The relationship between intention and conditioning

Someone on reddit made an observation about why they were having trouble with distraction in meditation that inspired me to respond. Their theory was that someone who spends all day thinking can’t have stability of attention—can’t avoid distraction.

But this can’t be right. Many of the meditators I know think pretty much all day in daily life. For example, I work as a computer programmer, and have a lot of outside obligations as well. If it were the case that thinking all day made it impossible not to have distractions, then a lot of meditators couldn't be successful. And yet the evidence is that they can be.

What allows you to have stability of attention is not what your daily life is like, but what habits you've successfully developed in your meditation practice. Think of meditation in terms of Pavlov and Skinner, not in terms of Freud. That is, how your meditation goes is a matter of conditioning, not history. Conditioning happens in history, of course, but it's not just history.

This is important because if you engage with the practice in a way that doesn't successfully produce the right conditioning, you will never make any progress. So it's important to identify the things that you are doing and evaluate whether or not they contribute to the conditioning you want to develop, or whether they act against it.

Consider for example the instruction early on in The Mind Illuminated to never beat yourself up when you notice that your mind is wandering or that you are distracted. If you beat yourself up, you're conditioning yourself not to notice, and so the distractions never stop.

So when you are practicing in stage 3, you want to have a clear intention to try to notice when you have gross distraction, so that when you notice, you feel satisfied that you noticed. If your intention is to not have gross distraction, then when you notice, you will feel dissatisfied, and you will condition yourself not to notice.

The same thing applies for each of the stages—if your intention is to get the result, you will condition yourself not to get the result. Your intention has to be to notice the problem that is your current obstacle.