Completion: 90% 924 words Essay first planted: November 10, 2025 • Last updated: November 11, 2025

Aldous Huxley claimed that our society needs non-symbolic education methods—modes of training not reliant on language or other abstract symbols—for realising one’s potential. I have not practised any of his suggested methods (Alexander technique and Gestalt therapy) but I was quite surprised that no schools of meditation were in his lecture, despite his pointing to the Three Yogas. Had I not completed a couple Vipassana meditation retreats, I think a lot of his commentary would have confounded me1. It is why I concur with him that such forms of education are needed in addition to formal ones. Here, I interpret why some meditation practices capture the essence of a non-symbolic trainingI can only claim experience of Vipassana but I suspect this interpretation generalises to other meditation schools..

About Vipassana

Vipassana meditation is a fairly widespread practice and has many centers where one can learn the style; a beginner course spans ten days and meditation is completed in silence. A single day comprises nearly ten-and-a-half hours dedicated to meditation practice; an additional six-and-a-half hours are for dining breaks and ablutions. Strenuous exercise and communication (including gestures with hands and eyes) are prohibited though one may whisper requests to the helpers concerning logistical matters. So, one can only reach exhaustion via meditation. These features make the training a non-symbolic one that is with the objective of “making people happier”; if true, it is precisely the kind of actualisation Huxley speaks of.

My experience

At the first of my retreats, I sailed through the first two days without much of a problem but by the third morning, my mind began creating unrealistic visions, plans for fun and sometimes even pleasurably risqué activities. It was not that the mind thought that we would be elsewhere later—without any objects to preoccupy it, it just didn’t know what to do so was just putting itself to some use that seemed familiar: imagination.

The mind was disengaged from the mind’s experience of reality2 and was instead experiencing an independent version of it; the body had accepted what the mind couldn’t: that the next seven days were here and all it would be used for is sleeping, meditating, eating, and walking to the destinations that supported that activity.

There was a day-long battle by the mind to regain control from the body and impose its version of reality as the valid one; it was quite weird but also demonstrated to me that the two are not only distinct features but that my hyper-specialised scientific education had ceded a lot of control to the rational mind. The following quote rings very true in retrospect:

Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant, but a terrible master”. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

David Foster Wallace, This is Water

Out of its regular environment of reacting to stimuli from conversations, speech, and screens, the mind was defaulting into the aforementioned imaginations to keep itself entertained. By the end of the fifth day, it felt like a truce between the mind and body had been struck; by day ten, the two had learned to cede control harmoniously to the other as situations demanded. I cannot fully articulate the mechanism, but the continuous practice eroded the mind’s resistance without any single dramatic moment.

The mind had not only been tamed into ceding control to the body’s experience but had also developed an awareness to observe many parts of the body in isolation; a common recollection from those who complete Vipassana is that they develop the faculty to observe specific digits of their feet and hands in isolation. This is what I call awareness here and I suspect that this is also a form of awareness training Huxley identifies.

My long-term observations

Vipassana style meditation is a bit of a bootcamp; experiences can vary by location—my first one in Ladakh was more brutal but also practically more useful than my second lesson in the UK—but the essence of the teachings really allows you to focus on the various senses and how they heighten. This only happens once the mind becomes quiet and cedes control to the body. Prolonging the practice eventually leads to heightening one’s awareness of progressively subtler sensations. And such awareness somehow led, in my case, to a prolonged state of contentment. Like most training, the lessons only stick with continuous deliberate practice; the less mental math I do, the worse I get at it. But there is truth in the general idea that there are non-symbolic trainings that can support one’s personal actualisation. There’s, nonetheless, a subtle irony to verbal discourses on meditation that assert its value as non-symbolic training.

To be honest, I have listened to this talk over five times and a lot of it flew over my head until I sat down with a notebook and jotted down key points. I suppose this only further asserts the meta-benefits of a hand-mind-eye coordinated task. ↩ 1.

Admittedly, this sounds incredible but for those who have experienced death or loss, I think it’s useful to visualise how the body’s processing of grief is quite decoupled from the mind. In fact, at times, even the body feels localised sensations differently. For example, when I put my dog down, I could feel greater sensations of pain in my chest and gut than I would around my head or extremities. It’s weird but it happens but these circumstances are rare and one has to REALLY seek them out—like at a meditation boot-camp. ↩

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