I did not think I was burning alive before I started meditating. I’ve never been depressed and I generally thought of myself as a happy person before I started meditation (now I’m the happiest person I know, and a bunch of friends have told me that I’m the happiest person they know), so it’s not quite a matter of me being especially miserable before starting meditation, and then becoming normally happy. The insights of meditation kind of reveal to you a suffering that’s always been there, all your life. It’s like I realized that I had been clenching my fist all my life, the very concept of an unclenched fist being inconceivable until the moment that my hand finally opened, and I realized just how much better life is capable of being. Said another way, my estimation of the ceiling of human well-being got dramatically increased. I should be clear that in the “clenched fist” metaphor, I’m not going around through life with my fist completely unclenched, that’s a much higher level than I am, but I can see my fist unclench regularly enough to let me understand what is possible, and I’ve talked with very advanced meditators who confirm that my extrapolations about the ceiling of human well-being are accurate.
However, the journey of increasing happiness was not monotonic, and at times I did feel significantly unhappier than I started, and it is true that some people are hit much, much harder than I was. This is a pretty heavy-duty psychological transformation, and people have been known to quit jobs and generally ruin their lives when passing through the difficult stages. This is not an easy journey, and only going through it halfway can leave you in the worst of all worlds. Generally the people who really try to go this route are either really desperate, or feel that they’ve achieved everything in life, yet still feel incomplete, I just didn’t know about the risk when I started, and by that point I had experienced enough to be irresistibly attracted to the upside. Everyone I know who has gotten to the end feels like it was massively worth it, and are moved to tears when thinking of the people who have made their journey possible, but the fact remains that I am basically advocating that you sail across the Atlantic in search of gold, and your prior should probably be to not do this.
I did not think I was burning alive before I started meditating. I’ve never been depressed and I generally thought of myself as a happy person before I started meditation (now I’m the happiest person I know, and a bunch of friends have told me that I’m the happiest person they know), so it’s not quite a matter of me being especially miserable before starting meditation, and then becoming normally happy. The insights of meditation kind of reveal to you a suffering that’s always been there, all your life. It’s like I realized that I had been clenching my fist all my life, the very concept of an unclenched fist being inconceivable until the moment that my hand finally opened, and I realized just how much better life is capable of being. Said another way, my estimation of the ceiling of human well-being got dramatically increased. I should be clear that in the “clenched fist” metaphor, I’m not going around through life with my fist completely unclenched, that’s a much higher level than I am, but I can see my fist unclench regularly enough to let me understand what is possible, and I’ve talked with very advanced meditators who confirm that my extrapolations about the ceiling of human well-being are accurate.
However, the journey of increasing happiness was not monotonic, and at times I did feel significantly unhappier than I started, and it is true that some people are hit much, much harder than I was. This is a pretty heavy-duty psychological transformation, and people have been known to quit jobs and generally ruin their lives when passing through the difficult stages. This is not an easy journey, and only going through it halfway can leave you in the worst of all worlds. Generally the people who really try to go this route are either really desperate, or feel that they’ve achieved everything in life, yet still feel incomplete, I just didn’t know about the risk when I started, and by that point I had experienced enough to be irresistibly attracted to the upside. Everyone I know who has gotten to the end feels like it was massively worth it, and are moved to tears when thinking of the people who have made their journey possible, but the fact remains that I am basically advocating that you sail across the Atlantic in search of gold, and your prior should probably be to not do this.