[0:00]Scroll through YouTube or listen to many current podcasts, and you'll often hear meditation described in a very specific way, that is, as a kind of tool. A superpower, a life hack to lower cortisol, boost focus, and upgrade your brain. And to be fair, it can have these effects, but if we view Buddhist meditation only as a hack for productivity or stress relief, we're missing a deeper point. It's kind of like owning a sailboat, but keeping it in the neighborhood pool.
[0:38]Yes, it'll it'll float just fine in the water, and it'll even move around a bit in that pool, but you're missing out on what it was really designed for. Today, we'll explore the tension between the modern biohacking view of meditation and the original early Buddhist path, at least so far as we can reconstruct it. We'll ask, can you extract the technique from the ethics? And is the science measuring the point of practice or just some of its interesting side effects?
[1:12]Modern science is often the authority we look to for reasons to meditate. We may hear terms like neuroplasticity and default mode network. It's all, I mean, I have to say, fascinating stuff for sure, but we have to be careful. A lot of meditation science is still in its infancy. Many of the studies are very small or rely on self-reporting, which is somewhat questionable. We should be careful not to treat every headline that we read as an established fact. That said, the the consensus is clear on one thing, which is that what you do with your mind changes your brain. If you practice attention, the networks in your brain associated with attention are going to grow stronger. That's not magic, it's biology. It's true whether we're learning a language, whether we're learning an instrument, learning a new sport, and it's true for meditation as well. But here's the trap. Science, indeed, does validate the mechanism, the mechanism does change the brain, but science can't really validate the goal that we're after. That is, both a pickpocket and a monk have high attitudinal control. Science can measure the focus, the attitudes that they both have. But it can't measure the ethics of how that focus is used.
[2:55]What do we mean when we use words like hack, life hack, mental hack, and so on? Well, a hack is a kind of a shortcut. It's all about gaining maximum results for minimum effort, doing more for less. It's also often transaction-based. That is, I, you know, let's say I put in 20 minutes of meditation so that I can get four hours of productive work done, something like that. And, look, it's all well and good, but from an early Buddhist perspective, it can manifest simply as a form, a new form of craving. That is, we, we crave efficiency, we crave worldly success, fame and fortune. A better, wealthier, more famous me. We're, and we end up using a tool that's designed for a path of universal non-clinging, to bring about results that we're going to cling to. In the eight-fold path, right mindfulness, right concentration, they aren't stand-alone practices. They're just the seventh and the eighth steps. Both of them depend critically on the other steps in the path. For example, they depend upon right view. Without right view, say understanding the role of suffering in our lives and the importance of letting go, mindfulness just becomes a kind of attention training. It can in some circumstances even amount to wrong mindfulness or at least an incomplete kind of mindfulness.
[4:46]Perhaps the biggest danger of this hack mentality, and this may not come as a surprise to some of you, is that it attempts to leave the ethics to one side. But the ethics really does matter to the practice. In the in the early texts, you can't have a calm mind if your actions are intentionally causing harm to others. If you lie to your boss and cheat your customers, or spend your days lifting out other people's wallets, your mind is likely to be agitated with worries or with remorse. No amount of life hacking is going to fix that kind of bad conscience. Now, the Buddha did not teach ethics just to sound like a good guy. He taught it because it's one of the key prerequisites for mental concentration or unification, what's known in Buddhism as samādhi. In one early sutta, for example, the Buddha's close attendant, Ananda asked him what the point is of behaving ethically. And the Buddha answered, the purpose and benefit of skillful ethics is not having regrets. And then Ananda followed up and asked, what's the point of not having regrets? The Buddha said that joy is the point of not having regrets. And there continued a a series of of questions from Ananda to the Buddha that led to a chain, we might say, of causal conditioning that went through mental concentration or unification, that is samādhi, eventually to enlightenment itself. The point here is that the whole edifice of practice purches on top of skillful ethics. Without it, the whole thing collapses. Trying to meditate properly without ethics is sort of like trying to raise up a roof without walls, or at least that's the standpoint of early Buddhist practice.
[7:04]In truth, what we have here are two different understandings of the proper goal of practice. Seeing meditation as a kind of a life hack understands practice as enabling personal optimization. Aiming to make some sarara more comfortable for us, managing stress so that we can stay on that hamster wheel for longer. Now, I'm not going to say there's anything so terrible about all this. It's it's good so far as it goes. And for many of us, that's what we're looking for, and and so be it. And further, if we're able to go about this optimization in an ethical way, our practice amounts basically to the lay path of early Buddhism. But the true goal of early Buddhism is is quite different from the lay path itself. The true goal is one of complete liberation of ending suffering. That is stepping off the hamster wheel forever, switching off that engine of dissatisfaction and throwing away the key. Is it wrong to use meditation to reduce stress in our lives? Of course it isn't. The Buddha certainly did not want us to be stressed out in our lives all the time. But at the end of the day, the Buddha hoped that we wouldn't settle just for being more skillful on running in the hamster wheel. He felt that we were capable of more. Now, for the Buddha, this more would have meant becoming eventually becoming monastics, leaving our lay life behind. Giving up our ordinary attachments to family, to wealth, and to livelihood. And that's going to be a step too far for most of us. I absolutely get that. I'm in fact, I'm in the same boat. That said, one particular danger that arises for us if we retreat to this life hack model of of Buddhist practice is that we might end up actually strengthening our ego attachments rather than weakening them. That is, we may be building up our attachment to this I that is productive. This I that is calm. Even this I that goes to all the right uh Dharma talks and Dharma retreats and becomes a good Buddhist, quote unquote. The early Buddhist path of whatever kind we may choose is about seeing through that I and not about refining it and strengthening it. So, for sure, meditation changes the brain. That's how it updates our hardware, you might say. But the Dharma is intended to update the software as well or instead. That is our views, our intentions, our ethical practices. The takeaway here is to be careful about hack language. While the whole package of monasticism may be too much for most of us to bite off, we nevertheless need to retain the outlook of the eight-fold path as a whole. That is, we need to use mindfulness to reduce stress and live our lives better, that's sure, that's perfectly fine. But we also need to use it to examine our ethics, to understand impermanence and unsatisfactoriness, and to cultivate kindness and compassion for others. When we go about our practice in that way, it isn't going to be so much a shortcut anymore, instead it's going to be or at least potentially can become a real transformation. Now, if you want to understand how that transformation might actually happen, the mechanism of how we get trapped and how we can free ourselves, we need to spend time with one of the Buddha's most difficult teachings, that is dependent origination. So I'll put a video up on the screen in a moment about that practice in case you're interested. Meanwhile, I'm curious, did you come to meditation originally for the the hack of it, for stress relief and and let's say better focus? Or instead, did you come to it for the broader path? And I don't mean for there to be any right or wrong answers here. We we all have our own interests, our own things that brought us into practice. Secondary question, has your approach changed over time? Has your idea of what the practice is all about, changed? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you all for your continued practice of whatever kind and please, all of you, be well.
