The Examined Life

Like most people who’ve expressed a view on the English city riots this month, I wasn’t there. Having relocated last year from inner London to a small countryside town an hour’s drive away, my experience of the unrest was mediated through television, Twitter and news websites. It was also filtered by the habitual tendencies of my mind when faced with events that seem to be creating widespread anxiety (it likes to take a contrary line: “Everyone is over-reacting/the media frenzy is out of proportion/don’t they know there’s a famine in Somalia with millions of people at risk of starvation?” and so on).

Imagine going to your local doctor and suddenly discovering a shamanic healer has been made partner in the practice. Not only that, but all the conventional doctors are referring their most difficult cases to him, murmuring reverentially about his evidence-based magic skills. It would seem pretty surprising, no?

Well, that's about the size of the seismic shift that's taking place in our culture's perception of meditation. In 1970, or even 2001, a meditating politician, teacher or policeman in the West would probably have deemed it prudent to keep their practice a secret, for fear of public ridicule—now we have openly mindful congressmen (see video below) and parliamentarians, and meditation is enthusiastically championed in government reports, school curricula and a vast range of other establishment settings.