Meditation isn’t a tool, as we often say it is in the West. It isn’t a tool but rather it is that state in which we no longer see the relevance of using tools, or the need to do so. The meditative state is that state of awareness in which we put all our ‘tool-using’ (which is to say, all our controlling or manipulating) ‘to one side’, as it were. We disengage from our habitual tool-using or controlling behaviour and it is in this disengagement that our freedom lies.
We very much tend to see this as being passive, as being an inactive or demotivated (and therefore utterly deplorable) state to be in. Our cultural prejudice is to confuse the state of consciousness in which we are disengaged from our controlling or tool-using behaviour with apathy or laziness, or perhaps even with the ‘despairing and cowardly resignation to our fate’. This is a ridiculous viewpoint on the matter, however. It is ridiculous because control is – when it comes down to it – ‘the fear-driven or greed-driven attempt to get our own way’. It is our attempt to get things to be the way we ‘think they should be’. Put like this of course, control doesn’t sound like quite such a heroic or inspirational or courageous type of thing after all. What is truly courageous – from a psychological point of view – is not controlling, which the Daoists call Wu Wei.
Constantly getting things to be the way we think they ought to be (or trying to do this) is a foolish road to go down because we never really know how they should be. We only think we know! If we imagine that we ‘do know how things ought to be’ then that is simply because we are unreflective, because we never examine or question our assumptions about life, and when we never question our assumptions about life then this means that we are driven by these assumptions, controlled by these assumptions. All we know in this case is controlling and our controlling is nothing more than our unreflective obeying of unexamined assumptions (or our programming, if we were to put it like that). Our controlling (commendable as it may seem to us) is nothing more than ‘the mechanical acting out of our prejudices’ and as such there is no wisdom in it. It is merely ‘reflex behaviour’ that we have spuriously legitimized.
This doesn’t mean that controlling is bad or that we shouldn’t ever do it. To say something like this would be absurd: if I am eating my dinner then I need to control the process or else the food is going to go everywhere! In this case (the case of eating food) we can say that I do ‘know how things should be’ – I know that the food I am eating should go into my mouth and not anywhere else! This is where control is totally legitimate, in specific practical instances like this. If I am sweeping the floor with a broom, or digging the garden with a spade, or making toast with a toaster, then these are all legitimate examples of tool-using. When we’re trying to control ‘the way things are’ in a more global way, and using tools to try to do this, then that isn’t legitimate – we’ve stepped outside the bounds of what we can know and if we have gone beyond the bounds of what we can know how can control ever legitimately come into the picture? We’re trying to use ‘positive capability’ (so to speak) when it’s the negative type of capability that is called for…
When we say that ‘such and such is the way we should be’ what we really mean is that we want ourselves to be that way and if we want ourselves to be that way then that is simply because we are averse to feeling bad – naturally enough, of course. It’s very understandable that we should be ‘negatively attached’ to feeling bad and – as a consequence – that we shall say that we ‘shouldn’t’ be that particular (painful or frightened) way, and that we ‘should’ be feeling some other way, some less painful way, but this doesn’t mean a thing. To say ‘that we shouldn’t feel bad’ is simply an expression of our attachment; it’s an expression of our aversion to pain and our attraction to pleasure. We can’t jump from this perfectly natural state of affairs to globally asserting that it is ‘wrong’ for us to be experiencing painful mental states. We simply can’t know this – we can’t say that mental health must never involve mental suffering. That would be an unjustifiably simplistic view of things.
It’s perfectly okay for us to be averse to painful mental states and to wish most heartily that we didn’t have to endure them, but to take the position that the state of mind in question is it malfunction or error to be eliminated is completely unjustified (despite the fact that this is what we always do). It sounds inhumane to say something like this but we can give a general example to help make the argument clearer – if it happens to be the case that I have, during the course of my life, identified with some sort of idea or image of myself which just isn’t who I am (and this is actually pretty much a universal situation!) then there is absolutely no way that I can ever ‘reconnect with my true nature’ without first separating from ‘who I am not but I am’, without first going through the very painful and long drawn out process of disidentification. There is no easy way to become free from a long-established and deeply-rooted habit or addiction (which is what we’re talking about here); there are no ‘short-cuts’ when it comes to personal growth. If we are prepared to look at mental health in these terms (which, on the whole, we aren’t) then it is clear that what would be genuinely helpful isn’t to learn techniques to help us exit the painful mental state (or help us control them) – which doesn’t work anyway – but rather, for us to get better at the art of ‘not interfering with their natural processes’. Developing negative capability is the thing, not investing more and more in control. Control is a very bad road to go down, as we ought to know…
This is where the vexed question of ‘using mindfulness as a tool’ comes in – if we have the idea (which we do have) that the helpful thing to do is to ‘exit the painful mental state that we are in’ (or ‘manage the painful state that we’re in’) then what we’re talking about here is using mindfulness as a tool. We have an aim in mind, a specific goal that we are trying to reach. This is ‘mindfulness in the service of the goal-setting or agenda-driven mind’ therefore, and this means that it isn’t mindfulness at all. Meditation isn’t about achieving goals that have been set by the thinking mind, it is about – as we have already said – spontaneously disengaging from our thoughts so that they no longer determine our perceived reality. It means ‘becoming free from our controlling’ rather than being further invested in it…
Being in that space where we are disengaged from thought, disengaged from goal-seeking behaviour, disengaged from all that constant obsessive analysing and categorising mental activity, doesn’t mean that we are ‘dissociated’ or ‘removed from the reality of our own lives’ (which is a common criticism of meditation) any more than it means that we are reprehensively ‘passive’ or ‘apathetic’. Actually, it is when we are in ‘Control-Mode’ that we are dissociated – we’re dissociated because in C-Mode we are by definition focusing exclusively on our goals and a ‘goal’ is merely a mental construct! How much more dissociated could we get than this? We’re ‘outside of life looking in’, in this case – we’re in a ‘mind-created bubble’. We’re ‘behind the Glass Wall’…
When we are in C-Mode then all we care about are our thoughts, our evaluations, our ‘abstract descriptions of the world’ and this is what ‘being dissociated’ is all about. We have absolutely no connection (or relationship) with reality when this happens – the only way we can have a relationship with reality is when we drop all our goals, all of our agendas, all our descriptions or evaluations of reality, and – needless to say – there isn’t a tool in the whole wide world that can help us with this! There is – very clearly – no such thing as ‘a tool that can somehow help us become free from the need to use tools’…