Secularizing the Western Meditative Tradition

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The story of my personal rediscovery of, and my fascination with, the western meditative tradition.

Bishop John Hall, 1574-1656, protestant meditation teacher

 

Meditation has gone mainstream. Whether guise of mindfulness or yoga classes, meditating is more and more becoming the equivalent of a mental workout for many of its practitioners. Maybe the most interesting thing about this contemporary interest in an ancient practice is that it happens in a secular context, at least superficially. Its adherents mostly do not associate with the religious denominations the techniques were originally developed in. Meditation is thought of as a neutral tool, a way of finding mental quiet and discovering the workings and potentials of your own mind.

I count myself among those who think that meditation has brought enormous benefit to their lives. Yes, it does produce mental quiet and may result in a more relaxed and skillful attitude towards life. It increases the appreciation of simple things. But, and this point is often overlooked, it is most of all terribly interesting to get to know your own mind first hand.

As most westerns practicing meditation in a secular spirit today, I had no doubt in my mind that meditation is an eastern thing. It had its roots in Indian yoga, Buddhism and ancient Daoism and it were the latter two traditions I drew my daily meditation instructions from. Thus, I was surprised when, in a podcast I can't find anymore, it was mentioned that there was a proper western meditative tradition that differed significantly from its eastern counterpart. Always on the lookout for something new to try, I was hooked instantly. And what I found was not just interesting, but important.

Embracing Thought

Put very briefly, the most striking difference between eastern and western meditation is that while the former encourages one to focus on bodily sensation and see thoughts as distractions, the latter embraces thought as a vehicle to reach altered states of awareness. I will thus refer to this technique as conceptual meditation. In perhaps the most workable manual on the technique I was able to find so far, The Art of Divine Meditation by the sixteenth century protestant Bishop Joseph Hall (the guy pictured above), the technique was put quite plainly: Think of a topic you are really interested in, sit down in a quiet place, close your eyes, and think about nothing but your topic for a set amount of time. (I will describe the technique in detail at the end of this article. If you are interested in the pragmatics rather than theory and history, feel free to skip ahead.)

The meditation topics Bishop Hall recommends are religious in nature, from the crucifixion to the nature of divine grace. While these are certainly wonderful recommendations, they will not resonate with most of us. However, there is no reason to think that this kind of technique is any less apt for secularization than the meditative traditions of the east. While in the beginning I struggled to find appropriate themes, I quickly got the hang of it. The trick is just that the topic has to be both vast and engaging. My particular favorite at the moment is to meditate on the question of what values and virtues guide my life.

At this point you may be thinking: "That's all? You just sit around for a while and think about your life?" In a sense, yes. That the basic instructions are of the utmost simplicity is something this technique shares with its eastern counterparts. After practicing for just a short time, I quickly found that systematically training thought in this way can swiftly lead to an altered state of awareness.

Perhaps the best comparison of the state of mind induced by conceptual meditation is flow. Flow experiences, that have only recently come to the attention of mainstream psychology, are associated with joy, a narrowing of attention, the absence of intruding thought, and increased functioning in whatever you are doing. It mainly used to happen to me at work when I was really engaged in whatever I was working on. Hours fly by like minutes and one usually gets more stuff done than in a typical week.

The quite artificial conditions of conceptual meditation are extremely conducive to flow. And, even greater, one gets better at entering flow, at least in meditation sessions, and perhaps in everyday life, by regular practice. I was astonished by the effectiveness of the simple technique.

Here is what Bishop Hall has to say about how meditation ought to result in altered states of feeling:

The most difficult and knotty part of meditation (cogitation) being finished, there remains that which is more lively and more easing to a good heart, to be wrought together by the affections. For if our meditations do not reach to the affections, they are vain and to no purpose. This that follows, then, is the very soul of meditation, and all that is past serves only as an instrument. A man is a man because of his understanding part. A man is a Christian by his will and affections. Since, then, all former labor of the brain is only to move the heart, we must try to find some feeling touch and sweet relish in that which the mind has chewed upon.

The Art of Divine Meditation, Second Part

As Hall is hinting at, it didn't take long to discover that conceptual meditation has a further upside. It brings one in deeper emotional contact with whatever you are meditating on. For me, meditating on guiding virtues quickly resulted in a deeper appreciation of what I am doing with my life. Writing my doctoral thesis, for instance, changed from a dry duty to something that was laden with meaning. The meditative process didn't produce anything that wasn't there in the first place. Rather it reminded me of why I do what I do.

Beyond Monasticism

The point of this article is not to argue that western meditation is "better" than its eastern counterpart. It is not. Rather, I want to urge that western meditation is in important respects different from what you will learn in a mindfulness class. And, my suspicion is, that the fruits of conceptual meditation are actually closer to what many people who study meditation in the west today are looking for.

Buddhist monks meditating in Sravasti, India

Many western meditation practitioners don't realize that it is not actually normal for Hindu and Buddhist lay people to meditate. Meditation is something that, if at all, is mostly practiced in monasteries by monks who devote a great part of, if not their whole life to the study of their own minds. It is no wonder that the well-known eastern practices often have a renunciatory character. They are geared at freeing the human being from suffering by loosening the individuals grasp at worldly affairs. When visiting India, I remember a local man earning his living as a yoga instructor in Rishikesh, telling me after a few beers that he thought his western students who thought that yoga could be practiced as some kind of wellness therapy were a bit nuts.

Conceptual meditation differs greatly in this regard from mindfulness and yoga. If the theme is picked well, the practice will increase one's connectedness to the circumstances of everyday life, while still offering a system for becoming more grounded and focused.

In recent years, within the western meditative world, there has been a growing recognition that meditation may not only have positive effects. For some people, it may lead to periods of depression and similar psychiatric symptoms. It is not that far-fetched to suppose that these effects partly result from the attempt to integrate a technique designed for a renunciatory lifestyle into our modern world. It would be fascinating and important to know whether adverse effects might be partly linked to the style of meditation being used. For what it is worth, my own experience teaches me that switching from a Buddhist practice to conceptual meditation may increase one's groundedness in the circumstances of one's life.

All this is not to say that the two styles of meditation are ultimately irreconcilable. In fact, in catholic mysticism, it is common to distinguish between meditatio and contemplatio, where meditation is roughly what I have called conceptual meditation and related techniques, and contemplation is much closer to advanced open awareness techniques taught in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. The idea is that one starts with meditation, and if one is worthy of God's grace, one will naturally evolve into contemplative practices. On the other hand, there are practices similar to conceptual meditation practiced in Vajrayana Buddhism, though, as far as I am aware, they do not take center stage and are not encouraged as stand-alone meditative paths in their own right.

This leaves one question: Given that there once was a meditative tradition in the west, how is it that we today associate meditation almost exclusively with the east?

What happened to Western Meditation?

In their article Meditation: The Forgotten Western Tradition, Ann Schopen and Brenda Freeman speculate that meditation, associated with mysticism, was more and more abandoned in the process of the enlightenment in an attempt to apply standards of rationality. When, in the end of the sixties, meditation was rediscovered by the Hippies, it had to be imported from the east by people like Maharishi Mahesh.

There are of course other reasons why the western meditative tradition is hardly practiced today. While sensible and practical material on eastern meditation is readily available, useful books on western meditation are quite rare. Apart from the more than four hundred year old Art of Divine Meditation I have yet to find anything that could count as a proper manual. In fact, I have considered studying Latin to get my hands on some more useful material. Not exactly an accessible subject. Be that as it may, I have tried gathering what I have read so far and what I have learned from experience into a few simple points.

Brief Instructions

Here are the very basic instructions. I plan to later give more elaborate instructions on how conceptual meditation can be used for systematic sel-exploration or even to get one into states similar to what are called jhanas in Buddhism. Here I will focus on the basic instructions.

1. Choose a topic beforehand! You may find that thinking about this during the session will only result in confusion. As I said, choose something that is both engaging (something connected to positive emotion, at least in the beginning) and vast (something that allows for a lot of different associations). Here are a few suggestions: What are the virtues that guide your life? What is it you want to achieve? Consider meditating on your connection to people that are close to you. If you are into any kind of mythological system or story, consider trying to understand it, and why you are drawn to it, on a deeper level. Later you may also focus on more intellectually demanding issues like philosophical puzzles or math problems, but not in the beginning.
   
2. Find a daily spot on your schedule. If you are a beginner in meditation generally, begin by sitting for 15 minutes using a meditation timer. If you are advanced, sit as long as you please but be prepared to not be able to sit as long as you are used to. If you are trained in a practice like mindfulness, it may feel like learning meditation all over again for the first few sessions.
3. Take a comfortable posture such that you sit both upright and relaxed. You don't have to practice yoga poses. Sitting on a chair without your back touching it will do. Just place your palms on your knees and mind that your spine is straight and balanced. If on the other hand you are used to a meditation posture, there is no reason to switch just because you switch to a new practice. I still normally sit "Burmese style", as I sat in my Buddhist meditation.
4. Divide your session into two phases. Begin by relaxing your muscles and breathe a few deep breaths until you get into a calm mood.
5. Now begin the core practice. Start thinking about your chosen theme. Let your thoughts roam freely. Whenever you realize that your thoughts have wandered, pull them back to the current subject. Repeat. If you have trouble refocusing on your theme, you may also utter it verbally in your mind every time you return.
   
6. After a few sessions, try the following: Whenever your topic gets out of sight, try to retrace the associations your thoughts took from the theme. This may be difficult at first, but you will get better quickly.
   
7. Stick with the meditation object for at least a few weeks. I find that writing down a few notes after each session increases the continuity of the practice and thus the depth to which I may understand the current theme.
8. After a while you may try to experiment with the breadth of attention. When you limit your thought more (i.e., draw them back if they stray only a little from the predefined path) this will result in the wheel of thought spinning faster. Letting thoughts roam more freely, you will realize your awareness will become more expansive. This way you may learn to get into a more optimal state for achieving flow states.
9. Have fun, be curious and experiment.
   

So far, all this is based on books, my personal experience and the experience of a few friends. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to comment or contact me.