What is Meditation?
by Franz Metcalf Seems like it should be an easy question, but it's like asking
what is love. There are so many aspects of it, so many perspectives on
it, and so many ways to experience it that meditation doesn't lend
itself to being reduced to one quick answer. The best I can do is this:
Meditation means ways of making the mind understand itself.
I don't mean "understand" in an intellectual way, like the way a
neuropsychologist understands patterns of brain activity. That's an
understanding of facts but not an experience of inner knowing. Buddhist
understanding starts inside and recognizes what is happening right
here, right now, in our heads. Meditation helps you understand how and
why your mind moves and thinks and wants by letting you see these
things as they happen.
And meditation goes beyond this. You start with the rest of the
Eightfold Path — or any other wise and compassionate way of being, such
as other religions provide. When you then add meditation, you gain the
power to change your mind. Literally. You can change how your mind
works. Why change your mind? The usual reason is to get happier. When
you use the tool of meditation to unlock the processes of your mind,
you can reprogram yourself to get rid of greed, ignorance, and hatred,
replacing them with calm, satisfaction, wisdom, love, and joy. Who
wouldn't want that?
So why doesn't everyone meditate? Two main reasons. First, some
people are taught that meditation is somehow unreligious and makes one
susceptible to the influence of evil powers. I'm not kidding; this is
the official position of the Roman Catholic Church as I write this
book. This is such a fundamentally ignorant and harmful view it is best
I don't say anything more about it. I don't want to get into wrong
speech!
There's also a more understandable reason people avoid
meditation: It can be really hard. Meditation is hard when we're
resistant to it. Sometimes our minds don't want to let go of our
hard-won sense of solidity and selfishness. We've been working on that
sense of self since we were toddlers, and on some levels it's necessary
for survival, so we cling to it. We also resist meditation when we'd
rather have external amusement than internal happiness. This may sound
stupid, like something nobody would ever want, but most of us feel like this all the time.
Think about yourself honestly. Given a choice, don't you always feel
immediate desire to do the most exciting, fun thing? If so, join the
club; you're a human being.
The trouble is, that search for amusement and excitement never
fully succeeds. In the end it always fails completely as we die. It
cannot be the path to happiness. Real happiness is internal and it
comes from changing your mind after learning how it works. Meditation
can get you there because it reveals the workings of your mind and lets
you fix them.
Because of their personal resistance to meditation, and because
it takes time, energy, a quiet space, and a bit of knowledge, most
people in the world don't meditate. Even most Buddhists don't meditate,
and a person can be an excellent Buddhist without meditating. Yet most
young people interested in Buddhism do meditate, and they're right to.
For many people it provides the single strongest push forward on the
path.
There's something immediately obvious about concepts like right
speech and even right effort, but meditation is another story. It goes
against all the thought habits most people have cultivated over their
whole lives. Yet meditation produces immediate, positive results across
the whole spectrum of body and mind. If you try it yourself, you'll
quickly discover that meditation can produce benefits for you that
range from eliminating stress to getting better grades. It may even
help you wake up.
Calming Meditation
The many methods of Buddhist meditation all boil down to two main types. The first type is samatha,
or calming meditation. It's not about putting yourself to sleep. That's
not meditation; it's not even calm — think of how active your dreams can
be. Samatha is more like concentrating your mind. This concentration is
not like concentrating on a math problem or on driving. That's much too
active and linear. Here, concentration means focusing thoughts on one
unchanging thing, not for the purpose of doing anything with it, but
simply to let it fill your whole mind.
Samatha calms the mind further
and further until it reaches a place of true rest and ease called samadhi.
(If samatha and samadhi sound alike, it's because they come from the
same root, meaning "peace.") Buddhism shares this general type of
meditation with other religions, especially Hinduism. When Siddhartha
practiced meditation and self-mortification with the renunciants in the
forest after he left home, he was working toward ever-deeper immersion
in open and quiet meditative states. He was doing samatha meditation.
When doing samatha, you start by concentrating on a visual or
mental object. You try to develop a one-pointed mind, free of the
hindrances of ill-will, laziness, greed, and other such feelings. You
purely concentrate on the object. After much practice, you can even let
the object go and concentrate on internal experience. As you do so,
your concentration strengthens, your calm deepens, and you find
yourself more and more able to achieve this state each time you sit
down to meditate. The process is not just some dry skill you acquire;
it's enjoyable in a way that touches you more deeply than normal
fleeting pleasures. Samatha gives you a foundation you can stay with as
you look at the action in your mind. That looking is the other type of
meditation.
Insight Meditation
"Insight" is the usual translation of vipassana, which literally means "clear sight." Buddhism attends to insight more than other religions do in their meditative paths.
When doing vipassana, you don't strive for calm. Instead your
objective is insight. You look right into your mind to see how and why
it's doing what it's doing. You begin to see how one thought leads to
another and how an attitude or desire leads to a natural reaction that
may or may not be good. When you see that actually happening in your
mind, it really hits you: you need to change, and you have the power to
do it. That power is the strongest thing in the world, and it's in you
now. Insight meditation puts that power right in your hands.
Is it possible to get this power without meditation? Sure it is.
Great spiritual people throughout time in all cultures have tapped into
this power, and most of them were not Buddhists. They gained insight
without Buddhist meditation, and so can you. Of course, each of them
was a one-in-a-million person with fantastic powers of intellect,
awareness, compassion, and mental discipline. Have you developed all
those qualities? If not, maybe try meditation.
This article was excerpted from:
 Buddha In Your Backpack
by Franz Metcalf.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Ulysses Press. ©2003. www.ulyssespress.com
Info/Order this book.
More books by this author.
About the Author
Franz Metcalf did his Masters work at
the Graduate Theological Union, and received his doctorate from the
University of Chicago with a dissertation on the question, "Why Do
Americans Practice Zen Buddhism?" He currently works with the Forge
Institute for Spirituality and Social Change, co-chairs the steering
committee of the Person, Culture, and Religion Group of the American
Academy of Religion, and teaches college in Los Angeles. He has
contributed reviews and chapters to various scholarly publications and
is review editor of the Journal of Global Buddhism. He's the author of
What Would Buddha Do? and co-author of What Would Buddha Do at Work?
If you want to learn more about Franz (and other Buddhist things),
visit his web site at:
www.mind2mind.net
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