The Banality of Transcendence

The most consequential insights can be the easiest to overlook

Photo by Philipp Torres on Unsplash

In 2014, I was deeply depressed. Stuck in a job I hated, mired in student loan debt, and watching the decade of my 20s circle the drain with seemingly nothing to show for it, I underwent the second (and hopefully final) period of depression in my life. It felt as though my life was over, squandered, the last dregs of my best years slipping away as I helplessly watched. Life became a kind of purgatory — joyless, bleak, and increasingly unendurable. After several months spent locked in the dungeon of my own mind, I began to envision this miserable state as the only future I had to look forward to. At my lowest point, I distinctly remember thinking to myself that any life in which one constantly suffered this much with no prospect of improvement was not a life worth living. To be clear, ending my own life was never even a glint in my eye, but my desperation to climb out of depression pushed me to take the step that men in particular struggle so mightily with: asking for help.

I started seeing a clinical psychologist for talk therapy in early 2015. During our first session, he asked me if I’d ever meditated. I hadn’t. I’d read Sam Harris’s book Waking Up (2014) the year prior and was intrigued — though not enough to actually begin meditating. Alongside weekly sessions in which my therapist deftly curated the conversation I needed to have with myself, I began doing daily meditation exercises focusing on my breath and other bodily sensations. In Buddhism, this style of meditation is known as vipassana.

Though I was idly curious about the spiritual aspect of meditation, the practical benefits for my mental health were what moved me to actually take the practice up. As any meditator will attest, those early sessions were in equal measure frustrating and bewildering. I could not pay attention to the breath going in and out of my nose for even 10 seconds before getting lost in thought. I could not control my thoughts or emotions. Indeed, thoughts spontaneously sprung unbidden into existence out of the darkness, like some kind of quantum spookiness of the mind. I could wrench my focus onto something else with effort, but any attempt to just exist in the present moment lasted mere seconds before the tsunami of my inner monologue slammed into me.

I realized something fascinating: my mind had a mind of its own. But how could that be? If it’s “my” mind, why was it doing things independently of “me”? There was something deeper here to explore, but for the time being, I had more pressing concerns.

Two months in, my therapist said he didn’t think I needed him anymore. I felt better. I felt normal. I’ve never been a “happy” person, walking around with a resting dopey smile and a hair-trigger laugh reflex. But I felt like myself again. Talking through my problems had helped me intellectually understand the self-destructive and irrational ways I was framing my life, but it was meditation that interrupted my mind’s doom loop. The more I meditated, the easier it became to just pay attention to the moment, the less frequently I found myself making mental notes about intrusive thoughts and having to recenter on the breath. These moments of freedom let me think clearly for perhaps the first time. I was living a life that more than 99 percent of humans who had ever lived would have envied. My mental anguish, I realized, was simply a story I had told myself so many times I believed it. And like a magic trick fully understood, these stories lost their power once I saw through them. How did I ever muddle through life like a leashed animal existing at the beck and call of all these stories?

I continued meditating every day for over a year, building in the latter months up to around 45 minutes per sitting. I developed a capacity to sort of dissociate from my emotions. If I felt a wave of negative feelings well up from my subconscious, instead of drowning in them, I found myself comfortably floating above the surface and merely observing them. My relationship to my emotions changed. Makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop became a sense of curiosity as I internally poked, prodded, and catalogued my feelings like some kind of first-person scientist. Eventually, my daily practice lapsed, but the experience left me changed. It also planted a seed deep within my mind that in time became a nagging question.

As the years passed, my ears perked up whenever I came across discussions about meditation or Eastern philosophy. The central theme, from what I gathered, seemed to be seeing through the illusion of the self. This concept, sometimes called egolessness or the more cryptic-sounding “no-self”, refers to the realization that one’s sense of self — as a coherent, fixed agent distinct from consciousness and in proactive control of one’s experience — is, in fact, a fiction. This sense of self emerges from the mind’s compulsive need to construct and cling to narratives, reinforced by constant, often neurotic inner monologuing, distraction, and pattern recognition. Together, these tendencies stitch the threads of experience into a story with an author — the self — at its center. Alan Watts once described the self as a torch being whirled in a ring to create the appearance of a circle of fire. And this fiction functions as an engine of needless dissatisfaction and suffering. Status anxiety, the hedonic treadmill, and the negativity that arises from comparing oneself to others — all flow downstream from our identification with this illusory self.

I found it all a little hard to wrap my mind around at the time, yet I realized this was what had been bugging me while meditating years prior. Becoming aware that my mind had a mind of its own and that my conscious sense of self didn’t have the control it pretended to seemed an early step toward seeing through the self. But there is a world of difference between intellectually understanding the illusion of the self and actually experiencing it.

My New Year’s resolution for 2020 was to get back into meditation. At least, that was what I told myself. What I really wanted was to have the experience. I wanted to have that dolly zoom moment where I witnessed the self falling away in a glorious awakening from which I would emerge transformed. I began meditating for hours a day. I meditated while sitting, focusing on the breath; while walking or running, focusing on my footfalls; and while lying down, focusing on my body. I practiced meditations with no particular focus, meditations cultivating feelings of loving kindness, and meditations aimed at directly seeing through the self. When I wasn’t meditating, I binged literature on Eastern philosophy, from reference materials, to primary Buddhist texts, to Zen memoirs. I listened to hundreds of guided meditations, scores of Dharma talks and conversations about meditation, and read books from Eastern meditation masters and Western scientists alike.

The COVID lockdowns and restrictions only gave me more time to delve and practice. While the pandemic wreaked havoc around the world and identitarianism raged unchecked, I sat in contented silence trying to pierce through the illusion of identity itself. This gave me an entirely different perspective on the tumultuous events of that year. As the salience of identity exploded across the culture, it now seemed not merely obnoxious, essentialist, and illiberal, but also so very, very Western. The same people in society who seized every possible opportunity to denigrate the West did so through the most Western lens imaginable. Perhaps it was only fitting that these new political cults revolved around identity. Illusion is, after all, the organizing principle of religion.¹

As the months piled up, however, no enlightenment came. I became more present, more focused, and less distracted. My capacity for boredom and need for constant stimulation diminished. I was more in tune with my thoughts and feelings than ever before. Yet I still hadn’t seen through the self and had my mind blown. How did you see something that wasn’t there? How did you see nothing? No amount of thinking, verbal instruction, or written description could guide me to the revelation I sought. Why was understanding that the self was a fiction, even coupled with hundreds of hours of meditation, insufficient to generate the experience I searched for? I was at a loss.

Once again, my meditation practice faltered after a little over a year, and once again, the years began to pass. I’d become a professional writer and quit my old job. My debts and depression were long gone, and for the first time in my life, my intellectual interests, creative passions, and career path converged. I never had found that elusive egoless breakthrough, but it no longer occupied my mind. In December 2024, I decided to dip a toe back into the meditation world and picked up a book that had been sitting on my reading list since 2020: Loch Kelly’s The Way of Effortless Mindfulness (2019). Kelly laid out a guide to integrate the experiences and insights of meditation into everyday life, not just when quietly sitting or lying. There was nothing particularly groundbreaking about the text. It was the sort of intermediate meditation advice I’d encountered dozens of times before, complete with the woo-woo language about “energy” and “chakras” that always earns an eye-roll from me. But it was exactly the book I needed to read at exactly the right moment in time. I don’t quite know why, but everything finally clicked.

I had been misled by the many accounts I’d read and heard into expecting some kind of dramatic event, some overwhelming experience of ineffable transcendence and awakening that leaves one radically altered. In the Zen teacher Henry Shukman’s beautifully written One Blade of Grass (2019), he recounted life-changing moments of spiritual epiphany and ego death in which he was physically and emotionally overwhelmed, in some cases even falling to the ground and uncontrollably sobbing. That wasn’t at all what my experience was like. In fact, it’s overstating it to even call it an “experience.” There were no fireworks. Not even a measly sparkler. Reading Loch Kelly’s book and running through the exercises he described, I realized that I’d already seen through the illusion of the self many years prior. It had happened so quietly that I never truly noticed, but once I finally did, it became clear, obvious even, that this was the way things had always been. It wasn’t an awakening. It was realizing that I’d always been awake and hadn’t recognized it. And once this occurred to me, there was no unseeing it. A switch had been flipped that could now be re-flipped at will.

In a sense, seeing through the self was anticlimactic. To borrow from the old adage about scientific discovery often attributed to Isaac Asimov, I’d spent so long seeking my eureka! moment only for it to take the form of Huh, that’s funny… In retrospect, it was always a little silly to be chasing what amounted to a kind of spiritual high that my particular brain, chemically unaided, may simply not be wired for. And yet, I can find nothing to regret in my “journey”, if we’re going to be pretentious about it. Life is experienced through the filter of the mind. Meditation, and the insights it facilitated, improved my mind, and thereby immensely improved my life. I still get lost in thought, swept away by emotions, and taken in by my inner monologue’s bullshit stories from time to time. But having the ability to flip the switch and begin again in any moment is a kind of superpower. Life is, after all, only as good as your mind will let it be. Nearly everything comes down to a matter of interpretation and perspective. In the final analysis, even my depression was a boon, because it set me on a path that left me far more happy, connected, and present than I’d ever been before. Some might see a kind of providence in that. I don’t. As I said, I’m just not wired that way.

See also: “Meaning Junkies”

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1. To be sure, this is just as true of Buddhism. For all the wisdom to be found in Buddhism as philosophy, Buddhism as religion contains more than its fair share of superstitious mumbo jumbo.