Meditation And Massacre

My father was a good person. When the bad grades came, he gave me a meditation cassette: Superlearning – learning in your sleep. Firstly, this end of the educational flagpole made me fall asleep quickly, secondly, it didn’t do what it was supposed to – and ultimately left me clearly traumatised by meditation as a child.

Today I am a so-called head person. Unfortunately, this hardly helps when playing chess, but it definitely manifests itself in a pronounced scepticism towards any skullduggery that cannot be logically justified. According to my last room neighbour – God have mercy on his soul – some meditation CDs have a more disastrous effect on me than a mixture of crack and crystal meth.

Let’s start with the names. For me, there are no authors whose names I classify as good. There is at best a “neutral”. These include Simonton and Creighton, Thich Naht Hanh and Rüdiger Dahlke. Other meditation teachers fail simply because of their name. “Benedict XIV” seems a little too “by the grace of God”. With other authors, the only thing left to do is to work through childhood traumas with meditation CDs simply because of the name.

Criterion two: voice and rhythm. There are meditation CDs that can be ripped into MP3 format and shrunk to 148kB per CD thanks to the variable bit rate. If the nasal, lisping voice of the speaker seems unappealing enough, the endless pauses between the speaker’s meaningless snatches of words, which minimise production costs, really do seem like pure relaxation. Mission accomplished.

The speaker’s dialect is the only thing that the producers of meditative CDs seem to have always got right. At least I don’t know of a single CD with a Saxon speaker. Unfortunately not a Bavarian one either. But I have heard Viennese slang. I don’t necessarily understand how a “Mei, wia leydig-liab dös Schaferl do üban Zaun hupft” contributes to relaxation – but it works. With a subtle grin on the listener’s face.

Practically every meditation CD uses background music. Baroque music is apparently the ultimate in musical mindlessness when it comes to meditation. As a professional would-be musician, I attach great importance to correct volume levels: With some cheap meditation CDs, my cerebral cortex is saved solely by the “bad” mix of “background” music and “foreground” speaker: if the drivel is inaudibly drowned out by music, it can’t do me any harm either. With baroque music, of course, the situation is reversed accordingly.

Correctly addressing the listener is also important. I’m a little hesitant here: would I prefer the formal but somewhat distant “Sie”, or the warm, approachable “Du”? There is probably no universal solution. The bad ones may step on my toes with a “Du”, while the good ones may appeal to my freedom of choice regarding the stop button with their non-binding “Sie”.

Finding the right meditation CD really isn’t easy. Confused people tend to go for radical solutions. For example, I’m pretty sure that Anders Breivik really shouldn’t have recorded audio books of his idiot pamphlet. He definitely shouldn’t have listened to it either. The world would be a better place.