While the benefits of meditation have been well documented, 85% of the US population and 95% of the global population fail to utilize the extremely accessible and inarguably valid wellness process. Even though mastery of the body-mind connection (BMC) permits a person to reduce stress, control anxiety, improve emotional health, enhance self-awareness, lengthen attention span, reduce memory loss, generate kindness, fight addiction, improve sleep, and decrease blood pressure, as a whole, the trove of benefits is avoided because human instincts and emotions steer the ship away from this apex behavioral technology. The response to meditation exposes humans as emotionally driven creatures, who falsely presume to follow logic and reason.
Motista is a leader in Predictive Emotional Intelligence solutions. They conducted an intensive study of consumer behavior and determined that 71% of customers refer brands because of an emotional connection to said brand. Despite what reason says, brand loyalty is a matter of the heart, not the mind for the majority. Chriss Voss is a former FBI hostage negotiator and best-selling author. His experience solidified his perspective that, "We are all crazy, irrational, impulsive, emotionally driven animals." His realization that negotiation was an emotional game was forged in the real-life crucible of hostage situations. Every life saved verified his perspective. Interacting with people as "emotionally driven animals" defined Mr.Voss’ remarkable career. This approach to negotiation proved itself in business sectors, too.
Despite its success, Voss’ approach clashed with long-held academic styles that were powerful as intellectual theories but weak in reality. What’s intriguing was the academic side's initial commitment to defending the intellectual model and rejecting the emotional model. It seems, often, the discovery or confession that we are emotionally driven creatures provokes debate as if it's hard to believe. We, humans, pride ourselves on being rational and intelligent. To realize we're emotionally driven challenges our superiority bias as "intelligent" animals. Lisa Feldman Barrett, the director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, also notes the significance of emotions stating they aren't simply our reactions to life, emotions are our "constructions of the world". In regards to meditation and BMC mastery, it's a miracle intellectually. The science, modern meditative cultures, and ancient contemplative religions stand by the proclamation that mediation is a very reasonable thing to do. Emotions and instincts, however, say something else about the act. Sitting down, completely alert, internalized, and self-regulated for long periods is the last thing our bodies and minds want to do because the stillness and nonreactivity of it eerily feels like death. As crazy, emotionally driven animals who construct our world through these emotions of ours; if it feels like death, it is death. This makes the price of meditation nothing short of life itself.
As a habit, meditation has had thousands of years to catch on and still hovers at a 15% adoption rate in the USA and roughly 5% globally because death is the gatekeeper of meditation and few see value in premature dying. But the gatekeeper can't be blamed. The emotions surrounding death are the reason why the miracle of meditation is avoided, not the dying itself.
"Of many I go the first. Of many I go the midmost." - Nachiketas; The Katha Upanishad
Nachiketas is a young boy. His father is summoned to the Raja (king) and expected to make monarchial offerings. Standing in front of the Raja, the father gives over his cattle. Nachiketas notices his father is giving the older, weaker cattle to the king and in youthful protest against him comments, "Why are you offering the infirm?" After a small back and forth, Nachiketas' father makes his son part of the offering. Nachiketas is sacrificed and finds himself at the door of Yama, God of Death. The boy sits in stillness for 3 days and 3 nights. Yama's wife was impressed and suggested that Yama meet the boy. Death agrees and honors the laws of hospitality, providing, at the minimum, water to drink. Then, Death goes beyond hospitality and grants Nachiketas three wishes as a reward for his willingness to die and sit. This story is called the Katha Upanishad. The Upanishads are a series of around 200 Hindi religious texts written between 800-500 BCE. Of the 200, only 10 are commonly studied. Of these 10 Principle Upanishads, The Katha Upanishad is one of the more recent additions. It's renowned for its brevity, summarizing the vast ideas of previous editions into a short, concise story about a boy who dies.
"Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the path. Until you have developed this awareness, all other practices are useless." - the Dalai Lama
Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism, if not all spiritual practices fixate on death in some way because death is the existential, ever-present, and personal grand finale of not just life but all things, even the inanimate, even you. It's not a revelation that stars and galaxies "die" as entropy builds and Yama disperses their forms back into his void. Somewhere there was once a star that burned bright and hot; now it doesn’t. The still, cold left behind is death. Energy spreads apart, collapses, or explodes and ultimately leaks away. Since this is the inevitable end of all things, spiritualists and BMC enthusiasts see it as a major point of life and a potential climax of their personal existence. The curiosity revolves around the question, “When the cold comes, will some special part of us remain?” or “Does dying reveal higher truths about the nature of life and self?” If these are possibilities, control of the body-mind system seems advantageous in dying well. In dying, the significance of life is made manifest. Nature knows, the cosmos is the way, and it all points to undoing. That seems wise. Meditators, seeking “pure” awareness, attempt to embody the experience of dying via the practices to gain the wisdom of life's ultimate moment before it actually comes to strip it all away.
"Die before you die," is a phrase used to describe the goal of yoga and yet another way of understanding the cryptic process, experience, and consequence of BMC mastery, yoga, and meditation.
So, in what ways is meditation death to our bodies' instincts and emotional minds? And why does it help a seeker develop transformative wakefulness?
In short: Death is an ultimate letting go where all personal systems progressively turn off. Eventually, all energy depletes. Resistance ends. Acceptance of life, death, and self becomes inevitable. Last inhale is taken. True nature is rediscovered. Last exhale is taken.
In Hindu mythology, there is a creature named Adisesh, the one that remains. He’s a snake with many heads who holds god in his long body as they drift in the milk ocean of creation. This creature points to the significance of the piece of a person that remains in all moments of life and death. This concept of something remaining is Nietzche’s void and Carl Jung’s “shadow.” In Vedic thought it’s known as shoonya, the void. The term for peak mediation, nirvana, means to extinguish the flame. Meditation is a process associated with turning off, emptiness, stillness, and, yes, dying. Diving into this void through meditation is the death that reveals what remains within the meditators themselves as a direct experience.
Stillness is instinctual death: While all things eventually die, movement is the definitive-constant of reality. As things die, life keeps dancing. True, absolute physical stillness is not only incomprehensible but, equally, impossible and non-existent. All subatomic particles and the atoms they construct are in movement. Regarding life, every cell in every living body and the subsequent tissues and organisms are, equally, in perpetual movement. Physically and biologically, denying anything its right to participate in the primordial law of movement creates exceptional stress. For organisms whose primary purpose is survival and whose primary function of survival is locomotion, movement is life itself. Every predator knows the significance of stopping an animal from moving and every prey animal knows if they’re still moving there’s still a chance. Predator or prey, cell or atom, planet or galaxy, nothing does not move because change is endless and forever.
Florida has spent 6.1 billion dollars in drudging, trying to prevent life and change at its coasts. The oceans are pulling the coastal sand away, usable shorelines are diminishing rapidly, and it can't be stopped. Change, movement, and life will always prevail. Imagine if a seed was somehow restrained from movement, the plant inside would have no opportunity to grow, and in that, it wouldn't. Imagine a planet paralyzed in space, somehow frozen in orbit - a lifeless and futureless rock. No movement feels wrong because it is wrong and the stillness of meditation triggers a similar, instinctual sense of alarm.
Whether it's the physical restraint of lab rats, time out for disruptive kids, the arrest and imprisonment of dangerous people, the freeze responses of prey animals (which humans are), or the act of sitting perfectly still to meditate; stillness and living beings have a disreputable history. We don’t want to be a frozen planet, ever. This exodus from stillness goes all the way back to the near beginning of life, when a single-celled organism sought out light, to escape the colder darkness of the ancient seas of a primordial earth. It moved purposefully for the first time and subconsciously vowed to keep living, surviving, and moving. Here we are, inheritors of that first single-celled dream, avoiding the miracle discovery of our mindful-kin because it defies a feeling we've been loyal to for billions of years.
"Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya" is a Vedic mantra that means, “Guide us from darkness to light.”
Now, it might be time to get still in the darkness.
Meditation as emotional and mental death: As fire meant danger and death to prehistoric humans until it was understood, meditation will trigger a sense of danger for modern people until stillness is intellectually understood and emotionally accepted. The modern emotional reason populations fail to meditate, however, is not because of stillness directly or death itself. Rather, it's because of the perceived "death" of experience and opportunity, mainly through the form of pleasure lost. Meditation is the momentary death of what can be called mundane and overt pleasure. Examples of mundane pleasure include relaxing posture, daydreaming, scratching an itch, sighing, or looking around. These are foundational forms of pleasure that nothing but death itself has the right to take away. Overt pleasures are both positive and negative thrills of the modern world; all forms of entertainment, hobbies, smartphones, apps, online shopping, streaming services, alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, and processed foods. Nachiketas essentially sacrifices himself, his life, and his pleasure to confront death. Meditation is an act of sacrifice, lethal for the ego, where personal wants, needs, and desires are intentionally subdued to the greatest extent possible. In that, moments of mundane and/or overt pleasure are traded for a moment of "close to nothing".
The mind doesn't like giving something up for nothing, let alone "all possible opportunity of pleasure" up for nothing. For that reason, meditation is perceived to have a high opportunity cost. Opportunity cost, plainly stated, is the potential benefits lost as one choice is made over all other choices. This stress of sacrificing potential pleasure is even more distressing when said mind is more than likely addicted to the opportunity of pleasure. Eknath Eswaran, a novelist and commentator of the Upanishads, observed that due to the innovations of the modern world, the obvious and unspoken religion of the planet is pleasure. It is the era of hedonism and meditation is an almost literal counterbalance. Stillness, now, is the unlikely hero. Meditation to a modern mind, accustomed to an unprecedented level of pleasure and desire, is not a literal death but the mental dying of its modern, core-existential reason; to feel good and be entertained as often as possible.
The reasons why meditation is avoided do not explain why meditation should be pursued. And as death is now associated with meditation, what is the benefit of pursuing the great void?
Rumi said it well, “We come spinning out of nothing, scattering stars like dust.”