It’s now been two months that I’ve been meditating for seven minutes each day. Those of you who know me may be astonished, as I am scarcely a man of routine; but I assure you that it is true. Having yet to reach egolessness, I’ve decided to engage in a little navel-gazing on the practice.
All things considered, that hard work only adds up to a total of 7.4 hours. To take productivity guru Malcolm Gladwell at his word that 10,000 hours are required to master a skill (an assertion which he makes in his book “Outliers”), at this rate, I’ve got 228 years left before I will have mastered meditation. It’ll just take some patience.
On second thought, though, why not get a little more optimistic about it? Let’s look at this quote from anti-productivity guru Buddha: “Though one may conquer a thousand men in battle a thousand times, the one who conquers himself is the greatest victor” (line 103 of a core Buddhist text, the Dhammapada). In meditation, what one seeks to conquer is not a warrior, but the next thought that follows the current one; the next boxcar in the train of thought. The gaps between thoughts are widened, and eventually (hopefully) some very interesting stuff will happen during those gaps.
Instead of minutes, then, we might be better off measuring in terms of breaths and thoughts: each breath on which we fully concentrate delays one thought from succeeding the previous one. Considering that the normal adult takes twelve to twenty breaths per minute — we’ll assume sixteen breaths per minute — that would be at least sixteen thoughts per minute defeated through meditation. I thus estimate that, under ideal conditions, it’ll take me at least 24.5 years before I’ve defeated 1,000,001 thoughts in battle — by then, maybe I’ll have a fighting chance at conquering myself. Not bad!
Hopefully by now I’ve shown the futility of measuring meditation in terms of hours logged, or perhaps at all. In fact, it was that question which prevented me from starting a consistent practice in the first place. “How long will it be until I start to see any results—and how much time will I have to spend doing nothing before then?”
So far, the main benefit of the activity, as I see it, lies instead in its routine-ness, and the role that the latter plays in separating thoughts from the perceived sources of their causality. Each day, an environment is created during which no new action is to be undertaken except for observation. Agency is relinquished. In daily life, our thoughts appear to be necessitated, validated by our actions or sensory experiences: “I am thinking X to help me complete Y action … I am thinking X because Y event made me think of it.” While meditating, it quickly becomes clear that our thoughts can run endlessly, absent of any external stimulus — and how little control we have over them. In turn, this makes us question how much we should allow them to rule us in the rest of our lives.
