We are made of molecules and our thoughts are simply chemical reactions. The biological basis for the mind and thoughts are not well understood today. Meditation is a time-tested way to influence our body's chemistry in ways that discourage agitation, reduce anxiety and increase clarity. Just don't take it too far and hope to discover the meaning of life.
Meditating for long hours is serious business and should be compared to pro-sports (in terms of commitment, training and potential injury). You wouldn't train like an athlete just to stay healthy, similarly you shouldn't meditate like its the end of the world.
"If, moreover, naturalism is correct (however implausible that is), and if consciousness is then an essentially material phenomenon, then there is no reason to believe that our minds, having evolved purely through natural selection, could possibly be capable of knowing what is or is not true about reality as a whole. Our brains may necessarily have equipped us to recognize certain sorts of physical objects around us and enabled us to react to them; but, beyond that, we can assume only that nature will have selected just those behaviors in us most conducive to our survival, along with whatever structures of thought and belief might be essentially or accidentally associated with them, and there is no reason to suppose that such structures—even those that provide us with our notions of what constitutes a sound rational argument—have access to any abstract “truth” about the totality of things. This yields the delightful paradox that, if naturalism is true as a picture of reality, it is necessarily false as a philosophical precept; for no one’s belief in the truth of naturalism could correspond to reality except through a shocking coincidence (or, better, a miracle). A still more important consideration, however, is that naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range. The one thing of which it can give no account, and which its most fundamental principles make it entirely impossible to explain at all, is nature’s very existence. For existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever; and anyone who imagines that it is susceptible of a natural explanation simply has no grasp of what the question of existence really is. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in the terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all.”
Excerpt From: David Bentley Hart. “The Experience of God.
The only way to perceive actual reality and truth is to be magically endowed with this ability? The author of this quote can't imagine how this ability might result from evolution? Personal incredulity does not count as proof. Naturalism is our only chance for understanding this world, everything else is just magical thinking without proof.
Naturalism is a metaphysical position; a second order claim about what kind of phenomena count as real. It is different than a methodological committment to only considering a certain set of causal relations -- this methodological committment makes research possible, not the metaphysical committment of naturalism, which is extremely untenable, as it can't account for the most basic aspects of our experience.
Absolutely. We are still suffering as a society from the baggage of the 20th century, when man rather foolishly imagined that science would explain everything. This was pretty much ruled out philosophically from the get-go, but we still have this naive scientism which crops up everywhere and claims to have explained the human condition and origin, when it has done nothing of the sort.
For most of us, mystery is intolerable. So we take the authoritative story on faith. And use it to create an airtight coccoon about ourselves. A bubble of dream where no phenomenon goes unexplained.
Do you have the magical ability to see, hear, and otherwise perceive reality? It's one thing to have sensory perceptions, it's another to consider them all somehow connected, and it's entirely another to do so while ruling out any other forms of perception which may not be known to you yet.
If I make a mistake in my perception of reality there is a chance I might die. I have many emotional reactions that prevent and attempt to correct for this misalignment whenever it occurs (surprise, disgust, doubt, anger). Are these the magical abilities that would get me closer to perceiving reality?
You may as well assert, since you cannot be sure of another's subjective yet perhaps eminently palpable experiences, that naturalism is the only chance for the rational, thinking masses to conceive of the world and its reasons. And that's very well. But the accused magical thinking could be first-hand and self-proving, but not transmissible much less generalizable, that science's naturalism may only get you so far down the tube of reality.
> Just don't take it too far and hope to discover the meaning of life.
In particular, reducing agitation and anxiety is great, but that meditation can make you more tranquil does not mean it can make you infinitely tranquil no matter how hard you try. Training the high jump will allow you to make higher jumps, but even a lot of high jump training will not teach you to fly.
It's a common misunderstanding that meditation leads to tranquility, that you somehow become a calm person. In the moment it does, but the bigger picture is that it gives you tools to deal with life with more equanimity and balance. The offshoot might be a sense of calm but it's an effect rather than a cause.
The "infinitely tranquil" thing needs some unpacking too, mainly because it's not exactly easy to define what that means... Are there people whose whole life has been hugely and meaningfully improved through the practice of meditation? Yes, absolutely.
This in my opinion is enough. We don't always need to fly.
For some trauma-laden people, meditation can be quite a (bad) trip. I used to have horrible trauma flashbacks during meditation sessions. I would be getting into a calmer state, able to let go of anxiety, stress, daily minute thoughts, and after some quiet time, I'd be in a terrible state, with horrible memories surfacing. I definitely recommend not doing it alone if your childhood was painful.
Same for yoga and long poses. One of the things I really hated with covid is the 'let's do zoom yoga' WTF ? Can't tell how many times in yoga sessions I needed 'help' because I was no more there but in a (very) bad place.
I'm not sure it happens to other people. Therapy helps, but I wish I'd been warned before starting on the meditation journey.
For sure. I'm training to be a MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) teacher and one of the things that is being stressed to us is the importance of providing loads of guidance / filtering when getting people to get involved - if there is significant trauma (and a whole bunch of other things including substance abuse, major relationship issues, etc), we are taught to encourage people to seek other forms of help rather than meditative approaches. Going deeper isn't always the right thing - people are very diverse in their needs, and teachers need to be really careful about being clear about this.
I think it's one of the things that is really off-putting to me about the current "trend" in mindfulness - the whole realm is completely un-mediated. Here in the UK literally anyone can set themselves up as a meditation teacher - there is only one body with anything approaching an "official" label and even that isn't required for anyone to practice. So there are always sadly gonna be people who are out there recommending and practicing really terrible stuff without being sensitive to individual needs.
Thanks for the concern. In a way it helped a lot for therapy, we were stuck for some time on not-the-right-target and I was contemplating going it alone...
It set me on a path to unpack all these things. I can still remember the horrible state of mind I was in, unable to get back out a memory unlocking loop, no one to help me snap back to the moment, like a involuntary purge, trauma-vomiting. Tens of minutes. Ugh. Never felt that before and I didn't think that was possible. I even thought there was something very wrong with me.
But now I understand these were my first panic attacks ever and I'd never had them before because of very efficient systematic diversion, and an acquired ability to clench my jaws and put that 'energy' into work or studies or 'being a better X' (husband, friend, father, son, colleague, manager, ally, plumber, ...).
"Drawing on a decade of research and clinical experience, psychotherapist and educator David Treleaven shows that mindfulness meditation ― practiced without an awareness of trauma ― can exacerbate symptoms of traumatic stress. Instructed to pay close, sustained attention to their inner world, survivors can experience flashbacks, dissociation, and even retraumatization."
I'm not sure if you were doing guided meditation at the time, but that has really helped me.
I do know what you mean about having trauma flashbacks, and you can get stuck in this loop. Meditation has thought me to not attach, recognize the thought, and start over. I use Waking Up with Sam Harris and I think that has really helped me from not attaching to the thoughts when they come up, and he will usually come back and refocus me.
I had problems with applying Jon Kabbat Zin, with guided meditation, and yoga (they call it 'yin' yoga here, where you stay for extended periods of time in poses, which is amazing for relaxation and stress-release and to get into a meditative state and that's where I went wrong :-)
I found I just need someone looking over every minute or so, whether I am in a bad way, and just talk to me, or just touch me (one teacher does a 'pose correction') to snap me back. It's even OK to have small trauma surfacing up, if it stops fast... It's hard to explain and it sure sounds sect-like but approaching that stuff in small doses is actually OK. Just not alone.
I talked about it to a friend long-time teacher in Qi-Cong (sorry for the bad spelling) that told me he always kept a look on his students for that kind of overwhelming reaction. So maybe it's not just me and meditation or yoga...
You are a simulated person running inside a simulated universe that is being simulated on a physical brain inside a physical human inside a physical universe.
With meditation you can learn for example how to turn off your simulated self. With certain psychoactive substances you alter the dynamics of your physical brain which causes it to simulate a somewhat different universe.
Someone observing Earth at distance might make a similar conclusion that humanity is made of humans and the apparent intelligence of humanity as a whole is solely the result of humans bouncing into each other.
I am surprised that Matthieu did not address this question head-on:
> This brings me to a critical issue: the side effects of meditation. One could argue that a strategy consisting of closing one’s eyes when facing conflicts, in escaping from problems rather than solving them, is perhaps a suboptimal strategy.
In Dzogchen meditation (which is his main practice), one does not close one's eyes or always sit in a special posture. It is engaged with real life. There is no "escaping" of any sort whatsoever. Thoughts arise as they normally do; it is only the method of dealing with them that differs (both from our usual habits and from other approaches like mindfulness as it is normally understood).
"True meditation, however, is not just taking a break. It is not simply closing one’s eyes to the problem for a while. Meditation goes to the root of the problem. You need to become aware of the destructive aspect of compulsive attachment and all of the conflictive mental states that you mentioned. "
I saw that. This quote can still give the impression that it is not closing one's eyes "to the problem," but is still about closing one's physical eyes. Or that it's about closing one's eyes to the problem for a bit (but not "a while.") I didn't see it clearly communicated that Dzogchen meditation is something does while in the very situations that WS is talking about.
Closing one's eyes can be very helpful for becoming conscious of subtle things, especially for those who, like me, are hyperliterate screen fiends.
Sitting with good posture in a dark room also really helps. An isolation tank is good too, I have heard. But none are necessary. Just good tools when applied properly.
And sometimes it's best to go for a walk, think it through, or sit for a while. Other times it's best to act without hesitation.A big part of the skill is knowing when to do what. That's my take.
When I forget something I quickly close my eyes and clear my mind, take a deep and slow breath and the idea usually emerges again before exhaling. It takes 2-5 seconds and I will continue with my mind busy. Not sure if that's a known meditation technique, but it's the most useful I've found to get back on track.
^- pretty good for a Western audience. He thought pretty carefully about the vocabulary, and mostly just presents pretty basic Dzogchen meditation.
Overall, i really like: https://wakingup.com/ by Sam Harris, and would probably recommend it more than resources on Dzogchen meditation. He does not teach Dzogchen meditation, per se, although he seems to credit a Dzogchen master (Tulku Urgyen) as his largest spiritual influence. He definitely has a practical Western, non-religious instructional method and Dzogchen influenced and compatible values and views. (Can't separate life and practice, importance of seeing through the subject-object split).
A 12 week course I took recently on dzogchen/atiyoga used “Weapon of Light” [1] as a main text and “The Flight of the Garuda” [2] as a supplemental one.
Getting the practice just right seems to require personal connection with a master for whatever reason, but Sam Harris does a pretty good job of communicating the essence of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSPWiEaOlfc. There are also lots of resources you can find online, though I can't say I recommend any one in particular. It is the kind of thing that requires a precise fit and the right conditions.
There seems to be an endless variety of Pointing Out / Rushen instructions in Dzogchen. Some work better than others for individual meditators. But personally I feel there's a strong placebo component to it as well. If you come in with a) good baseline concentration, b) an expectation of receiving real wisdom from a guru that you are in some awe of, you might be much more receptive than someone who stumbles into such a thing and treats it as another tourist attraction. The Pointing Out experience seems like a kind of hypnosis session; it matters how receptive you are at the moment.
Personally I don't think there's anything to the Dzogchen psychic connection its adherents claim you need to establish with a guru to experience the real thing. It's just woo woo influenced by Shaktipat from Hinduism.
In my opinion one of the best Western teachers is Loch Kelly. Although he doesn't call it Dzogchen, it seems to be pretty much the same thing and without the maddening obscurantism of Dzogchen texts translated to English. He has a lot of videos out but I liked this (paid) Vimeo course: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lochkellyhow/
While Dzogchen texts are certainly obscure, the proper realization of Dzogchen does entail a transformation of one's understanding of reality in a way that our culture would certainly find "woo woo." I would guess that Sam's aversion to such possibilities is what prevents his own practice and understanding from getting to that level, but this is just my own conjecture.
Making space to love the hate, rage, shame, etc... is not easy and takes conscious effort. What about all the times when your attention is busy with something else?
That's a large part of the point. Meditation gives you the tools to increase the quantity and quality of your attention. And let's face it, attention is probably the commodity we could all do with focusing on in these hyper-distracted times...
Here's my understanding of "shadow work", which I believe was invented by Jung. Unpleasant thoughts and emotions are made conscious. In this way, the energy behind them is released and they no longer influence you subconsciously. This ties in nicely with the Buddhist Vipassana mindfulness meditation technique, although they are separate processes.
In practical terms, I notice that something is bothering me, or that there is some unhelpful pattern in the way I live my life, and I sit down and pay attention to how I feel. I do this on the level of individual physical sensations. When thoughts arise, I let them go. When painful feelings arise, I notice the automatic urge to flinch away from them, and I simply allow them to be there, and I experience them fully.
In this way, their function (as "messengers") is fulfilled, and they disappear. As a result, I feel relief and "lightness", a feeling of being relieved of burdens.
The meditation / Buddhist phrase often used is that of "two darts".
The first dart is the "real" affliction. So an easy example is - you wake up with a migraine.
The first dart is real. It's an actual thing.
The second dart though is your response. So in the case of a migraine you might feel all sorts of things: anger that it's happening again, irritation that it's today when you've got so much to do; worry that you've got a brain tumour; sadness that you're going to miss lunch... Insert a hundred similar responses here...
What a meditation practice can do - and what Jung was sort of talking about - is make yourself much more aware of your responses. Although the first "dart" may be "real" and (in our example) you're gunna have a headache no matter what you do, you can relieve the suffering by lessening or even removing altogether the second darts.
There's an often used quote which is attributed to Viktor Frankl (I'm not sure it was actually him...), but:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
This is where some (only some in my experience and opinion) of the power of meditation is realised.
I like how Ken Wilber puts it (the consequence of practicing awareness): "hurts more, bothers you less." As someone else here mentioned, the dentist is a great place to practice mindfulness and surrender to pain.
The key distinction seems to be between "pain" (the first dart) and suffering (the second, which is created by resisting the first). The Buddha defined enlightenment as "the end of suffering" (not the end of pain). The pain is still there, and you feel it more keenly than ever -- but it doesn't bother you.
Well put - lingering and unprocessed emotions don't go away, they fester.
Shadow work often refers to dredging up feelings you have pushed down as "unacceptable" - anger being a common one. The idea being that shadow work helps you move towards total emotional development by embracing all of your emotional faculties.
Yeah that's a more accurate way of putting it - things like accepting your repressed sexuality would also count as working towards being a more fully defined and self accepting person, for instance.
>[...] certain areas of thoughts that tend to recur can be set aside and the feeling associated with them identified. The feeling can then be worked with by first accepting that it is there, without resisting it or condemning it. And then one begins to empty out the energy of the feeling directly by letting it be what it is until it runs out. Somewhat later, the former thoughts can now be looked at and their character will be observed to have changed. If the feeling has been totally surrendered and let go, usually all thoughts associated with it will have disappeared entirely and been replaced by a concluding thought which handles the matter quickly.
From Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins (Chapter 3: The Anatomy of Emotions)
This is sublimely deep and the root cause of the worlds problems. In cases where you cannot attain this naturally, mother nature has given psychoactive plants you along.
I don’t think “to make something conscious” means to make it clear, but rather to personify it:
* “Hate the sin, love the sinner”
* “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”
* “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people”
* “Memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically”
So, morally, it is profound (“enlightening”) to admit a reality of evil as conscious.
To become conscious of all things a person must look for that which they are unconscious of rather than focusing purely on that which they are already conscious of. Most people prefer to see themselves as competent, but to be a master one must always see oneself as a beginner.
"imagining figures of light" implies trying to believe in a goodness that doesn't really exist, while "making the darkness conscious" implies making an uncomfortable effort to become aware of the darker aspects of reality, to know it better.
I think, it implies that following an ideal (light) is futile, only seeing what is (darkness) works.
The most popular religion in the world is based on fall from grace, original sin that we must attone for to become pure again. Alternative is that there is no going back and no perfect world or state of mind ahead, only the reality, which is sometimes dirty and messy and for many of us hard to see clearly.
I don’t think so. Jordan Peterson is heavily influenced by Jung, and he said something that might be closer to Jung’s point:
> In some sense, I believed in the devil before I believed in God.
To unpack that a bit, he said suffering is the most real thing there is, and was obsessed with understanding how the unprecedented evil of the 20th century happened. That led him to reason that if evil like that can exist, its opposite might also exist, and has been finding his way to God ever since.
"Stand at the brink of the abyss of despair, and when you see that you cannot bear it anymore, draw back a little and have a cup of tea" ~Elder Sophrony of Essex
I've always found it interesting that many meditation techniques involve "emptying the mind" or "clearing the mind" of thought.
While practicing concentration on a single point of focus definitely seems useful for strengthening the mind, I'm not sure that practicing a state of being completely devoid of thought is necessarily healthy. I would rather meditate on being full of thought, and thinking of many things simultaneously, or meditate on focus in a high distraction environment.
I wonder if there are meditation styles that embrace this?
I would not say that meditation is about eliminating thoughts from the mind. That might not even be possible. It is more about setting intentions and sticking to them.
For example, I might have some thoughts that are rooted in a specific desire. Perhaps I feel an urge to see what's new on Hacker News. I already did that 15 minutes ago, but so what. I'm thinking about what a great feeling it was last time I found something cool on this site. So I stop what I'm doing, navigate to Hacker News and proceed to waste 45 minutes reading through comment threads.
Of course, there's another option. I could simply ignore the desire and do something else- like whatever it is I had otherwise planned to do with that time. But this is not so easy. Chances are, I will succumb to the desire and then rationalize to myself that this is, in fact, how I planned to spend my evening the whole time.
With meditation, we practice by setting an unusual and specific intention, such as monitoring the breath. That way, if you notice yourself doing anything other than that, such as walking around, planning your weekend or replaying some event in your mind, you know that you are not doing what you intended to be doing. By returning to what you originally intended to do, you strengthen your ability to behave in an intentional manner, rather than being powerlessly yanked around by whatever idea happens to pop into your head at any given moment.
I'm not sure whether meditating for very long periods of time is healthy. But most of us struggle greatly to do it for even 10 minutes. That's because 10 minutes is longer than our attention span: even if we firmly resolve to pay attention to something for that long, we inevitably get distracted by something else within a minute or two, and completely forget what we were supposed to be doing in the first place. Don't you think that's troubling?
This is maybe similar to some Jewish equivalents to mediation. The focus is ultimately on better action (the concept of commandments places an emphasis on doing over having the correct mindset or beliefs). These forms of meditation range from contemplative (of the characteristics of G-d, mystical concepts, etc.) to self improving (e.g. going out alone in nature and just saying to G-d whatever comes to mind, or visualizing what one learned to engage again in the topic, for understanding or building virtues). Jewish prayer and study can also be meditative, and can be either communal or secluded, verbalized or silent. [0] [1]
There are certainly parallels in other Western traditions, particularly in Sufism [2] [3]. Personally, I think that the most effective form would be the one closest to a person's tradition; ideally, meditation is a practice that's embedded in a wider setting (of legends, language, ideas).
For me meditation is mostly about calming the mind (and body - sitting and focusing on your breathing will slow your heart rate), so that I can then focus on what is important throughout the day.
Imagine you wake up and spend 30 minutes on your phone before struggling out of bed, then watch TV while eating reheated leftovers for breakfast, then rush off to work because you didn't realise the time. By the time you sit down at your desk you are going to have all sorts of nonsense thoughts going around your mind and have a really hard time focussing.
Compare that to waking up, putting on calming music and making your favourite breakfast and fresh coffee, then consciously enjoying that while staring out the window at nature. After that, when you get to work you are going to much calmer.
For me, meditation allows me to be in the later state even when I don't have time or the possibility to have my day start like that. Even if you do start with the calming day, you are still going to have some nonsense thoughts, but meditation allows you to train your mind to reduce them and focus on what is important to you.
Yeah in the vipassana tradition check out 'Mahasi style noting'.
In Zen, look up 'do nothing' or 'just sitting' - I don't know the traditional language. Shinzen Young has really good content on youtube IMO.
Focusing on a single point is called 'anapana' in the vipassana tradition and is used as a way to calm the mind - like sharpening a knife - before moving on the the juicier stuff.
It's sort of paradoxical but by giving attention to every passing thought/sensation, eventually they slow down and everything becomes much calmer, quieter, and clear.
Anapana(sati) is a specific kind of onepointedness exercise on following the breath; there are many, many more. (Literally, āna is inbreath, āpāna is outbreath, sati is 'remembering of'). What the (Goenka) Vipassana tradition teaches as Anapanasati is an overly specific extrapolated reading not supported by the Anapanasati Sutta itself. Scholar/monk Bhikku Analayo has published on this topic extensively. Many others have actually. The sutta itself is so vague that you can interpret it in any number of ways. Thai Forest Bhikku Buddhadasa even managed to fit Pranayama-like active breathing into his teaching of this sutta.
Shikantaza is the traditional Japanese for just sitting in Zen. The approaches of increasing ones ability to focus awareness or openning awareness of all salient reality flow back and forth as one practises.
Well, if you want to meditate on multi-layered themes, there's always the wild fox koan [1].
As others have noted, concentration in and of itself is not all of what meditation is. There are so many different sorts of practice traditions. In some practices there isn't an object of concentration at all, for instance in Mahamudra's teaching of samatha [2].
And you're certainly right that meditation can lead to unhealthy mental states, which is why it's important to work with a teacher or a practice tradition.
This is like saying sleeping is a "waste of time, how can I be more productive during my sleep?".
"clearing the mind", aka Shamatha without an object, has been compared to deep sleep but also a space where insights happen. You should give it a try, do it for 10 minutes a day for a month, just relax and don't hang onto anything (thought, feeling, noise, anything, just let them happen, relax some more).
Some of the theories are that it lets our right brain take over, others that only by stopping trying to be in control can old memories and repressed emotion come up, and some others are about deeper of sleep/reparation.
I'm as rational as the next guy, but this type of mediation has affected me more than other forms. Please check this video [2] of a brain researcher describing having a stroke in her left brain, and has a lot of parallel with some descriptions of deep meditative state.
Yes, I've had much practice in focus meditation and can attest to this. Sitting in one spot and earnestly focusing on an object of meditation for 15-30 minutes is harder than it sounds.
As powerful as that is (and backed by science), still I wonder about an alternative meditation that focuses on fullness or activity of thought.
But I subscribe to a materialist metaphysics that assumes the mind cannot truly be escaped and the benefit of meditation is to strengthen the mind and body.
Expansive awareness meditation can end up getting you to the same place concentration meditation does (a still, present mind), but by using a different path…. You may find [it] works much better for you…. It just seems to depend on the way your mind works.
[Y]ou try to open your awareness to everything. Imagine you’re waiting for some unusual or miraculous event, but you don’t know which of your senses you’ll perceive it with. Will it be a sound? Will it be a sight? Will it be a thought? Whenever you find your mind has wandered, instead of bringing it back to an object, you open your awareness back up. Any time you latch on to a train of thought or a particular sensation, you’re also closing down your awareness of other things. By opening your awareness as wide as you can, you’re returning to mindfulness of the present, just as you would by turning your attention back to an object of concentration.
MINDFUL EXERCISE
Sit, stand, or lie down and keep your eyes open. Widen your gaze, including what’s to the sides and above and below in your peripheral vision. (This will help keep you from getting distracted by particular things you can see.) Now watch your visual field as if it’s a movie—a slow-moving movie, perhaps, but one of those quiet, visually rich, artistic ones. Just keep watching. When you stop because you have gotten caught up in thinking, note that you have tuned out the “movie” because it’s boring, or because you think you know what’s going to happen next. Ask yourself, “When I really stop to look, is anything truly boring? Do I really know what’s going to happen next?”
Concentration meditation is in large part an exercise in the ability to focus, not on emptying the mind per se, though some traditions will use exercises that expect it.
But concentration meditation is not an end in itself, but generally a tool to aid in meditating on other things, including on thoughts ariaing on your mind, bodily impulses, emotion and others.
> I would rather meditate on being full of thought, and thinking of many things simultaneously
This is basically ADHD, and whilst it has its advantages, wouldn't recommend it in general.
The extreme of this might be psychedelics. A useful experience, but not necessarily something you want day to day.
Thoughts are a tool. They're like mind software.
The point of meditation isn't to stop thinking, it's to decouple yourself from them and see them from an outside perspective. In the process, perceiving that "you" are not your thoughts or your mind, and therefore direct the mind more effectively.
It's a bit like closing background processes and gaining back resources. Those thoughts take resources to 'run', and many of them are constantly spawning new ones.
When you turn your awareness on these processes, rather than them running ad hoc in the background, you can understand your self more and direct yourself better. The competing processes reintegrate.
Or perhaps it's like an unruly dog that's constantly pulling you this way or that, but you're so used to it you don't even know it's unruly. Then you start to train it, and sooner or later you become a unit, working in coordination.
> Meditation – Structural changes in areas of the DMN such as the temporoparietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus have been found in meditation practitioners.
There is reduced activation and reduced functional connectivity of the DMN in long-term practitioners.
Various forms of nondirective meditation, including Transcendental Meditation and Acem Meditation, have been found to activate the DMN.
I know very little about meditation, but it seems to me that a goal could be to develop awareness of and perhaps even more control over one’s thoughts, and that emptying one’s mind might be a useful exercise even when the goal is not to have a permanently empty mind. Kinda like how the goal of weightlifting usually isn’t to be able to permanently carry around heavy weights all the time.
Sam Harris kinda does this in his guided meditations. At times he asks you to sit in a noisy public place. His aim seems to be to to try to get you to quickly turn your attention on the thing that is currently doing the noticing. The point being a realization that there’s nothing there when you try to turn your attention to it. And that’s supposed to produce some kind of realization. Never worked for me in practice.
I believe there is an exercise benefit to meditation in noisy environments, as one form of practice. Swamy Vivekananda preferred meditating in a room with loud street noise in his youth.
I used to have a coworker who would work while listening to stuff like Aphex Twin specifically to exercise his ability to focus. Personally my programming output would suffer but I think there's something to the exercise.
This is a valid concern. Most likely meditation doesn't do anything at all. If you trust "Western Research", e.g. reading "Altered Traits", it either did nothing, or changes were noticeable after years. Concrete example - the author (or one of) practice meditation for 2 years to reduce his blood pressure and then ended up just taking some pills for it.
So it does nothing (likely), it's good for you, or it's bad for you. There is nothing saying that single-point focus doesn't just kill lateral thinking. It's not like it's working memory training or anything of the sort.
Before you downvote me - ask yourself if you really know of any PROVEN benefit of meditation.
Can you cite? I'm interested in this idea but it's unclear where he discusses meditation as such, rather than things like consciousness and introspection?
"As far as your own inner conflicts are concerned, if you use meditation simply as a quick fix to superficially appease your emotions, you temporarily enjoy a pleasant deferral of these inner conflicts. But as you rightly say, these cosmetic changes have not reached the root of the problem.
Merely putting problems to sleep for a while or trying to forcibly suppress strong emotions will not help either. You are just keeping a time bomb ticking somewhere in a corner of your mind.
True meditation, however, is not just taking a break. It is not simply closing one’s eyes to the problem for a while. Meditation goes to the root of the problem. You need to become aware of the destructive aspect of compulsive attachment and all of the conflictive mental states that you mentioned. They are destructive in the sense of undermining your happiness and that of others, and to counteract them you need more than just a calming pill. Meditation practice offers many kinds of antidotes.
"
Minsky thought meditation was dangerous in and of itself. (e.g. you aren't meant to inspect your own functioning)
Personally I did a mindfulness practice for a while that I thought was harmful because it encouraged me to accept unacceptable situations which was already leading me to bad outcomes.
"Accepting" in the context of mindfulness doesn't imply being passive. That's a common misconception. It's often said that passivity is the "near enemy" of acceptance, meaning one is easily mistaken for the other.
This is an underrated comment. Mindfulness is a precursor to objectifying your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions -- rather than "subjectifying" them (in other words, you are not your thoughts, emotions, etc). It doesn't at ALL mean laying down for others to kick you and taking it. They're completely different things.
"Do you have the patience to await right action to arise?" was a sign in my first teachers house (which we would walk by during Kinhin). Meditation's effect on your life and happiness probably varies based on what things are you are not seeing in your normal life. When I started meditating, I immediately discovered I was angry many times a day; several years later, having tried to respond to this reality in various ways, I got divorced as I found it impossible to ignore this previously un-perceived aspect of my reality. Now I am happier and more calm and so on, but the meditation definitely caused some shake up not more calm for quite some time.
glad to see this here and I would expand on it bc I think it's so important.
For a long time, I, too, thought accepting Something Bad meant forcing oneself to appreciate it somehow, to reframe it as actually good, or to lie to oneself or even to "approve" of it. Just to re-iterate: those would all be unproductive, or Wrong Action, or just "bad."
Instead, accepting means allowing one's self to acknowledge something happened without it driving thought to somewhere else. E.g. I was assaulted by a neighbor recently... true story... I was very traumatized for a few weeks and unable to process it well. As I slowly gathered myself up, I began to accept it. It doesn't mean I approve of it or welcome it or anything like that. I still hate the motherfucker and I'm disturbed that justice will never come for him, except hopefully he will fuck over the wrong person who is unlike me a scary person, and he'll get what he has coming.
But you see how I digressed there, moving out of the present and away from the fact, moving toward a fantasy? That part is not acceptance, either. For me, acceptance is simply being able to sit still and say, "yes, my neighbor injured me for life."
And to sit. and wait. and abide. and feel those urges to get mad and perhaps to get mad, but not to lose focus. When we get mad and lose focus, our minds confuse the negative feelings with our surroundings. I need to train my mind to connect the anger with what he did - not my current, comfy surroundings with a 43" 4k monitor and cool can of cranberry lime seltzer.
We do this because magic happens. when we simply sit with it, our mind begins to actually process it. It's an organic version of a mechanistic process that you don't have to consciously run, but you can almost consciously obbserve. I like to imagine a fleet of trucks in a warehouse. They are carrying the heavy load of the trauma or upset in them and they need to bring it to the right departments in the brain to chop it up, water it down, separate it, dissolve, and re-fabricate it into something new. This is an automatic process our minds have apparently evolved. And it's free!
But it requires some squirminess, some patience, some willingness to temporarily feel discomfort while sitting here, feeling the pain in my lower back, coming to terms with it. not appreciating it, but become capable of sitting with it.
So I urge GP to circle back and consider this way of accepting, rather than someone telling you you should appreciate or thank the pain or some kind of bullshit like that. This doesn't correct or justify and evil. All this does is remove my own excess reaction to it so I can bring myself to peace by not flipping out when I inevitably recall it.
Please accept my compassion for whatever your circumstances were and consider the advice of the late Thich Nhat Hanh to sit still and take it in. Let the delivery tracks in your mind do their processing and you will feel it settle and your mind will allow you to function better again.
Towards the end of the article, they touch on this:
> The antidote is to be aware of desire or anger, instead of identifying with it.
The general idea is to develop a sort of recursive awareness. In your case, it seems like there was a problematic situation that you were struggling with, and that once you became aware of shifts of perspective as a tool for actionable-ness, you attempted to do the "opposite" of struggling (accepting uncontrollable things as inevitable). But now your awareness extends to being able to see that neither of those options are necessarily the two polar extremes of the spectrum of choices you have.
One aspect that kinda rubs me the wrong way when people talk about mindfulness is this idea that things can just magically fall into place. I think it downplays the difference between being aware of something and the effort it takes to do something about it. I tend to think of mindfulness in terms of turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns. The former isn't actionable because you're not even aware of it. The latter is actionable in some way, but the exact way to go about it may not necessarily be obvious or easy.
> I tend to think of mindfulness in terms of turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns. The former isn't actionable because you're not even aware of it. The latter is actionable in some way, but the exact way to go about it may not necessarily be obvious or easy.
I like that and somewhat agree. It's not that some mystical force makes life easier for you because of your merit, it's just that you have a much greater awareness and comfort of your own ignorance. So it's not a surprise when that ignorance is revealed by the situations of life in stark ways, and you can more calmly respond to them than if you were otherwise triggered by them in an identified way.
Meditation is a tool that cuts both ways. It must be used, like any tool, with respect and careful practice. The Buddha analogized it to a poisonous viper in the wrong hands.
I'll give you one example from my own practice. When I learned the Mahasi style of vipassana (mindfulness) meditation, which has you note sense objects as they arise, I noted everything, including conversation. I noted "hearing, hearing, hearing" as I'd listen to the story of my elocutor. This brought me no closer to awakening! The act of hearing and awareness of hearing is so very far from understanding the content of conversation.
Small misunderstandings like these lead to big consequences.
"What is abstruse, subtle,
deep,
hard to see,
going against the flow —
those delighting in passion,
cloaked in the mass of darkness,
won't see."
Abstruse and subtle! Difficult to discern. Difficult for anyone, even monks in their monastic redoubts.
Mahasi noting is the most meticulous practice I've ever done. It's easy to do wrong and should be done with a trained teacher. There are Mahasi centers that offer month long retreats which are worth exploring (at least when the pandemic is done).
The first time I did a noting type practice (way before doing the Mahasi style of noting) I became nearly instantly depressed and disassociated. Noting is, for me, a very agitating practice. If someone is reading this, this doesn't mean Mahasi is a 'bad' technique. But you may want to steady yourself in a shamatha practice before considering noting.
I stand by this recommendation: if anyone reading this is near the San Jose area I can highly recommend the Tathagata Meditation Center, where I first learned the technique. It's still closed due to Omicron but hopefully not for long.
Vipassana is insight meditation, which is generally contrasted with mindfulness (known as 'samatha'). "Mindfulness" is generally thought of as a prerequisite to insight, though an especially committed vipassana practitioner might well develop both concurrently. (The aforementioned 'insight' is of course meant as insight into the three core features of phenomenology, viz. the impermanence of subjective states, the all-pervading dissatisfaction of 'craving' and 'clinging' and the lack of a true 'self'.)
Hey, sounds like you're familiar with some of the teachings. But mindfulness is not associated with samatha but rather vipassana in the western world, even though the most accurate Pali word for mindful abiding is sati. Samatha is classically associated with one-pointedness that can be a helpful adjunct to a practice of insight as the revelations that accompany a sustained insight practice can often be disturbing. Meditators steady their minds with the deeply pleasant states of jhana or near-jhana (laya) as base camps for insight practice.
If we look at the suttas, the Satipatthana Sutta, or Discourse on the Establishment of Mindfulness, offers a recipe to remain mindful of the sense aggregates to achieve insight:
"In this way he remains focused internally on the body in & of itself, or externally on the body in & of itself, or both internally & externally on the body in & of itself. Or he remains focused on the phenomenon of origination with regard to the body, on the phenomenon of passing away with regard to the body, or on the phenomenon of origination & passing away with regard to the body. Or his mindfulness that 'There is a body' is maintained to the extent of knowledge & remembrance. And he remains independent, unsustained by (not clinging to) anything in the world. This is how a monk remains focused on the body in & of itself."
I think "concentration" is too strong a word, even, since samatha is really about letting go (of objects other than the object of meditation), rather than buckling down and trying to focus, which I think a lot of people associate "concentrating" with.
For me phrases like "gently staying with" or "quietly attending to" or even "remembering" (which is sort of what sati means anyway) work better than "concentration", but it seems like there isn't a perfect piece of terminology to describe the kind of effort/effortlessness balance that has to be achieved for samatha to work. But I feel that "letting go of distractions" is a better way around it than "concentrating one-pointedly" which tends to sound very effortful.
Mindfulness/vipassana/insight, I have no idea what a good phrase is. There are so many modifications of insight techniques that it's hard to find a common core sometimes.
That said, I believe the early Buddhist texts (i.e. the suttas) don't really make the samatha/vipassana distinction much if at all, this is a (relatively) recent development. And it seems like practicing one necessarily invokes some of the other (apart from during very refined states of samatha where there's no "bandwidth" for the kind of analysis and noting that happens in most insight techniques). I've often thought of vipassana practice as "applying the principles/mechanics of samatha to (xyz mental noting technique)", which might be why some traditions tend to have you do some form of samatha first before vipassana - because the mind needs a little training in being steady and dropping distractions before it can apply a vipassana technique in a (roughly) one-pointed way.
Mindfulness meditation is a term we use to describe the practices that certain famous/influential western meditation practitioners developed after coming back from the mostly theravada countries that they went to to learn meditation practices from the monks there in the 50-70s. Generally speaking, those practices were vipassana/insight practices, and so mindfulness practices are in essence, or at least are modified vipassana techniques. Mindfulness is the translation we tend to use for the Pali `sati`, mindfulness techniques tend to develop this quality of `sati`, which is a kind of re-contextualisation of your perception from "I am having an experience" to "an experience is happening within conscious awareness" in a direct, first person way. And yeah, the development of sati, along with other helpful factors, can help to gain insight, which is basically the way the mind looks at itself and conceptualises its own experience, in a kind of self-reflective way, and what it means to relax and tighten the tension that holding the mind in that way causes.
In these western teachings and in the theravadan writings, usually insight is contrasted with "concentration", which is `samatha`, which is a kind of effortless concentration on one thing. Focusing solely on the sensations of the breath at a point in your body is one way of doing samatha, or imagining a complex mental image (of, say, a mandala) or a simple image like a white circle. This kind of meditation is about dropping your attachment to everything except this one thing, which creates a strong attachment to that thing to the exclusion of all else, and this is often pleasurable because you're both strongly mentally attached to that sensation and it's a sensation that keeps happening at high "volume", which is very rewarding. With this you can enter states called `jhana` (which is actually pretty much the only word in early buddhism for "meditation", and through the spread of Buddhism, linguistically became "chan" in China, "zen" in Japan, and "seon" in Korea, "thien" in Vietnam...)
The reason that they are contrasted is because mindfulness practices tend to go the other way and include a larger scope of what you are including in your attention, for example mentally labelling what senses are being activated from moment to moment, or the sensations of the body/breath in a more wholesome way without blocking out external stimuli, but developing very strong clarity on the momentary aspects of those sensations and experiences, sort of applying a "samatha" style concentration to analysing the sensations as the "three core features" you described.
Both the approaches tend to suppress the "hindrances" in the mind that prevent jhana and insight. These are recurring thoughts and emotions that trouble you and stop this kind of mental configuration from happening in a stable way. The techniques use up mental and perceptual "bandwidth" in holding the mind in a way so that attention/awareness and holding on/letting go are balanced on whatever the object of meditation is. By developing samatha or sati, or a some of both mixed together, you can enter interesting and unusual states of consciousness that are pleasant, weird, intriguing, peaceful- that can be used as a point of inquiry into why the mind is grasping at things in certain ways and what the result of that grasping is doing to it.
> And yeah, the development of sati, along with other helpful factors, can help to gain insight, which is basically the way the mind looks at itself and conceptualises its own experience, in a kind of self-reflective way
Actually the insight of vipassana is pretty consistent in being other-reflective and not "self"-reflective. It's concentrating on mental states as they happen, and realizing that a mental state can never be truly "about" itself, but at most it can relate to the fleeting memory of a former mental state. Since there is thus no such thing as actual "self"-reflection, the next insight is that mental perceptions, at their most basic level, do not in fact evidence any continuity and distinct identity of the "self" - which is of course the core "insight" of anatta!
It is my understanding that he refused the offer of sex. For instance, here is the WikiPedia (yes, I know WP can be an issue, but the link you provided is consistent with this quote): "[Ghislaine] Maxwell "directed" her to have sex with Minsky among others. There has been no allegation that sex between them took place nor a lawsuit against Minsky's estate."
To be sure, but that's missing the point. Consider the situation from his perspective. Even if they weren't exactly simpatico, the residue of material greed lingers. Money makes us all liars. Meditate on that.
Consider meditating. Greed clouds the mind. Compassion is key. Follow your own path and it will become apparent. Or you can refer to the above comment, if that helps.
I don't want to pretend that the way I do meditation and yoga is the right way or it's going to work for someone else. But I think they should try some of it because it might work for them but it also might not because everyone's different. At the same time I don't want other people to pretend that the way they do meditation or yoga is going to work for me or is the right way. But it might work, but it also might not... because everyone's different.
This is true on an important level, but also dangerous as sibling comments point out. There's no panacea for that tension, only the particular choices made and risks taken. Do you trust a particular "doctor", or will you take your chances with the "disease"?
The fact that this phrase sounds pithy and makes sense on a literal level tricks people into accepting the underlying message without critically analyzing the meaning of it. A classic Trojan horse of sorts.
Reality is like a dark room. Awareness is like a circle of light cast from a flashlight . Meditation manipulates that circle of light. Brightening and dimming it. Shrinking and enlarging it.
I know of 2 techniques. The Buddhists call them Samatha and Vipassana.
Meditating for long hours is serious business and should be compared to pro-sports (in terms of commitment, training and potential injury). You wouldn't train like an athlete just to stay healthy, similarly you shouldn't meditate like its the end of the world.