Talking Vietnam Meditation Blues—a Snapshot from the Past, or Is It the Future?

I started meditating in the mid-1960s. For someone who grew up on the streets of New York City, it felt like quite an unusual thing to be getting into. Almost no one I knew meditated. There were very few good books about meditation in English (and those you had to search for in weird “underground bookstores”), and virtually nothing about it in the media. I never thought of meditation as a “counterculturish” thing to do, in part because the term hadn’t quite been invented yet. I guess it felt a bit oriental in a romantic way, a sense that something had been discovered and nurtured for centuries in the “Mysterious East” that was potentially relevant for living fully and well and therefore might be worth experimenting with. …