This article is based on a talk I gave in Dec. of 2024.
What is life, really? What are we doing here? And what gets in the way of experiencing what life actually is? These are enormous questions, but in some ways the answer is very simple. When you begin to cut through the noise, the static, the conditioning, and all the ideas the world has given you about who you are supposed to be, something else begins to emerge: life itself. And life, when you experience it directly, is beautiful, brilliant and alive.
This isn’t about becoming special or constructing some grand spiritual identity. The extraordinary thing is that the deeper nature we are looking for isn’t reserved for a few unusual people. It is inherent in everyone. The question is who is interested enough to discover it. Who is willing to explore life as it actually is, rather than simply accepting what we have been taught it is?
There is an old Buddhist image of the 10,000 states of mind. Ten thousand really means innumerable - an enormous spectrum of possible ways consciousness can experience existence. Yet most people live in only a handful of them. Think about that. You have this immense range of consciousness available to you, but perhaps you spend most of your time moving among anxiety, frustration, desire, sadness, anger, excitement, boredom and temporary satisfaction. Those become the notes you play, and eventually those notes become your composition. You begin to say, “This is my life.”
But what if it isn’t your life? What if it’s simply the state of mind you’re in?
This is one of the most important discoveries meditation can give you. A state of mind can feel completely real while you are inside it without being reality itself. Anger can fill your entire field of awareness. Depression can do the same thing. So can fear, jealousy or disappointment. When you’re inside one of those states, it can appear to explain everything. But you’ve entered a room. That’s all. And rooms have doors.
We tend to think about karma as something mysterious or cosmic, but there is a very immediate way to understand it: Where do you find yourself right now? What state of mind are you inhabiting? What patterns keep repeating? What thoughts do you continually return to? Those patterns create momentum, and momentum begins to feel like fate.
Meditation interrupts that process because meditation makes you aware of what is happening. Once you can see a state of mind instead of simply being consumed by it, something extraordinary becomes possible: choice. You begin to discover that you don’t have to play the same note over and over again. You can change the music.
Whatever you continually feed with your attention becomes increasingly dominant in your experience. If you continually feed resentment, resentment becomes easier to access. If you continually replay an injury, the injury remains psychologically present. If you continually feed fear, you begin encountering life through fear.
But the reverse is also true. Feed awareness, love, beauty, truth and silence, and your inner world begins to change. This isn’t positive thinking. You’re not pretending that difficult things don’t happen. You’re becoming responsible for what you continually energize with your attention. You start discovering that attention is one of the most powerful forces you possess.
Most of us live on the surface of ourselves. We see, hear, react, think and feel, and almost immediately categorize what happens: good, bad, I want this, I don’t want that, I like this person, I don’t like that person, this should be happening, this shouldn’t be happening. We have been conditioned to navigate life through thousands of these categories, many of which we didn’t consciously choose.
We could describe this surface existence as two percent. The number isn’t literal; it’s a metaphor. Imagine that the ordinary personality - the thoughts, emotions, conditioning, preferences, fears and reactions that normally occupy our attention - is only two percent of what we are capable of experiencing. Meditation introduces us to the other 98 percent: silence, awareness, vastness, stillness, love without an object, and a sense of connection that doesn’t require an explanation.
When you begin contacting that deeper awareness, it changes how you navigate the surface. The two percent is still there. You still have a personality. You still have emotions. You still get irritated. Things still go wrong. But now they exist within something much larger, and perspective changes everything.
There is another illusion worth dropping: the idea that someday you’re going to have everything figured out. You won’t, and that’s wonderful. Look at the stars. Look at the cosmos. Look at a tree. Look closely at another human being. Do you really think you’re going to figure all of this out? Why would you want to? Participate in it. Experience it. Bring your totality to it.
Life is infinitely more interesting when you stop demanding that it conform to your ideas about what should happen next. You can figure out what this moment requires. You can become completely present. You can respond intelligently. Then the next moment arrives. Life keeps moving through you, around you and as you. The practice becomes one of learning to trust that movement.
This includes the difficult parts. Sadness, loss, anger, failure and disappointment can all become part of the path. Even experiences that tear apart our previous understanding of ourselves can become openings. Sometimes the reality we’ve constructed has to break before we realize it was a construction.
We experience this in our own lives. Some of the events that open us most deeply are not gentle. At the time, we would never have called them gifts. But meditation gives us the possibility of using everything. Instead of asking only, “Why did this happen to me?” we can eventually ask, “What can I see now that I couldn’t see before? What is this showing me about attachment? What is it showing me about fear? What remains when the identity I depended upon gets shaken?” Nothing has to be wasted. Everything can become part of awakening.
Conditioning is like walking into a room filled with smoke. At first you can barely see. Stay there long enough and you forget you’re in a smoky room. You simply think that’s what the world looks like. Our thoughts can become like that. Our judgments can become like that. Our emotional patterns can become like that. The mind fills with so much psychological smoke that we can no longer distinguish what is actually happening from what we are thinking about what is happening.
Meditation clears the room. Mindfulness keeps clearing it throughout the day. You notice a thought, a judgment, a story you are constructing about a situation or another person, and instead of immediately believing it, you see it. Then perhaps you let it go - not because you are trying to become a “good” person, but because you would rather see clearly.
In my experience, a real path has three indispensable elements. Meditation gives you access to deeper states of awareness. Mindfulness teaches you to bring that awareness into ordinary life. And then there’s laughter. There has to be laughter, because once you begin stepping outside the dramas of the personality, you start noticing something: we’re hilarious.
We get tremendously serious about our stories. We become offended. We obsess. We construct elaborate interpretations of what somebody said Tuesday afternoon three weeks ago. We replay conversations. We defend identities we constructed ourselves and then forgot we constructed. Sometimes the most liberating response is simply, “What am I doing?” And you laugh.
The moment you can genuinely laugh at a state of mind, something has already broken open. You are no longer completely trapped inside it. The spell has been interrupted. That’s why humor can be profoundly spiritual: it restores perspective.
We spend much of our lives building an increasingly elaborate idea of who we are. Our families begin the story. Culture adds to it. School adds to it. Success and failure add to it. Relationships add to it. Eventually we have chiseled out a remarkably detailed identity, and then we become trapped inside it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with having an identity. We need one to navigate the world. The problem begins when we mistake it for the totality of who we are. You can improve the dream. You can manifest things inside the dream. You can make the dream more comfortable, successful or exciting. But meditation asks a more radical question: Can you wake up from the dream?
As meditation deepens, there can gradually be less fixation on ME - my story, my image, my victories, my failures, my importance. Strangely, as there becomes less of that constructed self, there is more life. More immediacy. More awareness. More connection. More freedom.
What if as an exercise, you ask yourself to imagine your highest self looking at your life. What would your deeper self say to you? The student asked, “What would yours say to you?” Hopefully you can say, “Good show.”
Not because you’ve done everything perfectly. Far from it. I’ve personally spent plenty of my life thinking I should have handled something differently, understood something sooner, been wiser, clearer, better. Eventually I began to see that constantly judging myself was simply another form of self-absorption. There is so much to learn from not doing something perfectly. Now, when I see that I could have done something differently, I look, I learn, I adjust, and I keep going. That’s very different from building another identity around having failed.
At this point in my life, what matters most to me is fairly simple: awareness, truth and love. I try to live there. Sometimes I don’t. Then I notice where I’ve gone, learn whatever there is to learn, and return. No drama required.
And what if you get lost periodically in the confusion and chaos of your own mind - the haziness, thoughts and emotional patterns that become so convincing that you temporarily lose touch with what you know.
Coming back feels like coming home.
The smoky room isn’t your home. It’s just a room you walked into. Once you remember that, you can walk out.
This is why we meditate. Not to become religious. Not to become impressive. Not to become some perfected spiritual version of ourselves. We meditate so that we can see clearly. We practice mindfulness so that we can keep seeing. So that we can sit with whatever is happening in the present moment, without labeling it, without judging it, without turning it into a story that carries us away from ourselves and the moment. And we laugh because we will inevitably forget, and remembering doesn’t have to become another problem.
There are far more than a few discordant notes available to you. There is an entire symphony. Meditation gives you a chance to hear it. Pay attention to where your mind goes. Learn to recognize the rooms you keep walking into. Open the door.
And choose life.