The Art and Science of Meditation
-by Sam Tullman
You can watch the video of this talk here
Today I want to talk about something that's been a constant dance in my meditation practice, that has perhaps become a dance in yours as well.
There's a lot of different ways to talk about what this dance is between. One way that I think about it is the difference between meditation as an art and meditation as a science. Another way to think about this may be in taking a goal orientation towards meditation versus an intention orientation towards meditation.
So often, I think, for a good reason, we hear that meditation is supposed to be more of this art and feeling and intention-oriented and less goal-oriented. That's probably appropriate for us to hear up front, because in our society, the dominant mindset is so goal-oriented and rigid. So it's really useful for us to say, “Okay, well, in this space we can do something a little bit different.”
With that said, I don't know about you all, but I will say for myself, I'm not actually very good at either one of those kinds of perspectives – neither the goal or scientific-minded perspective, nor the intention or art-minded perspective. So I know that I can use support and practice in both areas, and both shed some valuable light on meditation as a topic of conversation and as a real life practice.
I've been reading through this travel journal of a famous translator of ancient Chinese works who went to mountainous regions of China to meet hermits, especially meditation hermits. As he encounters them on his way in these incredibly remote regions, he asks them about life and meditation. These are real treats, as these are people who rarely speak to anybody, but devote their entire lives to meditation. I want to share a few excerpts from this book, called “Road to Heaven – Encounters with Chinese Hermits” by Bill Porter (aka Red Pine). They’re really pertinent to our discussion today because they offer such contrasting perspectives. As a heads up, some of the language assumes very traditional Chinese spiritual worldviews, but see if you can be flexible with the language and poke out the deeper meaning. Hopefully, you can take it and see what resonates, and then as Whitman says, "Dismiss that which insults your soul."
Paraphrasing a bit here, in one interview, Bill Porter asks the abbot of a Taoist temple in a remote part of the Chung’nan mountains (who had formerly lived as a hermit for years), Jen Fa-jung: “What’s the goal of your meditation practice?”
“ … the goal is to return. The goal is to return to nothingness, or [in other words] to return to the body of the Tao.”
“Not only people, but plants and animals and all living things are part of this body. They're made of this body – this body of the Tao …There aren't two different things in this universe. To realize this is the goal of meditation. Everything in this world changes. What we're seeking is that which doesn't change.”
Bill follows up with, “How does a person reach that goal?”
And Jen responds, “It's a matter of stages. There are many degrees of achievement, and it's hard to reach the goal. But once you have this as your goal, you just keep going step by step, stage by stage. Everyone has different capabilities, but the goal is the same. The goal is to … return to the body of the Tao. If you practice, you'll eventually succeed.”
There's a lot more there, but as I was reading through that, I was struck by how achievement and goal-oriented this was. It made me reflect on the ways that this idea of stages, or achievements, has been both helpful and distracting in my meditation practice.
On one hand it's valuable to highlight and understand that there are predictable benefits that I can experience that other people have experienced. And along the way, there are techniques or methods that will likely produce a certain effect in my mind. We ourselves are taking this perspective just by virtue of the fact that we're on retreat right now – we must have a hypothesis about some sort of dose-response curve to meditation practice that we predict will have a desirable impact on our minds.
We don’t talk about this a lot in our group, but in many meditation traditions there are certain stages or categorizable states of the mind that you might experience. And they're not so exotic or foreign or crazy. We’re probably all experiencing at least tastes of these during this retreat. Our mind might do some particular thing, or feel good in a very specific way—and reading about others' experiences can help us recognize qualities of our own experience. We might learn what to look for to help ourselves in similar experiences, or we might want to know when others got stuck, what did they do? What techniques helped them? In this way we start to get a little more scientific with our approach to meditation.
But then we may become too rigid, and instead of focusing on our actual experience, we constrain it by looking through a framework, and can no longer see what’s really happening. So we need to balance that by bringing more of this art into our experience. Here’s another passage from a different hermit, Ch’en Shih-chieh:
“Everything comes from nothing … and everything returns to nothing. This is the Tao. This is my understanding.”
“Some people go around and they spread these teachings, but often their understanding is based on books. What they teach is what's in the books. They don't teach the things that come from the spirit. What I'm telling you comes from my own understanding, not from books.”
“Nowadays many people are interested in meditation. There are many books that teach this. But what they don't teach is that this isn't truly it. In meditation and yoga, you go through stages. But the Tao [ – the ultimate reality] doesn’t have any stages.”
“People are misled by these books, by names, by powers, by experiences. After they’ve practiced for a while, they think they’ve gotten somewhere. But they haven’t. There’s nowhere to get to. To follow the Tao, to really practice, is to just keep returning. People lose this when they try to find it.”
So this is the opposite perspective—he says there are no stages. As soon as you start to think in stages, you’re lost.
So how do we find a middle ground?
One metaphor I really like from a teacher of mine is thinking about using GPS or a map versus your personal perception of what’s right in front of you. The map is useful, but if you’re staring at the map the whole time, you’re missing the actual landscape, and the map itself becomes useless.
We need to bring in the art of perception to work flexibly with the actual territory — and this type of orientation towards practice and life is actually associated with different brain activity.
The goal-oriented brain is associated with more internal, older areas of the mammalian brain – the ventromedial reward pathway, and specifically the anterior cingulate cortex, being a core locus. Activation of this neural pathway helps us chase goals, getting things done to the exclusion of other things, often at a cost to other things.
But there are other neural pathways, such as one more heavily involving the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (on the outer, upper sides of the front of our brain), which support a more flexibly-held intention as opposed to a tightly held goal. That is, whatever is happening right now, how do I want to be navigating this? It’s more like a compass than a map.
These are two very different ways of being.The key point in this second mode, and what that second hermit touches on, is that the goal isn’t to get somewhere in particular in meditation. The goal is to get better at heading in the direction we want to go.
So yes, it's helpful to calm the mind, and to learn to feel more pleasant feelings in our meditation practice. But what comes up along the way – that’s the practice. The messy, hard stuff – that is the actual practice of meditation happening for us, which is so much bigger than self-soothing by calming breath.
Marrying the art and the science, we can use the science to prepare for what may happen and to understand our experience. The art is how we actually do it, imperfectly, in the real world. Considering this art of meditation from a Buddhist perspective, this leads us to the Three Marks of Existence. Different religious traditions have different names for some of the same concepts, which are core to human experience. The three marks are:
Suffering or a steady dis-ease with the way things are
Impermanence everything is changing all the time
Impersonality of our life and moment to moment experience
These are universal struggles, and particularly easy to see for those of us living with T1D. We deal every day with physical and emotional discomfort, constant flux, and the inability to control outcomes – even the outcomes of our own minds. These lenses – if applied wisely – can deepen our practice.
But we must be careful not to turn our practice into a dry or negative experience. For example, we might begin a meditation, first find some ease in your experience, and then open up to the discomfort that’s already here – how am I not at ease in this moment? How does that show up in my physical feelings, and mental content? Then, we can take this the next step and pair it with an awareness of the constancy of change, noticing that if we pay gentle but close attention, even the discomfort shifts. That awareness of change becomes a kind of medicine for our discomfort.
Or we may start by noticing that everything in our experience is always changing. This can be disconcerting at first. But rather than panicking, we can learn to settle in and realize that none of it is up to us, and there’s actually nothing to do about any of it. We can just watch it unfold.
And what about the third mark—the impersonality of it all, and our ultimate lack of control of our lives?
That’s where things get rich. If your experience isn’t personal, then what is it? First, it becomes impersonal. This can lead people to accuse Buddhism of being nihilistic, and can even lead practitioners into a nihilistic hole for a time. But having become sufficiently impersonal, our experience can begin to become interpersonal.
Sitting here with you, seeing your faces affects me. Sitting here with this screen, reading my words is affecting you. Our realities bump into each other and subtly shape each other.
As the late Thich Nhat Hanh said, we "inter-are." That’s his own beautiful way of expressing the realization that your experience isn’t just yours. What a relief to not feel so stuck in the private hell of our own minds all the time! Sometimes this realization is called “emptiness.” One translation I’ve seen for this that I really like is “boundlessness.”
These are ways we can begin to navigate this “art” of meditation. The science side helps us shape our attention and conceptualize what’s happening. The art side lets us work with it in the real, imperfect moments of life.
Use both. At times, you’ll need structure, something to hold onto. Other times, let go.
Those three marks are one way to meet the messy middle – engaging with meditation with a mind that’s organized, but not confined.
Here’s a quote from one more of these hermits to close:
“In meditation practice, there's a great deal to learn. But you can't do it quickly. This isn’t really something that can be put into words. You have to practice it to understand.”
“Lao Tzu teaches us to be natural. You can’t force things, including your practice. Understanding happens naturally, and it’s different for everyone. The main thing is to quiet your mind. It takes a long time. And you have to stay healthy.”
I love this last one. It balances that there is indeed learning and progress to be made, but that it looks many ways. It also reminds us that it’ll take a while, so we shouldn’t rush. As an old Zen master said, “The faster you hurry, the slower you go.”
We’re getting there. Just keep at it.
