Much has been made of meditation in pop American culture in the last 40 years. There was the craze of Transcendental Meditation, sold to a young intellectual crowd in the 1970s by the Beatles and their guru, who became a multimillionaire on it. There was Insight Meditation, another intellectual movement, inspired by meditative Buddhism. There were various self-actualizing New Age meditation gurus whose self-help books were eagerly adopted by the addiction-recovery industry. Zen meditation has been a constant path for those who turn their backs on frenzied, urban materialism. And, Tibetan Buddhist meditation has been popularized by the Free-Tibet movement. Thomas Merton wrote about Catholic monastic meditative traditions.
My question: Meditation or medication?
I have had some of exposure to all the meditative disciplines mentioned. I accept the validity and efficacy of meditation as a worthy behavior, regardless of the methodology. However, I do take issue with the concept that meditation has any cumulative effect if used only as a treatment in reaction to a psychic headache or worldly stress.
As I understand the traditions that developed meditation as an effective tool to expand consciousness, relax the body and calm the static interference of obsessive thought, their prescription for the use of meditation, based on centuries of its application to millions of lives, is the daily use of meditation as an exercise to build psychological strength and focus.
Therefore, when a regularly stress-polluted mind infrequently yields to meditation like taking an aspirin, its headache may temporarily be mollified, but the root causes of the problem are untouched. As occurs with the person who runs to the gym in May to feel comfortable in a swinsuit in June, backache is a more likely result than fitness.
Meditation of any kind, when practiced routinely, is both restorative and cumulatively empowering. Its restorative effect, in my opinion, becomes secondary to its strengthening of sustainable vision and focus in daily life situations. Like muscular exercise, meditation as habit eventually leads to greater emotional and intellectual fitness.
