Passion for Meditation

I sit. I watch my thoughts. Not to change them. Just to see them. To feel how they come and go. This is my look inside from first person view. Sometimes I'm also in a second person view, observing myself "first person" from a distance as a teacher observing a student. Knowing how i get there and what will be next. This is where I meet myself, in multiple variants, multiple souls, bodies and universes.

For most of my life, I thought meditation was about stopping the mind. I thought it was about finding peace. About escaping the noise of the world. I was wrong. It is not an escape. It is an encounter. A direct encounter with reality as it is through acceptance.

The beginning of the path

I remember the first time I sat for a long retreat. It was in Ireland. Ten days of silence. No phone. No reading. No writing. Just sitting and walking. Watching the breath. Watching the mind.

The first 2 days were torture. I was strong in my motives, why i want to be there, but then my mind rebelled. It threw up every anxiety, every regret, every desire it could find. It was quind of funny where you sleep in a room with 6 other mens, with own habbits and one of them is talking, screaming and even singing by the dream. It wanted to be anywhere else, focus on something meaningful. It wanted to be doing anything else.

But I stayed. I watched the rebellion. I watched the pain in my knees. The ache in my back. And slowly, something shifted. The noise didn't stop at first. But my relationship to the noise changed.

I stopped fighting it. I started observing it. I realized that the thoughts were not me. They were just weather. Passing through the sky of consciousness. Some days are stormy. Some days are clear. But the sky remains untouched.

One of days brings a total revolution, as i understand how sensors works and that i can just switch all off, whatever it is. My mental will was doing (previously incredible to name it at least) things and i ended up in a universe that wasn't this same, in different body, different mind, different setup and knowledge that my inner software can be rewired in few hours.

The practice of impermanence

Vipassana means seeing things as they really are. True nature. Not as we want them to be. Not as we fear they might be. But as they are in this exact moment.

And what you see, when you look closely enough, is impermanence. Everything changes. Every sensation. Every thought. Every emotion. It arises. It stays for a while. It passes away.

This sounds simple. Almost obvious. But experiencing it directly changes you. When you feel a sharp pain in your knee during meditation, your instinct is to move. To fix it. To run away from it.

But in Vipassana, you just watch the pain. You observe its quality. Is it burning? Is it throbbing? Is it pulsing? You break it down into raw sensory data. And eventually, it changes. It dissolves.

This is the deepest lesson. The things we cling to, the things we fear - they are all impermanent. When you truly understand this, you stop holding on so tight. You learn to let go and live your live as you like.

The mirror of the mind

I build machines that learn. I spend my days working with artificial intelligence. And the more I understand how these systems process information, the more I understand my own mind.

A neural network takes in data. It finds patterns. It builds a model of the world. Our minds do the exact same thing. We take in sensory data. We find patterns. We build a story about who we are and what the world is.

But the story is not reality. It is just a model. A useful approximation. Meditation is the practice of stepping outside the model. Of looking directly at the raw data of experience. Before the story begins.

When I sit, I am reverse-engineering my own consciousness. I am watching how the model is built and who build them. I see a sensation arise. I see the mind attach a label to it. I see the emotion follow the label.

And in that watching, I find freedom. Because if I can see the story being built, I don't have to believe it. I can choose whether to act on it or let it pass.

The semantics of self

In natural language processing, the meaning of a word is defined by its context. By the words around it. A word has no inherent meaning in isolation. It only means something in relation to other words.

The self is the same. We define ourselves by our relationships. By our work. By our history. By our desires. But when you sit in silence for ten days, those contexts fall away.

You are not your job. You are not your past. You are not your future plans. You are just awareness. Observing sensation.

This can be terrifying at first. The ego fights to maintain its boundaries. It throws up distractions. It creates dramas out of nothing. Just to feel real. Just to feel solid.

But if you sit through the terror, you find a profound peace. The peace of not having to be anyone. The peace of just being.

The illusion of control

We spend so much energy trying to control our lives. Trying to optimize our routines. Trying to manage our relationships. Trying to secure our future.

Meditation teaches you the futility of this effort. You cannot even control your own mind for five minutes. How can you expect to control the world?

You sit down and tell your mind to focus on the breath. Thirty seconds later, you are planning tomorrow's meeting. Or remembering a conversation from ten years ago. The mind does what it wants.

Accepting this lack of control is not defeat. It is liberation. When you stop trying to control the waves, you can finally learn to surf.

Application to life

The real practice does not happen on the cushion. It happens when you stand up. It happens when you are in a meeting. When you are in an argument. When you are stuck in traffic.

Can you maintain that quality of observation? Can you watch the anger arise without becoming the anger? Can you feel the anxiety without letting it dictate your actions?

This is why I sit every day. Not to become a better meditator. But to become a better human being. To be more present for my life. To respond with clarity rather than react from fear.

When I face a difficult decision in business, I don't just analyze the data. I observe my mind's reaction to the data. Am I acting out of fear? Am I acting out of ego? Am I seeing the situation clearly, or am I projecting my own insecurities onto it?

Meditation gives me the space to ask these questions. It creates a gap between stimulus and response. And in that gap lies all human freedom.

The journey continues

I have been meditating for years. But I am still a beginner. Every time I sit down, I am starting over.

The mind is endlessly creative in its distractions. The ego is endlessly subtle in its defenses. There is no final destination. There is no point where you say, "I have arrived."

There is only the practice. The daily returning to the breath. The daily returning to the present moment. The daily returning to reality as it is.

It is the hardest work I have ever done. But it is the only work that truly matters. The journey inward is the longest journey you will ever take. But it is the only one that leads home.

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