On Meditation: Self-Awareness and the Cultivation of Passivity
Meditation is a practice of self-awareness: a direct inquiry into how experience is organized before we ever begin to reflect on it. The objective of meditation is to become aware of how your attention is habitually and automatically pre-occupied, not just by our personal, idiosyncratic habits, but also by the non-optional dimensions of experiencing itself. The objective of meditation, in other words, is bearing witness to what was always already the case. Unfortunately, this disclosure cannot be manufactured through sheer force of will. One must wait, so to speak, for it to disclose itself.
Some meditation methods require continuous activity—chanting a mantra, manipulating the breath—and require our doing something. This doing has the same shape as the habitual self's basic move: a problem/deficiency arises (discomfort or simply unstructured space) and we apply effort to manufacture some result. These active methods of meditation can reproduce the very habit self-awareness is meant to expose: the impulse to fix, manage, or self-transcend whatever arises. Chanting a mantra, directing a breath—these can become one more instance of eliminating discomfort by doing something about it, a sanctioned place to distract our attention from the discomfort that motivated our practice in the first place.
Other meditation methods are more passive—mindfulness of breathing, open awareness—and require only our noticing what is already happening by itself: the breath already breathing, the mind already reaching out or recoiling, the momentum of desiring—including the very desire for whatever we think our spiritual practice will grant us.
Of course, none of this necessarily entails that active forms of meditation are inferior to passive ones. A quest for self-awareness could, indeed, be a disguised quest for personal invulnerability. Whereas active methods carry a structural liability that passive methods do not (i.e., they more easily mistake producing some state for increased self-awareness), activity and passivity are not mutually exclusive paths: every deliberate effort we make is an active gesture occurring entirely within an ongoing, unchosen field of experiencing that is already given to us. All active agency (chanting, holding a posture, regulating breath) is just a response to a situation that has already claimed us. In other words, any deliberate act—whether manipulating the breath, chanting a mantra, or performing everyday tasks—is only ever an occurrence taking place inside a field of significance we did not construct and cannot switch off. Our agency is not a wholly independent source of will/activity operating outside of experience; it is an activity supported entirely by our prior, passive exposure to embodiment, mood, world, others, etc.
To be sure, the cultivation of passivity is not the abandonment of action, but the recognition of the receptive ground that makes any action possible in the first place. Receptivity is the indispensable ground of all our doing, just as bearing witness to that ground requires the active discipline not to intervene.
FURTHER READING
What is the Objective of Meditation?
The Indisposible Problem of Desire
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