Marvellous Metta Meditation
The books and online courses, that has been my guide to a meditation practice, strongly advise the student to do Metta meditation. Metta is a word in Pali, the language used by the early Buddhists, that means something like loving kindness. Other words for Metta are benevolence and goodwill. Not being a Pali scholar, I’ve taken these translations from the Wikipedia article on the subject. Also, each source I’ve come across provides slightly different versions of what might be called a Metta prayer. The one I personally like is from the book “The Mind Illuminated” by Culadasa (John Yates Ph.D.). It goes as follows:
May all beings be free from suffering.
May all beings be free of ill will.
May all beings be filled with loving kindness.
May all beings be truly happy.
My initial reaction to this was that it would be impossible to for me to be true to the feelings expressed in these statements, much less to include them in my meditation practice. So for the major part of the period, I have been meditating I just ignored the subject. Then I started using the Muse Headset that I have discussed in a previous posting. Considering what I felt was true about our species I suspected that if I tried to actually do a Metta meditation my insincerity would show up somehow in the signals generated by the headset. So I decided to give Metta a try and see if I could generate good feelings without being a total hypocrite that would be detected in the patterns of my brain waves. The book contained an appendix with instructions on how to start such a meditation, which I carefully read several times. I also committed the above statements to memory. As part of the instructions, I was to get into the usual meditative state with a concentration on the sensations caused by my breathing. Keeping some concentration on breathing I should then attempt to feel what it would be like if each of the statements were true, even though I did not believe this was indeed the case. The object was to raise the emotions I would experience in such a case. Thinking about this a bit I concluded that I could do this without having to actually believe what I considered to be the reality. So I spent an hour-long meditation going through this exercise with my headset active. Much to my surprise and amazement, the result was amazing, both from the subjective and objective point of view. Thus my headsets signal registered both strong concentration and calmness, much in excess of my usual result. So whatever my assessment of this type of meditation it truly made quite a difference in my practice. The instructions said that I should continue doing this by replacing “all beings” by those close to me followed by an ever-increasing set of persons and other entities. I doubt that I will ever get close to “all beings” but so far I have managed to include many more than I expected. Whatever the case may be I am now sold on at least trying to broaden the scope of my Metta awareness.Â
Aside from my personal reaction to this type of meditation, I found it interesting to compare different versions of the statements used. For example in one of the online courses, the instructor put statement 4 first, as well as changing the overall wording. Some internet lookups revealed that almost every web page on the subject took a different approach. Perhaps because I had started with the above version I decided it was the best version. To me, it seems to have a built-in logic. For example, I can imagine someone to be free of suffering but not free of ill will, not possessing loving kindness or being truly happy. Thus I find the ordering to be significant, though I still have to work it out in a more formal manner. The author of the book I got this from is both a neural scientist and an ordained Buddhist practitioner. Perhaps the scientist part of his background plays a part in the particular version.Â
In conclusion and as a former skeptic of Metta meditation I now highly recommend the practice, at least as I learned it from Culadasa’s book. So “May all readers try out some Metta meditation.”
With Loving Kindness,
Marty











