Quieting the intellect · 8 of 24

Like a good book, with no story

Stop processing the world rather than trying to shut it out.

Letting go of the data stream

This is the best analogy Campbell gives a beginner, and it dissolves a problem most people spend weeks stuck on.

You already know how to do this, he says. When you are absorbed in a good book you stop hearing the traffic outside. The sound is still arriving; you are simply not operating on it. Meditation, he says, is like that — except there is no story. It is just you, without a story, letting everything go.

So the instruction is not to block anything out. It is not that you do not know you have a body. It is that you stop operating on anything to do with the senses. The children next door are still audible. You just do not listen to them.

In his model this has a technical meaning. What you experience as physical reality is a data stream you are receiving and interpreting, and what meditation does is teach you to let go of it — you stop receiving the stream that defines this reality as the one you are in. Which he then reduces to one line: you intend to disconnect from this one, and that is called meditation.

Twenty minutes, which is his own number. He asks for that twice a day, and for three months of it before you form any opinion about whether it works.

Campbell's own words

Campbell, Q&A: Developing a Meditation Practice; Campbell, Meditation: Time is On Your Side(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.

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