Does Meditation Make a Difference?
Talk by Laurence Freeman OSB on May 14, 2022
The Laszlo Institute 3rd Global Symposium on
The New Paradigm in Sentience & Consciousness
I am thinking of our theme today, the question of sentience and consciousness, and of what someone said about the universe itself being both sentient and conscious. This might sound like a fairly metaphysical sort of question. Well it is; metaphysics includes the study of fundamental and essential structures of reality, ontology, cosmology, the nature of the mind, space and time. Our present crisis is so deep and urgent that we need to throw ourselves open on all these fronts to the mystery of reality and to the power of wisdom. But we need also to link our enquiry to a practice that bridges the gap between thought and action. That practice is meditation practiced at depth.
If meditation is capable of changing not only those who practice it but the world they care for, is one of the truly redemptive questions for our time. If we find the right questions to lift us out of sterile, self-repeating patterns of consciousness, then we can find our way to the threshold of the self-revealing nature of truth. This metanoia will help us to navigate the confusion and anguish through which we are suffering at this stage in our evolution.
By identifying the right questions, we can see how what we are passing through does not need to collapse us into despair. True, it is a dark night of the soul, with an unleashing of chaos and self-destructiveness. Yet, a dark night, as St. John of the Cross calls it, is dark because we cannot see far ahead. We cannot easily say where or how long or even why. However, while knowing that it involves unavoidable suffering, it is purposeful. Hope carries the conviction, not the prediction, that it will lead to a new point of development in human consciousness which we cannot yet see clearly because we cannot see around corners and uncertainty is a purification of vision. We must therefore ask the right questions, and the question about the effect of meditation is one of them. Understanding the mutation of consciousness we are passing through will show a direct and grounded path forward and therefore, most necessary in a crisis, a way of hope.
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I would like to thank the Institute for making this the theme of our meeting because it directs us from the dualistic to the unified level of consciousness. We should not be too hard on dualism, though, because that is where we are starting from. There is a purpose in dualism. The problems and mistakes it causes point us to a higher consciousness.
The painful misperceptions associated with duality impel us to the next level of unified consciousness. Even though the dualistic level is inherently dysfunctional, suffering awakens us to the deeper meaning of the journey that we make together and with the universe. Julian of Norwich, the great English mystic of the 14th century, has an illuminating phrase: ‘sin is behovely. Sin, that is, is necessary, part of the plan and the pattern. If we think of sin as more than stolen pleasures or the breaking of rules or conventions, but rather as fundamental errors of perception and judgment, then what we call ‘sin’ is the nature of division and duality. These errors, bred in ignorance, produce the worst aspects of human nature. Far from abstraction, this is what we have been seeing in Ukraine or Gaza. The Russian aggression shows the error of believing that the enemy is the absolute ‘other’, the opposite of ourselves. As the language of Putin and of Netanyahu shows, in absolute polarisation and rejection we feel justified in ‘totally destroying’ the other.
Seeing that duality has a purpose, that it has Mother Julian’s “behoveliness”, we are better able to cope with its worst side-effects and seize the opportunity to dissolve duality on a collective level as we work in hope for global unity. This is a specific choice we must make: do we despair because of duality or do we believe in the higher integration process? This choice is a question of survival: it is really what evolution is about. To respond intelligently, consciously, will give us a measure of control. However vulnerable, we feel less powerless. This will help us, too, to identify the forces at work at the dualistic level while remaining detached from our individual experience and preconceptions. as we find at the heart of all the great wisdom traditions Meditation offers this detachment from the ego. It is not cold, scientific objectivity but the detached clarity of other-centeredness which is a sign of emerging unified consciousness. This detachment also creates space for compassion: it releases the primal energy of love, which is the supreme creative and restorative force.
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Another insight that came to Mother Julian in her solitude. She looked at the 14th century world around here — a world of war, plague and social repression and she asked a redemptive question (I paraphrase), ‘What is this mess we are in? What is the meaning of this universal fallout of sin? Is there any meaning to it?’ Her answer came from the Motherhood of God in the single word ‘love.
So I was taught that Love is our Lord’s meaning. And I saw very certainly in this and in everything that before God made us, he loved us, which Love was never abated and never shall be. Love is my meaning.
Love, the ever-present origin as Jean Gebser calls the mystery of God, is the source and purpose of all that exists. The wonder that anything at all exists leads us to see that everything emerges out of love. It is also sustained throughout its evolutionary existence by love; the ultimate meaning is love. Love is originative, creative, bonding, restorative, which human beings soon learn in their long developmental process. Confronted with all the dualities which cause such suffering and peril, it is important to have a holistic and meaningful vision connecting origin to goal. This underpins all ways that form all the ways that we have of making meaning.
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We are painfully conscious of duality because we are human and divine and the two have not yet married. In Christian wisdom, this union happened in the God-man person of Jesus. God became human so that human beings could become God. This keystone of the whole construct of human meaning led Nicolas of Cusa to a very simple defining statement: ‘God is the reconciliation of opposites’.
Human and Divine, what could be more of a duality than that? What could ever seem be more contradictory? And yet, in Christian wisdom, this union of opposites becomes the integration of matter and spirit, of male and female, of cultures and classes, of races, faiths and of the source and goal, Creator and Creation. In the Christian mystical tradition, there is a vibrant wrestling match with this question of duality. It resonates with similar intuitions with other wisdom traditions. It shatters the illusion that God takes sides. We cannot claim God for my side of a war, nor can my enemy. Here is a wedge in the door of violent conflict and hope for peace that passes understanding, not merely ‘peace as the world gives it. Push on door and you find what an Israeli-Palestinian friendship organisation whispers in the roar of ceaseless war: ‘in violence there can be no winners’. Reconciliation and union awaken in human consciousness in even the worst of conditions when we hear this whisper.
We feel important to the comprehensive meaning of the universe because in the daily human struggle, beset with failures, the reconciling of opposites unleashes a great change, a metanoia, in consciousness and in matter itself? If environmental factors can alter genes cannot the union of opposites change the structure of matter?
The union of opposites is not accomplished in the head, conceptually. It happens in the depth where primal unity abides. We are restless, we hunger and thirst for that condition of reconciliation but our hunger changes our environment. In the reconciliation of opposites, everything of human value, precious, beautiful, moving, is given its due recognition and appreciation.
Teilhard de Chardin summons this mystery in his paradoxical statement that “union differentiates”.
Believing that everything will be integrated, that is the work of restoring faith in the human, a self-valuation that is dangerously weakening through our fear of technology and shame at the failure to protect the environment. Faith is restored and made powerful through practice not by argument. Instead of seeing meditation as a way of stress-reduction or self-enhancement we need to understand it as does the perennial wisdom: as a way of faith, strengthening the muscle of attention, teaching us great truths in simple ways through our own experience. We practice it within a shared humanity, not by asserting the atomized, dualistic identity of modern culture. This is our deepest desire even if we cannot name it. St. Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they find themselves in God. Thomas Aquinas believed that ‘God is infinitely simple’, which points to the transformative simplicity of meditation practice.
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Remember what God is: God is the reconciliation of opposites in which nothing is lost or wasted. Even the most terrible things are reconciled. I was in Ukraine recently, visiting our meditation community. I was in a relatively safe part of the country but felt acutely aware, speaking to the refugees and to the people caring for them, of the real horror of what is happening — dehumanisation and the breakdown of humane values under the constant barrage of a brutal enemy.
But is there really anything new under the sun, a cynical observer of human history might ask? Leaving Ukraine, we drove back into Poland and had to stop because of a puncture. We were in a small town where we discovered a small concentration camp had been constructed and operated for two years. We spent time in what remained of it and meditated amid the silent memories of its stones. The dehumanising of the human is evil incarnate. Duality itself is not the problem until it descends into the dehumanising extremity of polarization which denies the right of the other to exist. At such an extreme silence replaces words until they may be used again with some vestige of restored meaning.
What triggers the reintegration process as we confront the darkness in the silence of meditation? The simple act of attention. When we can focus our attention, taking the time needed to give full attention to a question, to a problem, to a person in need, to any dilemma, attention intensifies and begins to become love.
We give attention to what we love, and we will come to love what we give selfless attention to. Attention is redemptive. It corrects mistakes. It replaces venegeance with veracity. It heals wounds and restores the rejected. Pure attention is miraculous.
At times, attention may be focused just on details, providing food and shelter, clothing and toys for children. ‘The holiness of minute particulars,’ as William Blake called them. Yet, attention is also all-incusive because it is in the gift of a human consciousness to turn its attention beyond itself and its personal needs, problems and difficulties, ambitions, fears, doubts, desires and fantasies. It is our capacity to be without striving or desiring so that we become no longer fearful and vindictive towards the other but other-centred. It is to look beyond oneself with a new perspective which transforms all perception of the world and the entire nexus of one’s relationships. This is the practical meaning of Jesus’s teaching to ‘lose yourself’. If I let go of self-consciousness, ego-separateness dissolves and I find myself in nondual union with whoever or whatever I am paying attention to.
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Now, to conclude: my question, ‘Does meditation make a difference?’ Yes, meditation changes things because it is the essential work of attention.
No one meditates without discovering that it changes them. It changes the person who meditates and, if it changes you, it is going to change the whole field of your life: your relationships at home, your intimate relationships, your work relationships, your sense of connection with people you have never met but to whom you belong in the human family in the nondual world of the Spirit.
The question of meditation is therefore an answer though not a reductionistic or instrumental answer. Meditation does not solve all our problems, however nice it would be for us if it did. I have been meditating a long time, but it has not solved all my problems. However, it does bestow a radically different perspective on the problems we have to deal with as they arise from the turbulence of duality and division. This includes problems that we have to live with even if we cannot solve them.
Because it gives us personal experience of integration, personal reconciliation of our conflicts and the opening of mind and heart to what is beyond ourselves, meditation does make a difference to the world.
When Russia attacked Ukraine our coordinators there told me, ‘We are at war, now is the time we need to speak about meditation. They are young but serious about their practice and generous in sharing it with others. The fruits of this are obvious: human kindness and compassion. As the Dalai Lama says, ‘My religion is kindness. If religion does not produce nice people, it has failed.’ Meditators, however, are not just nice. They become catalysts for change as transformation begins in them.
But when things fall apart and human beings are dehumanised, as we see in every war, it is easy to despair of the human. There are many voices today declaring a loss of faith in the human. Some propose that we re-engineer the human genome. Others despair of the advent of Artificial Intelligence or even welcome it to replace the human. Both of these responses are a surrender, a betrayal of the gift of our humanity.
And why is humanity so important? Because every human being has the potential and destiny to become one with the divine. As we pass through this valley of duality, we are move towards the fullness of humanity and the pleroma of God.
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At my home in Bonnevaux, we made a labyrinth near the ancient Benedictine cloister. It has become very popular with visitors and retreatants because it is a powerful universal symbol. Symbols heal and this one heals by symbolising the human journey to unified consciousness at the centre of reality as well as the journey of meditation itself.
Let’s end by considering the difference between a labyrinth and a maze. Walking into a maze leads from one blocked dead-end after another to collapse into the feeling of loss and fear. Walking the labyrinth, on the other hand, is to discover peace in the unity of its one path. You follow this path, accepting its many twists and turns. In doing so, we discover the symmetry of the labyrinth, the sense that spiritual practice makes. By walking its right and left hemispheres, a symmetry is consummated in the centre. All we need do is trust what Mother Julian calls “a condition of complete simplicity” by paying attention to the path.
Modern society is lost in its self-made maze. Meditation transforms the panic of the mental maze into the peaceful labyrinth of emerging consciousness.
