saturn return to sender

This past week, in response to Bad Astronomy Blog commentary on a news item about a transcendental meditation group in Iowa, I wrote the following, and then failed to post it as a comment, but eventually posted a shorter version. I am not an expert on the subject but make myself sound like one, and the comment was way too long, and jumping into internet conversations among strangers sometimes feels like jumping into a pool of angry fish with creepy translucent little teeth.

Um. Anyway. I spent so long writing it, and this blog has been so mundane lately, that I figured I’d post it here.

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Hi – Regular reader, first time poster. I really enjoy the blog. I hope this doesn’t come off as antagonistic, but I wanted to offer a different perspective on this. (1) these kooks are not representative of people who meditate in general, and (2) I think that meditation is not of the same sort of cloth as, for example, religious dogma. This is because it is (or can be, or should be, in my view) primarily a practice, and not a set of ideas. This means that it need not have any intellectual explanation whatsoever (religious or otherwise) in order to perform its function.

I am amused by, skeptical of, and annoyed by this group’s claims, but seriously: they are kooks before they are meditators. They just happened to have picked some kind of meditation as the vehicle of their kookery. Also, I’d argue that The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry linked to offers a rather impoverished perspective on meditation. (For example, that “TM” movement/cult may have started in 1956, but umm … the practice of meditation in general is slightly older than that.) I would recommend educating oneself beyond that viewpoint before passing judgement on the more general practice.

In point of fact, it can be argued that meditation is (or can be, or should be) a practice and not a set of ideas at all. This makes it a different animal than religious dogma, which says “you must believe this, just … well, because!” Those meditative practitioners I respect say “you should try doing this, and then the odds are good that you will experience this, and later you’re free to attach whatever intellectual model to that experience you want; it doesn’t really matter.”

In other words, the core of meditation is not so different from riding a bike. You might be an expert on human physiology and bicycle design, but still be unable to ride a bike. Put another way, you can have any intellectual model you want of how one rides a bike; wrong or right it really has no bearing on what it is you do when you ride a bike. Meditation is not (need not be) “sitting around, thinking about stuff.” You may think about riding a bike when you ride a bike, but that’s not what you do. You may think about things when you meditate, but that’s not what you do. In fact, in both cases, the less you live in your head, the more effective you’ll probably be. Meditation is (can be, should be) an action.

Meditation seen as practice is also NOT utterly different from science, in that there is a set of experiments you can perform and data you can collect. The interpretation of those data is up to you, though there are a few prevailing interpretations that have emerged over the millennia, and new interpretations sometimes emerge that may subsume previous interpretations. And just like science, your competence to evaluate any interpretation will be seriously hampered until you have performed the experiment and collected the data. NOT AT ALL like science, however, the interpretation of the data, the explanatory models, are (can be, should be) completely irrelevant. (Though some of them might be helpful tools, as well … )

Now, these analogies do fail because you can quantitatively measure a biker’s performance from the outside, and collect quantitative data about the world, but there appears to be no clear external metric on a meditator’s “performance.” Did she “dive deep into her own consciousness?” Who knows? It’s … uh, lets say doubtful that the people in the article actually accomplished the things they claim. (Though if they did, more power to them!) But I would argue that accomplishing things with external outcomes is not the point.

The point is that you can track your own internal experience and determine for yourself if it is something you value. Lots of people who have done the experiment come back saying that it’s valuable. They may explain their experience as identification with some unifying emptiness or as frolicking with domo-kuns in a meadow. It doesn’t matter.

But just as it takes years of dedication to “understand” a sport or martial art, it can take years of dedication to “understand” meditation, in the sense of an experiential, bodily understanding, not in the sense of possessing some intellectual model which you can develop in seconds by reading an article. I am arguing that the two are quite different.

So I won’t put forth any explanation of what it is or what it does. It probably doesn’t matter. I’ll just recommend (1) not conflating a practice with any particular ideas about it and (2) a fair inquiry into the practice as a practice before dismissing it on intellectual grounds.

(Oh, by the way, welcome to Boulder! )

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 10:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized, huh?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.