Why I Meditate

Meditation and Rilke’s Unsayable Spaces

Meditating 30 minutes a day, from age 21 until the American male average of 79 yields 10,585 hours, or 441 full days in meditation. Why spend 1.21 years sitting with eyes closed, legs crossed, doing nothing? What kind of anticlimactically meek response to philosophy’s old question — how to live — is plopping down on a cushion and breathing?

Just as Albert Camus asked what he called philosophy’s first question — why should I keep living? — we might ask, why keep sitting? In Why I Meditate, Allen Ginsberg sits for revolution:

But what radical change is brought about through meditation, seated or otherwise? What revolution springs from the zafu cushion? I turn to Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who, in the sublime Letters to a Young Poet, writes:

I sit to combat the amputation of my consciousness. I sit, quiet inside and out, to expand the registry of my awareness beyond the pale of language; to push perception into the dark, pre-linguistic woods of consciousness.

The stream of consciousness is not a ceaseless flow of words. Words are just imperfect nets with which we fish experience from that tangled stream of internal sensations. Words, like nets, are porous. The substance they carry leaks out the bottom, and by the time they reach someone else’s ear, much of their initial haul is missing, left at the source.

Conflating the stream of narration in our heads with the entire stream of consciousness reduces consciousness to nothing but our linguistic representations. We lose all that exists in the spaces words cannot enter. We live in but a sliver of consciousness, despite Rilke’s warnings.

David Foster Wallace, who suffered — fatally — from the opaque wall between language and its underlying sensations, the underlying substance words seek…

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