Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton Page B

seven-pointmeditation posture. For a group of novices this is, inevitably, something of a struggle, since many of our bodies are no longer quite so young, and all of us seem afflicted by the self-consciousness that naturally results from contorting oneself in one’s socks in front of strangers. A certain amount of giggling and even the occasional fart ensue as we strive to imitate Tony’s position, which is reputed to be the same one adopted by the Buddha and his disciples as they meditated under a sacred Bodhi tree in the eastern Indian state of Bihar twenty-odd centuries ago. The instructions are precise: our legs must be crossed, our left hand must rest on top of our right in our lap, our spine should be straight, our shoulders lightly stretched, our head inclined forwards, our gaze directed downwards, our mouth slightly open, the tip of our tongue touching the roof of our mouth, our breathing steady and slow.
    ( illustration credit 4.17 )
    To answer our longing for calm, Western consumer society has over the last fifty years refined the concept of sunbathing; Buddhism has taken over a thousand years to perfect the art of meditation. ( illustration credit 4.18 )
    Gradually the group falls into line, and the room grows silent save for the hoot of an owl in a distant field. Tony guides us to focus on the unremarkable yet rarely remarked-upon fact that we are all breathing. In our first steps towards mastering the
ānāpānasati
(‘mindfulness of breathing’) meditation, we recognize the extraordinary challenge posed by sitting quietly in a room and doing nothing other than existing – we apprehend, in other words, the draconian grip which the priorities and projects of our egos have on us. We take note of our tendencies towards distraction. As we strive to attend only to our breathing, we sense our conscious minds shooting this way and that on their customarily frantic itineraries. We realize how absurdly difficult we find it to take even three breaths without being seized by an anxiety-charged idea, and extrapolate from that how uncommon it must be for us to inhabit any experience without becoming enmeshed in the tendrils of our
ātman
.
    The purpose of our new seating position is to open up a modest distance between our consciousness and our ego. As we feel ourselves breathing, we notice that our physical beings have rhythms which play out without reference to our ego-led desires. The otherness of the body is one aspect of a vast realm of
anātman
which the ego does not control or understand and to which Buddhism now seeks to introduce us.
    ( illustration credit 4.19 )
    Because it is the ego’s habit to try to exploit and use as an instrument all that it encounters, it is unaware of the body except insofar as it is useful to its projects for sensory gratification. It is latently resentful of and appalled by its fragility. It does not want to think of the strange ways of the liver or of the mysterious doings of the pancreas. It orders the body to stay faithful to its tasks, hunched over the desk with back muscles clenched into a state of obedience and anxious expectation. Yet now, suddenly, the ego is being asked to cede control to nothing more distinguished and productive than the act of breathing, that background process of inhalation and exhalation which has been going on largely unnoticed and unappreciated since our birth. Taken aback, it experiences some of the same confusion that a king might feel upon being forced, due to unexpected circumstances, to spend a night on a hard bed in a humble inn.
    With all our attention directed towards our breathing instead of the ego’s demands, it starts to give up some of its claims on consciousness and lets in data which it ordinarily filters out. We become aware of things, both internal and external, that have nothing to do with our usual concerns. Our consciousness shifts from a focus on breathing to an awareness first of our limbs, then of