MEDITATION
Why Meditate?
Meditation’s ultimate purpose: A sunset is not
Maybe you’ve been meditating for some time, or entertaining the thought.
But you wonder: what for? Is it true that you eventually get something really cool at the end of it? And how long does this usually take?
And most important of all: did I happen to meditate during that sunset yesterday?
I think you might have, yes! Like this statement, what follows is just my opinion on a rather loaded and deeply personal topic 😊
Meditation Purpose Candidate #1: Serenity and Emotional Control
The most popular secular goal of meditation: sit calm, and you will become calm.
Then you can achieve your goals unfazed by life’s ups and downs. You can be optimally productive, or ultimately cool, whatever suits you.
This is great. But I wonder: have you meditated and tried to become serene? What happened? In that stillness, did your mind acquiesce into a quiet lull, or did it protest, clawing with restlessness?
Is serenity a state to be pursued, or is it a latent quality waiting to be acknowledged after arising out of a myriad intractable unfoldings?
In the dance of meditation, who leads? Is it the act, guiding you towards serenity, or is it the end state, reflected back through a quiet mind?
Meditation Purpose Candidate #2: Enlightenment
The most popular spiritual goal of meditation: understand something deep about life.
Ideally something that will “set it straight”, make it at last resonate and satisfactorily resolve, like the final note in a symphony.
This is great. But I wonder: have you tried to meditate hoping for enlightenment? What happened? Have you experienced universal joy? A warmth that permeates everything? How long has this lasted?
Did it make your bills not arrive next month? Do you still need to go to your job to earn a living? Have stray dogs stopped barking at you because of your newfound Buddha-nature?
The desire to ‘fix’ life can hinder true enlightenment. It closes you up to what actually might be the case.
What if what is the case cannot be communicated and thus never has been? Imagine, all those books, for naught!
What if at the end enlightenment is deeply unsatisfactory for all practical purposes? What use is it then? Why spend years sitting in awkward positions to attain it?
A sunset is not
This is how I understand meditation: a sunset is not.
It is not the printed word or the sound, it is not a magnificent poem about it, or a painting, or a photo.
Try this next time you witness a sunset. Feel the air getting progressively cooler on your skin. Follow the feeling as it unfolds. A bird is flying overhead, lets out a faint call. Trace it, how its pitch and volume change continuously as it moves swiftly through the air. See how the colors change in warmth and hue, in an unbreakable continuum.
Write all that down. To minute detail. Do not miss anything. Give it to someone else. Have them read it. Have they experienced your sunset? Now you read it. Is this the sunset you experienced?
All this is a lot of noise and a lot of words. What I am really trying to say is this: Next time you witness a sunset, you are there. I cannot be there. Nobody else can be there. Only you can ever be there, and then you aren’t.
Meditation Purpose Candidate #3: None
Meditation. Look at it: meditation. Let’s try again, one symbol at a time:
m e d i t a t i o n
Look at it really closely, touch your nose on the screen. Now, say “meditation” out loud. What is this? Is this meditation? Or is it pixels on a screen, and noise in the air?
Like sunset, meditation is a word, a noise.
It gets its meaning by having experienced it. Then it can symbolize this experience for anyone else that had it. Of course, you, as the sayer, cannot ultimately dictate what it symbolizes, this will always reflect the experiences of the recipient.
For me, meditation is a noise that denotes that you would like to connect with a world beyond all symbols and noises, even great ones, like God, or enlightenment. Beyond even the most beautiful poems and koans and books on meditation. A world that fundamentally is, that is defined by being.
It is an extremely vibrant, ever changing, delightfully useless world. Over it our heads superimpose a delightfully dramatic, chopped up, highly utilitarian and ultimately necessary model.
We can never know this world in its entirety, but we can access it more directly if we do not reduce it to language and try to infer a purpose for it. Let’s call this approach “meditation”.
Imposing a purpose on this world just distorts it: it makes its infinite pliability conform to whatever shape you are looking for. It will always do this if you so desire it to.
Can you look without purpose? Then you will know more of this world.
Ok, meditation might not have a purpose, but does it make a difference?
No.
It is a pity that pop culture seems to imply otherwise, although often this is just a miscommunication due to a lack of shared experiences conveyed through familiar words.
For me, meditation is the ultimate exercise in futility. This is its greatness. You can gain nothing through it, and whatever you think you are gaining is only a reflection on a quiet mind of what you already have.
Thus, change happens not in meditation, but around it.
Meditation makes no difference to anything that can be desired or achieved. But it is a direct gateway to the world that exists. A fundamentally, delightfully useless world.
Make of this what you will. But please do not impose any specific desires on meditation, because then it is not.
Unless this is what you want to do, which is totally fine with me. We will just clash on our terminology. No big deal.
This is all great, but I still cannot meditate
That is ok. Do not worry, by not meditating you cannot possibly miss out on anything you desire not to miss out on. So it really is totally ok, whatever you do.
Of course, you can always meditate on your perceived inability to meditate.
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If you wish to meditate, you can. If you do not wish to meditate, you need not.
