Radical Meditation

The other day I picked up  in the Oxfam bookshop a book called “The meditator’s handbook” by David Fontana, a university professor in the UK. It is billed as “The Meditator’s Handbook: a complete guide to eastern and western techniques” of meditation. Fontana has “studied Eastern and Western religions, meditation, dreams [etc] for over 25 years” with a number of different meditation teachers.

But reading the book, it appears Fontana has thought about meditation a lot, but if his life has been transformed by meditation (transformed, not just improved) that doesn’t come across. I struggled to have any sense that Fontana really understands the power of meditation to radically transform our lives. He seems stuck at understanding meditation as a source of enjoyable and useful experiences.  Sadly this is very common in books about meditation written by Westerners.

So I’ve started a series of posts on what I term radical meditation. You can find these under “Pages” on the right. If you have any questions, please post them as comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

As I say in one of the pages, I’m not enlightened, so there’s very much that I also can’t speak of from experience, or I’ve only had illuminating insights that aren’t yet a permanent part of my life. But at least I am aware of that and honest about it;  so many meditation writers don’t seem to be. And there is certainly much that I can speak of with authority. Where I rely on the teaching or experience of others about meditation, I will say so.