Lelan Hu

trailhead

aliveness

Last updated: Oct 26, 2025.

The first goal is to explain to myself why I’m doing this meditation thing. How might it be worthwhile determines how the meditation is done, if at all. Currently, I aim for 6 hours a week.

The second goal is to explain to my friends why I care about meditation. It originates from the God-sized hole for meaning, but I think it is possible that our base assumptions about suffering, personality, and what we strive for are wrong. It is hard to speak of why you might be motivated to shake these assumptions, since things like “more happiness” or “right understanding” are laden with undesirable connotations. Rather, I appeal to freedom. If you question these assumptions and find that they are still right, then you have lost nothing. If you find that they are wrong, you may find yourself free to choose them anyways.

It makes sense to go at this in a few parts.

  1. What problem is this supposed to be solving? Why might you be interested?
  2. What does that entail practically about what “meditation” literally is? How does your specific goal affect what “meditation” is (in other words, what the types of paths are)?
  3. What is the espoused end “goal,” if there is any?
  4. Responses to common critiques.

First, what problem are we trying to solve here? There are a few entry points.

Side comment: What if you feel convinced of the utility of meditation already?

This is helpful to think about because it frames the entirety of what you think "practice" means and meditation is for. Saying it is for "stress relief" means you should do different things than if you wanted "better focus." Those are still different from if the goal is "classical awakening," whatever you mean by that.

I think this is an important question! It extricates your assumptions about what you ought to desire, and it determines what you do and hence any impact.

Answer 1. It is a solution to Suffering.

Mistranslating the Buddha excerpt

The above image is from (mis)Translating the Buddha. I found it astonishing when I encountered it.

Suffering is caused by a series of micro-actions that your mind does. You may not notice it, in the way that someone with muscular knots doesn’t notice the tension until they get it massaged out, but it is there. You can even think of the metaphor literally. Suffering isn’t a signal from not getting what you want (or getting what you don’t want), but it is the grasping at experience. You don’t get as much suffering from “pleasant” feelings like joy because you don’t grasp at them and try to change them, but the higher degree of resistance to negative feelings is what causes suffering.

Let’s be clear. You are free to try to change the world or your life. You can desire that things be different on a macro level. The question of “suffering” is not about macro of how your life is going, but at the second-to-second level of experience. You can refuse to accept your circumstances of your life or the world, but you have to accept your subsecond-by-subsecond experience without tension, otherwise that creates suffering.

It seems best to advance past your notion of Buddhism as a religion, with deities and literal reincarnation. For one, the religious aspect is burdened by needs for evangelization, by practictioners with their own motives, by the millennia with which practice and the social fabric have changed. My stance in this theological discussion is that, at its heart, Buddhism was an early and advanced attempt at what we might call “neuroscience.”

Side comment: Epistemological note

There is an abundance of "reinterpretation" of early Buddhist statements. I make no claims as to whether I know the newer interpretations are decisively right, but they have certainly been very helpful. Those doing the translation also claim that interpreting these texts are literal psychological actions create a very accurate "map" of what happens after you sit down and meditate for a few thousand hours.

It’s helpful to review examples of how language used (in translation?) make certain Buddhist statements sound like Yoda metaphysics, as opposed to a very literal description of reality and mental movements.

The claim isn’t that this will make you feel slightly better, but that you can be Happy. You will never act from a place of tension. Even if you act from fear, you have chosen to act. You will see joy and beauty in all emotions, pleasant or unpleasant. This is the sense of home, the joy, the belonging, etc that we search for, in our heart of hearts. The following tweet is a thread that is complete in of itself. I don’t have a more direct sense of tanha and dukkha, so I’d just read it:

Does this sound a bit insane?

This is a common experience for the explainer and the listener. Here’s an explainer of the trouble of explaining, with the appropriate snippet below. The most important line here is, “You fool! You are burning alive and fundamentally confused about why you are suffering, please, for the love of everything good in the universe, walk to the lake right there and extinguish your flames!” However, also, “I quickly realized that my zealousness didn’t convince many people at all, and I found that I could make more people meditate by telling them that they could get a little stress relief from it. I was deceiving them, since I would never spend so much of my own time meditating if stress relief was all I was getting.” (emphasis mine)

Side comment: But if I can live with all this suffering, why bother fixing it?

Answer

For one, you are probably orienting your whole life towards amelioration of said pain. You want to get relief, but instead of jumping into the bottomless lake, you start running really fast looking for a fireman with a water hose to spray you down. You just keep running along this deserted road for your whole life, and every time you get tired, someone tells you that if you don't try very hard and run very fast, you'll die alone and sad.

If you believe this, you might have the opposite, extreme reaction. perhaps, if you suddenly get relief, you are getting "wireheaded" so hard that you never do anything with your life ever again. If there is no threat of a stick, perhaps you will blob forever. What about all the riches you'd get from "locking in?"

  1. If you stop burning, yes, you might no longer want to sprint towards some unknown firehouse everyone else is running towards, but you might sit down, look around, and build something useful and beautiful. Perhaps you will even build a big firehose to save everyone else. Avoidance of pain is not the only or best fuel for work!
  2. Imagine every time you've procrastined on something because you were frightened of trying and failing, or performing poorly because you were worried about yourself. Can you imagine working without this anxiety? If you still have the motivation, your net capacity to do work will greatly increase!
  3. Does this sound like why you might have anxiety about wasting your life?

I think there's a better tweet on this, but it's too long so it's embedded in the FAQ with the macro vs micro.

2. You can think of this as another answer to the following questions: What is the point of life, if we are all to die and God does not exist? What is there to live for, in the post-modern world where we realize that even our values are malleable and debatable? Without family, church, or state being held unquestionable by default, what is there to die for?

In the loss of automatic meaning, the modern person finds meaning in the “small things” or in family. Sometimes they seek out religion and stateshood again. But even then, there might always be some hollowness to our choice, since we know that we could have easily chosen another. From here, we have other answers like, “the choice is what matters,” or “everything is meaningful.” Or we can sink into a depression, called nihilism.

I found these answers to be uncompelling. You could choose the path of David Hume (as written by Easwaran in his introduction to the Bhagavad Gita, so with a few grains of salt), who “confess[d] that whenever he was forced to conclude that his empirical ego was insusbtantial, he went out for a walk, had a good dinner, and forgot all about it.” The point is less David Hume and more philosophy as life. What do you do when these questions interfere with your ability to live?

This meditation and Buddhism thing slots in as an experiential answer. Yes, phenomena are empty (Śūnyatā). Thereby, even our question (“What is the point of life?”) and our sense of hopelessness are empty too. To get an intuition, ask yourself, what does it mean for there to be a “point” in “life?” Does it not seem a litte like asking “what is the refridgerator of red?” Like nonsense?

The answer meditation promises to give you, is that you can see that your question here is nonsensical. You can see that your suffering is self-constructed, and you can let it go. This is “insight.”

Notably, this is not “insight” that you can learn from reading. You have to sit down, train your ability to observe your experience, investigate your experience, and then see these things for yourself.

Second question. Given this goal (of eradicating suffering, or “resolving” our modern crisis of meaning), what does “meditation” mean?

1. High Level

There are a lot of ways to go about this, but here are the ones top of mind:

  • Gently watch your breath, and if your attention wanders away, when you realize you’ve wandered, gently bring it back to the breath. This is breath meditation.
  • Gently repeat mantras like “May I/you/all beings be safe. May I/you/all beings be happy…” This is metta (loving-kindness) meditation.
  • “Let whatever happens happen. As soon as you’re aware of an intention to control your attention, drop that intention.” This is Shinzen Young’s two-sentence instructions for do-nothing meditation.
  • Jhana
  • Insight (vipassans). You contemplate the characteristics of impermanence, suffering, and non-self.

It is easy to be confused about what the “goal” of a meditation type is. You are not training yourself to never ever wander in your thoughts ever again, although that could be a side effect of certain states or practice.

Big thread!

In fact, it is important to remember that this is not the “goal”! The goal is to right understanding that widens your sense of what is possible.

But this is a little vague isn’t it? More specifically, the algorithm is to see the mental grabbings in higher resolution, and then experiment with ways to stop the grabbing (link). Where emotions and ingrained reactions are the source of the grasping, you must accept and integrate them, so as they fade away.

2. Theory

We have to talk about what suffering is first.

  1. Suffering is associated with literal mental tension.
  2. This is also why you can see meditation as a series of exercises aimed at making yourself more and more sensitive.
    • If you are in your head and overstimulated, all food tastes similar. Junk food tastes great because they are hyper-stimulating, and the sugar or sodium or fats pop into your awareness. However, meditators frequently report a much higher sensitivity to food quality (and quality of sleep, of a party, a book…).
    • You want to be more sensitive. If you can notice the gradations of food health quality, you will always choose healthier options. If you notice you prefer a type of work over another, you can make any resulting decisions. If you notice that doomscrolling limits your awareness and makes it very hard to return to work, you do it less.
    • The actual “caring” is effortless, as is the behavior adaptation. You just need to allow yourself to be sensitive enough, instead of numbing it out and intellectualizing the sensations.

  3. As a result, if suffering is caused by the microsecond grabbiness, meditation is like 95% listening to your experience and occasionally 5% a bit of steering. Notice your experience, things follow.

  4. This is also why there is often a period where meditators suddenly experience a reduction in QoL. Suddenly you realize how everything sucked a little bit before and need to tweak your diet, social habits, sleep routine, way you work, what you work on…friends. I jest on the last one.

  5. You might be wondering why this tension exists. Obviously I am totally shooting in the dark, but it sounds a lot like what happens if you apply reinforcement learning on humans. See below example with ice cream. You can extend this logic to everything.
  1. A natural extension of this logic is that your personality is just the result of this RL. You got good points as a kid for being awkwardly funny, so now that’s who you are. You got stars for getting good grades, and now that’s who you are.

An irksome child is encouraged to change, but for an irksome elder, we endearingly say “oh yeah they are just like this,” as if personality is proven through time. But we forget that personality is a trail through the woods. It is made with time.

It’s hard to say exactly what is immutable, but might we suggest that some parts of your personality are more malleable than you might imagine. More importantly, you might always be neurotic, but if you accept it, the view is that you will not suffer.

  1. So in this sense, meditation hopes to help you realize freedom. You can still choose to be this exact person. You will end up chopping wood and carrying water just as before, but you will do so with less tension and that makes all the difference.

3. Practical Theory

Practically, that’s why the path is becoming sensitive to your experience, noticing the tension that causes suffering, and then experimenting with ways to do it less.

You may notice it is not prescriptive as to exactly how you do it. Whether you should breathe in and out on a count of five, repeat a certain mantra, think about good things…your exact path is determined by what you have and where you want to be.

However, we can still think about pitfalls and hence what a good, complete practice looks like. I’ve seen an explanation of practice as three separate elements in a flywheel.

  1. Insight: ways of seeing that free you from your fixed ways of seeing. Picking apart your experience to see how your experience is constructed.
    • Examples: insight, vipassana, noting, contemplating, do-nothing (I would argue)
  2. Integration: translating your insight to day-to-day life.
    • things that look like therapy, changing habits, somatic practices
  3. Collectedness: a unification of the different parts of you, a natural focusing of the attention. People prefer this to “concentration” because focusing isn’t something you do (in the way you might pick up a ball) but the relinquishing of the different parts of the self, the narrowing into the task at hand or experience you are in.
    • breath, jhana, focusing on any object, metta.

The path is to cultivate collectedness and discover insight, and when integrated, you burn away your knots and stop accumulating more knots. Eventually, there are no knots.

Broadly, meditation as we usually speak of it (focusing on an object) is in the “collectedness” category. This means a lot of the path is actually working with the emotions (integration)!

Here’s a paragraph about how they are related:

"These three practice types lead into one another in a cycle. Concentrated mind states make the mind quiet and calm while at the same time much more capable of precision than normal. This is the perfect state in which to do insight practices. Insight practices stir up mundane 'stuff', the various things that are causing suffering in the first place. Integrating this psychological material cleans up the obstacles encountered in concentration practice, as it's built from the same mental movements. Concentration then becomes dramatically easier, and the cycle accelerates."

If you just do insight (stare at your experience and eventually realize that everything is empty), that could be pretty destabilizing and/or be hard to transplant into daily life.

If you just do integration (understanding your emotions), you might get stuck in circles with no real way out.

If you just do concentration (breath meditation forever), you might get fun states but not the life improvements.

In a way, everything leads to each other, so it’s pretty hard to get stuck on one. It’ll be uncomfortable when stuck, and you will naturally do more of what you need.

4. Practically

Here are a few suggestions:

-“safest bet at any given time is forgiveness, then metta, then jhana imo, with ifs mixed in, plus like stretching, body work (tho expensive), general basic health things eating well sleeping well etc”

In other words, actually, most of the path is therapy. However, the meditation techniques are just tricks. They are tools for liberation, and since each person’s set of problems are so different, the set of tools most helpful also vary.

5. Some instructions sources

Third, what happens all the way?

This is hard to speak of because I haven’t seen it, and I’d guess this tends to be an infohazard because guessing at a future where your experience of experience changes is basically going to result in a set of misunderstandings. However, it seems like there are a lot of fears about meditation or misconceptions about Buddhism that originate from taking Buddhist ideas to the logical extreme, so we might as well do some cognizing to reassure ourselves.

A lot of it seems to be about some dissolution of a hard sense of self:
sense of self is just a grabbing, it’s more of a verb than a noun, it’s almost the same as tensing a muscle. it’s like saying how would i function in society if i didn’t flex my tricep. nothing bc your flexed tricep isn’t the reason you’re functioning in society

it’s like learning how to secure the house a bit during storms, to learning how to get comfortable sunny weather on demand, to not needing the weather to be any way in particular bc you’re not trying to protect a house. So you can kind of enjoy it whatever it happens to be

On a level of the literal things you’re doing, it doesn’t seem to change much, but the experience is described to be much lighter.
before awakening the mountains are mountains, after a first glimpse the mountains are no longer mountains, after awakening the mountains are once again mountains
the meditative path can be pretty midwit meme, halfway in you’re doing nimitta jhanas, tantric energy transmutations, noting impermanence, and later you’re.. feeling your feelings, trying to relax. Like learning to be again but with previously load bearing stuff removed

A summarizing meme.

FAQs.

  1. A common objection is that renunciation or meditation or Buddhism seem to reject life. That seems wrong! To retreat from the world and become self-absorbed.
  1. A different flavor. Don’t I need to be attached to my family? Isn’t it good to desire?

Yes yes. This is a problem of language, not of the ideas. You can have macro-level goals but lose the micro-level grabbiness. It’s like working towards a goal or building a friendship without an underlying neediness.

Secondarily, it probably makes more sense to “think of the ‘views’ a lot more like exercises (eg bench press) than like logical statements or like beliefs”

  1. Doesn’t any bliss that you get induce an even greater crash later?

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  1. But isn’t meditation and Buddhism and all about doing good, not about feeling good? Isn’t that kind of selfish? Shouldn’t this be noble and be about meaning?

Gently, I believe the pursuit for meaning (despite my preoccupation with it) is one borne of suffering. The way out is through. More importantly, we’re basically all selfish when we feel bad and selfless when we feel good.

  1. But all the instructions I’ve ever seen are not complicated and say things like “just relax.”

  1. This all seems like too much. Can’t be real. Are you just too sensitive?
    Maybe everything is psychoactive. How much of this psychoactivity do you notice?

  2. Sounds interesting, but I literally do not know what you mean.

A glimpse is all you need. tweet

  1. Sadness and discomfort is core to life and what makes it meaningful. You should not strip it away.

Yes. This is not theology on “life ought have no sadness.” Sadness is not suffering. Meditation is to help you be open-heartedly sad, to feel everything in the sadness and to not clench around it to try to avoid it. You are more sad, but you suffer less.

—————drafting—————

  • aif you share this attitude, dispel! that is defeatism to avoid sadness, in fear. it is a mechanism, empiricism. it is not philosophy. it will not answer the grand questions. it is to realize the grand questions are meaningless(?) nonsensical(?) but also unanswerable and to see yourself as what it is. what is a puddle that loses and gains water? live fight https://www.thedriftmag.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-my-shitty-life/

  • and also not about control (still the mind, stay in your lane) but to undo the things that prohibit that. we do not say “work harder,” but if you have a complex about working or etc, get it out of the way. this is not breathwork, breathwork is one of many ways you can rewire your brain?

  • oh and we make it just therapy! ok yes it is neurotech and nothing more, but also there is nothing more. in the process you have beliefs and views. they are lifting weights

  • this is a epistemically question: I grew up feeling disssociated with truth, but living in ideas land. Feeling the truth of why people do things many types of truth - what is actually true? rationalist, the ununderstandable. makw no claims.

  • see things more clearly / less distorted, but what is there to see? how do we know what is real? so multidimensional, all parts a little right. do I have to decide? and also on technique, dependsnon what you need but what is the final goal to orient yourself with? A need to understand and know, to have a final goal

https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/there-are-only-two-mistakes-one-can-make/

TLDR:

  • a longer thread

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  • another helpful thread

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  • on language

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A more radical expression:
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