Meditation is for Everyone, like Breathing, Eating, and Sleeping
Meditation as a Catalyst for Change, Part I
If we are to move toward a truly sustainable and just future, we must begin by questioning not only our institutions but the paradigms that sustain them. We must acknowledge that our current reality is not inevitable, and that the frameworks within which we operate—economic, cultural, and political—can change.
This demands a deep reexamination of our values, a humble attitude, and a readiness to let go of long-held convictions. Only by expanding our sense of possibility can we begin to chart a course beyond the confines of our inherited worldviews.
But admitting that our beliefs and values — as well as those of our ideological tribe — might be wrong is remarkably difficult. It requires deep humility to remain open to the possibility that we may need to change our beliefs.
Among the most well-known catalysts for inner transformation are education, meditation, psychedelics, and art. I’ve explored the role of education in previous posts. This post, and the next two, will focus on meditation as a catalyst for change. Here, I’ll examine its practical value.
In a survey by the Pew Research Center, forty percent of Americans reported that they meditate at least once a week. Christians, Moslems, Hindus, and atheists, they all meditate. Unlike the beliefs and dogmas specific to any one group, meditation is a practice universally open to all people. It is not sectarian, belonging to any religion, cult, or denomination. It requires no belief. One simply follows a series of protocols, just as one might in doing a mathematical formula or an exercise regime. Then one observes the results. In the same way that anger, love and reason are universally human, so is meditation.
It has been practiced and refined through the mystical traditions of all the religions. Still, as a discipline, it was in the East where it was most widely practiced, where the greatest number of styles was innovated, and where its protocols were most perfected. Beginning with the Vedas written at least three thousand years ago, each of the many Hindu and Buddhist schools explored the inner world of meditation. Each had its own precise set of techniques, its unique phenomenological experience, and its own purposes.
What most of them have in common is a technique that involves the cessation of the uncontrolled flow of thoughts, or “stilling the fluctuations of the mind.”[i] Even when we are not focused on formulating a logical flow of purposeful thought, our thoughts flow all day long from one to the next, from the moment we wake to the moment we fall asleep, and then beyond. Any time our thoughts are not concentrated on a particular task, they flutter about like a butterfly in a flower garden. Thoughts flit endlessly back and forth from the past to the future and back again.
Relating a time-honored metaphor, the Vipassana teacher S.N. Goenka said, “The mind is so restless, agitated, wild, like a bull or elephant which creates havoc when it enters a human dwelling-place. If a wise person tames and trains the wild animal, then all its strength, which has been used for destructive purposes, now begins to serve society in constructive ways. Similarly the mind, which is far more powerful and dangerous than a wild elephant, must be tamed and trained; then its enormous strength will start to serve you.” The Theravada meditation teacher Ajahn Amaro said, “The capacity to focus in meditation has a lot to do with learning how to think when we choose to think, and learning how not to think when we choose not to.”
When we focus and corral thoughts into a linear flow, they have great power. We can create ideas, innovate new substances and technologies, construct anything from arrow heads to spaceships, strategize against our enemies on the battlefield and in the board room. Thought can be a wonderful ally. The West, with its refinement of science, technology, and capitalism, has clearly shown the world the power of rational thought.
However, the intentions behind these thoughts have greater power still. For love, good will, and compassion will direct our concentrated thoughts far differently than will anger, greed, and jealousy. The same science, technology, and financial know-how can be used to power homes with sunlight and to build and guide cruise missiles; to grow corn to feed people and to fuel shopping expeditions to the mall; to gain merit for one’s community and to benefit one’s own self-aggrandizement. In each case, the former will likely produce harmony within a person and within a society; the latter will not.
Kabat-Zinn noted that, “the words ‘meditation’ and ‘medicine’ come from the same Indo-European root, which means “to measure,” in the Platonic sense of everything having its own right inward measure. Medicine is the restoring of right inward measure or balance when it’s disrupted, and meditation is the direct perceiving of right, inward measure in all phenomena.”
So, meditation is not simply about concentrating the mind, although that is often the first big step. Once the mind is concentrated, a person can become aware of the deeper lying thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations that are “twisted, knotted, or held in darkness” in our mind and body. Through meditation these unconscious domains of the mind become conscious. We can see them in the light of day.
Goenka said, “To learn the art of living harmoniously first one must find the cause of disharmony. The cause always lies within, and for this reason you have to explore the reality of yourself.” Whatever arises in our minds we share with the world, often unconsciously. We do not keep it to ourselves. If it is love and compassion, then we share love and compassion with all with whom we come in contact. If it is anger, jealousy, or resentment, then it will be these miseries that we distribute.
Meditators come to realize, according to Joseph Goldstein, that “all our actions have consequences” and that we are both the creators and the “heirs of our own actions.” And, Jack Kornfield adds, “Through systematic meditation practice one brings the power of concentration and mindfulness to the knots and the deepest patterns of tension open up.”
To “purify” the mind of the “defilements” or “negativities” that cause suffering to us and to all those around us is the purpose of many of the meditation styles. According to the 8th century scholar Shantideva, “All the violence and suffering we cause to ourselves and to others comes from the mind. They arise due the fact that we put ourselves first.” And according to a group of 21st century scholars, sustained meditation leads to a weakening of “egocentric traits so that altruistic behaviors might arise more frequently and spontaneously.”
When Joseph Goldstein and his colleagues began teaching meditation in the United States in the 1970s, they quickly realized that “it is impossible to separate moral and ethical behavior from meditative realization. The entire spiritual journey rests on the morality of nonharming. This is the expression of the love and care we feel both for others and for ourselves.”
[i] To note just one difficulty in using precise language to discuss meditation, professor and teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn noted, meditation… “is not a technique at all, but a way of being and of seeing, resting on a foundation of deep inquiry into the nature of self, and offering the potential for liberation from the small-mindedness of self-preoccupation.” Ajahn Amaro added in the same conference, “…meditation would be defined as the refinement of innate abilities that we already possess…” “…from the classical Buddhist perspective, meditation isn’t an attempt to have any particularly special experience, or strange vision or acquire special abilities. It’s more like working with a couple of innate capacities that the mind possesses: the ability to focus the attention and the capacity to investigate, explore, and contemplate the nature of experience itself. These two capacities are natural to us, and meditation develops them, like cultivating a seed and giving it the conditions to grow and flourish. That is the purpose and the nature of meditation.” Quotes from Kabat-Zinn, J., and Davidson, R.J. (eds.) (2011) The Mind’s Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation. New Harbinger Publications, Inc., Oakland, CA.