What is being measured · 17 of 24

Low is the good end

Meet the model's one measure, with its sign the other way round.

Entropy, inverted

Say the direction out loud, because almost everyone gets it backwards on first hearing, and people with a physics background get it backwards hardest. In My Big TOE, high entropy means a low quality of consciousness and low entropy means a high one. Growth means the number going down.

The mechanism is stated in terms you have already been practising. Choices motivated by love tend towards cooperation and sharing, and lower it — the questions being how can I help, how can I be of service. Choices motivated by fear tend towards competition and hoarding, and raise it — what can I get, what is in it for me.

Then the whole model collapses into one line: lowering your entropy is spiritual growth, is growing the quality of your consciousness, is getting rid of fear, is becoming love. Four descriptions of a single thing.

There is a second sense that matters more for someone learning to sit still. A high-entropy consciousness is described as a scattered one — more difficulty concentrating, less awareness, a mind pulled between worry about the future and regret about the past, both of which the material traces back to fear. Which means the noise you have been quieting for four weeks and the moral vocabulary of this stage are the same subject.

Two guards against misreading. Low entropy does not mean rigid order — the material kills that with a chessboard, where the most orderly position is the opening and it carries the least information. And it is not a score you can grind: there is no ledger, and movement in the wrong direction is entirely possible if you stop caring.

Paraphrased from My Big TOE

My Big TOE glossary: Entropy(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.