
The 19th Century was the start of a meditation revolution, evolving into a Renaissance by the 1960’s. Since then, there’s been an effort to secularize it to make it accessible for everyone. Of course, there’s no shortage of plastic gurus trying to make bank off of people’s desperate need for freedom from pain.
By Johnathon Lee
Meditation is as natural as breathing, and we’ve been doing both from the start.
Meditation is the act of controlling introspective attention so that we can make sense of, or change our experiences. I’m sorry for that run-on sentence, but I was sentenced to write it. It’s good to cage in a definition. Otherwise, what are we even talking about?
Some researchers think that meditation isn’t just natural, but that it helped us evolve.
Since even now meditation enhances parts of the brain, it’s likely that it did that for our ancestors too. It might have helped them develop better memories, and that lead to using symbols and making better tools. Fire-gazing might be the oldest meditation method, and it was probably paired with chanting and herbal supplements. This gradually birthed the shaman, our first poets, painters, therapists, and doctors—our first scientists.
Meditation might go back even further, embodied by hunters waiting in a tree. Sitting there for hours and hours, there is little else to do but breathe—breathing with vigilance; cultivating attention, tranquility, self-control and patience.
Mindfulness might go back to gathering.
You have be mindful while walking through roughage looking for berries. Not just any berry, but ones that won’t poison everyone or cause explosive diarrhea (basically a death sentence back then). Mindfulness is being present while remembering what something is, what it does, who we are, and what we’re doing.
Our ancestors wouldn’t have survived without meditation and mindfulness.
The oldest hard evidence for formal meditation is in the 3,500 year old Vedas, and it was fine-tuned over millennia in the Upanishads. Many methods and religions sprang from Vedanta, including Jainism and Buddhism. Right on India’s tail, Hebrew meditations were recorded in the Torah and sprang up in China. From India, it traveled to Greece, and then the Roman Empire. When Islam joined the party, meditation was there from the start.
Meditative states and insights would create mystical branches in all world religions, many of them still around.
Indian meditation also wound its way along the Silk Road and sailed across the ocean, permanently affecting Eastern and Southern Asia. All of this was happening as European and American Pagan tribes practiced their own methods, usually combined with otherworldly vision.
Meditation slowly declined after 1500 C.E. There are a lot of reasons, but war, colonialism, and industry were big ones. Our ancestors went from seeking the good life to striving for a life of goods. That ethos is toxic to meditation because it captures and scatters our focus.
We can see life satisfaction, self-discipline, working memory, and belongingness slowly decline along with meditative virtues. So, I think that meditation makes temporary changes to the brain, and these changes are passed on by nurture instead of nature. There’s evidence for that—the changes it makes in the brain start fading after not practicing for a few months.
Even Buddhist monks stopped meditating regularly. They didn’t really start again until Westerners got curious. So, they dove into the meditative pages of their ancient books and brought their practices back to life.
The 19th Century was the start of a meditation revolution, evolving into a Renaissance by the 1960’s. Since then, there’s been an effort to secularize it to make it accessible for everyone. Of course, there’s no shortage of plastic gurus trying to make bank off of people’s desperate need for freedom from pain. Thankfully, they just float on the surface, their microplastics too hollow to sink.
So, if someone asks you why you meditate, you can say that it’s as old as breathing, and that it helps us adapt and come together.
Long ago, our ancestors made some space in themselves, and the whole world came from it.
If you’re asked about why you need to be a decent person to meditate well, you can say that meditation needs certain adapted virtues, and these virtues flow into all that we do. Virtue is the difference between meditating and concentrating really hard.
Since meditation is natural to us, you don’t need to confine yourself to any ideology or method if you don’t want to. Meditation is a tool, and your life is the project. No one else is living it for you, so no one else can dictate what you’re supposed to build.
History shows that we should be weary of anyone who says the cursed words, “This is the only way.” That sentiment comes from a need to control others or the narrative, and that’s the opposite of meditation. Take that critique with a grain of salt; I’m compulsively anti-authoritarian. There’s nothing wrong with following a tradition as long as you gave informed consent.
There’s also nothing wrong with informed dissent. In both cases, you just need to know why you’re doing it.
This tolerant, yet independent attitude can keep the renaissance going. It’s a path to basic sanity. A road to free will and a better life.
Photo: Pixabay
Editor: Dana Gornall
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