Meditation

What the fuck is "meditation"? Geeze, what a mess.

One particular source of confusion is that within a given school, they'll refer to some of their practices as "meditation", which is fine enough, but this often makes it sound like that's what meditation is in general. I've often heard people say "but I was taught that meditation is xyz" rather than "but I was taught to meditate by doing xyz." This is obviously also separate from schools often teaching that other practices are fake, wrong, or bad.

In Latin meditātiō meant "thinking" or "reflection"¹, in St. Ignatius's usage (writing in Spanish in the 16th century) it referred to practices of explicit "mental" reflection, presumably involving verbal thought, etc. I'm not clear on when it was first used to translate jhāna (dhyāna), which while also complicated as a term itself, were in any case used in Indian languages to refer to rather different practices.

This should be obvious, but people often forget: we're often working with practices and concepts from other cultures, which importantly literally use words from different languages! Two cultures might cut the world up very differently, especially for culturally specific practices, etc. etc.

Another major source of confusion here is that each of a. the actual experiences, b. the actual doing of some practice, and c. whatever the intended target is, are not the same as the instructions that are given to students. In particular people often conflate whatever the practice instructions are, especially for basic preliminary instructions, with "what meditation is." This is also besides the fact that people are seldom actually achieving what they've been told—which sometimes isn't possible, and sometimes isn't even meant to be possible!

(To be clear, you can obviously go off on your own and do whatever you want, but maybe what you arrive at isn't really helpfully called meditation, and in any case narrowly you might not be doing "meditation" as far as the tradition you started in is concerned.)

In practice, in Buddhist monastic traditions, a student would almost always be working closely with a teacher, and the instructions given from the teacher would change constantly depending on whatever was actually happening in their practice, in many traditions frequently completely throwing out or contradicting previous instructions. I know less about other traditions but this broad shape is common, where at minimum there isn't one thing called "meditation," (or whatever word, in whichever language) but there's a bunch of stuff, which may not have distinct names, and one's instructions and choices change in response to external and internal circumstances.

Also, traditionally, at least in Buddhism, a student would likely have thousands of false starts, dead ends, etc. etc., before finding their feet, and even then they would probably overhaul their sense of what the thing really is several times over. Whatever they were taught as a novice, let alone what they understood, was likely quite different from what a "master" would be doing, even if they're still sitting quietly in a hall or in the forest.

It's also interesting to note here that in the original Buddhist canon², practices are described in surprisingly little detail, almost all explanations basically skipping from "a monk should sit at the foot of a tree" to "and then here's what happens in a particular deep meditative state" or "and here's a big list of themes you might reflect on." Also, the practices taught by extant schools in Asia either were heterodox when those schools were founded, or were reconstructed in the last ~150 years; I talk about this more in an appendix.

There's a bunch of stuff in Christianity which we might call meditation—is that right? Does it really matter? Most of these practices have traditional names, and the ones traditionally called meditation we actually wouldn't likely call meditation in its modern usage. Others, eg. Hesychasm (sometimes translated as "the way of inner stillness,") are actually surprisingly close to traditional "meditative" practices from India and China, but to me it seems mostly irrelevant whether we call these meditation. Besides, a lot of modern usage of "meditation" in reference to Christianity seems to have basically taken the long way round, by way of Western pop versions of Eastern spirituality... which is fine, I suppose, but feels very "have your coastal progressive spirituality cake and eat it too." (And then of course, the same argument for Judaism, or Islam, or whatever.)

I don't really care, and my friends and I don't even use the word 'meditation' that much, but still. My sense in general is that there's a bunch of practices, some are very similar and some very different, and it's usually more helpful either to call them by their traditional names or just generically as "spiritual practices," etc.

What does meditation usually refer to?

For all of the subjects below, in a given context (as in, reading a given book or talking to a given teacher), I'd recommend distinguishing: a. which specific tradition we're talking about, b. what the instructions are, c. what the ostensible goal is, d. what other practitioners are actually doing with their mind/body, and e. what the reports are of "success" (often not the same as the goal).

Generally, with each item below, it's good to assume that the word is used to mean a variety of different things by different people, and that almost none of them mean just one thing, in the broader jargon.

To be clear, as well, my conception here is at least a bit nonstandard and opinionated.

Mindfulness

With 'mindfulness', at minimum I'd want to distinguish:

1. Specific practices (or often more like aspects of practice) from traditional systems which are translated as 'mindfulness'
2. 'Mindfulness' in eg. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
3. 'Mindfulness' a la vague progressive health culture

Briefly, these might be glossed (somewhat unfairly) as:

1. "Attentiveness, generically"
2. "Body awareness + equanimity, with a dash of dissociation"
3. "2., but watered down to be more amenable to suburban moms and bureaucracies"

Quite a bit more detail

1: 'Mindfulness' in this context derives from a translation of Pali sati, "recollection," from the late 19th century. In the canon, sati refers to something like a quality of attention to be developed, and as a major input to spiritual achievement and progress. The canon is much more concrete here than it often is, but still much less than modern teachers: broadly speaking sati is used to refer to a quality of attentiveness, likely with some quality of contiguity of memory in the recent past.

IIRC 'mindfulness' (n., as opposed to 'mindful', adj.) was almost unattested in English at this point, with one or two examples from some Bible translations, but has obviously caught on like wildfire, though mostly since MBSR. I think this is a great translation, but I bring up the etymology to again stress that even if we know what a word means ordinarily in English, when it's used as a translation of a technical term, we should generally assume we don't know what it means.

Sati probably also means something like "elicitation" or "reflection," eg. if we go by the satipatthanas³, a lot of these don't make a ton of sense if sati just means, well, "mindfulness."

The introduction in the page linked in the same footnote³ has a bit of context as well on the term having been reinterpreted in the West.

2: MBSR, as I understand, came about as an attempt by Jon Kabat-Zinn to make some subset of Buddhism that would be legible and inoffensive to mainstream American society in ~1980. "Mindfulness" in his usage doesn't map cleanly onto any traditional concepts, but broadly it's sort of a handful of satipatthanas, with an extra emphasis on equanimity, and not much of a path. Mostly probably helpful enough, but important to distinguish from sati, especially because a noticeable subset of eg. Americans now think that meditation == MBSR, which, oy.

One thing I want to add here: "mindfulness meditation" as an expression would probably have made sense to the original compilers of the Buddhist canon, but is a strange construction if you're familiar with the canon. Besides, what's actually taught by that name would likely have seemed confused or maybe even mostly unrelated. IMO that's fine, you can just do new stuff, but if someone uses "mindfulness" in this way that means you're definitely not looking at an orthodox source, and likely you're looking at someone who isn't familiar with the orthodox primary sources at all.

(I actually can't remember if the original MBSR materials used the term "mindfulness meditation", I think they didn't? I feel like that term is from a generation or two later and often means someting more like "just body scanning with a dollop of concentration.")

3: I'll just add that I've noticed that 'mindfulness' in the broader culture now often means "body awareness, maximally generically," or in many cases "any traditional spiritual practice, if sufficiently secularized and watered down" (eg. dance sometimes being referred to as a "mindfulness practice", or "mindfulness" in therapy curricula as a catch-all for spiritual practices taught to clients.)

Note however that mindfulness, as described above, doesn't sound at all like "concentration" practices:

Concentration

In the context of Western post-traditional meditation culture, "concentration" is used as a translation variously for all of samatha (śamatha), jhāna (dhyāna), and samādhi, as well as a generic bucket for similar practices originating outside of Buddhism⁴. I won't go into much detail about each of these, but mostly this is to say the schema in the canon doesn't line up with most modern conceptualizations, though the canon also doesn't line up with the models used in later schools of Buddhism.

Broadly speaking, so-called "concentration" practices are aiming to a. cultivate mindfulness (~in the first sense above), b. achieve meditative states of (relatively) high acuity and absorbption, and sometimes c. achieve intense or unusual altered states.

This is a huge rabbit hole, but I'll just mention that often people think that "mindfulness" (in any of the three senses) is basically equivalent to concentration; I think this is false both as a claim about the traditional models, and as a claim about how people's meditation practice usually develops. My sense is that they're less strongly correlated than people often think, and people can sometimes get fairly far in one while the other remains weak.

Instructions and reports, from across many traditions, often involve (among many others):

• Persistent, deliberate application of attention
• Cultivation of specific energies, to try to achieve specific states of mind (somewhat, see below)
  • Cultivation and exaggeration of various emotions or feelings, but often quite varied, eg. intense urgency, calmness and deep relaxation, anxiety, or intense pleasure
    • By the same token, purposeful diminution of undesirable energies or states
  • Note that in some schools this can be very "cool" or aloof, whereas other schools are energetic and even passionate. Contemporary western meditators often tend towards coolness and drowsiness.
• Repetitive movement, dance, drumming, or recitation of a short text or single syllable

I'll note here that I have an unusual perspective on concentration, which I'll discuss at some length in the next chapter.

Among westerners, especially those new to meditation, concentration evokes something narrowly "mental" (whatever that means), often specifically evoking a sensation of pseudo-visual attention, pointing as though from the eyes to a point in the body, even when eg. "attending to sensations in the body" with the eyes closed. I go into the complexity here in more detail later; just briefly, meditation is often not like this! I was once told by a Zen monk, that he had been taught that "meditation is something you do with the body." See also below re dynamic, moving body practices, used as meditation.

(To be clear, this distinction varies somewhat in different extant traditions, and while eg. many of the practices described in the Pali canon align with this, it's not actually cut up this way, etc.)

More on altered states

As a broken record, I'll say again: "altered state" doesn't mean all that much, the term is used in varied enough ways that it's hard to say something consistent about the whole group, and it probably doesn't quite track a natural kind. In any case, yes, there's some broad swath of """states of consciousness""" (same problem with that term as well) which are familiar and within some range of ordinary experience, and there's, well, quite a bunch outside of that.

Very briefly, some common features:

• Altered or extremely intense experience of emotion
  • Bizarre combinations of emotion
  • Seeming ability to directly experience others' emotions
    • Note that with many of these, and this one especially saliently, many people report some variation of this at baseline, and are shocked that other people don't experience the world this way, etc. etc. (I'll also just note that these people still sometimes report states where this kind of empathy is much more intense than usually for them.)
• Altered perception of normal phenomena:
  • Time moving extremely slowly or quickly
  • The world seeming to move under oneself while walking (rather than that one is moving)
  • The world, or individual objects seeming unreal, thin, or completely foreign
  • Perceiving the world (especially seeing) from outside one's body
• Visions, sometimes hallucinations,
  • In some? reports, visions are described as "real" in a different way from ordinary experience, in any case I have the sense that people experiencing visions aren't quite "mistaken" about what's real in their physical surroundings, in the way that people having "hallucinations" might be.
    • FWIW I've also had experiences on psychedelics where I had stable physical-seeming visual hallucinations which I knew in the moment to be not real and was lucid about etc. This is to say I'm not sure what separates "hallucination" vs "vision" but they do seem pretty different, anyway.

Purposeful modification of perception

See also: ways of seeing and hyperstition.

There's some cluster here, though this is my least standard category on this page. With substantial overlap with the other categories, these involve either trying to elicit, cultivate, or attenuate specific patterns of perception, usually oriented towards a fairly concrete intended state. For example:

• Seeing some or all objects (broadly construed) as disgusting, unreliable, or valueless
• Seeing some or all objects as holy, shining, or perfect
• Cultivating positive regard, compassion, etc.
• Attending to objects in such a way as to cause the perception of that distinct object to fade or break up
  • This is sometimes called deconstruction, some schools call this vipassanā (vipaśyanā).

More broadly these are usually regarded (within these traditions) as trying to either realize the "true" perception (not quite how it's presented, but obviously confused in my view), cultivate a more wholesome perception, or lay the ground for insight.

Vipassana, deconstruction, and "the way things are"

Just as an initial note, vipassana also means at least three things, in this case I mean both Burmese vipassana (and -esque) deconstruction, but also sort of adjacent deconstructive techniques across Buddhism, maybe peripherally in other traditions entirely, though I'm much less familiar. Unfortunately this sense isn't really orthodox, but sort of has the most cachet among those that use that term.⁵

Deconstructive practices in particular are usually explained as arriving at a perception that's "more real," and often as "the only real perception"—I'm confident this is basically wrong in principle.

One point here Burbea harps on often, to say that the perception of some phenomenon as empty (in that metaphysics, something like, phenomenally constructed, and contingent on mind as a causal input) is also empty.

I'd make a separate point that views with less fabrication can't be said to be "more real," any moreso than than atoms are more real than horses. Maybe this is right except for nirvana in most models, but this is such an obtuse definition of real that it's not that meaningful, and probably misleading. Blah blah, if I were awakened maybe my stance would be different. (Except, oy vey, oy vey.)

(See also about inquiry practices below, which often get lumped with vipassana, but don't belong here.)

"Meditative" body practices

Many traditions make use of "body practices," broadly construed this could include everything from placid walking meditation to "martial arts", not totally far off from Hong Kong kung fu movie fantasy.

Walking meditation, for example, is sometimes taught as very calm and slow, even so slow (perhaps one step every 5-10 seconds) as to be hypnotic and engrossing—easy to see as similar in quality to stereotyped seated meditation. Walking meditation is also taught as relatively casual, but still within a regimented meditative context; IIRC some traditions teach walking meditation as almost a march, complete with synced group chanting.

Monasteries in many traditions structure physical activity and work as meditative, and sometimes work is exaggerated, prolonged, or totally constructed as an excuse for "meditative" movement. These can sometimes be arbitrarily slow and methodical, or physically intense and invigorating.

More broadly are practices like Tai chi, Chi Gong, or Zhan Zhuang, which besides involving cultivation and sensitization to energy (see below), most directly consist of finely choreographed sequences of body positions and their transitions, or just statically sustaining difficult standing postures, in the case of Zhan Zhuang.

These bleed into other body practices which I'm less inclined to call meditation per se, but which are contiguous with "meditative" practices phenomenologically, and both interesting and an important part of some traditional⁶ systems of spiritual training. Central here is obviously Asana Yoga; there's a variety of more exotic practices in Tibetan traditions that I know a lot less about.

Very commonly, many traditions include some simple forms of movement into their ceremonies, eg. prostrations, as well as using these sorts of movements as extended practices in their own right, eg. at one time in Zen it was not uncommon for a young monk optionally to perform 10,000 prostrations, perhaps over some weeks.

Asana is... complicated enough as a community and a concept that I won't try to break it down here, besides that I don't feel I understand it, actually. Briefly, in many modern schools (read: Western, or at least something like "adapted under the influence of Western modernization"), asana practice again consists of a choreographed sequence of postures and transitions, in many cases uncomfortable, intense, or even psychologically demanding, combined with energy techniques which are intended to purify the system. Some western asana schools are also much slower, gentler, and incline more towards relaxation and ease.

Asana is centrally at least a kind of mindfulness practice, ostensibly practitioners are maintaining attention on the body as they move through each pose. Indeed, the less westernized schools usually insist that asana is meant to require fine attention and embodiment to work. Besides just "mindfulness," many more intensive Yoga practitioners report some kinds of altered states, energy releases, etc., like those reported in more advanced levels of stereotypical seated meditation. Many schools also teach asana as being used in tandem with meditation, understanding the two to be mutually dependent in a system of practice.

Even in the traditions most centrally organized around silent, seated practice, movement practices are still seen as contiguous with the rest of intensive spiritual practice, eg. IIRC there are reports of sudden awakening experiences occuring while performing prostrations⁷.

Energy practices

See also about energetic phenomenology in general.

Energy practices involve sensitization to, and cultivation and manipulation of energy. Again please see the section linked above for a detailed description of the concept of energy. I mentioned above a number of such practices (Tai chi, Chi Gong, Zhan Zhuang, secondarily Asana Yoga), but more with respect to their gross physical aspects.

Very broadly these practices are understood in their traditions to work partially by the energetic effects of the purely physical parts of the practice, but more importantly by purposefully, directly moving or clearing energy, purifying the energy body. Some are gentle, slow, and very progressive, whereas others are sensationally loud, uncomfortable, and intense.

This is a large and diverse group, but for example some common specific practices involve circulating energy in specific patterns while moving through some energetically "robust" sequence of postures, and using the energy to move through the pattern of movements.

Some energy practices also occur seated, or just the same lying down. Energy practices in stillness often have similar phenomenology to those practiced with movement, and some practices are taught first in movement and then transition at higher levels of skill to being primarily about the movement of energy, agnostic of physical movement. Again some seated energy practices are described as intense, invigorating, and sometimes very uncomfortable; sometimes these might be obviously perceptible to an outside observer, eg. clenched muscles, shuddering, etc., but often a practitioner will be perfectly still besides the cycle of breath, while they experience energy which is firey, roiling, or chaotic.

Misc: analysis, inquiry, etc

This section is a bit of a grab-bag, though the practices and qualities I'll mention here each rhyme with one another somewhat.

What I'm calling "analytical" practices mostly includes practices involving analysis of either the active phenomenal contents of experience, or of the causal structures generating specific patterns in experience. These often are oriented towards what's known as "deconstruction," which broadly involves some combination of a. cultivating perceptions of objects and processes as made of parts, b. separating those parts in perception, and c. inclining towards the phenomenal dissolution or decay of those parts of of sensations altogether.

Adjacent here are also what's known in some western meditator circles specifically as "insight"⁸ practice, from what I understand this means something like, "cultivating specific ways of seeing, either to cultivate flexibility of the mind with respect to perception in general, or to lay the ground for spiritual insight."

Less common, but surprising relative to some stereotypes of meditation, are also so-called "logical meditations" in eg. Tibetan Buddhism, which attempt to achieve insight, altered states, or specific qualities of perception by use of ostensibly rigorous logical analysis, eg. of an object's ultimate metaphysical un-reality, etc.

Inquiry practices are adjacent as well, which most generally involve posing a question, and sometimes either struggling actively with the question, or letting it percolate through the mind. The most stereotyped instance would be koans in Zen, usually presented as paradoxical (or sometimes seemingly nonsensical) puzzles or questions. As I understand, koans are meant to be "solved" by achieving specific altered states, as in, each koan implicitly defines a state which is meant to be achieved by the practitioner, and from which the question or problem can be easily "answered".

Inquiry practice in the "percolate through the mind" sense is often presented as using states of concentration, or altered states otherwise, to ask a question in a way which is uniquely existentially bright and vivid. Commonly also these practices are claimed to afford or give access to kinds of intuition and intelligence generally not available by ordinary reflection and thought.

Broadly speaking, this cluster is oriented towards what's known as insight (unfortunately a different sense from "insight practice" above)—a term which ranges from "sudden understanding, in approximately the colloquial sense" to "gnosis of spiritual truth."

Briefly on transformation, insight, and gnosis

See also the following sections on healing and insight and awakening.

"Meditation" (and whatever similar practices) in most traditional systems is understood as oriented towards spiritual insight and transformation. This is taught and practiced under a variety of models, but most often is meant to be achieved either by gradual cultivation of positive qualities, or the attainment of gnosis by means of altered states.

In the case of gnosis, personal transformation is usually explained to occur because of some combination of a. newly seeing behaviors or objects as undesirable, faulty, or worthless; b. newfound peace, joy, and compassion; and c. most centrally a fundamental reorientation to value and goodness.

Some traditions are basically whole-hog on "ultimate gnosis" as the only spiritual goal, but most include some combination of discipline, positive cultivation, and provisional insight as vital features of "the spiritual path."

Some contemporary western teachers often teach modern healing practices in combination with, or as part and parcel of meditation practice. From what I can tell this is almost entirely a modern innovation, which I discuss later.

Misc other considerations

Meditation and posture

Probably the singular defining stereotype of meditation is a person seated cross legged (🧘!), and people are often pretty confused about how "meditation" either traditionally or in general relates to posture.

Most traditions whose practices we call "meditation" do use cross-legged postures seated on the floor, but many or most of them also use a variety of other postures, including reclining. In the most orthodox² Buddhist canon⁹, there are strictly speaking four "postures": sitting, standing, walking, or lying down. See also above re movement practices.

Many contemporary western meditators conflate meditation with some notion of a practice of austere discipline, and in particular see bearing, and hopefully transcending, the discomfort of sitting upright on the floor for long periods, especially for westerners habituated to chairs and couches, as a display of virtue. I'd say here something like, I'm not gonna yuck your yum, but mostly I'm 👎 on this, and I also think this is quite a bit confusing matters, spiritually speaking.

Meditation vs. prayer

So, first off, who cares. In any case, most relevantly, there's quite a bit of overlap in the phenomenology of at least some reports, both from intermediate practitioners as well as in the extremes. Eg., there are reports of awakening that sound very similar, from practitioners doing canonical "meditation" practices, to those from others in completely unrelated traditions who describe their main practices as being those of "prayer" etc.

A lot of this is contingent on whatever specific definitions we use, which again, who cares, though yes I did define prayer in a certain way before. There are eg. some modern schools which teach this or that and call it "prayer," eg. IIRC some protestants (and maybe some catholics?) teach what they call "centering prayer," which is pretty straightforwardly just meditation. All good, as far as I'm concerned, tbc.

The more interesting point here is that based on all the reports I've seen, it sure just seems like the space of possible states-of-mind is just large, and the space of possible spiritual practices is large. And so naturally you end up with lots of overlap between coincidental groupings, etc.

Footnotes

1. Wiktionary ↩

2. In reference here of course to the Pali canon, but IIRC this is true of the corresponding parts of the Taisho Tripitaka (unfortunately "tripitaka" there includes another 2k years of books lol). Not sure about the versions the Tibetans have. ↩ ↩²

3. DN 22, trans. Thānissaro 2000. ↩ ↩²

4. Traditionally, actually, jhana is regarded to have predated the Buddha, and that he was taught it and later refined/integrated it into a larger curriculum. ↩

5. Ok so in fact Goenka calls anapanasati "vipassanā" which is pretty straightforwardly wrong, but yes, now that's actually the thing most people have heard of, if they know the word 'vipassana' at all. Boohoo, Mahasi Sayadaw wasn't a lot more orthodox either but I'm less annoyed by calling that stuff vipassana. ↩

6. I've found some conflicting evidence as to the historicity of Asana Yoga, and of the continuity of modern lineages of Hatha Yoga (IIRC, from which extant schools of asana are largely supposed to derive) with historical traditions. My current sense is that modern asana systems are probably < 150 years old, with a lot of innovation in the last 100, but that there were some intensive physical yogic practices in India historically anyway, and some at least in nominally the same lineages that modern asana schools are supposed to derive from.
   
   I can't recall the sources, but relevant keywords here as trailheads will be "ashtanga yoga" and "hatha yoga pradipika." ↩

7. I mean, also while performing all sorts of normal activities as well. ↩

8. My understanding is that in this context "insight" is meant as calque of vipassanā. Other translations I've seen of vipassanā with respect to the canon are IIRC "discrimination" and maybe? "seeing through" and "penetrating analysis." See also the dropdown in the section above for some more on vipassana. ↩

9. I didn't go check but this is the kind of thing that parallels really nicely in the Chinese Agama collection, so I'd be surprised if it weren't orthodox at least with respect to that canon, if not the extant traditions, and I'd guess the Tibetan canon(s?) also. ↩