Day 2:
I am somehow surviving. Waking up at 4 AM. No speaking, no eye contact, no journaling. I have never looked forward to meals so much—they’ve become one of the only remaining distractions in this new austerity. The food is all recognizable but Northern California hippie-ified: yogurt toppings include stewed prunes and toasted sesame seeds.
Aside from exciting new yogurt variations, the highlight of the day is the Dharma talks in the evening by the founder of the tradition. Hour-long lectures distilling Buddhist philosophy, anecdotes about students, and simple, yet hilarious, insights about human foibles. This is what brought me here. This is why I did this stupid thing—a hunger for wisdom, the hope that it would help me in some way, and maybe I could be more useful helping others.
Spiritual Tradition
The story about meditation presented to the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) world goes like this: Meditation has been around for a long, long time but has always been buried in pre-modern, religious “baggage.” Hippies brought it to America in the 60s, but also were wearing strange clothing, doing a bunch of acid, and were marginalized by the powers that be and their own silliness. Science began to take the practice seriously in the 80s. Since empiricism got its hands on it, we’ve been able to separate the superstitious from the scientific and distill the rational essence down for maximum benefit. This is the type of mindfulness meditation that got recognized by medical science, neuroscience, grindset biohackers, and corporate wellness programs. It was heralded as a mental technology and practical philosophy that could be seamlessly integrated into secular life and medicine.
It’s a good story, but I believe it’s incomplete. Meditation, as a whole, is much more complex and more vast than just mindfulness meditation and can have different aims than just awareness. Additionally, Mindfulness meditation “cleansed” of spirituality may have significant downsides that we’ll explore.
The story also neglects why meditation became popular in America and “The West.” It wasn’t just because practitioners were excited by the rational, scientific aspects of meditation. In fact, many, many people flocked to meditation because it fed a spiritual hunger gnawing at their hearts and was a practice that had space for the non-rational, the spiritual, and the transcendent and yet was free from the cultural baggage of Abrahamic religions. Meditation was somehow both new and ancient, sacred but non-dogmatic, idealistic but grounded.
Spiritual and Cultural Context of Buddhist Meditation
Meditation is most often linked to Buddhism and the teaching of Siddhartha Gautama, a purported pampered prince who was protected from all suffering until he left the castle one day and was exposed to poverty, illness, old age, and death. Obsessed with finding an escape from suffering, Gautama left the castle and became a monk, trying extreme practices of hedonism and asceticism until discovering the “middle path” of meditation.
This too is a myth and incomplete story. Stephen Batchelor’s Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist dispelled this and postulated that Gautama was probably a wealthy merchant who lived a complex human life. (Those interested in the historical foundations of Buddhism can’t go wrong reading Batchelor’s book).
Leaving aside the fact that meditation practices are as diverse, colorful, and wild as humanity itself, focusing only on mindfulness meditation and the practice of attention leaves out much of the surrounding context in which meditation was originally taught.
Traditionally called Samadhi (Sanskrit for “a putting together,” meaning here “intense concentation or absorbtion), mindfulness meditation was offered as one of three core tenets of a practice. The other two were śīla (ethics) and Sangha (community.) Living in Buddhist communities and engaging in retreat, these aspects were emphasized in equal measure with attention training as critical, integral parts of practice.
Śīla was emphasized because if you’re constantly running around causing harm to others, getting into fights, stealing things, causing and receiving conflict, your focus is going to be terrible. Furthermore, as your practice intensifies your sensitivity tends to increase. Things you used to be able to rationalize or ignore beg your attention, and your empathy often increases. As a result, ethical violations tend to increase in pain as people practice more often. Finally, some people who meditate begin to have unusual experiences. These can be transcendent and blissful, they can be deeply disturbing, or they can be downright bizarre. It’s possible in periods of very intense practice (or very quickly if you draw an unusual hand of consciousness and personality cards) that meditation can disorient people to what’s really real, and people can behave erratically during these periods without the strict guidelines of Śīla.
Mindfulness teaching in a therapeutic and medical context almost always completely ignores this aspect of practice. In fact, meditation is often touted as a way to pursue your goals, to maximize your productivity, or to live more authentically.
Though we can now learn meditation from an app, alone, with headphones on, meditation was always taught as part of a community, in a Sangha. Previously, this was at least partially a concession to practicality — without recording technology, the only way to learn was live lecture and it was too inefficient to teach people individually. But beyond that, sitting with a group and having a community of like minded people accelerates and deepens practice. Meditation is difficult. It’s boring. It’s easy to get distracted. When you meditate by yourself, five to ten minutes can feel like a herculean effort. However, if you put even one other person in the room, you’ll be able to sit for thirty minutes. Four or five others and an hour or two is possible. Once you’ve got a dozen, you can practice for weeks because everyone keeps each other on track.
Additionally, one of the founding teachers in the tradition in which I practiced the most (Zen Master Seung Sahn) would emphasize that other people help “shake off our karma, like potatoes in a sack bump into each other and shake dirt off each other.” Other people have their quirks. Those quirks stir us up, just like other people in the world. Someone moves too much in meditation and annoys you, another has an incense allergy so the group must forgo it causing a chain reaction amongst everyone, someone else sits like a statue and kinda inspires you, though really you mostly just feel envy and annoynace. All these things help your meditation practice, they make you more aware of yourself and give you fuel.
None of this touches the varied world of Buddhist sects, each with their own personality and aesthetic. From the exuberant, kaleidoscopic sumptuousness of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism to the austere, windswept, and nature sculpted minimalism of Japanese Soto Zen, the look and feel of meditation varies tremendously with its incubating culture. Vajrayana is the baby of Tibetan Shamanic practices and Indian Buddhism, just as Daoism blended with Indian Buddhism to form Chan Buddhism in China and Zen in Japan (with a sprinkle of Shintoism to differentiate it). And before that, Buddhism itself was incubated in the home of Hinduism, creating a legacy of confusion about Buddha’s original teachings. (e.g. it’s not clear if Buddha had any belief in past-lives, though collectively this idea is connected to Buddhism for most lay people because it was the belief of the dominant Hindu culture of Buddha’s contemporaries in India.) Each of these emphasizes different aspects of practice, each has their own style of instruction, each a product of the 2000+ year tradition it found its home.
This is not to say simply that connecting mindfulness meditation to its original context is necessarily better. Rather, it’s valuable to be aware of how these techniques were originally taught so that you can go deeper with them if you choose, or help fill in gaps if you feel something is missing. Though that may not be necessary either. I remember attending a conversation between monks, psychologists, and researchers and they agreed that the fusion of psychotherapy, neuroscience, and mindfulness may be evidence we are in the cradle of a new strand of meditation teaching just as the other variations developed in their own time and place.
Next week: How Meditation Met Medicine – From Monastery to Medical Center
References – Post 2
Note: This post primarily draws on traditional Buddhist teachings and cultural history. The Batchelor reference mentioned is:
Batchelor, S. (2010). Confessions of a Buddhist atheist. Spiegel & Grau.
