Stop Meditating on “Presence”: You Are Missing 2 Engines (Ep.9)

Hey, have you ever wondered how you can tell if you're really making spiritual progress or not? If you've been meditating and you're just not sure if you're doing it right, if your meditation is really moving the needle, this is going to clear it up for you once and for all.
And you may have heard the expression, “practice makes perfect,” but that's actually wrong. Practice just makes it permanent. So if you're practicing wrong, you're just cementing bad patterns. 

Now here's a hint. To really make this rocket take off, you need three engines, not just one. So if you've been meditating only on mindfulness or only on presence or only on one thing, then you're definitely stagnating because your meditation is only firing on one cylinder. And that's not your fault because it's being taught this way, but there are two big pieces missing and I'll give them to you today.

Welcome to The Meditate More Podcast, where it's all about helping you to meditate more consistently. So you can reap all the incredible magical benefits that meditation can bring to your life today. And here is your host, Manny Mandala.

Hey, and welcome to another episode of The Meditate More Podcast. And if you're here for the first time, make sure to subscribe because we have some power-packed content for you here.
This summer, it'll be 21 years since I started meditating often for two hours a day, at times even up to 10 hours a day. And I'm not fully liberated, but I've had some amazing results with this practice that I want to share with you, and that I hope will be useful to you. So let's get right into it. 

All three engines and how to measure progress across each one. And I recently re-read Eckhart Tolle's two most famous books, that's The Power of Now and The New Earth, and they're great books, very insightful. I highly recommend you check those out if you haven't yet. 

For me, that was the first time I revisited them in 20 years. And it's been very interesting to hear all the information again with a completely new perspective after so much experience with meditation. 

Now, The Power of Now is Eckhart's way to describe presence, right? To be mindful, to be in the here and now, to not be in the past or the future, but in the present, not being lost in thoughts. Our consciousness is right here with what's going on. All our attention is focused on what's in front of you, instead of on our thoughts. This is also known as a state of no mind.

In the Pali language, the language of the Buddha, this was called sati. And that's one of the three cylinders I mentioned in the intro. And that's the one most people usually focus on in their meditation: presence. Not being dragged around by your nose into the past and the future, not being lost in thoughts, but truly being here and now, fully aware of what's going on, without any mental chatter to distort that. 

And sati, this presence, is crucial because not being present is the dream state that the Buddhists talk about. That is the illusion that the Asian philosophers call maya. Because as long as the mind is chattering, and we know that even from modern psychology and from NLP, it distorts everything we perceive. The chattering mind distorts all our perceptions, so we cannot perceive truth. 

And I could talk for hours about the benefits of sati in your everyday life. Basically, it's good for everything. It translates over to everything you do in your life. But let me give you just a trivial example.

I recently took a week off and revisited one of the old video games from my childhood, Prince of Persia. And in Prince of Persia, there are these guards that you have to get past. And I realized that whenever I was focused on getting past the guard, I would always get hurt. But whenever I was truly present with the guard and with the moment of confronting him, I would get past him easily. I wouldn't get caught off guard, no pun intended, because I was present with every move, with every step. 

And that's when you tap into the power of your subconscious mind to always choose the right action intuitively. Or in more simple terms, you're not distracted. How well are you going to perform at a task if you're distracted, if somebody's tagging at your shirt at the same time and talking to you? 

That's what the mind does when it's chattering. And we don't really perceive it because we're like a fish in water. That's just our normal state of consciousness. And so we feel like it's normal, but it's not.

So, again, that's a trivial example. But because in a game, there's nothing at stake, we're a little bit more detached. And maybe we can observe patterns easier than in real life when we're actually trying to achieve something.

But just like in a game, the same thing happens in real life. When we're looking forward to something, when we want to get a result, and we're focused on the result, then our mind is in the future. We anticipate the future instead of being fully here and present. That's when we get hurt. But when we're truly present, things become easy. 

And the thing is, that's not just a decision. ‘Oh, I just have to realize that the ‘now’ is powerful, that not chattering in the mind is powerful.’ It's not just this realization. I would describe it more as a muscle that you have to build over time. And that's why we meditate to develop presence, to develop sati. And how do we achieve that? 

Well, my favorite meditation to work on presence is anapana. That's a simple meditation on the breath. If you want to learn that, check out my free course, where I teach you from the first steps to developing this presence for as little as a minute a day, if you're really busy, or you can do five minutes or 20 minutes. That's how we start. And then we build it up all the way to the most advanced stuff, like supernatural experiences and beyond. The course is free. Check it out at meditatemorechallenge.com. 

But focusing on presence and sati, as I said, that's incomplete. Let's look into that a bit. What is actually present? What are we really working on when we're trying to be present is we're working on the mind. Anapana meditation, any kind of meditation that aims to make us more present, works on the mind.

And we don't only have the mind, right? We have other expressions of consciousness as well. And all our other expressions of consciousness are being neglected by meditating only on presence, by working only on the mind. So if that's what you've been focused on, smash the like button and subscribe. I know everybody says that, but it really does help the channel. 

But, so, what else do we have? Ever thought about it? Like, our senses, right? We have sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. So we have five senses. Or if you really go deep with your meditation, there are six. On the last day of The Meditate More Challenge, I talk about the sixth sense. Check it out again, meditatemorechallenge.com. 

But there are five senses. And what about consciousness? How many aspects of consciousness are there? The mind is one aspect of consciousness. What are the others?
You probably heard the expression mind and body, the mind-body connection. So another expression of our consciousness is the physical, is our body. We can express our consciousness through our body, through the physical. 

And there is a meditation teacher that I want to give a shout out to, because he teaches this aspect, and his name is Shinzen Young. Awesome material. I highly recommend you check out his lecture series, The Science of Enlightenment. He's actually one of the famous Buddhist monks that had their brains analyzed by scientists in labs with brain scanners to observe the scientific effects of meditation on the physiology, on the brain, on the mind. And he's both a scientist and a Buddhist monk. So very interesting material. Check that out. 

But he talks about the fact that we need to develop presence, what we talked about so far, that's sati and the physical aspect, which is called equanimity. What is equanimity? Maybe you've heard the term before. The simple definition is equanimity is being impervious to the push and pull of our physical sensations. What do I mean by that? 

Okay. The pull on our physical sensations are our cravings. That's every time we feel ‘I want this.’ And sometimes this can become so strong that it overpowers us, that it becomes more than a want, that we perceive it as a need, even though it isn't. 

For example, I used to struggle with craving Coke and meditation freed me from that. I no longer have cravings for Coke. And that's obviously not a need. There is no such thing as a Coke deficiency. If you go to a lab and take a nutrient test to see if you're deficient in any minerals, vitamins, nutrients, Coke isn't on the test. But the craving was so strong that it felt like a need. So cravings can actually derail our consciousness and control us.

And maybe for you, it's something else. Leave a comment. What's your uncontrollable craving? But that's the pull aspect on our physical sensations, the cravings. And that's one of the things that developing equanimity makes us impervious to. 

So the pull on our consciousness, the craving in the Pali language, the language of the Buddha is called rāga. And that's an aspect of our physical consciousness because it manifests as physical sensations. And when you go deep in your meditation, you will be able to perceive that a craving for Coke or for anything else is not a mental aspect. It's a physical sensation. It appears to be mental, but it isn't. And I'll explain more about that in a bit. So that's the pull factor.

Now, what about the push factor? The physical push in our consciousness are aversions. There are some things we don't like. So for example, a bad tasting drink, and some things we can't even stand. For me, that's bureaucracy. For you, maybe something else. And some things really make us suffer, such as physical pain. All these are ‘push’ on the physical aspect of our consciousness. All these are aversions. And the Pali term for that is dosa. 

So the two forces that imbalance our mind, the two physical forces are cravings and aversions, rāga and dosa. And the goal then of developing our consciousness in the physical is to develop equanimity to become impervious to cravings and aversions. And that in the Pali language is called upekkhā.

Now, why is this important? Well, somewhat self-explanatory. If you're always craving Coke or other unhealthy foods, you'll get sick. If you have an aversion to pain, you will suffer. 

Have you heard that some people, some spiritual teachers say, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering isn't”? When I first heard that, it was a hostel. I was in my 20s. I was traveling the world. Everyone was having drinks and having these deep philosophical late night conversations. And this guy from Portugal said this. He says, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering isn't.” I was like, “What? Isn't that the same thing? If I'm in pain, then I suffer.”

And the answer is no. Because if you can really develop upekkhā, if you can really develop equanimity, then your reaction to pain is just an aversion. And you've become impervious to these aversions. So then the pain just feels like a massage. 

You can think of it like some really strong massage techniques, even in your local spa, may be quite painful. But some people enjoy these kinds of massages. They enjoy being worked through because they feel rejuvenated. And that's how an advanced meditator will perceive even physical pain. And that's why pain is inevitable, but suffering is not—depending how far you are with your meditation.

And that's one of the many reasons why it's so worth doing this practice every day, right? Like I always say, when we start meditating, it seems like nothing's happening. Like I sit down and then I get up again. And okay, now I've just lost however much time you allocated to your meditation, 20 minutes or whatever. And it seems like nothing changed. 

But if you do it every day, and you do it for several months, you will perceive big, big shifts. It's just like the gym. If you go for a day, you go home after the gym, you look in the mirror and nothing has changed. But if you do it every day for four months, there will be a massive transformation.

By the way, if you found that insightful, I'd like to ask you a quick favor, send this episode to someone who might find it interesting too. Because the algorithms these days are pushing high-dopamine entertainment. And for deeper content, we really need word of mouth to get it out there.

So back on topic, how do we achieve this equanimity? How do we achieve upekkhā? And there is one specific kind of meditation that focuses on developing this particular aspect of our consciousness, the physical, and that's vipassana meditation.

So just as a quick summary, we now have two aspects of consciousness covered. The first one is presence. In Pali, that's called sati. That is the power of now. That's what Eckhart Tolle talked about. And it's achieved by anapana meditation. Not only by anapana meditation, but that's the one I prefer. That's the one I recommend. And that's a meditation that develops the mind.

Second, we have equanimity. And equanimity, or in the Pali language, upekkhā. That's becoming impervious to cravings and aversions, which really helps with the promise of Buddhism to transcend suffering. So that's meditation developing the physical aspect of consciousness. 

Still incomplete. What's missing? What's the third part? There's another expression you probably heard. That's mind, body, and what's the third? And some say it's mind, body, and soul. Some say it's mind, body, and heart. 

I prefer heart in this context because the word soul can be confusing. There are different definitions for the word soul, and different people have very different connotations when they hear that word. So let's call it mind, body, and heart. 

So we have five senses. We have sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. And we have three aspects of consciousness. We have the mind, the body, and the heart. That's the mental, physical, and emotional. Mind, body, heart. Mental, physical, emotional.

And how in the world do you meditate to develop the heart, to develop the emotional aspect of your consciousness? Well, let's see what we're trying to achieve with the heart. What is the heart supposed to do if it functions?

Well, if your consciousness expresses in a healthy way through your heart, what does that look like? The heart generates love. And I do not mean romantic love. I'm not talking about the love between men and women. I'm talking about a higher form of love. The ancient Greek had many words for love.

You may have heard about this. The Eskimos have a lot of different words for snow. They make more distinctions, right, between fine snow and thick snow and bright snow and dark snow. They have a lot of different words for snow because there are different kinds of snow and they know. 

The Greek had several words for love. We only have one. Has our consciousness become that blunted that we can't distinguish between different kinds of love? Just like someone who lives in a warm climate can't distinguish between several kinds of snow because they've never seen snow. Have we never seen love, truly, the true higher form of love, the higher consciousness form of love? I'm not saying we haven't had glimpses of it, but it's interesting to think that something's off there. 

So the Greek had several words for the word love and the one we're looking for is agape. That's the Greek word for a higher spiritual cosmic form of love. In Buddhism, that's often called ‘loving kindness’ or Buddhists also describe that as ‘compassion’. 

In Pali, in the language of the Buddha, it's called metta. In Christianity this is often called ‘charity’. Charity not in the sense of giving money to a beggar or giving alms. Charity in the sense of loving your neighbor. In esotericism and occultism, this is known as ‘Care’ with a capital C and that's what we're looking for. The higher form of cosmic love. 

Why is that important? Again, I think it's kind of self-explanatory, but in the words of Jesus, this is all the law and all the prophets. This is it. This is what it's all about. 

You know Terence McKenna, the mushroom guru who did, like, thousands of talk about psychedelics and about psilocybin and he got into all these complex theories about the universe and the meaning of life and the timewave zero and he tried to come up with a theory of everything and all kinds of complex formulas and endless lectures. And I heard that on his deathbed he said, “After all this, it was all about love.” 

So in his dying moment, he had this insight: This is what it's about. It's all about love. So this is what we're trying to achieve here to begin with. That's what we're trying to develop here.
If you wanna go deeper on this, listen to my podcast. Just go straight to mannymandala.com and start with Episode 1. Go over the archives. I'm sure you will hear some things that you have never heard before. 

But now how do we achieve this expression of consciousness, this form of love, of higher cosmic love, agape? Anapana develops the mental aspect. It develops sati. Vipassana develops the physical aspect. It develops upekkhā.

And there is also a meditation to develop the emotional aspect, to develop this cosmic love. And that meditation is called mettapana. It's also known in the west as loving-kindness meditation. And it's very important to include this in your daily practice because, as we said, this is it. This is what it's really all about. 

And I want to make one important distinction. It's not only about the heart either. That's a very common misunderstanding, that people say, “It's all about the heart. Just make the journey from the head to the heart.” But the heart without the head is stupid. We need both. We need to unite them both.

As per Episode 4 of The Meditate More Podcast, we cannot develop only metta. That will lead you astray. And besides, without presence, the mind will drown out the voice of the heart anyway. The constant mental chatter will confuse the heart. Then suddenly people have so much love for humanity that they want to build a utopia by murdering everyone who doesn't have the same religion as them. So you have to develop presence and you have to develop metta, agape, care.

And of course, that's still not complete because without equanimity, you will constantly be pushed and pulled by cravings and aversions, rāga, dosa. Your very free will is going to be tightly limited. 

And if you want proof of that, just try to eat 100% healthy food only for 60 days and see how much free will you really have with your cravings and your aversions. Most people can't do it. Eventually, the cravings overwhelm them, even though it's like it's a no-brainer, right? Why wouldn't you eat 100% healthy food only for 60 days or even forever? You're going to feel better. You're going to have more energy. You're going to get better sleep. You're going to get more done. You're going to be more healthy long-term. You're going to avoid a lot of late-stage suffering that a lot of people get in old age. 

It's a complete no-brainer to only eat healthy food ever. But how many people can really do it, right? And of course, it doesn't mean you can't have a treat sometimes. But for most people, it's not a treat sometimes. For most people, cravings actually drive their choices. And not just with food, but with everything. And that's a big problem. 

So that's why all three are crucial. We need to develop the mind, the body, and the heart. That's the mental, the physical, and the emotional. Presence, equanimity, and loving-kindness. Or again in Pali, in the language of the Buddha, sati, upekkhā, and metta.
And there are three meditations to achieve these three states. Anapana meditation to achieve sati, the presence of the mind. Vipassana meditation to achieve upekkhā, the equanimity to sensations of the body. And mettapana meditation to achieve metta, loving-kindness, agape, care in the heart. Mind, body, and heart.

And as I mentioned, I go deeper in my podcast. So do check that out. Go over the archives starting with Episode 1 at meditatemorepodcast.com.

Now I have a few more very important comments. This model has actually been vindicated by many different schools of thought. This is not just a Buddhist idea or an idea from the world of meditation.

In esotericism, they actually say this is the real meaning of the word ‘trinity’, of the spiritual concept of the trinity. The three united in one. And in astrotheology, they even say this is what's meant by the Christian trinity. 

Got that? They're saying that the Christian concept of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are really mind, body, and heart in their full expression and united in one. I'm not going to comment on that today, but it's worth thinking about. What are the allegorical meanings of all of these teachings? 

And even science confirms this model. There was a famous neuroscientist called Paul MacLean, and he came up with something known as the triune brain model. The triune brain model says that the human brain actually physically has three layers. 

The reptilian complex for instinct and survival. That's the physical aspect, the body. Then second, the limbic system that governs emotion. So that's the heart. And third, the neocortex for reasoning, for higher cognition. That's the mind. 

I know that people say that this model has been somewhat debunked. It's just like with the left brain and the right brain. It's not a literal map, but the concept holds true. So science does confirm that there are different neural systems for instinct, affect, and deliberation. Instinct, that's physical, that's the body. Affect, that's emotional, that's the heart. And deliberation, that's mental, that's the mind. 

So develop all three. Get started today with my course. It's free. Check it out at meditatemorechallenge.com.

And now let's land the plane. Let's get back to the question that started this episode. How do you measure your progress along the spiritual path?

Well, you're going to have to measure all three. How is your presence? A great way to actually do anapana in a measurable way is to count your breaths down from 100 to zero and see if you can get to zero.

It's surprisingly difficult. You will be shocked how difficult it is to actually count your breath silently in your head without speaking out loud from 100 down to zero. If you try it, leave a comment and let me know how far you got.

And another way to test how far you've developed your presence is how long can you do it in your routine? How long can you do your daily chores as if it was a tea ceremony with complete focus, without any mental chatter, full focus on the dishes, on cutting your vegetables when you're cooking, on brushing your teeth, without listening to something in the background—no music, no TV, no podcast, no audios, just being fully present with your tasks. How long can you do it without your mind wandering off?

Now, second, how do you test your progress with equanimity? Well, one way to test it is if you have started practicing vipassana yet, how many rounds of vipassana can you do? Not that easy to do many rounds in a row.

That's why Goenka, one of the famous vipassana teachers, always says, “You ought to work ardently, diligently,” right? If you know his lectures, this will sound familiar. It's work. And how many rounds can you do in a row before your consciousness, before your mind tires and you need to do something else? 

Another way to test how far you've developed your equanimity is to see how much has the push-pull reduced on your consciousness. How much have your cravings reduced, right? So, for example, I have defeated my cravings for coke and I'm very grateful for that. That was a big one for me. For you, maybe something else.

And how do you check how much progress you've made in developing your loving-kindness? Well, again, one test is how long can you sustain it? Can you meditate on loving-kindness for 20 minutes straight?

Another test is how wide can you spread your love out to other people? For most people, it's pretty easy to get into a state of loving-kindness with maybe their partner, with their family members, with their friends. But can you do it with people you don't know?

Can you feel true deep love like you would for your child to a stranger? Can you feel this deep kind of compassion that you really wish them well and you want them to be happy because you love them as much as you do your mother for someone you've never met? Can you spread that out for everyone in the whole country, for everyone in the whole world?

And then the hardest test, can you spread it out to your enemies? Can you spread it out to people that have hurt you, that have harmed you, that you hate? That's what Jesus was talking about, right, when he said we should love our enemies. 

That doesn't mean we need to condone their actions. It doesn't mean we agree with what they do. It doesn't even mean that we will be in their presence. If they're doing harm to us in some way, there's no need to endure that. But it means we realize that their actions that bother us are part of their dysfunction and that underneath that there is a soul and that this soul is part of the all and the all is love. Not an easy drill to be sure, right? But very important. 

So one more thing here real quick. At the end of Episode 8, I foreshadowed a few topics and we're still going to talk about those. I just had to squeeze this one in. Some of the topics that are still on the list are how exactly meditation can make you happier. Specifically, right, to really be happy all the time.

Have you ever met someone like that? It's almost irritating when you're in your routine and you have to get up early and maybe you're in a bad—you're in a pissy mood, having a grumpy day and you meet that person who's always in a good mood. What's that all about?

And then the big question. What is God? So all of this will be coming up in future episodes. So keep tuning in and thanks so much for listening. I'm Manny Mandala and I'll see you in the next episode. So make sure to subscribe to the podcast now. And always remember to meditate more, meditate more, meditate more, because it is so, so worth it.