So after a long time meditating I’m going to share some tidbits with everyone. These are all things I learned the hard way from slogging it out. These are some starting premises that may spark a new perspective or insight in others.

I’m not going to talk about techniques, everyone knows techniques, plus I’m more of a big picture thinker. And I’m not going to talk about texts or theory.

Emptiness vs Dukkha

The point of understanding emptiness (or not-self, I’ll use them interchangeably) is to realise that being happy/blissful/content/joyful/etc., is a choice. They’re not your choice. But they’re a choice nonetheless. We need to take responsibility for our Karma, which has created conditions on conditions on conditions for our happiness. Realising emptiness means we have this choice to make, moment by moment.

What does this mean practically for us? Every experience is an opportunity to be wholesome. We learn to recognise unwholesome thoughts and supplant them with wholesome ones. We turn mistakes into opportunities to learn. We turn difficulty into situations where we build our character. In essence, we learn to control our conditioning so that we are not victims of it anymore — we are not spinning the wheel of Samsara. In your meditation practice this requires being completely transparent with yourself, all your flaws, insecurities, hindrances, etc., that arise must be accepted. That may hurt.

Impermanence vs Dukkha

Yeah, experiencing all these insecurities, flaws, and hindrances may hurt. But experiencing impermanence directly lets us have the conviction that none of this unwholesomeness will last unless a choice is made. And so we find impermanence as not just saying that happiness/joy/bliss/etc., are a choice, but that they can in fact arise from liberating unwholesome activity. Impermanence insights also teach us to pay close attention to as much as possible to catch how things change. Notice the mind inclining toward tension or agitation? Great! Now work to make new choices on that conditioning. But first is acceptance, and that is what impermanence teaches us — noticing and accepting.

What does this mean practically? If we pay attention to how things change (noticing and accepting them), we can see this liberation happening with unwholesome states.

• But you’re saying we should be reactive? No. If we can first appreciate and then gladden the mind in response to unwholesomeness, that’s all we need. The mind can untangle the rest.

Shamatha/Samadhi

Learning to relax the body is more important than relaxing the mind, in my opinion. Our body carries so much tension and in wakefulness is so conditioned to move, even on a very small scale. Stuff like twitching and sniffing, etc… Once the body is settled, the mind follows. Keeping dullness at bay is a matter of getting very intimate with how our minds work when in this super relaxed state. Meditating when tired can help if your goal is to curb dullness if that’s a major thing for you. But if your goal is more to reduce suffering, and you don’t feel like dullness is pressing, then don’t force it. The choice is yours.

Jhanas are wholesome states but aren’t the answer. They’re more stepping stones. Think of entering Jhana as a kind of mental game with certain rules. I’ve italicized “rules” for a reason. It’s another coping strategy, although a very very good one!

Mindsets

Some key points. And this may be for people experiencing the Dukkha Nanas or overly concentrating on suffering.

Ignorance is learning.

• You can’t remain ignorant or something once it’s there. I tried a lot throughout my life to forget the bad things I did, or the rotten mindstates I’d acquired. It’s impossible. It’s actually impossible to remain ignorant once we’ve noticed. There’s only suppression. Notice how this suppression itself reinforces a self-view? I am X, but I also did unwholesome behaviour/emotion/thought A, so I ignore the latter because I cling to the former.

Suffering is liberation

• Notice whatever suffering you have and work with it. Not through it.
• Notice —> Accept —> Appreciate —> Gladden

The most important thing I’ve learned from all of the meditation is that the mind cannot distinguish between positive and negative in the way we ordinarily think it does. Whatever is being thought of is whatever one’s mind works towards. Notice how when you’re really angry, despite it being a negative emotion, the mental activity is toward a person/thing/object/place/etc.? E.g., all those political types who hated Donald Trump back in the day constantly retweeting him, talking about him, and obsessing about him. They couldn’t get enough of him, yet they hated him? The mind is directional. Intentions are all we got. And intentions only work toward whatever they’re thinking of, regardless of positive or negative. This explains the psychological evidence of why positive reinforcement works to create new behaviours/habits. It also links in with evidence of how there’s no way to eliminate a habit, you only replace one with another. Tie this into our meditation practice and you see that when we incline the mind toward something, and maybe it gets derailed, focusing on the derailment via a punishing emotion/thought/behaviour is undermining. Because we’re actually guiding the mind toward that negativity, rather than the positivity of the situation. Remember how I said, conditions on conditions on conditions for our happiness? This is a perfectly relatable example of that.

Dukkha Nanas

Dukkha Nanas are things we definitely go through. “Knowledges of…” being the operative word, meaning we have to know the thing intimately. But knowing suffering is not the goal. The goal is to stop it when we can. But there’s no way to strategise the thing, we have to accept it all. Notice how in all the old Suttas the Buddha instructed people he taught to imagine their body as a festering corpse, mucus-ridden, and a rat-infested scumfuck disgusting thing? I think that was part of this acceptance phase; (proto-)Hinduism of the time was so fixated on Brahmin, that Siddartha had to shock them into waking up to their bodily reality. By doing these imagination-based contemplations he could help them wipe out the ignorance they had of their own bodies. I think in these modern times we’re so disconnected from our minds that advanced meditators end up doing this kind of practice for their minds. The squeaky wheel gets the grease…

Journaling

Here I go again. Please start a journaling practice. It trains your meta-cognitive capacities. Self-reflection is important. Writing is also important. The more angles from which we can learn to deal with our parts on our own terms, the better. Also, unlike meditation, it’s a great way to start using your rationality to bring in more wholesomeness too.

Working with the wholesome

I’ve talked a lot about accepting our flaws. The likely thing is that we need to relax into our good parts too. Part of clinging is also getting really attached to our flattering aspects, which causes us to suppress the flaws. So relaxing the tendency to amp ourselves up is also important. But that’s usually a fairly easy part of the practice I’d say.

Whenever we notice wholesomeness arising, we can try and notice what conditions led to it arising. What is in our control to bring more of it? Meditation is a lot about seeing how our mind/body curates the experience of whatever is happening, but then conveniently forgets that it created the experience, and so it suffers via clinging or craving. There’s a choice somewhere along there to change the formula!

Other tidbits

• The Buddha was a lion. King of the Jungle. He trained himself to have a noble mind. Nobility is not a classist thing in this case. It is a mental virtue. Thus, peasantry in this case means one is being pushed and pulled by the winds of their instincts and insecurities. The noble already lives in comfort, he isn’t pushed or pulled in either way. But this is purely mental, not a physical thing to do with luxury. I think there is a good metaphorical base from which we can draw a lot of power if we bring to mind nobility.
• Sila? Our meditation practice is how we learn to relate compassionately, generously, and patiently with our own rotten conditioning. We start to accept these parts of ourselves and suddenly we can better work with others and our environments.
• The whole point is to bring deep appreciation and acceptance of what is. Bliss is what’s happening right now minus an opinion.

Anyways, I hope this can help. Thanks for reading this far. If you need me to clarify, I’m more than happy to — this post is more of a jumping-off point for a discussion anyways.

Be happy