The key to understanding meditation instructions lies in the fact that they lay the foundation for one's experience of meditation. The instructions inform how one begins a meditation sitting, what one will do in the sitting, and what direction the sitting should go in. Behind those meditation instructions are three basic principles:
In following meditation instructions, one does not learn how to meditate, but rather one learns a set of rules and how to apply them to meditation practice.
To give you an idea of what I mean by rules, I will list two of the most common rules:
Let's take a common meditation instruction as an example. A person is instructed to be aware of the breath at the nostrils. He is simply told: Be aware of each and every in-breath and out-breath at the nostrils. Do that for twenty minutes. He sits down and brings his attention to the nostrils, but before long he is thinking about things. He stops his thoughts so that he can become aware of his breath. A breath or two later he starts thinking again, and so brings his attention back to his breath. Without even realizing it, he has just set up a rule, which he will follow for the rest of meditation sitting: When my attention wanders from the breath, I must always bring it back to the breath. Wandering from the breath becomes prohibited. One might go as far to say, after meditating with such a rule, that when one's attention is not on the breath, one is not meditating. Sure enough, after several sittings of defining meditation as having one's attention only on the breath, such a meditator will have developed an elaborate set of rules that govern his meditation practice. He will have rules regarding changing or modifying his breathing rhythm, when it is acceptable and when it is not; rules concerning his body posture, bodily movements in the meditation sitting, and which bodily sensations can be focused on and which cannot; and rules as what might be a permissible distraction from the breath and how long such a distraction should be permitted to last. This last set of rules, regarding permissible distractions, may only be made if the practice of being aware of the breath is supposed to lead to something else, such as a vision or blissful state of consciousness, or if the awareness of breathing practice is taught to include other sense experience, such as sounds, bodily sensations, etc.
Along with rules, meditation instructions include acceptable rule-breakers. These are generally strategies that are employed in the service of the instructions. When, for example, one is having difficulty staying with the in and out breath in meditation, one may break the rule of always being with the breath to employ a strategy to make being with the breath easier. A strategy can take many forms, and is the most common type of advanced meditation instruction given to meditators.
Flip through almost any book on meditation and you will find many a helpful strategy. Most of the strategies are given in the service of getting back to doing the instruction with renewed vigor and greater discipline. In the example above, a meditation student who is having difficulty staying with the breath for even a few seconds in a meditation sitting may benefit from a strategy, which, at first, breaks the rule of his sitting practice. He may then be given the instruction to bring his attention to his whole body sitting and begin to observe his breath from that vantage point, instead of keeping his attention firmly on his breath at the nostrils. Once this kind of strategy works however, the rules around meditating correctly go back into place, and one returns to one's core meditation practice. That is, the strategy rarely ever becomes the beginning of a new kind of meditation practice for the student.
This is a phenomenon that I became much more aware of when I began teaching meditation than when I was a student. As a student, I would just do the instruction diligently, thinking that the instruction was helping me see things the way they truly are. When I was observing my breath, for instance, I believed that the instruction to notice the rise and fall of my abdomen was getting me to see the fundamental truth of rising or falling, or as my teachers put it, the arising and passing away of phenomena. I didn't realize it until I heard it from students I was teaching, that this was just a concept embedded in the instruction. What is going on when this happens is that one is seeing the experience through a particular lens, a specific view on the nature of one's experience which is to be known, confirmed, and verified by following that particular instruction.
Other concepts that are embedded in instructions: being aware of each breath is being in the present moment; moving sensations up and down your body (body scanning) is purifying your mind and producing wisdom; and staying with the mantra is being with the true transcendent reality and eliminates the grasping ego. These concepts are not just tagged onto the instruction as an afterthought, but are as much a part of the instruction as the rules inherent in the instruction. One reason perhaps why people are reluctant to break the rules in instructions is that if they do, the promise of realizing the concept embedded in them may not come to pass. It would be as if by deciding to drop the practice of staying with the breath as the primary object of meditation, one would never find a way to be in the present moment or know how things arise and pass away.
This makes me think that perhaps for some meditators the rightness of the instruction may come from perceived rightness of the concept embedded in it. The thinking goes like this: If I believe in this particular concept, say that being in the present moment is ultimate reality and the highest truth, then I will learn an instruction that will lead me to being in the present moment all the time. The idea, or promise of the idea, basically sells the meditation instruction.
Then there are concepts that operate as instructions on their own: just let go, do not cling to anything, be in the present moment, accept all that comes, be equanimous, love yourself, empty your mind, and a host of others. Some meditators may sit down to meditate and believe that they are not meditating with any instructions. They are just going to sit and let go of things, or empty their minds, or accept all that comes, instead of observing their breath or reciting a mantra or doing any such task-oriented instruction.
What makes these meditation practices conceptual is that they start with an idea as to what being in the present moment is, for example, and not from someone's experience of being in the present moment. Some students may be given the idea that being in the present moment means that there is no past and no future, that the true reality is only in the present. This makes sense intellectually, and this understanding of the concept is then used to as a guide to correctly meditating in the present moment, which often then entails stopping one's attention from pursuing thoughts that go into the past or into the future. Other techniques might be used along with this concept of the present moment, such as a practice of observing one's breath, to help keep the student in the present and re-enforce the idea that being in the present is the only true reality.
Concepts are thus embedded in meditation instructions in two ways. One is that the instruction is given in order to understand a particular idea (have a specific realization or insight), as in observing the breath so as to understand how things arise and pass away. The other way is that of an idea being taught for the purpose of one realizing it in one's meditation experience, as in being present to one's experience so as to be in the Now.
Is it possible for people to meditate without embedded concepts? That is a question I will try to examine in other articles. But, for the moment, I would have to say that any meditation practice someone picks up has embedded concepts, just as it has rules to meditate by and ideal scenarios attached to it.
People have ideals regarding meditative experience when they talk about an experience they have not had. For beginning meditators that is often just the way it is; they have only the mental pictures and ideas about meditative experiences and may be meditating in order to have those experiences for themselves. But those experiences have to fit the idea they have of those experiences for them to be legitimate. What if the actual experiences are different from the idea one has of them? Then isn't one just pursuing a fantasy?
Few, if any, meditation students ever consider this to be a problem, for the ideals about meditative experience seem to be so generally accepted that people are easily led to believe that these ideal states of mind are indeed based on reality. Let's take for example the ideal that the optimum meditative state is one that is free of thoughts. It is usually conceived to be a pure (luminous) state of consciousness where thinking does not occur. With the absence of thinking, there is no self or ego, and thus the mind is pure. It also must be an awake, peaceful, and sublime state of mind, though some traditions might consider it to be more ordinary than sublime. Anyhow, the student gets the idea that to be empty of thoughts is an ideal meditative state, one which is only to be achieved by practicing the prescribed meditation instructions meant to get one there.
This approach makes perfect sense. One has an ideal state of consciousness to be realized through meditation and a practice to get one there. What is missing from this scenario is the real difficulties one encounters in meditating with that practice, for it is presented as a formula, which when followed correctly is believed to lead to the right outcome: freedom from thoughts. The student thus meditates according to the instructions so that an ideal state of mind becomes a constant state of mind (which is an ideal upon an ideal, for the student believes that ideal states are ideally constant). This way of meditating can turn any experience which is not ideal into a negative or unproductive or worthless state of mind.
I hear this kind of sitting often from students who practice trying arrive at ideal scenarios for their meditation sittings. A student goes into the meditation sitting to empty his mind of thoughts and finds himself thinking all the time. All thinking is seen as an obstacle, a hindrance, and even as a defilement. It must be gotten rid of somehow. So he tries holding his attention on the breath, a mantra, an internal image or feeling, or on sounds to see if he can free himself from thinking. But thinking keeps intruding into his meditation sitting. He may then put his attention on catching the moment where each thought begins, hoping thereby to cut it off at the root. All of his energy is focused on the elimination of thinking, so as to arrive at states of mind where there is no thinking. This state of no thinking is what meditation is supposed to be, or at least lead to, and yet what meditation has become is a battleground to eliminate thought. What the meditation student is actually going through is a process of trying to get rid of thinking, but what he thinks he is going through is a process of realizing an idealized state of mind where there is no thought. When this kind of meditation sitting is looked at without the ideal scenario coloring one's perception of it, the student sees that he is using aggressive effort to suppress thoughts.
The ideal scenario thus tends to hide what is really going on in one's meditation sittings. When I hear students talk about sittings in terms of such scenarios, it has an air of looking good by at least attempting to meditate correctly (in that form of meditation), even though their meditation experiences look bad to them much of the time. Meeting an ideal is not easy. It may not even be possible. So anyone trying to do it will often fail and carry with them the feeling of failing at meditation, instead of seeing that realizing an ideal is not much different from making a fantasy come true. Both have a picture of how things should be and obscure or distract one from how things are.