Talking Vietnam Meditation Blues—a Snapshot from the Past, or Is It the Future?

I started meditating in the mid-1960s. For someone who grew up on the streets of New York City, it felt like quite an unusual thing to be getting into. Almost no one I knew meditated. There were very few good books about meditation in English (and those you had to search for in weird “underground bookstores”), and virtually nothing about it in the media. I never thought of meditation as a “counterculturish” thing to do, in part because the term hadn’t quite been invented yet. I guess it felt a bit oriental in a romantic way, a sense that something had been discovered and nurtured for centuries in the “Mysterious East” that was potentially relevant for living fully and well and therefore might be worth experimenting with. Earlier brushes with Buddhist and yogic meditation within our culture, among the beat poets in the 1950s, some of whom, like Gary Snyder, went to Japan to practice, coupled with the visits to this country of a few luminaries even before that, at the turn of the twentieth century, on the occasion of the first Parliament of the World’s Religions that took place in Chicago, planted tiny dharma seeds that sprouted in the 1960s. Alan Watts’s book Psychotherapy East and West was an important catalyst in that nascent experimentation within the society. I was of the generation that came of age in the mid-1960s, the one that, whether we were students or not, whether we were politically engaged or not, seemed to be experimenting in unusually large numbers with different ways of breaking free from the social conformity that dominated the 1950s. We were sometime confused, sometime intrepid explorers on the young growing edges of society, its children really, looking for a kind of clarity, a goodness, a promise we were not finding in the conventional pursuits of success, power, status, fame, and fortune within the American corporate/political mainstream dream—especially against the what could only be described as surreal backdrop of the Cold War, and, within that, of the “superpower” that we were, waging relentless war day after day and year after year against a small agrarian society with no air force or navy, eventually dropping more bomb tonnage on Vietnam than on all of Europe in World War II. Some of us were looking for a place to stand and to be and to work that had the integrity of a greater awareness of the whole of things, for all the contradictions and paradoxes that we knew or quickly learned are part and parcel of living in this world. We were also incredibly angry and disillusioned about what was going on. In the meetings of the Science Action Coordinating Committee (SACC) at MIT, which a small group of graduate students founded in 1968 to bring the issues of MIT’s deep engagement in the war and war research into open conversation and dialogue, we often practiced yoga together on someone’s living room floor and did some sitting before we entered into the agenda. It was just a dabbling, but a heartfelt one, a nod to our growing sense that the changes we were trying to catalyze in ourselves and the world weren’t just a shift in priorities, or putting a stop to certain kinds of things from going on in our name, but rather a shift in awareness, a rotation in consciousness that felt big to us even though compared to the issues and social forces we were facing up to, it also seemed small and improbable. MIT had two highly celebrated laboratories devoted almost entirely to war-related research, dating back to the Second This article is excerpted from the book Coming To Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Copyright (c) 2005 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. Published by Hyperion. All Rights Reserved.