Language and Meditation
Meditation is often presented to us as something that will get us to a direct experience which is something beyond language. It's being aware of your breath, it's being aware of a sacred syllable, such as a mantra, it has a sense of being transcendent.
Often when people look at something being transcendent they think there's no language in that. So meditation, for many people, gets introduced as a way to get back in touch with something that is non-linguistic or even pre-linguistic. For instance, to get in touch with your body.
That's a particular view about meditation. It's a view that makes people think that meditation has nothing to do with words, with concepts, with thoughts. And yet, meditation is filled with words, concepts and thoughts. It's not separate from them.
One way that language appears in meditation is that we often use it to pin a label on experience as we encounter it. We try to make statements about what we're going through. Even if you're not trying to follow a particular technique that uses labeling, you may find that when you're feeling sleepy you may be telling yourself that you're going towards sleep. Or that you're too tired to do this. Or that your body needs some more rest. What you may be doing with your experience many times during your sitting is actually having some kind of discursive thought about what you're going through, that you're believing is your true experience.
During the day we may be telling ourselves with language what it is we're going through. We're saying: I'm going through a period of being anxious. I'm going through a period of being upset. I'm feeling hot. I'm feeling cold. You may actually have sensations that indicate that you're hot or that you're cold. But with language you are in a sense saying, "This is so, this is what is true." And it's the words that we put on experience that often give a sense that what we're experiencing is really happening. That that's it and it's not something else.
Often, too, we're telling ourselves things to do around experience. We're saying: I'm hot, I need to take my sweater off. I'm angry, I need to calm down. Or: I need to find some way to manage my anger. I'm desiring something I shouldn't desire, I should have more restraint.
We're often having a conversation with ourselves about what we think we're really doing and creating things around that. Your language in your sittings is producing an experience and you're saying, "This is so. This is what is really gong on."
If that's the case, if we really do believe our thinking is what's really going on, if the story of desiring something and restraining ourselves from it and the various memories that come up around it are all real and true for us, then that is something for us to really consider seriously. It's not just a fantasy. It's something that we believe in. It actually is a reality.
With a lot of Buddhist philosophy or with Buddhist ideas that are presented to people, that reality is often considered to be an illusion. People are told, "That whole thing you've made up in your mind about your experience is really not real. You're actually experiencing something else."
How do we hold those two realities (the conventional and the absolute) without saying one is completely an illusion and the other is absolutely real? That's really what I pose to you around your experience. That what we're starting to see is that our way of thinking about our experience is affecting our experience and our experience is affecting our way of thinking about it. That's there's an interdependent relationship between the two.
The stories about what we're going through affect what we're going through. What we're going through affects what our stories are about what we're going through. They are not separate things, but people will tend to separate them.
One of the reasons for that is we think that, or we have a view, generally, that language is used to designate things. We grow up thinking and are being taught that the words we use designate certain objects. I may call a Tibetan singling bowl a bowl. That's what it is. It's a type of bowl. But it's not like a cereal bow. It's not like other kinds of bowls. But the language I'm using or language anyone uses around objects seems to be something that designates what the thing is.
But in actuality, what we're dealing with, especially when it comes to our experience are not so much designations but realities of thought. These are worlds of thought that we create, that in a sense have their own reality for us. Worlds of thought that we believe in, that we follow, about which we say, "This is so."
When I'm upset with somebody at work, I'm thinking about that person and various situations, which seem to be true when I'm thinking about them. Yet at times in meditation when you look at those thoughts, they don't seem to be so true. You start to see that perhaps they came about because of certain conditions. You see because certain things happened with a person at work, you felt a certain way and the thing just snowballed. And you have this kind of world that has developed.
To call this illusion or to call it not real, to call our thinking world or our mental world in this respect, not real, is to disregard how real we think it is, how real we make it.
You may think that you're going to be able to capture exactly what went on with the language you use to describe experience, but that's not going to happen. What's going to happen is that you're going to build narratives, your going to build stories about your experience.
You may start to build new stories. And that's some of what we're doing with our meditation practice when we describe our experiences. We're actually breaking down an old story about experience, an old reality, like saying anger is whenever I feel I have a temper or I get upset. The new story in the descrribing of the experience is that you may feel a certain racing of your heart or you may feel a certain pressure in your head. You may start to have memories of certain feelings and events that previously you called anger, but now you're actually seeing it as this combination of things without giving it a name.
That kind of way of looking at experience starts to change how we relate to it. It changes the early relationship that I was talking about between our way of thinking, the kind of ideas and stories we have about experience and what we're experiencing. Because if you're experiencing something you keep calling anger and keep saying this is anger over and over again, what is probably happening is that your experience inside is not being looked at. You're telling yourself, "This is anger, this is what it is." It probably has a cyclic quality. Whenever you have that experience, that's what you call it.
You go on calling it that without it moving, without seeing much around what's underneath it or what it's about, what keeps it going. Whereas if you start looking at it in a more descriptive way and breaking it down, you might find that your attention is going to other parts of the experience. You're focusing on certain sensations around it or a certain kind of intention to say something or a background attitude that you have or a habitual way, perhaps from childhood, of feeling and relating to people and situations.
That's part of the process that we're working with around the reporting of meditation experiences. What we're trying to do, in a way, is get at some of the real problems with the language we've used around experience. This ties directly back to the Buddha's point of view around language, which is that there's a kind of conventional language that we use which just continues to produce suffering. It continues to produce ideas of self, ideas of permanence, ideas around ownership. It's language that leads to more speculative views, hypothetical thinking. It's not language that touches upon what it is that we're experiencing. It doesn't get at the nuances and the shades of what it is that we go through.
In your meditation sittings you might truly question when you say, "This is anger." What is this experience I am calling "anger"? What is it I'm experiencing? The same holds true when you say, "This is lust" or "This is desire."
© 2007 The Skillful Meditation Project