The being level · 11 of 24

The other half

Add the part of his practice that is not sitting.

Thirty minutes covers both

Almost everything written about Campbell and meditation stops at the meditation. His own dose statement does not. Thirty minutes twice a day, he writes, is enough to accomplish both the meditation and the examination of your choices — take more if you wish, but much more is not necessary.

Both. The sitting is one part; going back over your own choices and the motives under them is the other, and it gets equal billing in the only sentence where he specifies how much time to spend.

The review is simple and it is not a confession. You look back over the day's choices, find the intent that was actually driving each one, and adjust — towards more giving and more caring, and away from what serves you. That is all. No tallying, no penance.

Two rules about when. Not during the sit — analysis is exactly what kills a meditation, and he is unambiguous that judging and assessing belong afterwards. And not in a rush. The review works because the mind is quiet when you do it, which is why it belongs immediately after sitting rather than in a spare five minutes on a train.

The measure of whether any of this is landing is not how the review feels. It is whether anything about how you actually behave has changed — because in his account, understanding that stays intellectual is not understanding yet.

Campbell's own words

The thirty-minute figure and the phrase covering both are his; the shape of the review is our reading of what he describes.

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.
  • Leave yourself a few minutes afterwards. The review happens once the sit has finished, while the mind is still quiet — never during it.
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.