The best possible meditation practice
Here is a meditation practice that promises to be the best “preliminary” invocation of them all.
It’s simple. You have just one job—to feel your inclinations:
- Job: Feel your inclinations.
Take care!
Just kidding. That is the one job, but it is sandwiched between two other jobs—(1) the ongoing background job of Vipassana, and (2) the handling of surplus attention energy, which habitually manifests a surplus epistemic application.
Giving instructions on “the object of meditation” is only fractionally helpful. This is because 99% of the biological energy running you is completely outside the sphere of your practice’s official topic.
Remember: the ground of consciousness is spontaneity. This ongoing surplus flow must be handled. What to do with this naturally-occurring baseline energy of conscious attention?
We say that this spontaneous bubbling-forth of attentional energy is something that the agentive subject “has,” like an attribute. It is more accurate to say that this energy both constitutes you and is your very ground or before-being. The will is riding on an impulse engine that is outside its control for the simple reason that this engine is prior to the will. The effect can never comprehend its cause.
This extra energy is the main problem for all freshman meditators, and the real topic of this post. The solution? Let it expend itself as the cognitive-epistemic reaction to your awareness of the presence of strong inclinations.
Final version
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So the steps are —
- Practice Vipassana. That is, have a journalistic openness to the feeling of qualia that are impinging on (and constituting) you here and now.
- Feel your inclinations. When you do, get that each compulsion arises as a power that, in turn, is convincingly endowed with (analogous) qualities of mass and pressure. It is the pressure-like nature of inclinations, as they transition from distant possibility → near threat → possession that motivated Freud’s hydraulic model.
- After noting the compulsion pressure as an object, you now get to expend your surplus spontaneity by carrying out some cognitive work. Your cognitive job is to affirm (and understand) the following judgments: (a) “This impending compulsion has a cause,” and (b) “This cause is my own past reinforcing acts of carrying it out.”
Getting that this nuisance-compulsion is as strong as it is because of your past reinforcing actions of obediently carrying it out is the key insight.