I addressed this question in a previous article (see The 30-Minute Meditation
Challenge). Indeed, one of the primary reasons to meditate is to integrate your inner and outer experiences. But if my case wasn’t strong enough to induce commitment, let’s consider the existential anxiety.
One of the central tenets of Buddhism is the First Noble Truth: suffering is endemic to human nature. It’s the constant thought and concurrent feeling that things are not quite right. My health, my work, my weight, my strength, my vitality are all “off” in some non-specific way. I can’t quite place it or get rid of it, so I fear I will live with suffering for the rest of my life. And although I scratch a dozen items a day from my to-do list, I can’t erase an underlying sadness, a constant sense of unworthiness, a dearth of meaning that could assuage the fear of death and the constant precarity of life.
Buddhism (in the Second Noble Truth) identifies three causes of suffering: greed, aversion, and delusion. When you walk into a room full of people, what do you tell yourself about them individually? What judgments do you make? Are you, for instance, automatically critical of some people because of the way they look? That’s aversion at work. It can be quite unconscious, but negativity is there, and it has immediate repercussions that manifest as suffering. Fortunately, Buddhism also promises the end of suffering (The Third Noble Truth) by eradicating its causes.
We think the cause of our aversion is out there in the person about whom we are averse. But reality is never “out there;” it’s always in our minds. Virtually nothing in your life occurs without prior thought. So, the end of suffering is in your mind, beginning with the awareness that you are thinking negatively about other people. Those thoughts are the antecedents of karmic action. So, Buddhism’s solution is changing your thinking by following the noble eightfold path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. The final three pathways
are the primary realm of meditation.
“We think the cause of our aversion is out there in the person about whom we are averse. But reality is never “out there;” it’s always in our minds. Virtually nothing in your life occurs without prior thought.”
One cannot practice Buddhism without meditating. The outer world has too many sensory distractions to which we are attracted, greedily. Also, our aversely conditioned way of viewing others sucks us into myriad misperceptions, each with its concurrent feelings of having been violated. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet the power of our thinking drives us backward, though we insist we’re going forward. The sort of reality-based awareness we require is within us. And meditation is the vehicle that takes us inward.
If you still question the efficacy of meditation, don’t take my word for it. Forge ahead by taking little experimental steps. Pay attention to the way your life transforms. Can you admit to the diminishing of your existential anxiety? Is that diminishment at least equal to the time you spent meditating rather than doing what your ego-mind demanded?