The Intelligence of Remembering

23 Sept

What Mindfulness Forgot About Memory

I have known people who have sat in meditation for years and remained, through it all, difficult to be near.

Vain in the way that endures long, silent practice. Quick to anger when crossed, quicker still to explain it away. Genuinely uninterested in how their behaviour affects those around them. None of this makes them failures at meditation. Measured by concentration, by hours logged, and by the steadiness of the breath, they may have been rather good at it.

It is as if māna (self-conceit) had not moved; tradition holds that the fetter is the last to fall, still standing long after craving and ill will have gone. For some, the practice itself seems to have made it worse. The hours gave māna a better hiding place, a story about being further along that reads as humility from the outside and serves as armour from within.

Ajahn Chah has an image for this. A chicken, he says, can sit on its nest for days on end. Enormous diligence. No hatching of wisdom. Stillness on its own proves nothing about what a life is doing.

Olga Khazan's recent profile of the psychologist Willoughby Britton in The Atlantic provided substantial new evidence for an old suspicion. Britton came to meditation as a devotee rather than a sceptic. She trained to teach MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), considered ordaining as a nun, and found genuine personal help in the practice after a traumatic period in her life.

Her doubts began almost by accident, with a small study she ran in 2004, expecting an eight-week meditation course to improve people's sleep. Instead, the meditators slept more fitfully the more they practised, and she hesitated for a long time before publishing a result she worried would damage the Dharma.

What followed was years of more deliberate research into what meditation can do when it goes wrong. Her 2017 study, Varieties of Contemplative Experience, interviewed sixty meditators who had run into serious difficulty and thirty-two teachers who had watched students run into it.

The list of what people reported is not short: anxiety, panic, paranoia, depression, dissociation, hallucinations, delusional thinking, and, in a smaller number of cases, suicidality or psychosis. Later, less selectively recruited studies put the rate of adverse experiences at roughly one in ten to one in seven meditators, higher on intensive retreats, where long hours of practice combine with silence, disrupted sleep, and sometimes very little food.

Britton's own organisation, Cheetah House, now exists to support people who came home from a retreat and did not recover. She estimates that between half and three quarters of the people who reach her have developed their symptoms after one.

What disturbed her most, in her own account, was not the difficulty itself. It was what some of her teachers did with it. When her long daily sitting produced weeks of depersonalisation, when her house stopped looking like her house and photographs of herself seemed to show a stranger, she was told this was anattā, the direct realisation of no-self, and encouraged to keep going.

She says the encouragement made things worse. A framework built to describe insight was being used to explain away deterioration, and there was no way, from within that framework, to tell the two apart.

The headline version of this story, that meditation can be dangerous, is true but not very interesting. Of course, a practice powerful enough to loosen a person's sense of who they are can loosen more than intended. Anything strong enough to help is strong enough to harm; this is true of exercise, fasting, intimacy, and most things worth doing seriously.

The question the Atlantic piece raises without quite landing on, and the one I think matters more, is why a tradition with several thousand years of accumulated wisdom about the mind produced teachers who could not see the difference between a student in crisis and a student with insight. I do not think the answer is that Buddhism failed here. I think the answer is that a piece of Buddhism went missing on the way into the modern world, and it is a piece we have stopped noticing is gone.

It began, I suspect, with the English word itself. Meditation invites us to imagine a discrete activity, something a person does or does not do for a set number of minutes, with an outcome that can, in principle, be tested against a control group. Once meditation is a dose, it becomes natural to ask whether the dose is safe, whether more is better, and whether it should come with a warning label. All reasonable questions. None of them is the question the Pali Canon is asking.

The Canon certainly contains formal instruction in concentration and insight, jhāna, ānāpānasati, and satipaṭṭhāna, though these sit within something much larger: restraint, generosity, honesty, friendship, the deliberate examination of one's own conduct, and a great deal of ordinary attention to consequence. The Buddha's recurring question is not 'do you meditate?' It is closer to 'what are you doing, and what happens because you do it?' Sitting is one answer among several to a question that is really about a whole way of living.

The word that, I think, has been lost in translation more than any other is sati. We render it as mindfulness, and mindfulness has come to mean something like non-judgemental attention to the present moment, a kind of open, accepting noticing. This is not wrong so much as thin. Sati is the word the tradition also uses for memory, and I have become convinced that this is not an etymological accident to be politely set aside. It is the whole point.

Not memory in the sense of an accurate biography, the ability to say what happened last Tuesday. Memory in the sense of not losing sight of what matters. I become angry. I speak harshly. Something happens to the other person's face. Afterwards, something happens in my own chest, a kind of hollowness that arrives after the anger. The relationship is different the next morning.

Sati is what keeps that whole sequence available the next time anger rises, so the present moment is no longer quite the innocent, unprecedented moment it appears to be. The past becomes intelligence rather than baggage. This is why genuine presence, paradoxically, depends on remembering. A mind with no access to its own history is not free of the past. It is condemned to repeat whichever version of it happens to be running underneath, unexamined.

This changes what an honest, ethical life looks like from the inside. It is tempting to settle questions of character by reciting a self-description. I am a compassionate person. I was right in that argument. Both sentences are almost worthless as evidence, because they describe a self-image rather than a consequence.

The more useful question is not whether I am compassionate, but what happens when I act as I call compassion. Perhaps I gave clear advice and left the other person humiliated without ever raising my voice. Perhaps what I called honesty was really aggression wearing a nicer word.

Perhaps the thing that caused someone discomfort in the moment was the only honest and non-harming option available, and its value only became visible in what it prevented. None of this can be settled by the story I tell about myself. It can only be settled by remembering, carefully enough and for long enough, what followed.

There are at least four ways memory can fail this task, and I think all four show up constantly, in the consulting room and everywhere else. There is rose-tinted memory, which insists it wasn't really that bad, smoothing the past until it no longer teaches anything.

There is traumatic memory, which insists the opposite, that it is still happening, so completely that the present moment is treated as a rerun of the one that hurt. There is righteous memory, which has already decided what is beneficial to another person before the facts are fully in, and which reads every subsequent event as confirmation.

Then there is what I would call wise memory, which tries to hold what happened accurately enough to see the causation running through it, while staying open enough to be surprised by what happens next. The first three all protect a self-image. Only the last one is paying attention to consequences.

This lines up more than I expected, when I started noticing it, with what the predictive processing model says about trauma. A traumatised nervous system is not short of memory. If anything, it remembers with terrible fidelity, and that fidelity is exactly the problem: this happened, therefore this is what will happen again, applied so rigidly that the present has almost no chance to update the prediction.

Wise memory is the opposite move. This happened, and I will not pretend it didn't. What is happening now. It keeps the past as evidence rather than as a verdict, which is healthier than either forgetting or reliving.

Sati on its own is still not enough, and this is where the tradition becomes more demanding than the wellness version of it lets on. The texts pair sati with sampajañña, usually translated as clear comprehension, and with yoniso manasikāra, wise or appropriate attention. Attention by itself is not wisdom. A predator watching for prey is extremely attentive. An anxious person scanning a room for the first sign of danger is extremely attentive.

What turns attention into something liberating is not its intensity, but what it attends to and what is done with what it finds. This is the piece that goes missing when meditation is extracted and sold as a technique for calm. You can build extraordinary concentration and still be watching for the wrong thing, or watching for the right thing and, the moment something troubling appears, forgetting to ask what it means.

I think this is what happened to Britton and to the students whose difficult experiences her teachers dismissed as insight. Depersonalisation is not self-evidently either pathology or awakening. It becomes one or the other depending on what happens around it: whether it is held within a relationship that can tell the difference, whether the person experiencing it is asked what effect it is having on their capacity to work, love and function, whether anyone remembers, in the middle of the doctrine, to notice the consequence in front of them.

A community that has kept sīla, generosity and honest friendship alongside its meditation has some chance of distinguishing a crisis from a breakthrough, because it still has other information to check against.

A retreat that has reduced the path to hours of sitting in silence has thrown away most of that information. Doctrine shaped the sitting and produced what arose from it. Doctrine is also what's left to say what that meant. Nothing outside the loop checks the story."

That is not a community remembering wisely. It is a community that has forgotten how to ask what happens because of this and has a beautiful vocabulary for not noticing the gap.

None of this means Britton's conclusion is that people should stop meditating, and it is not mine either. Her position, after everything her research uncovered, is closer to a question of dose, context and honest attention to the individual case: modify or stop what is causing sustained harm, treat intensive retreat with real caution, recognise that different practices suit different people at different times.

That is not a retreat from the practice. It is what wise memory looks like when applied to an entire field, a discipline willing to remember its own difficult cases rather than only its successes.

The version of mindfulness I would want to teach, and the one I think the early texts describe, is not present-moment awareness for its own sake. It is the capacity to keep enough of our own history in view so that we can continue learning what causes suffering and what brings it to an end, without either drowning in what happened or refusing to let it inform us.

That is a more honest discipline than watching the breath and considerably more interesting. It asks not whether we meditate, but what we are doing and whether we are still willing, years into practice, to discover what it produces.

Pali Glossary

Māna: The tendency of the mind to locate itself through comparison, as better than, equal to, or lesser than others. One of the fetters said to persist longest, often surviving after craving and ill will have gone. It rarely shows as arrogance. In experienced practitioners, it can persist as a quieter sense of being further along than others, wearing the appearance of humility while doing the work of self-elevation.

Sati: usually translated as mindfulness, and the ordinary Pali word for memory. The capacity to keep something in mind rather than lose sight of it.

Sampajañña: clear comprehension, the discernment that accompanies sati and distinguishes what is happening from what it is assumed to mean.

Yoniso manasikāra: wise or appropriate attention, attention directed towards what is useful to see, rather than attention as an end in itself.

Anattā: not-self, the teaching that no fixed, permanent self can be found within experience. Central to Buddhist insight, anattā is also, per Willoughby Britton's account, sometimes used by teachers to reframe psychological deterioration as spiritual progress.

Jhāna: the states of deep meditative absorption cultivated through sustained concentration.

Ānāpānasati: mindfulness of breathing, a foundational concentration practice in the Pali Canon.

Satipaṭṭhāna: the four foundations of mindfulness, namely body, feeling-tone, mind-states and phenomena, constitute the Buddha's core instruction on the cultivation of sati.

Sīla: ethical conduct and restraint, traditionally regarded as a precondition for meditative practice rather than as something separate from it.