Qualy #94 - Comparing the two broad types of meditation, and Peter's favorite meditation apps
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Summary
In this bonus episode of The Qualies, Dan and Sam talk about the difference between noticing what is arising and not noticing at all in meditation, and how to cultivate mindfulness in general. They discuss the benefits of mindfulness and how it can be applied to everyday life.
Transcript
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Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Peter Atiyah Qualies, a member exclusive podcast.
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The Qualies is just a shorthand slang for qualification round, which is something you
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do prior to the race, just much quicker. The Qualies highlight the best of the questions,
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topics, and tactics that are discussed in previous episodes of The Drive.
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So if you enjoy the Qualies, you can access dozens more of them through our membership
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program. Without further delay, I hope you enjoy today's Qualies.
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You've talked about this idea of noticing what is arising versus not noticing at all.
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Can you elaborate on this? Yeah, well, so I guess I should define mindfulness, which is really the
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target state that one is trying to cultivate in at least this, probably what's the most popular
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type of meditation now. I mean, there are different, as you alluded to, there are different
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types. There are two basic types of meditation where the distinction is between being lost
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in thought and being clearly aware of whatever the object of meditation is. So that's true
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for all types of meditation. Thought really is the obstacle one is overcoming when one is learning
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to meditate. Because our natural, our default mode is to just be lost in thought. We're telling
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ourselves a story all day long, and we're not aware of it. So once one begins to meditate,
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one is trying to pay attention to something. And this is where the two different types diverge.
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The first that you alluded to, like a mantra-based or a concentration-based object of focus is
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the attempt to pay attention to one thing, to the exclusion of everything else, right? You want
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your attention to be absorbed in that object. And in many of those practices, the explicit goal
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is to do that so well that thoughts no longer arise, right? So you're really trying to get rid of
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thought in some basic sense. The arising of thought in that context is a sign that you're not
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meditating hard enough or one-pointedly enough. Those types of practices can produce extraordinarily
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positive states of mind that you can feel bliss and rapture, and you can actually use as an object
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of meditation specific states of mind, like loving-kindness, which is called metta in the Buddhist
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tradition, or sympathetic joy or compassion or equanimity. You can cultivate specific attitudes,
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which if you can focus on them to the exclusion of anything else, you're inhabiting that state to a
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degree that most people would find unrecognizable. But the second type of meditation, which is the type I
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have spent much more time doing and is almost universally considered the more fundamental or the deeper
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practice, is often described as mindfulness because that's the state you're using in the Buddhist tradition to
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cultivate it. Mindfulness comes from a practice called vipassana, which is insight meditation. And there you're not
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trying to selectively notice one thing or another. You are trying to break the spell of being distracted by thought.
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So you're trying to be aware of everything without perceiving things through this discursivity or this
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conceptual lens in each moment. But your attention can be much more choiceless. I mean, you can just notice
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whatever, in fact, you notice. You're noticing things all the time, sounds and sensations and moods and
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thoughts, but you're not noticing them clearly because you're thinking every moment of the day.
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Mindfulness begins, for most people, as a training on one object like the breath, but very quickly it
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becomes something that you apply to the full range of your experience. And what's nice about it, apart
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from all the benefits of doing it and all the things that can be realized by doing it, this type of
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meditation is clearly coincident with any experience you can have. I mean, there's nothing that is
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excluded in principle from the meditation. You're not, you can be working out or watching a movie or,
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I mean, there's no, there's no, there's no thing that in principle does not admit of mindfulness.
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And that's not true of other types of practice.
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Yeah. Just sharing one example, because the other thing that I remember you said at the time,
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I said, you know, Sam, I want to really shift this practice and sort of, I want to figure out a way
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to experience that, you know, more and more. And you actually said, look, there are a bunch of apps
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that are already out there that are all pretty good. I mean, obviously you're producing yours
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because you think it's going to offer something additional and I'll just make my plug for it here.
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I've used every one of the apps out there and I do find yours the best, but I also realized that
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there's no one thing that's the best. It's the way you explain things just resonates with me and it
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might not resonate with the next person. But the other app that I really liked that you recommended
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was 10% happier, which is Dan Harris's app. No, no, no relation, of course. And even within Dan's
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app, there are many teachers, but there are a couple that I really like, Jeff Warren and, um,
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Joseph, Joseph Goldstein, Joseph Goldstein. Yeah.
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