Q. You have been pursuing meditation?
A. Yes. It is going well. Just an aside, though: I notice in reading here and there a growing corporate and institutional interest in meditation. How can they impart the values of meditation when coming from there?
Q. It’s been coming since the late seventies with the 1975 book Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson, a Harvard physician. You could call it a secularization, though its more than that. Benson’s schema was based on Transcendental Meditation, popularized by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Which was based on reciting a mantra. Benson was trying to address the excess epinephrine or cortisol in the body, which sets off an overreaction to stress, even when stress is not perceived. The issue is far more complex than was made out to be, and continues to be complex, even though drugs address excess epinephrine and high blood pressure. The issue is complex,too, because each individual has multiple points of stress, some more obvious, most unconscious or subconscious. Today most of the recommended regimes of meditation no longer even try to address the more deep-seated sources. The corporate and institutional programs simply try to get workers fortified enough to reenter the work world every Monday morning, to carry on in the midst of stresses, anxiety, worries, insecurities, just living in the world and being productive enough for somebody else.
A. Is it legitimate?
Q. I suppose the effort is trying to help modern people cope with modern society. Although society, the world, has always been this way, to some degree. That’s why practice of meditation arose in the first place, the condition of living. I am not sure how successful the effort is in imparting particular values. Only in terms of reconciling oneself to the world, life, and oneself. The danger of the corporate method is when it is used simply to inoculate employees to their work, highly stressed and perhaps inimical to their mental health, if not irrelevant, demeaning, or pointless.
A. That’s what I thought.
Q. How about your practice? You are following a traditional system of Zen?
A. Yes. It is going well. Plus I am reading reflectively, poets, philosophers, thinkers. I discovered and am following the advice, the mentality, if you will,of Shunryu Suzuki’s beginner’s mind, trying to maintain the simplicity and the renewed energy each time I sit.
Q. That’s very good. Attitude is important. How are the mechanics?
A. Well,for one thing, I am not distracted by images at all. (Laughs.) Perhaps, I thought, it’s because my eyesight is poor. Without glasses I don’t see much, so closing my eyes shuts out a lot of potential image-making.
Q. Like the old comic strip where the sleeper has a dream bubble over his head but the images in it are out of focus. He puts on his glasses (still asleep) and suddenly the images in the dreamer are clear.
A (Laughs.) They were Borges’s dreamtigers, reversed back to childhood. Where they are clear, but don’t mean much.
Q. What about thoughts?
A. Some people say one ought to observe the thought, note what it is, then ignore it, let it float away, like a cloud. Others say just ignore it. The latter, that’s what I do. If I look at it, so to speak, I give it life, give it credence. Better to let it float past, right? Except sometimes it floats away too slowly!
Q. Yes, best ignore it. What about sounds?
A. Ah, now that’s interesting. First off, I don’t like mantras. Why generate or contrive things? Isn’t breathing enough? At least it is normal, necessary, a reflection of a universal sign of being alive, of being itself. But sound, which is noise? Sometimes I repeat conversations, pieces of news reports or the like. I let them go as soon as I can. And music! Even if I recently listened to music, at the time of meditation I have the snippet of music stuck in my head!
Q. What Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, called “earworm” in his book Musicophilia.
A. Exactly. And very hard to get rid of. Didn’t he say that the only way to get rid of an earworm is to replace it with another earworm?
Q. Yes, unfortunately. Until they give out. Earworms are my trouble, too. You know, it just comes down to not listening to music, at least not too frequently or regularly. A regular music fast is good. Replace music with music that has no melody, no tune, and no rhythm. That would be ambient music, at least that genre that has no intentionality, that reflects a quietude the composer found in a particular state of mind. Another “cleansing” genre is the music, the sound, of the shakuhachi, the Japanese flute. Some traditional works are better than modern ones, though Stan Richardson is a top artist in this regard. Also, I am always searching for true minimalist music, though there are a lot of versions of that, not all reliable. But the search is interesting in itself
A. Yes, very good. I will pursue it.
Q. And for how long are you meditating?
A. Started with ten minutes, then fifteen. Much too short to accomplish much. It takes that long just to silence the earworm, you know, or to cast out that lingering thought-cloud. I am finding twenty minutes good for my present level.
Q.Good. If you can do thirty minutes, so much the better. Then forty minutes. And so forth. But you know yourself.
A. Meditating is almost like exercising that long, especially like stretching that long.
Q. Think of it more like going for a walk. A twenty minute walk is the same as forty minutes, just longer. But if you are focused the walk you will not notice the extra time. And walking you have to plan a route, even if doubling over the same terrain. Not so with meditation. You just launch out until the meditation timer calls you back.
A. True enough. The longer the session, the better the breathing, too.
Q. You will find that the first sign, the regularity, the depth, of breathing. After a while, you are not just observing the breathing, which you are supposed to be doing all along, you are actually falling away from any observation, any sort of spying or overseeing, of the breathing. You may find that you are watching your whole self, not merely the breathing. You may find yourself observing from a point beyond your self, indifferent to your self and that your body is being “breathed.” Sometimes observing the breath too literally can get mixed up with causation. The longer meditation period addresses that by detaching the observer even from the breath, and therefore the self from the self that is breathing or is being “breathed.”
A. That’s an interesting way to look at it. You mean you forget that you are there and sitting and breathing?
Q. Yes, in effect. Of course, you always know, but you are not giving primacy, it is falling away to the process. The mind’s emptiness allows this to happen. That is perhaps a goal of meditation, but we don’t want to talk about goals because we are not trying to accomplish or succeed at anything. We are just sitting and letting the universe express itself during the mind’s silence. Or, frankly, not express itself.
A. And from this silence come all the healthful benefits people want from meditation?
Q.That’s right: calmness, relaxation, lower blood pressure and the like. Lots of what I call “secular” programs aim at these results. They don’t see — or don’t care — what the deep resources that proffer these benefits are. They don’t want to promote a philosophy, after all, not a spirituality. But the resources are there, waiting for us, and only need encouragement, nurturing, watering, so to speak. If these deeper resources help, fine, they will say with a wink. But there is always the sad fact that people will not have the fullest sense of meditation and its potential if they don’t dig deeper into the historical origins and resources of meditation. Meditation isn’t just for coping.
