Skeptic March 2020

ARTICLE

26 SKEPTIC MAGAZINE volume 25 number 1 2020

Most of you reading this have tried meditation.

And many of you have been successful. I do not

write for you. I write to seek clarity. So, you who are

devotees of this ancient discipline, please stop read-

ing. I write for those, who, like me, tried to medi-

tate and failed. For those of you who washed out,

who ceded your minds to worry, you told yourself

that you were not self-disciplined, that you didn’t

do your breathing exercises, that it would have

worked if you had just kept at it. So you tried again,

and you failed again. And you gave up... wistfully, I

assume, because you believed and still believe that

there was something there to get but you just could-

n’t access it. And so you are mad, mad at yourself,

not at it, “the practice,” as those who can meditate

call it. Why couldn’t you do this? You couldn’t get

your mind to shut down, right?

Have you ever considered this: that you were

successful, indeed too successful, that you caught a

glimpse of something and what you saw there in

that desert place was nothing, and so you fled seek-

ing to return to the “kingdom of bang and blab?” I

had a number of such unsettling encounters while

meditating, and they engendered in me something

akin to the terror I experienced in the demon-

haunted world of my Irish-Catholic girlhood. It

seemed to me I stood by the Iron Gate leading to

hell. I will never go back there again, but I think it

might be therapeutic, in-

deed exorcistic, to share

two of my experiences.

Caveat Emptor: I am

the product of 12 years of

painful Irish Catholic in-

doctrination, which I have

spent a lifetime trying to

shake off. To erase the

crown of thorns with the

Buddha’s smile seems

somehow irreconcilable

with my identity. We shall

see in what follows if there

are any of you who felt there—in that empty

place—what I felt, what Emily Dickinson described

when spying the serpent in the garden: “zero at

the bone.”

I took up meditation last year because I was de-

pressed, more than usual, by dark thoughts. I was

encouraged by friends, all who have derived benefit

from meditation and its close cousin, mindfulness.

Perhaps it would be better, one friend suggested, to

give up worry. Give up worry? I’m Irish. The two—

worry and “troubles”—are the corn beef and cab-

bage of the Irish soul. How to give up a habit of

mind that is a legacy, a sign of cultural continuity,

one that is inscribed in every Irishman’s genetic

code? Still, I decided to try.

Like most people, I had little success at first. I

couldn’t empty my mind. I couldn’t silence the voices

in my head. All I could hear was white noise, until I

didn’t. One day I heard nothing. The white noise van-

ished, and I experienced it—the blankness of not thinking. It took

me by surprise—this feeling of not being—and it is

impossible now to reconstruct the terror I felt. I find

myself fleeing to moments in literature where a char-

acter experienced something like I did, the most fa-

mous, of course, being The Heart of Darkness or

Ishmael’s experience of the “whiteness of the whale”

in Moby-Dick.When the practice of “not thinking”

lifted, I began to think, and I began to feel, and what

I felt was dark and inex-

pressible. I felt hollowed

out, as though dwelling in

a state of complete ab-

sence, separate, and com-

pletely alone. Gasping for

breath, I ran from my

home screaming into the

night. Outside at mid-

night, I looked about and

realized that all was the

same: the suburban street

upon which I live was

as dull and featureless as

Meditation as

Ideology

BY KATH Y SCH ULTH EIS