Research on the Politics of Meditation Points to Deeper Truths
Psychologists recently conducted a study that found that meditation may make you more liberal, at least in the short-term. Richard Schiffman argues that the politics of true spirituality are more about balance than support for any one side.
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There have been some fascinating studies about the effects of meditation in recent years. Buddhist monks and Trappist friars have been hooked up to EEG machines to record subtle changes in their brainwaves during their spiritual practices. Scores of clinical trials have also been conducted to assess the impact of meditation and prayer on physiological processes ranging from blood pressure and immune system response to recovery rates from surgery.
But until now scientists have not explored the impact of meditation on that most un-meditative of all disciplines—politics.
That changed with the release by the University of Toronto earlier this week of a report published in the latest issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science, which makes two claims. The first, that people who call themselves "spiritual" tend to hold more liberal views than those who define themselves as "religious," is hardly surprising. One would expect that individuals who practice yoga and favor vegetarian diets and natural lifestyles would tend to be on the left side of the political spectrum. And anyone who has followed the decades-long rise (and more recent decline) of the religious right won't be surprised to learn that religious believers are more conservative as a group than their secular counterparts—although there are clearly lots of exceptions to this rule.
However, what is truly new is the study’s other finding—that meditation makes you more liberal, at least in the short term. The researchers arrived at this conclusion by comparing the political views of people who had just participated in a guided meditation with those in a control group. The meditators expressed more liberal views—including a reduced support for "tough on crime" policies, and a preference for liberal political candidates— than the non-meditators.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/study-s-claims-about-politics-of-meditation-point-to-deeper-truths