Sitting down · 4 of 24

No expectations

Notice the wanting, and see what it is made of.

The most repeated instruction he gives

Somewhere in the first week, most people start wanting the sit to go well. To go deeper than yesterday. To finally get somewhere. Campbell returns to this more often than to anything else, and his phrasing does not leave much room: this is most important — have absolutely no expectations and no specific goals.

He extends it to results. Do not pursue or chase after specific or general results. All results must come to you. If you go after them, it will only delay your progress. And to comparison: let every meditation be a new and unique experience, rather than forcing each one to resemble a previous one you judged to be good.

This is not spiritual decoration. It comes out of the laboratory. Describing the first binaural-beat workshop, he notes that they expected twenty naive subjects and planned to keep them that way by telling them nothing, because they did not want to lead anyone's reactions by giving them expectations.

There is a reason it matters beyond good method. The My Big TOE material puts expectation on a list with ego and belief as one of the ways fear expresses itself — the register being I need, I want, I believe, I expect, I deserve. Which puts a meditation done in hope of a result in an awkward position with respect to the thing it is supposedly reducing.

It is also why this app has no streak, no score and no badge, and why nothing here predicts what a session will feel like.

Campbell's own words

The instruction is his own words; the placement of expectation alongside ego and belief is from the project's glossary.

My Big TOE, Book 1, Chapter 23; My Big TOE glossary: Fear(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.