Chestnut Ridge Park, Orchard Park, New York/Photo by Chuck Pierson
William Irwin Thompson, in his book Coming Into Being, discusses what advanced meditation can do to make your life more than what you thought it was:
Now even in the mystical experiences of stopping the heart in yogic meditation there is still a hermeneutics of the imagination. How does one interpret this experience? Say one has been in meditation for 2 hours and one has slowed down one’s metabolism to the point that the heart stops and the breath ceases, and then one feels a movement out of the body through the chakra-vortex of the third eye, … Is it the case that the heart has literally stopped? Or is it the case that now our sensitivity to time is so fine and subtle that the interval between each heart beat has become vastly extended. Like Alice going through the looking glass, or a shaman climbing a pole into another world, one has moved into a relativistic time-space. One is no longer situated in a discrete corpuscular self in which the ego holds reality together. Heart beat – gap – heartbeat. Normally, we ignore the gaps to connect heartbeat to heartbeat with a sense of continuity that we know as the ego or personality. But through meditation one reverses figure and ground and focuses on the gaps rather than the beats. The gaps are given equal time and space, and when that happens, “there goes the neighborhood”. Angels move in across the stream, and it is never going to be the boring suburbs of the ego again.
Is Thompson speculating or just using imaginative metaphors? Researchers at M.I.T. and other American universities are taking the effects of advanced mediation very seriously, suggesting it might be an important tool for optimal health.
Such capacities may also allow advanced meditators to perceive changes in natural scenes that are “hidden” from persons with “normal” attentional capacities, according to research on “change blindness,” and to enhance their visual system functioning akin to high-speed and time-lapse photography, in toto allowing for the perception, as well as sophisticated understanding, of the “moment to moment change or impermanence” universally characteristic of the phenomenal world but normally outside untrained attention and perception according to Buddhist doctrine.
Hat tip to CXB for reminding me of the quotation from William Irwin Thompson.
Porcupine Mountain State Park, Upper Michigan, August 2007
To me, becoming elemental means recognizing my natural place in the world around me; coming into harmony with the elements—earth, water, fire, air—of our surroundings.
Mostly I feel this in my body. Vacations are good, wilderness a necessity. There’s a beach on Lake Superior in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness Area that I’ve visited many times. I’m not much of a swimmer, but I love the water. It’s shockingly cold and awakens my senses, quickens my breath, surrounds me in its velvety softness. I splash around, float and paddle like a dog, then stagger onto the shore, hugging myself as the breeze dries my skin. I throw my head back, drink it all in—the dazzle of the water, the blinding brightness of the sun, the shimmering blues and greens of sky and water, the lake-scented air, the murmur of surf, the sand burning the soles of my feet. I feel stripped: a watery, bright creature, all oxygen and iron and chlorophyll and H2O. I spread out my towel, stretch out on the sand, and let the elements lull me. There’s no hurry, nowhere else to be. I doze and dream as long as I wish, until some impulse—for shade, perhaps, or food, or adventure—rouses me.
These are special times. But the elemental life surrounds us always, everywhere. Even here in my bedroom, there is the orchid on my CD shelf, the wooden curves of my guitar, the leafy branches just outside my window, the blood and bones of my own body. I don’t need to become elemental; I only need to recognize that I already am.
Lily Lake in Colorado, August 2008, Photo by Chuck Pierson
Jonah Lehrer, over at Frontal Cortex, highlights the latest research on how natural scenery is good for your brain, and how it might make you more compassionate:
I’ve written before about the powerful mental benefits of communing with nature – it leads to more self-control, increased working memory, lower levels of stress and better moods – but a new study by psychologists at the University of Rochester find that being exposed to wildlife also makes us more compassionate. Nature might be red in tooth and claw, but even a glimpse of greenery can make us behave in kinder, gentler ways.
If you have time to chatter
Read books
If you have time to read
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
Sing Songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot
Rocky Mountain National Park/Photo by Chuck Pierson
As I was driving home from work this afternoon, I heard Ken Burns, in an interview on National Public Radio about this new documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, articulate almost perfectly my inspiration for creating Becoming Elemental:
More than six years of work on this series led Burns to some interesting discoveries, like the true motivation that inspired the preservation of vast swaths of territory, to create the National Park system. “When I would say I was working on a film about the history, not a travelogue, not a nature film, but a history of the National Parks, [people] go ‘oh, Theodore Roosevelt, conservation’ I say, yeah, that was the second impulse, the first impulse is spiritual,” Burns tells NPR’s Robert Siegel.
Many of the early supporters of the creation of a national park system had experienced revelatory moments out in nature, and wanted to salvage wild land so future generations could have similar experiences.
“Let us set them aside,” says Burns about the thinking of the early park proponents. “Wouldn’t it be possible for a democratic people to own in common these things?”…
“We didn’t yet know why we needed these places and he [John Muir] reminded us, for both scientific and but also sort of spiritual reasons, why saving these places would be good for our souls,” Burns says. “The parks represent in the early years almost a spiritual advancement for the United States, and only later does the conservation ethic come in.”
During that NPR interview, Burns said that being in the National Parks “rearranges your molecules.” Scientific research on meditation, such as that of Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, confirms that insight. It is my belief that practicing meditation, or other forms of contemplation, in wilderness areas does in fact change your brain waves (temporarily) more quickly and more powerfully than technological tools (e.g., meditation CDs or Holosync) and possibly more powerfully than hours of meditation in less natural settings.
-CDP
Upper Michigan, July 2009, Photo by Martin Saunders
The mind moves naturally toward quietness as one enters and dwells in the wilderness. Sometimes it takes only an hour or so on the beach of Lake Superior, or sitting in a stream deep in the woods, before you find that you have returned to beginner’s mind.
Jay Parini, in his wonderful book, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America, points in the direction of “the church of the woods”:
Thoreau was no abstract philosopher, nor was he an original thinker. Instead, he sought what Emerson called “an original relation with the universe.” Emerson had shown him how to do this — not in church, but in the church of the woods, alone. This was quite revolutionary in itself. One did not hover over sacred texts, but simply went off into the natural world to make contact with the divine spirit.
The following photo essay by Martin Saunders captures the elemental quality of the natural world in a way that words alone fail to do:
Becoming Elemental is creating a vision for a truly American meditation practice in the 21st century. American meditation practice finds its place in an historical narrative punctuated by Jeffersonian democracy, constitutionally guaranteed individual liberties, the fight to abolish slavery and the ongoing struggle to protect civil rights, the metamorphosis of the immigrant experience, the defeat of fascism in World War II, the subjugation and then preservation of vast wilderness areas, and the current rising up to face the monumental challenges of climate change and ecological sustainability. American meditation practice is not philosophically or morally grounded in the Asian cultures of Tibet, India, or Japan, but rather in the drama of the American Experience. We trace the roots of an American contemplative tradition back to the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and to American nature writers such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, and Peter Matthiessen. Yet the essential element of a uniquely American meditation practice is that, like America itself, it is constantly evolving and has no fixed commitments to any dogma or ideology.
Becoming Elemental embraces the accumulated spiritual wisdom generated by long-term contemplative practices, whether from Buddhist, Zen, Sufi, or Christian traditions. We are grateful for the knowledge of states of mind that have been mapped by monks, sages, explorers of inner space, teachers of meditation, and modern consciousness researchers. Nonetheless, Becoming Elemental contends that those who teach “Buddhist meditation” or “Zen meditation” focus too much on philosophical and ethical systems that emerged in ancient Asian societies and not nearly enough on the religious, moral, and political foundations of American thought.
American meditation practice:
-is most powerful when grounded in regular practice in the great outdoors, particularly in wilderness areas.
-is evolving during a period of profound change in American culture, politics, and technology.
-is informed and enlarged by science and research.
-moves naturally toward Compassion-in-Action and social justice.
We invite you to join the conversation at Becoming Elemental. Please contact Charles Pierson with suggestions, comments, and questions at charlesdeanpierson@gmail.com
