Rationality Through Meditation

Meditation is often packaged up with so much nonsense metaphysics, religious baggage, and spiritual glitter that it is tough to take seriously. Sam Harris, a renown skeptic, is a proponent and practitioner of meditation, but even he is honest in acknowledging the ridiculous fanfare that accompanies it. Where should a level-headed, rational-thinking intellectual start on their path to discovering the realities and benefits behind meditation? That’s what I was wondering when I showed up for a group discussion on the matter. I came away with some very enticing points.

The definition of meditation can be distilled in many ways, but it mostly comes down to focus. All agree that the practice is difficult in its beginnings, but over time, one becomes better at letting their thoughts bead and roll off the surface of their consciousness, rather than soak in. Weatherproofing for the mind. The efforts of this exercise, which takes less than an hour a day, are realized in the brain, where structural changes can occur, to the effect of lowering anxiety and even increased sustained focus during involved tasks.

But the most compelling benefit of meditation for me would have to be its potential for promoting rational thought. You must be curious how I could see meditation, a junkyard magnet for woo-woo bullshit, as a gateway to rationality when the vast majority of its spokesmen seem to lack that very trait. Expectations go a long way in shaping our subjective worlds. You don’t need to buy into the concept of transcendence to empty your mind. Just like peyote may be used by shaman and laymen alike, you get out of meditation what you make sense of. It won’t turn a guru into a skeptic and it won’t turn a skeptic into a yuppie.

The process of meditation takes many forms. Let’s just talk about breathing and thoughts. As you fill your lungs and focus on the sensation of the air tickling the outer rims of your nostrils, thoughts may enter your mind, but they are not welcome now. You shoo them out and bid them to return later whilst every breath sweeps the dirt from the surfaces of your mind’s machinery. Eventually, you become more at ease and your mind hums with the white noise of a silenced motor. Now when thoughts occur, you experience them briefly, and then let them dissolve. You label them. “That is a thought.” And watch them slide away, never hearing or caring if they make a noise when they reach the bottom of the abyss.

Emotional attachment is somewhat of a sweet dessert. Its taste is teasing; it urges you to let it linger on your tongue so that every grain of sugar can melt before you swallow it down. We grow up leaving room after every meal for the emotions, skipping the steak, savoring the ice cream. Even when it gives us brain freeze or a tooth ache, the taste was worth it. And our sticky fingers hold on to thoughts and refuse to let them go. Meditation can be our diet plan.

We live our lives so full of thoughts and emotions, that the concept of being empty makes us shy away. We think of someone whose mind is empty and we imagine a shell of a person, a brick wall, a void of a soul. Nothingness is not a bad thing, though. It is a template that all clear thinking with no preconceptions must be done from.

Ideas and thoughts are like possessions to us; they evoke feelings when they are considered that make us favor them over others, often to the detriment of reason. Part of the effects of meditation is the ability to recognize thoughts apart from the feelings that they evoke. We can observe our thoughts as data or evidence rather than reflections of ourselves. That data can be used in a rational evaluation, but it is only as strong as the reality it represents. Let go of the need to have your self imprinted on the ideas you express or consider, because when you meditate, you cast them aside all the same. One way to do this is to imagine the idea as a nondescript object on the other side of the room rather than a treasure nestled within the vault of your heart.

More important than separating your thoughts from the feelings that accompany them is the recognition of the feelings you have in the first place. Identifying your emotions in meditation can help you recognize when they are affecting your normal thoughts. While emotion is necessary for things like empathy, we must recognize that it only works against us in rational thought. And sometimes, we must admit, emotion makes a mess of everything.

The saying goes that pain is real, but suffering is optional. And it is the suffering, with enough practice, that we can detach and discard from our experience. But while we can free ourselves from suffering, we should also be wary of soaking in only our positive emotions. I think the dessert metaphor can be extended to diabetes at this point. Nobody trusts someone who only sees sunshine.

The goal of rationality through meditation is to ultimately reduce our intrinsic bias when considering ideas, and we do this by isolating thoughts from the attachments and emotions that come with them. As you have seen, however, the whole process can potentially envelope and change vital aspects of what we consider to be our identities. Who wants to detach from their emotions and ideas? They’re what make us... us. But is that really who we are? In keeping with the spirit of detachment, we cannot be afraid to have our values change. I can imagine that if we look back and realize that the change happened, we’d be more afraid of returning than continuing on.