Clearing Away The Crud

Hi Roger, Sometimes when I’m meditating and my mind is running away with itself, I find myself sitting with my mind all over the place. But I’ve noticed during these times, just sitting with my mind seems to have very beneficial effect. I notice myself feeling different things –  sometimes happiness, sometimes sadness and sometimes anger. But these emotions don’t stay … they come and go. And I feel like I’m wandering a landscape of myself and it seems very cleansing. When I open my eyes after an hour or so of simply sitting, I come out of it feeling very refreshed.

So my question is, can you explain what is happening.  Is what I am doing when I am just sitting a waste of time or wrong in some way? Or is this a valid way of meditating.

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When all is said and done, the most basic prerequisite of meditation can be distilled to three things:

Knowing, accepting and letting go … as one instantaneous action.

But it all depends on awareness – so long as awareness is present, what you’re doing will be beneficial, and meditation will eventually work itself out.

But having said that, there is something missing from what you’re doing which is also very important. In this passive floating from one thing to another, what’s missing is the mental training that comes with meditation.

It’s very important to actively train your attention to be more discriminating with how it processes things. A primary part of meditation practice is to train your attention to develop the ability to instantly let go of whatever it notices. This ability to instantly let go causes the attention to become lighter, and less clingy, which in turn creates less needless mental activity. With less mental activity, we gradually become clearer, more intuitive, and calm.

As such, though what you’re doing is beneficial, and restful – it is not re-conditioning the mental habits and reactions that cause suffering.

Now, bear with me while I explain …

In life as it is, we are taught to win, to hold on, to get, to create and so on.  In short, we’re taught to accumulate things, not just on the physical plane, but mentally as well. Just as we accumulate money and property on the physical plane, so too on the mental plane, we accumulate things – we collect all kinds of mental stuff , particularly stuff that had a bad effect on us- memories, resentments, frustrations and all kinds of retained emotional reactions, together with their supporting stories. This stuff builds up like crud in an engine, gradually affecting the way our mind functions, and our view of life – forming dysfunctional habits like worry, anxiety, depression, negative self view and so on.  We weren’t born with these habits – they’re formed from the accumulated crud of a life – and as we age they become a part of our Self definition.

After all, what is our Self, but a big formation of memories and learned habits within the greater formation of ourself. We accumulate our sense of self, picking up new habits all the time – new memories, new patterns of emotion, intellect and so on. Everything we are, we have learnt to be. 

All well and good – but the problem is, we’re always adding new habits and reactions, but rarely removing them.

So after a while, as the crud of life collects, we lose the simplicity and freshness we had in our youth. Our view of life and ourselves becomes over-complex, ungainly and confused as we accumulate fears, anger, sadness and so on.

So then we come to meditation.

As I said, meditation practice is essentially the act of knowing, accepting and letting go. As we practice the meditation methods, building this new habit, eventually, like any habit, letting go becomes more innate and automatic, We don’t get stuck on things as much, and our reactions become more moderate – which means less usual crud altering our Self view. We feel lighter and more fresh and our view becomes more clear.

We begin living more efficiently, which cases less stress, which helps us to feel more calm.

But here’s the rub. In this process we cannot let go of that which we do not first know and accept.

So what do I mean by this?

Well, to let go of pain, we must first know it – that is to say, we must feel it – every part of it, and we must accept it, in all its intensity. Only then, as any experience meditation practitioner will tell you, will the mind let the pain go and it will disappear.

So too, to let go of past trauma we must first know it – that is, the memories must first be recalled and the emotions they elicit must be felt and accepted – only then will the mind let go and the trauma and its effects will disappear.

So ‘knowing and accepting must always come before letting go.

Many people forget this. They think they can meditate blindly – by simply chanting a mantra or mindlessly noting, or visualizing positive things. But that’s not meditation. All they are doing is hiding behind the mantra, and burying these unpleasant things further inside their psyche, making it such that, like assassins in the night, these things will attack them in covert ways and sabotage their lives – all the buried rage and sadness, and all the buried anxieties and tensions.

This does not mean we should consciously be thinking about these things, or reacting to them, or imagining them. Not at all. I mean to simply be aware – to know whatever is happening as it naturally arises and feel it as it is, until it is gone.

And this happens naturally as we practice a good meditation method.  As we train the mind to be more efficient we notice memories, feelings and sensations of all kinds of things arising in our awareness. And our attention wants to go to them, to build them into something bigger, but we use the methods to keep letting them go, so they pass away.

In this, we’re knowing all the parts of our Self, and the accumulated crug our Self is made from, while at the same time practicing the skill of letting go.

That is good meditation.

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Now, as far as I can tell, you seem to be doing one thing, but neglecting the other.

You’re drifting through the landscape of you, knowing memories, emotions, thoughts as they arise and pass away, and in this your attention is basically passive – simply wandering where it will.

This is indeed knowing and letting go and it’s very beneficial – restful and reviving. I do this myself quite often when I take a nap, or rest.  It’s very pleasant.

But it is not meditation, because you are missing an essential component of meditation practice – you’re not consciously training your attention to develop a habit of letting go – which is what the meditation methods are designed for – to teach the mind to experience life without accumulating the usual mental crud of retained reactions, so they do not accumulate.

If we can learn to live as a process of letting go instead of constantly accumulating, we wouldn’t need to meditate because life would have become meditation.

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Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’  is available now. Just click on the links below:

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