Renegade Yogi

How to be good at anything – a mystical meditation on neural associations

We are largely creatures of habit. Learning is, to a large extent, associating a sense impression with an idea or an action. I say mostly because when you’ve reached the mystical area of mastery, you’ve transcended association into something else. What that state is is up for debate (though I do have my ideas!). However, even in a mastered skill, there are deep associations in your mind.

Meditation helps to gain an awareness of those associations. Meditation gives you access to that split second after the senses register and before you take an action. It’s something weird and magical that happens to me whenever I meditate regularly.

Something will queue me to action (like someone asking a question), and before I act, in that split second, I can see with amazing clarity what I habitually would have done and all of the choices available to me. And I get to choose one that is much more suitable to the occasion than my habit, and feel a little rush of elation with my surprise.

I suppose this is one way meditation makes you “smarter”. Maybe from the outside I don’t seem much smarter, but it definitely feels like I can learn from mistakes that I had made far in the past but never learned from before. I am disconnecting my past conditioning from my present choices. I am able to take things on a case-by-case basis. To make decisions not based on habit, but based on intelligence.

Would you call this mindfulness? Would you call this meta-programming? It certainly feels like both. It seems like this is the kind of transcendence that masters of a skill achieve. They are able to direct themselves by effortless conscious choice. Is this the secret to living life skillfully? What other mysteries will meditation uncover?