When Meditation Isn't Enough

Meditation is a point of Buddha Dharma. I'm not even sure it's the main point. It's something we have to do if we want to go far, but without learning and reflection there is no view, and without a view there isn't much purpose to what we're doing. The sitting has to be joined to two other wheels: learning, and reflection.

The three wheels

For about twenty-six years I've practiced through a traditional Buddhist path, a couple of Himalayan lineages, studied across lineage, with a lot of trust in people further along than I am. That trust is there for a simple reason. We don't know what we don't know. When purpose gets confused, or when emotions and beliefs and thoughts start running our behavior, it isn't a bad idea to ask people who have already walked some of this.

What those teachers keep pointing to is easy to skip, even when we think we already agree with it. Learn the dharma. Contemplate what you learned. Then meditate on it. In my own life those three don't stay in perfect balance. Some periods are heavier on sitting. Some are heavier on study. I keep coming back to whether all three are actually happening, because the whole path depends on them turning together.

When sitting hits a wall

A lot of people come to practice because they want a stronger meditation, or because meditation is already a struggle. Some of them understand that learning belongs to a traditional dharma path. A lot of them resist it, and I understand why.

Western culture has a lot of secularism in it, and a strong distaste for anything that smells like dogma or religion. Nobody has to take up a traditional Buddhist path. That is a personal choice, and it should stay one. The trouble comes later, when practice has actually moved and then hits a wall. At that point the sitting usually needs to be informed. It needs a path to hold it, otherwise we keep repeating the same session and wondering why nothing deepens.

What I often see people struggling with, and what is hard to see until it clicks, is the value of a system. Learning it. The structure of it. Almost a surrender to it. That last part can't be forced. You can't ask someone to surrender to a system they don't have confidence in yet. Conviction takes time. And if that conviction is going to be real, it should come from curiosity, not from pressure.

Put everything on the table

Curiosity is one of the least dogmatic things we can do, because it puts everything on the table. Our own beliefs. What the dharma says is true. What a particular teacher says is true. All of it has to be allowed in the same room.

A lot of people keep their own material off to the side. Unconscious beliefs and assumptions stay over here, and then they investigate the dharma over there, as if the two won't touch. In the beginning that may be the only way. It's hard to bring out what we don't even know we have, and meditation is one of the ways we start to notice it.

Even so, it helps to know we are carrying habit patterns and some stagnation we can't see yet. If we admit that much, something softens. Learning, reflection, and meditation can work as one process instead of three things we keep apart.

View

This is the heart of it for me. Without learning and reflection, meditation has no view. That gap is easy to miss because sitting can still feel meaningful. We can still like it. We can still get calmer. But the path gets thin if we never ask what the sitting is looking at.

What helps is curiosity about the teachings, and the same curiosity turned toward our own bias as we meet them. The dharma is not there so we can believe it and become rigid zealots. That is one extreme. The other is staying the zealot of our own ideas, sure that our private take is already enough. I don't think either one is the point. These extremes happen. They may just be part of the process. Better to notice them than pretend we are above them.

Then the work gets simpler. We explore a view and we meditate on that view. The Four Noble Truths are a clear example. The first two are view: the truth of dukkha, and the causes of dukkha. We can investigate that. We can look at mind, emotion, and thought in meditation and ask if it's true. Then we can go further. Keep seeing more.

The beauty of this path, and this is the part I care about, is that as we see more we start to unstick. You don't see it and then have to do a whole separate job to get free of it. Seeing and loosening often happen together.

Inform the sitting

So we keep meditating. We also inform the meditation. For sitting to be powerful it needs a view of what it's for, why we're doing it at all.

In the West we reach for the word purpose. It isn't quite the same thing, but it's close enough to work with. Why this? And that why can mature. Maybe someone already has a good one. "I want to be a kinder person." Wonderful. I love that purpose. It can still grow.

Religious or secular is a little bit of a false split. Some people pull back the moment a path feels too religious and want a secular method. Others want the whole thing full hog, the believer and the practitioner. I've been both at different times in my life, so I understand the pull of each. I don't think either stance is what makes the path work.

What makes it work is commitment and conviction toward a process. We study the dharma over time. We contemplate it. Slowly the conviction becomes real. We don't have to decide to believe something. It gets clearer. It gets more obvious. It starts to feel like second nature.

Some of Buddhist philosophy is hard to make second nature, and we don't have to pretend otherwise. We work with what we can. From there practice gets stronger and more stable. We still struggle. We still have a process. But we know why we're doing what we're doing, and there is a kind of meaning in that.