Hey all,
I’ve been thinking about two Buddhist expressions: “against the stream,” and “stream entry.” Two different streams, moving in exactly opposite directions. I think they point to … the two most important dynamics in all of human life! You know, just that.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, none of which I have. Sorry. But I can offer some jaunty verbiage! Which you should feel free to ignore. In fact, please do ignore, and instead do the guided meditation, since in this particular case, your own experience is the only evidence that matters.
Here’s the verbiage: the stream in “against the stream” refers to the cumulative flow of unconscious conditioning and reactivity and aggression and self-centredness and the rest of our worst human habits. As it happens, these are all crystallizing in the world right now in a terrifying and epoch-defining way. Truly. Everything is fuckery.
To go against this stream of fuckery means to choose to deliberately go in a different direction. This is hard, and slow, and sometimes it’s lonely, because you may be moving against many of the norms of your own social group. It also requires a different way of being and acting. You can’t power out of a stream of fear and loathing with more fear and loathing. In fact, the more you thrash around and lash out and try to hurt your enemies, the more you reinforce the very current you’re hoping to challenge.
What other direction can we move in?
The Buddhist answer is the Eightfold Path: Right Speech, Right Action, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and all the rest. Easily one of the most beautiful and generous and comprehensive paths that’s ever emerged in human culture. And, ultimately, I think there are as many paths as there are human lives. If I had to generalize, I’d say that for any path to be effective, certain core mind-body skills or capacities must be directly or indirectly cultivated. This in addition to other obvious supports like community, and ethical values, and intelligent policy, and so on. I’ve written about these core mind-body skills a lot, so I won’t bore you with another list. Deliberate practice is the usual way they’re developed, including – but not limited to – the practice of meditation.
Why practice? Because practice can begin to sensitize us to a second, deeper stream. First it sensitizes us, and – if we stay with it – eventually practice can drop us right in, head over heels, and nothing is ever the same again.
Forget the narrow stream of selfish human conditioning. Now you’re in the big, mysterious stream of life just happening, the stream of time, of entropy, of civilizations rising and falling, of life and death and things coming apart and things reassembling. You’ve always been in this stream, but now you know it, now you feel it, now you ARE it.
“Stream entry” is when this deeper stream takes hold of you. It’s very real – in fact, it is Reality. You don’t have to be remotely religious to land in this stream; it cares nothing about your atheism or your materialism any more than it does your Hinduism or your Catholicism or any other belief system.
Buddhists talk about stream-entry as the dropping away of our certainty around being a separate self, and the ease that can come from it. That may be true – if so, I’m not there yet. I flicker in and out of that particular certainty, and for short intense periods feel as agonized as I ever did.
What doesn’t flicker though, is the stream. It keeps going. When I meditate – and often when I don’t meditate – I feel things shifting and reorganizing and hollowing out. Sometimes I feel like I’m not meditating at all; the meditation is doing me. I am not remotely in control. It can get uncomfortable, like I’m being forced to go through some psycho-spiritual process whether I want to or not. More often, it is a huge relief, like I can let go, and let the boat steer itself. There’s also an intimacy side, where I feel more attuned to the exquisite beauty of life, more connected, more surprised, more supported and more supportive to the rest of life in turn. It can get wild and magical and awesome. And the biggest relief in all of it is getting a break from myself, including my need to know what the hell is going on.
I think the practices and ways of life that connect us to this deeper stream are part of the medicine our sick civilization needs right now. Full stop. That stream is not gentle. It’s not moral. It’s not convenient. But it can give us the energy and creativity and perspective we need to address our challenges in a fresh way. I think this has always been true. Einstein knew it:”No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
Two audio files for you. The main one is a guided meditation that begins with noticing the stream of automaticity, and then dips into the larger stream of life unfolding. The audio below – for paid subscribers – is a short teaching I gave at Omega about these two streams.
Existential white water rafting. Let’s do it!
Jeff
A few quick notes—
The next Do Nothing Project happens tonight – Sunday, October 5 – at 8pm EDT, on Youtube. Link here. Soon it will move to Substack Live, so be ready for that!
New to Home Base? We have over 50 guided meditations in our library. Check out the most popular ones here.
How to Meditate, Relate, and Creatively Self-Regulate: A Meditation Retreat for Neurodivergent Humans
Date: July 16 - 19, 2026
Location: Art of Living Retreat Centre, Boone, North Carolina
Something new in the works. Ofosu Jones-Quartey and I have been developing a meditation retreat specifically for neurodivergent folks. Thinking about this is my new favourite thing in the world. It will involve a lot of non-meditation activities, and a lot of creative ways into the skills and potential support of meditation. We’re only taking a limited number of folks this first year. To apply, the link is HERE. I’ll be sharing more about this soon!
