What do these 'meditators' do for a living ?
How can they afford to spend their days sitting down doing essentially nothing ?
Could they do this high-level mediation in a busy office with people on phone meetings all around them ?
How can they afford to spend their days sitting down doing essentially nothing ?
Could they do this high-level mediation in a busy office with people on phone meetings all around them ?
And, everybody's getting high.
Life is about pleasure.
If you found out that you can feel really, really good by sitting and doing nothing... would you do it? Of course you would. :)
Now the stark reality however, is that to be able to sit and meditate properly requires to be already at home in the body. Any amount of trauma will make that particularly difficult. As soon as you sit, you have to work through restlessness, anxiety, and myriad of other unpleasant states of mind. And they all come up.. it's like a purge of the nervous system.
In fact I was just recently reading an article about the unexpected side effects of meditation. This is not talked about enough.
Meditation Is a Powerful Mental Tool—and For Some People It Goes Terribly Wrong
https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/vbaedd/meditation-is-a-...
edit: forgot this beautiful quote: "First, you chase the truth. Then truth chases you".
Nope, I'd go for walk. Meditation is passive and lazy. Being outside in nature with the sounds of the birds and the UV light, being actually connected with the universe, being alive.
Meditation is about training the mind to be more aware, more purposefully attentive, and more equanimous. As you can imagine, there are many benefits to achieving this.
It's not simply sitting and daydreaming, even though it can sometimes feel like that as a beginner, which is totally normal :)
For beginners, the important part is to just practice noticing each instance of daydreaming or getting lost thinking about something, without judgment. Each time one notices it is actually a victory to enjoy, not a bad thing.
It truly is neither. "Passive" meditation would be daydreaming, which all meditation techniques aim to minimise. Hardly 'lazy' either - retreat drop-out rates are high precisely because it can be really, really hard to muster the will to maintain the required discpline for hours (and days) at at time.
> Nope, I'd go for walk
Most meditation traditions include walking practises.
However you might assess such disciplines (I'm not sure myself), it's pretty clear that pleasure and getting high is absolutely not their aim - indeed attachment to such would be considered a hindrance to 'progress'.
> Could they do this high-level mediation in a busy office with people on phone meetings all around them ?
There is no such claim. Probably not (or perhaps the experts can, but they couldn't have got to their current level of expertise that way)
This assumes of course that they have any use of their brain during their work - ie, if they are creatives or mental workers, etc. If they stand at a factory pressing the same 3 buttons all day - then probably no, meditation will not help much.