Why Meditate?

From Menletter September 2006

By Tim Baehr

By now, most people have heard about the benefits of meditation: lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, less anxiety, insight, perspective, understanding and forgiveness, a connection with the divine. The technique usually involves monitoring the breath and trying to turn off the inner dialog that runs, more or less constantly, through our heads.

When we turn off the dialog, we can sometimes achieve a wonderful silence, a nothingness into which our notion of self becomes absorbed. But this silence can yield up other treasure.

Cosmic Language

By turning off language as we know it, we leave ourselves open to hearing the language of the cosmos. Human language is a great accomplishment in our evolution. It has allowed us to have a history (and occasionally to learn from it), transmit knowledge over time and space, and build a technology that affords the so-called civilized world many comforts and sources of entertainment. Many achievements of the human race would be impossible without language: modern medicine, space exploration, skyscrapers, cars and airplanes, computers, and so on.

But our language has also alienated us from the rest of nature. Because we can think in words, because we can put abstract ideas into words, we can often hear nothing else. We are like invading aliens from another galaxy, who refuse to learn the language of the natives as we go about subjugating them. If we can sense any communication from the rest of our planet, it comes across as unintelligible gibberish - or we interpret in human terms what we sense. The wind sighs. The flowers thanked me for the water. My cat is feeling sorry for me. The storm is raging.

By silencing our own language, we can begin to "hear" the voices in the wind, the grasses, the trees, the stones. But these are the merest whispers, and if we attempt to put them into human language, we lose a lot in translation. Instead, if we've turned off the inner human voice, we may be able to understand and absorb feelings and essences from nature. Our language (and our arrogance in thinking we are the end point of evolution) has blinded us to the fact that we are every bit a part of nature as a mountain, an ocean, an eagle, or an ant. Our essence is the same as everything in the cosmos, and the strongest sense of communication we may get is a sense of unity with the all-and-everything. If I had to put human words on this sense, they would be "wonder" and "resonance."

Slow Walk to Paradise

Sitting on a pillow and meditating is a fine activity - or non-activity. I haven't found that it puts me in touch with any resonance with nature. One activity I have found useful is the slow walk. This is not walking meditation in the Buddhist sense, but a slow walk, outdoors, that's somewhat faster that walking meditation. I go just slow enough so I don't miss anything - almost like looking for a lost penny.

When something catches my attention, I stop. It could be something I see, like a pretty stone or a butterfly landing on the path; something I hear, like a birdsong or the rustle of a chipmunk in the leaves; something I smell, like the mixture of new and decaying life in the woods; or something I feel, like a slight breeze in my hair.

First, I pay attention to whatever made me stop. I might crouch down and look at the butterfly for several minutes, or stare into the leaf litter on the forest floor to see if the chipmunk reappears, or enjoy the shape and all the textures of the stone. My intention here is to give total concentration to the object at hand. If I'm lucky, I'll be filled with a sense of wonder and gratitude, for even the smallest thing.

Second, I do a spherical scan, with all my senses, of the area around me. Up. Down. Left. Right. Ahead. Behind. This exercise puts me, and the object that caught my attention, into a larger context. I am in nature, with nature, and of nature.

Later, I may process all of this cognitively. That's a human gift as well as a curse, and I might as well use it. At this point, I'm not putting human characteristics into things. Instead of admiring the steadfastness and patience of stones, I think about how the stones might inspire steadfastness and patience in me. I recall the loon feeding her chick and think of nurturing. I remember a storm and think about how power can look like anger. Wonder from the slow walk begins to feel like resonance. I am not only of nature, I am nature. I am the cosmos.