Two Voices, One Song

Photo Credit: Sergiu Bacioiu via Compfight cc

 I began a course recently from The Great Courses called “Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation. The professor is Mark. W. Muesse, Ph. D. from Rhodes College.

Meditation isn’t something new to me, but this type of application makes for interesting learning. Standard practice meditation involves delving into oneself, discovering those nooks and crannies we’ve been hiding from ourselves since we were born. It involves a direct stripping away, if you will, of the layers of protection we’ve placed around our feelings and experiences.

Mindful meditation cares nothing about those past experiences or those layers. Instead, it moves the practitioner along a series of deeper and deeper levels of awareness of everything outside the body, mind, and spirit. Don’t be fooled, though.

Dr. Muesse explains how this form of meditation operates.

“Some people consider meditation to be an escape from reality, but… Given its bold intention to attend unflinchingly to all of our [current] experiences without judgment, it is more precise to call mindful meditation an escape into reality.”

Mindful meditation works to encourage awareness of personal judgments, prejudices, and attitudes and to eliminate them; to become objective and non-judgmental to what we observe outside of ourselves. It achieves that goal by creating intensified observations  of our surroundings and our internal response to them. Once that awareness takes hold, the elimination of judgment becomes easier.

I’ve gone through the first few days of preparation before the actual meditation began, and I’ve started the meditation exercises. Now, the real work begins.

This practice has helped me become hyper-aware of my thoughts about things I observe. When I see someone, anyone, and make an internal statement about that person, good or bad, it’s an observation and a judgment. Pretty or not, slim or not, old or young; these are all judgments of a type. An act is bad or good. That, too, is a judgment. One can say “moral” or not.

What we commonly use as descriptors in conversation to designate one person from another is a judgment of sorts. Writers, especially, use these devices to interest the reader enough to keep turning pages.

Descriptors aren’t really the problem, though. It’s the moral judgments that are targeted; that “good or bad” judgment. Mockery, ridicule, and hatred brought about by nothing other than an imagined difference is destructive judgment.  These are the thoughts practitioners work to eliminate in themselves.

If total objectivity is achieved, does the practitioner become a mini-Spock without emotion, living on logic alone?

I can’t believe that we will ever achieve that level of objectivity. Even Vulcans had passions, after all. That’s why they began living by logic.

What I’ve discovered isn’t pure logic with this meditation. I found myself and a way to remove prejudices, large or small, that lurked behind a veil of descriptors. I discovered how many of those judgments I made each day, without conscious thought.

This is an enlightening experience. I’ve barely begun, but I see where this is headed. Will I be a better person through this practice? I like to think so. I know I’ll be a more mindful person, but never a mini-Spock.

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