I saw a Dr. K video in another comment, and one of my favorite quotes he uses to describe meditation is that, "if you run for 5 miles a day, there will be changes to your body that will definitely happen".
More here:
- https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-i-the-fund...
- https://eudoxos.github.io/cfitness/html/index.html
- https://themindfulgeek.com/ plus a talk he gave at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xxsA9Bn-4
Also, I gotta say that language like "moral deficiencies" sounds incredibly broad without some examples. I think that speaks to the drawbacks of a religious context. I don't necessarily mean to direct these comments at you in particular (after all, I don't know what you meant by "moral deficiencies" without more info), but morality is a slippery topic and religion often seems to treat it like it isn't.
The pali word is "sila", the closest translation is morals. To be deficient in sila is to be deficient in morals, was my thought process. One example is do no harm, or avoid lying. If all your daily life is filled with causing harm, and deceit, then it will be filled with chaos and end up making it harder for you to make progress in awakening or do good stuff. This is one interpretation of karma (cause and effect).
There's a whole other philosophical side to it that I think about, outside of the Buddhist context. That certain choices or circumstances in life end up reducing your moral agency in this world. People can be born under unsafe, and unkind environments, so sometimes it becomes harder to be generous and kind, as if there was less wiggle room in your ability to act as a moral agent. One of the things Buddhism tries to address is removing the layers of conditioning in your mind and concept of self, to give you more freedom.
This is almost the opposite of Christianity, depending on what you mean by "right morals". Christianity says you simply can't reach salvation and be with God unless you are flawless, which is humanly impossible, so unless God does something... hence Christ.
If you are willing to confess your sin and repent for your mistakes with godly sorrow, God will forgive your trespasses.
Even the most handsy of trespassing priests is forgiven.
But like anything, institutions are run by humans and sometimes go the wrong way, focused on dogma, enrichment or power.
Wow! I haven't meditated before. That sounds like a lot of time.
Do you still meditate? What does it offer you? Has it offered you what you expected?
I am very good at deep work, and concentrating on stuff. It is also easy to deal with stress and emotions in my day to day. My life feels like playing a third person video game with the FOV slider turned to 360 degrees. Every sensation comes discretely where I can see the beginning and end. 1 second is a really long time, enough room to fit 1000s of sensations, bounded only by your speed of perception. I am aware of how my mind constructs the concept of time, the idea of later. The cool part about hitting stages of enlightenment is that there is a quantum shift in how your brain processes, that I know I cannot regress to a previous stage. But I wonder if awakening is built from physical, neural correlates, then things like dementia or a traumatic brain injury might reverse some of the effects.
Another interesting note is that I have a much higher pain tolerance, as well as sort of better control of my body movements. I know some people describe enlightenment as a full body transformation, not just the mind.
One thing that is keeping me from progressing further is the inconvenience that comes with sleep alterations caused by meditation, and how it affects my work as a programmer. I still have obligations to participate in modern society, pay bills, keep relationships, etc. And I know if I didn't do this, I would be perfectly content doing nothing all day, just meditating. It's why retreats and the monastic life is so conductive to awakening. Maybe this is the ultimate FIRE goal, I'm just working on the FI :)
For the record, the Buddha has never advocated leaving society, especially lay followers. Whether we are a monk, at a retreat, in a family, we all have a duty to be a wise citizen.
I'm not the OP, but after I practiced meditation intensely for a few months I found two huge benefits:
First: before I meditated I used to get annoyed and bored when I had to do chores like washing the dishes or standing in line. But after meditating for a while, when I had to do such a chore I'd just focus on my breath and I'd no longer feel bored or annoyed. In fact, such chores and waiting in line became almost pleasurable because they gave me an opportunity to meditate.
Second: when someone said something mean to me I would just focus on my breath and sort of catch myself about to get angry and saw that I had a choice whether to get angry or not. I didn't have to get drawn in to the hurricane of feelings as an unconscious reaction to the meanness directed at me. Instead I could just continue to focus on my breath and I wouldn't get angry at all.
Unfortunately, for some reason that I no longer remember, I fell off the wagon of meditating regularly and went back to my old easily bored, quick to anger self. I still try to meditate occasionally by focusing on my breath, but it doesn't help nearly as much as when I meditated regularly for hours at a time.
Highly recommend his channel by the way.
I was warned about it when I started getting "serious" about my practice, but I didn't believe it until I confronted it, face-to-face, on a daily basis. To this day I am the renegate and persona non grata at my Temple, ex except for the Abbot and my Zen Master who know how to tolerate, navigate, and leverage that BS for the greater good.
Samurai training is Buddhism training on steroids.
Regardless, my practice continue with a lot less time at the Temple, and I have relinquished my Center (the Center that I founded).
> The five spiritual faculties are said to be like a cart with four wheels and a driver. If any of the four wheels is too small, wobbly, or not in balance with the others, then the going on the spiritual road will be rough. The four wheels symbolize faith, wisdom, energy, and concentration. If the driver is not paying attention there will also be problems. The driver symbolizes mindfulness. [See SN 48.18, also Visuddhimagga, IV, 45.2.]
> The five spiritual faculties have also been presented in another order that can be useful: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. In this order, they apply to each of the three trainings, the first of which, as discussed earlier, is morality. We have faith that training in morality is a good idea and that we can do it, so we exert energy to live up to a standard of clear and skillful living. We realize that we must pay attention to our thoughts, words, and deeds in order to do this, so we try to be mindful of them. We realize that we often fail to pay attention, so we try to increase our ability to concentrate on how we live our life. In this way, through experience, we become wiser in a relative sense, learning how to live a good and useful life. Seeing our skill improve and the benefits it has for our life, we generate more faith, and so on.
https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-i-the-fund...
Always thought it was faddish.
I've also seen it make some people more likely to fall into the trap of woo-science and dodgy, spiritual scams. The practice of awakening forces you to investigate the ways you suffer. Before, they may throw their money at these sketchy MLMs and still suffer. With meditation, they can throw their money at them and also suffer a lot less.
I was newly moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a meditation course on literally loving-kindness (they were all mindfulness, this was a focused seminar).
When I was on my way in someone was having a mental health emergency right outside the front door and looked to clearly need care. Not knowing who to call for this since I didn't live in the city, and definitely not wanting to call cops, I went in and asked how to take actual action to help them out.
Instead of engaging with the real life actual emergency right in front of them where they could practice actually doing loving-kindness people wanted to discuss how they could "use their suffering as an object of meditation". Few even stood up to look. Averting their eyes from suffering was a very strange response.
It was unreal, I'm used to 90% of the people in a room during an emergency being stunned and uncertain (but attentive and worried), but there's always a few people who jump into action... there are times for action and times for contemplation and emergencies are not times to work on self-improvement.
It was eye opening -- thankfully one of them had a more normal response and had experience so we were able to connect them to the Episcopalian church next door which operated a shelter and had people there trained in how to help. It was disturbing though that the people in the class who spoke so eloquently about the importance of kindness and helping others, who were actively practicing mindfulness and learning about themselves, had such a strange response to an emergency 20 feet away.
One might almost describe it as faking being nice while changing little on the inside. Hippie and good person camouflage. A way to feel empathy so hard and so calmly that you don't feel any urgency to take actual action.
A group of experienced, task-saturated senior auditors were pulled in from the field to attend an anti-stress seminar. During the guided meditation, an intense but non-destructive earthquake hit (in a high-rise building in downtown Los Angeles). It was the auditors who kept their wits and made clear decisions to calmly exit the structure. In marked contrast, the stress-reduction instructors were a wreck.
A friend and I used to go out to eat on a regular basis. He reasonably decided to change his diet to more healthy foods. For all I know, it did improve his health, but I did observe that at a ball game, he opted for a hamburger and then his body rebelled. He had lost the ability to eat commonplace foods.
Among meditators (of which I was one), I observed a heighten sensitivity to being knocked off kilter by anything or anyone that conflicted with the world view of the practitioner.
My friends who were into body building routinely lifted weights for many hours a week, but when suitcases or scuba tanks need to be carried, there a was strong aversion. I surmised that the unbalanced loads greatly threw-off how they had trained themselves to lift weights with good form.
Among Python programmers who use Black and isort in order to improve the appearance of code, it is common to become intolerant of code that they used to consider perfectly readable. Likewise, it is common to become highly judgmental of people who don't use that tooling (and even more so with type annotations where proponents seem to have an almost religious fervor).
I don't really know what conclusion to draw from these events, but there is something of interest going on.
Before this tooling, my experience is that people are less tolerant of whatever isn't they prefer. If familiarity breeds readability, why not adopt a standard?
I also assume your characterisation is sensationalised to fit the comparison: all valid python is readable, but some can be read faster, and more importantly - errors are easier to spot, if its in a familiar format.
wrt the lifting scenario, I'd have to ask what "strong aversion" means; presumably good form is intended for situations that you repetitively lift weights, where long-term unbalanced lifting would cause damage. If that's not the case, maybe we should all lift with good form?
I would totally believe that it was more an unpracticed response while in a relaxed and learning state of mind than anyone's actual underlying meanness, these were nice folks as far as I could tell otherwise. That one situation was just astoundingly weird.
And indeed, it wasn't a person in the class that responded, it was an assistant who had done the material many times. The teacher didn't seem to know what to do either, I think it may be as you say that the assistant just happened to be in a "run the stuff" state of mind rather than a "teach" or "listen/contemplate" state of mind.
That definitely would explain a lot, a mental context switch takes a significant amount of time and meditation absolutely can do that. It would also explain why I felt like a bit of an alien bringing it to anyone's attention, I had arrived ten minutes late from another activity so I wasn't "in the zone" yet.
At least, I've yet to hear a better explanation. I've attributed it to long ingrained habits showing up in class because in no other location with the same group (edit: not the same people, the same organization) did I encounter something similar. But that can certainly be coincidence.
I did point this disconnect out to the class, and I think any Buddhist would not take awareness of this response as a criticism rather than an observation and opportunity to improve. If any of us were perfect there'd be no need for a class in the first place.
See https://douglastoft.com/2022/04/18/robert-pirsig-on-coming-t...
Imagine if everyone had that response... I know it's fantasy, but I think that if you're studying mindfulness and compassion that's at least the direction you might want to be heading.
Something like this occurred at my buddhist temple during a meditation, except it was one of the members who collapsed. Someone went over help and the rest of us... couldn't do anything more. An ambulance was called. they got medical treatment.
Should we have collectively wrung our hands? To what end?
The point here isn't averting your eyes in the face of suffering, it's about correctly judging the situation and taking only effective action. Collectively performing impotent empathy isn't any more useful to the ailing person than quietly sitting and sending them prayers/lovingkindness/whatever.
And to be clear, I mean this as an example and a warning to not get too disconnected from the physical world while doing these meditations. They were all as friendly of people as any others I met in a city, it was the context that made it stick out in my mind.
Very few people are equipped to handle crazy people on the street, even among people who are trying to become better people, whatever that may mean to them.
You yourself attended the seminar on "loving-kindness" but couldn't resist dunking on these people some time later. But the thing is that I don't consider that inconsistent just because you were trying to improve yourself.
Even if the seminar were about helping crazy people that were standing in front of self-help seminars, it's still an unfair standard.
More generally, Buddhist medicine would be a good thing, as Ghandi might have put it. The heart of Buddhist medicine is that life is short, suffering is unavoidable, and that the best treatment is to teach and practice Buddhism.
Since then I have realized I think very few people actually care about strangers beyond conspicuously appearing to for selfish reasons.
In my entire life, meeting people from all walks of life (including people I vehemently disagree with, and some I would almost consider enemies, and even some zen Buddhists), when it came to the crunch, I know they/we would all have run towards an emergency as humans/neighbours.
On the other hand, let me assume it's true, then it isn't representative IME.
The homeless in places like SF are routinely experiencing serious emergencies, invariably need money and shelter, and are passed by tens of thousands of people each day who have the abilities to help them.
Of those tens of thousands of people who pass a homeless person who's clearly in need of help, perhaps 100 will give them some money, perhaps 5 will pause to ask if they can help, and perhaps 1 will actually take a not-insignificant amount of time to try and assist them.
These numbers are certainly not perfectly accurate, but from the people-watching I've done in the bay area, I can easily and confidently say that the average response to a stranger who has the class-signifiers of being homeless, even if that person appears to be having a seizure or other crisis, is to ignore them entirely.
I think my observations align closely with the parent comment's observation, and I absolutely believe it is representative of the people who go to meditation courses in the bay area.
that incident was imprinted in you, but how has it worked out for you since?
my guess: you failed to learn anything because of course that focused seminar doesn't teach anything related to the kind of mental health emergencies that occur on San Francisco streets, and so thats a decent crutch for you to lean on to not engage with them yourself, overriden by your own self preservation instincts. or are you now a mental health case worker that responds to these instead of the police? or do you know how to call those groups now so that you aren't the confused bystander like when you first moved?
My point was that the context of a class on loving-kindness was especially jarring. I fully advocate for everyone to take a class on basic first aid and know who to contact in response to a few basic classes of emergency, that seems as basic as having clean water in your house in case of an earthquake.
I can perform CPR, stop blood loss within reason, or call someone that knows how to do things I don't. I'm very happy to take suggestions for other skills that should be commonly known to be good community members.
You know what he’ll bring up every day? Mindfulness or meditation or stoicism. Like buddy, if you can’t sleep it’s probably because you know you’re not a nice person deep down. No amount of meditation is gonna help that.
Both supply and demand for these motivational charlatans are immense. Something tells me it's not about actual drive to be successful, because the most successful people aren't listening/reading that crap, they're too busy practicing, learning, etc. Instead I think it's a self-misdiagnosis (there's something wrong with me, and it's my motivation) and then the charlatans confirm that by saying "yes, listen to me, I'll give you a short high of confidence, come back for more!".
In reality the success addicts just aren't passionate about anything, and that's ok. What they need is to either (a) find their passion, and that takes time, an open mind, and trying different things or (b) accept that they aren't passionate and enjoy life in other ways.
Hadn't heard of him, but as an [ex]scientist I'd be fascinated to see the actual data showing any correlation between "narcissist" and "entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster, and lifestyle guru"[0]
Put slightly different, how many people who shy away from attention end up famous for their podcasts?
I mean, it's not that he doesn't engage in philanthropy, because he does[0]. It's that he doesn't talk about philanthropy?
Is it possible--and I offer this in the spirit of friendship (mostly)--that you need to take your head out of your own ass for a minute?
Importantly, I didn’t use the word philanthropy because it’s clearly not the only or even a good way of helping people. It doesn’t even have to be strangers heck. The only time he and his guests discuss “not them” is when they could learn or extract something from said others.
Why don’t people generally call someone making $40K donation $10K philanthropy? It’s just charity. However Tim Ferris does some tepid Ukraine stuff and it’s philanthropy.
When he could land great podcast guests or interview subjects and let them speak it turned out great.
When he brought on certain friends or acquaintances and they tried to discuss something together with Tim’s input playing a large role, it was anywhere from boring to a disappointing mess. I haven’t listened to his podcast for years after he had a string of pseudoscience guests pushing easily debunked ideas. I vividly remember one where Tim was clearly uneasy with the obvious nonsense his guest was pushing but he wouldn’t dare push back or question anything for any reason. Really disappointing.
Tim Ferriss has always been like that, though. His whole personal brand was built on the idea that he interviewed world-class experts and delivered their knowledge to you. His old blog was almost exclusively “guest posts” which is another way of saying he got other people to write the blog for him (brilliant marketing move).
Good example: Tim Pool. He's ideologically pretty close to me, but I can't stand him as a person. No thanks.
In that case, you might want to listen to the episode with Will MacAskill (of effective altruism fame):
https://tim.blog/2015/11/22/will-macaskill/
Many other guests who seem to be genuinely kind people come to mind as well (e.g., Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, Debbie Millman) but it probably doesn't get any more obvious than with Will MacAskill that this show isn't about selfish or narcissistic endeavours.
It’s a common strategy for podcasters/big personalities and defenses of them to have examples of engaging with another side. Even those examples are few and far between compared to the norm. IE Joe Rogan or Lex Friedman having far more right wing or right wing sympathetic people than left wing people on their shows. That doesn’t mean anything bad in and of itself. The issue is acting like having at least one person from each side means the show and/or host are balanced unbiased people in this regard.
The western adaptation is reducing meditation and mindfulness to a "tool" of relieving stress and better ones mental well-being. As easy as downloading an app and stay calm for few minutes.
Unfortunately, this is not ideal. The traditional way is to seek a guru who asks the disciple to cleanse their heart first. Put them on the spiritual path of purifying the soul. Meditation is a part of ones spiritual journey. Some even leave everything and go to forest or mountains to practice for years.
Fortunately, for those who want to live in a society closely, they should practice "Raja Yoga" which is also a spiritual path where one raises their spiritual plane by helping others and following ones duty with high-integrity.
However simple breathing exercises still work for the body and can be easily incorporated into every day lives. There are so many apps helping with the patterns of different breathing techniques.
But don't expect you or anyone to become a better person just by doing some mindfulness exercises. When one goes to discover/amplify their inner core, you will just highlight whats inside you more. I.e. if you are bad, you will get worse. Mindfulness has nothing to do with it but just amplifying what is already there as you discover yourself more through mindfulness.
lots of rich religious folks out there in history. when they expropriated the buddhists in the huichang expropriation during the tang, they took tens of millions of acres of arable land and liberated 150,000 temple slaves
Have you ever asked your wife about this?
> The traditional way is to seek a guru
"The" way? According to whom? Did you do it?
> Some even leave everything and go to forest or mountains to practice for years.
Except the Buddha and his stories explicitly advised against asceticism...
> they should practice "Raja Yoga" which is also a spiritual path where one raises their spiritual plane
Again, according to who? Why not Jesus? Or Scientology? What's your personal experience?
> However simple breathing exercises still work for the body and can be easily incorporated into every day lives.
Well this is out of nowhere. It doesn't connect to anything that's been said. Do you do this?
> When one goes to discover/amplify their inner core
Inner core is new. What's that and who asked? Is it the same as a True Self?
I'd say let's just focus on this: "Meditation is a part of ones spiritual journey." That's correct and all this issue needs. MBSR and the other sanitized, faith-cleansed scientifically quantifiable practices are not synonymous with mindfulness, meditation, or Buddhism. They're tangential, and for some they are nice greeters at the door to a path of spirituality.
Swami Vivekananda has a dedicated book on "Raja Yoga" in detail.
I recommend - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.abdula.pra... app. I am a subscriber for years and this one has the authentic breathing patterns.
> Except the Buddha and his stories explicitly advised against asceticism...
Yup, the Middle Path.
Stop wasting your time on Church and find better alternatives from the east.
I spent a few months doing more, and it may not be related, but I became increasingly detached from the outside world, more self-absorbed and less motivated. Spent a lot of time just sitting and being content with nothing, which made me question why I should strive for -anything-. Always focused on improving myself, and the way I thought and felt, but it kept me stuck in my own head and not engaged with other people. There is a benefit in doing loving kindness and other forms of meditation that connect you with others.
I Meditated, Now I Don't Care Anymore - https://youtu.be/NnTLJtBr1zo
EDIT
Also consider the progressive muscle relaxation meditation technique. It greatly helps with anxiety and I still benefit from it today even though I did only for a few months about 4 years ago. I can recognize when I am tensing up due to anxiety and immediately relax myself.
I would say the "routine" aspect of these has been so much more impactful than any of the actual individual things that I'm doing. I'm sure 10 mins of yoga/meditation is better than doing 0 but it's nothing life changing. One of the issues with ADHD-like symptoms for me was inconsistency. Having a morning routine sets up consistency and a system within which I know exactly what I need to do to "succeed" for the day.
Reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear helped me actually turn these things into habits.
Maṇibhadda Sutta (SN 10:4)
On one occasion the Blessed One was staying among the Magadhans at the Jewel-stand Shrine, the haunt of the yakkha-spirit, Maṇibhadda [Auspicious Jewel].
Then Maṇibhadda the yakkha-spirit went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, recited this verse:
“It’s always auspicious for one who is mindful. The mindful one prospers happily—always. The mindful one grows better each day and is totally freed from animosity.”
The Buddha:
“It’s always auspicious for one who is mindful. The mindful one prospers happily always. The mindful one grows better each day
but isn’t totally freed from animosity. Whoever’s heart, all day, all night, delights in harmlessness with goodwill for all beings
has no animosity with anyone at all.
I studied Buddhism quite a while pretty seriously, and I know that a lot of the meditations involve practicing loving yourself, and your friends, family, community, and that these feelings of love are a core thing to have in your mind as your practice. But you also have to actually do things to help, it's not enough to be nice about it.
The Buddhist temple I took some meditation classes at practiced feeling good things towards people. The Episcopalians next door ran a shelter. It's not hard to see which is further on the path towards enlightenment, and it's something that seems like it's very very often missing from Western teachings.
And completely absent from self-help books about the subject, which are 100% self-centered. Lesson 1 of compassion meditation should be volunteering at a food bank, not learning to forgive yourself for your flaws. These things should be learned together, not in isolation.
What did help me though was a book called “Constructive Living” by David K Reynolds. It talks a lot about what you mention. The importance of “doing what needs to be done”.
I got quite into meditating, but I found it just made me go far too inside my own head. It’s easy to feel compassion inside your own house.
That said, I wouldn't be dismissive about people learning to forgive themselves for their flaws ...
If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food,
and one of you says to them, "Depart in peace, be warmed and filled," but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?
Many people in Western culture get into those Eastern (Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist) practices for the purpose of self enhancement. People will meditate to control anxiety, to improve focus or to increase performance in some aspect of their lives. Very often the goal is one of personal improvement, or managing some kind of idealized growth/flourishing of the individual.
Most people here would probably deride the outlandish New Age ideas that grew out of the original Christian Science underpinnings of New Thought. But I find the basic premises of new thought to be the spiritual zeitgeist of the current age.
Mindfulness practice at its core is super simple, there's not much to talk about, but it's been completely associated with the self-help movement to the point that most people can't distinguish it from nonsense.
Zen comes to America and it's adopted by self-absorbed people as a reason to be more like the self-absorbed people they want to be.
The advantaged of a well-thought out dogma is it can include things like a focus on compassion so that a tool doesn't just become another tool to help people rationalize their worst tendencies.
There are, of course, problems with dogmas, but I do encourage people to seek out things that challenge themselves rather than confirm their opinions and behavior.
> Yet a growing body of research suggests that such stories may be surprisingly common, with one study from 2019 showing that at least 25% of regular meditators have experienced adverse events, from panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of “dissociation”.
The 25% number is pretty striking, if true. You see people recommending meditation without reservation, and discounting adverse effects as "exceptionally rare". Over the years I've begun to see more and more stories of people having deeply destabilizing experiences with meditation, and it concerns me how quickly people dismiss that possibility. There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen.
(And going back to psychedelics -- I have a similar complaint about people's attitudes around "bad trips". Psychonauts like to say "there's no such thing as a bad trip, only difficult ones", but I think that dangerously discounts how destabilizing trips can be sometimes.)
Yeah, and the interesting thing is that in many Eastern traditions, meditation wasn't ever even recommended for the average person. And those that did do it, did so in an environment with teachers and safeguards. The McMindfulness fad is missing almost all of that, and I'm starting to see more and more stories of people hitting a dangerous wall without the cultural support they need to navigate to the other side.
Sam Harris is one of the current major proponents of meditation in the West, and I've heard him say "even if meditation were bad for people, I would still recommend they do it". I think that's irresponsible advice.
There is no golden rule and there are obvious exceptions, but if your empathy comes with a lot of animosity, you probably just deceived yourself.
The initial episode covers a story closer to a cult. But later this podcast reflects a lot of what you’ve mentioned anecdotally with respect to to modern psychedelic research.
> There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". .
It's pretty much my experience.
Yes, when you meditate, sometime some things will have to be broken or removed to let place to something new. Those temporary states are disagreable, and from the outside can be experienced as "panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of dissociation".
Unfortunatly, if a building is in a bad shape, there is no way around destroying some part of it to rebuild. And this takes time. Meanwhile, there is a hole.
It's not specific to meditation. You will see that in psychotherapy as well.
That's why having meditation teachers is important, because they have to help you through this, make you understand what's happening, that like all the things, it's temporary, and to keep it up.
And you are right when you say:
> But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen
Because the experience vary a lot from person to person. There is no typical path. Some will not live that. Some will live a very mild or short sample of that.
Meditation is not science. You can't predict how long things will go, or how long they will take. You even can't be exactly sure somebody is practicing correctly, nor that something else is not interracting with it in a bad way. That's why serious centers take so many precautions with beginers, but it's not perfect. It can't be.
And it would be tempting (also quite logical) to think "what I'm doing doesn't work, I'm worse than I used to be".
Unfortunatly yes, the old saying of "it will get harder before it gets easier" apply here in my experience. It will apply several times during a life of meditation, in cycles. Although it's way easier once you are experienced: you just use meditation as a way to go through it. It's what it's for after all.
There is no alternative to trusting it will pass. Like with a chemothery, where some patients feel terrible for a long time before they feel better, while some patients never fully recover, and some even die.
I went through all those stages in 16 years of meditation. Panic attacks. Depression. Dissociation. It sucks. The experience of a lot of meditants is that the practice does replace them with a better life eventually. The increase in happiness is, on average over a decade, very real and positive if you practice correctly, and keep at it.
But it's hard. It's also not something you can plan for.
Plus it can worry people around you, and even yourself. Which is a good thing: it means one cares about you.
I would understand than somebody doesn't want to take the risk.
I would state it's worth it, as I feel it is. But who knows, could be survivor bias.
Over the years of living there I became even more intolerant with these people, I came from the Biodynamic Ag side of things so was pretty battle-hardened in the World of 'Becasue woo' to explain most things.
But, Boulder broke me... I realized that most in the US who heard about Steiner's work (I think most of it is BS from a conman) were treading the woke spectrum, affluent or not, but Boulder'ites were simply faking the most ostentatious facade: they would drive their Tesla to and from their mansions yet remain the most rude, stingiest, greedy people I have ever encountered--I'm from SoCal and I'm used to fake and rich people, but even I was stunned by the sheer numbers in just one relatively small town!
But because they practiced 'mindfulness' and had a pocket full of crystals and a yoga mat in tow they were somehow exempt from it all.
The worst were the mindful vegans and vegetarians, I did the most strictest form of renewable and regenerative forms of Ag, and had cooked mainly in historic towns with a long history of farm to table concepts--dating back 100s of years in the case of Italy.
But the absolute trite that left their mouth was stunning, I was incapable of speaking my mind as they were our clientele, but... the way these people speak with such authority about topics hey have no idea about is astonishing: most were professors from CU Boulder reminding you they have a post-doc BA in some unrelated topic, but they all have more in-depth knowledge about the intricacies of Human physiology than people who actually studied health sciences (I have a BSc in Cellular and Molecular Biology, became a Master Grower in Biodynamic Horticulture, and cooked/ran Farm to table concept kitchens and helped grow 75%+ of everything that was on my menu).
Personally speaking, my recent trip will likely be my last: the vapid and rich were always the shot-callers there, but it's with great sorrow that I admit just how shallow that place really is. All of the progress many of us dedicated a lot of our time and effort was undone in less than 3 years!
I once met a mindfulness coach who was trying to sell me on his business where he comes onsite and coaches corporate clients on mindfulness. The pitch broke down when he couldn’t articulate to me what the hell was really meant by mindfulness.
Here is how it feels: the brain experiences stuff "objectively".
For example: if something happens and you get angry, instead of fully being angry, you get to see that you are angry. And now you get the choice to be angry or not. Or sometimes you don't get a choice, but can clearly see it and realize that it's something you have to go through. There emerges a clear separation between your brain, your emotions and the core you.
It's not something you do consciously, it's something that your brain does by itself all the time. Like fish noticing water. Things don't really change, but you get a perception to notice and see things.
An analogy I like to use is: You are playing a 2d game. Your character exists in a 2d world. But your perspective is 3d and can clearly see what's happening.
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P.S.
Since you seem to be curious, keep in mind that meditation is serious stuff and needs to be given respect. Using meditation for just feeling good is like using a gun to dig a hole. Can you do it? yeah. But without gun discipline, you may end up shooting yourself in the foot.
Meditation is a tool. It exists safely only within a larger ecosystem of other things. Prescribing meditation openly without the ecosystem is dangerous.
Once mindfulness comes, the problems get more and more subtle.
At the same time, I became very distressed about being single and having very few friends.
I finally realized why I lacked friends and relationships, it was because I pushing people away. I also realized that the reason for this was because I was stuck inside my head, over analyzing everything, over thinking everything, making up problems in my head, being anxious, worried, and fearful about the past and the future.
So I found "mindfulness" as a way to escape my brain from the never ending loop of analyzing people and social situations, to stop trying to figure out people's hidden intentions, stop thinking about the past and the future. To live in the moment and let myself be me rather than hiding myself.
To me, mindfulness just means recognizing when my brain is a run-away train of thoughts and to not let it consume me. It's about getting outside of my head and into real life. For me, it's the difference of being safe but miserable or taking risks and potentially reaping rewards (friendships, relationships, new opportunities, etc.) The best way I can describe is the stereotypical/incorrect description of being an introvert vs being an extrovert.
There's no point in trying to teach mindfulness to people who just want a 5-minute de-stressing session. Mindfulness is work.
- self-awareness, ie aware of your thoughts and feelings
- being present in the moment
- emotional regulation
I always use security guards as my example: you need to see what is actually there, not what you expect to be; you need to be aware of your own response, eg not panic or become angry; and you need to both be able to calm yourself and overcome your default not to act, as appropriate.
In all seriousness, people who know what they want tend to come across as selfish. I don’t know why people consider this bad. All airlines tell you to put on your masks, before helping others (in their emergency videos). The idea being, you must be capable in order to help others.
I think this is something many altruists miss. Society is best when everyone is healthy and capable. Teach a man to fish, as opposed to giving him a fish, so to speak.
- badly paraphrased from Gary John Bishop
"Selfish" is a sloppy word that combines unlike things. Which means it's a toxic word.
People should be self-interested. We are organisms, after all. Like animals.
However, people should not be fixated on their own self-interest to the point that they neglect the bigger picture. If you neglect the bigger picture, you will not be successful at being self-interested.
For example, if you neglect your spouse's feelings, people will say you're being "selfish." But you aren't being self-interested, because you aren't promoting a good life for yourself.
For a good critique of altruism, which is really a separate topic, see Ayn Rand.
"He’s examined a technique known as ‘loving-kindness meditation’, for example, which is inspired by the Buddhist practice of Metta Bhavana. The practice involves contemplating people in your life – from friends and family to acquaintances and strangers – and cultivating good wishes and feelings of warmth for them."
This is regular Christian prayer. We Catholics pray for other people, every day.
Metta Bhavana is more meant as a far reaching 'radiating kindness' across all beings on earth, as in to visualize literally everyone and wished them all well with deep warmth.
The purpose is more to love equally those who you would previously classify as loved ones versus people you don't like or don't care about. Which obviously is impossible for a normal human being unless you completely allow for some sort of 'death of ego'.
Ten years ago, telling a distressed friend you don't feel like hearing about their problems would be incredibly rude. Now you can find NYT articles explaining how to couch the same sentiment in more acceptable terms like, "I don't have the bandwidth to perform that kind of emotional labor right now."
Same thing here. Telling a person you wronged to "get over it" is unacceptable. Telling them that you've been working on letting go of negative feelings about the past and being more mindful of the present, and you hope they can do the same? Well if anyone has a problem with that, you don't need that kind of energy in your life!
Some people will need to become more discreet, while some people need to take more space, some people need to be less materialistic, while others need to accept to use material for their own comfort, some people need to play more, some need to work more.
Also, what you see is rarely the definitive result: it's usually only part of the ungoing correction, meaning you may be seeing a swing on the other side of the curve, a different kind of unbalance, and it would be easy to judge the meditant is not progressing.
However, progress in meditation is not an absolute, it is always to be understood in the context of each human. Some start from very far away on their path, and what your perceive as failure may be a great success for them.
As usual with things that are practiced inside yourself, there is no objective way of measuring progress. We don't have a wisdom metter. This is also why it's very hard to assess if somebody is practicing correctly, or if some teaching is off. Teachers have tools for this, but even that is fuzzy at best.
My personnal experience is that I used to be minimalist, and after years of meditation, now I buy more things. I used to attend to more social events, and now I'm declining regularly some of them. Now some around me could see that as a regression. But from my perspective, it's a way of taking more care of myself.
Be careful with the way you evaluate people, practicing or not. You are probably not having all the context.
I don't even know if enlightening exist, to be honest.
For me, it doesn't matter. I don't need the promise of something potentially amazing in the future, I'm just interested in something that makes my life better right now.
In the center, I only met regular people with ordinary problems, even teachers. Getting a hang on suffering, one step at a time. Sometimes being completly off the mark, because humans are humans.
Meditation is also probably the most boring thing I ever encountered. It's unspectacular, tedious, slow and utterly mundane.
But it's the only thing that I've tried that brings consistent, increasing benefits in life.
I wish for everybody to find something that is as good for them, awakening or not.
That's the advice I keep seeing.
Breath mindfulness can sharpen your blade, but it won't tell you when or why to use your blade. I present Axelrod as a modern pop culture representation of that.
No Self is the path to Intentional Self.
The goal isn’t the deconstruction of the self, but rather, that through the deconstruction of the self we can act from a place of intention rather than bias and preconceived notions. And in doing so, no longer engage in the random suffering that was thrust upon us — but the intentional suffering that comes from our chosen life.
Life is suffering — the only escape to that is death; instead, we should seek to choose our suffering, as befits our goals.
I don't know what this is, but it isn't Buddhism
Meditation is not about meditation. It's not about your time that you're on the cushion. Any good teacher points this out again and again. Meditation is about life, it's about Metta, it's about understanding your place in the world. It isn't about progress, or happiness, or being calm. It isn't a fad, to be dropped for something different when that becomes the next popular thing on Instagram. It's deeper than that, more central, more vibrant, longer, simpler - but harder! This is a journey of a lifetime, not a happy pill.
The whole context is stacked full of nuance - which, to be fair, the article stresses time and time again. Set and setting are slap in the middle of this. IT DEPENDS, as it always does and always did. Some people aren't in the right place to take on a proper meditative practice; others are in it for the wrong reason. Others still are so goal-oriented that they'll never understand the path for what it is. Some will become more selfish. Others will become better people. This is life. This is meditation.
On the one hand, if they've bought into the notion that "we are all a family here" and that loyalty to their employer is like a familial obligation, and quitting their job is like abandoning an elderly relative on the street corner, then they may indeed be consumed by feelings of guilt and anxiety. Most observers would note that this is a false equivalency: the relationship between employer and employee is certainly not like that between parent and child.
One could likewise argue that quitting a job one hates is actually altruistic, as there are people who might like that job and if one's workplace is full of people who like what they're doing, it makes it a much more pleasant environment. Additionally, people who hate their jobs are known to take out their frustrations on family members, which is an unpleasant situation, so quitting a job one hates, even if it results in a somewhat lower standard of living, is not at all selfish - assuming one can find another job, and the end result is not poverty/homelessness.
Meditation would seem to be beneficial in any case. Some people don't even recognize that they hate their job as much as they do, and perhaps some internal reflection can suggest some changes that can be made to make the situation at least tolerable.
Incidentally, attempting to use things like guilt to motivate people to be obedient is a very unhealthy and Machiavellian tactic, and if 'mindfulness' helps people to break out of such situations, then the more the better.
> The practice had muted their feelings of guilt and, as a result, their willingness to make amends
Personally, I would say a sincere apology would be motivated by a person's objective belief that they had done wrong, not by their desire to soothe their feelings of guilt. But the whole situation seems of dubious value, as the person is being requested to write an apology (vs. offering one of their own motivation), and to a person they feel most guilty towards. In other words, this study seems pre-constructed (intentionally or not) to produce these results...
This ethos to which you attribute the greatness of the West, in the 1500s was seen by the East as a barbaric, dirty way of life. Civilizations like those of the Middle East, China, and even the MesoAmericas were far more advanced in technological and societal arrangements than the “West” up until the 17th century.
Detachment proposed by Eastern traditions is not equal to “lack of emotional involvement”; rather it is the lack self-identification with the transient aspects of life. It’s the breaking of the illusion of that same ego that propelled many civilizations (Western and Eastern alike) to cause atrocities in name of a so-called progress, industrial achievements and sophisticated products.
Some people actually need to become more selfish.
It just seemed so strange that the key villain was practising mindfulness, yet not being very mindful.
It's a pressure chamber. He uses it so he can take off his pressure suit / armor for a bit without dying.
IIRC it wasn't about meditation at all.
After all, the act of staying alive, is a selfish act in itself.
But even giving your life for someone else is also a selfish act. Some part of you wants to be seen as the hero. And wants to be remembered as the selfless person who did all.
Even towards babies. And that’s because that behavior is hard-wired in our DNA because of our need to live forever through them.
Every so called altruistic act has to have some kind of benefit in it, even if we don’t gain anything tangible from it. The gain in this case can be moral, satisfaction or some other intangible reward.
This is taken to the extreme with modern “virtue signaling” where you get social points such as likes and comments for signaling how selfless you are.
We should get over ourselves and realize that we are selfish to the core — and in so doing actually do more for the rest of humanity, accepting the gain that we get from it.
Everything is selfishness is an especially lame theory of everything. Start asking who the self is, and what the benefit is and you're going to quickly see that you can't define either without completely washing any value out of your theory of everything. In the end it doesn't serve much purpose beyond justifying selfish behaviour.
I think the more useful way to evaluate actions is to try to estimate the net good they do or don’t do. It seems like a much more useful metric than the level of genuineness we attempt to ascribe.
"Even when I thought, with most other well-informed, though unscholarly, people, that Buddhism and Christianity were alike, there was one thing about them that always perplexed me; I mean the startling difference in their type of religious art. I do not mean in its technical style of representation, but in the things that it was manifestly meant to represent. No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things."
This is not so surprising, seeing as Buddhism developed and distinguished itself from its neighboring religions (Hinduism, Chinese folk religion, Shinto etc.) precisely by being more inwardly focused, and not defining itself as community oriented. Practically speaking though, the Buddhist sangha does fulfill the expected roles for its surrounding communities - and Christianity has its own traditions of solitary hermit asceticism. So the difference is not so large.
I'm a fan & practitioner of NVC, mindfulness, careful work life balance, etc for being able to treat startups as a marathon vs sprint... But I've observed people overuse & abuse these tools to rationalize prioritizing self over peers in ways that come at the direct expense of the same exact things of their colleagues. It can add up over time in a way that breeds resentment, distrust, non-collaboration, etc. Generally, risks a toxicity that taxes everyone more than the individual brings to the team. What one person needs is different from their peers, so requires some sort of empathic give-and-take, and for someone not as good at paying attention, help doing so.
In a team of high-functioning folks, a tricky line to walk! (And if people have recs here, am curious!)
"higher vibrations only"
Now when I read this article about mindfulness promoting selfishness what I actually see is people who are preyed upon by these vampires stop being prey when they embrace mindfulness. I suppose when you are the vampire and you are no longer to Leach your happiness from others you would consider that other person selfish. In reality this is more that people embracing mindfulness are incredibly attuned to their surroundings and the people that they interact with and realize what's happening and simply are holding up a mirror. These social vampires like the vampires of fantasy see nothing and thus call other selfish for refusal to be prey.
"Experiments 2a-2c found that induced state mindfulness reduced the willingness to engage in reparative behaviors in normally guilt-inducing situations."
This is about people who has has wronged others becoming less likely to make up for it after practicing mindfulness. Meaning, this is about mindfulness making more vapid social vampires who just take without giving back since it reduces guilt, not about people being more resistant to them.
I didn't notice what the article describes when I meditated (if anything I got nicer because my failure mode is being impatient/easily annoyed, and meditation helps with that), but one thing I did notice is that I really couldn't handle going to some meditation groups and any Buddhist ones, because of all the religious/compassionate fluff. To me meditation was always just form of great mental exercise. I thought it was just because of my atheism... but I guess it's also because I think the selfishness is a virtue, so trying to counteract it with some new age stuff never sat well with me.
Siddhartha himself left his wife and infant baby to seek a solution to his problems. I've never heard direct criticism of this act but there's a beautiful song called Yasodhara Vilaapam that talks about the sorrow and shock that his wife goes through after he vanishes without any notice or explanation. Selfishness is deeply baked into a philosophy that above all values personal enlightenment, no?
If we ask again what is mindfulness technique and what is created for, we will arrive to answer that it is technique from Buddhism, meant to liberate us from world, and repeated cycle or rebirth and suffering. Regardless of what you believe pause there and ponder. Forget for a moment whether you believe in after life or not. If we think about the end goal "liberate from the suffering" liberate from world and minds game.
So, we took a tool which should liberate us from world to become more productive?
Isn't our usage premise wrong? Of course there will be side effects, if you "abandoning" everything that is world game and keeps you worried or money looking animal, why is so strange that there are side effects as selfishness? First stage of going inward is removing everything around you, and by seeing true nature you stop caring. But by stop caring suddenly, you see that as explained in many scriptures 'good or bad do not exist' there is only constant change.
Imagine you are child and you are with other children playing in the court, they ask you to join and you refuse. You say "I do not want to be in the game", and they reply "Why not?! C'mon we need extra player, here, you can be on a good side", you reply "I do not care about game, sides, manipulations, or you, in fact in this moment I do not exist"... from your perspective this is valid, from other children perspective you are selfish.
Also question of quilt is inverted. Who expect guilt we as society, or the individual?
Practicing mindfulness is not just letting your mind wander. It’s practice, just like exercising or coding. You get better at it with time, not just a Homer Simpson moment of following your thoughts after being asked a question about being a decent human being.
The whole idea of mindfulness is to get to know yourself better and work on the not so great parts such as when your ego gets involved. If you practice it today and have found tremendous results, great! Also if you tried it and it didn’t help much, that’s okay too.
I’ll continue to do it because it’s what I believe separates good from great in my life and helps me accomplish more. I’m glad they mentioned this:
> “The effects are much weaker than had been proposed.” Like Hafenbrack, he suspects the practice can still be useful – but whether you see the desired benefits may depend on many factors, including the meditators’ personality, motivation and beliefs, he says. “Context is really important.”
But I think a state of no thought, where things just flow in your absence is just as (if not more) important. Be it when you play music and stop thinking and just do. Or when the same happens in sports, coding, painting, walking whatever.
The thing about mindful people is (at least judging from the small sample size I know) that they like to be mindful about everything. And they don't look well or relaxed. Just like this behavior is yet another form of escapism.
Mindfulness, sure. But it is by far not the only state of mind that you should bw in.
I came to have an association with the people who I met who were into this stuff as being extremely selfish and self righteous. There is a weird intersection between that stuff and kind of hustle culture where they always be explaining to you how the can change your life and usually selling something along with it.
Anyway totally subjective but this doesn't surprise me at all.
They would benefit from putting their own sleep, healthy eating, and exercise ahead of others needs.
Paradoxically this will enable them to be in a better position to help others and be in less need of help.
It’s not just a little stress reduction technique, it can completely shift your view of reality. Much of your “average successful life” is based on the illusion of the self, and meditation slowly chips away at that illusion. I think without the spiritual “context” (e.g. what was taught by Goenka) for the insight, one can become very withdrawn from life
That said, I still meditate and think it’s been overwhelmingly positive. But like anything worthwhile, denying the real risks doesn’t help anyone
Mediation helps you become self-centred, which to the outside observer may be labelled 'selfish'. But it is really just the state of deep compassion for all being and perhaps the realisation that all is well (and I don't need to get caught up in your drama)
But in mine and perhaps others' case, not a bad thing at all. See, I've had years of religious indoctrination and because of my way of thinking, I internalised that so deeply, that I lived every moment in a deep well of shame.
So a little "selfishness"; actually trying to be kind in giving myself the things I've wanted = good.
Without strong intention, clarity of purpose, things can go downhill.
They will turn it into a list of rules. Every time.
Fact is people just want a list of rules. They're born slaves looking for a master.
And of course that's never gonna work.
I'm curious what is meant by mindfulness in this regard. People use the same word (meditation) to refer to many different practices, each with its own intentions and results.
For example in Metta we develop feelings of kindness towards others, in concentration practice we develop concentration (which can be used as a soothing respite from the horrors of life, and from the psychological destabilization of insight practice), and in insight practice we develop insight (in the specific sense that is relevant to becoming enlightened—see Daniel Ingram's excellent book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, available for free online).
If you meditate in a way that suppresses negative emotions instead of confronting them, that seems counterproductive to me—except to the degree that you know you are doing it intentionally to take a break from the hard work of psychological re-integration (shadow work).
My personal aim in meditation is to become lighter, ie. less burdened by feelings of heaviness. I have had a few days and weeks in a state of near-total lightness, and it is wonderful. So my goal is to obtain that state of inner peace more or less permanently.
(As an aside, in such a state I find it effortless to work with complete concentration, am not prone to avoidance, procrastination or addictive behavior, and experience heightened physical and creative energy.)
So, while meditating I will often have to confront some nasty stuff, because until I resolve it, I have to carry it around with me. Sometimes it's about negative beliefs, often rooted in difficult past experiences.
Sometimes it's about guilt. To resolve guilt, I have to make amends. I have to apologize. Then I feel a bit less burdened, as though I've unloaded one of many large stones from my backpack.
Where I ran into trouble was that I put too much pressure on myself to be moral: I tried to live up to the ideal of always doing the right thing, and when I learned that I was unable to do that, that was extremely disturbing to me.
What I failed to realize is that it's a muscle you have to develop. You can't just decide to instantly become perfectly moral, just like you can't decide to be instantly become perfectly fit or fluent in Japanese. Like anything else, your "moral consistency" will improve with time and effort.
Sam Harris who does this with meditation etc. says that we don't have "Christian science" because science is true and useful regardless of where it comes from and that "Christian" is not relevant.
I've held this to be short sighted. Useless at best. Socially and personally damaging at worst. This just seems to be the latest manifestation.
Tribal feudalists and nomadic spirits have been waging culture wars for a long time.
Contemporary British politics seem a bit selfish. Not sure the BBC should be taken too seriously as its government funders push austerity. Deflect! Project!
Tomorrow they’ll run articles about being more mindful for clicks anyway. Does anyone else get tired of this intentional emotional ping pong?
