Morning Sun by Edward Hopper
One the most ironic reasons that many Westerners are attracted to Buddhism is that it is explicitly an non-Evangelical religion. That is, Buddhists deliberately refrain from proselytizing. As one ancient Buddhist text implores that a Buddhist should never talk about his religion unless a seeker asks him three times.
So it’s only right, I guess, that I am reluctant to talk about Buddhism, even though I have been a student of Buddhism for several years. But then again, when I see something written about Buddhism, either as a philosophy or as a religion, that is just patently wrong, I feel the need speak up.
Such was my consternation when I saw this article on one of my favorite websites, LifeHacker.
LifeHacker is a really cool site. It has lots of Do-It-Yourself advice about everything from computers to time-management to cooking. But this little article really threw me.
To be clear, the question “Is Meditation Really Beneficial, Or Is It Just Ridiculous” was not posed by the blog itself, but rather by a reader. One of the site’s writers, Thorin Klosowski, gives a very succinct, intelligent response defending meditation.
If you see the word meditation and immediately conjure up religious images or deadbeats wasting time at work, you’re not alone—but that’s not exactly what we’re talking about here. Mindful meditation, despite it’s awkward name, is really just about training your brain to concentrate and focus better. As professor David Levy describes it to USA Today, meditation is just another exercise…
The fact that LifeHacker is openly espousing the benefits of meditation did not surprise me. Western doctors, psychologists, and counselors have long been aware of the healthful effects of regular meditation, including lowered blood pressure and increased neuroplasticity in the brain. The really startling news about these health benefits is that they seem to occur regardless of what kind of meditation the subject practices—either religious or secular.
Clearly, LifeHacker is in the “secular” camp. Most Westerners are, for obvious reasons. We are a post-Enlightenment civilization, and Secular Humanism, as any Tea Party politician will tell you, is the accepted philosophy of the intellectual elite.
I agree with this stance, in part. I think everybody could gain from a few minutes of daily meditation, even secular meditation. There are several good books on the subject, including The Eight Minute Meditation.
There is nothing wrong with using meditation as relaxation technique. In fact, we are a people desperately in need of relaxation. Most of us are stressed-out, overworked, and anxious. Meditation, even in its simplest form, can help with all of these problems. After all, the first step that Zen Masters teach is how a person can quiet an over-active mind (what Buddhists call “monkey mind”). One way to do this is to sit and breathe, to concentrate on the simple, basic act of breathing. Usually, this is done sitting on the floor with a straight back. Practitioners of Zen Buddhism call this zazen (literally, “sitting meditation.”)
There are other ways to meditate, however. Another common practice in the Far East is “walking meditation,” in which people walk and breathe in a formalized way, again allowing them to avoid intrusive thoughts by concentration on breath.
Some Buddhists are even less strict. The great Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, states that you can even meditate while jogging, or sitting in your car at the red light. Basically, you can meditate anywhere, so long as you are able to quiet the mind and be aware of the present moment.
Buddhists call this awareness Mindfulness. That’s the whole point of meditation, as practiced in the East. The idea is that the endless, spiraling thought-processes of our conscious minds actually prevents us from experiencing the radiance of existence. Far beyond being “just another exercise,” as Mr. Klosowski asserts, meditation is the best way of learn how to truly live. 
But how can you be Mindful of something without thinking about it? To our Western, rationalist minds, the concept of Awareness Without Thought seems like an oxymoron. But this is, in fact, the ultimate point of Buddhist meditation, if not the core of Buddhist spirituality. You Are Not Your Body. You are not your Thoughts. Your are not anything, in fact, that can be captured in a single word or concept.
As Eckhart Tolle writes so eloquently, “The Brain did not create consciousness; consciousness created the brain.”
It’s no accident that so many Western Buddhists are lapsed Catholics and Jews. The Judeo-Christian understanding of human consciousness is very closely related to that of Buddhism (so closely related, in fact, that some scholars have suggested that Christ might have been exposed to Buddhist teachings from Indian monks who lived in Jerusalem in the first century). Nhat Hahn has written a fine book on the subject, called Living Buddha, Living Christ in which he beautifully describes the parallels between the two great religions:
In the Psalms, it says “Be still and know that I am God.” “Be still” means to become peaceful and concentrated. The Buddhist term is samatha (stopping, calming, concentrating). “Know” means to acquire wisdom, insight, or understanding. The Buddhist term is vipasana (insight, or looking deeply). “Looking deeply” means observing something or someone with so much concentration that the distinction between observer and observed disappears. The result is insight into the true nature of the object. When we look into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the earth, and everything in the else in the cosmos in it.
I was raised Catholic, and I also see a deep connection between the kind of prayer my grandmother used to tick through on her rosary and Buddhist meditation. (Yes, I am aware that Catholic rosary beads originated in the Buddhist monasteries of India.)
Traditional Judeo-Christian prayer reveals divinity in the present moment. Buddhist meditation does the same thing. The only real difference is that, in Buddhism, the focus is not on an external unchanging God, but on the sublime reality of eternity itself, of which you and I are merely an aspect. So are your house, your computer, and the desk you work at all day. As Nhat Hahn writes:
When the Buddha was asked, “Sir, what do you and your monks practice?” he replied, “We sit, we walk, and we eat.” The questioner continued, “But sir, everyone sits, walks, and eats,” and the Buddha told him, “We we sit, we know we are sitting. When we walk, we know we are walking. When we eat, we know we are eating.”
Obviously, the guy who wrote to LifeHacker with the original question was laboring under a common misconception—namely, that meditation is just a New Age fad. The picture that LifeHacker chose to run along top of Klosowski’s reply is an echo of this sentiment: a very yuppie-looking guy trying to escape the reality of corporate existence by “blissing out”. The guy is even sitting in the classic Lotus position (which, as everyone knows, is what a person is supposed to do when they meditate, right?).
But Mr. Klosowski is himself laboring under a separate misconception. Namely, that meditation, as practiced by millions of Buddhists over thousands years, is “just another exercise.”
What most Western advocates of meditation don’t realize—or refuse to realize—is that zazen is only the first step. Without a spiritual component, meditation is just another band-aid on the psychic wound of our daily, post-Industrial, cybernetic existence. In her book Nothing Special, the late, great Charlotte Joko Beck wrote:
The actual practice of sitting [meditation] is always somewhat murky. If we keep sitting long enough, however, slowly over time things get clearer. There’s a continuum, and to sit is to move along that continuum. It’s not that we get somewhere; more and more we just get ourselves. I don’t mean only sitting on a cushion. If we’re practicing well, we’re doing zazen all the time.
It’s interesting that what Western doctors and psychologists call “meditation” was first popularized in the America during the late 1960s, when it was still called “transcendental meditation.” Somewhere along the line, we lost the “transcendental” part of the equation, and I think that’s a mistake. In our slavish devotion to what the Buddhist teacher Robert Thurman calls “Nihilistic Materialism,” we have lost any tolerance for even the possibility of a spiritual component to anything, even consciousness itself. 
What I would ask Mr. Klosowski is this: When you sit and simply “be” for that blessed hour a day, what is that is doing the “being?” Is meditation really just another exercise…?
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