One of the most well-known Buddhist meditation practices is vipassana or "insight" meditation. It can be taught in an entirely secular way. The purpose is to cultivate a quality of mind called mindfulness, which is a state of clear, non-judgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
Vipassana is the practice of noticing the components of one's experience with equanimity, without grasping at the pleasant or pushing away the unpleasant. This eventually leads to the insight that there is no self that is the enduring experiencer of one's experience.
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The Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Dzogchen aims to point out the nature of mind to the student directly, without any complicated philosophy or practice.
Instead of striving towards awakening through meditation, the student is invited to recognize the innate wakefulness that is already present - an open, contentless awareness that is naturally free from grasping and the illusion of self. This is done through an introduction called "pointing out instructions" given by the teacher. With this glimpse of the mind's nature, one then practices "taking the goal as the path," resting in pure awareness.
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There is a deep paradox in spiritual practice - although we have to make an effort to meditate, taking up the practice reinforces the sense of self that is trying to improve itself through meditation.
Meditation only works to the degree that we can let go of the meditator and simply accept what is appearing in consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. This doesn't mean resignation or passivity - we should absolutely work to change things for the better. But on a moment-to-moment basis, the deepest form of well-being comes from complete acceptance of our experience as it is, without grasping or resistance.
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Meditation is the practice of paying close attention to the contents of consciousness in a way that goes beyond our habitual ways of thinking. It reveals the following:
- The mind has a strong tendency to wander and get caught up in thought.
- Thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are constantly appearing and vanishing on their own - consciousness is like a flowing stream.
- There is no stable self to be found behind the flux of experience - just the flow of experience itself.
- It is possible to observe the contents of consciousness in a clear, non-reactive way, without identifying with them. This is the essence of mindfulness.
With practice, one can learn to disentangle from thoughts and simply be aware of them arising and passing away, leading to insights into the nature of the mind.
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The purpose of meditation is not to achieve a magical state of sustained bliss, but rather to recognize that consciousness itself is free of the feeling of self in every moment, whether one is concentrated or distracted. Glimpsing the intrinsic selflessness of awareness, even for a moment, can radically transform one's life. While this insight won't permanently remove all psychological suffering, it allows one to be free in the present moment, in the midst of both fortune and misfortune.
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From an evolutionary perspective, emotions evolved as a way to motivate animals, including humans, to approach things that helped them survive and reproduce (food, mates) and avoid things that threatened survival (predators, toxins). Good and bad feelings are nature's carrot and stick to control behavior.
However, in modern environments, these once-adaptive emotional propensities can lead us astray. For example:
- Our natural desire for sugar and fat, adaptive in ancestral environments, now leads to obesity and health issues
- Anger, useful for deterring rivals and cheaters in small hunter-gatherer bands, is counterproductive in modern anonymous societies
- Anxiety, which helped keep us alert to threats, now often arises in situations where it serves no productive purpose
Buddhism argues that mindfulness can help us step back from unhelpful, conditioned emotional patterns and see them with more clarity and choice in whether to act on them.
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Struggling to focus on the breath during meditation, only to have the mind repeatedly pulled away by thoughts, provides direct insight into the modular mind. You may notice:
- Planning thoughts related to getting needs met (mating, status, affiliation, safety, etc.)
- Rehashing social interactions to analyze your performance and others' opinions
- Fantasizing about pleasant experiences or worrying about unpleasant ones
- Self-referential thoughts evaluating your qualities and self-worth
With practice, you can start to see these arising not as "your" thoughts, but as the output of mental modules evolved to grapple with particular adaptive problems. Rather than getting caught up in their content, you can notice them as "events" in the mind and let them pass without identifying with them.
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Some Buddhists object to descriptions of meditative insight as revealing that "all is one," arguing this contradicts the core doctrine of emptiness (shunyata). If there are no truly existing, independent things, how can they be one?
But the author suggests this distinction may be more semantic than substantive. Emptiness points to the thorough interdependence (pratitya-samutpada) of all phenomena - how everything arises in dependence on everything else, lacking "inherent existence." And this radical interconnectedness could also be described as a deep unity or oneness.
Experientially, those who describe "becoming one with everything" in meditation seem to be pointing to the same basic insight - a falling away of the usual sense of separation between self and world, revealing a more intimate, less differentiated field of experience. The same basic realization may just be expressed through different metaphysical frameworks and vocabularies.
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The author describes a breakthrough experience on meditation retreat when he drank too much coffee and felt an unpleasant tension in his jaw. Observing the sensation mindfully, it suddenly seemed like something outside himself that he was watching with detachment. The unpleasantness dissolved, leaving the physical sensation but without the emotional overlay of discomfort. This illustrates the Buddhist idea that much of our suffering comes from over-identifying with passing mental and physical states. Stepping back and observing them breaks their grip over us.
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Evolution has primed our minds to see threats, even where none exist. 99 times out of 100, rustling in the bushes is just the wind - but running away each time kept our ancestors alive the one time it really was a predator. Similar "false positives" occur with social threats - we may lie awake worrying how people will react to an upcoming presentation, even though it will likely go fine.
Mindfulness meditation allows us to step back and see the false alarms generated by anxious thoughts without getting caught up in them. Over time, this weakens the tendency to generate needless anxiety in the first place. The evolutionary default is to treat all threats as real, but we can train the mind to be more discerning.
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While Buddhist teachings emphasize uprooting unwholesome tendencies like greed, hatred and delusion, meditation is not just about eliminating the negative. It also nurtures and strengthens positive mind states. For example:
- Compassion - the heartfelt wish for others' well-being and freedom from suffering
- Loving-kindness (metta) - a radiant friendliness and care extended to all beings
- Sympathetic joy (mudita) - taking joy in the happiness and success of others
- Equanimity (upekkha) - an even-minded, accepting presence amidst life's ups and downs
These qualities, known as the Four Immeasurables or Brahmaviharas (Divine Abodes), can be cultivated through specific practices. For instance, metta meditation involves mentally offering phrases of goodwill to oneself and others, while compassion meditation visualizes relieving beings of suffering. With repetition, the associated emotions and attitudes become more natural and spontaneous.
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Even if one doesn't attain the complete experience of not-self, it can be useful to practice disowning feelings and thoughts a little bit at a time. When a strong emotion like anxiety or craving arises, see if you can observe it objectively for a few moments and experience it as "just a feeling" rather than something integral to your being. Notice how this creates some space around it and reduces its grip on you.
Similarly, when a repetitive thought pattern arises, like self-judgment after making a mistake, imagine it's just a voice in your head rather than the core truth about you. Viewing passing mental contents as "not-self" bit by bit chips away at the solidity of the self over time and can lighten the weight of suffering.
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"Ajahn Chah, a twentieth-century Thai monk who did much to spread awareness of Vipassana meditation in the West...once recounted a time when he was trying to meditate and kept getting interrupted by sounds from a festival in a nearby village. Then, as he recalls it, he had a realization: 'The sound is just the sound. It's me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won't annoy me.'"
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The Buddhist idea of emptiness (shunyata) points to the way we implicitly assign "essences" to perceived objects, as if they had inherent characteristics independent of our minds. For example, we may experience a particular person as annoying, as if "annoying-ness" was an objective attribute of the person.
Cognitive science suggests these essences are actually constructed by the mind by unconscious affective judgments. These emotional valences then get projected onto the thing itself, so it seems to be inherently pleasant, unpleasant, desirable, repulsive, etc.
Mindfulness practice may lead to experiencing things as "empty" of essence by weakening this automatic affective labeling. As fleeting feelings of attraction and aversion get noticed as such and disentangled from perceptions, the world seems more neutral and fluid, less full of fixed, independent things to react to.
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The author recounts an experience on retreat where he was caught up in feelings of ill will towards another practitioner who was snoring loudly during a meditation session. At first he indulged the feelings, silently judging the person and feeding his aversion.
But then, mindfully observing the feelings, he experienced a sudden disenchantment and release. The feelings of anger and annoyance were still present, but he was no longer fused with them or compelled by them. They appeared as simply passing phenomena in the mind, rather than as defining his relationship to the snoring yogi.
This illustrates the power of mindful, equanimous attention to break the spell of difficult emotions, so we can respond to situations more clearly and less reactively.
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The author recounts a time on meditation retreat when he had a painful toothache. Sitting down to meditate, he tried viewing the pain mindfully and objectively rather than with aversion. The throbbing became awesome in its intensity, more captivating than unpleasant. Stepping back and observing the pain rather than identifying with it reduced the suffering. This illustrates the Buddhist idea that our sense of an all-important self is an illusion that causes suffering. Experiencing pain as just pain, rather than "my pain", reduces its sting.
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Vipassana meditation, also known as insight meditation, aims to give the meditator insight into the true nature of reality, defined in Buddhism as the "three marks of existence":
- Dukkha (suffering/unsatisfactoriness)
- Anicca (impermanence)
- Anatta (not-self)
By observing the contents of the mind with clarity, the meditator comes to see the pervasiveness of these three marks. In particular, anatta, the realization that there is no fixed, permanent self, is considered crucial for liberation from suffering but is very difficult to grasp intellectually without meditation practice.
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While intensely pleasurable meditative states known as jhanas can sometimes arise with concentration meditation, mindfulness meditation aims more for a clear seeing of reality that can permeate daily life off the cushion. This may involve:
- Greater presence and sensory vividness. Colors seem brighter, sounds more vivid, food more flavorful. There is a childlike freshness to perceptions.
- Reduced attachment and aversion. With a less self-referential perspective, there is less of a feeling of "what's in it for me" or "what does this mean about me" in response to experiences. Things can be appreciated for what they are.
- More openness to both pleasant and unpleasant feeling tones without getting caught up in narrative thoughts about them. Difficult emotions pass through more fluidly.
- Insights into the constructed, dreamlike nature of experience that create a sense of spaciousness and choice in how to respond.
While peak experiences on retreat may come and go, a more continuous "quiet joy" and intimacy with life can suffuse everyday experience with disciplined practice.
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Some worry that realizing emptiness could lead to emotional detachment and apathy. If no one is truly good or bad, if it's all illusion, why bother caring about others' welfare?
Traditionally though, Buddhist liberation is said to yield spontaneous, impartial compassion. Seeing the ephemeral, dreamlike nature of self and other alike, we instinctively wish for all beings to be free from confusion and suffering, just as we wish to be free.
To cultivate this ethos, try relating to others beyond just the labels and stories you habitually impose on them. Notice the vulnerable, wanting, struggling being behind the surface, behind the role of "friend" or "authority figure" or "stranger." Relax the borders between self and other and allow a natural empathy and care to arise.
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"When we have that basis of wisdom about the nature of thought, then we have more power to choose, okay, which thoughts are healthy . . . which thoughts are not so healthy—those we can let go." - Joseph Goldstein, on the fruits of deepening insight through meditation
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Robert Wright explores how Buddhist teachings and meditation practices, particularly from the Vipassana tradition, align with findings from modern psychology and evolutionary theory to diagnose the human condition and provide a path to greater clarity, happiness, and moral progress.
