Post #32: The Melancholy Meditator

29 May 2023

“Who would lose, though full of pain, this intellectual being, those thoughts that wander through eternity?”

— John Milton, Paradise Lost

It may come as a surprise to many readers that there is not, in the classical accounts of the Buddha’s Teaching, a word for meditation as we understand the term today—that is to say, a distinct activity for which one should set aside some committed time each day. What the scriptures speak of instead is a general discipline of mind and body alike that centers on the cultivation of awareness and mindfulness in all of life’s many situations, whether on the mat or off, whatever else one may be doing at the time. Some advanced practitioners even go so far as to dispense with a formal daily practice altogether—what might perhaps be called matitation for greater clarity—on the logic that they are “meditating” all day round. (The holier-than-thou aspect to this argument may be noted with some concern, but I don’t think it needs to be resolved here, nor could I do so even if I wanted to.)

Perhaps even more surprising to some, the very word “meditation” that today leans so far East used to have a well-established meaning in the West long before it became associated with activities on or near the mat: thus the title of Marcus Aurelius’s reflections (entitled “To Himself” in the original Greek) has long been translated as “Meditations” in English, as I have pointed out before, and early editions of the OED (like my beloved Concise, revised and corrected impression of 1931) define the term as “exercising the mind in contemplation,” especially with a religious connotation, but without any reference to Eastern practices at all. It is, in other words, a concept as much at home in Western as in Eastern tradition, though with differences in nuance inasmuch as the old Western term carried stronger undertones of specifically intellectual and pious reflections and devotions.

In Vipassana circles, both these dimensions can get short shrift sometimes: the first belittled as mere “intellectualizing,” the second filed under “rites and rituals” and downgraded accordingly from its high position of honor in other schools. Not that Goenka could be accused of being insufficiently thoughtful: it’s evident that both he and his teacher U Ba Khin were keen intellects and students of many things. Nonetheless, the more philosophical questions raised by the practice can still get subordinated rather painfully sometimes, as inquisitive students may find to their chagrin when Vipassana teachers prove quite unwilling at times to engage on that level. Again, though, it must be said that I am making a broad generalization and that there is no dearth of certified intellectual types at or near Vipassana centers. They don’t generally set the tone, that is all.

One may well think that’s as it should be, even as someone with an intellectual disposition. Individuals with gifts of that nature have ever been far too ready (as have those with any other gifts) to make their own strengths the measure of all things. It is true that the most eminent philosophers have also been among the fiercest critics of reason (not in the sense of disparaging it, but of pointing out its limitations: one thinks of Hume and Kant, for example), or their own fiercest judges, for that matter. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why a connection between such eminence and a melancholy tendency was noted at the very cradle of Western philosophy, by Aristotle, who may have expressed a commonplace view at the time (Problemata 30.1): “How is it that all who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts turn out to be melancholics?”

Arthur Schopenhauer, whose indictment of the hellish miseries of human (and also animal) existence remains perhaps unmatched for its mercilessness, not surprisingly also found that those with particular gifts of mind, spirit, or soul (neatly combined in German under the term Geist, which cannot be properly replicated in any other language I know) must expect to be made miserable to an equally outstanding degree (thus chapter 2 of his Aphorisms, “On What a Man Is”). Robert Burton, in the 1620s, committed to paper some 1400 pages (as they appear in the latest edition) of musings on every aspect of melancholic behavior in relation to the life of the mind, and Lady Murasaki, a thousand years ago, established sadness as an aesthetic principle, draping her Tale of Genji in every shade of beautiful sorrow. (To enjoy that side of the world’s first novel to the full, go with Arthur Waley’s translation; it may take some liberties with the text, but it does so in keeping with the spirit of the tale and to great effect.) All Greek tragedy culminates, arguably, in the idea that to learn is to suffer and that wisdom is attained, against our will, only by the awful lashings of fortune (to paraphrase a passage from Aeschylus that Robert Kennedy was fond of quoting). All the vaunted sagacity of the great king Solomon may have come down, in the end, to a sense that everything done under the sun, even the search for wisdom itself, is only vanity and vexation, a mere wearisome striving after wind (Ecclesiastes 1:1–18). The list of initiates into these blue-black mysteries reads like a Who’s Who of human accomplishment through the ages—a troubling fact, but a well-nigh incontrovertible one.

This is not the place to propose any rigorous or robust taxonomy of all the countless hues of blue and black in which the dogs of despond can come barking into our lives and chase brighter shades away. I would distinguish, to keep things simple, at least three different regions along this vast spectrum, even if their boundaries cannot always be made out very clearly. There is first, on the less menacing end, the ordinary blue range: all the familiar lows, manifold sadnesses, and all-too human griefs that can be difficult enough to get through, but that are nonetheless a normal, inescapable part of our condition, and that should not, so far as I can tell, be medicalized unduly. There is, second, at the extreme other end, the pitch-black of incapacitating depression proper, a condition of life-threatening mental states that can throttle the very will to live as by a choking pall. Third, in between the other two, there is the realm of what I am calling melancholia and what concerns me here primarily, the navy and midnight shades of blue, one might say.

What is so curious and distinctive about the melancholic region is that it seems to have, despite its evident miseries, certain advantages and compensations too that might make someone hold on to them, if there is any choice in the matter, as defining and even cherished features of his personality—which no one would be tempted to do, I believe, in the black zone, which is unambiguously an illness in a way that melancholia is not. The very unpleasantness of the condition habituates the mind to suffering, one might say, and lines up rather neatly with the first noble truth, as the sages cited above all discovered in their way. Good times, when they do come, are thrown into sharper relief and become that much more precious; so long as it does not get too debilitating (that is, black), melancholy keeps you on your toes and vigilant, for fear of the terrible sensations and overreactions it can induce; and it often drives someone irresistibly to his work (or to the mat) for much-needed balance and relief. For other meditators, their practice may be an option among others; for the melancholic if becomes a life raft in the storm-tossed sea. Even if it falls short of a harbor, it still keeps you afloat through life’s shipwrecks, acts as a spur to creativity in many cases, and perhaps gives you more credible ideas too, if José Ortega y Gasset was right when he said, in his Revolt of the Masses, that only those of the shipwrecked are worth much in the end. But this is not to romanticize the melancholic tribe and its ways: even aside from the sheer wretchedness of swallowing so much salt water and shedding so many tears, they have a way of getting drowned in the briny waves, and often enough dragging others down with them.

Over the past thirty years or so, owing largely to the availability of better medication (and legitimate excitement about its possibilities), there has been a tendency to reclassify what used to be considered ailments of the spirit into cases of defective plumbing in the brain, requiring the correction of chemical imbalances, not investigations of the soul. The vagaries of causal direction that afflict all correlations are by their very nature hard to resolve. Even if melancholic or depressive tendencies go together predictably with certain patterns in brain chemistry, are they really brought about by these chemical imbalances—or are the imbalances themselves a symptom of deeper causes that are submerged in a subterranean world of underlying emotional, mental, or spiritual difficulties, as the pioneers of modern psychology insisted?

The rebalancing approach has certainly proved valuable, even lifesaving in many cases, and side-effects have been reduced sufficiently for any prospective beneficiary to be grateful. Many report very satisfactory results, others miss not happiness, exactly (for in fairness the medication never promised that much), but a return of that joy which is so sorely absent from their lives (whether anyone, or anything, ever promised it or not). How much of a cure the medication really offers, then, each must judge for himself. I find it peculiar that redressing a chemical imbalance in the brain of someone who was not unduly libido-driven before should, of all things, hit the sex-drive and genital sensitivity—not because those are the most trustworthy polestars in life, but because they look like focal points of vitality to me, which I would expect a true cure to restore, for what is health if not vitality? But there are other ways of reading the evidence that also make sense, so let everyone concerned come to the best conclusions he can.

Where the confounding human problem of either episodic or temperamental and persistent fits of the blues and the blue-blacks would leave meditators, specifically, is also not easy to say. There are times in Goenka’s discourses when he comes perilously close to suggesting that depression can be cured by Vipassana practice, and perhaps it is really so in some cases; the jury is still out, not least because we don’t understand very well what, if anything, ever properly heals depressive tendencies rather than banishing them for a while or palliating them in various ways that fall far short of a cure. Be that as it may, Vipassana courses now come with all manner of disclaimers that they are not to be undertaken in hopes of thereby overcoming serious mental conditions or illnesses.

Melancholy in all its shades is not fundamentally different from other mental states in that it changes all the time, not always dramatically perhaps, but subtly for sure if one cares to notice it. All there is to be said about adopting an observer’s perspective on oneself still holds, with the spectrum of despondency as with everything else, and the same unburdening that is possible along other parameters must surely be possible with this one as well. But then again, the Path is a long one, and not to be walked with the expectation of quick fixes. If you need immediate relief, therapy and medical options should come first, and meditation not so much as a remedial measure and more as a new frame that might help dulled and dampened colors come back more joyfully to life. But that might take a long time.

To look at things through the lens of the Four Noble Truths once again (see Post #14: Choose Your Suffering), one should be a little wary, surely, of getting too hung up on the first truth; at the same time, however, confronting the reality and pervasiveness of Dukkha in all its formidable scope and scale remains an indispensable foundation of the practice all along. There is simply no way around it; but there is a way beyond it, and those who have trouble seeing it, or who lose faith in the prospect, need to be reminded and encouraged in the belief that there really is joy to be found here, in life and on the Path, and not just bitter truth.

Sometimes that struggling person who needed reminding, encouraging, and consoling has been me. The refrain, for all of us, again and again, can only be that Dukkha is universal and therefore not to be escaped in life; that everything changes, both subtly and sometimes dramatically; that the Path points in a cheerful direction, though if you can find better ways of getting there genuinely, then you should avail yourself of them without hesitation. Most important of all, we are in it together; if I can keep walking, then so can you, and if you can, then so can I.

Readings: Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York Review Books, 2001), and Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Nullity and Misery of Life,” chapter 46 in the second volume of his World as Will and Representation, available as an excerpt in my own translation on my Academia.edu page.