Vic. I hope you don’t mind me correcting you on one misunderstanding of Easten meditation. You talk about the Eastern tradition ‘zoning out’ rather than facing suffering with serenity. The Eastern tradition is very much about facing suffering with serenity. Rather than trying to escape suffering, the meditator sits with suffering, learning to feel it fully and accept it. An extreme case is meditation in the charnel grounds - where carrion would eat corpses (in parts of the country where burial and cremation were difficult). The meditator faces his or her own mortality face on - thee is no escape from the knowledge that this life is impermanent.
And that is one of the clinical benefits of mindfulness meditation - people learn to sit with their emotional and physical discomfort. They explore it and learn to accept it. Mindfulness does not reduce pain or change circumstances of life, but good quality clinical evidence shows that people, through learning not to run from it, become less distressed by pain or the circumstances of their life. An example anyone can try is the next time you experience pain, rather than immediately seek to avoid it, sit with it and explore it - take the mind fully to the site of the pain and for 5 minutes fully concentrate on exploring the pain - is it absolutely constant? Where is the pain exactly? What is the response elsewhere in the body (e.g. breathing shallower? Muscles tighter?). Then trying ‘breathing loving kindness’ into the site of the pain and look to soften the reaction to the pain. Can you slow and deepen your breathing, can you relax the muscles you are now aware are tightening as a response? Can you, in short, learn to be fully with that pain? At the end of the 5 minutes you may find that after being so fully (mindful) with the pain it is actually less distressing than it was when your first response was avoidence.
On another note, like the desert fathers, all meditators know what it is like to face their ‘demons’ (compulsive thoughts) head on. The idea of meditation being an easy escape from reality is soon rejected as soon as anyone starts on a serious course of meditation. There is no escape - the meditator faces reality, and their own nature, very directly, and through that better understands the cause of suffering (often by learning clearly about their own compulsive attachments and aversions - lust, greed and anger). The meditator observes their own thoughts coming and going, and so deepens their own knowledge of their thought patterns (not always a comfortable thing!). The meditator learns that they control little in life, and that serenity cannot be achieved by trying to match the world to their own wishes, but rather they must learn to see the world as it is, accept the world (and other people) as it is, and have compassion and loving kindness for the world (and other people) as it is.
All of the above transcends religious and faith boundaries. The meditator is simply learning to sit and face reality as it is, to get a fuller experience of their own reality. Buddhists can do that, Christians can do that. Muslims, Jews and atheists can do that.
Michael
