On your own · 23 of 24

Tasting the pudding

Learn the only test he accepts, and when you are allowed to apply it.

Objective, measurable, and not yet

Campbell has a phrase for the only kind of verification he accepts. Tasting the pudding means testing the value of an experience, a truth or a piece of knowledge by the objective, measurable results it produces. If what you take for truth cannot honestly produce those, it comes out of the truth bin and goes back into the interesting-possibilities bin.

Applied to this practice, the instruction has a date on it. Do not begin to judge how well or poorly your meditation is working, he writes, until you have run a productive process twice daily for at least three to six months. Then taste the pudding. Then keep tasting it at three-month intervals.

The test itself is the striking part, because it is not introspective at all. After six months, ask people close to you whether they notice a change in your approach to life. Not whether your sits feel deeper. Whether other people can tell.

That follows from everything in Stage 3. If understanding stays intellectual it is not understanding yet; real assimilation modifies your intent and shows up as personal change. So the evidence is behavioural and it is held by other people, which conveniently makes it much harder to fake.

Which is also why this app has never scored a session. There is no honest metric available before three months, and the one that arrives afterwards is a conversation rather than a number.

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.