The Logic of Practice: Meditation & Mindfulness

02 - The Logic of Practice
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In his apology, Plato attributes the following now famous words to Socrates, the unexamined life
is not worth living. And whether or not that's strictly true, the unexamined life is certainly
needlessly painful, both for oneself and for others. And painful or not, the unexamined life is
certainly less interesting.
We really spend our lives learning how to live. And this isn't necessarily as absurd or as tragic as
it sounds. Most of us find a pattern of living that makes approximate sense, and we tinker with it
for decades.
If you're lucky, you'll discover that you can live more or less the way you want. But even if you are
lucky, you'll find that it's possible to want the wrong things, to be lured into squandering your time
and attention, to be bewitched in a way by things that don't really matter. Even if you're lucky,
happiness can be surprisingly elusive.
So why meditate? The basic logic is quite simple. The quality of your mind determines the quality
of your life. Happiness and suffering, no matter how extreme, are mental events.
The mind depends upon the body, of course, and the body upon the world. But everything good
or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample
opportunity to make the best of bad situations, because changing how you respond to the world
is often as good as changing the world.
Of course, you can try to change the world. You can try to get everyone around you to behave
exactly as you want. You can try to never get sick or injured.
You can try to keep your favorite possessions from getting damaged or lost. But try as hard as
you might. The sources of stress and disappointment and embarrassment and self-doubt will
always be there.
Happily, there's another game to play, and not everyone knows about it. Rather than try to
change the world in each moment, there is another move open to you. You can look more closely
at what you're doing with your own mind and actually cease to respond to life in ways that
produce needless suffering for yourself and those around you.
When we're lost in thought, there are certain things we tend not to notice about the nature of our
minds. For instance, every thought or feeling you've ever had, good or bad, has arisen and then
passed away. The anger you felt yesterday or a year ago isn't here anymore, and if it arises in the
next moment, based on your thinking about the past, it will once again pass away when you are
no longer thinking about it.

This is a profoundly important truth about the mind, and it can be absolutely liberating to
understand it deeply. If you do understand it deeply, that is, if you're able to pay clear attention to
the arising of an emotion like anger rather than merely think about why you have every right to be
angry, it actually becomes impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments at a time. If you
think you can stay angry for a day or even an hour without continually manufacturing this emotion
by thinking without knowing that you're thinking, you are mistaken.
This is an objective claim about the mechanics of your own subjectivity, and I invite you to test it.
And meditation is the tool you would use to test it. Now, while I can't promise that meditation will
keep you from ever becoming angry again, you can learn not to stay angry or fearful or
embarrassed, etc., for very long.
And when talking about the consequences of negative emotions in the real world and in your life,
the difference between moments and hours or days and weeks is impossible to exaggerate. Now,
this is not to say that external circumstances don't matter, but it is your mind rather than the
circumstances themselves that determines the quality of your life. Some people are content in the
midst of real deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the
world.
And there are practices that allow us to break this habit of being lost in thought, and to simply
become aware of our experience in the present moment. And the main one that I'm teaching in
this course is a technique known as Vipassana, which is generally translated as insight
meditation. And this comes from the oldest tradition of Buddhism known as the Theravada.
The quality of mind cultivated in Vipassana practice is almost always referred to as mindfulness.
There's nothing spooky about mindfulness. It's simply a state of clear, non-judgmental, and
undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
This practice has been shown to produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition,
and pain perception. And these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.
Mindfulness is now very much in vogue, of course, but it seems to me that there are still many
misconceptions about it.
It's often taught and marketed as though it were merely an improved version of an executive
stress ball, where it is really more like the Large Hadron Collider. That is, it's a method for making
profound discoveries, in this case about the nature of our own minds. And there's nothing passive
about mindfulness.
You could even say that it expresses a certain kind of passion, a passion for discerning what is
subjectively real in each moment. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about
experience. It is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts
themselves.

One of the great strengths of this technique of meditation, from a secular point of view, is that it
doesn't require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified beliefs. It simply demands that
we pay close attention to the flow of our experience in each moment. So as you progress through
this course, notice that what you're being asked to do more and more is to simply recognize what
is already arising in consciousness in each moment, without modifying it, without grasping at
what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away.
In some basic sense, meditation is the act of doing less than you normally do. It's the act of being
less distracted in the midst of everything that is already happening on its own. And once one is
less distracted, one finally has a tool with which to notice truths about one's mind that otherwise
would never be discovered directly.
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