Meditation: Why Bother?
vipassana.com
vipassana.com
"The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant. Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same. Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe. A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone. In comes another one, and that is gone too. A sound strikes your ears and then silence. Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and they leave again. Friends go, relatives die. Your fortunes go up and they go down. Sometimes you win and just as often you lose. It is incessant: change, change, change. No two moments ever the same."
"You can never step in the same river twice." - Heraclitus
"Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things."
"To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just."
We try to stick each perception, every mental change in this endless flow into one of three mental pigeon holes. It is good, or it is bad, or it is neutral.
Does anyone actually live just like that or is it a strawman that wrings another drop of ethos from the audience?
I don't want to make a statement against meditation, actually. I have some mental antiviral habits that make me think Vipassana as its practiced in the US is half truth and half marketing delusion, but at the end of the day stress is a huge problem and anything that can get people to honestly, psychically relax has its value. My own experience is that meditation can take many forms and truly is a perspective inversion with a great personal ROI. I go backpacking, and I'll recommend it heartily too.
I want to go one step further. I've known and spoken to a few people who practice meditation both here and in China and will say the essay isn't wrong in its spiritual recommendation either. I am thoroughly convinced through testimony and personal practice that you can learn a lot from sitting still. There was even a link on HN a few days ago that suggested rational, tested support.
But even if meditation were the honest cure for all existential angst in the human condition, even if it cured AIDS and fixed Greece's financial woes, I'd still prefer someone talk to me with respect instead of trying to wheedle their way into my heart with meandering, gypsy-like proselytizing.
It only sounds bleak when you view it from the level of ordinary mental perspective
You too can be extraordinary! How many payments is Vipassana? (Well $125)
There is only one way you will ever know if meditation is worth the effort. Learn to do it right, and do it. See for yourself.
The only valuable 3 sentences in this whole business.
And where on earth does he attack families singing Sweet Caroline along with the crowd at the local baseball game? Do you actually think he's attacking the whole of baseball fandom?
You guys are definitely reacting to something, but I'm not sure it's this article.
I can understand and sympathize with those sentiments, but I don't feel or encounter them in my life. There are some who are faking enjoyment and their reasoning is complex, fascinating, and deserving of conversation instead of pigeonholing. Many (most) I know are not.
Either I live in some kind of spiritual wonderland, am wildly blind to my social surroundings, or this article is setting the world up in two-tone.
I don't think he's attacking. I think he's framing. The rule says simple as possible, but no simpler and I feel there are many who live enlightened-enough lives to find their own paths to meditation or what-have-you without proselytizing guidance.
I'll call it a personal Guideline Foul. "Anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." There are many, many things on meditation that would gratify my intellect and HN is swinging through them on it's slow topical trajectory. This one just didn't suit me, so I spoke up.
For a much more subtle, loving, and informative treatment of similar topics I suggest Consider the Lobster [pdf] (http://www.lobsterlib.com/feat/davidwallace/page/lobsterarti...).
This is just one guy's take on what meditation has allowed him to perceive about the world, and naturally he has chosen to emphasize those things. You can disagree with him as oversimplifying and misrepresenting the world, and that's fine. I just don't get why you're so worked up about it, and assigning base/crass motivations to him to boot. Assuming your interpretation isn't merely uncharitable, maybe he's just wrong. Hanlon's razor and all that.
Since meditation is basically just sitting still, shutting up, and listening, anybody who wants to sell you an extreme ZenTM experience is suspect.
You. Just. Sit.
It's boring. So fucking boring. At least the paint is drying. You just have sore knees.
But it helps. While you were so worried about random crap, how many little joys did you tune out? Your morning coffee. Playing with your SO's hair. Pay attention!
And yeah, I'm just as wary as you of someone trying to sell me sitting and looking at myself in the mirror for hundreds (no, thousands) of dollars.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612740
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I've meditated before. I've done it for many hours a week for several weeks in a row. Then I realized I totally agree with davidw's comment here that exercise often does just as good a job without being fucking boring.
Backpacking. You. Just. Walk. (Through beautiful terrible landscapes that you might actively enjoy for a while but will later become a part of literally and spiritually.)
Backpacking. It. Fucking. Hurts. A lot. All day long. All night long. You mentally scream at yourself for deciding to pack each and every single piece of extraneoitivity you're carrying on your back. Each ounce. You curse the world for every stair step up the mountain. Then it all fades into the back of your mind like raining white noise. It's cathartic terrible screaming total peace.
And next thing you enjoy it.
I'm not saying you, generalized, should meditate or backpack. I'm not saying they're the cure for what ails you, let alone what ails the human condition at large. I'm pretty convinced that if you don't feel like you'd enjoy either one of them then practicing one will transform you positively, but I'd never say that exclusively.
But yeah, please do keep telling people to try meditation. I will too. My only beef is when you try to help them decide by pumping them full of psychological sympathy triggers.
Meditation is a different approach. Sometimes being so boring is an asset - It's not all about testing your body.
"Psychological sympathy triggers"?
I think it probably works for most people, but the actual effects really aren't that profound, which fucks with peoples' expectations. You aren't going to be able to fly, but you might catch yourself before you get mad and chew out a friend about something you know really doesn't matter. Which superpower would you rather have?
I'd also recommend that people find a sane local group to meditate with, or whatever, but I don't know where everyone on HN lives and can't give useful advice there, so my advice is skewed.
Some of you may find this blog entry I wrote to be interesting. It is a review of Buddha's Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love & wisdom.
http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/05/the-neuroscience-of-buddh...
I am currently reading The Myth of Freedom by Trungpa. He's definitely assaulted my practice of spiritual materialism.
I am confused about one thing. Trugpa asserts that the benefit to meditation is boredom. Csikszentmihalyi, in Flow, asserts that meditation is beneficial because it is the practice of such a well-honed skill (practitioners become skilled at observing the intricacies of their breath and therefore experience a feeling of being "in the zone", which is basically the opposite of boredom).
Trugpa says that observing the breath is just a useful beginner's crutch.
What do you think? Estragon, would you please chime in?
Saying, "oh, I lost focus, I'm going to take a deep breath and try to stay here" seems to help most people, that's all.
I also find the rollercoaster metaphor to be pretty on the money as well. Yes, there are nice experiences, but they do not last forever and in the end are empirically unsatisfying; as a result, their shadow side is that we compulsively try to attain them, thus causing suffering.
Not sure where you are getting the postmodern vibes from, this is basic buddhism dogma for the last 2500 years. It seems the very thing the author is pointing out is what is ticking you off: this is a shared experience of all humans. But I don't think that just because its a lowest common denominator is a reason to dismiss it out of hand as a manipulation.
Postmodern angst isn't the introduction of new ideas on the global scale, just a particular rehashing of them that has resonated with consumerist America for the last 50 years. Perhaps it's safest to say there are many outlooks on human suffering, but any and all ways of saying them are insufficiently precise to have claims of solutions be anything more than delusion.
So now, I'll apologize beforehand should I misspeak, but I believe the heart of the study of meditation is wrapped up in just doing meditation because talking about it only occludes one's understanding of the practice. With that in hand, I find the article even more disingenuous. Whatever happened to good old koans? Just because they're tricky doesn't mean they were an accident.
Shut up and meditate. Or exercise. Or backpack. Or go dancing.
Koans are hardly omnipresent throughout Buddhism. They're a pretty late addition. The Buddha wouldn't have had a clue what you were talking about.
Regarding Zen, koans are a feature of Rinzai, whereas Soto centers on just sitting.
So this essay enabled you two experience two of your emotions, you must have enjoyed it
Actually, someone posted the link to the Anapanasati Sutta in a recent HN thread on meditation (thank to that person!), and you can just read it and figure out what to do yourself. I would like to think that the Buddha would prefer that you behave like a scientist, which is the path he took towards understanding the mind + life/death. "Buddhism" is an ism, and quite different from being a Buddha.
http://www.greatwesternvehicle.org/ati_website/canon/sutta/m...
It took me several months of experimenting to get to that point when it just "clicked". Before that each sitting did leave me refreshing, like after an exercise, a cold shower, or a long introspection, but there wasn't the same degree of amplified sense of awareness. I believe the latter is what the author is talking about.
What you experience with your newly developed awareness probably depends on your environment. For me, as a newbie, I can't sustain this mental state for more than a few hours. Within those hours I generally feel like staying home, so I don't know what it's like in a social event. Supposedly it takes years of practice for this awareness to stabilize and become permanent, so perhaps by then I can gain more perspective on the various walks of life like the author described.
So yeah, the skeptic part of me can't let me vouch for the specifics, but there's a good chance the author isn't bullshitting.
As I recommended in another comment, I cannot recommend more highly the works and philosophy of David Foster Wallace. Read Consider the Lobster (and then everything else) and tell me what you think.
debt suggests in a further comment the angst of college frat parties, news coverage, and pop music. Maybe he's got a point in that the participants there are psychically ill and the essay is targeted properly, but I'm still seeing the mkn's Zarathustra reference.
At the beginning of my college career I hated (hated) fraternities. Today I have gone to many of their parties, ones I would have once described exactly as debt did, and found simple, string-free enjoyment in irresponsibility. The angst and fake smiles had their roots, too, but people's problems are not things that are to be simply overcome by meditative escapism. It's a much deeper transformation and should be sold as such, I think.
All you have to do is register and attend the 10-day course.
It makes me think that if someone can be that insightful, I'm more likely to go along with whatever he suggests because he's got it figured out so well. Maybe it's time to give meditation a shot.
I definitely recommend that you (or anyone else interested) give meditation a shot-- but I'd suggest that you find a teacher. Otherwise, it's a bit like trying to learn to swim from a book.
There are a lot of meditation centers around, and most of them don't charge money or require adherence to any doctrine whatsoever. In my experience, they are happy to have you there, and happy to show you how it's done.
That being said: as books go, Bhante G.'s is one of the best.
I'd rather someone be an example of the results of their ideology, than have them try to sell me on it. I think it speaks volumes.
As Suzuki Roshi said "Sit Zazen. To live life without sitting Zazen is like winding a watch without setting it: It will run, but it won't tell you the correct time."
[1] Recordings of the talks at that retreat are linked from this URL: http://unfetteredmind.org/audio/podretreat.php?code=PAP#here They're the PAP01-PAP10 links.
Even though 2 hours seems like a lot, because of what it is (focusing the mind, learning to not overreact to external stimuli, stability of the mind), it makes people able to be very highly productive throughout the day.
I do think the concept of "limited amount of time" is a little flawed. Perhaps the real reason people shy away from meditation is that it's hard and takes discipline and willpower (in a good way)?
And you do have a kid. Huh:-)
Well, I do not have enough time for all the activities that I would like to do, so for me it's a very real concept. Proper training is hard and takes discipline in a good way too, so exercise has that one covered.
Frankly, some people are constantly working and don't have time to meditate. It isn't that they shy away from it because it is hard or takes discipline and willpower, it is because we live in a world that (unfortunately) gives us a limited amount of time during the day that we can spend awake consistently if we don't want to possibly damage our health.
If you're "constantly" working, then that's a choice you made, right?
[edit: just realized I sound kind of like an ass. I shouldn't speak for other people. Just read this as me talking to myself :)]
I guess the point is that for me, exercise is probably more efficient, time wise, in terms of benefits/time, and also includes some of the mental things that I think meditation must give you, but of course it's a fairly personal thing, and to each his own.
Or you can embrace that inherent unsatisfactoriness and affect real change in the world.
>Examine each of these goals and you will find they are superficial. You want food. Why? Because I am hungry. So you are hungry, so what? Well if I eat, I won't be hungry and then I'll feel good. Ah ha! Feel good! Now there is a real item.
I'm pretty sure happiness is the superficial goal when it comes to food. Food can be a want yeah sure, but it's also a NEED.
In general I just can't abide by this sort of nihilism couched as noble anti-materialism.
If the truest expression of your philosophy leads to you sitting in a cave waiting to starve, freeze, dehydrate, or get eaten by wolves, you can just fuck off.
An essay that dismisses the idea that there exists people comfortable with feeling the full range of human emotions, that dismisses civilization as a whole as self deception?
And you're sure you want to defend a Buddhist by telling me he's not anti-materialistic?
Also in response to that Buddhist saying? I choose to get a bigger glass.
Until you've been able to get your own mind to quiet down, to get rid of the nagging voices and tugging emotions and distorting filters in your head, it's very very difficult to notice this
If you've never experienced this sort of total perspective shift, I recommend that you read a bit more and reconsider your objections. Meditation is not about freezing to death in a cave
[1] Much has been written about emptiness and nothingness in Buddhism, with one prominent example being Nagarjuna, whose argument was in summary: if you cannot be empty of an individual self, then that means you have an individual self. If you have an individual self, you exist regardless of causes. If you exist regardless of causes, then you affect anything since everything changes you in some way. Therefore, you are empty of any individual self, and instead only have a causal self.
This is exactly why the Buddha and later teachers emphasize on taking the middle road. In the end, meditation is observing things as they are, and theoretically you could do this while being an anti-materialist or a hedonist. However, people usually become anti-materialists because they want to block out a large collection of 'distractions', such as pleasanties. They would always be practicing half: such distractions are also part of reality. Hedonists on the other hand, easily become attached to their wealth, making progress in meditation hard as well. So teachers always advise to take a balanced approach to meditation: do not become an ascete, do not indulge too much in wealth, do not be lazy, also avoid zealotry. The mind, and world as it is in the moment provides all the necessary circumstances to learn to understand the mind.
Then there is a practical dimension as well: a starving person is probably not able to meditate, a very wealthy person is probably not very willing to meditate. My personal interpretation of Buddhist ethics is, that it is aimed to create the circumstances for as many people as possible to reach enlightenment, and is not an absolute ethic system.
It might or might not help you, many of those who meditate feel that it does. But you don't get magic powers or instant success in your life. It also doesn't prevent you from affecting real change in the world, but you don't necessarily have to be angry or unsatisfied to do so.
The goal isn't to sit in a cave and starve. In fact, the first buddha tried following all these "noble paths" and they didn't help him, except to discover the middle way.
A buddhist friend once said that if I needed buddhism in my life, it would come to me some day. I still haven't started practicing meditation, but maybe one of these days I'll get around to it. :)
Meditation actually helps (in my experience), but it's about on par with actually getting exercise or getting enough sleep - totally lame. :)
If I have kids, I hope that one day they understand this essay.
However, one of the better parts of my experience was watching the plants. Their movement as one is what one is attempting to mimic in meditation. Plants are immensely connected to the world in a way we are not. Mimicking them is how we can connect ourselves to the same feeling. This mimicking of plants is what I feel meditation is. It is why it became easier for me to meditate after doing lsd than before as the reasoning behind it makes much more sense.
Some things which helped me understand meditation at a deeper level are:
* Bhagavad Gita - The last couple of chapters make more sense. The whole I am everything was a bit annoying before, but it makes more sense when you get the point. If everything is One, then everything is beautiful.
* Foucault's The Subject and Power or anything Foucault - Meditation is supposed to break the chains our desire. Foucault's The Subject and Power is immensely powerful in understanding that we are all part of a system and governed by rules. Humans are by no means free but are held together by a discursive power which we are unaware of. One of the things we are supposed to realize is how we are entrapped by these rules and gain the ability to break rules.
If you think this is all tripe please feel free to ignore it. This is after all my own experience and it can be completely different to a different individual.
I just think the article is incorrect, which is a necessary consequence of its sweeping generalizations. A quote from the article: "You are a mess." The author spends much of the article telling the reader how unhappy the reader is, how much the reader is suffering. From a rhetorical perspective, I can understand why the author would do this. Yet I'm not convinced that I'm unhappy, and the rest of the article falls apart without that foundation.
"It [life] is an emotional roller coaster, and you spend a lot of your time down at the bottom of the ramp, yearning for the heights." To me, life feels more like emotional airplane, at home above the clouds but makes the occasional layover in Detroit.
Your experiences may vary.
I have lots of problems, but I don't feel that I'm a mess. I'm overall quite happy. I still really appreciated the article, and it made me think that meditation might be a good thing for me regardless. There are certainly lots of things in my life that I could be better at dealing with, and probably some things that I'm not aware of.
And let's say that something terrible happens in my life. My family dies, I lose my job and get cancer. Would I be sad and unhappy? Probably. Would meditation help me in that situation? It might. Even though it wouldn't revive my family, get back my job or cure my cancer, it would perhaps help me deal with the situation in a better way.
If you spend your programming life never looking at your old code to see if you can improve it, always making the same mistakes and always getting a headache by supporting your old code, there's something you could do (code reviews, refactoring) - but you might not realize it or be motivated enough to do it. I think it's the same with the rest of your life.
That said, there is no point in spending all your time refactoring your code if you don't learn anything from it and if you're not shipping working code. And there's no point in meditating if you don't feel it has a positive impact on your life. :)
This study shows brief mediation gives improvement, however I'm not sure how they controlled for those who didn't complete the experiment. Could those people be self-selecting out of it due to difficulties - ADD perhaps?
Overall - I'm love to try a simple form of meditation to see if it'd work for my ADD self.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100414184220.ht...
I prefer just vipassana, watching the breath and watching thoughts as they arise and fade. No chanting or 'OMMM'.
An interesting book is "Zen and the Brain" by an emeritus professor of neurology, published by MIT Press. The author started doing zen while in Japan in the late 60s. Over about 1000 pages, he tries to come up with testable hypotheses explaining the phenomena and results of long-term meditation practice.
It's very detailed and dense. There are a few chapters that describe his subjective experiences, but the rest is pretty scientific. There are few illustrations, it's a massive block of text.
Some have suggested simply reading the sutra or running your own course at home, and I won't say it is impossible to achieve the benefit of meditation this way, but the distractions of the world will make it very difficult to really get started.
This is why when you go to a Vipassana course, you are instructed to bring no books, no electronic devices, not even a pen to write, as any and all activities will simply help your mind to become distracted from the monumental task at hand.
Saying that, apparently the drop out rate of their course is something along the lines of 60-70%, most people do not have the discipline required to complete it.
I personally haven't done the course so I can't comment directly. I would say though, that meditation is beneficial, and I'm sure there are proper scientific studies that attest to the benefits.
Certainly the 'bio-feedback' movement is merely meditation techniques with some output you can discern, kind of like a server with monitoring.