I expect that many people will answer this question with descriptions/criticisms of the world today. How people are programmed to find value in time as a commodity that can be exchanged for money or services. How addictive dopamine from the internet and technology have turned us into drug addled ADHD zombies with goldfish memory brains.
I’m interested in looking past these surface topics and seeing the great use problem at the heart of this question. Why is it so hard to meditate?
To get proper context for this question, I turn to a progressive, modern zen koan. I came across this koan being quoted by one of the writers I respect most - Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex (later Astral Codex Ten, check him out if you haven’t cos for me it’s a ten).
“One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"
"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse."
And the student was enlightened.”*
My answer to the question is that it’s pretty complicated to understand exactly why meditation is hard. That’s exactly why many people do find it hard. Our natural intuition that guides us all as children gets suffocated by all of the concepts, dogmatic and otherwise, that get crammed into our head forcefully from a young age by the people around us.
A spiritual teacher I have followed for many years shared this wisdom in his latest Sunday live broadcast. He said that we should take a little time every day to just sit and feel. Five minutes is enough. He further said that this process allows us to empty ourselves of those thought concepts that suffocate our natural emotional body and it’s honest expression. This allows the new to come in, and replace the old concepts that were cluttering up our brains and altering our ability to perceive clearly.
Erland Oye Sings in the Kings Of Convenience song Freedom Never Greater Than It’s Owner “No view is ever wider than the eye”.
A condition of non mediated experience is the goal. The challenge? To get rid of all concepts in our mind, especially ones like “goal”, “success”, “concepts” and “meditation”. It’s a hard game but I feel I have given you a basic outline to the best of my ability, so we can go and play it ourselves. The best part is, you don’t need to buy anything, nor go outside, nor inside, and not need anyone to play with you neither. You just need a conscious brain, a beating heart, and the confidence to turn the flow of your attention around and go in. Happy meditating, fellow Hive members of ecoTrain.
Just a quick message to the community: I am working on a bigger scale post in which I talk about the current state of affairs and how it has resulted in many of our most valued sustainable community enterprises to die, so please keep an eye out or follow to be updated promptly! it’s an exciting time.
