Post #58: Fifty Days and Counting (Benefits of Meditation)

27 August 2023

One’s Dhamma practice is hardly the best place to apply cold-hearted cost-benefit analysis of the kind that passes for rigorous in the world; there are too many barely visible subtleties and intangible higher aspects to which such mundane calculations can do no justice. But a daily meditation regimen does require a lot of commitment, so to help with raising and maintaining the necessary determination, it’s fair enough to ask what the expected benefits might be, even if they will of course vary from person to person, not only in intensity but even in complexion.

Unfortunately I must begin by disabusing anyone of the notion that meditation might be cost-effective in the sense our results-oriented age tends to demand; it is not at all efficient in that sense, alas (as I have already pointed out in Post #13 with a bow to Joseph Goldstein). It calls for great effort while delivering few or no immediately visible results—not something that can be called a good deal beside the instant relief brought by pain-killers or the feel-good magic of so many clever pleasure-delivering mechanisms that human ingenuity has discovered and refined over the ages. (Look a little more closely and you will be astounded by just how central this business of generating pleasant sensations really is to human life as we know it.)

One would set oneself up for bitter disappointment if one expected the Dhamma to deliver a miracle cure that makes one’s problems disappear or that gives anyone magical abilities to solve them. It will not often make you feel as if you were walking on air, nor does it confer the power to walk on water, so far as I can tell. Though dramatic breakthroughs can happen at times, for the most part, the changes come slowly and incrementally. It is a gently sloping, gradual training that the Dhamma aims at (see Post #9, Anguttara Nikaya 8:20), and along the way, the fundamental taint of the unsatisfactory in life is by no means erased, but on the contrary, brought into sharper relief; one “merely” learns to live with it a little better than one otherwise would. (One’s practice may not even rise to the dignity of living with it well—doing a little better leaves much room for misery and mistakes.) But there are real benefits, nonetheless, and precious ones, if one can only manage to keep things in perspective and proportion, instead of getting impatient and covetous, which beckons as dangerously with spiritual as with material gains.

What benefits, then, concretely? Well, the first thing I’ve noticed whenever I’ve been able to maintain my practice rigorously is simply that it gets easier to keep up—a little easier, at least. (One hour in the morning and one at night would be the gung-ho prescription, but this will vary with individual circumstances and should not be forced unduly; with practice you will develop a good sense of what a realistic daily practice would be for you.) There may not always be much relish in the exercise, and the resistance may remain considerable. I still struggle with some sittings after fifty unbroken days as I have after a hundred, or a thousand days for that matter (yes, even that, once upon a time, when I was on fire; but that was more than a decade ago). Despite the intermittent sluggishness, however, it is usually possible to make it through the next session on the strength of a series well-established, partly because one does not want to see the chain breaking. For experience teaches that when one does let it break, the whole thing may well unravel altogether once again, as I’ve seen countless times by now.

Second, even if one should be realistic and not expect any dramatic transformations, one’s commitment to the practice will, with time, soften the sharp edges of the mind. They can remain jagged enough, but not quite so miserably cutting, and that can make all the difference. Twice a day, after all, you are making a determined and sustained effort to hit the break on the endless rush of thoughts and blind reactions chasing each other across the crags of your mind. You won’t be able to stop the flow very often, but you may be able to slow it down; and if even that should prove too much to ask, it is good to realize what is going on inside, even if, for now, one cannot do a whole lot about it.

Which brings us, third, to developing more awareness in life generally, though it may come in the form of having to watch yourself, quite mindfully, taking the usual sorry missteps. Alas, you are not likely to find yourself suddenly endowed with the miraculous power to get everything right at all time—a super-power that even the Buddha himself never acquired. Nonetheless you may well notice your mental abilities improving in subtle and unexpected ways, along with your physical reflexes, your balance, and the processing time it takes to recover from the inward wave of unpleasant sensations that comes with unwelcome outward events. The same shit may happen, so to speak, but it will pass more quickly through your emotional digestive system—sometimes so quickly that you will be amazed by how short-lived the latest bout of madness turns out to be, even if you are still a long way from living in a state of perpetual harmony and unerring wholesomeness of thought and action. (Dreams can get quite turbulent and disturbing, for some reason, when one meditates more intensely, especially on retreat. It may be a little disconcerting to see, but seasoned meditators take it as a good sign—the pus oozing out of the wound that is getting cleaned at last, as it were.)

Fourth, along with more equanimity and awareness, one’s capacity for love will deepen, since the two are twins as I’ve explained in Post #55, and joyfulness too, as I tried to show in my previous post. The depth of such changes is not easily gauged, nor progress easily measured; few saints are made from one day to the next. But one’s better orientation in life should become more and more evident as one progresses along the way, while the urgent and disheartening sense of setbacks and relapses should recede, even if may never quite go away.

Fifth, more seemingly mundane, perhaps, but by no means unimportant, there is a sense of satisfaction and achievement that comes from having done at least one unqualifiedly wholesome and good thing with one’s day, every day, no matter what else may have gone wrong.

For my own part I really do believe, as I’ve tried to explain in Post #52 (on lucky streaks) that the changes go much deeper, inducing a better karmic alignment all around that then shows up in “lucky breaks” and other strangely fortuitous happenings of the kind that Jung labeled synchronicity. But I don’t understand those mysterious layers of reality well enough to pronounce on them with any confidence; what I have to go on are intimations only, and I would not expect anyone else to find them convincing.