I saw a lecture given by a Westerner who had become a Tibetan Buddhist monk a few decades ago. I won't mention his name so as to protect the potentially guilty. During his talk he described how in the years since he's become a monk and engaged in formal meditation practice, he's become more calm and more able to deal with the ups and downs of life.

The audience reacted with a combination of optimism and envy. Optimism because they could see the possibility of a meditative life increasing one's happiness. Envy or, maybe, disappointment because they also knew they had no intention of giving away everything they owned and putting on monks robes and spending hours a day doing meditation practice.

But I saw something totally different.  I saw a man who aged almost 40 years since he began his formal practice. I have a sneaking suspicion that the number of people who have become more calm or more wise in their 60s than they were in their 20s is quite large especially if, like the monk, they don't have a family or a mortgage or a job on Wall Street.

Everything he described as the benefits of meditation could have just as equally been attributed to maturity.

As always, I'm not trying to discount the value of meditation. After all, if I thought it had no use or value I wouldn't teach the Instant Advanced Meditation Course.

But I'm also not interested in making assumptions about meditation, where critical thinking and analysis might be more valid and valuable.

For some reason it seems that when we are put face-to-face with someone who's made a life choice that we imagine we couldn't make  — for example, becoming a monk or priest or nun — and especially when the conversation is about a spiritual life, we have a tendency to defer to the "experts."  But perhaps at those moments it's the best time to put into practice the supposed last words of the Buddha, "Do  not believe anything simply because it's written in a sacred book or  taught by gurus and teachers."

Meditators these days are looking for science to support their theories in claims about the mind and the universe.  I'm all for it.  Let's simply demand that the meditation professionals be held to the same level of scrutiny and rigor as the scientists who are examining them.

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