recordings of meditations as portable rituals

[Daniel B]

Hey guys,

Since ritual is an art form, meditation should be considered a sub-genre of that art form. One that isn't too different from audiobooks, really.

Meditation is earning a place in medicine and psychotherapy that is distinct from its purely aesthetic qualities. But that is a fairly recent development. Before that, if you substract any claim to supernatural efficacy, it is fair to call the broad range of meditative traditions a form of folk art. Sure meditation causes profound conscious experiences and causes genuine psychological changes - just like all (good) art can. It just doesn't use a canvas beyond the mind's eye.

The idea of meditation as an art form may strike you as odd, especially if you think of meditation in the Zen style or imagine it as an attempt to still the mind, to empty the canvas. But historically, the far greater part of meditative traditions has been quite colorful and entertaining. Whether you sang the 99 names of Allah, performed the Exercitia Spiritualia or repeated "Om namah shivaja" 108 times before going to bed, you had rich, vague concepts salient in your mind, triggering all sorts of associations, creating something like a daydream.

And of course the boundaries to more performative ritual aren't strict. Consider a bunch of Vajrayana buddhists who meditate on the Heart Sutra together. One of them reads it aloud, everyone else sits and meditates on what they hear, and they end by all singing the Prajna Paramita mantra together. Nobody moves about, most of the action happens behind closed eyes, but still this is very clearly a ritual, as well as a meditation.

Since there are rituals without meditative aspects, and meditations without outward ritual, the differences are quite obvious. A ritual can (and often should) be done together, while for a meditation, whether anybody else joins in can make no material difference. Rituals are communicative, meditations generally aren't. Et cetera.

And I want to especially point out that unlike performative rituals, meditations are amazingly portable. In any situation where you can close your eyes and listen to something, you can meditate. It used to be the case that people knew a meditation or two and did those, or went to a specialist who recited a bunch more. In this age of MP3s and headphones, you can have a much wider selection.

Now in a way, all of this is an elaborate plug for my rhyming, Sagan-esque meditations, the Seven Secular Sermons, of which I just finished MP3s that you can download. 😁But I would like a more general discussion. How do you think about the relation between ritual and meditation? And should we have, besides rational performative ritual, rational meditation (as an art form, not a medical treatment) to fill a niche that performative ritual cannot fill?

Happily,

:-Daniel

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www.sevensecularsermons.org