Meditation, huh, What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing!
Meditation as a Catalyst for Change, Part II
Because meditation fosters compassion, love, and good will towards all beings, many of the Deep Ecologists have settled on meditation as the primary vehicle that can bring humanity towards a consciousness of sustainability.
The billion of us who have access to more than we need must sacrifice our many wants and desires for the rest of those living, now and in the future. But it takes a deep spirit of altruism (or at least selflessness) to sacrifice for others or to voluntarily give away our material abundance, especially to those we cannot see or who have not yet been born or who are of another family, nation, or species.
Still, for the sake of Civilization and all complex life, we must make this punctuated jump in our consciousness—from an egocentric to a biocentric grounding. This is why the “Deep ecologists… see meditative experiences as a primary vehicle of humankind to transcend anthropocentrism and find a wider identification with nature, culminating, by definition, in an ecocentric worldview.”
To the rational mind, these alleged powers of meditation sound a bit farfetched. However, as Ken Wilber notes, meditation and its realizations are translogical in nature. They can make sense and be communicated using our powers of reason;[i] neurological tests can validate the activity in corresponding regions of the brain; and the changes in a person can be empirically observed by those who know this person—friends, family, workmates. The person may become more peaceful, less angry, or choose to be vegetarian. Any number of positive changes can be observed.
But the meditation process, itself, occurs in a manner altogether different than either the observation of exterior objects or the interpretation of interior ideas. And consequently the results and benefits of its process are different than the other two, as well. However it happens, meditation masters and novices, alike, attest to its powers.
If forty percent of Americans stop their busy lives to meditate at least once a week, they must be deriving some benefit from it. Even in “relatively inexperienced persons,” meditation has been found to produce a state of calmness, the appearance of alpha waves on an EEG (which are associated with a relaxed, tranquil state) and “a tendency towards personal growth.”
For the more experienced meditators, the list of benefits reads like the label on the bottle of some all-purpose elixir. Meditators scored higher than the general population on scales that measured acceptance, spontaneity, inner directedness, self-regard, and empathic ability. Neurological studies show that meditation has been “associated with changes in gray matter concentration in brain regions involved in learning and memory, emotion regulation… and perspective-taking,” including an increase in gray matter volume.
Fibers in the entire brain have been found to be significantly more numerous, more dense and more myelinated in meditators when compared to nonmeditators. Moreover, inflammatory cytokines and the stress hormone cortisol dropped in meditators.[ii]
Increased well-being, improvement in attentional skills, renewed energy, clarity of mind, reduced anxiety and depression, a sense of peace and equanimity, a positive attitude, increased purpose in life, and an increase in life satisfaction, decreased symptoms of pain, illness, and the relapse of depression, faster healing rates and stronger immune systems, increase in emotional regulation—especially in stressful situations—and insight into the underlying nature of reality have all been consistently reported by meditators.
And importantly for our purposes, both survey and neurological studies corroborate the meditators’ anecdotal testimonials: through the training of one’s mind in certain forms of meditation, a person can enhance her powers of loving-kindness and compassion, as well as the qualities of courage…, kindness and wisdom, generosity, and selflessness. Jon Kabat-Zin reminds us that “the true meditation practice becomes how you live your life, not how well you sit on a cushion.”
Meditation will not, by itself, teach us how to make a better solar battery or live a simpler, healthier lifestyle. However, it can free us from the ideologies that hold us back from exploring them.
As S.N. Goenka taught, “One develops attachment to one’s views and beliefs, and cannot bear any criticism of them, or even accept that others may have differing views. One does not understand that everyone wears colored glasses, a different color for each person. By removing the glasses, one can see reality as it is, untinted, but instead one remains attached to the color of one’s glasses, to one’s own preconceptions and beliefs.”
This is the promise of meditation—the liberation from the bonds of our dogmas, resentments, jealousies, greed, selfishness and all the other self-centered delusions that keep us separated from the rest of our human family and from all of nature. “The connections of meditative disciplines to ecological sustainability are both direct and transparent,” say the researchers Merlin Brinkerhoff and Jeffrey Jacob. The “dualistic, subject/object split of Western science and materialism…” recedes and is “replaced by a sense of unity with one’s environment.”
However, meditation and its purported benefits have not been without its critics. There have been any number of sages and saints with controversial histories and dubious ethics. More importantly, most adherents, disciples, and practitioners have fallen far short of the ecologic ideal of the simple, sustainable lifestyle. And ashrams, meditation centers, and New Age resorts tend to be no more committed to employing green technologies than are mainstream and secular organizations.
Cultural critic Michael Parenti is highly skeptical of the “New Age enthusiasts” whose practice he finds sometimes “beneficial,” sometimes “counterfeit.” Most of them, he maintains, are well-educated “Caucasians” from the upper social-economic strata who, like the rest of this group, have less interest in righting injustices in the world than in learning techniques to make them worldly successful.
And there is a whole circuit of teachers, writers, and spiritual authorities who prey on these aspirants, lecturing, leading courses, and writing books like The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success that assure us that we can have “material abundance… spring forth easily and effortlessly.” Careers and fortunes can be made and reputations won by commodifying the spiritual. “Spiritual materialism,” Chogyam Trompa called it.
As yoga historian Mark Singleton notes: “The irony is that yoga, and spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate commodity… Spirituality is a style, and the ‘rock star’ yoga teachers are the style gurus.” Although it isn’t all that ironic really, given that the yoga and “spiritual” teachers have been immersed in the same dominant cultural paradigm as everyone else from the day they were born. Given the ubiquity of our culture’s message, the selfless esthetic is a difficult path even for those with the best of intentions and the greatest determination.
[i] For example, one can satisfactorily explain in a rational manner how a sustained and penetrating concentration on the present moment can lead to a realization that the dualistic reality of which we are aware is in a continual state of flux—our breath, individual atoms, our cells, our lives, everything changes from moment to moment, comes and goes; and how that realization can free us from attachment to anything outside of us and from even ourselves. And this punctuated jump in realization then allows us to have compassion for ourselves and for all who suffer from the fear of pain, aging, and death. And this can lead to another punctuated jump in our awareness, where we realize that we and all else share this reality together. And then in another punctuated jump we can realize that we are not different than all the rest that we generally identify as “not me” – that what we identify as “me” expands to include everything (unity consciousness it is called). What we identify as “me” is akin to, for example, the individual mushrooms that pop out from the underlying web of mycelium – the mushrooms and ourselves being but temporary beings that pop into and out of existence from a deep connective substratum of which we are rarely aware except in certain “altered” states of consciousness.
[ii] Subjects in some studies change several lifestyle behaviors simultaneous to the addition of daily meditation practice in their lives, such as increasing yoga, exercise, and relaxation and improving diet.