Diane Hamilton on Zen, Meditation, and Human Development

As people grow in these areas, something shifts in how they hold their own identity, and also in how they experience space and time. The boundaries of the self start to loosen. What struck me is that as the sense of identity opens up and the view of what's happening gets wider, the heart tends to switch on too. People who have come further along in this kind of development usually turn out to be more spiritual, with a richer relationship to the divine and a lot more room inside themselves for stillness, for sitting quietly, for meditation.

Erik picked up on that. He mentioned something Albert Einstein once said: that the religion of the future wouldn't belong to one god or another but would be a cosmic religion, and he wondered aloud whether that was close to what Diane was describing. From there he turned toward something more concrete. Listeners, he figured, would want actual tools. Take a common situation. Someone has a difficult relationship with their family. Maybe the family is dug in, maybe talking to a parent feels impossible, maybe there's been a fight among siblings that has dragged on for three decades. So what does a person do when they're working on themselves, trying to grow, and the people around them aren't? How do you stay in relationship with family who have no interest in changing?

Diane said that right away you may be dealing with a difference in levels. You're moving, and your family looks like it's standing still. The usual reaction is impatience. We start insisting that the people around us become different, and that almost always backfires. Her suggestion was to begin with the skills themselves, and the starting point is three basic perspectives, checking how steadily you can actually hold each one.

The first is the one most of us find easy: the first-person view. What do I think? What am I feeling? What do I want, what do I need, and if everything went as well as it possibly could, what would I like to see happen?

The second takes more effort. You turn the same questions outward toward the family. How are they feeling? What's going on in their heads? What do they want, what do they need, and in the best version of events, what would they be hoping for?