I was riding up the ski lift with a wise and good friend. The rosy fingers of dawn just touched the high peaks. The white snow and deep green lodgepole pine seemed to absorb all sound. After a few minutes, my friend asked “Bud, why do you meditate?” It was a question I couldn’t refuse.
I thought out loud with my friend for a few minutes and then had the good sense to ask him, “Why do you ask?”
“Because I’ve meditated and enjoyed it but one of my friends goes on and on about a green light, an aura, he sees surrounding everything during some sessions. I don’t believe in this stuff, and I can produce the same light by rubbing my eyes. I’m a physician and tend to think there is a physiological explanation for most things. I’m suspicious of a lot of things that people attribute to god that may well have simpler explanations.”
I thought out loud some more and asked some more clarifying questions that brought us to an interesting rephrasing of the question: “Do you meditate to experience things you perceive as magical/supernatural? Do you meditate because of your religious beliefs about God and what he expects? Is there any place in meditation for a skeptic like me?”
My answers are: no, no, yes.
I meditate to experience everyday life more fully, I meditate to decrease the amount of criticism, judgment and evaluation I unconsciously apply to the situations of ordinary life. I meditate because I find it leads me to more compassion for myself and for other s.
As to God, I’ve always like the Alcoholic Anonymous formulation: “the only thing you need to know about the higher power is that you aren’t it.” I meditate to quiet the part of me who thinks it is god and to experience myself and my world as it is, not as I think it should be. There are times I experience a decrease in separation from others, a sense of connection to the world around me, and an oceanic dissolving of boundaries. Some see this a contact with the divine. Some see the same effect in people who have strokes that disable the left side of their brain. I really don’t care which it is. For me, the point is that the connection is a reality. We are nowhere as separate and independent of each other as our internal critic imagines.
At this point my friend said that he though much of religion might be a mass brain washing, beliefs inculcated in us by organized religion.
With a wink, I told him I was interested in the opposite view. That the commonalities in religious and spiritual practices across cultures might not be due to brain washing but to humans trying to understand the things that happen in their heads. Here is what I mean: Think of yourself at peace watching a magnificent sunset. Most of us experience feelings that are poorly described by equations and statistics but are part of the magnificence of poetry…that which is beyond words. We use songs, dance, images, epic stories to try to capture the magnificence with our poor symbols.
I believe some very deep insights will occur as we unravel the mystery of how the human mind works. We will see what this means for organized religion and the scientific secularism of our time. For me, right now, given a choice between Maxwell’s equations and poetry, I’ll bet on the poetry.
That’s a vague way of saying why I meditiate.