Since I've started writing about meditation, I've received a few comments from people who said they'd appreciate hearing more about the experience of meditation. I've mentioned the fundamental impossibility of describing such experiences and the ways in which those attempts can actually interfere with the meditative process. Lately, when I sit to meditate, I spend at least as much time thinking about discussions from my meditation course, things I've read about meditation, and how I would explain my efforts to others as I do actually meditating. I've just started reading Wittgenstein, and he says it best: "What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent."

Because of their non-dual nature, the process and experience of meditation cannot be described in any language I'm aware of. Even attempts to convey the reality of meditation metaphorically are problematic. The only sure way to convey the experience of meditation to someone is, using Ken Wilber's term, injunctively: if you do these things, you will have the experience. The illustration that Wilber uses involves chocolate cake--the experience of eating a chocolate cake is far more easily and effectively conveyed to someone by giving them the recipe than by attempting to describe your experience. And the "recipe" for meditation isn't difficult. If you really want to know what I'm writing about, if you're as frustrated as I am by my inability to communicate the essence of meditation, just follow that recipe for ten to fifteen minutes a day, and in a week or two, what I'm saying will sound familiar. You don't have to subscribe to any particular beliefs or commit to any dogma--just see what happens.

And on the topic of Wittgenstein, though he "was held in especially high esteem by the anti-metaphysical logical positivists," my impression of his writing (after reading just a few pages) is that it offers the strongest and most succinct logical derivation of one of the central tenets of Buddhist thought that I've seen yet:

2.026

Only if there are objects can there be a fixed form in the world.

2.027

The fixed, the existent and the object are one.

2.0271

The object is the fixed, the existent; the configuration is the changing, the variable.

2.0272

The configuration of the objects forms the atomic fact...

2.04

The totality of existent atomic facts is the world.

Logic is the process of deriving conclusions from some starting point, some dogma. Wittgenstein starts with the possibility of objects--he seems to posit their existence only tentatively--and states that their totality and the totality of their configurations are our world; that we directly experience not the fixed underlying objects, but the change and variability of the configuration of those objects into atomic and molecular facts. From there, he has only to take the small step of recognizing that there is nothing fixed--that his caution in positing the existence of objects was indeed justified--to arrive at a fairly complete elaboration of the Buddhist notion of sunyata. It's our delusion that objects exist (our delusion of objectivity) that draws us into the cycle of samsara--literally, the cycle of birth and death within which all suffering occurs, and figuratively, the cycle of attachment, aversion, and ignorance that begets all suffering.