An earlier version of this essay went too far. The direction holds (what’s most findable is rarely what’s most valuable, and the search itself can become the obstacle), but the first version allowed no room for guidance at all, as if every teacher and every pointer were just a trap.

These worked for me, and they land closest to the bullseye.

All via the Waking Up app, in the order I’d rank them:

On a recent 10-day silent retreat I took in a few phrases on a scrap of paper, some of my favourites over the years. They were very helpful. But this is in the context of having engaged with the Waking Up app thousands of times, which is my recommendation to you. Your own favourite pointers will emerge.

  • Noticing being lost in thought is a rep.
  • Look for the looker. (Sam Harris)
  • “Am I lost in thought?” “Lost in thought!”
  • Imagine it’s the last day of your life, and treat the next action as an absolute sacrament. (my paraphrase of Sam Harris)
  • Put your awareness in the corner of the room and have it look back to where it came from. (my paraphrase of Loch Kelly’s panoramic awareness glimpse, via Waking Up)
  • “Does this change your relationship to what you see? Is there a relationship to what you see?” (Sam Harris)

A clarification on what these are pointing at. Sam Harris talks about “thinking without knowing that you’re thinking,” and being “lost in thought.” The bolded parts are the issue, not the thinking itself. Thought isn’t the enemy; thought you’ve disappeared into, mistaken for reality, is. Noticing it is the whole move.

And two longer passages I kept whole:

In reference to seeing, there is only the seeing. In reference to hearing, only the hearing. In reference to sensing, only the sensing. In reference to cognising, only the cognising. There is no you at either end of that. When there is no you there, you are neither here, nor yonder, nor between the two. This is the end of stress.

My adaptation of the Bāhiya Sutta (Udāna 1.10): the published translations anchor each line on the object (“in reference to the seen”); I anchor it on the act (“in reference to seeing”). The close is adapted from Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation.


She saw that arisings arose, abided, and fell away. She saw that knowing this arose, abided, and fell away. Then she knew there was nothing more than this, no ground, nothing to lean on stronger than the cane she held, nothing to lean upon at all, and no one leaning, and she opened the clenched fist in her mind and let go and fell into the midst of everything.

Sallie Tisdale, Women of the Way, on the Zen nun Teijitsu. I say “an awakening moment,” not “the awakening”; the passage itself contains the reason why: even the knowing “arose, abided, and fell away.” The recognition doesn’t last either.

Another pointer I heard in Joseph Goldstein’s Insight Hour, episode 131: Everything Changes is the image of a rope being pulled through your hands. If you grip it tightly, you get rope burn; opening your hand lets it pass without that friction. Impermanence keeps pulling, however much you want a particular experience to stay. That includes a pleasant meditation or a moment of recognition, which can become another thing to cling to.

Start with naked observation, with unfettered attention to the nature of experience itself. There is no framework, lineage or teacher, only looking. Sam Harris and others point to this practice after extracting it from quasi-religious South Asian traditions in the 1980s and 1990s.

It is unstable. The gravitational pull runs towards guru-ification, reification and institutionalisation, until “just look” becomes a tradition with Sanskrit terminology, orange robes, donation tiers and a charismatic face on every YouTube thumbnail.

Gresham’s Law for the soul

Gresham’s Law says that when valuable and debased currencies circulate together, people hoard the good money and spend the bad, so the debased currency dominates transactions while the valuable one disappears.

In contemplative practice, the named drives out the unnamed. What survives and spreads is what can be named, packaged and attached to an institution or a teacher with a following. Naked practice has no equivalent reproductive machinery; “sit quietly and observe experience without adding anything” is a poor memetic vehicle, while some neo-Advaita teachers have millions of YouTube subscribers.

The guru model is optimised for spread. The unnamed practice is optimised for little, because optimisation needs a name, a metric and a thing to improve.

The teacher, lineage and terminology are not necessarily bad. They are simply easier to find than the thing they point towards, which creates a selection effect: search returns what is most searchable, not what is most valuable.

The mind adds a second pressure. “Just observe” gives it nothing to chew on, so it reaches for concepts, progress measures, a teacher to idealise and a community to join. When the practice offers no handle, the mind grabs the teacher’s face, the lineage story, the Sanskrit, or the in-group identity. The finger pointing at the moon becomes an object of study and worship while the moon goes unattended.

That is why nearly every genuine contemplative tradition eventually calcifies into religion.

Explore versus exploit

Reinforcement learning has a useful distinction between exploring for new options and exploiting what you already have. Searching for enlightenment is exploration, which leaves a small koan: what can be exploited before any exploration has taken place?

Only awareness itself, the fact of experience already present before the search, during it and after it ends. It was never somewhere else and, as a fact of consciousness, cannot be.

There is nothing to check for, nothing to verify as present, absent, returning or home for dinner. Even consciously contemplating the search proves awareness and satisfies the search’s own conditions, so the project collapses before the mind can turn it into another object. The collapse is easy to miss, which is why practice is still needed to stabilise the recognition.

The spiritual marketplace assumes exploration: find the right teacher, tradition and technique. Yet what all of them point towards requires no exploration to access. It is what does the exploring, and the search itself is evidence that it is already here.