Meditation's marketing problem

Oshan Jarow is a staff writer for Future Perfect. He covers topics in political economy and consciousness studies, running a pretty strange spectrum from anti-poverty policy to psychedelics and philosophy of mind. You can read more of his work here and follow him on X.

Hey readers,

Oshan Jarow here. I've been meditating, with varying degrees of commitment, for about a decade. And the new year — a time when the ranks of meditating Americans swell with New Year's resolutionists, at least for a few weeks — gives me a great excuse to tell one of my favorite meditation stories.

Ram Dass was a 20th-century American spiritual teacher and former Harvard psychologist who played a big role in kindling Western interest in meditation. At an event once, someone asked him for advice. They said they knew they "ought" to meditate more but struggled with committing to a regular practice.

"Forget it," he responded. "Go out and lust some more. Go until you are so nauseated by your own predicament that you yearn to meditate. Get so hungry for it that you can't wait to just sit down, turn off the television, turn off the drama, and just be quiet for a few minutes. Wait until you really want it, because when you start with 'I should,' you end up hating the practice."

In recent decades, a narrow band of basic meditation practices exploded into the mainstream. One estimate puts the number of Americans who tried meditation in 2022 at around 60 million. But the overwhelmingly popular narrative about meditation centers on stress relief, a framing that has helped make meditation feel like yet another thing we "ought" to do. That, in turn, dooms it to wind up in the resolution graveyard alongside exercise, diets, and my short-lived resolve to become a jazz pianist.

The stress-relief framing isn't wrong. Basic meditation is relaxing, and learning to concentrate is useful. But there's a much more interesting story to be told about what meditation can do. That's why I launched More to Meditation, a newsletter course that charts the world of meditation beyond the shallows of mindfulness, from science to practice, helping you deepen your knowledge — and if you're up for it, practice — of meditation.

For example, consider two claims side by side. The former ABC News anchor Dan Harris has a popular book, podcast, and meditation app project which all say that meditation can make you "10 percent happier." That refers to the kinds of introductory meditation that so many of us might turn to in the new year.

At the same time, meditation teacher Shinzen Young says that meditation has made him about 10 times happier — a different ballgame entirely. But the varieties of meditation that point in that direction require a little more than counting your breaths for a few minutes each morning.

Over the past few years, a whole new field of scientists studying more "advanced meditation" has started taking shape. Researchers are beginning to put some of the wildest claims from contemplative traditions on sturdy scientific ground.

Advanced meditation may sound intimidating for those of us who just downloaded the Calm app for a New Year's resolution. But what you expect from the practice can change what you get out of it. Already, people are discovering that many so-called "advanced" practices are surprisingly attainable, even for relative beginners.

And efforts are underway — ranging from neurofeedback machines to brain stimulation to psychedelics — to make them even more accessible. At their most ambitious, such efforts aim to "democratize enlightenment," as Young writes.

My interest, and the focus of More to Meditation, is on the wider spectrum of practices beyond the popular veneer of mindfulness, but still accessible enough that the practice doesn't have to consume our entire lives. If nothing else, these other practices — the deep end — are more likely to shift your motivation from that burdensome sense that you "should" meditate to actually kindling an interest in the unfolding experience of meditation that helps make your practice stick.

Stepping into the deep end

I picked up the interest in meditation from my father, a professor of religious studies with a focus on Indian traditions. He cut his academic teeth translating Sanskrit texts, which planted a fair bit of meditation lore in my childhood.

Still, I didn't get serious about meditation practice until I graduated college. The entry-level job prospects for a graduate with a degree in economics and philosophy — data analyst, management consulting, and I still don't know what philosophy grads who don't want a PhD are supposed to do — didn't exactly scream existential fulfillment to me. So I saved up and shipped out to Asia instead, doing about a year of the wandering travel and meditation circuit.

I learned some vipassana practice in Thailand. I visited Indian sage Ramana Maharshi's ashram and learned his flavor of self-inquiry practice. I spent time at a zendo in southern India led by Father AMA Samy, a former Jesuit priest turned Zen master, where the simplicity and directness of Zen got me hooked.

Since then, my relationship with meditation has jumped around. At times, I've felt pretty sure that it's The Answer to the stubbornly human question of how to be happy, that true, durable well-being comes from sitting quietly and unraveling the habits evolution has carved into our minds that have helped our species survive, while perhaps, at the same time, keeping us from really thriving. I've also gone through long periods of thinking meditation is mostly a waste of time, a distraction from less literally navel-gazing efforts to improve the world, like ending poverty or factory farming.

Today, I'm somewhere in the middle. Despite the current mindfulness hype, I still believe it is one of the more underrated ways to durably improve our experience of being alive. At the same time, there are plenty of other ways to do so that mindfulness can't substitute for, like building worker power.

What I find particularly interesting about the rising field of advanced meditation, though, is how well it intersects with the core ethos of Future Perfect. Learning how to transform human psychology for the better is, I'll go out on a limb and wager, important. But in the shadow of mindfulness, it has gone neglected. And thanks to the new generation of research starting to crop up, it's becoming increasingly tractable. Advanced meditation so neatly fits the important, tractable, neglected framework for doing good that it's starting to get written up on Effective Altruism forums.

So, if we're lucky, we're about to benefit from feedback loops between research and practice that help pave the way for more refined approaches to powerful meditation practices in the near future. Already, the field is full of ideas, practices, and even communities that are putting modern twists on ancient traditions. The idea behind More to Meditation is to guide you through what's already out there while looking ahead to see what's coming next.

If you wind up taking the plunge, More to Meditation will guide you through a comprehensive story of meditation, one that weaves in the middle ground between stress relief and enlightenment that, so far, has been largely left out of popular narratives. Along the way, we'll highlight a wider range of practices, effects, questions, and resources to help you get started, get acclimated, and decide whether any of this is something you'd like to try.

Sign up for More to Meditation here.

—Oshan Jarow, staff writer

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