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The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.” Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want.
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I consider loving-kindness meditation to be a central example of a “cultivation” exercise. If you’re one of the people it fits well and you do it regularly for a long time, it nudges your dominant cognitive patterns into a more compassionate shape. Eventually, you become a more compassionate person, overall.
Some more examples: Shikantaza, and other meditations that go straight for enlightenment, might also be cultivation meditations. If you do daily gratitude journaling, that’s probably a cultivation for gratitude (or some related capacity). Runners who train at slightly greater distances every week cultivate endurance.
Gendlin’s Focusing, by contrast, is not primarily a cultivation.
In exploring the craft of meditation design, one thing I’d like to learn is how to cultivate arbitrary virtues using nothing but my own mind. So I set out to build a meditation that cultivates epistemic relinquishment. And here it is.
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It borrows the structure of loving-kindness meditation, but has nothing to do with compassion. To start, you’ll need to tailor the building blocks so they each fit you snugly and don’t chafe. Then I’ll explain how to put them together, and at the end, I’ll suggest variations.
Stuff you’ll need (I’ll discuss each of these in detail):
- a fixation point
- a reference experience
- a mantra
- a belief it would be very easy to let go of, in the face of counter-evidence
- a belief it would be a little hard to let go of, in the face of counter-evidence
- (eventually) a belief it would be very difficult to let go of, in the face of counter-evidence
- some circumstances that would be counter-evidence against each belief
Fixation
A fixation point is an external target onto which you can rest all of your attention. The goal is to gather up as many cognitive resources as possible in preparation for the meditation. Some examples include
- the sound of your breath
- the visual details of a dime-sized spot on the wall
- the feeling of your feet touching the ground
The “external” part is important. When you look at a spot on the wall, you can be sure the spot will stay put. If you instead focused on “what you’re feeling right now”, you’d have a moving target. Choose something that will stay put without any effort on your part, so you’re free to devote your whole mind to mere observation.
A note on neuroatypical attention: I expect that fixation may be a wrong move for a lot of people, especially some with ADD. If fixation sounds terribly unpleasant, you should probably skip it. Do whatever will help you engage with the rest of the meditation.
A Reference Experience
During this meditation, you’ll be moving into a mental state where it would be easy to let go of a belief that carries extreme personal significance. What would such a mental state feel like?
You might not get this right, at first, and that’s ok. But try to take a guess. You can call on memories of changing your mind, or imagined experiences from fiction or other people’s lives. Think of a time when you held or even defended a belief fiercely, but then something changed so it became possible fto update easily. That is the kind of state you’re looking for.
In my case, the relevant feeling is a kind of freedom, relaxation, and relief. It’s a letting go, a recognition that I’m not responsible for holding reality by force of will. It’s a relief to feel that all I have to do right now is learn what is true, and a reassurance that I’ll be positioned to respond with greater strength once I’ve done that.
A Mantra
For some people, words will just get in the way. If you think you’re one of those, skip this part. But if you’re not sure, give it a try.
Look for a word, phrase, or series of phrases that can be a System 1 handle for your reference experience. You can adopt someone else’s words, or you can compose your own. To me, using the right mantra feels like speaking the True Name of relinquishment.
My general method of finding mantras is this: I imagine a far-future version of myself who lives in Utopia, is vastly more wise and competent than I am right now, and who remembers exactly what it was like to be me. I imagine them coming to me in a moment where I need to make a specific mental motion, as though they’ve traveled back in time to intervene at a key point in my development. Then I imagine the words they speak to me to guide me through the motion.
When I do this for relinquishment, I get, “First know what is true. Work out what to do about it later.” Those words are my mantra.
Some Beliefs For Visualization
The meditation itself consists of a series of visualizations. For the first visualization, you’ll need a belief with no personal significance.
For example, I currently believe that the pencil I tossed in my book bag this morning is yellow. I’m pretty confident of that, but when I imagine reaching into my bag to find that it’s actually pink, it’s no big deal. I feel no hesitation about observing the pencil, no fear or shame or despair, no feeling that things I care about rest on the color of the pencil. I don’t feel betrayed by reality. I just imagine a brief moment of surprise and mild confusion, followed by a guess at why I was wrong, and then an effortless update. All it takes for me to change my belief from “yellow” to “pink” is picking up the pencil and observing its color.
For the second, you’ll need a belief with moderate personal significance, something you care a little about. You could try completing some of these sentences: * I think that , and would be a little unhappy if it turned out that _. * I think that , and it would be uncomfortable to learn that . * I think , and I hope it’s false that . * I feel mild dread at the idea that __.
A good example of this for me is, “I feel mild dread at the idea that I filed the legal documents incorrectly.” It wouldn’t be huge, just annoying because bureaucracy sucks.
You can keep going with this series, finding beliefs that are increasingly dear to you. But I recommend starting with just these two, to get the hang of the meditation itself before adding more difficult content.
Imaginary Counter-Evidence
For each belief, come up with at least one observation you would count as counter-evidence. For “the pencil is yellow”, counter-evidence could be “when I take the pencil from my bag, it looks pink”. For “I filed the legal documents correctly”, counter-evidence could be “I got a letter from the County Clerk saying I did something wrong”, or “I didn’t hear back from the Clerk when I expected to”. It doesn’t have to be decisive, as long as it would cause some part of you to feel that you should update.
For more personally significant beliefs, look for imaginary counter-evidence in the direction of hesitation or fear. Look for regions of thought-space you would prefer to avoid while holding the belief in mind. Look for the thoughts that hurt.
With filing legal documents, I looked in the directions of “something about paperwork that is already in the mail and out of my control”, “something about red ink”, and “something about judges”. Navigating by the experience of avoidance is key to this exercise.
A Word Of Caution
Bear in mind that relinquishment is not the same as updating away from a belief.
Relinquishment is the mental motion that allows you to update away from a belief that you’ve been clinging to stubbornly. A simple Bayes net can update a belief. It takes a far twistier mind, one with a strange human-like relationship to epistemics, to relinquish one. It is possible to relinquish without updating, and in fact part of the goal here is to divorce those two motions.
The virtue cultivated by this meditation is the freedom to change your map when you notice a discrepancy with the territory. But it can go the other way: If clinging and belief are still tightly bound in your mind, then relaxing your grasp may directly cause an update. That would be like changing your map when it already matches the territory.
So when you do begin to progress to more fraught visualizations, I caution against choosing beliefs that are doing a lot of practical work in your life, at least until you have the hang of the associated mental motions. There is some danger here of actually updating away from beliefs you have no reason to think are false. If you notice your betting odds changing drastically during this meditation, back up and work with an easier visualization.
With that, you now have all the parts you need to put this meditation together.
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Relinquishment Cultivation
- Perform your fixation (breathing, or whatever). Wait until you feel clear and free of distraction.
- Play through your first visualization, in vivid detail if possible. In my example, this would mean closing my eyes to imagine reaching into my backpack, searching for a pencil. Then I find the pencil, take it out, and am met with counter-evidence: it seems to be a different color than I expected.
- Pay attention to your subtle psychological responses this whole time. First notice what it’s like to expose yourself to the possibility of counter-evidence. Then notice what it’s like to receive it. Seek your reference experience, or the opportunity to create it, in those responses. In my visualization, the pencil I’m looking at is most certainly pink. There’s an unconcerned openness between me and that fact. Learning I was wrong, I completely submitted to alignment with reality, with no wasted motion. That’s the easy freedom that I’m looking for.
- When you find it, focus your attention there, as you did earlier with your fixation object, drinking it in. Then, when the feeling of relinquishment is steady and precise, recite your mantra, either aloud or silently. For me: “First know what is true. Work out what to do about it later.” Repeat it a few times, if you like. Feel it in the context of the visualization. Let its meaning wash over you.
- When you’re ready, move on to your next visualization.
- At the end of your final visualization, let go of the details. Spend some time basking in the abstract experience of relinquishment. That’s the goal of this exercise: to make pure relinquishment familiar and comfortable. Rest there until you feel satisfied.
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Some Variations
The version of this meditation I just described is for routine cultivation. It uses beliefs whose truth values you have no reason to doubt, just to get you familiar with holding them loosely. It’s meant to be done regularly, at the point in your routine when it’s time to meditate.
But a slight adjustment makes it good for acute relinquishment as well. It can be part of a trigger-action plan: “If I notice myself clinging to a belief, I will do a relinquishment meditation, using the belief in question for the second [or third] visualization.” If you’ve done the cultivation version many times, you can probably skip the fixation and even the other visualizations, and move straight into relinquishing the belief.
If you can identify the experiences and mental motions that most often obstruct relinquishment, you can make this meditation the second half of a reflex re-training meditation. I’ll talk about reflex re-training meditations later in this series, but I’ve probably hit on most of it already while writing about how to build cognitive trigger-action plans.
You can also adapt this for cultivation of lightness or evenness, since they’re really just different guises of the same capacity.
With lightness, for instance, I’d do variations on the theme of each visualization. I’d imagine the pencil being pink, then green, then purple. I’d imagine it being a pen instead of a pencil. I’d imagine it being absent all together. I’d imagine seeing that it’s pink, then realizing I’m in unusual lighting and it’s actually yellow after all. I’d look for the feeling of dexterity, rather than the feeling of letting go. I’d say to myself, “I follow where reality leads.”
Finally, this meditation could be used in a Crisis Of Faith.
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I’d like to close by inviting you to repair this meditation.
The thesis of my first post on meditation design was that different minds benefit from different meditations, and it is worthwhile to find or even create the ones that serve you best given your circumstances.
There is a larger thesis for this whole line of thought and research: If you are interested in systematic personal growth, you should learn how to wield your own mind.
Yes, you should also learn to mine external resources. You should be intellectually gluttonous, because there’s a lot to learn from others, out in the rest of the world. “The eleventh virtue is scholarship.”
But you should also be prepared to face down important problems that have never been identified, let alone solved. One point of disagreement I seem to have with a lot of my community is that such problems are commonplace. It’s not immodest or arrogant to suspect that you’ve found one. One reason for this is that you are the only person who has ever been you, who has ever experienced the intersection of your circumstances and values. When you walk from where you are to where you want to be, you will encounter problems that nobody but you is likely to solve.
And when you do — when you find yourself in a place that lacks roadsigns, or any trail at all to follow — do not wait to be rescued. You may have followed someone else’s directions, and ended up in a place they never imagined could exist. Part of the territory is your mind, you can’t avoid walking through that region, and nobody’s been there but you.
What do you do when nothing you know is enough? When you don’t expect to find an answer outside of yourself no matter how hard you look? When your parents have failed you, your gods are dead, and your tools have shattered in your hand? This is the question that drives me, when I think about meditation.
So if you try the relinquishment cultivation I’ve outlined, it won’t work. Not exactly as I hope. It won’t take you to the same place it takes me, because I’ve never walked through your mind. Don’t wait for someone else to come along and fix it. Ask yourself, “What went wrong? Why exactly did that happen? What could I try instead?”
Out of these broken pieces I’ve offered you, please build something that is new, and whole, and yours.
