First it’s the sound of my breath entering my nose, a slight whistle created by my stuffed-up nostrils. Then it’s the cars rumbling outside, the vibrations passing through the window and catching my attention. Next, the shifting weight of the person next to me, the grumble in my stomach as it digests the pizza I’ve just inadvisably eaten, the thoughts of an argument I had with a friend two days ago, ideas about what I’m going to write in this post. At each interruption, I try to reign my focus back to my breathing, but my mind is a skittish horse and refuses to be led. A hot panic begins to rise in me. I feel trapped, inadequate and incapable, and I feel the sting of frustration prickling through my body.
How can I suck at breathing?
***
This is my first real experience of meditation, at a session hosted by the Humanist Graduate Community at Harvard, a group which I help lead with other Harvard graduate students. We meet weekly to discuss existential issues (“How can we serve our community?”), watch films (Contact was the first, and a representative example), plan service work, share art and, as on this occasion, to try something new. Hence, meditation.
But this isn’t your run of the mill meditation session. This is secular meditation, supernaturalism- and transcendence-free. What does this mean? It means that we practice meditation as a form of psychological exploration, seeing how it can help bring calmness and heightened attention to our lives, without crediting any of the more outlandish claims of enlightenment made by some adherents.
Our approach is informed by the increasingly influential trends of Secular Buddhism and mindfulness, spearheaded by figures like Stephen Batchelor and Daniel Siegel. These practitioners and thinkers seek to extract meditation from the religious context in which it has traditionally occurred, and place it firmly in the naturalistic world, offering the benefits to all, regardless of religious perspective. Rick Heller, editor of The New Humanism, argues “as Humanists, we’re interested in what works. If something about meditation is beneficial and can be extracted from a religious context into a secular form, that’s something we might like to employ.”
But this movement hopes to do more than simply “secularize” meditation, in the sense of taking away supernatural elements. As I articulated in my first post for State of Formation, there is danger in allowing secularization to be seen as a subtractive process. No – there is an additive purpose here too: Batchelor, Siegel and others are spearheading attempts to better understand meditation, through psychological, cognitive and neuroscientific interrogation. It is this element, not the lack of supernatural words and trappings, which most significantly distinguishes secular meditation from its religious counterparts.
After the Humanist Graduate Community meditates (for a short 15 minutes, about as much as I could handle), we follow with a discussion of the experience, and a short review of relevant scientific literature. We seek to understand the psychological and biological processes which give rise to the experience we have just shared, and in so doing we endeavor to understand ourselves better.
This yearning to understand, to go beyond an experience deep into its roots and causes, is central to the Humanist enterprise. We are not satisfied with simply undergoing something: we want to grasp it, comprehend it, to fill it with reasons. That’s why, even though I struggled with meditation, I’m going to try again. I’m going to quiet that critical voice (my breathing is perfectly fine, thank you!) and refocus. I’m going to meditate, reasonfully.
Hi James
Thanks for your post. Your comments about your mind being a skittish horse that refuses to be led made me think of Richard Foster’s (a Quaker Christian who has taught and written on the subject of spiritual disciplines, including meditation) comment that “each time we attempt to still the mind for meditation the mind relentlessly mocks us.” Stilling the mind is as difficult for those who employ the spiritual elements of meditation as it is for you. Press on!
Hey James,
Great post. It seems to me that many Eastern practices and beliefs can be harnessed and interpreted in a “secular” fashion. Victor J. Stenger, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, works through this in a chapter in his “The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason.” Lately I have been seeing many connections between “secular” forms of religious belief (i.e. Death-of-God theology, religious naturalism, religious humanism, etc.) and modern atheism. I like that you are working in an area that is interdisciplinary and “at the crossroads” of contemporary scholarship on religion and humanism.
Best
As a Buddhist who chants (which is another method of meditation) I was amused by James Croft’s difficulty in reining in his mind. As the founder of our faith, Nichiren Daishonin, said, “The human mind is like a wild elephant..” I can only offer the observation that it gets a little easier with practice.
Dear James,
I enjoyed your article and experience the same thing daily in my own sitting practice. I have learned to laugh at the rabid monkey of my mind, or, as Sakyong Rinpoche calls it, lungta, the wild wind-horse. But I feel compelled to comment upon your reductive confluence of the concepts of enlightenment and supernaturalism. According to many sutras, Buddha himself adamantly stressed that there was nothing supernatural about the self-awareness and full occupation of the present moment that are the gifts of mindfulness meditation. Indeed, Buddha, when still Siddhartha Gautama, was long under the impression according to his Hindu upbringing that Nirvana was a place or thing, but with his experimentation with various ascetic and experiential journeys into consciousness exploration, he ultimately devised Buddhism as a religion-free practice. “Secular meditation” would have been a phrase redundant even to Buddha’s ears. When asked if he was a God or if he was in communion with Gods, Buddha said, “No. I am awake.” The Sanskrit word, Buddha, indeed means “awake,” not sky-daddy or magicmeister or concession stand or doctrinal acquiescence or suspension of logic. Moreover, one of Buddha’s most frequently repeated dictates in many sutras is his insistence that he could not possibly know everything, as his subjectivity was limited and that nobody should take his word for this system without trying it out for themselves and seeing if it was operative for their own lives. Buddha recognized that this is because meditation, as you have observed, is something a person can only do for themselves, and if you are lazy about it you are the only one who knows it.
I wonder if you have ever read or heard of Huston Smith’s “The World’s Religions”? He presents a poetic recapitulation of Buddhism and takes the reader through Siddhartha Gautama’s sheltered youth and discovery of old age, disease, a corpse, and a life of withdrawal and made his Great Going Forth at age 29. Though he initially ventured into asceticism, Siddhartha left for the Middle Way, thus establishing a practice that was not about any kind of supernaturalism or “transcendence.” Buddha sought to identify multiple temptations of the material world such as attachment to the past, fantasy about the future, desire for instant gratification and various extreme and destructive behaviors, and the human tendency to project and manipulate others and themselves into a world of their own making. He developed a system of different behaviors (communicated through the “Noble Eightfold Path,” basically cognitive behavioral therapy) that enabled him to triumph over his destructive, impulsive selfishness and feel unerring compassion for others. Thenceforth the Buddha, in a manner both rational and tender, espoused his way of infinite compassion, stressing his own humanity so as to make his path available to others. Where most other religions balanced forces of authority, ritual, metaphysical speculation, tradition, grace and mystery, Buddha proposed a way that was almost entirely devoid of these ingredients, insisting that speculation was unnecessary because “whether these views or their opposites are held, there is still rebirth, there is old age, there is death, and grief, lamentation, suffering, sorrow and despair” (Smith 96). Instead, original Buddhism is characterized as empirical (personal experience being the test of its truth), scientific (in its examination of causality), pragmatic (interested in problem-solving), therapeutic (devoted to relieving suffering), psychological (not metaphysical), egalitarian (available to all), and individual. “Humanist meditation” is precisely what the Buddha advocated.
Of course, in following schools and traditions and interpretations of Buddha’s teaching we have as many sea monsters in the sky as you might identify in many mythic systems. But I thought to share this background information with you because I sensed a lack of acquaintance with the tradition you criticize. I would wish for a more equanimous distinction between Buddha’s teachings and the inevitable human candyland of later denominational Buddhisms that Buddha himself originally sought to eviscerate. Much of this same narrative, by the way, can be applied to good ole Jesus, including, of course, and in even more horrifying manifestations, the applications and cosmologizing of his gospel teachings.
Peace,
Jenn