This is my love letter to silent meditation retreat, and a glimpse of why I devote so much time to quietly exploring internal frontiers.  

Feeling a sense of danger during an election season is nothing new to me, or probably anyone else. I wrote one of my first essays about how the Democratic fervor was so zealous in my family that it was not until high school that I realized there were ideological differences between Republicans and Nazis. And it would be ridiculous to suggest that politics today is any uglier than it ever was—just look to Jefferson and Adams to dispel that notion. Yet I am worried about the near absence of space for civil dialogue between political parties. 

It’s not uncommon for people to ask Joseph Goldstein for the secret teachings. As one of the great meditation masters of our time and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS), fielding such questions comes with the job. On more than one occasion, I’ve heard friends talking in the IMS staff dining room about the time they asked Joseph for the secret. Here’s the most frequent answer he gave: