Contemplative Practice

This section covers what people actually do when they sit down to practise: vipassanā and Zen, Christian contemplation and Sufi dhikr, prayer, fasting, silence, pilgrimage, and the modern secular mindfulness that descends from several of these while claiming none of them.

Three things shape how it is written.

"Meditation" is not one thing, and treating it as one wrecks the discussion. Concentrating on a single object, watching whatever arises without selecting, repeating a phrase, visualising a deity, and inquiring into who is asking are different activities with different mechanisms and different results. A study finding that "meditation" reduces anxiety has told you roughly as much as a study finding that "sport" improves fitness.

The traditions were not aiming at what is being measured. Buddhist practice aims at the uprooting of craving and the end of rebirth. Christian contemplation aims at union with God. Sufi practice aims at the annihilation of the self in the divine. None of these is stress reduction, and measuring cortisol in a person pursuing liberation is not so much testing the tradition as declining to.

And the difficult parts are in the traditions' own maps. Contemporary mindfulness is often presented as uniformly gentle and beneficial. The classical Theravāda progress of insight includes stages named for fear, misery and disgust; the Christian contemplative literature has the dark night; Zen has its own accounts of the ground giving way. These were documented by people who expected them. The modern adverse-effects research has largely rediscovered what the traditions already recorded — and the reason it needed rediscovering is that the material was left out when the practices were secularised.

Everything here is described rather than instructed, and where a practice carries documented risk — intensive retreat and prolonged fasting both do — that is stated on the page rather than left to a disclaimer.