Meditation Is A Long-Term Project, Not A Quick Fix

Sorry about that, you wieners

It’s 2003, and I’m reading this Buddhist magazine called Tricycle

It’s 101 days since I read this tiny book on Buddhism and, in typical extreme fashion, announced my conversion at the dinner table that very evening. Now, as I sit next to my elaborate shrine and my newly acquired Buddha statues and water features and bonsai trees and CD of the beautiful sounds of whale orgasm, I stumble across an ad with a picture of a shaven-headed meditator with headphones on and the headline:

Meditate like a Buddhist monk, INSTANTLY.

It was an ad for a theta wave CD where just by listening, you could transcend dualistic perceptions and rest entirely in the Dharmakaya. It didn’t say that as such, but I’m assuming that’s what it meant by ‘meditate like a Buddhist monk’.

So, I bought the CD, stuck on some Nag Champa, sat on my $175 special Tibetan meditation cushion and pressed play.

It went something like this:

WOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOB.

So is this it? Is something happening? I don’t feel different. Maybe that’s the point. Don’t the zen masters talk about everything as it is?

WOBWOBWOBWOBWOB

Hmm, I’m not sure about this.

Maybe the next track is better.

Track 2: WOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOB

Track 3: wobwobwobwobwob

Hmm, I’m not sure this was worth the $99 I paid for it. Maybe CD 2 is better:

WOBWOBWOBWOBWOBWOB

CD 3: WobWOBWOBWOBWOB

It’s fine, I’m sure. I mean, the ad said ‘instantly’, but maybe that’s just a sales pitch. Perhaps I should commit to ten minutes. Maybe it’s — hmmm, I don’t feel so good, actually. I’m feeling a little paranoid.

WOBWOBWOBWOBWOB

What can I say? It was twenty years ago

It was long before meditation became an industry, and stupid ideas like this became mainstream and before any twenty-year-old with a top knot who became enlightened when they kicked the bunk bed with their little toe could sell you a course on becoming ‘awakened’.

And even today, I see people getting turned on to meditation and wanting it to work for them immediately and giving it the thumbs down on their YouTube channel when it doesn’t work in a video called:

‘I tried meditation every day for a month, and this is what happened.’

So, some mildly post-pubescent hipster has sat there breathing in and out for fifteen minutes a day for four weeks, solely intending to use the experience to further their career as an influencer. And now they have debunked the myth of meditation, meaning several thousand years of spiritual scripture can finally be disregarded.

What a relief.

If only they had Youtube two and a half thousand years ago, the Buddha needn’t have bothered

Now listen — what these little bastards fail to understand is that the most significant spiritual masters studied directly with their teachers for decades. And by decades, I don’t mean two. They studied with their masters for thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty years — in some cases a lot longer. And not just fifteen minutes a day either. They dedicated their whole lives to it.

They went to red hell and back like Richard B Riddick for their damn practice you idiots.

That might sound disheartening to those who think of themselves as deeply committed to the spiritual path or those who feel they are advanced or even intermediate practitioners.

But it shouldn’t be discouraging. It should be inspiring. At the same time, we should realise how ten years of daily practice is barely even the beginning. Seeing a few lights in your mind or feeling a little ecstasy is like a rocket scientist passing their GCSEs (That’s a high school diploma for you Americans.) Although let’s face it, it’s hard to live in our society and not at least subconsciously use our meditation practice to outdo other people.

Don’t we want it to make us calmer, more powerful, attractive, and less anxious? And yet, the teaching of the Buddha was always intended to move us past the grasping mind, not to make the grasping mind slicker.

The path taught by the Buddha is the antithesis of our sick-self-development culture.

It’s not a self-development tool. Its purpose is to help us transcend our desperate desire to develop the self, yet people still want it to strengthen and refine the ego.

But when we don’t understand that, we crave instant results.

We need instant results because our lives are so fleeting and temporary.

We don’t have much time to build our YouTube and TikTok channels, and we don’t have much time to cover our bodies in spiritual tattoos, grow our dreadlocks, and develop our profiles on Headspace and Insight Timer.

We need our meditation to work quickly. So we are always looking for better methods floating from flower to flower like bees with ADHD. What is better, faster, or more fulfilling?

A wise man once said it is good to check out all the flowers, but ultimately, you have to go deep into one flower. And going deep means practising your whole life without expecting any results at all. And that can be challenging to get your head around.

And if this all sounds disappointing, then good. It’s a sign that it’s the right thing to do.

If you are enjoying it, it is because the methods you are practising are methods your ego has selected for its own destruction.

The enjoyment you feel is your own ego laughing at you.

Wouldn’t it be better to find an authentic spiritual teacher who gives you what you need rather than what you want?

As ‘they’ say:

Spiritual enlightenment is the final great disappointment of the ego, and the spiritual path is just a series of disappointments along the way.

If you are doing it right:

It won’t make you more powerful.

It won’t make you more attractive.

It won’t make you richer.

It won’t make you at all.

It’s the opposite of that.

Do with it what you will, you bastards.

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