I think that laughing meditation is the most honest practice, and I’ll tell you why eventually. For now, I’m going to tell you about an experience I had with mindful eating. ## Natural (un)Practice I’ve tried mindful eating a few times over the years; it feels like a natural fit for me, given that most of my meditation practice is lived meditation. By hour count, the time I’ve logged in walking meditation, sensory meditation, moving meditation, and so on dwarf my hours seated on a cushion. So why not add another activity to the meditative roster? But eating never quite _clicked_. Probably for a number of reasons, many of which don’t bear getting into. I’d read or listen to some instructions, get a feel for the practice, and try to do it when the opportunity came up — pay close attention to the feel, the smell, the taste of each bite; to my body’s experience as it took in the food; to the movements I made to bring food to my mouth, chew it, etc. When I tried, it usually felt like my attention was trying to do too many things at once. So I’d focus on one — and it would feel rote and dull. So I’d zoom out and try to hold all of them without over-focusing on any, and I’d just get drifty. Over the years, the impulse came back here and there and I’d give it a go, but it just never took. --- Last winter, I was living in India, avoiding mold and preparing for Ayurvedic treatment and generally not having much to do with my days. I took my medicines, meditated, looked at the trees, listened to the birds. Not a whole lot else to do out in rural Gujarat. After a couple weeks of this, an experience I’d only really had a few times before started to take over. It’s hard to describe, but basically I’d say that _there was nothing more interesting than whatever was happening at any given moment._ I stopped reading books, I didn’t watch tv, I didn’t get bored or play games or reach out to call people. I might sit in a chair on the terrace for 3, 4, 5 hours at a time, listening to the birds and the wind in the leaves. Not because I was trying to make myself be still and pay attention to the moment, or because I’d made some decision to be still for awhile — but because [[Naturalness|naturally]], effortlessly, there was nothing else that could compete with the experience of what was already going on. I’d lie awake at night fascinated by the sensations in my legs and torso. I took a 6 hour car ride around the Gulf of Kutch and spent the whole time alert, relaxed, fascinated by everything happening in and around me. The scenery, the joy, the grief, the pollution, the discomfort — I wasn’t pushing myself to Be Here Now™, there was just nothing else that could compete. What was already here was as [[The Zest for Living|interesting, luminous, appetizing]] as anything could be. Why trade that for a book, or music, or collapsing in the backseat? And during this period, surprise surprise, the descriptions I’d heard of mindful eating became my experience of just… eating. “Pay attention to the scents and flavors.” Of course, obviously, what else could I even do? “Notice your eating motions, in your hands, your jaw, your throat.” That’s like telling me to pay attention to my orgasm, what else do you think I’d be paying attention to with that going on? “Feel how your body responds as it takes in the food.” THERE’S AN AURORA BOREALIS FIREWORKS SHOW PERFUSING THROUGH MY ORGANS, OF COURSE I’M FEELING THAT. There was zero trying, zero effort, zero idea that there was something here I _should_ be doing, or any instructions I should be sticking to. An experience was simply happening, and I’d notice every once in awhile that it lined up with experiences I’d tried to guide myself into before, with mixed success. --- ## Natural (un)Practice If I’m honest, this is how a lot of my path has gone the past decade. I hear about a state, a practice, a teaching, and I try to apply myself to it. Sometimes it’s a total dud, sometimes I get these flashes of something that feels like the state I’m looking for — and then I start some balancing act, holding my breath to keep myself riiiiiight there and hope it stabilizes. And sometimes it stabilizes a bit. Sometimes I just keep missing it. Either way, at some point the whole thing becomes unsustainable, because _effort_ and _trying_ are unsustainable. If something doesn’t stay up on its own, you can’t hold it up on your own power forever. It’s a structural instability. And when the storms and earthquakes roll through, all that stays is what has structural integrity. So I’d try the practice. Hold myself there. And then it would fall away, over and over, and I’d get back to doing my own thing, doing what comes naturally, following the natural downhill gradient of what my body-mind-soul wanted to be doing. And things would move, usually unpredictably. Stuff would happen and over time that stuff _would_ stabilize, because it was coming out of a natural process, not out of me _trying_ to make my idea of something happen. And when I’d talk to my friends, describing what was going on with me, they’d point out that I was describing something that was already on the map — I was just describing it without realizing it, because _my idea_ of the thing had been pretty fully unrelated to _the experience_ of it as it actually happened. If that’s abstract, I’d point to the presence and mindful eating examples I started with. It didn’t occur to me until a week or two into the process that “oh, I think this is what they were trying to point at with mindful eating.” To me it was just the natural thing that was going on. It was just the [[Choiceless Choice]] of doing what came naturally. --- Another core example is equanimity. I’d tried practices aimed at cultivating equanimity before, but honestly my heart wasn’t in it. The descriptions I’d heard all sounded kind of bloodless, detached, uninteresting and uninterested. But people insisted that it was really great, that it opened doors impossible to open otherwise. So I kept trying. And what came up in practice was sometimes nice, but mostly in a bloodless, detached way, and in a way that took effort to get to. So over time, I stopped aiming at it. Then I hit a period where I kept falling into this warm, cool, light blue open space where my organs all exhaled a little bit. Everything was just _okay_ there. It was nice. I felt much more free to hang out with whatever was going on, whether it was good or bad. Frankly, that soft blue space may have saved my life in 2023, while I was locked in some kind of serotonin syndrome breakdown, pacing the halls of a hospital in Tirana with a heart rate of 170 and my vision full of undulating tracers. Opening into the clear blue space made it _okay_ to be in that particular hell for days at a time. Which didn’t make it less hellish. But it did make it okay, or at least survivable, to be in something hellish. When I’d talk about this with my friends, especially more monastically-inflected friends, they’d go “so… you mean equanimity? Seems like you found equanimity.” When I listened to them, I had to slowly admit to myself — yeah, seems like I’d tripped backwards into some equanimity. And seems like equanimity, as I experienced it, was pretty unrelated to the image of equanimity I’d gotten from listening to meditations and talks about it. --- ## My Crackpot Heresy Theory My sense is that most of spirituality is some kind of terribly inefficient reverse-engineering semi-cargo-cult. And that to the extent it works, it works haltingly, partially, and in a way that doesn’t quite do something important. (Upside: it does at least _seem_ to be easier to control and predict — which is very emotionally important to hairless apes living in precarious economic and social realities.) It seems like there’s a process where: - Someone goes through a deep, personal, strange lived process - Along the way, they undergo deep changes in their personhood and experience of reality - People ask them about these changes - They describe the changes, what things are like, a bit of the way that they’ve shifted over time - People take these _descriptions_ as a set of _prescriptions_ to practice, and they try to brute force themselves into experiencing reality the way the description describes. - It… sort of works. Sometimes. Or at least, it helps some percentage of practitioners find some kind of experience that they find helpful. If they stay with it a lot. No one knows the difference except the original person who went through their own process, and they kinda just peace out from the whole thing anyways. --- In other words, I imagine a long set of conversations that basically boil down to **Jim**: Hey Sarah, the way you’re eating is really slow and careful and you’re always grinning. What’s up with that? **Sarah**: Oh, I’ve just been going through something for awhile. It’s like, every moment is heaven, like the purelands are all around me and inside me and some dial turned everything else down and let me experience them all the time. **Jim**: Sounds great!! How are you doing that with the food right now? **Sarah**: Odd question, but hmmmm. It’s like… the way the light bounces off the food is so beautiful. And when I feel my hand grip the spoon and lift it to my mouth, it’s like this set of tiny miracles all co-occurring inside me. And when I taste the food, I can feel how every cell in my body is grinning, preparing itself to take in the nourishment, which is both physical nourishment and cosmic soul nourishment. I don’t know, I’m not describing this very well. **Jim**: No no, that’s great, thank you. [The next day, Jim has gathered everyone together for lunch.] **Jim** [to crowd]: Hello everyone! From today onward, we will eat following the instruction of Sarah-ji, as follows: Look at your food, and experience the beauty of the light bouncing off of it. Grip your spoon, experiencing the miracle of your hand. Lift your spoon to your mouth, experiencing the miracle of movement. As you taste the food, experience your body as grinning from its cells. Experience this grin as the anticipation not only of physical, but of cosmic nourishment. Follow these teachings, and we shall all be as enlightened as Sarah-ji. **Sarah**: I, uh, I think I’m gonna go live in a cave and stop talking to you people. **Jim**: So wise, so holy, yes, you know best, oh illuminated master of the 12 tastes. **Sarah**: The twelve wh— Right, uh. How do you feel about taking a vow of silence. For like… a long time? **Jim**: If it be thy will, wise one. **Sarah**: Cool, let’s start that now. --- It strikes me as similar to someone thinking they’ll catch a cold if they sneeze and cough. There’s a backwards causation there. It’s taking something effortless (catching a cold and true ‘mindful eating’ both require certain conditions to occur, obviously, but if those conditions are in place, the thing itself is effortless, it’s not something you could ‘try’ to make happen if you wanted, 'trying' can only lead to an ersatz knockoff) — it’s taking something effortless and turning it into a state you _should_ attempt to grip and pull yourself into. And just like you can psychosomatically talk your body into a cold, if you act sick enough for awhile — you can pretty much get yourself into a state that matches your idea of ‘mindful eating’ or ‘equanimity’ or whatever else, if you keep steadfastly nailing yourself to it. As James Hillman so succinctly put it, [[🙏 "Our Ideas About the Psyche Affect the Psyche"]] ideas about the psyche affect the psyche.” We are flexible creatures. If we decide our psyches work a certain way, they will work that way. (And then, because we aren’t _infinitely_ flexible, we have to deal with the consequences of the shape we decided on.) I’ve seen this same dynamic discussed in therapeutic contexts as well, especially around “boundaries.” At their best, our boundaries can be a natural sense of what we will and won’t accept in connection, which we naturally enforce by staying or leaving or discussing or warning or whatever else. —But at worst, “boundaries” is just a word someone can use to control others and/or coddle themselves so they never have to deal with anything outside their comfort zone. The natural version occurs of itself, and is difficult to get at by nailing yourself to it directly. The forced version is the main consequence of nailing yourself to “boundaries are good and I must have them” directly, and enforcing them with conscious, prefabricated decisions. Seems similar, to me, with a lot of spiritual practices. Going at it headfirst is workable, but almost never the best route. --- ## Laughing Meditation as Honesty If you've never done laughing meditation, it's more or less what it sounds like. You start laughing, forcing yourself to laugh on manual by making the sounds even though you don't feel like laughing. And at a certain point, especially if you're doing it with other people, you start to laugh for real. Something takes over and you just... keep laughing. That genuine laughter tends to come and go, but when it's not present, you just keep laughing anyway, manually moving your mouth and voice and stomach and chest *as if* something were worth laughing about, and at some point it turns into actual laughter again. It's... weird. The laughter tends to feel manic and strange to me, even when I get to the "real" laughter. When I've brought this up, some people nod in agreement, and others assure us that if you keep doing the practice regularly, the sense of strangeness goes away -- but I'm not sure I'd want it to. That feeling seems honest to me. Because no, you're not naturally laughing. Laughter is effortless, it just happens, you hang out with your friends, or watch a funny movie, listen to a stand-up you like, and you just laugh. It's a joy, being in that natural sense of surprise and amusement. And forcing it... kind of *should* feel like you're forcing it. It feels honest that it comes, for most people, with a reminder that it's not quite real. That it can be pleasant and helpful and bring happiness into the rest of your day, but that it's not actually The Thing it's mimicking. It's a more convenient, direct, running-headfirst-into-it version of The Thing -- and as with most direct headfirst things, it's missing a lot of the indefinable subtleties around it that make The Real Thing so nourishing. I'm thinking of literal nourishment here too -- the way that you can grow carrots in depleted soil, but they contain significantly less nutritional value than carrots grown in good soil. Or livestock grown in factory farmed conditions, versus meat from livestock that's free to move and roam and have non-hellish social contact. The depleted stuff works, you can live on it -- but there's a lot missing. To me, the fact that it's pretty easy for people in laughing meditation to notice that there's a significant difference between The Real Thing and the Practice-Nailing-Yourself-To-It version -- that fact makes laughing meditation very honest. Everyone can experience how there's a real benefit, and how there's something missing, and how there's something not-natural about it. Something forced. Without that being evil or meaning the practice isn't helpful... there's still something *off* about it. It's different from The Real Thing in ways that matter. ## You Gotta Fall Backwards Into It I won't say that every meditation or spiritual practice is like that. I haven't tried all of them, haven't gone deep with all of them, haven't been inside anyone else's life and experience and psyche. But for me, I've experienced this from the other side enough times now to feel a pattern that's at least common, if not total. That pattern being what I've described, where I go along with what seems to want to happen naturally for me, and at a certain point that seems to open into an experience that's very far outside what I've experienced before. It's something fresh, novel, unfamiliar -- and also somehow deeply natural, casual, no-big-deal. I could not have gotten to that experience by trying. I literally wouldn't have known what I was trying *for*. The experience wasn't anything I'd had before, anything I could map to -- and all the things that I *would have* mapped it to were wrong. With equanimity, I knew all the words people were using to describe it. I had certain things those words meant for me. So when I tried to go towards it, I went towards those things I'd already experienced. But the actual experience was in a completely different direction. So not only could the words and descriptions not lead me there, they took me further away from it, by convincing me I had any idea what I was looking for. --- For me -- and I may be a minority in this, no use in either of us mistaking me for an authority here -- the big openings, the big shifts that actually changed my experience of reality, they all happened without me trying to get to them. Which isn't to say I wasn't doing *anything*, I certainly wasn't just lying around doing nothing and hoping enlightenment would hit me out of nowhere on a park bench or something. But the things I was doing were, pretty much across the board, unrelated to the opening that occurred. In my head, it reminds me of complex dynamic systems in the body, like referred musculoskeletal pain. Sometimes, to fix the pain in your shoulder, the work you need to do is in the opposite ankle, or the deep interior of the belly or something. --And in my example/analogy, my process largely consisted of listening to my body, feeling like it wanted me to be doing ankle circles and deep belly breathing or whatever, and then, over weeks, without me hardly noticing, my shoulder simply... stops hurting. And I can't be consciously sure of what exactly happened there -- but it seems like some intelligence inside me knows where the leverage points are. If I had tried to work directly on the shoulder, I might have been able to alleviate some symptoms, but they'd keep coming back. If I'd tried to consciously map where the referred pain came from, I would have gotten lost in the million different possibilities. If after fixing it, I'd tried to tell someone else that the key to fixing *their* shoulder was to do ankle circles and belly breathing, I'd most likely be wrong. If I simply *described* to them what my healthy shoulder felt like, and prescribed to them as a practice that they emulate that feeling -- they'd probably get *somewhere* with it (I'm actually curious to try this with literal physical examples now), but it wouldn't be The Real Thing. --- ## Natural... Unfolding? Growth? These words feel bad to touch, ummm... Natural Will. Natural Going. Natural Stop-Fidgeting-And-Let-Things-Move. Just [[Naturalness]], I guess. I get this experience with writing a lot, where the end product looks nothing like the original inspiration. And even if the end product is good, I still feel this dissatisfaction that the thing I *wanted* and *planned* to create just... didn't make it into the world. I think every artist gets this. I wonder if every parent does. The thing is, every piece of writing -- every piece of art or creation -- has a will of its own, a soul of its own. If you try to control them too tightly, they come out dead, rote, bloodless. Perfectly in the image you wanted, but with no life in them. If, however, you let them move, follow them where they want to go, give them urging and spaciousness for how they want to unfold... they become something unexpected, and often something very good. But you have to let go of what you *wanted* them to be, what you *expected* them to be. You have to -- excuse me for talking like this, but it's real -- you have to *attune to their soul* and let that be the creative force, rather than your own plans and visions. If you can do that, you might not end up with the thing you wanted, but you will end up with something *real* and *living*. Here's the part that's hard for me to actually accept and live by: this is exactly the same for each of us, in our relationships to ourselves. I don't get to be the person I planned to be. More honestly, I should take that out of the past tense. All the ways that I think I *should* be or all the ways I *ought* to behave, the ways I *have* to experience reality -- for as long as I try to *effort* myself towards those plans, I'm ignoring and neutering the life force of what actually wants to happen. I'm precluding the possibility of The Real Thing showing up. Oh, right, there's a Carl Jung quote for this, of course: > "We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life." > --Carl Jung That's basically it. When I decide in advance, "I should be an *equanimous* person, I should be a *joyful* person, I should be *deep* and *loving* and *securely attached*" -- when I decide that "I should *have a wife* and *be highly paid* and *get big on social media* and *live in a big city* and *be a guy who knows wines*" -- when I decide that "I need to *keep my head down*, I should *not bother anyone with my needs*, I have to *keep quiet, go unnoticed, not make a fuss*"... These are all the same thing, the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life. When I decide what I *should* feel, what experiences I *ought* to train myself for, which practices I *need* to follow to *do spirituality correctly* -- I'm pinning down a cocoon, and what's in the cocoon is me. I'm refusing to nurture and nourish what's in that cocoon without trying to control it. I'm refusing to be patient and leave space for what this *me* is going to be, for what the life force inside this *me* actually wants to do. Which... yeah, man. I mean, what if this *me* turns out to be a loser? A jackass? A poor? One of those people who uses the word *energy* unironically? Or oh god, what if the *me* turns out to be a [white rasta guy](https://youtu.be/sTUmhxi6Mo8?t=191)? This seems to be my edge lately. I am participating in the limitation and exclusion of *life* in and around me, by having agendas for what the *me* should be -- just like I participate in cutting the life force off from a piece of art when I have agendas for what it *should* be when I finish it. And yes, my anchor in this matches up pretty well with the Jung quote as well: We should grow like a tree that does not know its law. For me, that means [[Naturalness]], putting my attention on the [[True Nature|essential]] living core that's trying to shape me, and moving with that. Like a tree that just grows towards the sun and the canopy, step by step, without planning a full architecture for itself, just building on what works moment by moment, year by year, taking the shape it takes. And for me, that means admitting to myself that most spiritual practice seems confused to me. From where I stand, and from how my being seems to work, the idea of window shopping for meditation techniques or drug experiences or whatever else, it feels like the limitation and exclusion of life. It feels like injecting dye into a cocoon and hoping it'll make the butterfly match my favorite shirt a little better, so it can be a nice accessory that fits my weekend plans. --- --- --- ### Coda Notes Worth noting that I think working with a teacher who can access The Thing does obviously give much better access to it than verbal or written descriptions, whether that thing is equanimity or jhana or samadhi or love or boundaries or whatever else. The trickier area here is that I'm pretty sure most teachers don't actually have access to the thing they're teaching. It often seems to me that they have access to the ersatz version of it that you get when you decide in advance what you think it feels like and then nail yourself to that. I obviously can't know what's going on inside anyone else. But I will say that I've met people who seem to have some unrecognizable aura I could only describe as *love* pouring off of them; and I've met people who have something that feels like one *idea* of love pouring off of them. And the latter feels somehow thinner than the former. Or like the latter somehow fits into the known world, while the former comes from beyond its edges. They feel like different things. --- Oh, also worth noting: the period I wrote about in India where I fell into natural meditation for days and weeks at a time -- I don't mean to give the impression that it was all pleasant. A lot of that involved being extremely present in some of the most miserable, lonely, horrifying experiences of my life. Without getting into too much detail, that was one of the roughest periods of my life in a lot of ways. And also, for being such a rough period, much of it was also... fine, somehow. It's hard to describe. The only pointer I could give is that in periods like that, when people ask how I am, it feels like they're expecting an answer somewhere along the "great to terrible" spectrum; but my actual experience doesn't find that spectrum salient. The salient spectrum is more like "moving to stuck," and in those periods, things are, over and over again *moving*. Which isn't pleasant, and is often almost unbearable. But there is some *something* extremely... satisfying? Luminous? Something, about things *moving*.