Point

Quieting the intellect · 7 of 24

You cannot engineer this

Find the effort you are applying, and take some of it away.

Natural, easy, patient, gentle

Campbell gives a two-sided checklist for whether a session is going the right way, and it describes the process rather than the result — which makes it far more useful than any rating.

On one side: natural, easy, patient and gentle. Those, he says, are the hallmarks of a successful process. On the other: result driven, ego driven, success driven, frustrated, forced, fearful, and having preconceived notions and expectations. Those are the hallmarks of a wrong-headed, flawed execution.

Read the second list again. Almost every item on it is a form of trying. Which is why he says, flatly, that you cannot engineer a meditation — you have to let it happen, you cannot make it happen. And that it is not the technique you use, it is the way you approach it.

He does a good impression of the failure mode, and it is recognisably the engineer's: you sit down, you take a deep breath, you relax, you go through all the things, you do this and then that and then you let go of things, and then — nothing happens.

Today the instruction is subtraction. Whatever effort you are applying, apply slightly less of it, and see whether anything is actually lost.

Campbell's own words

My Big TOE, Book 1, Chapter 23; Campbell, on reaching 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.
  • Twenty minutes today. This is the length Campbell actually prescribes, and from here on it is the normal size of a sit.
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.