Point

Quieting the intellect · 6 of 24

Gently put aside

Practise the one verb he uses for dealing with a thought.

There is no blame in this

Campbell's instruction for what to do with an intruding thought never varies, and the verb is always the same. Gently put them aside, and refill your mind with the mantra. Not fight. Not banish. Not analyse where it came from. Put aside, gently, and refill.

The gentleness is doing real work. He pairs it with the observation that if you ever become frustrated, you are trying too hard — frustration is not a sign you need more discipline, it is the diagnostic that tells you your approach has gone wrong.

And then, unusually for this genre, he removes the moral dimension entirely. There is no blame, he writes, no reason to feel badly, and no failure on your part. Continue to apply the process gently and consistently and one day, when you relax, success will take you by surprise.

Notice what that sentence does. Success arrives when you relax — not when you concentrate harder. It takes you by surprise, meaning you were not watching for it.

Today, count nothing. Every single time you notice you have gone somewhere, that noticing is the practice working, not failing.

Campbell's own words

My Big TOE, Book 1, Chapter 23(opens in a new tab)

Before you start

  • Lighten up. Do not be intense or serious about this.
  • Sit somewhere comfortable and quiet where you will not be disturbed. A chair is fine. He does not specify anything beyond that.
  • Close your eyes.
  • Pick a time when you are not already churning. First thing on waking or last thing before sleep tend to work; straight after a big meal, or while you are angry about something, tend not to.
How long

Campbell’s own instruction is twenty minutes, twice a day. The shorter lengths early on are ours, not his — starting at twenty is how most people stop after a week.

The two buttons during a sit

Campbell’s mantra is not a fixed thing you repeat for twenty minutes. Its size is a dial, and you move it during the sit against how much thinking is going on. His instruction is symmetrical: if intruding thoughts constantly stream into your awareness, give the mantra a more active form; as thoughts disappear and do not return, decrease the complexity.

Busier
Your mind keeps wandering off. Give it more to hold, so there is less room for anything else. At the busiest: fill your mind with the longer chant: ah-lum-bar-dee-dum · ah-lum-baa-dee-dum. no need to make an actual sound. let it be busy.
Simpler
Nothing much is intruding any more. Let it thin out — there is no point crowding a mind that has already gone quiet.

Keep going down and you reach the end of it: If the sound slips away and no thoughts come in behind it, let it go. Drift in the quiet blankness of your consciousness. That is the whole aim — the mantra is scaffolding, and you take scaffolding down when the building stands up. Arrow keys work too, if you have a keyboard to hand.

Keep this tab open. The screen stays awake and dims itself, so the phone can lie face down. On iPhone, locking the screen or switching apps stops the sound — a browser limitation rather than a setting.