Can you move a little faster, said the whiting to the snail.

Recently our stream was addressed by Bill Whiting, head of the School of Meditation. For this listener, he exemplified how to teach the subject: he not only knows what His Holiness says on the subject, but also tells you what it is like to meditate, for him. I asked him about whether we should talk about meditation and he said that we certainly should.

Although I appreciate, and feel, the concern that people have about speaking of meditation, I think the value of this has been very exaggerated in the School. Why? Because there are very few people in the School - very few tutors - that feel confident to talk about it. Their reticence has led their students to follow suit. This means that the problems never get addressed or resolved. I recently spoke to someone who said that she had recently 'fessed up' to her tutor - in 25 years she'd never really got what meditation is about, and in fact she didn't meditate on her own time. I don't think that's uncommon among senior people. It's time to be honest with ourselves, and others.

I think what we should also consider is the growing scientific evidence about meditation. Firstly, it suggests that it's 'a good thing', and secondly it specifies why it's a good thing.

One thing I've noticed about meditation is that it has definite effects on the body. This morning I sat down to meditate and I noticed that I felt tense - my shoulders were gripped with tension and stiffness. There's not much you can do about this kind of tension. A massage helps a bit, or exercise, but really you're only addressing the symptoms. But after 30 minutes of meditation (no fireworks, lot of thinking) the physical problem is gone. It works by itself, despite my own worst efforts. It's kind of miraculous, and it's a daily contradiction of what I normally believe about cause and effect.

One of my students gave me printouts of two medical abstracts about meditation. The first one concludes that "the practice of meditation activates neural structures involved in attention and control of the autonomic nervous system". The second one says meditation changes the physical structure of the brain. It thickens the brain cortex, an effect especially notable in older people: "suggesting that meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning". This means that meditation might be a safeguard against senility or diseases like Huntingdon's. Another book I read recently summarised the research that showed that meditation was the only thing, other than prozac or cognitive therapy, that you can do to make your outlook on life sunnier. Psychoanalysis, and all the panoply of therapies and spiritual practices, do not have a reliable effect on your level of inner happiness, but meditation does.

I suppose I mention all of this because I think a lot of people don't really believe in meditation. They don't believe because their tutors don't believe. This is not to blame the tutors, but to note an area that needs some honest self-assessment by individuals and the organisation. In the previous post I noted one reason why this might be: the School is strongly oriented towards 'the way of action', and meditation is not an activity. Meditation contradicts many of the things we believe in.

This leaves us in a bit of a quandary. In one of the Marx Brothers films, a lady says to Chico Marx that she had seen him cheating at cards "with my own eyes". Chico retorts: "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" Until we start believing our own eyes, our own perceptions, our own insights and intelligence, our beliefs are no better than hearsay. Until we get used to speaking about what we find, and acting on what we say, we're not really philosophers.