called “the stage of the mind.” Cognitive psychology calls it
“working memory.” Descartes said this enables you to get a
“clear and distinct” image of the object. You see it accurately,
and you understand its true value and significance for you.
To hold something in mind also means holding it still. You
see it but don’t deliberately think about it. This suggests a non-
reactive, clear-seeing quality of attention. Vipassana, Zen, and
mindfulness-based stress reduction generally aim to globally
devalue thoughts, per se, and to down-regulate emotions in the
interests of tranquility. The Buddha’s approach, on the other
hand, seeks to understand thoughts. This understanding is
what vipassana, or “insight,” entails.
The Buddha’s term dhamma-vicaya, as the second of the
seven factors of enlightenment, means the “investigation of phe-
nomena.” When we hold an object still, without thinking about
it, this places it within its broader context of associated memo-
ries. Paradoxically, this enables us, if we choose to do so, to go on
processing the object, but in a lateral, nonlinear, intuitive way.
This is how “just watching” can lead to a deeper, gut understand-
ing of the object than just talking to ourselves about it.
This feeling of holding something calmly in the spotlight,
holding it distinct from everything else, and carefully exam-
ining it, is quite unmistakable once you get it. Something
clicks into place. You feel face-to-face with the object. This
is true whether the object is vast or tiny, trivial or profound,
momentary or enduring. To be calm, alert, undistracted, and
fully focused on something is a marvelous mental state. As the
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Buddha said, you are like a charioteer in full control of your team of fine horses, able to direct and stop and switch your
train of thought as you wish. This is high-quality sati.
MAKING JUDGMENTS WHILE WE MEDITATE
When we meditate, our attention is always split between the
focusing and monitoring functions. We choose to focus on the
body as much as we can, but we can’t avoid noticing the other
“not-body” phenomena that also arise in the mind. At first,
most of our efforts have to go into focusing on the body or the
meditation collapses. Later, when we attain a good degree of
stillness and mental control, we can devote more of our cogni-
tive capacity to processing and evaluating the peripheral data.
I would guess that many if not most meditations eventually
gravitate toward some kind of Open Monitoring practice.
Over the years, an immense array of thoughts, sensations,
emotions, memories, impulses, stories, images, and fantasies
will arise in the mind, as they should. This is what gives us
the full picture of who we are. It is the raw material of our self-
understanding. Let’s call all this the “stream of conscious-
ness” for short. New meditators are often astonished by
the vast inner library they uncover when they sit. This also
explains why they can meditate for years without getting
bored. The big question is, how do we relate to all of this?
There are many possible strategies, and they all imply some
kind of screening or selection, evaluation, or preference.
We make thousands of judgments every day, but they are
mostly subliminal or automatic. We can easily flush our auto-
matic judgments to the surface, however, by noticing where
our attention goes. Attention is the currency of the brain. It
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streamlines oxygen and glucose toward the network of cells that support the mental representation of an object. This typically leads on into the kind of “approach or withdraw” reaction
described in chapter 16. You intuitively choose to give more
attention to something, or you dump it, or you switch to some-
thing more promising.
Notice that as we distribute our energy moment by moment,
anything we choose to focus on or do is at the expense of the
alternatives. We read the paper rather than go for a walk. We
think about a celebrity rather than focus on the breath. Endlessly
surfing the web has its reward (that is, it can feel “good” to do),
but it can also be “bad” because it takes time you need to spend
elsewhere. To stay with any thought or sensation or activity is to
implicitly decide “This seems to be more important than any-
thing else just now.” You can even measure how valuable you
judge it to be by noticing the amount of time you spend on it.
When we meditate, we are making a strong judgment that
this activity deserves twenty minutes of our time. Our basic
preference is obvious: We orient toward the body and away
from thought; toward the sensory present and away from past
and future; toward stillness and away from stimulation. We
relax the body and calm the mind, and gravitate toward an
ideal homeostatic state of body-mind stillness.
In Zen, this is shikantaza (just sitting, not thinking). In
Vipassana, it is jhana (absorption). Done well, this can induce
a timeless, thought-free state of inner peace that is so satisfy-
ing that many meditators regard as the highest good of all.
Unfortunately, these states take long or repeated sittings to
achieve, and they dissolve once you stop meditating. This is
where Open Monitoring meditations come in.
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When you have a good degree of body-mind stillness, you
no longer need to see the stream of consciousness as the enemy.
You can divide your attention equally between inner and
outer. Without losing focus on the body, you can also choose to
examine any peripheral thought, sensation, memory, emotion,
or problem that arises. You simply ask: “What is this? What is
happening now? Is this worth any further attention or not?”
Frequently it is. As we do the Open Monitoring practice,
we also make small, subtle, wide-ranging reappraisals and
micro-judgments about the peripheral thoughts and emotions
that arise. We can hold each one clearly in the mind and choose
our response. Over time, we sense how we stand in relation to
the complexity of our present experience. Sati-sampajjana,
the calm, conscious perception and evaluation of phenomena,
is sensitively realigning us toward the raw data of our inner
lives, without our getting caught in runaway thought. We
remain calm and centered, but we also “see” exactly what is
happening for us in the moment. We know who we are.
MEDITATING ON A DECISION
And there is more. While meditating, you can simultaneously
reflect on a problem. If you have to make a financial decision—
such as to buy or sell shares or trade in a car—you would n
or-
mally think at length before deciding. By meditating, however,
you can take a different approach: You can deconstruct the
issue and see it in a broader perspective.
When your mind is relatively calm and still, you can split
your attention equally between the body and the problem.
In other words, you continue to scan the body or track the
breaths while you break the issue down into its component
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parts, following the format of the Sutta, in order to see each part as accurately as possible.
Those parts are the thoughts themselves; their affective
charge or valence; the underlying emotion; the state or
quality of mind; and the body sensations that occur during
the process. In reality, these all interpenetrate, but with
practice you can provisionally separate them out. You can see
each one—thoughts + valence + emotion + state of mind + body
sensations—relatively clearly and distinctly on the stage of the
mind, and hold it still.
Let’s go through this process in more detail. To start, you
hold the issue in mind. You ask: “What is this?” and you name
the issue in as few words as possible, such as “buying shares”
or “buying a car.” Then you ask: “What is the valence around
this issue?” Is it strong or weak, positive or negative? In other
words, how important does this issue seem to be for your
well-being? Once you can see the valence, you don’t need to
do anything else for the moment. Your mind will tend to auto-
matically reappraise it up or down as appropriate.
Then you can ask: “What is the underlying emotion?” Is it
excitement or fear of missing out or dread or desire? Then you
ask: “What is my state of mind?” If you recognize that you are
agitated or exhausted or anxious, you will see that you are in
no fit state to make any decision, no matter how convincing
the arguments. Conversely, you will also recognize when it is
exactly the right time to act.
By consciously focusing on your body throughout, you
can remain calm and centered, with no physiological urge to
make an immediate decision. A clear sign that you are truly in
control is that you can freely abandon the issue and give full
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attention to your Standard Meditation Practice. Alternatively, you can switch to another problem on your mental list.
Mindfulness can also help make judgments that are more
emotionally complex. Issues around work, relationships,
health, identity, and satisfaction are truly vast, and the ratio-
nal mind has its limits. When I was young, I eventually real-
ized that a sexual relationship is too complicated to ever fully
comprehend. Even when a relationship was going well, I never
really understood what was happening. So how can you make
a decision to stay or go, for example, or to speak or be silent,
without making a complete mess of it?
The best meditative strategy is still to deconstruct the issue
into its component parts—thoughts, valence, emotion, state of
mind, body sensations—as in the example of buying shares or
buying a car. But this is not enough on its own. We can’t com-
plete this process in just one or two meditations. We need to do
it repeatedly, and at different times of day, and we can’t just do it while we’re meditating. We have to be able to identify those
components in the live situations during the day. It is amazing
how wise you can seem to be when sitting, and how confused
you become when you return to the world.
At a certain point, however, the answer will be perfectly
obvious. You finally know exactly what to do. Alternatively,
you may wake up one morning to find that the process of delib-
eration is over. The last votes were counted overnight. You then
find yourself acting as if a decision has already been made.
COMPARATIVE EVALUATION
Yes-or-no decisions are hard enough, but either-or decisions
place even greater demands on our cognitive capacity. At any
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time, we are likely to have the problem of competing good things in our lives. We all have primary life goals that are hardwired into us. At the most basic level, we have a will to live and
thrive. It is very hard to overrule that, as people who try to
commit suicide often discover.
Moreover, we all need money or some form of support; we
all need some social recognition or love; we want good health;
and we want to enjoy our lives. We can’t opt out of these high-
value goals and choose to simply drift along, accepting what-
ever happens. They all take continual effort. We instinctively
line up our actions against these ethical yardsticks every
day and make our judgments accordingly. If we try to ignore
those inbuilt goals, the result is poverty, isolation, sickness,
misery, and an early death.
Money, love, health, and enjoyment are all worth pursu-
ing. However, it is almost impossible for any of us to achieve
excellence in all of them at once. They compete against each
other for our limited resources of energy, time, interest, and
money. Every decision we make will be a trade-off against
those natural goals. We might wish for a vantage point from
which we could have an overview to put everything in per-
spective, but at that height we wouldn’t be able to imagine
how the detail would work out on the ground.
In these situations, we can use a judgment strategy that
I call “comparative evaluation.” Both A and B may be good.
They both have high positive valences, and both may be nec-
essary, but how do they compare against each other? How
should we best distribute our energy between them? How can
we compare, for example, the issues around work versus fam-
ily life? Career versus health? Education versus adventure?
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Having a baby versus a career? Spending versus saving? Leisure versus achievement?
These issues are too big to compare rationally, but you
can evaluate them through embodied cognition. By think-
ing through the body, and becoming fully conscious of the
valence and emotions around an issue, you can gradually
construct an integrated body-mind image of it that isn’t solely
reliant on words. You can start to think of “work” as a rela-
tively stable, muscular, visceral, gut feeling within you, rather
than a riot of words and behaviors. If you do the same with,
for example, “family life” or “health” you will get an entirely
different image. Every issue is likely to have its own unique
configuration of muscle tone, arousal, affect, and mood. It has
its own body-
mind image or signature.
Once an embodied image becomes coherent and stable
and familiar, you can compare it with another. You can place
them both on the mental stage and turn your attention slowly
from one to the other. How does “work” make you feel? Give it
a minute or two to become vivid. Now switch to “family life.”
How does that make you feel? You can let the thoughts and
emotion and colors of each one emerge as you do so, but you
try not to verbally elaborate on them.
Ultimately, you are trying to sense their respective weights
and emotional tone. Both may be good, but which of the two
feels more substantial and worthy, at least in this moment? Are
you undervaluing or overvaluing one over the other? This is
usually not a winner-takes-all situation. You have to choose
how best to distribute or sequence your energy between them.
If you want to be thorough, you do this repeatedly, both
in meditation and out. I also suggest you get into the habit
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of comparing the relative value of all the big goals in your life, and even the little ones as well—A versus B, A versus C,
A versus D, then B versus C, B versus D, and so on—in order
to discover what is truly important to you. When you make
decisions, you will be working from judgments that are closer
to the substrata of your primary values.
INSIGHT
Most of our thinking is routine, pedestrian, and workmanlike
at best, but occasionally we have a truly brilliant thought. We
call this an “insight.” The skies open up. The problem is per-
fectly illuminated. The answer comes with effortless convic-
tion. The Sutta is a training manual designed to produce just
this kind of brilliant thought. I gave the classic example of the
monk’s preawakening insight near the start of this chapter. In
fact, the term vipassana, which literally means “repeated deep
seeing,” is usually translated as “insight.”
The author Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) proposed four
stages of creativity or insight: preparation, incubation, the
flash of insight itself, and the subsequent verification. The
first stage, preparation—brooding over an idea, collecting
data and hypotheses—is completely rational. For instance,
Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913), the cofounder of evolu-
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