always, and I stumbled back to my door and fell into
a restless sleep in which Sister Mary Agatha,
mouthing the word “forever,” watched me descend
into the flames of hell.
After this, I was quite certain I would meditate
no more. There is no prospect, I considered, more
terrifying than nonexistence. I would never do this
again. As the days passed, my insomnia, which had
responded not at all to meditation, got much worse.
Sleepless and anxious, I decided to go once more
unto the breach. Someone recommended that I lis-
ten to Sam Harris, and so I put his “Waking Up” app
on my phone. Each night I tuned in to Harris’s
calm, rational voice. In one lesson, Harris likens the
meditative state to one of being without a head. In-
deed, this particular exercise enjoins the listener to
imagine being headless. When I tried this, I could
only imagine a headless me, and I found that most
unsettling, and then I thought of Ann Boleyn and
her beheading. Then, ISIS and Internet beheadings.
And then, the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hol-
low. I imagined riding off with Ichabod Crane and
that ghastly pumpkin. So, you see... I could not
shut down my mind: instead, morbid thoughts in-
creased and multiplied. Well, at least I could fight
them off with soothing music. So, I removed Har-
ris’s app, dialed up Spotify and abandoned the prac-
tice forever.
Meditation was for me something akin to
Wilde’s creative death by opium. The sheer blank-
ness appalled. I found my grief ever more piercing,
for in its place was hideous insensibility. As I look
back on these two distasteful encounters with the
practice, I realize that what I had experienced was a
glimpse of non-being. What would it be like, Ham-
let wonders, “not to be.” After this experience with
meditation, when I had promised never to take it
up again, I tried to imagine not existing, and what I
found was that I was merely imagining. I was still
there thinking; and so with Descartes, I concluded
that I was. The thought experiment of nonexistence
is playfully dramatized in the old Mark Twain fan-
tasy of watching your own funeral. The fact that
you are observing the proceedings means that you
haven’t disappeared. You haven’t ceased to exist.
The very word “nonexistence” is contradictory. In
the act of utterance, it subverts itself.
Perhaps, unlike me, you tried meditation,
whether in yoga studio or ashram, and noticed that
all around you, many people seem to be getting to
that place to which you believe you should be able
to go. Through the process of mimetic engulfment,
you try to become like them, and slowly you be-
come estranged from your doubting-Thomas self.
You silence your doubts, your X self, and take up
not-X. And so you live with both, X fading like an
isotope and not-X triumphant. The mimetic com-
munity of which you are a part blurs your sense of
identity and facilitates this process. Your self be-
comes obscured through its identification with
other selves. So, here then, is your new mantra: “I
am my normal walk-around-in-the-world-self; I am
also a new, enlightened self, free of the contamina-
tions of self-narratives that I and the world have im-
posed on me. Like Yahweh, I simply am.”
Yet, “am” leaves out “was.” And, it is the “was,”
the inquiry into the past, the remembrance of things
past, that meditation casts aside. The drive of “the
practice” is to confine the practitioner to the present
moment, and that habit of mind leaves out William
Faulkner’s most profound truth about the fluidity of
mental time. Meditation confines the self to a purely
physiological existence, one defined by respiration.
Yet, human identity is not merely tied to sensation,
but to things—objects—these are the reliquaries of
self. To live in a meditative way is to believe that jetti-
soning the objects (both people and things) that clut-
ter our lives (but to which we feel attached) is to free
oneself from suffering the pangs of loss. Yet, it is
those very objects that we are told to slough off that
bring a sense of continuity to our lives.
Like everything else in the world, meditation is
an ideology, and it has a vigorous marketing campaign
going on in its support right now. It has spun off a se-
quel called “mindfulness training,” and it too is both
ideology and pathology. Like a commodity, mindful-
ness is both fetishized and mass-produced. The mind-
fulness practitioner knows very well that the real
terror is of the void, the nothing that lies at the heart
of things. But rather than confront that brute fact, he
engages in double think and overlooks the illusion of
presence which is structuring his reality.
Freud’s great gift to the world was his assertion
that in the theater of life, we each become real to
ourselves as we strut and fret each hour upon the
stage, that each life is many days, day after day, and
that as we bump into ourselves we transfer to one an-
other all our fictive identities. Life is the theater in
which we encounter each other, not in the ashram or
the contrived yoga studio. And then at night, in the
Walpurgisnachtof sleep, we inhabit dreamscapes and
play out all our forbidden wishes and desires. We
rediscover ourselves as the day’s residue becomes a
Hollywood backlot aflame with desire.
Banish retrospection? Banish Falstaff. Banish
all the world.M E D I TAT I O N
volume 25 number 1 2020 W W W. S K E P T I C. C O M 2 7