(2022-08-04) Chapin Review Meditation From Cold Start To Complete Mastery

Sasha Chapin Review: Meditation from Cold Start to Complete Mastery. For some reason, sometimes people want to know what I’m reading. Usually, the answer is “five things at once”

But for the past two-ish years, perhaps an accurate answer could be, “I’ve been reading other stuff in between revisiting clumps of this bizarre meditation book written by some guy who hovers on the edge of my loose internet social circle.” Meditation from Cold Start to Complete Mastery, a frequently updated book/webpage by Mark AKA @meditationstuff, has become an important text for me. I dip in and out of it often, and I’ve read it front-to-back maybe 4-5 times

along the way, some of its prose has become permanently embedded in my mind and heart. The voice in this book is frequently in my head as I walk around.

However. This book—and perhaps this is part of why I love it—is also frustrating. It’s highly dense and complicated, and the structure is bizarre. Many parts of it I don’t fully understand. It’s purportedly a manual for Mark’s idiosyncratic meditation system, but, at the end of reading it so many times, I’m not even sure I understand Mark’s system

And, wow, the prose. I have never read a more inconsistently written thing. Sometimes, Mark writes in a warm, funny way that’s alternately nerdy and embodied

After some time with the text, I’ve come to the opinion that this opacity is, at least in part, an intentional artistic decision

*On the other hand. Sometimes, the prose is wildly thickety and dense. Let it be known that, with context, passages like this one—which is about progress and momentum in meditation—become easier to parse, but they still sort of break your brain while you’re trying:

…And, second, misnomer-wise, the dynamics, at a fine grain, aren't precisely "momentum-y;"*

I’m going to review this book as a meditation manual because that’s the only way to make this tractable. But just know that it’s way more than that. This is a record of one person’s fascinating mind

Treat it as an idiosyncratic introduction to Mark’s work, not a comprehensive exegesis

The first thing I want to do is get into the part of this odd, shaggy text that I think everyone should know about.

Technical Debt, My Favorite Psychology Abstraction Ever

The first question that a meditation book should answer, assuming that it’s addressed to a general audience, is what is the point of all of this meditation stuff. What is meditation supposed to do. Mark has an answer for this that’s more satisfying than any other answer I’ve ever read.

Mark says the reason you meditate is to take care of your ‘technical debt.’ This is something you have, you just don’t know it maybe. You should probably address it.
Once you’ve taken care of your technical debt, it’ll be easier to have a good life, which is what we’re aiming for ultimately.

The goal of the practice is to have a good life, in the most broad and ordinary sense, on your terms, in your words, in your frame, or in no frame.

Technical debt is a concept taken from software development.

You have incurred technical debt: some amount of mess that will make further development more difficult.

Mark says that this is pretty much the same as a lot of our mental problems, structurally. “People have really been liking this [technical debt] metaphor,” he writes, but “…it’s not even really a metaphor; it’s just what’s happening.”

Here are some scenarios.

From an early age, you learn to live up to the high expectations of your demanding parents by being extremely agentic, getting good at playing achievement games, becoming valedictorian, track star, making partner, etcetera. This is a feature you’ve built out. However, there is technical debt, notably in the fact that you don’t have a sense of inherent worth,

In your new demanding job, you learn to schedule your time effectively. However, you have a difficult time doing deep creative work, or enjoying a vacation, because unscheduled, unstructured time feels Wrong now, and this is technical debt.

As a brainy software development type, you have become exceptionally good at living in your head. You are one big calculator and you are great at it. However, you have taken on technical debt in that you are uncomfortable in the fluctuating, changeable world of embodied emotions. People tell you about vibes and empathy and vulnerability and you don’t know what they mean.

in other words. Technical debt is whatever “bad” there is in your “good” strategies

I love this for a bunch of reasons. First, it makes explicitly clear what often gets buried when people analyze their neuroses: often, your dysfunction is a direct side effect of some good or at least internally rational development. Second, it furnishes a healthy end goal: try to keep the essence of your gifts while you work on the curses furnished in their acquisition. Third, it’s a model that scales up and down effectively—it can apply to everything from your unfortunate conversational tics to your crippling fear of intimacy.

it’s nice, and a little more complete (and useful) than casual use of the word ‘trauma.’

Mark is careful to point out that technical debt isn’t a bad thing. To lead a full life, you’ll need to overwhelm yourself, go beyond your capabilities, throw yourself into situations where your development will need to be skewed in one direction. That will create debt. However, too much debt, and you get stuck in your patterns permanently

With sufficient meditation, Mark says, you’ll get to a point where you can pay down ~all of your existing technical debt, and learn to pay off new debt quite fast, such that it never accrues too densely. He doesn’t say that meditation is unique in this ability; he points to good sleep, and excellent therapy, as other stuff that can pay it down to varying degrees

Mark memorably summarizes the goal as “happiness dependent on exquisitely and flexibly handling your shit.”

he says will take you about 10,000 hours to achieve

To some extent, this all tracks with my experience of meditative/emotional development. As I’ve learned to cope with my emotions and inner landscape, I do less of the compulsive stuff I used to, and my recovery from novel disturbances seems faster, in general. Less technical debt, easier to pay off. And things do feel cleaner, smoother, and lighter in a way that I find difficult to describe.

how does Mark suggest you go about this? Well, that’s where it all gets kind of fucking complicated.

The Meditation System, or, Wait, No, Don’t Meditate

doesn’t even advocate that most people meditate.
The book begins with approximately 10,000 warnings about how meditation can go horribly wrong.

Ideally, a person either has "truly nothing to lose" or they have ample resources to last them three to seven years (just in case).

Do I think this is warranted? Uh, maybe!
Over the last twenty years of the mindfulness boom, the risks of heavy-duty meditation have definitely been underplayed.

On the other hand, there are a lot of ways to mitigate these risks: starting with short sessions of meditation and dialing up slowly, engaging in more gentle ‘open awareness’ style sitting, or going for embodied contemplative practices like certain slower kinds of yoga or qigong, and so on.

Also, you can try to obtain some degree of self-compassion before you start serious practice, such that you’re coming at it with an attitude of maybe we can befriend the mind, not maybe we can erase the mind.

Remember when I mentioned, earlier, that I thought this document was opaque for a reason? I think this is part of the reason. I think Mark has deliberately avoided making his practices super legible and appealing. I suspect that he wants to appeal to a select audience that’s willing to put some mental work into interpreting his system.

It’s almost the method of Zen koans as I understand them, but using forbidding complexity, rather than forbidding simplicity, as a pointer towards the ungovernability of being.

So. That aside. The practice. Let’s start with what I understand.

The Practice

Mark’s conception of meditation is quite different than that of other teachers. Perhaps the main distinguishing feature is, I think, also the best part of his system: the Meta Protocol.

*Mark helpfully provides an example of what this practice could look like:

(a) let bodymind wander [baseline, glue that can hold it all together] 30s-5 min

(b) if notice your bodymind doing something "good," just be like "alright, cool" 30s-5 min*

(i) now patiently, slowly interleave (a)-(h) in a single practice, as you are so moved or as salience changes 30s-5min

*So. You… let your mind wander, notice what it’s doing, and try to steer it in a ‘good’ direction, and try to steer away from ‘bad’ directions. And then, as practice develops, you notice other ‘good’ things that can happen with your mind or ‘bad’ things you can stop, and thus, you advance as a meditator.

That might seem meandering and unfocused. Yes, true. This is by design. Most meditation systems are depth-first*

Mark’s is breadth-first: he wants you to mindfully do a whole bunch of different little things—small intentional changes in your thinking, exploration of different states, reflection, reverie—and thus take a million little steps towards the goal of understanding the way you function.

As Mark says: “One sort of has to ‘walk the entire mind,’ every little nook and cranny and tiny seam. That’s how the mind and meditation work.”
There’s a subtitle to this book, by the way: a Manual of Global Wayfinding Meditation. I didn’t include it before, because I didn’t know that it would make sense to you, dear reader. But maybe it now makes sense

If this seems too complicated/odd/vague/indecipherable, and you anticipate that you’ll just end up doing your own thing, well, that is actually fine with Mark. In fact, that’s inevitable

He concludes this section by writing, “do hold any particular system lightly, including this one.”

how are we supposed to be paying down our technical debt? How does any of this stuff work?
Mark is, again, not keen on giving us any final answers.

The Mind Is Really Smart in Some Ways

This book is remarkably free of concrete illustration. He says: do what feels good and right, and then, unless you die of meditation or go crazy, you’ll figure it out, and your technical debt will be paid off.
Mark never said this would be easy.

The closest thing we get to concrete illustration is an extended metaphor about tubes, which I barely understand. I think the thrust is roughly: the mind routes data from the world. We can think of incorrect mental representations and inappropriate habitual actions as either routing errors, or results of routing errors—kinked tubes

By the way, don’t traumatic memories feel like tense little bunchy mental objects that get in the way, almost like literal blocks in the flow? And when you get over them, it feels like flowing energy has been freed up? Maybe it’s an excellent metaphor

In some ways, I disagree with this ‘you figure it out’ approach.

But can’t you at least give me some slightly wrong directions to iterate on, that are a little more specific, of commonly desirable states I might work towards?
But, in some ways, I agree with this approach

There’s something weird I increasingly encounter on the contemplative path. Which is: if you don’t accidentally fry your brain with meditation, at a certain point, the mind starts to guide you somewhere. The contemplative path reveals itself.

Today I had a meeting with a meditation teacher, a former Zen monk who is non-dogmatic and experienced in a bunch of different practices. After I told him about various things I was doing, he said, “it sounds like it’s already started, and if you don’t block it up, you won’t be able to stop it.”

Assessment

I think Mark’s book can probably get you to stop being narrow and dogmatic if you’re on a meditation path that’s sub-optimal, and it can help you think about contemplation in a new way. That’s what it did for me, which was invaluable.

If you’re a beginner at meditation, and you want to jump into a practice I endorse, this might not be super user-friendly. I might suggest this book instead, despite its terrible subtitle. The Way of Effortless Mindfulness: A Revolutionary Guide for Living an Awakened Life is a book by psychotherapist and meditation teacher Loch Kelly*

There’s something here that seems stable, settled, certain, able to metabolize anything without being disrupted or stained or corrupted. Incorruptible. Pure. Yet, it is sensitive, responsive, creative, awake, sentient, sapient; not stagnant, not ossified, it learns, it grows, it spontaneously and proactively seeks and acts.
The answer to all the questions, all the seeking, all the contradictions, may just be love.

Experience can hurt us! That’s weird. We don’t like to think about that. But, bullies, accidents, health scares, scary movies, looking at a low balance in our bank accounts, someone saying the wrong things to us—experiences like that can fuck us up.

this seems to be the state of love.
Rather, love seems to be the answer.

*One could boil it down as:

Enlightenment =
—Input: everything, anything
—Output: love, gentle love, patient love, caring love, accepting love, parental love, romantic love, sexy love, compassionate love, love with teeth, love with claws, love with fists, love without againstness, love without opposition, love without opposite, love without remainder

I adore it and will continue to grapple with it as time goes by.

Coda

I want to conclude this review by sharing one of my favorite passages of this book

The Meta Protocol is simple. As part of your meditative life, frequently ask yourself—in writing or in your head—what, concretely, is going on when you meditate, and whether it’s helping, and where you think it’s going, and stuff like that. He wants you to do this a lot

Mark has a specific reason for including this protocol, beyond the value of introspection. He feels that a lot of meditative traditions, which focus on encouraging certain mental states, actually increase your technical debt.

But what are the meditations Mark wants you to do? Like, what are the actual actions this book wants you to perform?

The Meta Protocol is also a pleasant onramp to a greater global amount of introspection in your life. Many people, me included, ask the question ‘what is it like to be me’ surprisingly infrequently. Asking yourself this, a lot, can stop you from falling into a bunch of varieties of self-destruction, and lead you towards a more self-authored and less self-inflicted life.

Well, there are a whole bunch of them. Some are similar to traditional awareness practices

But. The one he asks you to do most is… not a typical meditation instruction. The direction is referred to in the document as ‘do and will good things if you can.’ The beginning of the direction is as follows:

P2:
will = will(/​intend/​plan) [that P]; do something volitional that alters expectations for future in a specific way; willing[/​intending/​planning/​expecting/​intent [to produce (an) effect (that)]; goal, purpose, for-what-purpose, for-what-further-good(ness)-If-any, for-ness, in-the-service-of*

Mark has a zillion little insights about the mind that seem intuitively right, and a number of other ones that seem incredibly wrong