I am glad I am a meditator
As the world shows its unhealed wounds and tumbles into chaos, meditators have a layer of preparation that they wish others had too. And they can. Just takes some prep.
Yes, things are certainly heating up right now.
People are outlining worst case scenarios for so many things, it seems like we are listening to a symphony of pain. The strings are the climate. The woodwinds are AI. The brass are the authoritarian moves we see every day. The percussion are the wars breaking out in the world. The players are the rich, the second-tier officials, and possibly, the military. The conductors are the heads of state — the most powerful individuals in the world. The audience is everyone else. That’s probably us.
The whole performance is trending toward sadness and violence, and our response right now is probably a mixture of fear and anger, or hopelessness and despair. Yes, some people are cheering at all of this, but we can set them aside as people who don’t know what they’re seeing. Is it possible they are actually right about all of this? Well, anything’s possible, but we’re going to let them make their case in their chosen channels. We’ll explore the scenario just described.
This Has Happened Before
First, this is a variation of things that have, in similar ways — though not identical ways — happened before. People have always experienced fear and suffering, oppression, and the destruction of what they dearly loved and valued. Sometimes this can be averted. Sometimes it cannot be averted.
My teachers experienced a similar societal collapse in 1959, when the Chinese communists invaded Tibet and enacted genocide in the cruelest possible way. My teachers are the ones who survived. I probably would have had more teachers if more had survived. Some of the greatest teachers of that generation died in concentration camps or were murdered by troops. It was horrible, and it resembles all the other genocidal invasions I’ve read about — from Genghis Khan to World War II to Rwanda and others.
Genocidal invasions, brutal takeovers, military coups — all this stuff is so common in the human story as to be a feature of human life. We like to think of it as an aberration. But is it? The difference to us right now is that our fears are based on outcomes that haven’t yet come to that stage. We are just afraid that they will.
Facing What We Can and Cannot Control
So. This brings us to a very sensitive point. We can face the situation openly and understand what is happening at a fundamental level. And when we do, there are two aspects to this:
(1) what we can control
(2) what we cannot control
This won’t be a suggestion to do nothing, and it won’t be a suggestion to rouse yourself and do everything you can. Those are up to you, and you’ll make decisions based on what your situation is right now. Some will want to do something, but will not have a situation where it is possible to do so. They may be sick, or remote, or emotionally unable to participate. We have to let people in these situations make their decisions without castigation.
Some will not want to do anything, but will watch. Or not watch. Again, this is their choice, and if we have emotions about it, we can end up clouding our own mind. Some of the smartest things people are doing right now would have seemed ignorant to me if they told me what they were going to do. First I would scoff at them, later I would admire them.
A Life Lived in Another Time
I was born in the late 1960s, and I grew all the way up to be thirty years old without bothering with computers. I lived in a world of analog media. A world of paper and ink, typewriters and acoustic guitars. It was a better situation than what I see young people have today, but I can’t change it.
My parents were born right at the end of World War II. They grew up in the 1950s, built their lives in the 1960s and ’70s, and are now in their 80s. They lived most of their lives in the most peaceful and prosperous time that a person of their working-class upbringing could have experienced.
Every day I read of someone who has just died in their late 80s or 90s. I think to myself, they are finishing a life just before the orchestra has begun to play. Perhaps they are lucky. Their timing was impeccable.
But I also think to myself that I would rather be alive than not alive, and if/when the world turns to darkness, I would still rather be alive.
But then again, I have a secret. I have something that makes dark times and light times more similar to one another. Lots of people have this. It’s called dharma — teachings on the wisdom nature of existence.
We really need to upgrade our vocabulary to include the word “dharma”.
In America, where I have lived my life so far, we don’t have these teachings, and 99% of Americans wouldn’t even know what I just said. They would hear this as my saying I have religion. But that isn’t what I have. I don’t have religion, and I am not religious. I have teachings on the wisdom nature of existence, which are universally called dharma.
I had to learn these from my teachers — the ones who escaped from the genocide of the Communist invasion of 1959. I have been doing this for about 30 years now. And it took me 20 years to arrive at an outlook that could see the world and not turn to hope or despair. For the last 10 years my outlook has been stabilizing more and more.
That is normal for people who practice meditation and study dharma. I am not a special case. I am not any more of a success story than those like me.
I had a lot of peaceful years to absorb these teachings, ask questions, absorb them bit by bit. I spent much of my adult life going in and out of meditation retreats where I refined my understanding. It has been at the center of my life for more than half of my life.
But that was just good timing. I didn’t need that much time. I could have learned what I learned much more quickly if the conditions had been different.
The Value of Unstable Conditions
And what conditions would have made me learn more quickly? Unstable conditions like the ones we are facing now.
When I was learning, I always had parallel opportunities tempting me. Maybe I could give up my meditation path and try to become rich and famous. Maybe I could become a rock and roll star. Maybe I could become an actor. Or a writer.
I took 20 years to learn what I could have learned in only a couple of years. True, the years of meditation probably couldn’t be condensed, but the shaping of an outlook that protects me from despair right now didn’t need 20 years.
And that is what is important in this conversation. What is in our control is more powerful than we suspect.
Practicing Worst Case Mind
It is helpful to take a worst case scenario as our case study. Just assume that everything is going to go wrong. Don’t exaggerate — just allow yourself to envision that the rest of your life will move toward the worst case scenario.
If your worst case scenario is some kind of annihilation — nuclear exchange, pandemic, genocide — then at least build in a one-year buffer. Imagine for the sake of this that you have another year.
But there are other scenarios where it is better to imagine that you have less than a year. We can talk about those in another video, or you can find resources for that level of “what if I only had a month to live” questioning. I highly advise you to replace your hope for a brighter tomorrow with a mature contemplation of darkness. Sorry to be smiling as I say that.
So, it happened. Remember, you are still alive, and you have at least a year left. Or three years left. Or five years. Or ten.
Here is the question: if the events of the world are out of your control — if you cannot shift the world toward peace at a global scale — what is left for you to do?
What Matters in the Time That Remains
What can you do? If your food is compromised, if your travel is restricted, if your lifestyle is adjusted downward — not life-threateningly downward, remember — what is left for you to do?
What important thing is still available to you with a handful of years alive?
You can’t look to your bucket list anymore if it was filled with requirements that the world is peaceful and prosperous. That time is no more. But what can you look to?
If I left you to this for a weekend, you would run through many things that would seem possible and then begin to seem unlikely. You would cross things off the list. You would narrow it down to very basic human things that are possible simply because you are alive.
And in that way, you would find yourself thinking like the majority of human beings who have lived on this planet — humans who didn’t have the freedoms and opportunities we’ve had for so long. But from that lack of options, great things emerged. It was from that bare and basic situation that the traditions of enlightenment arose.
The Legacy of the Meditators
These traditions harnessed the introspective power of meditation to look into what comes with every human life: mind and awareness. Meditators didn’t have lots of cars, lots of vacation homes, or lots of plans. They had what they had — which is what you have — although you still have a lot more than they had.
One thing you might have seen in them that you don’t necessarily see in yourself is the mysterious quality of well-being. Contentment. Even happiness. Meditators become happy as a byproduct of the way they live their lives. Even when the ruling class was cruel and distant. Even when the masses were poor and without medicine. Meditators were joyful and kind. All the recorded history talks about it this way.
You won’t find history full of angry, bitter meditators. Even when the world around them was full of angry, bitter people. And you also won’t find any historical accounts of how the rich and powerful were also happy meditators. Because wealth and power are never associated with meditation. They aren’t good conditions for the discoveries of meditation.
Wherever you see the rich and powerful gather, you should know that you simply will not be able to find good instruction in meditation and wisdom. It’s like all the places where meditation doesn’t exist have collected together — and it is convenient for you. You know what you won’t find there.
A friend of mine used to joke that whenever the sports arenas in our city are full, you know that it’s safe to go about the city and meet literate, intelligent people. The people who get in the way of intelligence are all collected together for the day in a sports arena, so the general reading level of the city goes up for a few hours. He upset a lot of people with that remark, but I still think about it.
It seems that if what most people do (whatever that is) produces good character, good intelligence, the ability to decipher truth from lies, then most people would impress us with their intelligence, character, and perceptiveness.
And if what most people want leads to happiness and well-being, then the people who seem to get what they want would also strike us as happy and well.
What You Can Still Wake Up To
Do you know what is outside of your control, or do you still need to find out? If you need more time, understand that this almost always comes through lessons in disappointment, shock, indignation, anger. It won’t be a series of peaceful insights.
But if in your heart you do already know what is out of your control, but you just haven’t accepted it yet, it may only take a period of contemplation to bring those realizations forward. You may be ready to grow up all of a sudden.
It has taken me a very long time to grow up in this way. I am one of those people who expected the people in charge to be benevolent. I never grasped that the masses would raise anyone into power who wasn’t benevolent.
I was like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin for most of my life, even while I was avidly reading history. My foolishness is just something I have had to befriend. It has been painful, but I am much more awake since I started opening my eyes.
And in this case, awake means: I don’t expect things from people when I know they probably don’t have those things developed inside them. I don’t expect people to be honest and compassionate and generous and altruistic if they haven’t lived their lives in a society that instills those values in them. A competitive world does not foster kindness and generosity. It’s simple, but true. A cooperative world is required to see the full flowering of kindness, to see how generous and benevolent people can become.
And I don’t expect wisdom from people who have spent their every waking hour gathering power and material wealth. Wisdom isn’t found in those hunting grounds. And wisdom takes just as much time and attention as gathering material power. So it’s one or the other.
I would like to see a world where benevolence and generosity are held up as standards of achievement. A world of virtue, a world led by people who model virtuous qualities. But that will have to await a world that can produce such leaders. For the time being, this one can’t.
Wealth and power are not associated with virtues and benevolence. At least not in any historical society I know of. The accumulation of material power at the expense of sharing has long been seen as shameful, anti-social, pathological. And in some situations, normal. So if a society instills the desirability of wealth and power — and even worse, fame — in its people, only a fool would expect to find honest and wise people emerge as its leaders.
And like I said, I was one of those fools. Not so much anymore.
Still, beneath all this, something else is available — and always has been.
Awake Beneath the Dream
The most important point I intend to make here is that no matter what our circumstances, all the way up to our last moment, we can make the move into seeing what we have never seen before. Meditation is the art of doing this. It isn’t a simpleminded thing, but it isn’t out of our reach either.
And it is important, but seemingly hard to get across, that this is realistic. It happens. It has happened to all of my teachers. It happened to all of their teachers. It happens to thousands, millions of people who aren’t teachers. It has BEEN happening for going on 3000 years. It is as real as learning to ride a bicycle.
It’s also started to happen to me, at least at an early stage. But I confirm it is real. If this early stage is all I ever taste, my life will have been lived better than anything I ever hoped for. So really, if a guy like me can do it, I think anyone else can too.
The mind that thinks is like a reflection in the mirror. The part of us that sees this reflection is not in the mirror. As long as we think we are the mind (which we aren’t), or that we are the body (not that either), we follow their lead. But we don’t get far if we just switch our thinking superficially. We can’t just say “ok, I’ll give it a try: I’ll think I’m not the body or mind.” That wouldn’t do anything.
Seeing is believing. But what sees is beyond the activity of believing or not believing. Seeing means that the part of you that can discern truth, real truth, fundamental raw truth, has come alive and seen that it is not the reflection in the mirror.
When this happens — and it will happen, and it does happen when you do what makes it happen (meditate) — you will be standing in a much bigger concert hall than just the one featuring the orchestra of pain.
You won’t be in a paradise, but you won’t be in a hell, either. You will be free from paradise, and free from hell. Free means something important: it means you are free from something you thought you could never be free from. You were wrong all this time!
I don’t like what is going on in the world either. I don’t like the people who seize power. I don’t like people who double down on lies, or who entertain themselves with escalating anger stories.
But they are playing their part in the orchestra of pain, which is doing its gig without my input. I am not making it happen, I am not conducting the orchestra, I am not marketing the orchestra.
They are not the only show in town, and I don’t have time to listen to them when there are more important things available. That is within my control.