Meditation

Here we go. I wrote a post about the Virginia Tech shooting. I had a feeling, just from people that I talk to, that this time people seemed to have a different response than they did after other violent acts that have come before. After Columbine and other school shootings folks I know were quick to come up with possible solutions like; ban guns, more guns, parents should be more strict and pay more attention to their children’s possible behavior issues, prosecute parents, ban video games, kill Marilyn Manson. After 9/11, as a nation we were quick to respond with unrealistically simple ideas of solutions to stop this type of thing from ever happening again.

I’m not criticizing or, making light. I think that people were reacting with pure and passionate emotion to these events. Reacting with emotion is part of the stuff of life. On the whole it’s a positive. A well-meaning emotional response to a crisis is often ineffective because life isn’t simple. There are problems that can’t be solved by emotion and the alternative, logic, is uncomfortable because it is stark.

After Virginia Tech, I had a sense that people’s emotions were spent. Or, maybe there was a widespread realization that the emotional response wasn’t working. Once again, this is my opinion garnered from personal observation.

Today I saw this press release entitled, “David Lynch to Announce Plan to End School Violence: Teach One Million Students to Meditate”.

David Lynch, he’s no stranger to violence in his artistic expression. He is being joined in his effort by author John Hagelin (”The Secret”), and folk singer Donovan (”Mellow Yellow”).

You may be expecting me to slam this as whack job insanity but I am not going to.

First off, I meditate. I have experienced concrete, positive results from meditation. Meditation, in some form, is a basic tenet of any spiritual system. That isn’t a coincidence, it derives from results going back to ancient times.

Second, I don’t think that a meditation period during the school day would be nutty at all. For those of you that get upset because we don’t allow prayer in school, what if we just called it the meditation period. For that matter, I think it would be great to have a meditation break in the workplace too.

Here’s the problem. The guy at Virginia Tech, the guys at Columbine were sociopaths. Is a sociopath just born evil or created by their environment? I don’t know. Nobody knows. I guess the premise is, that if one is born evil, we can meditate it out of them. Or, if it’s the other way, maybe we can get them meditating early enough that their environment won’t screw them up.

A sociopath is selfish and wants to do harm to society. A sociopath doesn’t just snap and inflict the harm, they plot and are clever enough to fit into society until the time is right to do their will. A sociopath would go to meditation class and fit right in then, one day shoot up the place and leave a manifesto.

Can meditation stop violence? I’m sure it has but ponder this; the evil men that flew those planes into the World Trade Center did so with the misguided belief that it was the will of their Supreme Being. Would you be surprised if they meditated that very morning?

So, David Lynch, John Hagelin, and Donovan, I like the idea of promoting meditation but, make your pitch on an honest premise not showbiz sensationalism. Or, as we say in the Ozarks, don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.