Getting nothing done
From Monk Mode
Having no goals bewilders most people in the beginning because in life we are obsessed with goals. “How can we get anywhere if we don’t have a goal?” The answer is that if we let go of the idea of getting anywhere we come to see that we are already there. There is nowhere to go.
—Rob Nairn, “Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation”
We’re so attached to goals, as a society, that we get a bit worried when people don’t have them. “Unambitious” is never a complimentary way to describe someone, whereas “ambitious” often is (as long as they’re not too ambitious, of course: that’s bad).
But what is ambition other than a kind of unhappiness? If you’re happy right where you are, doing what you’re doing (or not doing), then you’re happy! No need for any goals or ambitions.
In Catching grace, we talked about how meditation seems like something difficult at first, but it’s actually easy when you know what to do: absolutely nothing! Just sit there and let the grass grow by itself: congratulations, you’re meditating.
After you’ve done this a while, and let off some of the high-pressure mental steam that’s been filling your head for years or decades, you’ll find that you’re less and less likely to fall into the trap of thinking “This meditation is going badly”. Instead, there’s a new trap waiting for you: thinking “This meditation is going well!”
Nothing to do and nowhere to go
But it’s really just the same trap in a different disguise, isn’t it? Instead of berating yourself for failing at what seems like an easy task, you’re congratulating yourself for succeeding at something that most people can’t do. Being a good meditator makes you a special person, a better person.
Oh, really? But aren’t we just back again to end-gaining, goal-striving, and trying to fix something about ourselves that’s broken or unsatisfactory? The danger is that even though we know meditation isn’t an activity, once we slap a label on it, it feels like something we could be good at (or bad at). It’s not.
Nor is it a means to an end. There’s nothing to be achieved in meditation, except perhaps a respite from the constant need for achievement.
In particular, it’s not a way of achieving enlightenment, because there’s no such thing. “Enlightenment” means nothing, because there is nothing and no one to enlighten. As soon as you realise that, you’ll be enlightened!
There are no goals
Being goal-focused is like saying “I’m not happy here and now, but if I could just solve these 83 problems, I would be”.
Well, good luck with that. Maybe a better way to be happy ever after, though, is not to be after too much.
As soon as there is a goal, there is a potential problem because it brings with it the idea of achievement or failure. We need to understand the general principle, that change will come about if we learn to work skilfully with the mind but we don’t make change the goal. That’s not our job. The change will arise in its way and in its own time due to the effect of meditation.
—Rob Nairn, “Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation”
In my book Monk Mode, I won’t tell you how to be happy, or even how to meditate. I don’t have all the answers, but I can maybe help you figure out how to at least ask the right questions. For example, why do we meditate, if it’s not to get better at meditation?
Making time for nothing
Here’s the paradox: meditation isn’t something you can be good at. It’s not even an activity of any kind. Maybe we should call it an inactivity.
But you still need to make time and space in your day for this very important nothing to happen. Don’t wait for there to be a blank space on your calendar: make one. Who’s in charge, after all? Who pushes whom around inside this careenium?
Find a crack in the day and slip a crowbar into it, then use that leverage to open up a little space where you’re allowed not to do anything. More, you’re explicitly allowed to do nothing. It’s rare to see this on anyone’s calendar, but sometimes it’s the most urgent appointment they could have.
JERRY: So, what’d you do last night?
ELAINE: Nothing.
JERRY: I know “nothing”, but what did you actually do?
ELAINE: Literally nothing. I sat in a chair and I stared.
JERRY: Wow, that really is nothing!
ELAINE: Told ya.
—“Seinfeld”
It is impossible to fail at meditating
If you find sitting still for more than a few minutes very difficult, which most people do, try going for a walk instead. Walking is another way of giving ourselves permission to do nothing for a while, except put one foot in front of the other.
Whether you’re sitting or walking, resist the temptation to think of what you’re doing as “meditation”. That sounds like something exotic and difficult that you could fail at. It’s pleasantly impossible to fail at sitting (unless you fall off your chair for some reason; try not to do that).
Similarly, you can hardly fail to go for a walk. Oh, sure, you can get lost, or trip over a root, or end up somewhere you hadn’t planned to go. But that’s all just a matter of colour and interest. The point is that you succeeded at walking.
When a cat gets tired of sitting, it gets up
Think of meditation, or “brain-resting” if you prefer, in the same way. It doesn’t matter where your mind goes, or how many times it trips over itself. It’s all success. What we’re really doing here is gently building the discipline necessary to resist the mind’s stubborn tendency to manufacture, and then consume, its own distractions.
It also doesn’t really matter how long you sit (or walk, or swim, or whatever you do to tell your brain it’s time to rest). An hour is great. Ten minutes is great, too. Longer periods will be harder, especially at first, but don’t fall into the asceticism trap. Meditation isn’t about purifying ourselves through deliberately prolonged suffering. It’s more like we’re giving ourselves a little break from the ingrained human drive to be always doing.
Animals, by the way, don’t suffer from this: when there’s nothing to do, they do nothing. How easy they make it look!
Those who understand the Tao delight, like cats, in just sitting and watching without any goal or result in mind. But when a cat gets tired of sitting, it gets up and goes for a walk or hunts for mice. It does not punish itself or compete with other cats in an endurance test as to how long it can remain immovable.
—Alan Watts, “Tao: The Watercourse Way”
Playing with mud
You don’t need a special place, or a special time, or even special clothes, to meditate. It’s just letting the mind rest when it’s not needed, and that’s the case more often than you might think.
Whenever you find yourself feeling bored, or impatient, and you crave distraction or want to “kill time”, instead just slip your brain into neutral and simply sit in awareness, drinking in every sensation and letting your thoughts come and go like clouds.
After a while, this won’t be a mode that you need to deliberately engage: your mind will learn to recognise when it’s not needed for a little while, and take a nap of its own accord. Meditation ceases to be a task, and becomes a rest. All goals and self-criticism and dissatisfaction melt away, and we become caught up instead in the timeless moment.
We are just doing it like a child playing with mud. It doesn’t play with mud for any reason, but it is totally absorbed, fully fascinated, absolutely enjoying it. If we were to ask the child why it is doing that, it wouldn’t be able to tell us. It’s just doing it. This is meditation.
—Rob Nairn, “Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation”
When you’re completely absorbed in something, or (even better) in nothing, the conscious mind seems to switch off. For a little while, you’re connected directly to reality, all filters disengaged, and it’s as though Time is pouring straight into you, like a waterfall.
We say that you “lose yourself” in the moment. Lose your self. Isn’t that interesting?
Entering power-saving mode
So, though we don’t meditate with the goal of quieting the mind, that’s nevertheless what happens, eventually. At first, it may take fifteen minutes or half an hour, or even longer, for our thoughts to calm down a bit and stop bouncing off the walls of the careenium. But they will.
Don’t try to force this to happen: just keep sitting and watching in awareness and enjoyment, like a cat. Pretty soon you’ll notice that there’s a small blank spot in your memory of the immediate past, where you slipped into a timeless moment.
Don’t chase this state, or try to recapture it. Keep sitting, letting thoughts roll slowly across the sky without interference, and the mind will start to shut itself down, like a TV going into power-saving mode.
The more you make space in the day for this to happen, and the more you regularly give yourself permission to do nothing, the easier and more enjoyable it becomes. It’s not that we get better at meditation with practice, exactly: there’s nothing to practice and nothing to get better at.
What changes over time is simply that we learn how to be more gentle with ourselves, to stop interfering with the mind, like stirring up muddy water, and instead just let it settle. After a while, if you leave it alone, the mind naturally goes to a quiet place.
It’s like learning the route to a new friend’s house. At first you might need detailed directions, and it still takes you a while to get there every time, because you keep getting lost. After you’ve visited them a few times, though, the route becomes familiar and you no longer need to pay so much attention to where you’re going.
Eventually you don’t have to think about it at all: you can just visit that house any time you want. See you there!
