Learning it by Heart: What Sticks in the Mind

Most of us have something that sticks in the mind so well we can’t not know it. A phone number from childhood. A chant. A song you’d swear you never learned on purpose. You don’t retrieve it — it’s just there.

This is how we explain the ninth stage of concentration meditation. When we recite a text often enough, we come to know it by heart — then particular passages come to mind on their own, just when you need them. The same thing happens in concentration meditation. By the ninth stage, the mind has returned to its object so many times that it stays there without effort.

That’s worth contemplating, because it says something about what we’re trying to build.

It’s easy to assume that progress in meditation comes through greater willpower. You start out unable to hold your focus, you practice, you get better at forcing it. Under that picture, an advanced meditator is someone with an unusually strong grip.

That’s not the picture the tradition draws. Across the nine stages, effort doesn’t intensify — it thins out. At the beginning it has to be constant, because the mind won’t stay where you put it. Later it becomes intermittent, needed only when something breaks through to consciousness and disturbs our concentration. Further on, it isn’t needed at all. At the end, we don’t have to force concentration at all; it happens on its own.

Familiarity is the word to describe this. The mind has focused on its meditation object so often that being focused becomes ordinary. That’s less a mountain you climb than a habit you accumulate, one session at a time.

Which changes how we think about what we’re trying to accomplish.

If the goal is a stronger grip, then a session where you had to drag the mind back forty times is an exhausting workout. If the goal is familiarity, those forty returns are a deposit toward the future. Nothing is lost. The session where you struggled, and the one where you didn’t, are both building familiarity.

A session where the mind wanders can feel like a defeat. I won’t dismiss that feeling, but I do want you to see that even the tough sessions are progress. Practice built only on willpower runs out when the willpower does. Practice built on accumulating familiarity doesn’t have that problem, because it only asks that you keep coming back.

You’ve already done this without realizing it. Nobody memorized a childhood phone number by concentrating harder. You repeated it and repeated it, and one day it was simply there.

We practice and learn together in Chattanooga, in person and online. I’d love for you to join us.