On Meditation As A Western Practice
(x-posted to The Valve)
Dear readers,
Many of the people I know, myself included, have tried meditating at some point in their lives. I know some people who have gone to meditation retreats for days or weeks. I don’t currently meditate, but I have been considering starting up again. I’m finding it hard to begin again, though, because I fundamentally don’t know what meditating means.
Now, of course, it may not be necessary to know what meditating means. It is relaxing, it is supposed to clear the mind, and that is perhaps sufficient. Yet I am uneasy about the fact that Westerners who meditate do so in a widely divergent manner, and that there is no consensus on how one should meditate or about its nature as a discipline. Furthermore, meditating is almost universally considered a healthy practice, in the same way as “getting exercise.” If I told you that I sat in a warm bath for fifteen minutes a day, you might not have much reaction at all, or you might consider me a bit self-indulgent. However, if I announce that I meditate for fifteen minutes every day, most people will act as though I’ve admitted to great willpower and good sense.
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Meditation is valuable to us because of the way we moralize about thought. If I can hold one focus for fifteen minutes, I feel not only as though I’ve eliminated distracting thoughts — I feel as though I’ve achieved a victory over modern life, with its constant stream of things competing for my attention. To surrender to a flood of stimuli tends, upon reflection, to make us anxious, as though we are becoming less self-directed and more passive. We see ourselves as protagonists in a story in which we must overcome the Internet, cellphones, advertising, and the rest, in order to achieve prosperity and selfhood.
In reality, there are many situations in which we have to respond to a lot of simultaneous information, and where a “short attention span” is a necessity. A variety of professionals, including investors, sports players, press agents, and teachers, have to thrive amidst sensory overload. If “mindfulness” has any meaning for these vocations, it means adapting to the flow of information in order to act quickly and correctly. Still, this is quite different in practice from sitting down with a book, or carrying on a single conversation for hours.
We should be suspicious of a practice that has supposed benefits, but no possible downside. Even exercising, done incorrectly, can cause injury or exhaustion, a fact of which we are all aware. In truth, there are some studies of meditation that suggest it can be a negative experience for people repressing severe traumas (if they are not prepared to face repressed material), as well as for people with a weak sense of self. But these findings are rarely discussed, and they are probably just the tip of the iceberg. If meditation is really as important to our psychic lives as philosophy, shouldn’t we view it in an equally critical, questioning light? Great debates ought to arise between people who favor a mantra, and those for whom “focusing on your breathing” is the correct way to practice. The definition of mindfulness should be studied and debated. There should be substantive comparisons between Indian yoga, Transcendental Meditation, Zen meditation, and other Buddhist and non-Buddhist forms. All of us should wrestle with the relationship between meditation and everyday life. Does it reveal the emptiness of all material things, and the absurdity of attachment? Is it concentration or meta-cognition?
One can say, easily and with great shows of serenity, that it is all these things, or that it is ineffable. Neither is really an answer. For many secular people, and even for people with loose religious ties, meditation is really replacing prayer. The risk is that it becomes a stagnant practice, its victory over modern “noise” a surrender to forces driving us away from life. We ought to try to learn, from each other, where each of us goes when we enter into that stillness.
Our concept of ‘meditation’ might have more to do with secret feelings about wealth than it does with mindfulness.
‘Meditation’ is often shown as something that occurs in a really beautiful setting — outdoors, in a place where no one else is (expensive); indoors, in a beautiful modernist home with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over more private outdoor land; in a beautiful meditation studio, almost certainly in a well-off part of town.
‘Meditation’ might be a code word meaning ‘doing nothing’, which is something we don’t do enough of. We care about productivity without understanding how important downtime is. (“Downtime” — doesn’t it sound like a bad thing?)
‘Meditation’ is something people keep telling themselves they will get around to doing, once they get their lives in order, once they get the place cleaned up and looking more like a magazine photo. In reality, meditation would be a good thing to do *first* — it can break your habits and that can give you the mental room to get your life in order.
‘Meditation’ is the opposite of reactive living. Working for others is reactive; white collar work (meetings and schedules and phone calls and email) is reactive. We fantasize about being non-reactive. Laptop commercials often show people relaxing the back yard or a park with their laptop. These days, it seems commercials really like to show calm, non-reactive people amidst the chaos of life. ‘Meditation’ is the opposite of this, a fantasy of not having to work so hard. It is the meaning of being rich. ‘Meditation’ isn’t for monks here, because that means poverty. ‘Meditation’ is for when you’ve arrived. It’s a dabbling in another culture, which is sophisticated, which is therefore the province of those who have the time and energy to do something other than work and sleep.
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Such comparative research has been done. I no longer know where this example took place, so my report of it will have to be regarded as hearsay unless someone else can provide chapter and verse. But I once learned of a study that was done comparing (I think it was) Zazen and Transcendental Meditation. The study looked at the EEG readouts of the two groups. The meditator was exposed to a sudden loud audio stimulus, like the sound of a gun being fired; the noise was repeated at different intervals. There proved to be, in fact, a significant difference in the way the two kinds of meditation ‘coped’ with the noise.
The EEGs of the practitioners of T.M. showed a big spike right when the noise first happened; then the line gradually tapered back down to where it had been. At first, every time the noise was heard, the needle jumped; but gradually, as the meditator got used to the ‘intrusion,’ the spike got smaller and smaller, until it barely registered. Baseline was maintained; it was eventually as if the EEG could not hear the sound.
The EEGs of the Zen practitioners also showed a big spike the first time the noise went off. And they too took a while to slope back down to baseline. Each time the noise happened, the readjustment got a little bit quicker. But the difference was, that in Zen meditation, *every time* the noise went off, the EEG spiked *just as high*. The amount of time it took to regain baseline got quicker, but the stimulus was always registered, and registered just as much– never tuned out.
I am pretty sure other kinds of comparisons could be done. This sort of research is of course only one way of “comparing.” Another would be, as you suggest, oh, say, talking to each other. The traditions that commend meditation are not without such comparisons, and they are not always polite; the Buddha has some sharp words for the Hindu masters of his day, for instance, and vice-versa. (I prefer politeness when I can get it without sacrificing substance).
Any spiritual practice, uncritically adopted, risks courting shallowness at best and delusion at worst. Any spiritual tradition worth the name is rife with warnings about these dangers. But to avoid spiritual discipline out of fear of shallowness is, well… do I need to say it? it’s not as if we aren’t shallow anyway. The idea is that with practice, you get deeper–not cleverer, or smarter, but more able to avoid delusion, even more able to be appropriately critical.
This reminded me of you: http://www.neticons.net/prickles/
It’s possible to perform a variety of mental tricks which affect experience. For instance, one can watch Star Wars movies (or other genre productions) with a certain critical presupposition rather than another, thus making them more enjoyable (or less).
Do you think this has any relevance to “meditation”?
thelineicrossed, that was great. I do indeed think it’s time to bring some of these issues into the clearer focus to which Watt refers at the end.
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laufeysson, I think it will be hard for readers to understand the context of your question without first reading our exchange at the Valve x-post (so if you are lurking, visit there to see it).
Criticism should not be a process of deliberate, forced framing. If it takes that much effort to make a work of art enjoyable, then it’s simply not very good art — and given the deluge of excellent creative work available in every medium, there’s no reason to waste time on second-rate productions.
Two things, if I may. First, you’re avoiding my question. The fact that deliberate framing is possible and produces such definite effects would seem to have implications for meditation. Do you agree or not?
Second, you’re right that there are works of art which are only bearable as a result of some Borgesian readerly exercise. However, on the other hand, there is the interminable question of genre. There are academics all over the internet at this moment who grew up loving comic books, and with apparently complete unconsciousness hold comics and movies based on comic books to different standards than other works. More broadly speaking, there are many “guilty pleasures” which, if read with the same expectations that one has been taught to bring to Thomas Mann’s _Magic Mountain_, would seem atrocious.
But the first question is more important, I think.
I’m not sure; what are these implications?
Well, right. I agree about comic books, and I think it’s just awful how uncritically they’ve been embraced. If a work of art doesn’t live up to the standard of wonderful achievements like The Magic Mountain, then ultimately it is saddening and a disappointment. Genre exercises shouldn’t be held to a more relaxed standard than works that are difficult to classify, and “guilty pleasures” end up being traps.
What are these implications?
Meditation supposedly clears the mind. What is cleared away, and how the clearing works, are not well understood.
However, what if I proposed a series of exercises that demonstrated the extreme variability of ordinary perceptions? If nothing else, these exercises will shed some light upon that-on-which-meditation-operates. They might even turn out to fall under some definition of meditation itself.
On the other hand, your original post implicitly defines meditation in terms of the social space that it fills — we don’t know exactly what it *is* or what it *does* but it is regarded in a certain way and people who do it gain a certain status. Which means it is a social ritual that needs no further justification. But in that case I can’t understand your exhortation that all of us should take it quite seriously.
“… (either) live up to the _Magic Mountain_ … (or be) saddening …”
Your avowal of the cult of genius is surprising but not unwelcome! Still, you are sweeping something under the rug: the role of the preparatory stages of connoiseurship on the part of the audience. I think The Clash represent genius in their pure poetic ferocity of performance. Glenn Gould represents another kind of genius. But how did I learn to listen to each? When I was relatively young, each was presented to me as an exemplar of a certain style. That would be fine if genres and art forms never changed — I could stick with what I was first taught — but forms are continually changing. Surely to get the most out of the arts I should cultivate my independent capacities for evaluating the arts, in part by challenging my critical presuppositions?
Which again sounds suspiciously like what “meditation” is supposed to accomplish, in other aspects of life …
In the first case you’re talking about thought experiments; the kind you propose have a wonderful history, including (for example) Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. It makes sense to me to think of meditation as a thought experiment. What, then, kind of thought experiment is it, and what does it try to accomplish?
I apologize for leaving that as an open question; I don’t have the leisure right now — being, as I am, at work on Henry James for my dissertation — to thoroughly answer it. Certainly, it would take more than the space a comment box provides.
By no means, though, do I think activities that confer social status are inherently justified. They may be justified, or they may be problematic.
Fundamentally, I believe that works of art have to make intuitive sense to the audience. They have to be legitimate responses to certain lived realities. Of course some work is challenging, and criticism helps us see why those challenges are worthwhile, but The Clash also have to sound good to us. They are definitely ferocious, but they aren’t always so — they play reggae songs and recorded “Train In Vain.” I have also heard Nirvana accurately described as “ferocious,” but the experience of listening to them is quite different. New forms of criticism are the after-images of the original moment of contact between artist and audience, an experience for which we are never (and thank goodness) adequately prepared.
In the first case you’re talking about thought experiments; the kind you propose have a wonderful history, including (for example) Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Actually, I’m not. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which I choose as only perhaps the most well-known example, there are many directed meditations. One imagines oneself having been, in the total of all previous existences, the mother of all beings with whom is now acquainted. One imagines oneself having been their child. One imagines oneself experiencing death. And so on.
The arts began as magical practices. Though the content has surely changed, it is not clear that the cognitive mechanisms have done so. You and I and presumably anyone reading this have been very well educated in the arts; but perhaps less well educated in meditation which seems to be a bit of a mystery.
I put it to you that we can employ our knowledge of the arts to get a bit of an empirical grip on the possible mystery of meditation. Intentionally manipulating our experience of watching “The Phantom Menace” by deciding beforehand on different interpretations of Jar-Jar Binks, for example, may not be so far away — formally — from the Tibetan Buddhist practices as might at first seem to be the case, and will have the advantage that we are very much familiar with the experience of watching SF movies, while “meditation” is inherently subject to Orientalist expectations, projections and fantasies which may obscure understanding.
If you will simply acknowledge that this is a logically consistent and legitimate possible approach I will be satisfied. :-)
I’m sure that’s quite right; I was describing a felicitous continuity between East and West by invoking Wittgenstein.
I see the connection to meditation, in that meditation is supposed to help — and, in my experience, does help — us discover new ways of looking at the world. It opens the door to “13 Ways of Looking At A Blackbird,” if you will.
However, I think there is a difference between new ways of seeing and intentional manipulations of experience. If I see something in a new way, I am still responding to the truth of the object. If I simply “decide” that I am going to see Jar-Jar Binks differently, I am turning my back on the truth of that artwork.
You seem to be edging toward the thesis that the only difference between The Phantom Menace and the Clash is that we don’t sufficiently appreciate The Phantom Menace because we haven’t found the right pair of goggles. I would respond that those goggles don’t exist, and we certainly shouldn’t bother using meditation to cultivate a stoner-like complacence about matters of taste. I can pretend, for instance, that The Matrix Revolutions is a deliberate satire on bad movies, but even if that makes me enjoy the film more, I’m wrong. Nor do I have any obligation, to myself or to the society, to like bad art.
laufeysson wrote:
I put it to you that we can employ our knowledge of the arts to get a bit of an empirical grip on the possible mystery of meditation….If you will simply acknowledge that this is a logically consistent and legitimate possible approach I will be satisfied.
Well, it’s not my conversation, but I’ll acknowledge it. I think the experience of aesthetic “reception” is different from that of spiritual discipline, but close enough to furnish valuable analogy. Kierkegaard suggests that the step into the Religious “stage” can easily look like a backsliding into the Aesthetic.
In any case, the family resemblance between prayer and poetry is often noted in the history of the West; the affinity between meditation and poetry has been increasingly noted as well.
Learning to meditate can certainly play a kind of role in some private or social narrative I tell myself (“how spiritual I’m becoming!” or some such)–and in this, among other things, it is not so different from prayer. But at bottom, while it bears comparison with the “mental tricks” one can use to shift one’s experience of art (or of life, for that matter), I think meditation is different from any sort of critical judgment. It’s a training in equanimity. This doesn’t make it incompatible with a critical disposition– it just helps one see more clearly what one is critiquing. And– this may be somewhat what laufeysson is saying– it cultivates, perhaps, a kind of flexibility in ones critical reception.
(Some good thoughts on the intersection, or not, between such equanimity and artistic excellence in Salinger’s Seymour: an Introduction).