December 8, 2008
What is meditation?
What is meditation?
For some meditation means sitting on the top of a mountain in a quiet cave eating nothing but tree bark, wearing a loin cloth and reeking of incense while you chant some Sanskrit word over and over and over.
For others, meditation is a state that they find themselves in when they are fully engaged in some activity that they enjoy, like painting, or sports, or even making love.
For some, the techniques of meditation are not as important as the benefits they get. For others, meditation is indistinguishable from the meditation technique itself.
At the same time, there are various states of awareness that everyone might agree are meditative states. And yet they're very different states…
For example, concentration versus awareness.
Concentration can be defined as the ability to keep your focus on a single object for an extended period of time. Awareness can be defined as the ability to let your attention move from object to object without getting seemingly stuck on any specific object of attention.
As you can see, these seem like completely different skills, or completely different states of being. And yet when you read the literature about meditation, each of these is sometimes held out as a goal.
In fact, here's an interesting story to distinguish between the two. I was given a copy of some letters that were written between a Burmese meditation teacher named U Ba Khin and one of his Western students, the wife of a diplomat, named Mrs. King. Ba Khin had written the letters to Mrs. Kane to help her with her practice when she returned to America after having meditated with him in Burma. And in the letters, he gave her very explicit instructions about how to develop concentration so that they would be able to communicate telepathically so that he could continue to help her advance in her meditation practice. Now, I'm not going to argue about whether or not telepathy is possible or just magical thinking; the important part of the story is the next part.
I showed these letters to a friend of mine named Robert Hover. Robert was one of the first Western meditation teachers. In fact he was one of the people, who was asked by U Ba Khin to take over his particular Buddhist meditation lineage — an amazing request considering that Robert was not Asian, nor was he raised Buddhist.
When Robert read these letters, he called me and expressed his amazement, saying that he didn't even know that Ba Khin knew about these particular concentration meditation techniques.
I was somewhat stunned to hear him say that. I asked him, "You were supposed to take over the lineage for this teacher. How could you not know this?" He answered, "I don't have the skills of concentration that Mrs. King had and what's amazing is that, because I don't have those concentration skills, these issues and teachings never came up in my conversations with my teacher."
Obviously, this speaks quite highly of Robert's teacher, someone whose understanding of meditation was skillful enough that he could tailor his meditation teachings to each individual student. And as I've gotten to know many of his other students, I have similarly found that each one of them learned something slightly different from the other.
One of the great advantages that we have at this time is the amount of communication between teachers and students and scientists and psychologists and other researchers. We can start investigating what it means to say "meditate" or "meditation" or "concentration" or "awareness." I can only hope that these kinds of conversations about meditation techniques and meditation instruction will advance our understanding of the essentials of meditation practice, that it will become more understandable more accessible. That we'll separate out the cultural components from the truly effective components.
I trust that as we have better answers to the question, "what is meditation?" we'll also discover better methods (or improvements in methods), or discover the most effective ways that people can enjoy the benefits of meditation.
Comments on What is meditation? »
please read the book the science of meditation by torkom saraydarian.
A book that, among other things, demonstrates that just because you use the word "science" in the title doesn't mean the book has anything to do with science