Appendix (4): Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression

Good Mood

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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 15

cont.

Meditation

A comparison is the basic element in any evaluation or judgment. And comparing is a process of developing and using abstract concepts to deal with the sensations that your mind receives from inside and outside your body. In contrast, the various forms of meditation, and of Eastern religious practices generally, are devices to orient you away from abstraction, judgment, comparison, and evaluation, and toward the "primitive" sensations themselves. The other side of the coin is that meditation points you toward the judgment-free perceptions of the sensory world, and perhaps toward cosmic imaginations that often arise from the elementary experience in meditation.

As the greatest interpreter of Buddhism to Westerners put it, not just meditation but Buddhism in its entirety "is a method...for the correction of our perceptions and for the transformation of consciousness" rather than a theology.13 The purpose and effects of Buddhism and Hinduism, in which meditation is the key spiritual element, are more like Western psychotherapy than like Western religion. And indeed, meditation can remove sadness and depression, at least temporarily.14

By "meditation" I mean to include all the sorts of meditation described by Buddhist and Hindu writers as well as by such popularizers as the Maharishi of Transcendental Meditation. More specifically, I include both the sort of meditation in which one shuts out all outside stimuli, and the sort of meditation in which one lets all stimuli in. For more details about the nature of meditation, see such writers as Humphreys (1970), Wood (1949), Suzuki (1907-1963), or a delightful narrative account by Gibson (1974-1975). In the 1970's there also was a rash of discussion of meditation by psychologists, e.g., Naranjo and Ornstein, 1971 and Benson (1975).

Getting rid of suffering by one's own mental efforts in meditation is an idea found in the Western tradition, also. The psychologist James quotes with approval this statement by the artist Carlyle:

Once more, then, our self-feeling is in our power. As Carlyle says: "Make thy claim of wages a zero, then hast thou the world under thy feet. Well did the wisest of our time write, it is only with renunciation that life, properly speaking, can be said to begin."(15)

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Western religious mystics in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions also have practiced meditation; among the most famous are Meister Eckhart, the Cabbalists, and Sufis, respectively.

It is of fundamental importance to understand that the nature of meditation is not mysterious scientifically, though one's thoughts in meditation may (or may not) be mystical and full of awe at the mysteries of life and the universe. Rather it is a process of concentration and controlled imagination.

The Technique of Meditation

Scientific writings on meditation have performed a considerable service in removing the mumbo-jumbo and metaphysical clap-trap from it.(16) Benson and Klipper have invented the felicitous and non-mysterious label, "Relaxation response" for the processes that occur in meditation, and they have boiled down the necessary conditions and instructions for meditation as follows:

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