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Meditation Isn't Getting Used To Is

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Meditation Isn’t; Getting Used To Is

A Tibetan saying about gom (meditation), introduced in Ch.1 and unpacked as the climax of Ch.2. The authors treat it as the book’s most compact statement of method.

Meditation — isn’t. Getting used to — is.

Key Points

  • “Meditation isn’t” = meditation is not a method of doing. Ch.2: “One does not involve oneself in doing anything. One does not instigate anything or impose anything. One does not add anything or elaborate anything. One simply remains. One simply maintains presence in motiveless observation.”

  • “Getting used to is” = the practice is acclimatization. “One acclimatizes oneself to the undefined dimension of existence. We are unused to our own enlightenment, so meditation is a way of ‘getting used to’ it.”

  • What specifically is being gotten used to — in shi-nè: being referenceless. “In terms of deep-rooted attachment to thought, one is getting used to nonreferentiality. One is getting used to being referenceless.”

  • Gom’s literal sense supports this. Gom (sGom) means “to become habituated” — “getting used to” is not a loose translation but the term’s core. See Gom.

  • The adage is load-bearing. Ch.2 closes on it: “It is crucial to know quite personally that meditation isn’t, and that getting used to is.”

Why Non-Doing ≠ Not Practicing

The adage is easy to misread as “meditation isn’t a thing, just relax about it.” The chapter forecloses this in two directions:

  • Against doing: the two impossibility-exercises of Ch.2 (force thought out; force thought continuous) demonstrate that any coercive doing produces the opposite of the intended state. See the three vital points under Shi-nè.
  • Against not practicing: the authors insist on sustained sitting, the gomchen’s dawn-till-dusk exercises, and the relational rigor of working with a Lama. Non-doing is a specific operation one sustains — not an excuse for drift.

The correct reading: practice is a sustained withdrawal of the fueling that keeps the unenlightened condition refreshed, not a production of a new condition. The fire metaphor in Ch.2: “One treats thought as a fire that has served its purpose — one merely ceases to add further fuel.”

The Inversion of Outcome-Directed Practice

Ordinary framing: meditation is for something (calm, insight, stress reduction, enlightenment-as-achievement). Success is measured by what is produced.

The adage’s framing:

  • There is nothing to produce — the enlightened state (the base, the natural state, sem-nyid) is already what one is.
  • There is something to un-do — the continual refreshing of the five markers through reference-point activity.
  • “Practice” is the un-doing: the sustained non-addition of fuel, the non-coercion of mind, the acclimatization to what remains when the fueling stops.

This inversion is the reason boredom is the practice’s early content: boredom is exactly the defensive affect that arises when the production-of-self machinery slows. It is evidence the adage is being taken seriously.

Method Mirrors the Adage

Ch.2’s pedagogy enacts the adage:

  • Meditation isn’t: the exercises instruct the student not to do — Exercise 1 simply lets thoughts come and go.
  • The two impossibility-exercises (Ex. 2 and 3) are deliberately counter-examples — they demonstrate that meditation cannot be a doing by having the student try to do it, forcefully, in both directions.
  • Getting used to is: the resolution comes not as acquiring a new skill but as recognition — “I have known this without knowing it! It is so simple!”

Ch.3 Gloss — Getting Used To the Fact of Our Existence

Ch.3 cashes out the second clause in a direction that matters. Before Ch.3, “getting used to” pointed at nonreferentiality in the abstract. Ch.3 makes it concrete: the practitioner is getting used to the texture of being here.

“Initially, the practice of shi-nè is getting used to the fact of our existence. We are here, and there is a texture that relates with that. It is a complete texture, containing both pleasure and pain, hope and fear, gain and loss, meeting and parting, pride and humiliation.”

This is not a softening of the adage. It is the nearest phenomenological handle on it. The referenceless condition (abstract) is the experienced texture of sitting with what one is (concrete). The two descriptions are of the same event from different heights.

The Ch.3 corollary — “if we practice shi-nè, we begin to live our lives; if we do not, our lives continue to live us” — is the adage’s consequence for agency. Acclimatization restores the capacity to meet one’s life. Non-acclimatization leaves one’s life happening to someone who is elsewhere.

See Presence for the named fruit of this acclimatization.

Ch.11 — “The Method Is a Method of No-Method”

Ch.11 (Appendix 1) §5 reformulates the adage’s first clause in a register the practitioner can take into ordinary activity:

Q: Is there a method —

NCR: No.

KD: There is no method. There’s just being.

NCR: If there’s a method then …?

Q: Quite (laughs).

And later, when the practitioner asks for “something to get hold of”:

NCR: Like something that would enable you to “be” in a particular style, rather than simply being? … The method is a method of no-method. The method is simply being. If you find that you can’t continue in that state of simply being, then you can try to be mindful.

This is the adage’s first clause restated as practice-instruction:

  • “Meditation isn’t” = there is no method, just being.
  • The fallback rung = if you can’t continue in just-being, try to be mindful. The fallback is not a different method; it is a less ambitious form of the same gesture.
  • Tripping over things as the alarm clock. “And if you can’t be mindful?” — “Then you trip over things. It’s life’s way of reminding us to be mindful.” (KD) Even ordinary clumsiness is the practice’s feedback signal.

The connection to lhun-drüp (the fourth naljor) is direct: “there is no method with lhun-drüp apart from continuing in the nondual presence of awareness in the efflorescence of every moment.” The Ch.11 §5 method-of-no-method is the adage’s training-form for what lhun-drüp is the realized form of.

Ch.11 — Daily Practice as Promise-to-Self

The adage requires sustained acclimatization, which requires daily sitting. Ch.11 develops the daily-practice pattern as integrity-of-intention:

“It’s good to sit for a length of time that you can manage every day. … It’s better to sit for five or ten minutes a day than for an hour every once in a while. Daily practice is vital.” (KD, Ch.11)

“Only make promises to yourself that you know you can keep, otherwise you’ll never have confidence in yourself and you’ll find that you won’t be able to make promises to yourself at all. Being able to make promises to yourself is keenly meaningful. It’s a way of giving your life real direction.” (KD, Ch.11)

The adage’s “getting used to” is operationalized as a daily promise of small honest sitting. Five honest minutes daily is a real promise that builds the capacity for promises. An aspirational hour-a-day that is broken in week two is a broken promise that erodes the capacity for promises. The adage’s acclimatization principle (gradual, sustained, ordinary) supports the small-honest framing rather than the aspirational-large framing.

This pairs with the Ch.11 quality > duration principle: going-through-the-motions for an hour is not the practice the adage names — it is the avoidance form of “doing meditation.” Five minutes of actual let-go-and-let-be is what the adage names.

SoE Ch.3 — “The Method of Non-Method”

Spectrum of Ecstasy Ch.3 supplies the cross-book reformulation of the adage under a different phrasing — with the methodological hinge made explicit:

“Being is methodless. However, the methodlessness of being is something that the limitations of our foggy faculties cannot encompass… So we need to feel our way with delicacy, daring and determination. We have to acclimatise ourselves to the method of non-method. We discover the effortless spontaneity of being, through the practice of shi-ne — the introduction to space.”

“The method of non-method” is SoE Ch.3’s compressed reformulation of the adage. The structural content is identical to RS’s “meditation isn’t; getting used to is”:

  • Methodlessness of being = meditation isn’t (there is no positive method)
  • Acclimatising to methodlessness = getting used to is (the practice is acclimatization to what methodlessness is)

The three-quality requirement — delicacy, daring, determination — is Ch.3’s addition: the acclimatization to methodlessness is not easy, despite the absence of method. Delicacy, because coercion cannot enter; daring, because the dualistic mind reads methodlessness as annihilation (mistrust of existence); determination, because the habituation-of-referentiality must be sustained against.

Non-Method as the Post-Sit Condition

Ch.3’s KD Q&A supplies the operational register of “non-method”:

KD: ‘Non-method’ is the condition in which you might find yourself at the end of a meditation session. You stand up, and somehow — that’s not the end of the meditation… but we still need to avoid pretending to live as though we’re enlightened.”

Non-method is continuity-of-sit into post-sit, not a style to perform. This is the same register Ch.11 RS names as jé-thob — the 15–30 minute post-meditation period where the practitioner continues-in-state without adopting a meditation-technique. The connection is structural: method-of-no-method = jé-thob = lhun-drüp’s training form.

Life Without Method Is the Goal, Not the Path

A load-bearing Ch.3 clarification:

KD: life without method is the goal — it’s not the path, even though methodlessness may be reflected in the path.”

Methodlessness is reflected in the path, not characteristic of it. The path has method; the realized state is methodless; methodlessness can appear on the path (as jé-thob, as non-method, as the post-sit condition) but the path itself is not methodless. Claiming methodlessness without having completed the path is the failure mode Ch.3 diagnoses as imitating enlightenment.

This guards against a common misreading of the adage: that “meditation isn’t” licenses not-sitting. The correct reading is: meditation-as-doing-something isn’t; the practitioner still sits and acclimatizes — the “isn’t” is the do-ing, not the practice.

See View Meditation Action, Imitating Enlightenment, Jé-thob.

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