I realised I haven't directly answered the question 'Why
meditate?'
Here is a good article (and in fact a good book as well, called
Mindfulness in Plain English): http://www.budsas.org/%7Eanson/ebud/mfneng/mind1-4.htm
Chapter 1
Meditation: Why Bother?
Meditation is not easy. It takes time and it takes energy. It also
takes grit, determination and discipline. It requires a host of
personal qualities which we normally regard as unpleasant and which
we like to avoid whenever possible. We can sum it all up in the
American word 'gumption'. Meditation takes 'gumption'. It is
certainly a great deal easier just to kick back and watch
television. So why bother? Why waste all that time and energy when
you could be out enjoying yourself? Why bother? Simple. Because you
are human. And just because of the simple fact that you are human,
you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life
which simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your
awareness for a time. You can distract yourself for hours on end,
but it always comes back--usually when you least expect it. All of
a sudden, seemingly out of the blue, you sit up, take stock, and
realize your actual situation in life.
There you are, and you suddenly realize that you are spending your
whole life just barely getting by. You keep up a good front. You
manage to make ends meed somehow and look OK from the outside. But
those periods of desperation, those times when you feel everything
caving in on you, you keep those to yourself. You are a mess. And
you know it. But you hide it beautifully. Meanwhile, way down under
all that you just know there has got be some other way to live,
some better way to look at the world, some way to touch life more
fully. You click into it by chance now and then. You get a good
job. You fall in love. You win the game. and for a while, things
are different. Life takes on a richness and clarity that makes all
the bad times and humdrum fade away. The whole texture of your
experience changes and you say to yourself, "OK, now I've made it;
now I will be happy". But then that fades, too, like smoke in the
wind. You are left with just a memory. That and a vague awareness
that something is wrong.
But there is really another whole realm of depth and sensitivity
available in life, somehow, you are just not seeing it. You wind up
feeling cut off. You feel insulated from the sweetness of
experience by some sort of sensory cotton. You are not really
touching life. You are not making it again. And then even that
vague awareness fades away, and you are back to the same old
reality. The world looks like the usual foul place, which is boring
at best. It is an emotional roller coaster, and you spend a lot of
your time down at the bottom of the ramp, yearning for the
heights.
So what is wrong with you? Are you a freak? No. You are just human.
And you suffer from the same malady that infects every human being.
It is a monster in side all of us, and it has many arms: Chronic
tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the
people closest to you, feelings being blocked up, and emotional
deadness. Many, many arms. None of us is entirely free from it. We
may deny it. We try to suppress it. We build a whole culture around
hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting
ourselves from it with goals and projects and status. But it never
goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every
perception; a little wordless voice at the back of the head saying,
"Not good enough yet. Got to have more. Got to make it better. Got
to be better." It is a monster, a monster that manifests everywhere
in subtle forms.
Go to a party. Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongued voice
that says fun on the surface and fear underneath. Feel the tension,
feel the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. They are faking it. Go to
a ball game. Watch the fan in the stand. Watch the irrational fit
of anger. Watch the uncontrolled frustration bubbling forth from
people that masquerades under the guise of enthusiasm, or team
spirit. Booing, cat-calls and unbridled egotism in the name of team
loyalty. Drunkenness, fights in the stands. These are the people
trying desperately to release tension from within. These are not
people who are at peace with themselves. Watch the news on TV.
Listen to the lyrics in popular songs. You find the same theme
repeated over and over in variations. Jealousy, suffering,
discontent and stress.
Life seems to be a perpetual struggle, some enormous effort against
staggering odds. And what is our solution to all this
dissatisfaction? We get stuck in the ' If only' syndrome. If only I
had more money, then I would be happy. If only I can find somebody
who really loves me, if only I can lose 20 pounds, if only I had a
color TV, Jacuzzi, and curly hair, and on and on forever. So where
does all this junk come from and more important, what can we do
about it? It comes from the conditions of our own minds. It is
deep, subtle and pervasive set of mental habits, a Gordian knot
which we have built up bit by bit and we can unravel just the same
way, one piece at a time. We can tune up our awareness, dredge up
each separate piece and bring it out into the light. We can make
the unconscious conscious, slowly, one piece at a time.
The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant.
Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same. Perpetual
alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe. A thought
springs up in you head and half a second later, it is gone. In
comes another one, and that is gone too. A sound strikes your ears
and then silence. Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and
it is gone. People come into your life and they leave again.
Friends go, relatives die. Your fortunes go up and they go down.
Sometimes you win and just as often you lose. It is incessant:
change, change, change. No two moments ever the same.
There is not a thing wrong with this. It is the nature of the
universe. But human culture has taught u some odd responses to this
endless flowing. We categorize experiences. We try to stick each
perception, every mental change in this endless flow into one of
three mental pigeon holes. It is good, or it is bad, or it is
neutral. Then, according to which box we stick it in, we perceive
with a set of fixed habitual mental responses. If a particular
perception has been labeled 'good', then we try to freeze time
right there. We grab onto that particular thought, we fondle it, we
hold it, we try to keep it from escaping. When that does not work,
we go all-out in an effort to repeat the experience which caused
that thought. Let us call this mental habit 'grasping'.
Over on the other side of the mind lies the box labeled 'bad'. When
we perceive something 'bad', we try to push it away. We try to deny
it, reject it, get rid of it any way we can. We fight against our
own experience. We run from pieces of ourselves. Let us call this
mental habit 'rejecting'. Between these two reactions lies the
neutral box. Here we place the experiences which are neither good
nor bad. They are tepid, neutral, uninteresting and boring. We pack
experience away in the neutral box so that we can ignore it and
thus return jour attention to where the action is, namely our
endless round of desire and aversion. This category of experience
gets robbed of its fair share of our attention. Let us call this
mental habit 'ignoring'. The direct result of all this lunacy is a
perpetual treadmill race to nowhere, endlessly pounding after
pleasure, endlessly fleeing from pain, endlessly ignoring 90
percent of our experience. Than wondering why life tastes so flat.
In the final analysis, it's a system that does not work.
