Over 8 years, I spent 29,366 hours experimenting with every mindfulness technique available. I checked my results with a senior monk and a neuropsychologist.
Want to know a secret?
Meditation isn’t necessary.
Contemplate these 7 insights. If you understand them, you can save yourself a lot of time.
Insight 1: Meditation Isn’t Magic
‘Meditation’ just means ‘practice of mindfulness’.
I’ll define ‘mindfulness’ in a moment. But the first thing I want you to understand is that there’s no amount of sitting on your ass counting your breaths that will ever make you truly happy. It just doesn’t work like that.
It might make you happy compared to video game addiction and marijuana, but that’s just a relative improvement, not the jackpot.
What the game is really about is changing your whole perception of reality.
Insight 2: Mindfulness Just Means ‘Seeing Clearly’
Have you ever seen a person in the corner of your eye, only to double-take and realise it was just a tree?
Mindfulness practitioners discover that this kind of error happens with pretty much everything.
The problem is interpretation…
Insight 3: To See Clearly, Stop Judging And Describing
We evolved to interpret things for survival purposes (which is why you sometimes jump when you see the tree-person).
Interpretation is how you spot danger.
But you’re safe now. There are no tigers. So you can learn to relax those mental processes that are on high-alert by default.
Insight 4: To Stop Judging And Describing, Stop Making Things Important
Do you spend much time thinking about what tyres your neighbour put on his car?
Didn’t think so. But he may have agonised over it.
In contrast, you probably spend a fair amount of time considering what you’re going to eat for dinner each day.
Some people get so concerned with their diet that they develop eating disorders.
But those people don't care about your dinner, nor your neighbour's car.
This all reinforces my point that interpretation is the root of all our problems.
What's important to you means less than nothing to someone else, and vice-versa.
Insight 5: To Stop Making Things Important, See That They Have No Power Over You
If your dinner had the power to make you feel a certain way, then it would make everyone feel that way.
Other people in your home have seen that steak in the fridge, but only you are thinking about it all day at work.
That’s because everyone makes a different interpretation when they look at that steak.
If your partner is vegetarian, they probably want to throw it out.
You, on the other hand, salivate at the thought of it.
Insight 6: To See That Things Have No Power Over You, Learn How Happiness Really Works
Things don’t have the power to make you happy. But nor do they have the power to make you sad. Hooray!
There is a kind of happiness that comes from your interpretation of things. But that happiness is always flawed.
🔹 Before getting what you want, you crave it
🔹 Whilst you have what you want, you fear losing it
🔹 After you've had what you want, you miss it
But I have good news: there’s an alternative.
If you’ve ever had a moment of clarity while overlooking a natural landscape that’s given way to a deep sense of joy, then you know what I’m talking about.
And I have ever better news: this is your natural condition. This happened because of the absence of wanting!
And I have better news still! You can learn to live in this natural condition.
Insight 7: The Goal Is To Make All of This Your Default Mode
Maybe meditation will be the way to do this.
Maybe yoga will be the way to do it.
Or you could get really crazy…
Ram Dass noticed that no matter what crowd he spoke to about meditation, they’d always nod along with whatever he said.
This was particularly noticeable to him one evening when he spotted an elderly woman in the front row.
He saw her nodding away and so decided to test her.
No matter how whacky his stories of deep meditation and psychedelic trips, this old lady was smiling and nodding—as if she knew exactly what he was talking about!
After the lecture, he approached her.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t help noticing that you seemed to know exactly what I was saying at every point in the lecture.’
‘Yes!’ the woman smiled.
‘But—forgive me again—you’re not of the hippie generation. I can’t imagine you have much experience with psychedelics or meditation, so… What’s your thing?’
The woman’s smile grew. She seemed to Ram Dass to be toying with him as she slowly leaned forward and whispered in his ear as if sharing a secret, ‘I crochet!’
(For those who don’t know: crocheting is a kind of needlework like knitting.)
So there you have it.
The method doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you go deep, deep, deep into experience—whatever it is.
Whatever secrets are to be found within the inner circle of monks are to be found right here, too—and there’s nothing you have to do to get them.
See, it’s not about cultivating something (though this can be useful).
Rather, it’s about recognising something that’s already the case.
Because if truth is truth then it must be so for everyone, all the time.
If it’s only true for certain people then we’re just talking about subjective truth.
Maybe you’ll have to do thousands of hours of meditation, like I did, to realise this for yourself.
But I assure you, it isn’t necessary, because truth is truth—it doesn’t matter whether you recognise it or not; it doesn’t matter how you come to recognise it.
Hundreds of millions of people have confirmed that natural happiness is what remains in the absence of wanting.
Join us.
dg 💙
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