Meditation will not fix any problems at all

We need to face ourselves squarely

“I will finally get to a place where I’d be immune from all pain and experience perpetual bliss and wonder”. That was one of the major impetus for me to start this endless journey-less journey I called the spiritual path. You see, it had taken me just a few months to successfully realize that I had spent more than 30 years looking forward to going to heaven, that place where …I will be immune from pain and live in this bliss forever. “This world is temporary and I will finally rest in heaven”, seemed like my motto. And when this reliance on concepts of heaven being a place to achieve fell apart, I was left feeling like there was nothing else to stand on. Life seemed bleak and hopeless. Then, all the pieces from deconstructing my religion started coming back into new constructs. It didn’t take long for me to see something else that we could relate to depending on where one is on this ‘journey’— the aversion from pain and suffering.

Oh, I am the master of this aversion! Years and years and years of stuffing down pain, dodging confrontation, protecting the thorn of triggers, redirecting fear through video games and phone calls and vacations— I was well trained in not dealing with pain. As I began to understand the root cause of suffering, another strategy for averting pain slowly crept in: burying pain in meditation. I believe most people on this path eventually find escape in meditation, bypassing the very lesson that pain opens us to. In fact, what we may not know is that the pain that we try to escape from is the same pain that we inflict on the world. Why? Because in some sense of seeing, there’s no world outside there. There’s just this very manifestation of what appears. That’s all there needs attending to. Just like a cancerous cell doesn’t affect just the tissue it latches onto, it kills the entire body. In some ways, our repression and escape from pain is what feeds the cancer of suffering.

Thomas Merton once said, “Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, anguish, or from doubt”. And that’s the truth. There’s some belief that once one locks themselves up as a monk, or dedicates their lives to living within the walls of the church, then somehow pain would stop and somehow all of life becomes rosy.
A few years ago, I learned in absolute horror as monks in Myanmar incited violence against Rohingya Muslims leading to more than 140,000 people displaced and over 25,000 people killed between 2012 and 2017. All of this despite the vows that monks take to not kill any sentient beings. Despite all the daily hours of concentrated meditation. Look around at those who perpetuate the worst evils— you may see that for a huge number of these, they happen despite the spiritual lineage, religion, pius belief systems etc.
It seems super clear then that the practices are not what change the world. The practices are not what change us. The common denominator in all of this is this ‘us’— the self and how it structures itself ultimately for protection.

But are tools bad? Are tools ineffective? I believe all tools are designed to do exactly what they are designed to do. However, we must examine the way we use them. And we must put the understanding of the solution before the tool itself. I would assert that nothing changes until we understand what the self construct is. When we understand its make-up and how it creates our experience, we can better use the tools to help navigate the different problems. I will, at this time, highlight the tool of meditation.

Meditation is a beautiful tool for recentering, for training the mind in concentration. Most of the academic studies that praise meditation cite meditation as a tool to help with focus, sleep and general mental wellbeing. To me, those are the minimal side effects. At the same time, a number of studies are coming out about some risks to meditation.
I used to be a huge evangelist of meditation until I properly examined the tool, realizing that crossing one’s leg, closing your eyes and holding a mudra mean absolutely nothing until you can bring attention to where attention comes from. And for that you need no cross-legged meditation. As I have gotten more practiced in paying this attention, I find that it does get harder and harder to talk about what that is and ultimately, that can’t be properly understood without experiencing it yourself. That’s the freaking catch 22 in all of this.

And so, in bringing attention to the source of attention, it becomes more easy to see how pain propagates. And to me, that is how one can use meditation to magnify-glass our experience of self and other, this-or-that, good vs evil, here or there, outside-or-inside. It becomes easy to see how all wounds are self-inflicting in a certain sense. It becomes so easy to see that the conditioned mind rejects pain, seeking pleasure, seeking joy— all good attempts but in poor executition through running away from the inevitable.

Perhaps the trained unconditioned mind recognizes joy as its default state, seeing that all ineffective effort to gain this state of joy is still a struggle and push toward attaining this unexplainable joy. So, the allowing of pain, the permission for the inner contractions to occur becomes the way the mind comes back to its default state. Maybe in this, one can begin to see that no pain is caused by anything external. The external event markers are appearances while the perception of this appearance is what gives it the deliniator of cause and effect. To explain further, imagine someone cuts you off in traffic. Your body reacts—tight shoulders, surge of anger, maybe even a string of words that would make your mother blush. But the driver is long gone. What starts to play out is just a narrative. A loop. A movie still playing in your chest. That’s the punch. That’s where it landed. And now, long after the event, you’re the one replaying it. It’s like being mad at someone for punching you. Yes, in the plain sense of it, the punch was landed on the face by someone external to you. However, the pain is within, defined within, created within. So when I say, "the punch is myself," I’m not pointing to some masochistic theory where I’m to blame for everything. No! It’s subtler than that. It’s the recognition that the entire experience—the perception of the event, the emotional fallout, the looping thought—is arising within me. Not outside. Not separate. Within.

This changes everything.

Because once you see that, you begin to notice the way cause and effect operate differently than we’re taught. We’re conditioned to think the world is causal in a straight line: this happened, therefore I feel this way. But in direct experience, it's not so clean. Two people can receive the same insult and have wildly different reactions. One laughs it off. The other spirals for days. Why? Because the real cause is not the event. The real cause is the interpretation—the internal relationship to what happened.

I’m reminded of a line from Viktor Frankl: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." That space isn’t outside you. It is you. Or rather, it’s your capacity to witness what arises, rather than be swept away by it.

And so I describe our experience of ‘life’ as a dream(and in a way it truly is). Now this is not a dissociative view, but a revelatory one. Hear me out. In a dream, someone might attack you. You might feel pain. You run, you scream. But when you wake up, you realize: the attacker, the victim, the pain—all of it was you. All of it happening in one mind.

Now, what if waking life isn’t fundamentally different? What if the separation between self and other, cause and effect, is thinner than we think? What if the same field that dreams at night is dreaming this moment, right now?

This doesn’t mean we don’t respond to harm or set boundaries. But it does mean we stop outsourcing responsibility for our inner world. The storm may come, but the eye of the storm—the witnessing awareness—is always untouched.

When I trace all my pain back to its origin, I find it not in the world, but in my own resistance. In my narratives. In my identification with the character being wronged. I find it in wanting my current situaton to be different than it is thereby fighting with reality. But in my moments of remembrance, when I return to the witness—the one who sees it all—I see that I am free. Not that I just became free by seeing. It’s that I was always free. It’s thinking that puts a big block of scales to my seeing. Even if the pain remains, the suffering changes flavor. It loses its grip.

So, if I had a lesson to share, I’d say the next time life lands a punch—through words, through unfolding events, through unexpected loss—pause. That pause becomes how you start to pay attention to your self. Feel where the blow lands. Not in theory, but in direct experience. You may notice that there is no physical location to the pain apart from the knowing of the pain(I know! Just keep watching you’d notice the truth in that statement). Now, watch what happens within you. That’s the real theater. That’s where liberation begins. What I have found in having this ‘watching’ be the only activity is this: strips of wisdom begin to unfold. I begin to see that life isn’t happening to me. But it is happening as it is— unbothered by my narratives, unbothered by what could have been, unbothered by what should have been. Life just be lifing!

Another piece of wisdom unfolds in watching the pain from the punches: I begin to realize I am not the punched. I am not the puncher. I am the space in which both appear and disappear.

And that space is unhurt, always.

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