“Do not try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”
– Dalai Lama

1. Mental Health

   This is the most obvious reason to meditate. If you think of your mind as another organ, then just as you need to keep your muscles healthy so too your mind. It’s not entirely clear to me what a healthy mind means. To me, this is not the same thing as getting rid of negative emotions. Just as you can have a healthy body in various ways - you can be a slim runner or a buffed-up body-builder or a gymnast or a cross-fitter - so too you can be mentally fit in various ways. I suspect that the two kinds of fitnesses are highly correlated - I would love to be mentally agile and flexible in much the same way that I think I’m physically agile and flexible. One needs to be a bit careful with overgeneralization though. Meditation is not a panacea. Running can make you healthy but if you catch Covid it is not going to get rid of the virus for you. The same is true with meditation. It can only help you maintain a general level of mental fitness and even raise your baseline to high levels but it is not going to eliminate your repressed trauma for you. The onus of that, unfortunately, lies entirely on you.

2. Lifestyle

   Once you’ve meditated long enough, it becomes a lifestyle. Meditation is no longer about just sitting with your eyes closed (which is just the necessary training) but rather it is about how your live your life from moment to moment. I like to think of it as a self-check subroutine, a cron job, that you can run ever so frequently to self-evaluate the state of your mind. The reason you need to practice the meditation meditation is to make this self-check subconscious and effortless. Moreover, most of us have atrophied metacognitive muscles and we need the training to revive them and keep them strong.

3. Clarity

   One superpower you get from meditation is that of Clarity. Whenever you feel like life is getting too chaotic and things are running out of control, in the blink of an eye, you can turn off a switch in your mind and look at things from a distance and wait for them to calm down. One of the fundamental insights of meditation is that, with time, the state of your mind inevitably changes by itself, whether you want it or not. If you don’t like the state that your mind is in right now then just wait it out. Of course, there is no guarantee that the next state that arises will be better. But you can hack your brain using your body, by doing physical activity, or socializing, or watching something wholesome on YouTube, or things like that. Again, this is not about fundamentally rewiring the brain but rather clearing it up momentarily. It’s like when your computer gets too slow even when no programs are running and you restart and it miraculously speeds up. Nothing has permanently changed in the hard disk and yet the result is a speed-up.

4. Disabling Autopilot

   Most of us most of the time are running on autopilot. Time passes without our noticing it. This is not by itself a bad thing. But too much of anything is always a bad thing. You want to turn off your autopilot every once in a while and take stock of things. On a long timescale, this is a very difficult thing to do and is often something that only happens when you go through some difficulties in life. But on a short timescale, you can achieve this through meditation. This is the same switch that I mentioned above that you need to flip to just pause and make a decision if you want to keep on doing what you’re currently doing or do something else altogether. If you find yourself sliding down a water slide then, by all means, keep having fun but if you find yourself free-falling and being dangerously close to the ground then it might be time to pull up your parachute before it is too late.

5. It’s Fun

   I take great pleasure in learning new skills and becoming an expert in them. I love doing math, learning new languages - natural and programming, I love to write, I love to dance, I love to bake, I type in Dvorak, I used to play video games when I had the luxury of time, and now I love to meditate. Meditation is a very fun skill to acquire. It requires no special equipment or location. You can be meditating while you’re walking or watching Netflix or doing math. It is an unending video game with no boss level. I can easily imagine becoming so mad skilled in meditation that it becomes a subconscious process like walking or driving and it can become something that you constantly do like breathing (actually, this might be the boss level). As with any other skill I might not become the Michael Phelps of meditation but I have no reason to believe that I cannot become an expert in it with enough practice.

6. Insights

   I saved this for the last because this might be the most complex reason I like to meditate, or rather read about meditation, and am interested in understanding it more generally. I’ll write longer posts about these. Here, I just want to summarize the insights I have learned and assimilated so far, in no particular order.

   1. We’re not in control of our thoughts. They should be thought of as external stimuli as far as the conscious mind is concerned.

   2. Everything inevitably changes with time, including the states of mind. Everything is impermanent.

   3. The default state of mind is not its only state. Other states are attainable through meditation, introspection, and contemplation.

   4. Meditation is about doing less than what you’re doing by default.

   5. Attention and Awareness are not the same things.

   6. There are 3 levels of understanding or knowing: conceptual, experiential, instinctive. There is more likely a (non-linear) spectrum and these are broad markers.

   7. We make decisions based on feelings and not reason. System 1 is more powerful and the true decision-maker, and not System 2.

   I’ll probably be updating the above list frequently as I learn and understand more.