I got several varied responses to my recent reflection-post Arguments against Meditation. I think some of the commentators got what I was trying to do with the post, where a couple of other may not have. Part of the reason is probably lack of clarity on my part. So here are some thoughts concerning meditation and the arguments against it…
First of all, I’m a big fan of meditation, and this post wasn’t aimed at people who don’t meditate or who are critics of meditation. It was aimed at myself, to try and challenge my hidden assumptions about meditation in a philosophical manner (as Duff rightly pointed out). If you took in some other way, and felt like you needed to defend “meditation” then you may have missed the point of the post.
But coming back to the arguments I made against meditation, I think all of them were completely valid and true. Meditation is not all good, and many people who have taken up the injunction of meditation have been harmed in the process. Not necessarily because of meditation, but because meditation is a tool like any other and can be used in harmful ways. And certain tools, whether or not you’ve used them, can lend themselves to certain accidents. With a hammer, one can build a beautiful house, and can also smash the hell out of their hand. So to with meditation one can use it to disengage with the world and escape pain rather then embrace it (in fact this tendency is common enough to have received the label “spiritual bypassing”).
So the distinction between the tool (or technique) and the tool-user is an important one. It doesn’t mean that they are completely divorced, because all tools can benefit and harm depending on their unique properties and potentials and also depending on how the tool-user makes use of them.
Another important distinction, which was brought up by a couple of the commentators of the last post, was that critics of meditation shouldn’t criticize it unless they have done it. Or to continue the tool analogy, until they have actually used the tool. The problem with this sentiment is that it fails to recognize our ability to make discriminations based on the evidence outside of us. Perhaps I’ve never meditated, but I know people who have, and several of them have begun acting quite strangely or perhaps have even had full psychotic breaks with reality (as happened to my wife’s aunt in India several years ago). Surely I could make a fairly accurate judgment (discrimination) that meditation was being used in a harmful way. That judgment may or may not be accurate, but it certainly needs to be taken into account when we consider the potential pros and cons of meditation.
To say that we can’t make discriminations if we haven’t done something is a bit remiss. How else would we ever decide to try something if we never decided that it was benefiting others? Which brings up the positive side of this judgment. If I have a friend who has become more at ease, peaceful, and flexible, and they attribute it to their meditation practice, I’ll probably be much more likely to be interested in meditation myself (assuming those are qualities I want to cultivate) or at the very least will hold the technique in some esteem. Making discernments—both positive and negative—about things that I haven’t yet tried can be quite helpful, and in fact is necessarily.
The other side of this argument, and where I agree with the comments from the last post, is that people often conflate the way the tool is being used with the tool itself. How many people have completely negative opinions of “guns” because of the way they are commonly used? Does that mean that they can’t be used in beneficial ways? The guns themselves are neutral; it’s we who animate them, and use them in ways that either benefit or harm. ((Although even the question of benefit and harm when looked at more closely becomes a much more multi-faceted and complex idea then I’m giving it credit here)) When people receive information, in this case about meditation, and then decide that the way the tool is being used is the same as the tool itself then they are completely missing the point.
And having not tried the tool out for themselves, they are in fact in a more compromised position to make that final judgment. And that’s where criticizing meditation, without having tried it out, or without having the proper information is basically pointless. And this does sometimes happen. I don’t see it often (probably cause I don’t engage with those people), and I don’t think it makes too much of a difference in any case. They’ve clearly made up their minds, and I have no interest in using my energy trying to change them. Although they are possibly feeding misinformation to those people who are gathering information.
My interest is in bringing a greater flexibility to my own awareness, and one of the tools I often use to do that is meditation. The other, in the case of this and the last post, is a kind of philosophical gymnastics, where I try to argue both sides in an attempt to clarify and help move along my own understanding. Both are tools, and I’m just trying to get better at wielding them.
