Second-guessing

Julia H. and Chris R.,

"Second-guessing" (over-analyzing) is indeed a problem for many NSR practitioners. It is a problem that is very easy to fix, but hard to fix on our own. A little advice from someone else is sometimes needed.

As always, letting go is the most frequently useful answer. Just knowing, in the background, "this doesn't matter" is all that is needed. Without a technique, without a method, and without any doing or trying, this knowledge is enough. If you need to call it a technique, that is fine: whatever you need to call it, just let it go. Even without the analyzing is possible to get deep rest. And deep rest is all we need to release stress, since that is part of the natural functioning of the nervous system.

Yes, it is true at times that what goes on in meditation seems like nothing special, nothing different from "normal" (surface-level) thinking. This can happen in a number of different situations, and is very common. No matter what causes it, our technique is simple: we just don't care. We don't care if the thoughts are ordinary, we don't care if there are many thoughts, and we don't care if the mantra is completely forgotten. All of these can happen during the correct practice of NSR Meditation, so we accept them.

All we care about is that we are getting deep rest physiologically and that our life is improving outside of our meditation sessions. If you have ever been startled by an interruption and felt uncomfortable, that shows that your body was experiencing a deep state of rest (this is not a good test because it can create another stress that later must be dissolved). If people tell you about some improvement in your actions or behavior, or if you actually accomplish more or feel better, those are all evidence for improvement in daily life.

Whenever the mind is flooded with other thoughts, in other words, whenever we are having active low-level stress release, it may be impossible to think the mantra without some sort of effort. "Effort" includes clever tricks to work around the thoughts and keep the mantra going. As I have written many times on this forum, any such effort is wrong because it defeats the natural process of transcending.

I don't know where the idea comes from that the mantra has to be present. It doesn't come from the NSR manual. I think we just use our "common sense" and figure that our meditation sessions are a waste of time if we are not actively doing something. After all, this is the way it works in daily life. If we want good results, we have to do something.

However, common sense can be wrong. Einstein showed us that any object that is moving very fast gets heavier. It becomes shorter. There are changes in measured time intervals. All of these fundamental predictions of special relativity contradict common sense, yet they are actually true (we can see them all around us, with the proper equipment to extend our senses).

Why does this happen, that our common sense can be wrong? Because our common sense is only reliable within the domain of our sensory experience, and we simply have no sensory experience of ourselves or other objects moving with a speed close to that of light. It's just too fast.

Similarly, our common sense is wrong in the domain of transcending, since we have never done it before. We think we have to do more to accomplish more because that is how it has always worked. But the way NSR works is "do less to accomplish more". It is the opposite of the way the waking state of consciousness works.

David Spector
NSR Meditation/USA