Most meditation instruction begins with some version of the same idea: quiet the monkey mind. Return to the breath. Let thoughts pass without grabbing them. Don’t follow the story. Allow the mind to settle until, eventually, the muddy water becomes clear. This works. But I’ve found something else works too: let the monkeys go absolutely fucking wild.
Follow the thought. Then follow the thought that thought creates. Let the committee in your head convene an emergency meeting. Let everyone talk. Let them interrupt each other. Let one sing while another complains and a third tries desperately to explain why something you said seventeen years ago was embarrassing. Instead of turning the volume down, turn it up.
There is a point where the individual voices stop being distinguishable. Thought piles onto thought, sensation onto sensation, until the whole thing becomes something like a sound machine—a wall of mental noise that somehow ceases to register as noise. The individual frequencies disappear into each other. It becomes a hum, and inside the hum: peace.
I first encountered versions of this idea through Magick, where practices can deliberately intensify emotion, thought, movement, breath, or sensation toward a moment of gnosis. Within that framework, the strange intensity makes sense. You aren’t necessarily trying to calm consciousness. You’re overwhelming its ordinary patterns until something else becomes possible.
But Magick certainly doesn’t own the mechanism. Once you start looking, relatives are everywhere. Koan practice can push conceptual thought against an impossible problem until something gives. Mantra and chanting use repetition and saturation. Ecstatic dance, drumming, Sufi whirling, intense visualization, breath practices, and other contemplative traditions sometimes approach transcendence not by reducing experience but by amplifying it.
And yet, at least in our ordinary conversations about meditation, we don’t talk about this route nearly as much. That makes sense. “Sit comfortably and follow your breath” is much easier to teach than “encourage the committee in your skull to simultaneously begin screaming.” It’s also safer and easier to standardize, particularly when teaching large groups of people with very different relationships to their own minds.
Meditation has also increasingly been presented through a therapeutic lens: regulation, calm, focus, stress reduction. All worthwhile things. Within that framework, deliberately amplifying mental activity sounds like the exact opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish. But perhaps it isn’t.
Perhaps there are two directions into stillness. One is attenuation: progressively reduce the noise until silence remains. The other is saturation: allow the noise to increase until the individual pieces can no longer maintain their separation and the whole thing collapses into something else. 0 monkeys ≈ ∞ monkeys.
For me, this isn’t how I meditate every time. Usually I can simply sit, watch the breath, and let thoughts wander away without chasing them. There is no reason to manufacture a thunderstorm on a clear day. But sometimes there is simply too much energy in the system. The monkeys are already holding instruments.
On those days, asking my mind to immediately become quiet feels almost absurd. Worse, the attempt to suppress the activity can create another layer of activity: I’m thinking, then I’m thinking about the fact that I’m thinking, then I’m frustrated that I haven’t stopped thinking, and now one of the monkeys has apparently been appointed Meditation Supervisor.
So instead of fighting the energy, I use it. Go ahead. Think. All of it. Faster. Let every voice speak. Follow every crumb. Don’t try to organize the committee or decide which member has the floor. Let the entire internal parliament descend into chaos.
Eventually the thoughts begin overlapping. The distinctions blur. What initially felt like chaos becomes saturation. Saturation becomes a hum. And somewhere beyond the hum, I arrive at remarkably familiar territory: stillness.
What’s interesting is that the destination doesn’t feel fundamentally different from the stillness reached by quieting the mind. The route does. One approaches silence by removing fuel from thought. The other seems to burn through the available fuel until the machinery exhausts itself.
I think practices like this deserve to be pulled out of the places we’ve labeled mystical, occult, secret, or strange and discussed more openly as another possible contemplative technology. They don’t have to belong to Magick. They don’t require supernatural beliefs. And they certainly don’t require robes, initiations, or knowing the correct name of a 16th-century demon.
Nor am I suggesting that everyone should abandon the breath and start deliberately driving themselves into a frenzy. The point is much simpler: peace doesn’t always require us to move away from chaos. Sometimes we can move through it.
Sometimes the mind is a pond, and the best thing you can do is stop disturbing the water. Sometimes it’s a thunderstorm. And maybe you don’t calm a thunderstorm. Maybe you let the whole damn thing thunder until all that’s left is rain.