The engaging and creative Professor Peter Mandik is very passionate about meditation. He was inspired to learn about the subject in his high school library when looking for books about “Zen, Buddhism, psychedelic experiences, and far-out stuff!” After 37 years, he continues to practice meditation. When confronted by a tiger shark while scuba diving, he was able to find a “calm space” in his mind. He now teaches a course on meditation at William Paterson University as part of the newly created “Mindfulness and Wellness Certificate” multi-course program organized by Professor Lucia McMahon, history chairperson.
At a 2011 conference in Portugal, Mandik met neuroscientists, robed Zen monks, and nuns using cushions and candles in morning meditation Zen Dojo sessions, all “staring at the wall trying to clear their minds.”
“It was very difficult but appealing to me because I was already interested in that sort of stuff,” Mandik said. “When I got back to the United States, the first thing I wanted to do was teach this.”
Mandik’s course focuses on Hindu, Buddhist, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic meditative traditions, as well as the modern development of the centering prayer movement. Philosophically, he said, there’s an emphasis on non-duality, and the question about whether there’s a “self”. His class also analyzes “hardcore metaphysical questions– what is the ultimate nature of reality?… that’s the sort of stuff we talk about in my class.”
“I have been meditating pretty regularly since I was 18, and I’m now 55. I have four children, so I’m not able to meditate every day, but I nonetheless do it fairly regularly.” It doesn’t seem like the professor will become a Zen monk anytime soon.
Mandik has also said that “older students tend to be interested in relaxing and achieving calm, younger students mostly are just curious, for reasons similar to what drove me to it–far-out things like psychedelic experiences and meditation.” Other students’ interests are related to their “experiences with anxiety or ADHD.”
MEDITATION: WHAT’S GOING ON?
When asked how meditation affects executive brain functioning, Mandik said: “I’m familiar with research on it. I’ve been diagnosed with depression and ADHD; my own experience is that meditation has been helpful.” He notes that there’s evidence that meditation helps with symptoms of depression. In brain scans of meditators, scientists see “activity profiles that make sense with the hypothesis that it’s helping, and you know intuitively if it is.”
He explains that portions of the brain emotionally react to internal and external stimuli. “If you’re afraid or are telling yourself negative thoughts, your brain will respond with feelings of fear and adrenaline; your heart starts pumping.”
With improved executive functioning from meditating, “you could turn that stuff off, or at least turn the volume down. Like in the case of the shark, you can make yourself not react and use your executive function to say, hey, just hold your horses. Emotional parts of the brain want to be afraid and have this fear reaction, but then there’s this other part of the brain that will say no. So in talking to yourself, you become the executive; you change the body’s reaction.”
Mandik tends more toward the scientific, like a subconscious implantation of an idea, like meditating on the word and idea of happiness. He agrees it’s like planting a seed. “There are two analogies. I like one of them that comes directly from these traditions.”
THE THREE-DART PARABLE
Mandik’s explanation of the three-dart parable:
“There’s this parable of the three darts. If you got shot with a dart, that would hurt; okay, that’s one dart. But most human beings, in virtue of our advanced intellect and ability to hold on to the past and worry about the future much more than any non-human animal that doesn’t have language can. We can, even after that first dart has been pulled out, remember it and just keep torturing ourselves, thinking ‘Oh man, that dart sucked so much I hated it; it bummed me out. My whole day is ruined.’ You hold onto the memory of the dark and torture yourself with it. That’s the second dart.”
“Third dart is–you can use the same kind of intellect and self talking to worry about possible future darts. ‘I might get shot again, right?’ There was just one dart. If a dog or a cat got shot with the dart, they would forget about it and not worry about the next one, and then move on.”
MEDITATION WITH MANTRAS
In most traditions, mantra (meditative words) is a common technique that helps support meditation engagement. “I tell my students there are a lot of different views, from a belief in praying to gods, that they will come and help you with extreme religious realism or metaphysical interpretation,” Mandik said. “And then there’s a more naturalistic or scientific interpretation, whereby, if you talk to yourself, that will activate certain responses in other parts of your brain that might not be activated if you didn’t talk to yourself.”
“My interpretation of mantras is, in part, from a long history of different people interpreting Buddhism, and a lot of the struggle to interpret the words of the Buddha over 2000 plus years. Simply put, it is this history of trying to figure out how hard Buddhism should be for people.”
In the very earliest versions of Buddhism, “the recommendations for what you had to do to become enlightened, to achieve nirvana was tough. You basically would have to be a monk, give up your household, or wait until you’re old enough after all your children were raised, then you could go live in the monastery and dedicate hours and hours every day to perfecting yourself. Later, versions of Buddhism promoted the idea that maybe it doesn’t need to be that difficult. Perhaps we should try to formulate Buddhism in a way that would just be easier and thus doable for a greater number of people. And some versions of Buddhism made it very simple.”
Early spiritual thinkers and leaders said, “Look, if you want to be saved, then just say these words or pray to this deity; that’s all you have to do, so you don’t even have to meditate. And so, some of the people promoting these ideas probably believed them and that there were gods. You could also introduce a cynical interpretation and say some of these people were just trying to get people to come to their monastery instead of the other person’s monastery, and so that they’re just promoting intellectual products in a competitive market.”
“My interpretation is that if it works at all, it probably does work. It’s a very scientifically understandable thing that has to do with the general process by which we know that self-talk could be beneficial and have a beneficial and positive effect on you. Still, there’s no one size fits all.”
“I don’t think there’s some right way to meditate, and that you’ve got to do it this way and not this other way. It can and should be really simple for the beginner. Just take, say, five minutes every day; it doesn’t have to be 30 minutes or more.”
KEEP AN OPEN MIND
Mandik concludes from personal experience: “You can see some benefits pretty rapidly…in my interpersonal reactions with people, I am less quick to anger, and I’ve become a better listener. I feel less of an urge to always be the one talking. Maybe meditation isn’t for everybody. Try it out. Don’t think it has to be a big deal… you can give up, not a big deal, right?”
If you’d like to learn more from Professor Mandik, you can visit his YouTube channel, where he discusses all things philosophy.
