When I started meditating back in October last year, I knew why I wanted to do it. I had a goal. A purpose. A North Star to keep me on track, and to convince myself that taking 10–20 minutes a day for meditation was not going to be a waste of time.
This is what I wrote about that goal:
My interest in meditation ties directly to my ongoing efforts to improve focus and productivity… I’ve realised that it’s important to be present in whatever situation I’m in, especially as my business keeps growing and my responsibilities are only poised to become more demanding.
This sounds perfectly rational, of course, and I had much hope for its success going in. What I did not realize at the time was that a purpose-driven approach such as this was counterintuitive when it came to meditation.
Although I haven’t been meditating every day since then, I’ve given it increasing effort over time, trying to perfect my focus and my ability to be a spectator to my thoughts. Yet every time I do it, it seems like I’m trapped in an illusory mind game that tricks me to try harder and go deeper, only to leave me distraught at the end.
Changing apps did not help. Changing my schedule did not help. What did, surprisingly, was a three-and-a-half minute audio clip of Alan Watts, the British Philosopher, on the purpose of meditation.
Here’s a full transcript of the audio clip.
If I think all the time, that is to say, if I talk to myself all the time, I don’t have anything to think about except thoughts. And therefore I’m living entirely in the world of symbols, and I’m never in relationship with reality.
Alright, now that’s the first basic reason for meditation, but there is another sense — and this is going to be a little bit more difficult to understand — why we could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason, or doesn’t have a purpose, and in this respect it’s unlike almost all other things we do, except perhaps making music, and dancing.
Because when we make music, we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music — to get to the end of the piece — then obviously the fastest players would be the best.
And so likewise when we’re dancing, we’re not aiming to arrive at a particular space on the floor as we would be if we were taking a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point. When we play music, the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation.
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
And therefore if you meditate for an ulterior motive, that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life, you’ve got your eye on the future and you are not meditating.
Because the future is a concept. It doesn’t exist. As the proverb says, “tomorrow never comes.” There is no such thing as tomorrow, there never will be, because time is always now. And that’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves, and stop thinking, we find there is only a present, only an eternal now.
So, it’s funny then isn’t it that one meditates for no reason at all, except we could say for the enjoyment of it, and here I would interpose the essential principle, that meditation is supposed to be fun. It’s not something you do as a grim duty. The trouble with religion as we know it is that it is so mixed up with grim duties — we do it because it’s good for you, it’s a kind of self punishment.
Well, meditation when correctly done, has nothing to do with all that. It’s a kind of digging the present. It’s a kind of grooving with the eternal now. And brings us into a state of peace where we can understand that the point of life, the place where it’s at is simply here and now.
Now, I have to say that this suddenly solved everything and I became a good meditator overnight. Because I didn’t. Things don’t happen that way in the real world, there are no magic pills. If there are, this certainly wasn’t one.
What it did bring about is a change of perspective. When I realized that I was better off without an end goal, I found it easier to ease myself into the practice.
I am yet to see any concrete benefits, but now I’ve learned not to care for them. I meditate because it certainly puts my mind at ease when I cut out all distractions and put my mind at ease for 10 minutes every day.
A purpose, it turns out, is exactly the thing you don’t need.
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. — Alan Watts
- More on the banality of purpose: Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, on why he has never had a goal in life [Read]
- More on the importance of living in the present moment: Sam Harris, author and neuroscientist, on ‘Death and the Present Moment’ [Watch]
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