Meditation

What the fuck is meditation? Do you think you know, punk? Huh, punk? Yeah, that's right. You have no fucking clue, and mostly neither do I.

See also: the illusion of transparency.

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 besides 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 verbal thought, etc. I'm not clear on when it was first used to translate dhyāna / jhāna, which while also complicated as terms themselves, 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," besides the fact that people are seldom actually achieving what they've been told—which sometimes isn't possible, and 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 is not that 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 with a teacher, and the instructions 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, and just a bit obnoxious. A lot of modern usage of that word 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 "spiritual practice," etc.

What does meditation usually refer to?

For all of the subjects below, in a given context, 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 people are actually doing with their mind/body, and e. what the reports are of "success" (often not the same as the goal).

With every item in this list, you should assume "this word is problematic, and is used to mean a bunch of different things by different people, and if I think it means one narrow thing I'm probably confused.

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

Mindfulness

At minimum I'd want to distinguish a. specific practices (or often more like aspects of practice) from traditional systems which are translated as 'mindfulness,' b. 'mindfulness' in eg. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and c. 'mindfulness' a la vague progressive health culture.

Briefly, these might be glossed (somewhat unfairly) as a. "attentiveness, generically," b. "body awareness + equanimity, with a dash of dissociation," and c. "b., but watered down to be more amenable to suburban moms and bureaucracies."

Quite a bit more detail

A: '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.

B: 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.")

C: 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 shamatha / samatha, dhyāna / jhāna , 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 the modern concepts, though also neither does it 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:

• 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.
  • Note that in some schools this can be very "cool" or aloof, whereas other schools are energetic and even passionate, and 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.

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 ordinary range, 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 less often 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 a separates "haullcination" vs "vision" but they do seem pretty different, anyway.

Purposeful modification of perception

See also: ways of seeing.

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 with 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 often called "deconstruction," some schools call this vipassana

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 which often get lumped with vipassana, but don't belong here.)

Energy practices

See also: somatic phenomenology.

some (ugh) "meditative" kinds of physical practices

tai chi etc, but maybe broader

again, what's meditation? who cares

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is meditation about sitting in this cool posture on the floor?

not rly? like nonzero but it's extremely marginal just descriptively blah blah traditionally they have often used other postures, tho the whole upright sitting on the floor thing is pretty common traditionally. is that what meditation is? who knows, who cares, lol

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. ↩

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 vipassana 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 isn't a lot more orthodox but I'm less annoyed by calling that stuff vipassana. ↩