Real workers don't meditate

Or maybe they do, all day long

Recently I was involved in an interesting discussion on meditation. It made me read Waking Up! A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014) by Sam Harris. A new, foreign world opened in front of me. For example, Sam Harris made a trip to the Himalayas with some other Western meditation experts in order to learn from different meditation gurus.

He writes:

“A woman from Switzerland became “enlightened” in Poonja-ji’s presence. For the better part of a week, she was celebrated as something akin to the next Buddha.”¹

What was the woman's big alleged achievement? She claimed that she didn't think! She was completely empty-minded, she bragged. But the woman was revealed to be a fraud. A better guru called Tulku Urgyen made her realize that she was actually thinking all the time. People, including the woman herself, had mistaken her blissful state of mind for real enlightenment. In fact, she was just an ordinary stupid happy person! 

Sam Harris told this anecdote in order to praise Tulku Urgyen and criticize Poonja-ji. But for me, as an outsider, the relevant part of the story is that a group of well-off, middle class people actually went to the Himalayas in order to politely compete over who was the most brainless.

Fish in water

Why would people arrange some status competition over whose head is the emptiest? I find it perfectly easy to understand the problem with human existence that Sam Harris describes: People walk around constantly a bit dissatisfied. Whatever happens, they always find something that could be improved and feel annoyed about the perceived lack of perfection. People can't appreciate a beautiful landscape, they can’t appreciate the feats of human ingenuity, they can’t even appreciate their own families because they constantly find flaws that someone should fix.

“The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. A move to the shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is just a little too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let’s take a look. Yes, there it is. You’re warm now, but you notice that your sweater has seen better days. Does it make you look carefree or disheveled? Perhaps it is time to go shopping for something new. And so it goes.”²

I entirely get what he means. I just don't get the solution. Why is the solution to that problem to empty one's head of thoughts and to overcome the sense of an “I”, of all things?

After having read for a while, I realized that Sam Harris, and tons of people with him, live in another world than I do, with very different problems. His solution to the problem of dissatisfaction with life and self-obsession makes no sense to me, because I have another solution: I work. Not in the modern sense, through negotiating all day long with people in an office, but in the traditional sense: I build things, I grow things, I wash the dishes and I chop wood. Those activities give me something akin to the calm, matter-of-factly perception of reality that Sam Harris and millions of people like him get through meditation.

That way, explaining the virtues of meditation to me is a bit like explaining the concept of water to a fish. I suspect that the reason why I fail to understand the point of meditation is that I'm often in a kind-of-meditative state myself. Not any of the most advanced states that elite meditationers brag of on Twitter, of course. Just very ordinary, basic states of meditative mindsets. And those are good enough for me. That way, I don't spontaneously understand the idea that humans need to deliberately modify their minds. I'm already modifying my mind in that direction, every day, without thinking very much about it. 

Foreign language

Another book I read recently emboldened me in this assumption: How Emotions are Made (2017), by Lisa Feldman Barrett. (It was one of the recommendations on the Wood from Eden book recommendations page, posted by Ken, who writes a blog called Vamps. Please write more book recommendations - at least I really appreciate them and I read at least some pages of all books recommended). 

How Emotions are Made conveys the hypothesis that above very basic states of mind like feeling good and feeling bad, emotions are cultural constructs. For example, different languages have different expressions for emotions. German (and Swedish) have a word for Schadenfreude. English doesn't. But surely English-speakers could feel something like schadenfreude also before a German-speaking person imported that word into the English language? They just couldn't talk about it. They had to feel it all on their own. 

Also, the Ilongot, a headhunting tribe in the Philippines has a word for an emotion called liget. It describes the sense of collective excitement from going to war against another group.³ The Ilongot are one of few peoples in the world that can talk about that feeling using one word. But does that mean other people do not feel it? The young American soldiers in Iraq described in Generation Kill used to yell “get some!” at each other when they were heading into dangerous missions.⁴ Didn't they feel some liget as well?

In the same way, meditation is not a word describing a state of mind for all users of the English language. For many, if not most English-speakers, it is not a description of a state of mind, but of a pattern of behavior: The word just means something weird that some middle class people do.

Does this lack of words mean that most English-speakers never experience states of mind associated with meditation? I'm convinced that people can experience states of mind without having words for them. Just like English-speakers could experience schadenfreude before the word was imported from German, people who never think about meditation should be able to experience meditative mindsets. Not intentionally and deliberately, but unintentionally, when they work.

Workers are already doing that

The more I read about meditation, the more I got the thought: But workers are already doing that! If not exactly that-that, something largely similar. Just like meditation people, workers: 

1. become brainless

2. focus on material phenomena

3. forget themselves

4. forget hunger, thirst and pain

1. Become  brainless 

I don't feel the need to go to the Himalayas to empty my head, because my head already gets too empty when I work too much with practical stuff. When I run out of thoughts, I even start to obsessively repeat some mantra. Like any guru on any mountain, but obsessively and involuntarily instead of deliberately. The mantra often is a slightly strange-sounding name, like “Saffron Siskind the San Franciscan” (Thank you for that one, Scott Alexander!). My problem is not that my head is too filled with thoughts. To the contrary, I need to refill it constantly so I don't run out of meaningful thoughts when I work and have to repeat meaningless word sequences to myself. 

Why is there music blaring in most workplaces? Probably because the workers become unpleasantly empty-minded if they get no mental input at all. 

2. Focus on material phenomena

Sam Harris writes that the first thing to do in order to learn to meditate is to sit upright, close your eyes and focus on your own breathing. You are supposed to attentively feel how breathing is being done and direct all wandering thoughts to the breathing.⁵ I can do that - and it makes me a bit calmer than the moment before, actually.

But I don't find the effect very different from the effect of focusing on anything that is of material nature and working as it should. Focusing on berries going through my hands into a bucket is not very different - I feel a bit calmer from that too. 

Working at a too-fast tempo is not meditative. Working with tasks that are not manageable is not meditative. But as long as the work is as unproblematic as breathing, focusing on my object of work is as calm-inducing as focusing on my own physiological processes. 

And curiously, I think working with the material world leads people to the highest goal of them all, according to Sam Harris: The death of the ego.

3. Forget themselves

At first I found Sam Harris’ skepsis toward the ego very difficult to understand. He writes that one should liberate oneself from the feeling that there is a seeing “I” behind one's eyeballs.

I'm usually not feeling burdened by such an illusion when I look at things. To the contrary, I have the illusion that the image in front of me is one of objective reality. I have to think in order to realize that it is just I, a subjective being, that am perceiving things in a certain way.

For example, I might see a tree with ivy growing on it, thinking that if I don't do anything about it, the ivy will overgrow the entire tree, so I need to cut the ivy that climbs on the branches. The “I” here is a kind of gnome with shears - how can anyone want to eliminate such an innocent existence?

My guess is that the “I” Sam Harris is talking about is not that anonymous doer, but an entity that takes form in the friction with the “you” and “he” and “she” and “them”. It is in relation to other people that we develop our sharp-edged sense of identity. When I have other people in front of me - especially people with whom I'm feeling a bit tense - I also have that feeling of an “I” behind my eyes. Like, a week ago, when I went to a village gathering. I was wearing my working jacket with yellow reflex bands (the same one I’m wearing in the photo at the end of this article). When I was there I discovered that people had “dressed up” for the occasion - apparently the dress code was inconspicuous, but neat, outdoor wear. I kept seeing myself from the outside, thinking of how much of a bad impression I made in my ill-chosen jacket. Seeing people meant being seen by people.

My guess is that such a socially induced “I” is the only “I” many people ever experience. For example, take all those women who say “I'm not doing it for others, I'm doing it for myself” regarding their make-up, hair-dyes, plastic surgery and fashionable clothes. For them “myself” must be something that only exists in immediate relation to other people. 

When I moved to the countryside and started working with practical stuff, I quickly learned one thing: The most dangerous thing a worker can do is to ask themselves: How do I look now? If I'm hammering in nails and shift perspective to seeing myself from the outside, I can be almost certain that something will go wrong very quickly. In the worst case I will hit my thumb. In the best case I will bend the nail. There is no possible good outcome of it - thinking of oneself in a social sense ruins all physical work that requires concentration. Workers need to overcome their egos just to get things done.

4. Forget hunger, thirst and pain

Meditation practitioner Superb Owl has written about how to handle physical pain through meditation: The trick is to focus on a sensation of pain as just a sensation, decoupled from the usual interpretation of the sensation as painful. 

I can easily do that over lighter pain. Not because I meditate, but because I work. When a piece of firewood hits my shin for the n:th time, I quickly notice what happened: a very well-known and non-dangerous kind of accident. I know that I can safely ignore such an accident and just move on. So I'm doing exactly as Superb Owl: I just notice a sensation and think of it like just a sensation. That way I don't have to waste time on experiencing minor pain.

Meditation practitioners learn to ignore hunger, thirst, rain and cold and heat. Workers do the same, to one degree or another. They are ignoring discomfort in favor of the task they are performing. They can't obsess over a sweater like the person in Sam Harris’ example, because they have a job to do. 

Capitalism killed meditative work

My guess is that in an evolutionary sense, the feeling of mindfulness arose around repetitive physical work. The individuals who could get into some kind of mental flow when they worked could work more persistently than those who did not enjoy work one bit.

But there is a downside to it too: People who enjoy work too much tend to become a bit inefficient. I know it from my own experience. When Anders comes with creative suggestions of how he could use the tractor to improve my firewood logistics I tend to get annoyed. I don't want to hear that the work I enjoy is a bit inefficient, even if it is objectively true. 

Nowadays, few workers can hold on to such preferences. For most of human history, a meditative working style functioned very well. Who was the very fastest worker was not that important. That changed with capitalism. The market economy is a competition over who can work the fastest - by any means: Technology, logistics or mere pressure on workers. 

Capitalism is a competition in overcoming nature. Both the nature of the material world and human nature. Companies in the capitalistic market economy compete to overcome the laziness, conservatism and individualism that makes humans inefficient producers. And, also, they compete to overcome the spontaneous joy of work that also makes humans less than optimally efficient producers.

Suicide instead of fratricide

After having read half a book about meditation, I summarized the practice in two words: Not war. The quiet self-denial of meditation equals not-fighting. 

I'm loosely suspecting that the practice of meditation arose in order for excess sons of warrior classes to calm down. As a rule, warrior dynasties produce too many sons. The alternative, too few sons, is even worse. But excess sons certainly are problematic, since they tend to lead to rivalries and civil war. In Turkey under the Sultanate, the Sultan sired numerous sons with harem slaves. After a devastating civil war in the 15th century, a law that allowed the winning son to kill his brothers was made.⁶ 

Fratricide has obvious disadvantages. It is clearly brutal. It stands in opposition to another very important part of human nature: Alliances between close male kin. For that reason, a religion that encourages some sons to be as quiet and undemanding as possible serves a purpose. Actually, some branches of Buddhism idealizes certain kinds of suicide - meditating until death is seen as a high ideal. According to legend, Siddhartha Gautama was a prince. A prince who gathered a following around his own wish to perish. In a society that overproduced upper class people (like all societies tend to do), a religion celebrating non-existence could help increase social order. 

I guess that buddhist kingdoms couldn't tell their excess sons to just get a hobby. They needed them to be humble. But they also needed to preserve their social status above the working masses. That way, their religion re-launched the humility of working people in fancier and more extreme forms. (Christianity expressively did much of the same, although it partially builds on other mechanisms for peacefulness and humility). 

Fight the materia

Meditation is one opposite to war. Work is another. And I think they both build on the same mechanisms in the evolved human psyche. I think the calm, non-fighting instincts that meditation builds on evolved as an adaptation to work, in opposition to the warlike side of human existence.

My purpose of this essay is not to say that meditation is useless. As things are, we live in a human zoo where many, maybe most people are actually banned from doing almost any useful practical work. People living in urban apartment complexes almost can’t do anything more offensive than breathing. In that case, focusing on breathing is the way to go.

Also, not all people are practically inclined. Even in a perfect world where everyone is free to take an ax and chop some wood, some people would just not find the inspiration to do it, or have the ability and health to do it. 

My purpose here is not to say that meditation is bad and that everyone currently sitting on a yoga mat should pick up an ax instead. Meditation and manual work are two roads to the same goal: A peaceful live-and-let-live existence. Either people avoid fighting each other through avoiding all kinds of fights. Or they avoid fighting each other through fighting the materia instead. In a peaceful future, both options are likely to be useful. 

Wood-based cross-training! I'm sure city people somewhere pay a fortune for the opportunity to lift pieces of logs from spot A to spot B. 

Read a good book recently? Please drop the name of it on the Wood from Eden book recommendations page!

Substacks referred to in the post above:

Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco

Suffering = Pain × Resistance

 

1. Sam Harris, Waking Up! A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014), 52 percent of e-book

2. Sam Harris, Waking Up! A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014), 52 percent of e-book

3. Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions are Made, 2017, 31 percent of e-book

4. Evan Wright, Generation Kill, 2004, 2 percent of e-book

5. Sam Harris, Waking Up! A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014), 17 percent of e-book

6. Wikipedia on fratricide