In the Western world, meditation is conceived as bringing about a peaceful, tranquil state that you sort of drift off into upon sitting down, which unleashes this lovely cloud of peace that dissolves stress and makes one fresh, which is only a sliver of the true practice. This is just as well, as the West has largely subsumed various Eastern spiritual practices like meditation to serve as a kind of narcotic - as Zizek has expertly noted - to extract the narcotising effects from the entire body of practice and then toss the rest of the body away, just as one derives heroin from poppies. This narcotic, along with many others, spiritual and chemical, is essential to keep running an essentially insane state of affairs that drives its inhabitants to utter spiritual desolation and existential terror.
To be fair, this is how a society functions: bound by some unifying ideology, it takes in ideologies and practices from the outside and converts them into a projection of its own ideological form which it can then incorporate into its belief systems and practices.
As a side note, the East is now largely administrated through the dictates of global capital, but I'm using "East" and "West" in this case for expediency, and "the West" has become colloquially known as the central locus of empire, the fountainhead of the concentration of material power, the modern Babylon.
Moving on, meditation is in fact very peaceful and bestows its pupils with a lasting and even-ended serenity that no tranquillizer or narcotic can achieve. But at the same time, meditation is quite violent as a practice within Western culture, and it takes a little unpacking to understand this.
To reach a true state of tranquillity and contentment means to adopt a lifestyle fundamentally antagonistic to the Western life in the belly of capital. It means to renounce not just psychological and physical cravings - an act that would collapse the global economy once and for all - but to overcome the aversion to death itself, which would not just bankrupt the healthcare and medical sciences industries, but dissolve the police state and the military as well. This means adopting a living ethos whose axiomatic precepts would generate a society that would have to blow apart the capitalistic society it grew inside.
A serious meditation discipline like Vipassana seeks to break down this systematized pathway of pleasure craving and pain aversion, much like most other types of spiritual practices which have emerged from the ruins of a collapsing material empire.
It does this by simulating a confrontation with the forces of destruction. One is to sit for an entire hour, sitting completely straight, without moving. To a Western subject, the agony starts almost immediately, yet one cannot move. The body experiences excruciating pain all over, but instead of escaping it, it must be met head on and surrendered to. This process changes one's perceptions of and attitudes towards pain.
The state one achieves after this process mirrors what one can find in certain trauma survivors or people who have hit some sort of rock bottom. One reaches a point in the traumatic event in which the forces of destruction cannot be escaped, and one comes to terms with them. The process continues in a macro sense as empire undergoes its slow disintegration: the subject comes out of its dream state, renouncing the pleasure/pain dichotomy.
A practice of peace, contentment, contemplation, and compassion takes on this violent character through dialectic contact of the Western subject. The Western industrial sensibility is administrated with great violence: one is beat about the head with it through a constant assault of advertising. One must consume and produce or else one is functionally useless and left to starve, or be absorbed into the incarceration complex, or be destroyed.
This generates a rational constellation of controls which is constantly administrating and directing the emotional drives, so as to integrate the subject into the greater system with a tolerable amount of social and political harmony. It is this constellation of controls that meditation seeks to destroy and dissolve.
This is not to say meditation is anti-rational. On the contrary, the act of practicing meditation takes rational controls. It takes a measured and disciplined direction of the lower brain. A better way to conceive of it is as a way to reboot the system, to wipe away the messy tangle of heuristics, habits, and thought-patterns which accompany the modern subject, so as to commune with the lower processes and generate a new, functional rational system.
The process lays bare the stark dysfunction of the postmodern mind; one's attention flits from one stimuli to the next, often without processing or resolving the last. One resides in a cognitive state of near schizophrenia, as Deleuze and Guattari described. One's attention exists much as a frayed end of rope, the detached strands angling off into space, out of communication with each other. The task is to mend these splits and reconstitute the mind.
All of this is why meditation in its most serious forms is largely practiced in monasteries, sanctuaries which are safely removed from the material-economic mainline.
To learn a serious technique such as Vipassana, one has to learn it in a highly regimented and controlled environment, which is intended to address the effects of living in a highly regimented and controlled society, even as the ideological structure housing meditation practice stresses radical impermanence, change, and encourages an impetus to let life proceed as it will and to let things happen.
Impermanence is the key word. Modern society perceives pain and pleasure in a wholly unique way, a perception which is tied to a greater ideological apparatus and sensibility. In this society, both in its ideology and daily life, death is conceived as this odious specter that man can overcome. We are predisposed to treat disintegration as some cruel abnormality which we must fight against with all of our will, and so as a society we go about generating institutions and cultural artifacts which insist they should last indefinitely.
Man - there's a good reason for saying "man" - stands apart from this cyclic pattern of birth, death, and rebirth. Man alone is divine, and will transcend this cycle. And so we see individuals fighting tooth and nail to maintain a youthful integrity of their bodies and mind, even as they come apart. We see empires committing vast atrocities to curtail the natural ebb and flow of power, to concentrate power among their members, to preserve their access to objects of pleasure indefinitely, and shield themselves from objects of pain indefinitely.
It is power that makes this sensibility particularly explosive. Concentrated material power creates a highway in which objects of pleasure, whether physical or psychological, flow in greater concentration towards the powerful, and objects of pain flow towards the powerless, resulting in a profound state of social polarization. This creates multiple centers of polarization, multiple empires of the powerful seeking immortality, which, upon coming up against resource limits and the reality of a finite planet, results in a violent clash, as no two empires can co-exist with the logic of indefinite accumulation and concentration.
Meditation and other spiritual practices then are part of a natural response to this dangerous state of attachment. They are the breaking away of individuals and eventually masses from this calcified structure.
The Vipassana teachers claimed that meditation was not necessarily a process of self-mortification, but in a way it is. One voluntarily undergoes pain and deprivation to further extinguish this ego which has raged out of control.
This process also reveals the dialectical nature of pain. If one's mind fears and loathes pain as some abnormality, it actually amplifies the pain itself. One looks upon the pain and remarks, good god! One becomes alarmed, and the pain grows in power and importance, and one looks upon this growing power and remarks, good god! And the pain grows in turn.
But if one looks upon the pain as yet another natural phenomena, to arise and then pass away after some time, the pain is diffused. The conversation is not entertained. The pain goes away.
This does not account for extreme pain, as pain still is the body attempting to communicate. To account for this requires an examination of the paradoxes which face Buddhism, which I will get to next.
