is something? Well, you couldn’t tell me that, but it’s an observation that I had. I’m curious what you’re taking.
Sam: Yeah, well, so you’re bringing up many pieces of the paradox here, which are hard to understand for people. I mean, there really is a, there’s a fundamental paradox in that it is perfectly natural, even inevitable, to associate progress in meditation with certain changes in the character of experience, right? I mean, that’s, and that is really the point in the beginning and for the longest time. People perceive that they have some kind of problem. For whatever reason, something about their experience persuades them that life could be better and that they’re suffering unnecessarily or there’s just aspects to mind they haven’t discovered.
And they’ve read a book about this stuff or they took psychedelics and then they had some experience but then it all wore off. And so now they’re convinced they have some kind of problem to solve. And meditation is the proffered remedy for that problem. And then the question is, at what point, so now you begin practicing, at what point do you begin to feel like, okay, well, this is working, right?
This is actually solving my problem. I’m feeling better, right? Or I’m feeling less neurotic or I’m less, I can see I’m having insights into something that I wasn’t noticing before. And so it seems to promise a path of changes to experience. And if you just keep walking that path and ultimately these changes will prove indelible or they’ll be vivid enough or there’ll be a point of no return or so it’s, so the logic of meditation becomes incorporated into the normal logic of seeking to become happy which is the logic by which we do everything else in our lives and which is really the basis for our underlying problem where we were continually deferring happiness to some point in the future where it can finally be enjoyed and yet the future never arrives. And we’re just, we’re left with our memories of the past and our expectations of the future and the present goes comparatively unnoticed or at minimum it’s just, it’s continually cluttered by our distraction.
So there is a problem and a paradox to become more and more sensitive to here which is that real progress in meditation breaks free of this logic, right? Where it’s not, so one heuristic here is that any change in your experience, right? Any, you know, a feeling of bliss or rapture or just joy or seeing something beautiful with your eyes closed, you see some inner lights or something, all of that stuff comes and goes like any other impermanent experience, right?
So none of that ultimately can be the point of learning to meditate. I mean, that’s just like eating a meal, right? It’s, you know, however pleasant it is, it’s eventually gone, right? And the wisdom we’re looking for in meditation, it’s not about having a peak experience which you then later remember and keep that memory around as a reference point. Though I’m not saying peak experiences can never be useful. Much of the, really all of the utility of psychedelics is to have certain peak experiences and to have them become reference points and then you can later work out the implications of having had those experiences in your life. But, you know, all the drugs wear off, right? And so you’re left with the larger project of figuring out what in this moment is available, what can be realized now. And for that project, by definition, you’re looking for something that is coincident with any possible contents of consciousness, right?
It’s like, what is there about the nature of consciousness that actually transcends its content, right? That’s where it’s not actually improved by the blissful feeling and it’s not actually harmed by the feeling of contraction or of regret or disappointment or anxiety or whatever the unpleasant mental state is that was arising based on you having been lost in thought a moment ago about some unpleasant things. And so the process of learning to meditate is one of continually breaking the spell of one’s clinging to positive experience and pushing negative experience away and of just allowing consciousness to be wide open and leave everything as it is, right?
And not to read into the changing contents of consciousness some story about progress or regress or anything, right? Just again, it’s just the sound of a bird impinging upon your ear in that moment. And if you’re listening closely enough, as with the headless way being taught by Richard Lang in the app, which he first learned from his teacher, Douglas Harding, who wrote a really seminal book on having no head as you can notice with your eyes open and as you inspect the visual field, your head isn’t there.
There’s just the world where your head is supposed to be. So too with listening to a sound of a bird, you can if listening closely enough or if in a moment of looking for yourself and not finding it, there’s just hearing, right? There’s no hearer and thing heard. There’s just the raw experience and the non-dual experience of hearing and there’s no story to tell about it. And there’s nothing to hold onto there. There’s just this, what will happen is in the beginning, you’ll notice that and then it’ll be natural for the thought to arise, oh, was that it, right?
Or like the checking on it, like you’re trying to resolve your doubts about the significance of this experience. Like you’ve been looking, you’ve heard me rattle on and on about the illusoriness of the self and how you can look for the self and not find it and have that not finding be clear. And then you’ve been frustrated by that and you’re trying to do it and noticing that the trying itself is an appearance in consciousness. It’s just like, it’s a kind of contraction of energy and that consciousness must be prior to that.
And you’re continually trying to untie the knot of self by looking, but yet it feels like someone’s looking, right? And yet there really can be this recognition where you look for yourself in the midst of seeing or hearing or sensing the breath. And there’s a clear moment of there being nothing there. And there’s just this kind of unity of experience, that kind of a unified field of consciousness and its contents, and there’s no center to it. But then again, a thought will arise uninspected and it will be the thought of, oh, that was it, or that must be it. But in that moment of being lost in that thought, it’s not it, you’re now trying to hold on to experience. And again, meditation there is just, once again, a process of recognizing that moment of distraction and letting everything be, letting the thought unravel as it will, and noticing this next moment of bright appearances, whether sounds or sensations or visual appearances or thoughts themselves.
So it’s continually this experience of non-clinging to experience and so part of, one way to know that you’re not doing that is to notice yourself holding on or keeping score or judging the changes. You were lost in thought for the last five minutes, you notice that, and then you think, oh, shit, I was supposed to be meditating. Like, why am I so bad at this? I’ve been doing this for months. And so that whole conversation is yet another moment of being lost in thought, and yet it’s going uninspected. And the best time to notice that is right now, right?
And nothing’s been lost, nothing’s been gained. Consciousness is already free of a center. It’s not like you’re going to meditate your ego out of existence. The thing doesn’t exist, right? There is just this openness and it’s not gonna get better than it is right now and that just needs to be recognized. And so, yeah, I mean, I gave you a lot there but that’s the, there’s a paradox and a new logic by which practice has to ultimately function and it can take a while to understand that and actually warm up to it.
Jason: Yeah, and I found myself checking in less often lately as I’ve sort of continued to do this because in the early days, it’s kind of like, again, like playing guitar, you’re like, oh my God, I got the C scale. Like, I just got that. And you’re just excited that you got something. Like, I played something I couldn’t have played three weeks ago. Just exciting. And then at some point, you move on from that and you just continue to get better or this is the guitar point, but I’ve sort of felt like I’ve been getting there in meditation where I’m not keeping score, but I’m noticing, I feel like I’m noticing things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. A moment, a situation, a calmness that I might have or something I might’ve normally reacted to.
I can tell that that’s happening and it’s not like a score keeping, it’s more of just, oh, that’s different than I would have been or than I would have reacted had I not done or had I not been doing these other things. I do recognize some of that, but I can also see how it is to some degree, trying to almost prove that it’s worth it or something. But I tend not to do that in general, but it is when you’re new, it’s harder not to.
Speaking of, if you wouldn’t mind, I have two questions about, one about psychedelics related to this and then one about experience, and I’m gonna start with the experience one because it’s sort of related to what we’ve been talking about.
Sam: Actually, before we jump to that, I just want to respond to what you just said there because this is the sort of the other side of the paradox because, of course, the point is also to be happier and less conflicted and less of an asshole and let me just say, you want to be a better person, you want to have a better experience. That’s implicit in this whole change to the way you’re paying attention, right?
And so it’s inevitable to keep score to some degree, if only intermittently and more globally. And so to notice that you’re spending less time ruminating about things that bother you or just to notice that you have a degree of freedom that you didn’t have before, all of that’s fine and I think unavoidable and I think the practice needs to ultimately show up in your life. It’s not a mere abstraction. And if you’re suffering as much as you always were in precisely the same ways and for the precisely the same duration and you can’t change any of that, well, then the practice on some level isn’t real, right? It’s not working, right?
You have this idea that you’re practicing meditation but it’s not actually a tool you can use in your life. So you want that again, but again, the fundamental insight is that there’s simply consciousness and its contents in this moment and there’s an intrinsic openness and perfection to it. And it is in some sense unimproveable and without any defect. And any story you’re gonna tell yourself to the contrary is just a story you’re telling yourself and it’s going uninspected in this moment because you’re however inexplicably identified with thought, right?
And that spell can be broken in the next moment, right? It’s like you’ve gone back to sleep and are dreaming yet again and you have whatever problem you have in the dream and there really is a remedy. But the remedy is orthogonal to the dream logic. The remedy is not to solve your problem in the dream. The remedy is to wake up and you can do that.
And when you wake up, then the dream logic mysteriously evaporates but then you’ll be dreaming again in the next moment. On some level, there are two projects. There’s the project of, well, how can I have better dreams and how does punctuating my bad dreams with many, many awakenings make them better? And then there’s the more fundamental project of, well, what is it like to spend more time actually not dreaming, right? And to be fully woken up.
Yeah, and I think the best people to maybe keep score there, my wife, she’s gonna notice if I’m less of an asshole, my kids will notice. I don’t wanna even keep track of it for myself. I know very clearly how I’m doing reactions of others.