Negation: The Art of Doing Less, Seeing More
🪷 Negation: The Art of Doing Less, Seeing More A reflection and response from the lens of Buddhist psychology ❓ The Question During a six-day Śamatha and Vipassanā retreat at the Buddhapada Retreat Centre in Kalimpong in September 2025, which focused on the Four Noble Truths , one idea quietly took root in my mind — the concept of negation . I began to notice that in Buddhist practice, the emphasis is not so much on achieving a particular state, but on removing what obscures it. The teacher spoke often of working on causes and conditions, not chasing outcomes. This left me pondering: “In Buddhism, is the path really less about striving toward something — like peace, calm, or enlightenment — and more about negating what blocks them? Because when I strive, there’s always an ‘I’ that wants to get somewhere. But when I work on removing what obscures clarity, the sense of ‘I’ itself seems to dissolve. How does this work psychologically? And how is this kind of doing d...