Why I Meditate
Meditation and Rilke’s Unsayable Spaces
Meditating 30 minutes a day, from age 21 until the American male average of 79 yields 10,585 hours, or 441 full days in meditation. Why spend 1.21 years sitting with eyes closed, legs crossed, doing nothing? What kind of anticlimactically meek response to philosophy’s old question — how to live — is plopping down on a cushion and breathing?
Just as Albert Camus asked what he called philosophy’s first question — why should I keep living? — we might ask, why keep sitting? In Why I Meditate, Allen Ginsberg sits for revolution:
“…I sit inside the shell of the old Me
I sit for world revolution.”
But what radical change is brought about through meditation, seated or otherwise? What revolution springs from the zafu cushion? I turn to Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who, in the sublime Letters to a Young Poet, writes:
“Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered…”
I sit to combat the amputation of my consciousness. I sit, quiet inside and out, to…
