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Guided Meditation: Meditation as an Atelic Activity

Good morning. Good morning, or good afternoon and evening. Lovely to see where everyone's calling in from. It's raining here in Berkeley, which is very unusual for this time of year, and it feels—whenever it rains, even in the rainy season—it feels very good these days in California.

So I'll share a few thoughts and we'll sit and have our usual form.

This is from a book from Kieran Setiya^[1], who's a philosopher, talking about goals, the goal-directed life, the value of goals, and then the limits of goals. He says:

"What gives purpose to your life is having goals, yet in pursuing them you either fail or, in succeeding, bring them to a close. If what you care about is achievement—earning a promotion, having a child, writing a book, saving a life—the completion of your project may be of value, but it means that the project can no longer be your guide. Sure, you have other goals, and you can formulate new ones. The problem is not the risk of running out. It is that your engagement with value is self-destructive. The way in which you relate to the activities that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and so expel them from your life. Your days are devoted to ending, one by one, the activities that give them meaning."

For me, that captures something important really about what the Buddha said of dukkha^[2], of unsatisfactoriness. That if we live exclusively in this goal-directed life, our relationship to those projects is self-destructive. We complete things and expel them from our life, and then have to look for more. And there's something fatiguing for the heart in that.

Now, is meditation like that too? I think in some ways you can say, yeah, meditation is a goal-oriented activity: to heal, to wake up. But if it's not just a goal-oriented activity, some of meditation practice is about stepping out of goal orientation entirely. And resting with nowhere to go. And no goals to achieve, and nothing to do other than be present. And so it's confusing, I think, for us practitioners to sense the goal-directed dimension of practice, but then also the language and philosophy like atelic^[3]: not goal-directed. And atelic activities are only ever done in the present moment. That's where it happens.

And so this morning I'll just try to guide us in that atelic side of practice. Of really stepping out of the realm of goal orientation, where we strive and achieve and expel our goals from our life. Something in the heart is restored when we take a walk with nowhere to go, or listen to a loved one with nothing to achieve, or sit in meditation with nowhere to go, nothing that needs to happen whatsoever.

So please find your posture.

Just arriving right here.

Maybe using your body breathing as a way of arriving.

Maybe there is something to just gently put down.

But from here on out, in this sit, we're not trying to go anywhere.

We're not trying to engineer concentration.

Not seeking insight, or even tranquility.

Just a little bit fed up with the relentlessness of our goal-seeking.

And so we put it down all at once.

So deep is the habit of goal-making, striving, and expelling goals from our life, that we turn our meditation into it too.

And we turn ourselves into a self-improvement project.

But for now we surrender all notions of progress, of regress, of moving somewhere, anywhere.

No refuge outside this moment.

And the anchor, if you have one—the breath at the nostrils or belly, the whole body, sound, the whole sphere of sensory experience—whatever the anchor is, it's only a way of reminding you to surrender striving.

To be here.

Thinking can be a powerful tool for solving, for achieving goals, strategizing.

But we're practicing non-achievement.

And so our thinking, strategizing, simulating futures, problem-solving—it's not wrong, it's just beside the point.

It's just a way that our goal-making creeps in the side door.

So we keep relaxing into all that's already here.

Keep relaxing into non-achievement.

Everything that strives in us finally gets to rest.

And everything that evaluates and contests our enoughness also gets to rest.

Because the only refuge is the imperfection of this moment.

And its beauty and brokenness.

This is the only point.

[Bell rings]

Okay, thank you. It's good to sit with you. I tried to ring the bell more loudly, my little electronic bell, I hope you heard that this morning.

Okay, well, more to be said about those kinds of instructions. Let's keep going.

Dharmette: Dharma as Cognitive Therapy

I am often amazed that short, low-dose mindfulness interventions—eight-week interventions that have a lot of wisdom in them, but are a low dose—seem to actually deliver positive benefits and results. My sense is that if mindfulness and these kinds of mindfulness-based interventions were merely attention therapy, I don't think we'd see benefits after eight weeks. It's too short, too small a dose. But this path of practice is many things. It's not merely an attention therapy. Even in an eight-week MBSR^[4] program, for example—Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction—there's social support and a lot of new views that are introduced.

Religions are really a kind of attempt at a cognitive therapy in part. Yesterday I spoke about the dharma as an attention therapy, and today the second mechanism: dharma as a cognitive therapy.

This approach suggests that maladaptive thoughts about self, world, and future lead to emotional pain and psychiatric symptoms. Classically, Aaron Beck^[5] says schemas, which are central to information processing, reflect various beliefs, expectancies, evaluations, and attributions, and serve to order everyday experience. When information processing becomes distorted, other systems—affective, motivational, behavioral—begin to function in a maladaptive manner. Schemas can be modified in response to potent new information. Adaptively modified schemas deactivate dysfunctional schemas, which leads to a reduction in symptoms.

So we're living our life in a situation. Something happens, it elicits schemas, which elicits emotions, motivations, and behaviors. The treatment is that maladaptive thoughts are explored and challenged, and self, world, and future are reappraised. We reconstrue self and world. Classic distortions like overgeneralizing, catastrophizing, or dichotomous black-and-white thinking—these distortions are corrected. And those corrections are said to lead to more adaptive appraisals of the world, more adaptive, functional schemas. It's the structure of cognitive therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy.

Practice is a cognitive therapy too, in part. It begins with wise view, right understanding, right view. The Buddha says with wrong view, wrong everything follows. With wrong view, wrong effort, wrong action, wrong speech—all the stuff that gets us into trouble follows on the heels of wrong view. So we pick up wise view, and the dharma introduces so many views. So many ways of perceiving experience that are adaptive, functional schemas.

This is how you divide up experience: not good and evil, but suffering and freedom from suffering. That's the distinction to attend to. It invites the view that clinging hurts. Always trying to control experience hurts. The view that suffering can be redeemed. This is a path of purification, and suffering is not a brute fact in the way we imagine. It can be redeemed. It can be transmuted into wisdom and love.

The view that everything you are is a facet of nature, and that the story of me is forever at least a little wrong. The Buddha invites a view of the self that is fresh, the self as a kind of—to use some philosophical language from Gilbert Ryle^[6]—the self as a category mistake. This is Ryle:

"A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks, 'But where is the university?' It has then to be explained to him that the university is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The university is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized."

The Buddha introduces a view of the self like this. Now part of what we're doing in our practice is beginning to detect the stories and schemas we live by. Some of which are quite obvious and some are very subtle, but all the things we believe without knowing we have fidelity to them. These kind of wild, absurd beliefs that if we actually said them out loud, they would seem utterly ridiculous. But there's a part of us that has fidelity to them: I should be perfect. I should be loved by everyone. The next possession is going to make me finally happy. I shouldn't experience physical and emotional discomfort. I shouldn't get sick. Maybe I should never die.

We're much more suggestible than we believe. We feel so autonomous, like "these are my views," but they're conditioned by a million factors. We are all of our time in a way, and so many cultural inheritances and stories about our bodies and about our affective life, stories about strength and weakness, about the nature of happiness and the good life. We just take these things on. We're more permeable than we recognize. And so we look. We investigate what are the stories we live by. And our stories about ourselves are so often charged with a kind of moralism. A kind of infantile, toddler-ish moralism. Our egos are a kind of tangle of moralism.

And so we start to see, I have a lot of maladaptive beliefs about happiness. We basically assume the opposite of the Three Characteristics^[7]: suffering, unreliability or impermanence, and not-self. The fantasy that some pleasure will end all seeking. The fantasy that the more choice we have, the better we are. The research about choice—how could five choices possibly be worse than two? But sometimes the proliferation of options can have a variety of negative effects on well-being. As options are added within a domain of choice, three problems materialize. First, there is the problem of gaining adequate information about the options to make a choice. Second, there's the problem that as options expand, people's standards for what's acceptable rises. And third, there is the problem that as options expand, people may come to believe that any unacceptable result is their fault, because with so many options they should have been able to find a satisfactory one.

In dharma, a lot of our happiness comes in narrowing choice, narrowing the menu in all spheres. We have the sense that if we worry in just the right way, we'll be able to game out anicca^[8], to manage uncertainty. And anxiety is the intolerance of uncertainty. We have the sense that if I accomplish this or that, become this or that, I'll finally feel like a grown-up, finally land in a kind of identity and feel at home. And that moment never comes as far as I can tell.

And so we look, what are our organizing assumptions and how is the cognitive therapy of dharma relevant? Yesterday I spoke about the dharma as a kind of attentional therapy, and these two interact. The cognitive therapy and the attentional therapy, because as I was alluding to yesterday, when the mind is steady, stable, concentrated, it's very malleable, very elastic. And the cognitive changes, the new views we introduce, have more staying power. The learning induced has more staying power, makes deeper marks in our being.

So I offer this for consideration. Happy to be with you and look forward to tomorrow. Thank you all. I wish you a good day.