On mindfulness

You start by watching all your thoughts very carefully. Watching your feelings, watching your emotions. You begin to build up a sense of separation between the watcher and what is watched, so you are no longer carried away by your own stream of consciousness. You remain the witness, impassively, impartially — suspending judgement and watching it all go on. That seems to be something like progress. At least you’re taking an objective view of what’s going on. You’re beginning to be in a position to control it… but just wait a minute! Who is this self behind the self — the watching self? Can you watch that one?

(Alan Watts)

The concept of mindfulness can be hard to communicate, not because of how complicated it is but how simple. In the same way that ‘just be yourself‘ isn’t very pragmatic advice to give to someone experiencing an identity crisis, saying ‘don’t let it bother you’ isn’t especially practical for someone who is hardwired to be bothered.

But, like ‘be yourself’, it’s still essentially the solution. There’s just more to it. You don’t ‘just‘ be yourself — you struggle with it until a consistent personality comes out of that struggle. It’s a process. If you miss out on that process, by foregoing introspection or always taking the path of least resistance, you could feel out of sorts forever. Likewise, the ability to be mindful isn’t something that emerges spontaneously — it needs to be developed. But if the way you think is the problem, how do you think your way out of it?

For me, it was startling to realize just how fundamental a problem it was and how many others it had its fingers in. I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t keep my mind from racing, I was depressed and anxious because I couldn’t stop ruminating, and I was indecisive because I could only stick with one idea for as long as it took to be swept away by another. I was a slave to my imagination, always coming up with new things to fret over and elaborate ways to second-guess myself.

When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume he is mentally ill… But we all talk to ourselves constantly — most of us just have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. We rehearse past conversations — thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said. We anticipate the future, producing a ceaseless string of words and images that fill us with hope or fear. We tell ourselves the story of the present as though some blind person were inside our heads who required constant narration… And we seem to imagine that if we just keep this inner monologue to ourselves, it is perfectly compatible with mental health. Perhaps it isn’t.

(Sam Harris)

Every so often my ruminating would yield an epiphany about myself. They were always simple and grandiose, usually something like ‘I should be more confident’ or ‘I shouldn’t overthink things’. It wasn’t really the ideas themselves that were significant so much as the shift in attitude they instilled, like I was briefly able to grasp not just the concept but the whole mindset it entailed. In that sense, mindfulness can emerge spontaneously, but it was only ever a flash in the pan: once the initial burst of enthusiasm sputtered out I’d go back to acting the same way I had before, unsure anything had sunk in.

So I made a concerted effort to figure out how to sustain that perspective. I started ruminating more deliberately, trying to apply my thoughts about myself in a methodical way instead of just marinating in them. I kept notes, tried to have a scientific attitude, and became aggressively positive, as if to rebel against myself. It was liberating and helpful at first, like I was starting to judge myself based on what I was instead of some abstract ideal I was failing to live up to, but it soon started to feel like I was going in circles. I was having all of these important realizations about myself but nothing seemed to be happening, and I came to realize I was treating introspection largely as an end in itself. I kept trying to inspire those insights and reconnect with that perspective, and whenever I felt it I would treat it as a victory and then get back to trying to figure it out.

After two focused years of that I was more confused than ever. The act of pursuing that frame of mind was keeping me from getting there. Seeing growth as something to attain intrinsically separated me from it. That realization invalidated the gung-ho self-improvement kick I was on and left nothing in its place. What was the solution to my problem then? If I didn’t make an effort to improve myself I’d just stagnate, but if I did make an effort, the effort was part of the problem — I needed to be instead of trying to be. I could feel an answer on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t scrape it off.

I felt starkly disillusioned with myself. The prospect of going down that road again and again, coming to the same conclusions and never learning from them, made me feel ill. So I gave up on trying to fix myself.

That was progress, although it didn’t feel that way at the time. By allowing myself to be so enamored with positive and uplifting thoughts, I was opening myself to be as profoundly influenced by the negative ones. It was the indiscriminate power I was giving to all of my thoughts that was the problem, not the thoughts themselves, and trying to zero in on certain thoughts and emotions, while necessary at first, was just feeding into that. Feeling miserable all the time is debilitating, but so is striving towards the opposite extreme. Misery has its place and trying to smother it with positive ideas or distractions is like scratching a rash.

But abandoning my crusade left me confused and depressed. All of that fighting and introspection had left me in what felt like a worse place than I started from. I didn’t feel like I could trust myself to think, and because the drive to fix myself had become so essential to who I was, giving it up felt like giving up on everything. I resigned to the idea that I would be depressed and neurotic for the rest of my life. I drifted from work to my computer to bed. I felt dissociated and became estranged from my friends and family. I shelved most of my long-term plans and allowed myself to become the bare minimum of a person.

I read a few accounts on the internet that described the spiritual and eye-opening experiences people had under the influence of psychedelic drugs. I didn’t know how to describe what I was lacking exactly, but ‘spirituality’ seemed closer than anything, so I bought some acid. I had a history of depression, which some sites said wasn’t conducive to taking LSD, but I didn’t feel like I could get any lower than I was so I went for it.

My first trip was with two close friends in a comfortable setting. We took 200µg each and spent the next ten hours having our brains unraveled in ways we could never have possibly imagined. We were absolutely astounded to see how malleable our subjective experience of the world can be.

The trip left me feeling invigorated and frustrated, but in a constructive way. I had become acutely aware of and infused with something that I had been lacking for most of my life, but I couldn’t pin it down or describe what it was — and in some way, that was the point. It made sense to me why most of the firsthand accounts of psychedelic use I’d read online had a tendency to read like rambling inanity. There’s a purity to the experience that can’t be described because it’s essentially a liberation from words and concepts. It’s how it must feel to be a child, or dog, or cat. I could still think while under the influence, but for the first time in as long as I could remember there was another option available:  I could simply be.

I took acid several more times and began to grasp the ‘oneness of the universe’ I’d heard so much about. I began to understand more intuitively how identities and concepts are illusions we apply to the world to make sense of it. For example:  it’s useful to be able to recognize a house and to have a word to refer to it, but there’s nothing outside of the brain that makes a house a house. Is the backyard the same thing as the house or is it separate? What about the furniture? It depends on how you want to think about it. If an apple falls from a tree, is it still ‘part’ of the tree? At what instant in its decomposition is it no longer an apple? Whatever nanosecond you decide it became a different object would have to be arbitrary because all of the lines we draw are necessary illusions in that sense. Identity is utility. (See also the Ship of Theseus paradox)

We are also “illusions” in that way. Physically and mentally, we are entirely products of our environment — of our genes, of the culture we consume, the food we eat, and the company we keep. The sense of being an autonomous self is an illusion in the same way. We can become so invested in our thoughts about reality and our attempts to define it and ourselves that we mistake those thoughts for the real thing. In the purest, most absolute state of the universe, we are all one. I found this easy to grasp on a superficial level, but to experience it, not as a concept but a perspective — to regard the world and the lives around you in exactly the same way you regard yourself — is something truly moving and profound.

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

(Astronaut Edgar Mitchell)

That perspective became something for me to lean on when I felt overwhelmed by my own petty and overzealous ruminations, helping me phase out of my obsessive desire to fix myself. I suppose the spirituality I was seeking was just a perspective that could dwarf my own when I needed it to. The idea that ‘you are not your thoughts’ by itself wasn’t enough for me; I could understand it intellectually, but I couldn’t apply it until I had a conception of what I am that could take the place of those thoughts.

I should say that while acid helped me to understand the solution to my problem, it wasn’t the solution itself. Tripping feels like an extreme and expanded form of those moments of clarity I clung to before; a month or so afterwards I would start to slip back into old habits and ways of thinking. A mindful disposition is not something that can ‘just’ happen, it needs to be developed. I’ve found regular exercise and meditation practice are the best ways to sustain and integrate it.

It’s obvious that a proneness to rumination is not a problem that can be solved by ruminating about it. I was neglecting the more crucial physiological component — trying to use software to fix the hardware, so to speak. I feel much happier now that I meditate, eat right (or better), and exercise. That advice is so simple and common as to make it seem disposable, but it’s the truth. Don’t let the simplicity fool you!

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Further reading:

• The Ego Trick by Julian Baggini
• Waking Up by Sam Harris (who also has some great guided meditations here)
• Meditating on No-Self by Sister Khema
• Sunyata, or Emptiness by Barbara O’Brien

As a side note, it’s interesting to think about how mindfulness, or the lack of it, manifests on a larger scale. Society seems to be captivated by extremes in the same sort of reactive, all-or-nothing way I see in myself and other people who let their thoughts get the better of them. Maybe that will level itself out; maybe the sheer amount of information we’re exposed to these days will necessitate our becoming collectively more mindful about it, which might in turn help us break out of those bad habits. One can only hope.

The “war on drugs” has been lost and should never have been waged. I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers, rapists, and child molesters makes one wonder whether civilization isn’t simply doomed.)

(Sam Harris)

That’s all. Thanks for reading!