What I'm going to do is present my book Unlearning Meditation. First of all, before we go into the book, I just want to say a few things about it to give you some history on it and just a sense of what it is I'm doing. I wrote this book in 1998 - 1999, and what I did during that time was I had people meditate for several days and do journal entries of their meditation sittings and then send me their journals. What I found in doing that was that many of the traditional ideas of what happens in meditation, or the models of meditation that people are taught, really did not fit what people were experiencing; that there was a discrepancy between what people were going through and what many of the books on meditation talk about as ways to meditate or meditative experiences even. So what I did was modify my own way of looking at mediation from what I had read from people. And I had been doing this all along, but seeing the journals made me think more deeply that we need a way of looking at meditation that's based on what people experience. And this is a different orientation.
What I found is that many of the people were meditating and looking at their own experience; what they ended up doing was quite naturally follow a process of unlearning rather than a process of learning new techniques or learning new meditation practices. The way that they would develop in meditation would be to break down the various obstacles and views that came along with the earlier meditation practice. And so their development would be truly a sense of letting go of what they originally learned. And that's what unlearning is about. It's another kind of learning. It's really for those who have been introduced to something and have made it so habitual, made it so much a part of themselves that they can't see it anymore. And when that happens, when a meditation practice or almost anything you do becomes so much a part of yourself, becomes such a strong habit, what you tend to do is just try to improve it along the same lines. You don't necessarily look at it. But once you start looking at it, you may start to see that there are other ways to go. That you're not limited just to that one way of meditating. And that's what I wanted to do here. And to really show that you can look at any way of meditating. It doesn't have to be my way of meditating. It can be any school of meditation. People can do this doing Zen or Tibetan practices or Hindu practices or Christian contemplative practices. They can look back at the practice and see what the practice is about.
What I decided to do instead of commenting on any other type of practice was to only comment on what it is I teach. Well my hope was that people reading this, if they're other practices would apply some of what I'm doing in this book to those practices - that they would see that this is a way of looking at what has developed in your practice of meditation. It's a way of reflecting on it.
And in saying that, there are still some things in this which are going to be about learning about what meditation is. Learning about the kinds of experiences you have, the way your mind works in meditation. And so that process is found in this unlearning.
Let's look at page 8, and I'll read this for you: "One's experience of meditation defines what meditation is. That is what I believe and teach. Most people do not trust their own experience and insights, deferring to the views of authorities (meditation masters) when faced with uncertainty as to whether they're meditating correctly or not. That is because meditation is primarily taught as a technique or exercise that must be done properly in order to get the desired results. The instructions are for the most part logical and direct in this respect: the perfectly executed instruction is synonymous with the desired goal. Thus, the person who practices being aware in the present moment comes to believe that the goal, when reached, is that of being aware and present all of the time. The person repeating a mantra in meditation comes to believe that the goal is a transcendent experience of Truth and the complete absorption on the mantra. On the other hand, a person who trusts in their own experience and insights, learning what the meditative process is by paying attention to her own meditation experiences, whatever they are, is not going to follow a logical path and may not even have a clue as to what the goal of meditation actually is. From my experience as a meditation teacher, that is an excellent place to begin."