Why We Meditate : Part 1

How to Meditate: A Guide to Self-Discovery
by Lawrence LeShan

This simple, straightforward, yet powerful guide can help you-just as it has already helped hundreds of thousands of readers since its initial publication twenty-five years ago-reap the profound rewards of meditation. Outlining an easy-to-follow and realistic approach that enables you to bring meditation effortlessly into your life, no matter how great the demands on your time, How to Meditate is an unrivaled source of inspiration and practical instruction for anyone seeking inner peace, relief from stress, and increased self-knowledge.

Chapter 1

A few years ago, I was at a small conference of scientists all of whom practiced meditation on a daily basis. Toward the end of the four-day meeting, during which each of them had described at some length how he meditated, I began to press them on the question of why they meditated. Various answers were given by different members of the group and we all knew that they were unsatisfactory, that they did not really answer the questions. Finally one man said, "It's like coming home." There was silence after this, and one by one all nodded their heads in agreement. There was clearly no need to prolong the inquiry further.

This answer to the question "Why meditate?" runs all through the literature written by those who practice this discipline. We meditate to find, to recover, to come back to something of ourselves we once dimly and unknowingly had and have lost without knowing what it was or where or when we lost it. We may call it access to more of our human potential or being closer to ourselves and to reality, or to more of our capacity for love and zest and enthusiasm, or our knowledge that we are a part of the universe and can never be alienated or separated from it, or our ability to see and function in reality more effectively. As we work at meditation, we find that each of these statements of the goal has the same meaning. It is this loss, whose recovery we search for, that led the psychologist Max Wertheimer to define an adult as "a deteriorated child."

Eugen Herrigel, who studied the Zen method of meditation for a long time, wrote, "Working on a Koan [a meditational technique of that school] leads you to a point where you are behaving like a person trying to remember something you have forgotten." And Louis Claude de St. Martin, summing up his reasons for his long years of meditation, succinctly put it, "We are all in a widowed state and our task is to remarry."

It is our fullest "humanhood," the fullest use of what it means to be human, that is the goal of meditation. Meditation is a tough-minded, hard discipline to help us move toward this goal. It is not the invention of any one person or one school. Repeatedly, in many different places and times, serious explorers of the human condition have come to the conclusion that human beings have a greater potential for being, for living, for participation and expression, than they have ability to use. These explorers have developed training methods to help people reach these abilities, and these methods (meditational practices) all have much in common. As I shall show in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, all are based on the same insights and principles, whether they were developed early in India, in the fifth to twelfth century in the Syrian and Jordanian deserts, in tenth-century Japan, in medieval European monasteries, in Poland and Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or at other times and places.

All take work. There is no easy or royal road to the goal we seek. Further, there is no end to the search; there is no position from which we can say, "Now I have arrived, I can stop working." As we work we find ourselves more at home in the universe, more at ease with ourselves, more able to work effectively at our tasks and toward our goal, closer to our fellow humans, less anxious and less hostile. We do not, however, reach an end. As in all serious matters - love, the appreciation of beauty, efficiency - there is no endpoint to the potential of human growth. We work - in meditation - as part of a process; we seek a goal knowing it is forever unattainable.

A good program of meditation is, in many ways, quite similar to a good program of physical exercise. Both require repeated hard work. The work is often basically pretty silly in its formal aspect. What could be more foolish than to repeatedly lift twenty pounds of lead up and down unless it is counting your breaths up to four over and over again, a meditational exercise? In both the exercise is for the effect on the person doing it rather than for the goal of lifting lead or counting breaths. Both programs should be adapted to the particular person using them with the clear understanding that there is no one "right" program for everyone. It would be stupid to give the same physical program to two individuals differing widely in build, general physical condition, and relationship of the development of the breathing and blood circulating apparatus to the development of the muscles. It is equally stupid to give the same meditational program to two individuals differing widely in the development of the intellectual, emotional and sensory systems and in the relationship of these systems to each other. One of the reasons the formal schools of meditational practice have such a high percentage of failures among their students - those who get little out of the practices and leave meditation completely - is that most schools tend to believe that there is one right way to meditate for everyone and, by a curious coincidence, it happens to be the one they use. Both physical and meditational programs have, as a primary goal, the tuning and training of the person so that he can effectively move toward his goals.

Does meditation also change these goals? Certainly the increased competence and knowledge of this competence, the increased ability to act wholeheartedly and wholemindedly, the wider perception of reality and the more coherent personality organization that it brings do change the individual's actions and goals as much as good psychotherapy is likely to change actions and goals for the same reason. My goals are a function of the way I perceive myself and the world. As these perceptions clarify and broaden, my goals also develop. As I become less anxious and feel less vulnerable, I become less suspicious of and hostile to my fellows, and my goals and actions change. The analogy between physical and meditational programs cannot be carried too far, but it seems reasonable here to point out that a person who has trained his body and is confident of it feels far less vulnerable and therefore behaves differently in many situations than a person with an untrained and uncoordinated body.

There is no age limit for meditation. This book was originally titled Meditation for Adults. One can practice, and benefit from, these disciplines as long as you are adult enough to understand that your own growth and becoming is a serious matter and worth working for. And so long as you understand that if you wish the best from and for yourself, you will have to work hard, that it does not come without sustained effort.

Meditational techniques have been primarily developed by individuals generally termed "mystics" and in certain mystical training schools or traditions in which individuals come together to study and practice these techniques. The term "mystic" has long been widely misunderstood in Western culture as referring to an individual who believes in things no one else can understand, who withdraws from the world and has little to do with its ordinary activities, who talks or writes in terms that communicate nothing and who, if not actually certifiable as insane, has drifted so far from common sense that he or she certainly could not be considered sane. (There has certainly been a modification of this viewpoint in the past few years in this country, but the position as stated has been the prevailing view for a long time. Recent developments in Western culture are changing this stereotype.)

© 1999 by Lawrence LeShan

About the Author

Lawrence LeShan, a pioneer in exploring the therapeutic and ethical implications of meditation, is a practicing psychotherapist. He lives in New York City.