Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times: Powerful Tools to Cultivate Calm, Clarity, and Courage

"Yes. For me, a big challenge from this year has been trying to figure out my own relationship with the news. This is partly a matter of doomscrolling and finding Twitter very addictive. But it’s also the question: what are my responsibilities? Given that it doesn’t seem to make me a happier person or make the world a better place when I spend most of my day immersed in American politics , or in the British government’s response to Covid-19 , that seems to call into question the old-fashioned idea that being an informed citizen—constantly discussing this stuff around the dinner table, staying up to date with what’s happening in the world at large—is the pinnacle of being a good human. And, as my son grows up out of toddlerhood, I find I’m not too sure that I agree with the prevailing wisdom that constantly talking at home about climate change and racial justice—things that really matter!—is the right approach. I find myself wondering if, actually, a certain amount of protection from the outside world has a role here. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Anyway, that’s all by way of a preface to discussing what Phil Goldberg calls ‘spiritual practice’, by which he mainly means various approaches to meditation , and various ways of shifting your perspective. It’s not a question of: ‘Are you going to be a hermit and spend your life meditating?’ or ‘Are you going to engage?’ but that having a kind of inner sanctuary is a precondition for engagement in the world in which we live. He doesn’t put it quite this way, but a lot of this is about stewarding your attention, training your attentional faculties. We have good reason to believe that if you do that, and persist at it, it can lead to some more dramatic ‘spiritual experiences’, and grasping certain deep truths about reality. But I also think they’re very useful just as tools for living in the world that we live in, with an economy that profits directly from taking control of your attention. This is a very practical book. He talks about how to fit meditation into your day, that sort of thing. It has this feel of—this is language that Western Buddhists, meditation people, use—creating a refuge from the world inside yourself, rather than needing to retreat to a cabin on top of a mountain, or quitting online news altogether. I think that’s true. What you just said reminded me of an interesting point—I’m speaking from other sources, rather than this book specifically. There’s evidence for certain kinds of mystical experiences going back right to the beginning of the human species. But formal meditation, of the sort where you sit down and train your mind, is new, relatively speaking. It’s a few thousand years old, as far as people can tell. And I’ve seen it argued that this is because meditation is a response to what people felt happening to their attention when cities started to develop, when some early form of information overload began—when people were no longer just living in bands of twelve in rural isolation. This is fascinating to me, because it suggests that, actually, they were struggling with the equivalent of what we’re struggling with today when we’re trying to figure out if it’s possible to use Twitter in a sane way. Yes. Although people always use that example to imply we should just stop worrying. But maybe some aspects of our inner experience were better before we were reading books? I don’t know. Or before TV? Or before radio? Maybe it has just been a long slow decline. Because we have no access to the pre-printing press mind, how would we ever be able to know? But we are where we are. And I’m not suggesting we go back."