A Meditation on Meditation

One of the characterizing elements of the season of Lent is its pensive, reflective aspect. Being a period of penance and conversion and of deep introspection accounts for certain practices that lead to a closer encounter with God: centering prayer, meditation, phrase repetition, and of course, chant music.

This Sunday at Trinity Church, Rutland, the choir will sing an anthem called “A Lenten Meditation” by David Wagner.  The music is based on a Gregorian chant in Mode 1 from the mid-12^th century called Jesu Dulcis Memoria. (The hyperlink will take you to a recording of the chant performed by The Cathedral Singers under the conductor Richard Proulx. Richard Proulx was a renowned American composer of church music, and we periodically use his mass settings in our worship.) Gregorian Chant is named for Pope Gregory I, whose great work was to collect and itemize music used in worship. It is marked by specific characteristics: it is vocal only, sung in unison, free of rhythmic constraints, modal so as to evoke particular emotions, and the text is always Latin. One of the purposes and goals behind Pope Gregory’s insistence on the use of chant was to create an atmosphere of focused attention and praise of God.  In essence, chant was to create a meditative state of prayer. Even in 560A.D., the use of chant as a centering device for meditation was not unusual.  In fact, Gregory himself had traveled to Byzantium and farther East to experience music in worship. While empirical evidence of the effects of meditation may not have been as readily available as today, he did discover that certain devices are highly conducive to creating a state of consciousness that allows one to experience closeness to God.

Today, countless studies have been done of the effects of meditation and prayer. Meditation is said to have healing powers and enhance brain power. So of course studies have been done to either prove or disprove this.  The University of Pennsylvania submitted the results of a study about cerebral blood flow during meditation.  Increased activity in the prefrontal cortex and parietal lobes suggest coordinated cognitive processes during meditation.  That is to say, a meditative state increases potential for heightened creativity and intellectual acuity. Another study at the Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies in Italy discovered that people with experience in meditation are able to more easily regulate cognitive engagement and that meditation at any level—even simply “zoning out”—is crucial to developing brain plasticity (that is, the flexibility of the brain to reroute, restructure and reorganize itself). This means, the practice of meditation trains the practitioner to control brain function. A similar study from the Indian Council of Medical Research indicated that meditation will increase performance potential.  This particular study looked at the results of the same task performed by four different groups: ordinary practice with no meditation, meditation based on a symbolic (visual) centering device, meditation using a linguistic device (a repeated phrase) and meditation using an auditory device (a sound repetition, like chant). What they discovered was that regardless of the mode of meditation, those subjects performed the task with significantly faster and more accurate results than those non-meditators. The study did not show any significant preference to the device used for centering.  It did, however, show that different parts of the brain were activated with the different modes of meditation.                       

Tibetan monks meditate while creating this sand mandala

I think my favorite study was one conducted at MIT through the Anthropology Program that examined perception capabilities of highly trained Tibetan monks in the art of meditation. The question of whether or not meditation puts one in an altered state of consciousness and is thus prone to hallucinations was raised. The researchers at MIT for this particular study wanted to show evidence that meditation actually increased the brain’s ability to perceive information that a “typical” non-meditative brain could not. They discovered that these monks, who’ve trained for decades in practices of meditation, can actually perceive light at limits imposed by quantum mechanics, allowing them to “see” what is hidden from the typical brain. Essentially, researchers learned that these highly trained Tibetan monks are able to enhance their visual system functioning to that of high-speed, time-lapsed photography.  The implications being that they are able to perceive levels of reality through meditation that the average person cannot.  It is NOT hallucination, but actuality. Think of it this way—these monks highly skilled in meditation practice and prayer really do see God! Or at least are honestly more enlightened than the rest of us.

There is another story about a monastery in France whose abbot insisted on aligning with Vatican II and eliminated the eight hours a day of chanting. The monks began to show signs of mental fatigue and anxiety. They tried sleeping more, but only found themselves even more fatigued.  They altered their diet to no affect.  Finally, they called in Dr. Alfred Tomitas who pioneered research on the neurophysiological effects of chant on the minds and bodies of its listeners. Upon learning that these monks had been trained to the meditative benefits from chanting, but then had that benefit removed, he reinstated the practice.  After a short period, once the monks had re-trained their brains, they were once again healthy and functioning at superior levels of cognition and performance.

Music, especially chant-like music, in our liturgy enhances our ability to send ourselves into a meditative (prayerful) mental state.  When we intone the same mass settings and repeat the same prayers, we are training our brains to become meditative and therefore more open to God’s message to us.So the next time you get and "earworm" or "music maggot" in your head, don't curse it!  Thank God for it, for it's forcing a meditative state in your brain.