At first glance Objectivism and meditation may seem violently at odds with one another. Objectivism is the philosophy of rational egoism – it champions the mind and upholds thought as the most noble of pursuits, and it does so in the name of the self; meanwhile, meditation explicitly strives for the ‘death of the ego’, and much of its practices focus on stopping your thinking. Despite these seemingly irreconcilable set of differences I have continued exploring meditation throughout my two years of being an Objectivist, as I cannot deny how much it has improved my everyday life. This article is an attempt to provide nothing more than a hypothesis for just what might be good about meditation – mainly for my own benefit.
I discovered meditation before I had read anything by Ayn Rand, and I was immediately convinced it was one of the missing pieces of the problematic puzzle that was my life at the time. I was half way through university, in the epicentre of progressive education, and I had become obsessed with my image. I was desperate to appear to be the strong, confident person I had always wanted to be anyway, but it was appearance that was becoming the focus of my thoughts. In essence, I was hurtling towards becoming Peter Keating. Meditation was the first thing that really helped this problem – it acted as a simple, relatively easy to learn antidote to all the obsessive, negative, image-related thoughts that had infested my mind.
About a year later I was neck-deep in Objectivism, and meditation had been left stranded on the shore. Then, while I was watching one of Leonard Peikoff’s lectures on the ARI website, he brought up the concept of focus.
‘“Focus” is not synonymous with “thinking,” in the sense of step-by-step problem-solving or the drawing of new conclusions. You may be walking down the street, merely contemplating the sights, but you can do it in focus or out of focus. “In focus” would mean you have some purpose directing your mental activity—in this case, a simple one: to observe the sights. But this is still a purpose, and it implies that you know what you are doing mentally, that you have set yourself a goal and are carrying it out, that you have assumed the responsibility of taking control of your consciousness and directing it’. Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 3.
I immediately made the connection to meditation. Peikoff’s description of being in focus while walking down the street is an almost exact description of how I felt walking down the street after meditating – in sharp contrast to my old self, who would be so preoccupied with such a multitude of thoughts that I often wouldn’t be able to find my way back home after a few minutes of wandering. The question, then, is just what exactly does meditation do, and how does this related to the concept of focus?
My hypothesis is this: meditation is a technique for practising staying in focus, and an antidote to the negative, irrational thoughts that plague the minds of most young people today. It may be that you don’t need to ‘meditate’ in the traditional sense of the word, rather that you can just practice staying in focus in normal everyday situations – like going for a walk. I still ‘meditate’ in the traditional sense of the word for fifteen minutes every morning, simply by sitting and focusing my concentration on my breath, the sounds of the street outside, and the feelings in my body, but I am experimenting with other techniques as much as possible. I suspect this is probably most useful for those with an actual problem remaining in focus, and it may very well be that many people simply don’t need to practise it – all I can say with certainty it there is something valuable about it, and it subsequently should not simply be dismissed.
Rational Observations 