Training the Truth
By: Jess Graham
Tags: Truth, Meditation, Mindfulness

Training the Truth

When I first began meditating, I had no idea that a lasting change in my day-day psychology was possible, let alone probable. My naïve prediction was that meditation would make me more peaceful, less of a slave to my head, and perhaps improve my relationships a little. Meditation did do all these things, but it also shifted my relationship to the world in some fundamental ways.

For one, the way I experience thoughts and emotions is substantially different. Before meditation, a classically distressing emotion like anxiety would produce a tightening of mind that made the experience seem all-consuming. Because I felt overwhelmed by these states, I instinctively assumed that once in their grip, acting out whatever was in store for me was inevitable. I didn’t acknowledge this consciously of-course, but the implicit, conditional belief went something like: “IF anxiety, THEN A, B and C”. At a deeper level, I don’t think I understood that the reality I occupied was at root a construction and like all constructions, open for questioning.

When I was anxious around others, it felt like information about my jittery state of mind was being telegraphed directly to them — like it was as much a part of our shared reality as the physical objects in our immediate surroundings or the colour of the sky. Likewise, my perceptions of other’s emotions seemed just as real and immutable.

Since becoming a meditator, I have realised that much of what we take as the bare facts of our environment or other people are actually the cumulative results of many years spent inattentively training ourselves to interpret the world in a certain way — trainings so established that most people aren’t even faintly aware of the influence they have over their lives.

From the perspective of modern Psychology, the idea that our minds shape and distort reality based on our past personal experiences is hardly world-shaking and borders on trite. As a case in point, David D. Burns’ Feeling Good handbook painstakingly details 11 distinct ways in which the human mind systematically deviates from the truth. What meditation adds to our established understanding however, is a way to propel its promoted ideas to the foreground of experience, making them impossible to overlook in daily life.

The difference between being reminded of the unreliability of your mind as a guide to what is true only occasionally and knowing it perpetually and personally should not be underestimated. With this steady knowing we claim a critical stake in who we wish to be or become. Without it, we remain blind to and so tyrannised by whatever explanatory frameworks, behaviours or lines of thought our minds happen to haphazardly suggest — be they what we would choose for ourselves in our nobler, more reflective moments or not.

A complicating factor is that because our internal maps of the world are generated by the same faculty used to fathom it — an inconvenient truth insightfully articulated by Maria Popova in her 2019 book Figuring, it is extremely easy to remain ignorant to the ways in which our present experience is being programmed by the past or even that any programming is taking place at all (see cartoon depiction below).

Concept attribution: ‘This is Water’ — David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech given at Kenyon College on May 21, 2005. Image attribution: author.

One of the oldest mythological symbols known to humankind “Ouroboros” — Greek for tail devourer (see Appendix A.) — depicts a snake in a figure-eight or circular arrangement, the head fused with the tail and so continuous with its entire body. Ouroboros’ condemnation to a life of chasing after his own tail — not realising that it belongs to him — is similar to the human predicament of being incapable of recognising our mental grooves as grooves because we do not possess the psychological distance from them necessary to do so.

At its most basic, meditation involves training yourself to notice what your mind is up to at any given moment. This repeated, contrived noticing acts as a kind of “circuit breaker” by interrupting tight coils of believing and perceiving. Every-time you are able to clearly observe what is happening inside your mind, consciousness unhooks from the tangle of conceptual activity for a brief moment, and in so doing begins to understand how and where it gets lost or caught. Overtime and after many repetitions, the duration of this “unhooking” increases, allowing new levels of insight to be reached. There eventually comes a point where the noticing becomes automatic, and thoughts, reactions and other such mental phenomena seem to effortlessly float into direct awareness without deliberate attempts to observe them. In the beginnings of a practice, however, it can seem like the only insight being gained is how hopelessly and painfully distracted and fractious your mind is most of the time. Such disharmony is not a sign of “doing the practice wrong”, however. It is actually a necessary first step on the path to mastering your mind. After all, one first needs to become intimately acquainted with a problem before being in a position to solve it.

Appendix A.

Ouroboros — The Tail Devourer.