It’s been 60 years since Maharishi proselytized - and George Harrison popularized - transcendental meditation in the West. Today, a sturdy meditation practice is one of those Western white whales, like great sleep and veganism and a perfect body, that once achieved by the rat-race-exhausted professional will finally, finally, unlock happiness.
No surprise that Headspace, an app featuring hot-sounding Australian guys whispering you through five-minute meditations, is valued at $3 billion.
But the problem isn’t that meditation is scammy or pseudoscientific or commercial. The problem is that when it works, it kills the creative soul.
When I lived in Bali, I meditated all the time (duh). 15 minutes every morning among the bird sounds, long Savasana journeys at the end of 90 minute yoga sessions, soundbaths in white pyramid temples that poked out of the central Bali jungle like Jim Jones’ ayahuasca fever-visions. Seriously, look at this picture:
And it was great! I felt so at peace, in fact, that I wrote about it on my old blog. I could sit in front of a rice field for hours, watching my thoughts pass like so many clouds, my floating ego feeling nothing.
But there was a cost. Meditation quieted an angst I had carried ever since puberty. It smoothed out the complex topography of my insecurities, fears, and regrets until there was nothing but an endless two-dimensional plane. I had no desire to create, to explore tensions. It wasn’t very punk rock. It wasn’t very anything at all.
Compare this to the months after I left a long-term relationship in 2018, the least peaceful period of my life. I wrote ten songs, half of which I recorded and published on Spotify, which are some of my proudest achievements. I would hear music composing itself as I walked to work, and I came to believe in muses. I needed to create, to release tensions. It was awful, yet it produced beauty.
Which period was better?
Hence the title. I genuinely don’t know what to make of meditation. Its murder of the creative soul scares me. Its exhortations to observe pain from a distance, rather than sublimate it to new creative heights, worry me. Art without tension ceases to become art. It diminishes itself to the sleepy, forgettable tracks playing over the spa speakers.