I took my first meditation program in Boston in the early 1970s. Shortly after, I began to carefully introduce meditation to selected patients in my medical practice. Over the following years it became possible to teach it openly in a medical setting. Today, only a few decades later, this age-old practice has entered the mainstream of modern culture in the fields of education, medicine, scientific research, and psychology.
We are at a critical moment in the integration of meditation into modern culture. Not unlike the innate tendency of the human mind to filter, shape, and condition all incoming experiences according to pre-existing knowledge, the social mind does much the same. Meditation is received and shaped according to the perspectives, orienting values, and guiding beliefs of our culture. The perspectives, orienting values, and guiding beliefs of modern times are far different than the cultures that developed, refined, and practiced meditation as an integrated part of their personal and social life.
Let’s examine the role of meditation in its traditional setting. Meditation is a method for exploring and understanding the human mind, the self, and the ultimate nature of reality. It is an investigative methodology. Its aim is to understand and cut through the obscuring layers of ordinary mental life and mental activity and come in direct contact with the essential and true nature of our humanity. The guiding belief is that all humans have an essential core being of basic goodness, natural well-being, authentic happiness, a pervasive serenity, and an authentic and expansive compassion. To understand and overcome obscuring emotional afflictions and habitual and patterned reactivity allows us to live our full humanity.
There are many names for this universal awakened state of full humanity, a state of being beyond suffering and inner strife. It has been called Christ Nature, Buddha Nature, the Tao, Satchitananda, and in our own tradition Aristotle called it Eudaimonia – a word we translate as Human Flourishing. To arrive at and live the fullness of our possibilities has been the traditional goal of meditation and its associated understandings.
Traditional meditation practice begins with quieting the incessant mental activity of the overactive mind. This process alone can take a substantial period of time. With proper instruction, practice, discipline, and patience one develops a modestly stable state of inner stillness. The next phase of meditation unfolds in the still and clear mind. We seek to examine and understand the nature of afflictive thoughts, feelings and their sources in the self-cherishing and self-grasping ego that largely defines the ordinary human condition. This is not an easy exploration. We are directly challenging the tenacious veils that obscure the most precious gifts of a human life.
We go about this task with a variety of meditative practices whose aim is to undermine the self-betraying and self-sabotoging aspects of the ego, which continuously seeks to protect and defend itself against the perceived fear of groundlessness and impermanence that is life itself. Rather than seeking to understand the nature of self and life, the ego seeks to create a secure fortress of self, separating self from other and from our true essence that lies beneath. This exploration, catalyzed by meditative practice, is the major task of meditation. The result is a progressive freedom from the untamed mind, afflictive emotions, and false notions of self and reality. As the practitioner progressively accomplish this task he/she increasingly lives in accordance with life as it is, within our fundamental nature of basic goodness and natural well-being.
There is also one further stage of meditation, which can be attained through Ph.D. level work. This final achievement is a falling away of the dualistic experience – a simultaneous union of subject and object in a singular and unitary experience of self and reality. Such an accomplishment allows an individual to simultaneously live in the fundamental ground of being and function at a high level in day-to-day conventional reality. All is understood and the hallmark quality of such a life is compassion and service.
I have related this brief overview of the traditional approach and goal of meditation to contrast it with what we now call meditation in modern times. It is important to understand the distinctions because these distinctions result in significantly different outcomes. Mindfulness meditation is the most popular form of meditation in Western culture. It is a foundational meditation practice most emphasized in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism. Mindfulness meditation is an initial practice whose aims is to quiet the coarse chatter of the overactive mind, train the mind in attention, cultivating present moment awareness. Let me emphasize this is an essential foundational mediation practice. Without quieting the mind we cannot develop the mental clarity that allows us to see into the actual nature of mind, overcome afflictive emotions, and develop insight into the true nature of reality. We must tame the mind to have access to deeper levels of experience.
But if, when we experience the early taste of a still mind, we become absorbed in the pleasure of this temporary state and stop the progression of the meditative process our meditation practice will become a relaxation technique, rather than a methodology to fully awaken the human mind and spirit. It becomes another remedy for stress, anxiety, insomnia, unhappiness, loneliness, and so on. By focusing only on the first phase of meditation, we stop as soon as the mind quiets. Thirsty for an experience of inner peace, we are relieved for and grasp at a moment free of mental distress or suffering.
Enchanted and seduced by these moments of relaxation, we fail to further pursue the meditative process. As a result, we forego an understanding of the root causes of the unsettled mind, and understanding that awaits further inner development. Thus, the mind quickly returns to its usual activity, the afflictive emotions re-assert themselves, and it is time for another meditation/relaxation session. Do we get the point? Meditation has become one more temporary remedy for the afflictions of modern life, another remedy for the afflictions and stress of modern times. Unfortunately this is largely the fate of meditation in Western culture.
We have re-shaped this extraordinary investigative and enlightening process into another treatment, albeit a relatively healthy one with few side effects. In the process we forfeit the opportunity to gain a permanent end to mental distress, as well as the opportunity to access to the precious gifts of human life. We have taken an expansive method of awakening and turned it into a “useful tool” that allows us to function better within an unhealthy environment of body, mind, and spirit. Yes, there are changes and insights that do occur even when we stop at the most basic meditation/relaxation practices. But, they are a booby prize. We miss the real gold.
So let’s return to the title of this piece: Meditation: Blessing, Distraction, or Obstacle. Now, it may be easier to understand what I am getting to. If meditation is used as a relaxation technique it distracts us from further inner growth and development. We take a permanent detour from a life-enhancing possibility. Our chance at awakening to a larger life is hijacked by a popularized version of meditation that entirely misses the point. We live in the illusion that we are doing something good for ourselves, but we cannot see they we are actually repeating our cultural obsession with the quick temporary fix.
But there is more. Not only is meditation as it is now taught in the West a distraction from the real needs of our time – inner development – but it actually becomes an obstacle to inner development. Why, because we not only suffer from the illusion that we are going in the right direction, but we also believe that this illusion is true. That is a delusion on top of an illusion. This is an obstacle to achieving the very promise of meditation, the promise of a full understanding of mind, life, and reality and the related emergence of the qualities of human flourishing. If these possibilities are uniquely human, then they should be central to the meaning of what it means to be fully human.
The progressive attainment of our full humanity is the Blessing of meditation. That blessing can only be experienced if we take on the full meaning and progressive practices of meditation. Otherwise, there are no blessings, just temporary relaxation. However, if we establish the causes and conditions for the emergence of a precious human life the blessings will emerge by themselves – the blessing of a peace that surpasses understanding, a sustained inner happiness, a penetrating wisdom, authentic compassion, boundless freedom, and a fundamental and irrevocable well-being that is immune to all adversity.
In the end it is a choice we can each make. Do we wish to experience the distilled and diluted form of meditation that is now so popular in the West, or do we wish to mine the richness and promise of the great tradition of inner development, East and West? The choice is of great importance. It results in the difference between an ordinary life, health, and death, and a precious human life.
www.elliottdacher.org
Comments