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 what is seen. In reference to hearing, only what is heard. In reference to sensing, only what is sensed. In reference to cognising, only what is cognised. There is no you in connection with 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 condensed 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.

Start with naked observation: unfettered attention to the nature of experience itself. No framework, no lineage, no teacher, just looking. This is the practice Sam Harris and others point to, having extracted it from quasi-religious South Asian traditions in the 1980s and 1990s.

This state is unstable. There’s a gravitational pull toward guru-ification, reification, institutionalisation. The practice that begins as “just look” becomes a tradition with Sanskrit terminology, orange robes, donation tiers, and a charismatic figure whose face appears on YouTube thumbnails.

Gresham’s Law for the Soul

In economics, Gresham’s Law says bad money drives out good. When two currencies circulate together, people hoard the valuable one and spend the debased one, so the debased currency dominates transactions while the good currency disappears from circulation.

In contemplative practice, the named drives out the unnamed.

The practices that survive and propagate are the ones that can propagate, which requires naming, packaging, institutions, teachers with followings. The naked practice has no reproductive machinery. There’s no memetic vehicle for “sit quietly and observe the nature of experience without adding anything to it.”

Meanwhile, certain neo-Advaita teachers have millions of YouTube subscribers.

The guru model is optimised for spread. The mind reaches for the name, the handle, the thing to search. The unnamed practice is optimised for little, because optimisation requires a name, a metric, a thing to be optimised.

This creates a selection effect. What you find when you search is not what’s most valuable; it’s what’s most findable.

Psychological Gravity

Even if you somehow stumble onto genuine practice, the mind rebels.

“Just observe” gives the mind nothing to chew on. The mind wants handles: concepts to grasp, progress to measure, a teacher to idealise, a community to belong to. When the practice itself offers no purchase, the mind reaches for the next available handle: the teacher’s face, the lineage story, the Sanskrit terminology, the in-group identity.

The guru-devotee relationship, the levels of attainment, the spiritual jargon are all handles that make the ungraspable feel graspable.

This is why nearly every genuine contemplative tradition eventually calcifies into religion. The finger pointing at the moon (rather than the moon itself) becomes the thing that people study, worship, and build institutions around.

Explore vs Exploit

There’s a useful frame from reinforcement learning: explore vs exploit. Do you search for new options, or do you extract value from what you already have?

Searching for enlightenment is exploration mode. But here’s the koan: What can be exploited before any exploration has taken place?

Only one thing: awareness itself. The fact of experience. The thing that’s present before you search, during your search, and after you give up searching. It was never somewhere else and, as a fact of consciousness, cannot be.

There’s nothing to check for. Nothing to verify is there or gone or coming back or whether it’ll be home for dinner. The search, even the conscious prospect of it, immediately proves itself and satisfies its own conditions, and the whole project collapses. That collapse is too quick to notice; hence, practise stabilising.

The whole spiritual marketplace is built on the assumption that you need to explore: find the right teacher, the right tradition, the right technique. But the thing they’re all pointing at is the one thing that requires no exploration to access. It’s the thing doing the exploring, and the searching itself is proof of its presence.