Meditation

I’ve been thinking about meditation recently. In 2021, it seems as if the only real way I can do something nowadays is to download an app, and have its daily ‘streaks’ keep me on track. Therefore, I downloaded Headspace, and have been trying to at least do one meditation exercise every day.

Basically, I think a lot about what we are and what we do; who we are in relation to other things in our environment, and, I think meditation is a great way to focus on yourself and your actions. It’s great to really consider who it is you are, what it is you do, and how it is that you act with other people. In fact, when I read a few books recently, one called Homo Deus and the other 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, both books came back to the idea that we’re thinking so much outward. We’re thinking about how to make something, make money, make a flight to outer space, make something… out there.

We’re not as much thinking about how to make something within us. How to make ourselves better, how to find something that’s already there, something that’s already within our grasp (not merely just something that we haven’t found yet). In the 21st century book, he literally calls the 21st chapter ‘Meditation’, and talks about how his trip to some retreat influenced him more than he thought it would; how he thinks that brought him closer to it, closer to himself, than any kind of thinking or philosophy truly has. He says it’s because he’s literally just thinking about himself; about how his body feels, how his breath takes, and how he is in relation to the world around him.

Basically, here’s my two cents on mediation. I think meditation is good, and I’m going to continue to instill it into my routine as I do other things, but I don’t think it’s it. I think our bodies are conduits to it, rather than to some true inner self. Meaning, our bodies are how we experience the world, but not just for our benefit. Our hands how we touch and move things, our mouths how we eat, our brains how we think, our whole motions how we help people and influence as much as our lives let us.

All that we can do is within our own bodies, everything else is a story. Our bodies are real, suffering is real, happiness is real. So, you could make the argument that everything that happens to you, and you alone, is real. But does that mean that ‘you’ is the greatest thing that there is? Is humanism and meditation on our human condition the end of philosophy?

I don’t think so.