‘Be Present’: Does Secular Meditation Actually Do Anything?
Have you ever been asked to close your eyes, take a deep breath and spend a moment trying to “be present”?
Many of us have been confronted with this kind of mindfulness meditation — this encouragement to sit and be still before engaging with some kind of task
This practice of retreating into one’s mind in order to achieve some kind of clarity has been around for thousands of years. But its current iteration most directly finds its roots in the Vedic texts of Hinduism and through Buddhism.
Meditation didn’t begin to enter Western life with any real significance until the 1960’s — and even then it was largely reserved for the hippies and artists. Today, meditation is practiced by 17% of U.S. adults — up 10% from just 20 years ago.
It’s also encouraged by major companies like Apple and Nike and practiced by highly successful entrepreneurs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and immortality-seeker Bryan Johnson. He meditates every morning in between light exposure and a very complicated smoothie.
Is this popular practice actually helpful or is it just a corporatized interpretation of an ancient spiritual technique meant to distract us from the world’s larger problems by going inward? And was it ever helpful to us, even before western civilization got its hands on it?
These are some of the questions that R. John Williams asks in his upcoming book “Out of Mind.” Williams is a professor of English and Film Studies at Yale University, whose first book covered the way the West has sought to use Eastern practices and aesthetics to escape from technology. On this week’s podcast, I sat down with John to understand the history and the limits of mindfulness meditation.
Listen to this episode of the Religion Unplugged podcast on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
Matthew Peterson is Religion Unplugged’s podcast editor and audience development coordinator. He took part in the 2025 European Journalism Institute held in Prague, an annual program co-sponsored by The Media Project.