Average moments of a long-term meditator

Outside the community of serious long-term meditators, meditation is still thought of as a healthful hobby, like speed-walking, that will make you an incrementally better person. Inside the community of serious long-term meditators, it’s known that subjective experience is changed utterly by the contemplative path. To illustrate this, I thought it would be fun to describe some typical moments in the long-term meditation arc.

The moment when you realize woo people know something. “I guess I have to believe in chakras,” you glumly admit, as you realize there is a nuclear reactor in your chest, and begin to perceive a radiant core extending through your perineum into the center of the universe.

The moment when you get tired of bliss. It’s been three months of jhana practice, and every particle of sensation in your environment is a vibrating gleeblip. It’s exhausting. Everybody has stopped finding your constant smiles charming. You resolve to return to the contemplation of death.

The moment when self/other duality falls away. How silly, that you ever perceived that your consciousness was separate from you. At a normal lunch in Thaitown in LA, for example, your friend’s face looms gigantic, like Mount Rushmore, inside the clear bubble of awareness. He doesn’t know that you perceive him as consubstantial, and you don’t bother to explain. Later, you look at a tree, feel non-separation, realize that you have reinvented animism. Later, you discover that sex is a whole different thing now.

The moment when reality loses its thinginess. Vapor within vapor. The brilliant sky is tissue paper. The body is a glimmering hologram. You wake to the glass candy of sunlight illuminating the vividness of nothingness, and step off the bed, half-expecting to fall through the earth. Nothing bad happens to you, it’s just really fucking pretty.

The moment when you realize that you thought drugs were powerful and meditation was mild, but you now realize the opposite is true.

The moment when a spiritual teacher disappoints you. It’s a massive achievement to contact the source of consciousness. And yet, atop that clear light, there is still a human psychology. Those are dicey. And the clear light of awareness will not give you formal management techniques. Or perfect wisdom in romantic relationships. Or complete emotional stability.

The moment when you disappoint yourself the same way. For example, you realize that your spiritual ego is being internally harnessed for the purposes of petty superiority. Or that you are avoiding conflict and calling it Daoism. Or that denying your ongoing selfishness is a great way for it to come out sideways. Whoops, guess you’re not Jesus yet. (This one happens a lot.)

The moment when you notice that, nevertheless, you are better. Being10% less of an asshole, compounded over years, has tremendous effects.

The moment when you realize you never did any of it. You thought you were “finding” all of these states and insights, you thought you were “searching”. But actually, primordial wisdom was attempting to penetrate the tiny aperture of your consciousness. While you spent most of your hours with distraction, distraction, distraction, real love was trying to show itself to you.

The moment when you contact what is sometimes called God. And forever after, the idea of doubt feels silly. Mystery is not silly—contacting the Divine aspect of Reality doesn’t resolve all questions about the afterlife, or good and evil, or anything like that. But doubting the divine, when you have eyes to see it, is like doubting gravity.

The moment when personal will becomes transformed. You are not doing anything anymore. And yet, an energy arises in you that accomplishes your daily tasks, and speaks through your mouth. And it is more you than you were. The compulsive voice in the head, which you took to be you, and associated with a sense of control, turns out to be the most scared, zero-sum, shortsighted, foolish part of you.

The moment when you realize you have left the normal game. Burning Man people talk about “default world” as everything that is not Burning Man. I like this term applied to the world of people who believe that grasping will cause satisfaction. The more you drop this idea, the happier you are, and the more alien you feel. All day, you see people punching themselves in the mind, believing entirely that this will bring them joy, in the absence of any evidence. You try to say, “over here, the water’s fine,” but basically nobody listens.

The moment when you realize you have to keep practicing, even though you’ve had transformative experiences. You got into meditation precisely because you are poorly-adjusted, because your weak little psyche needs special support. This doesn’t stop being true after deep realizations. They help, but they also offer you new traps to get snared in. You return to the breath.

The moment when you realize why your heart was closed. All the grief in your life comes bearing down on you, without the protective netting of your conceptual mind. Maybe some of your dad’s grief and your civilization’s grief, for an extra treat. You feel it carving away at you, like you’re soft, like you’re artichoke dip. If you make it through, you notice how this has opened you to the world. You extend canyonlike into the evening. You want more. You turn again to sorrow and request to be consumed.

Thank you to Erin Shetron for editorial help. Photo credit goes to Alec Soth.