Why I meditate. Why I don't meditate.
These are some of the reasons why Wes Nisker meditates:
I meditate because life is too short, and sitting slows it down.I meditate because I've discovered that my mind is a great toy, and fun to play with.I meditate because I am growing old and want to become more comfortable with emptiness.I meditate because I want to discover the fifth Brahmavihara, the divine abode of awe, and then I’ll go down in history as a great spiritual adept.
As good as any other, I suppose. Meditation is a confusing subject indeed. The recommended techniques as well as the alleged aim of the practice vary enormously across schools. For instance, I've come across several forms of mindfulness of breathing (e.g. pay attention to your body as you breath, pay attention to your nostrils, count the number of breaths up to ten and start again, breath deeply and slowly with your belly, don't try to control your breathing at all, any combination of the above) or vipassana (pay attention to any bodily sensations that spontaneously arise, systematically scan your body in a particular order, acknowledge your thoughts as they crop up, pay attention to your feelings, pay attention to your breathing except when something crops up). There are many more variations of these techniques, as well as altogether different kinds of meditation like mettā bhāvanā (practice of loving kindness), recitation of mantras or walking meditation. When it comes to the aims of the practice the variability is considerable too: calming the mind, realising the true nature of reality (the one and only!), communion with God, transcending the phenomenal self, developing compassion, just sitting (yeah, right), etc.
Summarising, meditation is a technique where you sit in some position or other, lie down, walk, or even jump (try googling "Osho Dynamic Meditation"), pay attention to your breathing, your body, your feelings, your thoughts, God, or the candle in front of you, or recite a mantra, or visualise some object, or just sit, with the purpose of calming the mind, developing mindfulness, realising the absence of self, developing compassion, or "[awakening] the sky-like nature of mind, and [introducing] practitioners to that which they really are: unchanging pure awareness, which underlies the whole of life and death" (Wikipedia's entry on meditation). I mean, wow!
In the following lines I'll be referring mainly to vipassana meditation (the most important in Buddhist practice according to many) in any of its usual forms (as taught, for instance, by S.N. Goenka or Joseph Goldstein). Vipassana basically involves observing the mind and/or bodily sensations as a means of realising the three characteristics of reality: anicca (impermanence) (pronounced anitcha), dukkha (unsatisfactoriness) and anatta (lack of an inherent essence or self). The idea is that you sit on your cushion, spend an hour or so observing your mind (or some eleven hours a day if you are on a retreat), day in day out, and just by doing that you will realise that everything is impermanent and that you don't have a self, and that will liberate you from suffering. That's great, isn't it? I have some objections to raise, though.
Firstly, how many people have actually attained liberation through the realisation of anicca, dukkha and anatta? OK, it's a gradual process, but so gradual that it can take several lifetimes! Not very good value for money. Secondly, how many people have realised anicca, dukkha and anatta though meditation without having been told that that's what they had to realise? Spending as many hours a day as you can, for as many years as you can, sitting immobile on a cushion with your eyes closed, observing your mind, trying to resist the temptation to scratch your nose, fighting the natural tendency of your brain to think of something interesting, with the sole purpose of "realising" what someone else has told you are the great truths that lead to liberation sound worryingly like brainwashing. (Uproar! Outrage! Scorn!)
The problem is, you see, that if you had been told that what you are going to realise through the practice of observing your mind is the divine nature of the self, the immutability of the sacred ground of being (I just made that up), or anything else, that is most likely what you would realise (although it might take you several lifetimes of committed practice and study, of course).
It is true that meditation can have dramatic experiential effects, particularly in retreats of some length and intensity. But let's think of it critically: ten days of seclusion and silence, not being allowed to read, write, have eye contact, sleep an extra hour or skip a meditation session; spending some eleven hours a day sitting on a cushion (every joint in your body hurts), with your eyes closed, observing your mind, not even being allowed to consciously daydream (not that anyone would find out, of course). In such extreme circumstances of sensory, social and mental deprivation, regardless of whether you are doing vipassana or reciting Hail Marys, your mind is bound to explode, implode, turn inside out and upside down. Intense emotions will unexpectedly arise and overwhelm you, you'll become paranoid, fall in love with the guy meditating next to you, you'll experience unusual sensations while meditating (am I levitating?), you'll become hypersensitive to sensory stimuli, you will experience a great sense of achievement when you make it to the end of the ten days, and you will interpret all this chaos according to whatever preconceptions you have about what you're doing. You could believe that you're experiencing intimate communion with Jesus, or that you've had a breakthrough in your realisation of anatta, or that your chakras have opened and rebalanced. Meditation done in this fashion is the most anti-scientific method of enquiry you could think of.
That is why I don't meditate.
On the other hand, observing the mind is a fascinating thing to do, and meditation is a systematic way of doing it. I sit and meditate every now and then (with very occasional stretches of regular almost daily practice). Some years ago I tried vipassana, but I eventually got bored and my practice gradually turned into a more active exploration of mental activity. Instead of just watching phenomena come and go, I would try stuff, e.g. paying attention to my brain (crazy idea, I know, but I suggest you try it) or to the blackness inside, listening to the silence, feeling the space around my body, observing how I fall asleep, observing what it feels like to want to scratch an itch while repressing the urge to do it (it often makes me smile), observing what it feels like to observe. I'm not sure whether I have achieved any great insights through my idiosyncratic practice of meditation, but I'm definitely developing an ever more detailed knowledge of mental phenomena, which I consider very valuable in itself and provides me with material for my musings on the nature of consciousness and other geeky subjects. I'm also having fun as I go along. You couldn't ask for more.
You know what the downside is, though? That I am on my own. I can't belong to any group that practises a given kind of meditation and upholds a particular doctrine, because my curiosity and heterodoxy would be frowned upon, as it often has been in the past. I can't share my experiences with my dharma buddies. Mine is a solitary search, and that is something I resent. But perhaps one day ...
