When a Therapist Puts Buddhism into Practice | Hacker News Reader

When a Therapist Puts Buddhism into Practice

nytimes.com

82 pointsnz22 comments

I really sympathize with anyone who has looked into Buddhism and found it puzzling or even annoying. I felt the same way for many years -- if the Buddha had realized something really important, I'm listening, why not tell me what he realized in a straightforward way?

Well, he would have, if that would work, but it doesn't. Concepts fly easily between our minds but concepts don't seem to really change how our minds work. What does change how our minds work is direct experience. We lead ourselves to the life-changing realizations by meditation.

Slowly, steadily, you train yourself to be calm, to be indistractable, to make your mind very still, much stiller than it ever is even in sleep. Focusing on the nature of experience itself, your mind directly experiences new information about its own workings. And when it does, it has no choice but to change itself, because it does not want to suffer. It causes itself to suffer only because it does not see how its actions lead to suffering. When it does see, it stops. It's freedom and peace by insight.

It starts making perfect sense to help others, to plant trees the shade of which you will never enjoy yourself, etc. You see that it doesn't make sense to fear death. It doesn't make sense to be angry at anyone. It's good stuff.

Good solid advice right here. For me, personally I feel meditation is about developing wisdom through concentration. The more wise you become, the more sense the Buddha's instructions make. The more insights you get.

I was raised firmly Protestant. I've since decided that prayer is meditation:

- You typically enumerate ways where you've strayed from your ethical goals. "I harmed so-and-so. I regret having done that."

- You put yourself into the mindset of change. "I want to be a better person. Help me recognize when I'm about to do something I know I shouldn't so that I can steer away from it."

- You open yourself to insight. "OK, I've said what I wanted to say. Now I'm going to sit back and listen for an answer."

Although meditation is secular and prayer is explicitly religious, in my experience they seem to follow identical processes. The main difference is whether you intend to send your thoughts outward or to deal with them yourself, but either way you're introspecting your own behavior and desires to seek insights on how to deal with them.

Prayer absolutely is meditation. It's easier to see in say, Orthodox Christian practice, or in some Catholic monastic orders. While some Protestants are rediscovering it, it fell out of favour for awhile as Protestants often eschew monasticism.

They don't feel the same to me at all. While meditating I try to keep my mind energized (not sleepy) while attempting to be aware of of the moment, my breath, and the stray thoughts which although I'm aware of I let them go. My mind is energized but quiet and without thoughts (if I'm successful, which I'm often not, that's ok), a state few in this world spend much time in.

In contrast when I pray I'm often judging the past and planning the future. The first 2 points you mentioned are specifically reinforcing these habits. Meditation gives me a time to practice not constantly dwelling on the past or the future, which if we're not careful we spend most of our lives doing; meditation is merely a time to practice breaking this thought habit.

Not to say one is better than the other though. I just wanted to express my opinion that meditation is much different than prayer according to my own understanding. Granted there are a variety of definitions and understandings of both words.

My understanding is that there are different definitions, where generally meditation is some sort of thought cultivation.

But the way I learned, you meditate in order to enter samadhi. Samadhi is a Sanskrit word that means right concentration/proper concentration, and it is what allows you to gain insight. It represents a class of meditative states that you enter and can last for short time or long time, typically when you leave samadhi you feel very good, very peaceful and blissful - you reduced your thinking process thus your afflictions too. The higher your samadhi, the better your concentration and wisdom. Without samadhi, meditation is just analytical thought process.

So, if any practice (prayer included) is to be meditative it has to enable you to enter samadhi IMHO. I believe that's why it has a different feel for you.

I know there are many ways to meditate and many differing thoughts about how and why we should meditate. I don't know any of the religious beliefs behind meditation. I believe what I've practiced is called mindfulness meditation. What is the type of meditation you described called?

Generally speaking, it is Buddhist meditation; Buddhist meditation texts talk about dhyana (or jhana in Pali; where most of mindfulness sources come from) which is another word for proper concentration. All Buddhist meditation is about entering/achieving dhyana as far as I can tell, although I believe the Chan meditation system puts more emphasis on this.

Of course, mindfulness meditation nowadays means many different things, but if you go to the Buddhist sources you will find information about this.

"wisdom through concentration"

As a buddhist-ish person for a decade now, I follow the path that meditation allows us to see things (and ourselves) as they really are, not as we've constructed or interpreted them.

There may be other ways of achieving this, but meditation creates a space between the thoughts we have constantly. We can see our thoughts from the "don't believe your thoughts" perspective.

Or, our thoughts -- our consciousness -- is like logs in a stream, and we're not in the stream, but on the banks of the stream, watching the logs go by.

We are not our thoughts, we must observe our thoughts, and that requires practice, and meditation is a practice that allows us to develop this.

I'm probably wrong about this, or, let's say, understand it incompletely (though I think the same point was addressed in the article in the part in which the therapist relates the need to understand the world to the formation of the ego), but a relevant insight might be that you interrupt the process by trying to understand. Like, at all. That part of the problem is your mind compulsively mapping things out, and then obsessing over its own map, rather than the territory.

There are things that one _should_ understand intellectually. You need some kind of a map, even very general.

There are three types of knowledge in Buddhist tradition - information you acquired from others, information you intellectually grasped and finally information from direct experience, insight. Each requires some amount of the previous kind to form.

You're right that we are not in direct control of our minds and we don't understand it directly as much as we think we do, but we can understand some important general causal principles which allow to learn how to influence the mind through the right causes.

So it's not about not thinking at all, it's about right kind of thinking. We need thoughts, right constructs, to point the mind in the right direction. As in the raft simile - only on the other shore we can let these skillful constructs go.

URL without the Google crap:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/books/mark-epstein-advice...

Can a mod that can fix this please?

Yes, please. I try not to go to NYT articles (I just try to avoid the paywall system) and this one fooled me.

I broke down recently and bought a subscription. They are the only news outlet I actually pay for. Their content is simply ubiquitous. I never thought it would happen, but there it is.

What's ironic about all this is that what I want is cable-like bundling of content. But while with news content I can be content with channel surfing, with television content I want to consume individual shows.

Curious as to why this is.

are you familiar with blendle.com ? It's how I tend to consume news these days. I don't get why most news sites don't allow me to pay per article. Very happy blendle exists, just wish more outlets would partner with them.

Looks like I'm already on their mailing list. Must've been a long time ago. I hope they make it to launch.

In addition to the NY Times, I believe that The Washington Post is worthy of a subscription. And while you are at it, sending some money to The Guardian seems to make sense. We all complain about the poor quality of the news and the prevalence of fake news. If we want quality news with intelligent reporting, we have to ensure that the news media that provide it are adequately resourced and funded.

Of course, there are methods other than paywalls that could be used, but paywalls are what we have. It would be nice if several news organizations were to provide a single subscription with broad access. The current paywall strategy nickel and dimes voracious readers.

I may get there. Let's see what the next few years bring.

The Google crap was probably to disable the pay wall. I had to google the article title and follow the Google link myself to avoid it...

A lot of therapy (esp CBT) is incorporating Buddhist concepts. The most established is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), which is roughly Buddhism + CBT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy

And the concept of mindfulness is practically mainstream in therapy (as it is becoming in culture overall).

Good trends, IMHO.

Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) is also largely a sort of secular subset of Bhuddism.

Frankly, I'm tired of this:

"Help Times journalists uncover the next big story. Get The Times from $9.99 a month."

As much as NYT might have interesting content, lately there is a high amount of these on HN.

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