Stepping into the deep end
I picked up the interest in meditation from my father, a professor of religious studies with a focus on Indian traditions. He cut his academic teeth translating Sanskrit texts, which planted a fair bit of meditation lore in my childhood.
Still, I didn’t get serious about meditation practice until I graduated college. The entry-level job prospects for a graduate with a degree in economics and philosophy — data analyst, management consulting, and I still don’t know what philosophy grads who don’t want a PhD are supposed to do — didn’t exactly scream existential fulfillment to me. So I saved up and shipped out to Asia instead, doing about a year of the wandering travel and meditation circuit.
I learned some vipassana practice in Thailand. I visited Indian sage Ramana Maharshi’s ashram and learned his flavor of self-inquiry practice. I spent time at a zendo in southern India led by Father AMA Samy, a former Jesuit priest turned Zen master, where the simplicity and directness of Zen got me hooked.
Since then, my relationship with meditation has jumped around. At times, I’ve felt pretty sure that it’s The Answer to the stubbornly human question of how to be happy, that true, durable well-being comes from sitting quietly and unraveling the habits evolution has carved into our minds that have helped our species survive, while perhaps, at the same time, keeping us from really thriving. I’ve also gone through long periods of thinking meditation is mostly a waste of time, a distraction from less literally navel-gazing efforts to improve the world, like ending poverty or factory farming.
Today, I’m somewhere in the middle. Despite the current mindfulness hype, I still believe it is one of the more underrated ways to durably improve our experience of being alive. At the same time, there are plenty of other ways to do so that mindfulness can’t substitute for, like building worker power.
What I find particularly interesting about the rising field of advanced meditation, though, is how well it intersects with the core ethos of Future Perfect. Learning how to transform human psychology for the better is, I’ll go out on a limb and wager, important. But in the shadow of mindfulness, it has gone neglected. And thanks to the new generation of research starting to crop up, it’s becoming increasingly tractable. Advanced meditation so neatly fits the important, tractable, neglected framework for doing good that it’s starting to get written up on Effective Altruism forums.
So, if we’re lucky, we’re about to benefit from feedback loops between research and practice that help pave the way for more refined approaches to powerful meditation practices in the near future. Already, the field is full of ideas, practices, and even communities that are putting modern twists on ancient traditions. The idea behind More to Meditation is to guide you through what’s already out there while looking ahead to see what’s coming next.
If you wind up taking the plunge, More to Meditation will guide you through a comprehensive story of meditation, one that weaves in the middle ground between stress relief and enlightenment that, so far, has been largely left out of popular narratives. Along the way, we’ll highlight a wider range of practices, effects, questions, and resources to help you get started, get acclimated, and decide whether any of this is something you’d like to try.
Sign up for More to Meditation here.
—Oshan Jarow, staff writer
