Guided Meditation

Dan Clurman interviewed Eckhart Tolle for the article “Stillness and Presence” from the Fall 2001 issue of Inquiring Mind.

Eckhart Tolle: You don’t have prepared questions. That’s very good. [Laughter]

Dan Clurman: Being aware that silence says it all, to begin speaking does feel somewhat silly. On the other hand, sometimes words carry the perfume of the silence, or point back to the silence. In reading your book and listening to you speak, it seems that what you are saying points back to stillness—and that is how you live your life.

ET: Yes. I’m aware that a sense of stillness comes through in the book. Somehow, there’s a certain power that goes beyond the words, and that’s the place where art originates. A work of art comes out of a state of deep stillness. Somehow, and nobody knows how, the essence of the unmanifested, of the stillness, flows into the work.

DC: The work becomes a carrier of the stillness. A person can also become a work of art, in that sense.

ET: When someone becomes transparent, then something shines through that person that has nothing to do with the person or any of his or her personal history. What is required is becoming so transparent that the self or ego dissolves.

Paper Frog links to a Slate.com video interview with Joseph Goldstein, who has been teaching at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts for many years. Robert Wright, the interviewer, who obviously has an interest in meditation, isn’t afraid to ask the probing, naive, or self-interested questions. It’s a good watch, particularly if you’re new to meditation, or have questions and concerns about it. While Goldstein’s approach has a Buddhist flavor to it, the interview contains a lot of insights.

Here’s one exchange I like, as taken from a transcript of the interview, in which Goldstein elaborates on the difference between detachment and non-attachment:

Joseph Goldstein: …This could be clarified by the distinction of two words which often get confused. You know often people understand in Buddhism that there’s a great value on detachment and that sounds a little grey. You know just to be detached from everything.

Robert Wright: Right.

JG: That’s not what the teaching is about. The teaching is about non-attachment. Detachment implies a sense of withdrawal.

RW: Withdrawal from?

JG: From whatever.

RW: Including joy, including…

JG: Anything!

RW: Right.

JG: It’s like a pulling away from. Non-attachment doesn’t imply withdrawal it simply implies not holding on. So that’s a very different experience, it’s a very different mind-set. That’s really what we’re practicing.

Technical note, watching the interview on a Mac, I was only successful using the Real Player option.

“Can anybody meditate?” is the title of a chapter from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s deservedly bestselling book “Wherever You, There You Are.” It’s a good question to ask, as many people think they don’t have the temperament for meditation, have tried it briefly only to give up, or simply see it as an esoteric discipline without application to their lives. It’s unfortunate, because meditation is a simple way for everyone to access life fully and deeply. Here’s the rest of Kabat-Zinn’s chapter:

I get asked this question a lot. I suspect people ask because they think that probably everybody else can meditate but they can’t. They want to be reassured that they are not alone, that there are at least some other people they can identify with, those hapless souls who were born incapable of meditating. But it isn’t so simple.

Thinking you are unable to meditate is a little like thinking you are unable to breathe, or to concentrate or relax. Pretty much everybody can breathe easily. And under the right circumstances, pretty much anybody can concentrate, anybody can relax.

People often confuse meditation with relaxation or some other special state that you have to get to or feel. When once or twice you try and you don’t get anywhere or you didn’t feel anything special, then you think you are one of those people who can’t do it.

But, meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel. It’s not about making the mind empty or still, although stillness does deepen in meditation and can be cultivated systematically. Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It’s not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are. If you don’t understand this, you will think you are constitutionally unable to meditate. But that’s just more thinking, and in this case, incorrect thinking at that.

True, meditation does require energy and a commitment to stick with it. But then, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, “I wont stick with it,” rather than, “I can’t do it?” Anybody can sit down and watch their breath or watch their mind. And you don’t have to be sitting. You could do it walking, standing, lying down, standing on one leg, running, or taking a bath. But to stay at it for even five minutes requires intentionality. To make it part of your life requires some discipline. So when people say they can’t meditate, what they really mean is they won’t make time for it, or that when they try, they don’t like what happens. It isn’t what they are looking for or hoping for. It doesn’t fulfill their expectations. So maybe they should try again, this time letting go of their expectations and just watching.

Wired reports on the Dalai Lama’s meeting with scientists at the Mind and Life Institute conference in Washington D.C. in November. This part caught my attention:

While Western researchers are exploring the effects of meditation on physical health, Alan Wallace, a leading Tibetan scholar and one of the Dalai Lama’s translators, pointed out that when faced with physical ailments, Tibetans traditionally turned to doctors or healers, not to meditation. The purpose of meditation, added the Dalai Lama, is not to cure physical ailments, but to free people from emotional suffering.

While meditation has recently been gaining attention in the media as a result of medical research proclaiming its health benefits, it’s good to have a reminder that meditation goes beyond stress relief. In the act of being aware, deeper forces are at work. Awareness grounds us in what we can call reality, life here and now, rather than in mental abstraction.

A Voice of America article on the Dalai Lama’s visit to D.C. includes this excerpt:

Mind and Life Institute chairman Adam Engle compared meditation to exercise, saying a healthy mind is as important as a healthy body. “So, in the same way that you’ve got a myriad of physical exercises to help your body, there are a myriad of mental trainings. And this is not well known. Most people, when they think about meditation, they think about turning your body into a pretzel and zoning out somewhere,” he said. “But it is really just a word for mental training.”

Meditation is often presented as a form of mental training in which the mind applies its focus on an object (the breath, a sound, a mantra, a visualized image). On this site we would like to offer an alternate view of meditation as a kind of mental un-training. Instead of focusing the mind on an object, the mind can be left to rest as it is. Paltrul Rinpoche (1808-1887), a Tibetan meditation teacher, describes this poetically:

All you practitioners, male and female, who wish to realize the faultless and correct point of view, should let your mind rest fully awake in a state of unfabricated emptiness. When your mind is quiet, then rest in that quietness without trying to fabricate anything. When it doesn’t think, then rest in that non-thinking. In short, no matter what takes place, let your mind rest without fabricating anything.

Don’t try to correct, suppress or cultivate anything.

Don’t try to place your mind inwardly. Don’t search for an object to meditate upon outwardly. Rest in the meditator, mind itself, without fabricating anything.

One doesn’t find one’s mind by searching for it. The mind itself is empty from the beginning. You don’t need to search for it. It is the searcher himself. Rest undistractedly in the
searcher himself.

“Have I now grasped that which should be observed?” “Is this the right way or not?” “Is this it or not?” No matter what takes place rest in the thinker himself without fabricating anything.

No matter what kind of thoughts occur, excellent or terrible, good or bad, joyful or sorrowful, don’t accept or reject, but rest in the thinker himself without fabricating anything.

I recently watched the documentary “Wheel of Time” by the indefatigable German director Werner Herzog. The film depicts the pilgrimage of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan Buddhists to the spot in Bodhgaya, India, where Siddhartha Gotama, more commonly known as the Buddha, was said to be enlightened. A side trip in the film covers the occasionally perilous journey of thousands of Tibetans to circumnambulate Mount Kailash, which is regarded as holy. In Bodhgaya the Dalai Lama leads the assembled monks and laity for several days in a ceremony called the Kalachakra initiation. The Dalai Lama is interviewed briefly for the film, and is his usual genial, insightful self. However, the Bodhgaya gathering itself appeared to be steeped in the rituals, tradition, and hierarchy of religion. The display evoked a spiritual striving that seemed at odds with Paltrul Rinpoche’s words that, “One doesn’t find one’s mind by searching for it.”

A comprehensive study summarizing the scientific research on meditation is available free online from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. The publication (also for sale in book format) is titled “The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation” (1996) by Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan. In the helpful introduction Eugene Taylor discusses the historical roots of meditation, outlines meditation’s introduction to the modern West, and provides an overview of meditation as a subject of scientific study in the West, India, and China.

When it comes to defining meditation, Taylor writes:

As for modern developments, in trying to formulate a definition of meditation, a useful rule of thumb is to consider all meditative techniques to be culturally embedded. This means that any specific technique cannot be understood unless it is considered in the context of some particular spiritual tradition, situated in a specific historical time period, or codified in a specific text according to the philosophy of some particular individual.

Taylor is indicating that meditation doesn’t exist as we popularly conceive it — in an abstract or general form — only as distinct techniques which have emerged from specific philosophical and religious backgrounds. As an example, Taylor points out that the widespread and well-regarded Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, “combines elements of Vipassana, a Theravada form of Buddhist meditation from Burma, and Zen practices from Japanese Buddhism with Hatha yoga, a tradition from the Indian subcontinent.” (An entry at TricycleBlog, the weblog of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, offers some thoughts about the MBSR program’s secular presentation of Buddhist meditation.)

When meditation is put under the scientific microscope, Taylor refers to two points of confrontation. The first is whether a rationally-based scientific method can adequately evaluate the realm of “intuition and insight”:

Science, the product of Aristotelian thinking and the European rationalist enlightenment, now turns its attention to the intuitive transformation of personality through awakened consciousness (and other such Asian meanings of the term enlightenment). This means that the faculties of logic and sense perception, hallmarks of the scientific method, are now being trained on the personality correlates of intuition and insight, hallmarks of the traditional inward sciences of the East.

To grasp what meditation is has proven to be no easy task. The underlying and usually hidden philosophical assumptions of traditional, rationalist science do not value the intuitive. They do not acknowledge the reality of the transcendent or subscribe to the concept of higher states of consciousness, let alone, in the strictest sense, even admit to the possible existence of unconscious forces active in cognitive acts of perception.

Secondly, Taylor asks whether science itself will be transformed by the encounter:

The essential difficulty here is not just the reformulation of meditation techniques to fit the dictates of the scientific method, but rather what might be called a deeper, more subtle, and potentially more transformative clash of world epistemologies. It is not simply that meditation techniques have been difficult to measure but rather that, in the past, meditation has largely been an implicitly forbidden subject of scientific research. Now, however, major changes are currently underway within basic science that presage not only further evolution of the scientific method but also changes in the way science is viewed in modern culture. An unprecedented new era of interdisciplinary communication within the subfields of the natural sciences, a fundamental shift from physics to biology, and the cognitive neuroscience revolution have liberalized attitudes toward the study of meditation and related subjects. Meanwhile, the popular revolution in modern culture grounded in spirituality and consciousness is having a growing impact on traditional institutions such as medicine, religion, mental health, corporate management strategies, concepts of marriage, child rearing, and the family, and more. Increasingly, educated people want to know much more about meditation, while our traditional institutions of high culture remain unprepared as adequate interpreters.

The body of “The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation” is authored by Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan. Following their own overview of the scientific studies on meditation, they provide a detailed summation of the scientific research by organizing it into three categories: physiological effects, behavioral effects, and subjective reports. The research is then broken down by category as follows:

Physiological Effects

The Cardiovascular System
— Heart Rate
— Redistribution of Blood Flow
— Blood Pressure and Hypertension
— Other Cardiovascular Changes

The Cortical System
— EEG: Alpha Activity
— EEG: Theta Activity
— EEG: Beta Activity
— EEG: Hemispheric Synchronization
— EEG: Dehabituation
— Specific Cortical Control
— Other Cortical Changes

Blood Chemistry
— Adrenal Hormones
— Thyroid Hormones
— Total Protein
— Amino Acids and Phenylalanine
— Plasma Prolactin and Growth Hormone
— Lactate
— White Blood Cells
— Red Blood Cell Metabolism
— Cholesterol

The Metabolic and Respiratory Systems
Muscle Tension
Skin Resistance and Spontaneous GSR
Other Physiological Effects
— Brain Metabolism
— Salivary Changes
— Effectiveness in the Treatment of Disease
— Treatment of Cancer
— Changes in Body Temperature
— Alleviation of Pain
— Exceptional Body Control

Behavioral Effects

Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities

Perceptual Ability
— Reaction Time and Perceptual Motor Skill
— Deautomatization
— Field Independence
— Concentration and Attention
— Memory and Intelligence

Rorschach Shifts
Empathy
Regression in the Service of the Ego
Creativity and Self-Actualization
— Creativity
— Self-Actualization
Hypnotic Suggestibility
Anxiety

Psychotherapy and Addiction
— Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
— Addiction and Chemical Dependency
Sleep
Sex Role Identification

Subjective Reports

Equanimity

Detachment
Ineffability
Bliss
Energy and Excitement
Altered Body Image and Ego Boundaries
Hallucinations and Illusions
Dreams
Synesthesia
Extrasensory Experiences

Clearer Perception
Negative Experiences

Searchable Bibiliography

Related

The Mind and Life Institute is a “working collaboration and research partnership between modern science and Buddhism.”

Reader Mikko Ahonen emailed from Finland in response to the recent entry on Transcendental Meditation. He gave relevant feedback based on his personal experience with TM, and I have included his message below.

You have touched on an important and controversial topic. I participated in the TM basic course here in Finland 5 years ago. Learning the meditation technique was the good thing. However, there was already then something really strange going on in the TM movement (World Government, etc.) and I decided not to participate in the extended course. What made me sad is that there was no critical public discussion within the TM movement, all messages from gurus were taken as a given. At least to me this is a sign of a very closed religious community The mantra system in TM is based on some Sanskrit words which are seen by some scholars as variant names of Hindu gods. These mantras are provided to the student by the TM teacher in a private tutoring session and the mantras are selected with a pretty simple system based on age and sex of the meditation student. On the Internet (e.g. Freedom of Mind Center) and in many analytic books covering meditation movements there is this list of TM mantras available. (Please, make your own search, during my TM basic course I had to make a promise that I will not reveal my mantra!). When I later heard that the mantra I was given may be a Hindu god name variant, I felt a bit odd. Joke: In Finnish language this mantra given to me does not mean anything imaginable and I don’t know much about Indian belief systems, so hopefully there is no harm done to my head

Talking about TM in schools: I very much encourage teaching meditation in schools but I find TM meditation very unsuitable in its present form. Group meditation is a great experience and at school it could remove anxiety and stress. At least in Finnish schools children between 12-18 years are very closed and separated mentally from each other. In that sense meditation could help them to be more open, creative, and enable them to smile However, meditation has such a bad reputation especially among some praying, religious people that they are afraid of it. (Some people just don’t get it that in meditation you do not pray or beg anything So, let’s hope there will be a truly independent meditation technique on the way to schools and workplaces. Could it be based on ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti or some other positively critical thinkers?

Take care,

Mikko A.
Innovation, Creativity and Learning Researcher
Beyond Creativity

P.S. Thank you for this fantastic blog, Meditation. It has given me so many insights. Please, allow people to comment on blog entries more easily

Mikko also requested that comments be allowed on blog entries. By way of explanation, I haven’t included a comment section on the blog due to concerns about the tenor of the discussion. I’ve noticed that internet message boards about meditation, ironically, attract posters who are more interested in opinionated assertions than constructive dialogue. However, emails are always welcome, and I thank you for reading.

In a recent interview with Newsweek, the film director David Lynch talked about his plans to raise $7 billion for his new foundation — the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education. Lynch has been a dedicated practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (TM) since the 1970s. The foundation’s purpose is to make instruction in TM available to schoolchildren across the United States. Lynch believes that the biggest problem facing children is stress, and that TM is the ideal antidote. While Lynch’s intentions seem noble, TM and its parent organization have a controversial reputation. The Journal News article “Meditation Controversy” gives an overview of the TM movement, its efforts to introduce TM into schools, and presents the viewpoints of the organization’s critics and supporters.

TM was trademarked as a meditation technique under the auspices of the Maharishi Vedic Education Development Corporation. The corporation’s name is derived from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who founded TM in the 1950s and remains the head of the organization. Here is a list of the corporation’s trademarks, as taken from the TM website, which gives an indication of the organization’s expansive activities:

® Transcendental Meditation, TM, TM-Sidhi, Maharishi Ayur-Veda, Maharishi Ayurveda, Science of Creative Intelligence, Maharishi, Maharishi Sthapatya Veda, Maharishi Global Construction, Maharishi Yoga, Maharishi Yagya, Maharishi Vedic Astrology, Maharishi Jyotish, Maharishi Gandharva Veda, Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health, Maharishi Vedic Vibration Technology, Maharishi Instant Relief, Instant Relief, Maharishi Rejuvenation, Maharishi Rasayana Program, Maharishi Vedic Management, Maharishi Corporate Development Program, Consciousness-Based, Maharishi Vedic University, Maharishi Vedic School, Maharishi Vedic Center, Maharishi Ayur-Veda School, Maharishi Ayur-Veda University, Maharishi Ayur-Veda College, Maharishi Ayur-Veda Foundation, Maharishi Ayur-Veda Medical Center, Maharishi University of Management, Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, Maharishi Medical Center, Maharishi Vedic Medical Center, Maharishi Medical College, Maharishi Vedic, Maharishi Vedic Medicine, Maharishi Vedic Psychology, Maharishi Self-Pulse, Maharishi Heaven on Earth, Maharishi Center for Excellence in Management, Maharishi Vedic Management, Maharishi Master Management, Natural Law Based Management, Maharishi Corporate Revitalization Program, Maharishi Global Administration through Natural Law, Maharishi Vedic Development Fund, Thousand-Headed Purusha, Maharishi Thousand-Headed Purusha, Maharishi Purusha, Purusha, Thousand-Headed Mother Divine, Mother Divine, Ideal Girls’ School, 24 Hour Bliss, Spiritual University of America, Breath of Serenity, Maharishi Amrit Kalash, Maharishi College of Vedic Medicine, Vedic Science, Maharishi Vedic Science, Maharishi Vedic Observatory, Vastu Vidya, Maharishi Vastu, Time Zone Capital, Council of Supreme Intelligence, Prevention Wing of the Military, are registered or common law trademarks licensed to Maharishi Vedic Education Development Corporation and used under sublicense.

Other than describing it as a “simple, natural, effortless, easily learned technique,” the TM website gives no specific detail on the technique itself. The site states, “The Transcendental Meditation technique must be learned personally from a certified teacher of the Transcendental Meditation program. The technique cannot be learned from a book, video or audio tape.” The initial course of instruction, which comprises four 1-2 hour sessions, costs $2500. Subsequent courses in “advanced techniques” are charged at the same rate.

The TM movement has numerous critics, some of whom are former students and teachers of TM. These critics have made detailed information on the organization and the technique available online. Trancenet offers a comprehensive overview of TM, including statements by prominent former members of the movement. Meditation Information Network describes itself as “supporting critical examination of Transcendental Meditation and the programs associated with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.” Falling Down the TM Rabbit Hole is maintained by Joe Kellett, a former TM teacher, whose purpose is to explain “How Transcendental Meditation really works, a critical opinion.” Each of these sites reveal the TM technique itself — the repetition of a mantra derived from the Hindu tradition. These critics argue that despite TM’s claim to be non-religious and non-sectarian, the TM movement is based in a belief-system and religiously motivated.