Introduction
Mindfulness is paying attention to what you're doing and trying to experience reality for what it is in the moment. This practice starts with sitting still, and paying attention to your thoughts and your breathing. Through an internal journey of mindfulness, and diving deeper into your thoughts and emotions, you can achieve something close to enlightenment. Enlightenment is defined here as "experiencing reality for what it is, instead of what you think it is". Since we can't experience reality in its purest form due to our filters, biases and human limitations, the best we can do is be highly aware of our filters and limitations. By compensating for them we can have a closer experience of "true reality" and achieving "enlightenment". As part of that, I believe there are 5 levels of mindfulness.
I've been practicing meditation and introspection for almost 10 years now, I started when I was finishing high school and deciding what to do with my life. I spent a lot of time thinking about who I was and what I wanted. I traveled on an inward spiral, on a new journey within me. My experiences and discoveries on that journey led to a new and unique outlook on life. Based on this personal journey, as well as all my research of other people's experiences, podcasts, and articles, I've come to the conclusion that there are at least 5 levels of mindfulness. Each level takes you deeper within yourself, and towards a deeper understanding of "true reality".
I used to read articles similar to this one and see warnings of "Proceed with caution, this may seriously affect your mental health" I would laugh those off, thinking "How can words mess you up that bad?" But after seeing other people go through similar journeys, there is merit to having a warning. There is a danger to introspection. If you are in a certain point in your journey, and you hear a specific piece of information, it can send you off a cliff into a free fall. The dangerous thing is that you can never really tell where that piece of information will come from. Lucky, this article is more of an overview that doesn't dive too far into specific details, but even knowing what's possible may cause issues for some.
As you move through different levels, some are best explored by yourself, and some are best explored with others. Having a professional, such as a therapist, can be a great help, especially if you know that there are issues in your past that you struggle to face. There may be levels beyond this, but these are the ones I've traveled through.
The 5 levels are:
- Observe your thoughts
- Follow your thoughts
- Change your thoughts to change your experience of life
- Create or destroy experiences to create the life you want
- Experience life for what it really is
Let us begin.
Level 1
The first level of mindfulness is the one that is starting to become mainstream. This level is where you learn to observe your thoughts and experiences from a more objective, removed perspective. There are guided meditations, apps, classes, all sorts of places where you can go to learn how to do this. Here is one example on how to get started:
Find a comfortable place to sit, and close your eyes. Focus on something simple, such as your breath. Feel it move in and out of you, feel your chest rise up and down, feel the air passing over your lips. As you sit and focus, new experiences will arise. Depending how you're sitting, you may feel your legs start to fall asleep. You may feel your butt starting to get sore, you may feel itches appear on your body. Don't fight, but embrace these sensations, and observe how you react to them.
Alongside the physical sensations that you feel, you will also begin to notice mental activity. You'll have thoughts appearing in your head such as "I'm bored", "How long has it been?" "What do I have to do tomorrow?" "Oh no, I'm getting distracted, FOCUS!" All these thoughts are natural as well. Sit and learn to observe all these experiences, both internal and physical. As your mind drifts to follow the thoughts that appear, gently guide your focus back to your breath. In and out, up and down, as the air moves through you.
As you sit with this exercise, you learn a sharper sense of focus and the ability to see your thoughts. This experience can be very grounding and relaxing. It gives you time to let your mind and the chatter within quiet down, as well as removing some of the stress that has built up. As you get better at focusing on your body, you can move to focusing on your heartbeat instead of your breath. Not only can you feel your heartbeat in your chest, if you focus elsewhere around your body you can feel your pulse in different places.
My two favorite analogies for watching what goes on in your head are "the field" and "the pond".
One way to imagine meditating is to imagine that you're laying in a sunny field, looking up into the sky. As you're watching the sky, there are clouds that move across the sky. Sometimes they cross the sun, and cover you in shade and sometimes they are rain clouds that make you miserable, but at the end of the day all the clouds pass over. All you do is watch, there's no reason to get mad at the clouds. Just sit, observe the sky, and watch the clouds go by.
The thing to learn from this analogy is that you are not your thoughts, you are an observer and experiencer of your thoughts. As you travel through life and have different experiences, you learn to react in a certain way. That reaction is not "you", it is just triggered by the thoughts that you have in that moment. It seems to be an innate reaction, since you've always had it, but everything that you are has been learned, and came from somewhere.
The other way to imagine what's going on in your mind is to imagine that you are sitting beside a pond. You are trying to see what is at the bottom of the pond, but it is difficult because there are sticks and leaves on the surface that are distractions. If you try to move the distractions out of the way, you may remove a leaf from the surface, but the motion will create ripples that continue to block your view. The best way to see to the bottom of the pond is to wait for the pond to settle. The ripples disappear, the sticks and leaves float away, and you can catch glimpses of the bottom of the pond once it is still.
The pond analogy teaches that trying to control everything and force your way through meditation isn't the best way to find what you're looking for. If you sit and try to force yourself to "stop thinking", all that happens is that you become frustrated at the thoughts that appear in your head and you will never be still. To achieve stillness you must let go and allow your thoughts to flow uninterrupted. You need to be able to see through your surface layer thoughts to see the filters and biases underneath, which is what we look for in level 2.
Level 2
The second level of mindfulness can be achieved by using the focus learned in level 1. Once you have the ability to see your thoughts moving around your head, you can begin to follow them to see where they came from. This helps you to find the bias within you that caused that thought. If you are following a negative thought, this can be dangerous. You may find some traumas that you have blocked out, or find things that you had avoided facing in the past. This is a good time to have a professional to talk to, and help guide you through your meditations.
My analogy for this is that life is like a maze. As you walk through the maze, you come to crossroads and have to make choices. Left or right, what are you going to do? Ideally, we'd get to have a totally free choice on what to do, but that's rarely the case. There are usually large external pressures on us to choose one way or the other. I see these as signs on the crossroad. There is a big arrow pointing one direction, saying "GO THIS WAY, THE OTHER WAY IS DANGEROUS". It is difficult to make a free choice and ignore the sign.
An example would be quitting and finding a new job. You may be miserable at your job and wanting to find a new one. You come to the crossroad of "Do I quit or do I stay?". Ideally, you would be able to look at this choice objectively, weigh the pros and cons of each side, and then make the choice that you think would be best. However, that doesn't usually work out. You may have a family that you need to take care of, all your friends expect you to keep your career, the fear of change makes you want to stay... There are many different reasons that point you in the direction of "keep your head down at work, don't quit, it's too dangerous." Some of these pressures are great and will help steer you in the right direction, but others are bad because they are based on false information and fear. These negative pressures and biases will prevent you from living the life you want. What would life be like if you were able to make free choices without any biases? Or better yet, what if you were able to keep all the good ones, and remove that bad ones? Then when a crossroad appears, the answer would be obvious.
Knowing why I reacted the way I did when I was faced with a crossroad was the first goal of my self analysis. Not only did I want to know why I made physical choices in the external world, but I was curious about my internal choices as well. This led to the "Why?" game. Whenever I had a thought I would ask myself, "Why do I feel that way?" and work backwards. Every time I hit an answer, I'd ask "Why do I have this answer?". I wanted to follow the "Why" back as far as possible, to learn what filters and biases I had that made my crossroad signs. I began to notice that this style of analysis works for thoughts, feelings, emotions, experiences, reactions... everything within you. Moving forwards, I'll use the word "thoughts" to cover all of those. You can use the "Why" game to learn more about yourself.
As you dig deep and explore the different "Whys" of your thoughts, some checkpoints that you pass could be:
"Why do I react to this situation like that? I learned from my parents to do that."
"Why did my parents learn to react that way? They were shaped by their parents, and the society they grew up in."
"Why did society teach them to act that way? How does society influence me now?"
As I worked on following my thoughts around my head, I began to notice that there was a second layer that was fighting me. Even though I thought I have control over my actions, there seemed to be another player in the game. This changes the analogy. Instead of walking through the maze and looking at signs on crossroads, I was driving a car. And the car had an autopilot. Even if I was at a crossroad, looked at the evidence, weighed the pros and cons, and made the choice I wanted, sometimes the car would drive the other way. Obviously, there was more to the puzzle.
An example of this is New Year's resolutions. People have resolutions like "I'm going to go to the gym to work out and be healthier!" They put lots of thought into making up good resolutions, they set goals, they make workout plans, the whole nine yards. Yet when the time comes to go to the gym in the morning, their alarm goes off, they roll over, hit the snooze button and go back to sleep.
Why do we fight ourselves? There's more to us then what we consciously choose, so we must dig deeper to find out why we REALLY act the way we do. The short answer is that the car's autopilot is your habits, and that you need to break bad habits and make good habits if you want the autopilot to work with you instead of fighting you. But diving deeper, how do you go about doing that besides sheer repetition? Why are some habits easier to change than others?
Level 3
The third level of mindfulness is where you learn to change your filters and biases. This leads to learning that you have way more power over yourself then you could ever imagine. In Level 2, you learned to travel deep within yourself to find where your thoughts came from. In Level 3, you find exactly how your past is affecting your present and how you can begin to change that. My favorite analogy for this level is the Tower.
Imagine that every experience, thought, and emotion you've had in your life is a brick in a tower. They are all built up, layer by layer, all intertwined, creating "you". You feel you are the tower, the sum of your experiences and knowledge. As you have new experiences, or receive new information, you have new bricks that you can add to your tower. Sometimes these bricks don't fit, so you discard them. The problem is that how do you know if the new brick is bad and doesn't fit, or if your tower was built wrong, so it cannot accept the new brick? An example of this is climate change. Some people have a tower built based on a foundation of "Climate change isn't real". No matter what new evidence appears, no matter what bricks they get, they will never accept the bricks into their tower, since the tower is built based on the idea that "climate change isn't real". If they were to accept the new brick, they would have to modify the whole tower to make it fit. This would involve admitting that they were wrong, as well as requiring them to put in lots of work to rebuild their tower to make space for the new brick. This is what leads people to get "stuck in their ways". They have a tower that they either don't want to or are unable to change.
The other thing is that people are often very protective, and very proud of their towers. They like what they've built, they want to show it off, and they don't want anything to come near it that might mess it up. No big new bricks, nothing earth shattering, nothing dangerous. They are happy with their tower, and they are protecting the image that they have. I mentioned before that "You feel you are your tower, you are the sum of your experiences" but I don't think that's the truth. However, that's still how most people feel. They identify very strongly with their tower and the identity built around it. If you're not the sum of your experiences and beliefs, what are you?!
I believe you are more like a curator of your tower. Your tower is the bricks, the thoughts, experiences, beliefs, emotions, triggers, and everything else inside you. You are the curator, standing outside your tower, choosing how it is built. You can move bricks around, rearrange them, change your mind, pick new bricks, and discard old bricks. You are constantly evolving in the way that you interact with the world, and constantly growing with the new information you find. Using lessons learned in level 1 and 2, it's far easier to avoid identifying with your bricks, and to instead see yourself as the curator who checks out each brick before you add it to the tower. As a curator, you have certain filters and biases that you use to determine what makes a "good brick". You have to make sure that these filters and biases are good for the life you want, and are as close to the "truth" as you can get them.
This tower analogy builds off of Descartes' meditations. Descartes was looking for a truth that was unshakable. He was trying to find the perfect foundation to build his tower on, and he was willing to throw away as many bricks as he needed to until he found the rock solid bricks that were undeniably true. Descartes was extreme with discounting everything he had ever learned from his senses, and imagining there was an evil demon out to get him, but he saw the value in taking time to inspect your bricks to see if they are strong and worthy to build upon. Rebuilding your tower is a massive undertaking, but it is a very valuable exercise. Play the "Why" game with every brick, and see which ones are worth keeping. A secondary inspiration for the tower analogy was Elon Musk and his talk of "engineering from First Principles". If you were able to ignore the influence of your upbringing, and the influence of society, what are the first principles that you can build your thoughts from? What are the First Principles to build your foundation on, instead of simply doing what everyone else is doing?
Examining your tower must be approaching with caution. There can be some dangerous bricks and sections of your tower that may require help to deal with. If you have had a traumatic experience in the past, that will be built into your tower. Each new brick will be affected by the traumatic experience. When something happens that reminds you of the trauma, you will re-experience the pain. A clear example of this is PTSD, where people are severely impacted when they experience something close to their trigger. Another example would be someone who escaped an abusive relationship. They will most likely have trouble trusting and creating new relationships because of the negative experiences built up within them. They cannot place new bricks on top of a bad foundation; the old foundation must be cleared.
The consensus seems to be that your brain will hold onto memories and triggers as long as it still fears that you can still be affected by them, for example, public speaking. You will be afraid of public speaking as long as you think that you cannot handle it, for fear of embarrassing yourself (or worse!). Once you convince your brain that the thing it fears won't happen, or if it does happen you have a response for it, the fear will fade. "Convincing" your brain is easier said than done. When dealing with your mind (subconscious), I've found it to be similar to a ridiculously smart baby. It's hard to communicate with, and it will yell at you and fight you, but once you find something that makes it happy, the answer is clear. Keeping the public speaking example, a common fear would be "What if I forget what to say, lose my place in my speech and the crowd laughs at me?!" One answer would be to practice your speech over and over to ensure that you won't forget it. This is a good answer, but never really removes the chance of forgetting, it merely lowers the chance. A stronger answer would be to practice improvising, so even if you do forget your speech you can make a quick joke and continue once you remember.
These examples work for smaller triggers and experiences, but if you have any serious issues like childhood traumas, relationship issues, or PTSD, you should definitely seek a professional to help. While I was investigating myself, I do not have any serious triggers since I have never had a terrible, traumatic experience that incapacitated me. I am lucky to have a relatively stable past that allowed me to work through everything on my own without too much trouble. I know others who have crashed into barriers at this stage. They have troubles ranging from relationship fears to personal disappointments that they are unable to overcome by themselves. Being able to talk with someone who understands, like a professional or someone who has gone through something similar can really help you work through tougher issues.
For "minor" issues, one of the best ways to solve them is exposure therapy. This is something you can do internally, by imagining yourself in the scenario and planning what you'd do next. This is what the analogy means by inspecting your bricks of past experiences. You take the brick, examine the experience to see how it affected you in the past, and think about the difference between how it COULD affect you in the future, and how you'd WANT it to affect you in the future. Once you have inspected for long enough and imagined some different scenarios of how you'd like to react differently to the experience, you can move to acting out those scenarios in the real world. When you go out to face the problem to practice what you'd imagined, you can see how it affects you now that you are prepared. You can then go back and forth between imagining how you'll react to different scenarios, and practicing them, until your brain is convinced that you know how to deal with them properly. Now your brain no longer has to worry about that brick because it is no longer afraid. You are happy with the outcome because you have put the energy in to make sure the outcome is one you want. With your practice, you know that whenever the scenario appears in real life you have the skills to deal with it in the best way. As you practice revisiting past scenarios, you learn how similar your imagination is to real life. Each time you re-experience your thoughts and act them out in real life you learn to trust yourself more because you can see that what you imagine is actually how the scenario will play out in real life. This removes the need for physically practicing everything, because you trust yourself that once you've thought about it properly you'll act properly in real life. This means that the more you practice, the faster you can analyze your past experiences because not all of them have to be acted out, only the major ones.
The problem with exposure therapy is that it's essentially the same as desensitizing yourself to an experience. This helps for little experiences like public speaking, because is it really THAT bad if you forget a sentence? But it definitely does not work for more severe experiences like domestic abuse. Some things you should never desensitize yourself to. It's not always the best answer to throw away the bricks that have bad experiences attached to them, you need to integrate the negative as well as the positive within yourself. You must face your Jungian Shadow, face every brick, good or bad, to make sure that everything is properly integrated. Your choice is either to face everything negative that you can on your own terms, or live in fear of negative experiences popping up and blindsiding you. There are some extreme experiences that there is no way to practice, and will be devastating no matter what. For example, the death of a loved one. No matter how much you face it, how many times you think about it, losing someone you care about is always devastating. I think that desensitizing yourself to that would be removing a foundational part of your humanity, and would be on the path to psychopathy.
The oft-ignored flip side is that it's not only negative experiences you can desensitize yourself to, you can desensitize yourself to positive experiences as well. If you play the Why game for something like kissing, you end up with "We mash our faces together and touch lips, why does that make me happy?". When I started down the rabbit hole of the Why game, I made a rule that I would stop as soon as I hit the level of: "Why? Because it makes me happy." I didn't need to dig into the mechanics behind why something makes me happy, I wanted to be free to enjoy it for what it is. Even still, once I had practiced this system of analysis long enough, it became second nature to question everything. This meant my happy experiences were analysed and deconstructed as well. Even when I was actively trying to defend against it, I still ended up deconstructing happiness. This led to me being pretty apathetic for a few years, and it took awhile to make a comeback. I have heard of others who did not have this issue, and even said that playing the Why game with positive experiences helped amplify the experience instead of dulling it. Either way, it's a point to be aware of as you move forwards.
The final challenge of this level is the Nihilism trap. Once you play the Why game for long enough, and have dug to the bottom of your tower looking for a foundation, it turns out there's nothing there. It becomes difficult to tell what to base your thoughts on. When playing the Why game, you will eventually hit a level with everything that is either "I don't know" or "It just is". Here you have your first brush with creating meaning. This is also where religion lives. When you dig into morality, asking questions like "Why are we nice to each other?" there are no real answers for it. Lots of people have theories, like cooperation is an evolutionary trait that we evolved because it gave us the best chance of surviving, or that being nice is a way to build social bonds which increase our odds of breeding, but at the end of the day we don't have a definite answer. We're nice to each other because that is the right thing to do. Religion pops up here, because the easiest answer to any "Why do we do this" question is "God told us to" or "Because God made it that way".
People bounce along this train of thought even on the surface level, without conscious introspection. Everyone naturally follow the "Why" game back a certain distance, then faith has to take over. Eventually there comes a point where you Don't Know, and have to pick something without hard evidence. A popular example is "Where did we come from?". You can follow the science path, which says we evolved from cells, the planet was formed by dust, the dust was formed by the Big Bang, and the Big Bang was formed by... Something. A religious person might follow that same path, and put God in at either the evolution level as "God made humans", or the Big Bang level as "God created the universe". Once God is involved, they no longer have to follow the chain any further because God did it. Science is always playing the Why game, always trying to push the boundaries and learn more. But at the end of the day, even science doesn't have all the answers. There is always a point where you have to pick an answer and stick with it, even if there is no good reason to. The nihilism appears if you can't find any reasons that you like, which means you have no foundation for your tower. Learning to create foundations is the path to level 4.
Level 4
The fourth level of mindfulness is learning to create and destroy your filters and biases. Continuing the tower analogy, this is where you build a foundation, and choose how to curate your tower. Once you have finished inspecting all your bricks and are looking for a place to build, there are 2 main options. You can either accept that there is no foundation, and build a floating castle, or double down and create a foundation based on whatever you want. Both options seem to be viable solutions.
If you accept that there is no foundation, then you are accepting the reality of "I don't know", and accepting that there are some things we can never know. Even if science breaks another boundary and comes up with an answer for what happened before the Big Bang, that doesn't create a foundation, it only adds one more layer to the bottom of the tower. There's still empty space below to continue to expand into, and still the question of "What caused the thing that caused the Big Bang?" Depending how rigorous you want to be, it almost seems to be cheating to try and build a tower with no foundation. But for all practical purposes, it doesn't really matter to go that deep. It's a good exercise and thought experiment to learn more about yourself, but in day to day life it doesn't really matter. To answer the question of "Why are we nice to each other", it doesn't matter if the answer is "God told us to" or "We evolved that way" or something else, at the end of the day you should be nice. The benefit of leaving a floating foundation is that you can continue to add or remove bricks to the bottom of your tower without affecting too much, but the downside is that it's hard to feel properly anchored.
If you want a more anchored foundation, there seems to be 3 possibilities: Make something up, find an infinity loop, or find a paradox to use as an anchor.
The first and most obvious is to find the "right" answer. Once you know the answer, there's no reason to ask why. But this is far easier said than done. The downside of picking an answer is that you could be wrong, and there is no real way to prove that you are RIGHT. All the evidence you have can point to your way being the right way, and all your thought experiments can point to the foundation you choose being the best of all possible choices, but one new piece of evidence can destroy it all. This is the huge problem of "You don't know what you don't know.'' There will always be a nagging feeling, knowing that your foundation can still crumble, no matter how strong you make it.
Second, you can put the Why's into an infinity loop. Religions are good at this one. The classic is "Why? God said so." "How can we trust God?" "The Bible said so." "How can we trust the Bible?" "God said so". Around and around you go, and your brain gives up and stops digging. Deeply religious people have some of the strongest foundations out there, and they are unshakable in their beliefs and convictions. For better or for worse, they believe that they are RIGHT and on a strong base. This gives them confidence to move forwards with their lives.
Third, a sneaky way to make your brain stop asking why is to give it something it can't figure out, and can't figure out how to question. You can use paradoxes as a foundation. Paradoxes, or contradictory sayings that are both true, are ways that we see the duality of the universe at play. Yin and yang, light and dark, good and evil... they're the main building blocks of the universe, foundational pieces that we can't live without. You can't remove one without destroying the other. Solving paradoxes seems to be a test of wisdom. You can't solve them with intellect alone, you need a deeper understanding of what's going on. But as you grow and learn more, you can pass by paradoxes that have previously stumped you.
A simple example of a "paradox" is cooking. To cook something, you need to make it hot. But not too hot, that's bad. How do you achieve this stage of "hot but not hot" to properly cook something? The answer seems obvious and intuitive to us, because we understand it. That's how most paradoxes work, they seem contradictory and confusing until suddenly an answer appears and all you can think is "Duh, that's obvious, how was I stuck on that?"
There are a few more complex paradoxes that science is stuck on. "How did something come from nothing?" or "What existed before the Big Bang", which can be rephrased as "What existed before time existed?" These are good foundational blocks, because they're really hard to destroy. And when you do "destroy" a paradox by finding out the answer, it's rare that the answer sneaks up on you and pulls the rug out from under you. You usually have time to work towards the answer, and adjust your foundation as needed as you get closer to solving the paradox.
As you work through levels 3 and 4, you see that basically everything that makes up "you" can be changed. Sometimes there are things that cannot be changed, for example there is nothing you can do about an event in the past, but you can always change your reaction to it and how it currently affects you. For example, an abusive relationship. By looking into that part of your past and seeing how it affected you, you'll most likely notice that you probably have fear surrounding new relationships. Since you know that you have a history with bad relationships, you can imagine that your level of fear and apprehension is probably overblown with regards to new relationships. You can't necessarily change the fact that you feel higher levels of apprehension towards new relationships, but once you know that your default is to feel fear, you can begin to compensate for it. This doesn't mean blindly compensate and ignore the fear, it's acknowledging the fact that you feel a heightened sense of fear, and can most likely take slightly higher risks and still be OK. Similar to the field and clouds analogy, once you know the clouds are there and recognize what types of clouds they are (storm clouds, rain clouds, shade clouds...) you can compensate for them. Instead of trying to avoid a coming cloud that looks like it may be stormy (a potential relationship viewed with fear), you can wear rain clothes and boots, so that even if it does rain you are protected and can remove yourself from the situation instead of getting stuck in the mud. This allows you to stay in the cloud and experience it for what it really is, which is potentially a good relationship, while still learning from your past and preparing yourself for different possible outcomes.
This is what it means to use the powers of creation and destruction to adjust your biases and filters. Not only can you transform certain bricks if you wanted to, you can change what you do to create bricks. This is what it means to curate your tower, you choose the judgments you make to decide if a brick is good and worth integrating into your tower, or bad and destroying. A personal example of this is an experience I had after a breakup.
I live in Canada, and was dating a girl from Catalonia. She was in Canada studying her PhD. We were together for a few months, had a great time, and then she had to move back home, which led to us breaking up. Dealing with this breakup, and meditating on it, showed me the potential of transforming emotions. After the breakup, I was feeling sad, and since no one likes feeling sad, I was looking for ways to deal with it. How can I make the sadness go away? I saw 5 options. First, I could move to Catalonia, and live with her, and then we wouldn't have to break up. That way, I wouldn't have to be sad since we never broke up! But, I have a life in Canada and wasn't willing to change everything for her. Second, she could move back to Canada and stay with me. But, same situation in reverse. She has a life in Catalonia, and since I wasn't willing to change my life, I couldn't expect her to change hers. Third, I could transform sadness into anger. How dare she leave me, how dare she cause this sadness. It's her fault for leaving, she should have stayed longer and stayed with me. Was I not a good partner? Why would she put me through this?! But anger is unfair, it's not her fault for leaving, it was life circumstance pulling us apart. Fourth, I could be indifferent and forget. Nothing to be sad about, if you don't remember anything! What's the big deal, she was just some chick. We had some good times together, but whatever. A few months together? That's nothing, barely even a real relationship. However, I wasn't willing to sacrifice all the memories of the good times we had to remove this experience of feeling sad. That left me with the fifth option, embrace the sadness. Feel the anguish, experience it for what it is, and let the cloud roll over. Remembering that this too shall pass. As part of embracing the sadness, I learned the lesson that "Life shouldn't be lived in avoidance of sadness, life should be lived so that when sad times do come, the good times make them worth it."
That was an experience where I had the option to transform the emotions I was feeling, but decided against it. Another example where I did transform emotions was when my step dad would yell at me growing up. Middle school, even high school, we'd get into fights, and I'd go off to my room to cry, and eventually I learned that there was no need to cry, he was just mean. Sadness was turned into anger, which led to a block in our relationship. When I learned to stop crying, that planted the seeds for this entire introspection, but it took a few years for me to come back to start it. My question, the seed, was "If I can change how I experience an event that makes me feel/react in a sad way into making me feel/react in an angry way, what else can I change?"
Having the power to change emotions is useful, but can also make you feel numb to life. As I was practicing this, it started to feel like I was living life through a filter. An event would happen, and before I could organically react to it my brain would say "WAIT! What is the best way to react to this!" and I'd have to take a moment to choose. As I did it more and more, the moment shrunk to an instant, and my brain saying "WAIT" turned into instinct. It was no longer a conscious effort, things were being too aggressively filtered. Anything sad was turned into "this too shall pass", anything anger inducing was turned into "It's not that big a deal", and anything happy, even as much as I tried to avoid it, turned into "I'm only happy because I programmed myself to be happy". I had smoothed out the emotions of my life, the lows had disappeared, but the highs had shrunk as well... It took a long time to get back to fixing that emotional filter, and is still something I deal with today.
The powers of creation and destruction give you a massive amount of power over how you experience reality and how you react to the world. But, with great power comes great risk. Once you can change any aspect about yourself, it's hard to have an identity because everything can be flexible. Changing thoughts, changing reactions, changing emotions... Everything is up for debate, everything can be reprogrammed to what you want it to be. It becomes hard to have a sense of self, because you become a creature of fluidity. You have the power to adapt yourself to any situation, and change anything about yourself, so what are you? Who are you? What's left?
Level 5
The fifth level of mindfulness is the level of experiencing reality. Level 5 is finding the limits of your power, and perhaps even achieving enlightenment. With everything you've learned to see in level 1 and 2, everything you've learned to change in level 3 and 4, there are final limits in the world. Even with your power to change who you are and how you act, there are some things that cannot be changed. Some things just ARE. This is the true nature of reality, and the true nature of you. I believe you have achieved enlightenment when you see and respond to the world as it IS, instead of what you think it is. You take experiences as they are in the moment, instead of what you think they are tainted by your internal filters. The only way to get close to this point is to know the limits of your filters and your biases. There's a careful balance here, and the constant push is to see if you actually have found the absolute limit, or if you've just found your current limit.
An example is weight lifting. If you ask yourself the question "What is the limit to how much I can lift?" the answer seems easy. Go to the gym, pick up heavier and heavier weights, and eventually one will be too heavy. You've found your limit, that's how much you can lift! But that's not the real answer. That's how much you can lift RIGHT NOW. On a small level, maybe you're having a bad day, and can't lift your max. On a much bigger level, this is how much you can lift as you are in this moment. What if you trained? If you started an exercise program, ate better, trained for a few years, the question of "What is the limit of my lift" becomes very different. What is your true lifting limit?
This is the same for introspection. As you begin to change things and tinker around inside yourself, you learn more and more about yourself and more and more about your limits. But, you also get stronger, and better at changing your limits. When you run into something that you cannot change about yourself, is it unchangeable because it's your true nature? Or is it just that you haven't practiced enough, and it is a part that you can come back to once you're more prepared?
At the end of the day, this comes down to the same problem as in level 4. What is your foundation? What is REAL reality, and what is the REAL you? Instead of choosing between a solid foundation or a floating castle, you get to choose between constantly searching for the limit, and choosing when enough is enough.
Back to the weightlifting example. In the search for your maximum lift, you have to choose how far you're willing to go. To truly find your ultimate lifting limit, you would have to dedicate your life to the search. Hiring a personal trainer, going to the gym everyday, having a perfect diet, no cheating, only a constant, pure focus on your body. A quest to find your maximum potential, the maximum lift you can get with your biology. But for most, that is an unreasonable goal. You probably don't want to dedicate your entire life to lifting. The question is more realistically "What if I went to the gym 2-3 times a week and ate healthier, then what is my lifting limit?"
The same process is used when developing your mind. You may find a problem that you are working on, but you don't need to train yourself to the extreme. This goes back to the issue of desensitization and exposure therapy. Imagine that when you see blood, your reaction is to faint. But you want to train yourself to be better at reacting to seeing blood, so you begin to practice. On one hand, you could go to the extreme, and look at terrible gore, watch surgeries and see dead bodies, until nothing bothers you anymore and you're totally desensitized. Maybe that extreme is a reasonable goal, if you want to be a surgeon or an EMT and have to deal with terrible gore frequently. But depending on what you want to do in life, it's not so much a quest to find your absolute limits, it's a question of choosing where to put your limits. Maybe your goal is to desensitize yourself to blood so that when your kid scrapes their knee, you can put on a band-aid and take care of them without fainting. Just because you have the option to train and change yourself, doesn't mean you have to change yourself to an extreme.
This leads to the paradox of level 5. On one hand, you get to choose your limits of reality. You can choose your own limits, you can choose how you want to respond, and you can choose how life affects you and how you move forwards. On the other hand, the point of enlightenment is to see reality for what it actually is, not what you choose for it to be.
The way I reconcile that is that we are always looking at reality through different filters and biases. True enlightenment would be having no filters, no bias, just a pure experience of reality. But we can never get that. The best we can do is to know what our filters and biases are, and compensate against them, so that we can get closer to experiencing true reality. The only way to know how much to compensate against our filters is to know the limits of those filters. Those limits we get to choose, based on how we alter the filters using everything learned in levels 1-4. Putting that together, it's like looking at life through a pair of tinted glasses. No matter what, reality will be tinted, but you can choose your tint, and knowing that the tint is there means you have a better idea of what reality looks like without a tint.
The final conundrum is the free will vs determinism debate, because DO YOU REALLY CHOOSE? Is life really something you get to choose to react to, or are you just programmed to follow a pattern? In this whole mindfulness journey, are you really changing yourself by conscious will, or are you just playing out your role in the cosmic wheel? To me, the question of "Do we have free will?" is in the same category as "Where did the universe come from?". It's merely another brick down near the foundation of the tower. We will never really have the answer. Some people find meaning searching for answers to these big questions, but I am not one of those people. Even if we do not have free will, I believe that we have to act as though we do. Thinking that we have free will in life lets you act with more agency, but thinking that everything is predetermined makes it easier to overcome tragedies. Regardless, the answer won't change how I live my life. I chose to be this way, or I was determined to be this way. Either way, this is the way I am, and I'm going to continue to make the best of it.
Conclusion
So where do I stand in all this? Is it all just theory? I mean, I made up all these levels, so I can place myself wherever. But I believe I am living my life between levels 4 and 5. It's taken almost 10 years to get here, and I had a major breakthrough after about 4 years. The seeds for the journey were planted back when I'd fight with my step dad during high school, but I didn't actually get started on the journey until after I graduated high school and was sitting around in the summer thinking about college and what I wanted to do with my life.
My journey started with moving through my maze analogy, and trying to decode my crossroad signs. Why do I feel and react the way I do? Is it the best way I could react? I worked my way through all my thoughts and experiences through that lens. That led to the tower analogy, so I started working on bricks. Every brick was taken apart, examined, and decided whether to be put back or not. The way I feel now is that I have a very small, very strong tower, and a giant pile of "to be decided" bricks beside it. My favorite thing to do is throw things at my tower, to see if I can break it to rebuild it stronger. One thing I always strive towards is "being right", but I approach it differently than most. Instead of always trying to prove myself right, I always try to prove myself wrong. When it's impossible to be proven wrong, that must be the right answer. That's why I throw things at my tower to try and find its weaknesses. I like to say that I'm a marshmallow surrounding a rock. There's a huge piece of me that's malleable and easy going with a dense unchanging core.
I know my core. I know all my bricks, I know why they're there, and they are chosen to be the best of all possible bricks. I know which ones I can easily swap out, and I've got my pile of spares that can be used as needed. Knowing what all my bricks are, and why they're there, I know what all my biases and filters are. I always strive to compensate for them, and adjust them as needed. It took almost 4 years to work through my original bricks. All I would do is think. I don't listen to music often, so whenever I was walking around town, on the bus, or bored at work, all I would do is think and think and think. I never liked calling what I did "meditating", because meditation is always talked about as a lack of thought. What I did would manifest as chatter in my head, both the chatter of me thinking through a problem, as well as the background chatter that everyone has in their head. I have a vivid memory of the day the chatter stopped, the day I finished with my bricks.
I was walking down the street, thinking about stuff, and as I finished thinking about one brick, I'd start on another. On this day, I finished up with one brick and reached for another, but there was nothing there. My head was suddenly silent, the chatter was gone. I was so shocked I stopped dead in my tracks. As I was reveling in this newfound silence, there was a sudden WOOSH in my vision and everything sharpened. It was like putting on your glasses. The world was one way, and then suddenly it was SHARP. I had finished thinking, all my bricks had been examined.
The clarity of finishing my bricks lasted for a few days, and eventually the chatter came back. But it was far less and I can almost instantly clear it to regain that state of silence and focus. Now that I had finished examining my bricks, I began to rebuild the tower. The first part was to determine what filters I wanted to use for which bricks to keep and which to discard. Next I had to compensate for my biases that I had found in my bricks. Knowing my biases, I was able to rebuild the tower to compensate for the things I'm less naturally good at. One example is that I'm a very private person and don't talk about how I feel often, so I put extra effort into opening up to people. Once I was happy with my biases and built in how to compensate for them all, I now experiment with my limits. How far can I push myself, what things can I still change? How can I show others what they can change? People have far more power than they believe.
Clearing your head to have better focus is like closing programs on a computer to have extra processing power. You've got certain hardware to deal with, and you adjust the software to push the limits. If you want to be better at processing, the easiest thing to do is close all open programs, so that you can focus on one task (Level 1, wait for the pond to clear). The next thing to do, is go into Task Manager and close the unnecessary background tasks (Level 3, deal with extra bricks). But the final option is the most powerful. Write a new operating system, that does exactly what you want with no unnecessary background chatter (Level 4, curate your tower). The cherry on top is that you leave the OS able to be modified so that you can adjust it as needed (Level 5, choose your limits).
My final analogy is that "life is like a river". It's a popular analogy, but I add a twist. It's true that it's easier to go with the flow of life, instead of fighting the current. But the downside of "going with the flow" all the time is that you don't really know where you're going to end up. Through all this introspection, you learn about the flow of your life. You can see where you're going, where you came from, and you have the power to decide where you want to go. Instead of sitting in a boat and floating down the river, you have the chance to go ahead, plan, and change the course of the river. By making adjustments to how the river flows, you keep the ability to "go with the flow" and live with far less stress. Problems are much easier to deal with when you can see them coming in advance, and change the flow of the river, instead of having to deal with them when you're bouncing through the rapids. Even though you're going with the flow, you can use the ability to change the course of the river to end up wherever you want to.
This internal analysis is my 10 thousand hours, perhaps even 20. Of all the things in my life, I have spent by far the most time on introspection and internal self development. After all that, can I say I'm enlightened? I don't think so. I think the concept of enlightenment is the same as the concept of perfection. Enlightenment is a goal to always strive for, but at the same time a goal that can never be reached. We use enlightenment as a guide, a beacon that we try to move towards to know ourselves and the world better. I hope that I can help others do the same. It's a rough path, but the destination is worth it. The major risk is that it's not a flat path, it's more of a trip down into a valley. If you quit part-way through, you could end up in a bad place. The good news is, there's nothing special required to finish the journey. Just put in the time, and think.