Meditation in Troubled Times

There’s an old Zen saying: “The world is topsy-turvy.” 

Who is not aware of this today? The state of the world is painful to everyone. The world careens onward in its topsy-turvy course, causing a pervasive sense of inward dread many of us can’t afford to entertain.

No wonder so many of us are in denial, whether subscribing to fanaticism, lunatic politics, addictions, or simply unplugging from the disturbing news of ecological crisis or economic woes. Deep down we all know the fix we’re in, but we can’t afford to face it. It’s just too much. 

Is there a way we can digest, hold, and live with the scale of our current problems?

Meditation practice makes denial impossible and truth sustainable. 

First, it is impossible to sit on a meditation cushion for any length of time without noticing suffering, within and without. But as consciousness opens up little by little over time, it becomes big enough and resilient enough to see and withstand great difficulty. Though meditation practice may or may not help us produce rational solutions to the problems we face, it does give us wide vision and deep stability in the face of difficult situations—and the courage to sustain the effort to do something about them, even against great odds. In trying times, these personal qualities may be just as important as rational solutions. Maybe even more important. 

Joe Galewsky, a Zen priest from The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, is also a climate scientist. A few years back, his studies took him to the polar ice caps of Peru, 18,600 feet above sea level, where he spent a full day at the margin of a melting glacier. Here’s what he wrote in his blog:

The overall experience of being in the presence of this glacier, is one of immensity, stillness, and deep deep silence… The glacier is clearly melting, for sure, but I really experienced it in terms of the most basic Buddhist teaching of impermanence: All conditioned things arise, abide for a time, and pass away… This impermanence is very impersonal. It doesn’t matter what we think about it, or how we feel about it, or how we vote, or what we drive. This impermanence is simply the nature of things.

This may sound like Joe is suggesting that we relax about climate change. But he’s not. He’s suggesting that if we’re going to be able to do anything about climate change, we are going to need a deeper, more mature, and more grounded perspective.

Political, technical, and social action are necessary to bring the changes we need. There’s a lot of work ahead: cages to rattle, courage and imagination to manifest. But we will need to sustain such effort over the long haul with compassion and clarity of vision if we hope to get anywhere with it. 

This is where meditation practice and other forms of serious spiritual practice really help. With it, we grow in our capacity for patience, fortitude, compassion, imagination, and love. Month by month, year by year, meditation helps us become mature, kind, capable individuals—the sort of people a troubled, crazy world will depend on to maintain stability.

Finally, beyond the internal resilience and groundedness that meditation fosters are the valuable social skills it helps us develop. 

A few years ago I spent a day talking about climate change with a small group of engineers, social scientists, and political theorists. One of the engineers said that despite the enormity of the problem, the technical solutions to fix  it are available. But, he said, the political possibility of applying the solutions is pretty much zero. 

Ultimately, climate change—and probably all our social problems—are less technical than moral problems, a collective failure of imagination and courage, a narrowness of heart.

At the end of the meeting, I said, “If we are in for hard times, it will go much better if our collective attitude is predominantly one of patience, kindness, love, and compassion. If we have to suffer, better to suffer in loving embrace, rather than to go down bickering and fighting.” 

Everyone in the room seemed to see my point. So maybe the cultivation of peacefulness and love in tough times isn’t such a crazy thing to do.