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I'm amazed at how angry this article makes you (and other commenters). I'm even more surprised that you're trying to frame this as a cheap sales pitch, because there isn't any mention of money or their services in the entire article, or even the suggestion that you ought to seek out such a service. You actually have to click through two pages just to find a price for their online course. This doesn't even begin to approach the somewhat sketchy nature of blog posts describing a book with an Amazon referral link at the end, which get FPed here with some frequency.

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.

Go to a party. Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongued voice that says fun on the surface and fear underneath. Feel the tension, feel the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. They are faking it. Go to a ball game. Watch the fan in the stand. Watch the irrational fit of anger.

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...).

I get the same feeling reading your response as I do reading comments by libertarians objecting to "paternalism" and the "nanny state", in which the issue in question becomes wholly subordinate to the libertarian's sense that they are being insulted.

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.

Meditation isn't a cure, it's just a good way to actually hear the alarms that may have been going off for years - a diagnostic technique. You hear all of the (demons? background processes?) that you've gotten tuned out, and realize how much mental energy they drain. (Hold on - maybe I have email. And while I'm there - are people on HN voting me up? What was I saying?)

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

I'm not disagreeing with you. At the end of the day I'm probably not even disagreeing with the message the author wants to convey. I'm just disagreeing with his rhetoric, and I find that philosophically and psychologically vital.

--

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.

Oh, I'm in no way saying that exercise isn't beneficial. I'm a cycling geek. Shit, look at my name. (I also love weight training, and I did Aikido for years, but biking is my thing.) Your body wants you to exercise, just like it wants you to eat well. I'm not here to nag people to brush their teeth, though. C'mon.

Meditation is a different approach. Sometimes being so boring is an asset - It's not all about testing your body.

"Psychological sympathy triggers"?

This is very interesting to me. I have signed up for the free 10-day Vipassana course (dhamma.org).

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?

Focusing on your breath can be a good way to recover after sitting for several minutes and (without realizing it) getting caught up in worrying about whatever crap has been dragging you down. It's a fundamental body function. At the same time, there's nothing inherently sacred about your breath - it's just oxygen keeping you from dying.

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.

Saying that meditating is "you just sit" is like saying that exercise is "you just move". You'll get somewhere doing only that, but not very far. Things in life that are simple, we already all do--like wiping our asses. On the other hand, meditation ends up working for some people and not others, and different people require different amounts of time and effort to get anywhere. This indicates that meditation is like any other worthwhile thing in life--not simple.

Oh, sure. I'm just reacting to people who think that "sitting Zen" is going to make magical enlightenment fairies fly out of their asses. The way Zen/Buddhism was typically presented in the US, you'd think it had summoned Magic Fairies, or at least was full of antioxidants or something.

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.

With the school of Zen I am familiar with you pretty much do "just sit". The practice is called Shikantaza, literally "Just sitting" in english. With 10% chanting and bowing afterwards.

AFAIK, Shikantaza is only done after you've had a good amount of experience with other, more structured forms of meditation, like counting breaths or following the breath. At this point, you should already have some idea of where you're going, and "just sitting" will be more than just sitting to you.

I sit at a Dojo regularly and occasionally do introductions. We don't teach counting, but do teach following the breath at the nostrils and settling the mind in the hands, as things to come back to once the mind has wandered. There is some technical stuff about posture to learn but basically you just turn up and sit. If they do it differently somewhere else that's cool too, lineages vary.

Speaking for myself, I found the assessment about labeling all experiences as good, bad, or neutral (and then ignoring the neutral bin 99% of the time) to be right on the money.

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.

They're all sensible abstractions of the way we think, but to judge the problems developed by this framework as the root of all dissatisfaction is to take it too seriously. To pass off this conviction as truth is then dishonest. By this model, we're clearly dishonest all the time, but the author does a disservice to the reader through the holier than thou rhetoric.

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.

"Whatever happened to good old koans? Just because they're tricky doesn't mean they were an accident."

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.

Yeah, but "Buddhism" in the US means Soto and (especially) Rinzai Zen, since the Beats (esp. at the San Francisco Zen Center) did so much to popularize it. Otherwise, Buddhism has mostly stayed in local ethnic enclaves.

Insight meditation, a.k.a. "vipassana", has made big strides, thanks to Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and Spirit Rock in California, as well as S.N. Goenka's centers around the country.

Regarding Zen, koans are a feature of Rinzai, whereas Soto centers on just sitting.

I found it distasteful. I very much respect the idea of personal meditation, but this essay gave me that belly nausea that I experience reading a religious pamphlet dropped on my doorstep. "Purify the mind"? "Emotional bondage"? Is this any different from "auditing" my "reactive mind" in search of the elusive "state of clear"? I like my emotions goddammit, and this essay left me flustered and angry!

I like my emotions goddammit, and this essay left me flustered and angry!

So this essay enabled you two experience two of your emotions, you must have enjoyed it

I didn't realize that people are now charging for this. It's free in India, and runs on donations.

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...

My experience with meditation is that immediately after a long sitting, my awareness of the various "mental events" bump up an order of magnitude. I was indeed seeing the subtle fluctuation of emotions in myself and my family that I didn't even know existed. It was a pretty eerie experience at first, then I gradually got used to it. It's more like a drug-induced experience than something I naturally run into.

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.

Have a look at the top comment from 1 year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612276

Interesting! I don't want to make the same projection that mkn did, though I'm tempted. Just because a theory fits doesn't mean it's right.

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.

That website charges $125 for the 90-day course, however Vipassana meditation can be learned for free at donation-supported meditation centers all over the world: http://www.dhamma.org/en/bycountry/

All you have to do is register and attend the 10-day course.

The whole book is available online for free:

http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html