So when Adriel retired from my position as the chief exec, I traveled to Massachusetts to spend a week at the Insight Meditation Society Center. Since I was there to deprogram, to cool-off as it were, it seemed that it was hellish hot in Barre, MA. Of course, Buddhists don’t have a hell so I suppose the IMS campus was a good substitute. No A/C, many mosquitoes. And any type of lotion or anti-bug goop was strictly verboten. I persevered nonetheless and made no complaint. After all, talking was not allowed. Yogis were allowed one speaking session in an interview with the meditation teacher. I was lucky to have as my leader the learned and thoughtful Narayan Helen Liebenson. Adriel had only one question for her. This was a metta or “loving-kindness” course. The guided meditation was designed to instill a kind of universal love and good-will toward all peoples and indeed all sentient creatures. My question was this: how does the meditation itself lead to that result, what is the connection, logically, between a calm and insightful meditation to the good of all living things. Well, Ms Liebenson insisted that loving-kindness necessarily follows metta meditaion like a valid syllogism. I remained in doubt these many years since.
Now I read an explanation that may be satisfactory. Prof. Paul Condon writes in Psyche:
Those in traditional contemplative cultures typically understand persons to be constituted by their relationship to others, as the historian David McMahan notes in The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008). As a consequence, practitioners first learn to experience themselves in meditation as empowered and supported by the care, compassion and wisdom of their spiritual ancestors and community. By contrast, citizens of the modern West often see persons as individual selves that exist prior to the community – atomistic individuals who choose whether or not to enter into relationships.
https://psyche.co/ideas/modern-mindfulness-meditation-has-lost-its-beating-communal-heart
It appears that this may be a matter of the perspective of the meditator. In Buddhist terms, there is no self. Everyone’s existence is contingent. Everyone is really a process, not an entity. This is puzzling to Westerners. So now I get it, Ms. Liebenson, somewhat.
Two Strikes 