Point

Quieting the intellect · 5 of 24

Telling the intellect to sit down

Direct yourself freely. Just do not analyse anything.

Thinking is allowed. Judging is not.

Campbell never uses the phrase monkey mind. His image is an unruly two-year-old — and the instruction that follows from it is not to argue with the child but to tell it to sit down and be quiet until you are done.

What makes this usable is a distinction he draws that most meditation instruction blurs. Asked how you can give yourself direction without thinking, his answer is that you can think, as long as you do not analyse, judge, assess or compare. Giving yourself a direction — go there, stay with this, let that go — is permissible and does not break anything.

What breaks it is the other kind. The moment it turns into did I do that right, I hope I do it well this time, was that any good — you have stopped directing and started grading. And his verdict on that is blunt: as soon as your intellect gets in the way, game over.

He also names the reason people do it. The habit of analysing everything, he says, comes from not wanting to make a mistake. Which makes it one more thing running on fear.

So today: you may steer. You may not mark your own work.

Campbell's own words

Campbell, Analysis Paralysis in Meditation and Point Consciousness(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.