Study links mindfulness and meditation to narcissism and “spiritual superiority”
psychnewsdaily.com
psychnewsdaily.com
It's unfortunate how far I had to scroll down to see they are using a different definition of narcissism than one typically expects. I was either expecting either Narcissus "pop-culture" narcissism or the actual personality disorder.
> "But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep."
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/lsquo-the-jews-rsquo-by...
> The same paper claims that doctors found a shortage of care, food, and painkillers, although Teresa had raised millions of dollars. Slate also found that Teresa brought in tons of money, but her missionaries looked as bad when she founded them as they did after her death. (During her own illness, Teresa fled to California clinics, Slate reports.) The conditions in her missions were so dire, in fact, that they were once compared to photographs of "Nazi Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/gvzebx/mother-teresa-was-kin...
Now in light of that definition, consider Mother Theresa's scandals/criticism[3], such as Christopher Hitchens saying[3] "[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction." [...] Hitchens said that "her intention was not to help people", and that she lied to donors about how their contributions were used. "It was by talking to her that I discovered, and she assured me, that she wasn't working to alleviate poverty", he said, "She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She said, 'I'm not a social worker. I don't do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church.'""
And you can see a definition of narciccism where she was more interested in her image as a Christian, than in the suffering of other humans. See this claim: "According to a paper by Canadian academics Serge Larivée, Geneviève Chénard and Carole Sénéchal, Teresa's clinics received millions of dollars in donations but lacked medical care, systematic diagnosis, necessary nutrition and sufficient analgesics for those in pain;[118] in the opinion of the three academics, "Mother Teresa believed the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross".[119] It was said that the additional money might have transformed the health of the city's poor by creating advanced palliative care facilities.[120][121]"
That is, she was more interested in the image of Catholicism, holiness, piousness, suffering adequately to uphold the image of Christ(liness), rather than putting that aside and treating people with the best available medicine, at the expense of peity, etc.
(You might not agree with these claims, but you can at least see "a definition of narcissism that could label Mother Theresa as narcissistic").
[1] https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/08/just_because_you_see...
[2] https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/10/the_story_of_narciss...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-new-home/201...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_Through_Spiritual_Mate...
Having said that, some aspects of the study made me cringe:
"the incentive to participate was a lottery with gift certificates of € 25,- to € 50,- ..."
"we recruited 860 participants via a Facebook page about psychology"
Leading questions like "My faith in myself goes up when I acquire more spiritual wisdom"
Not all claims of superiority are narcissistic. (Although I think society has rightly picked a convention where you're not really supposed to say such things about yourself, but rather wait for someone else to nominate you as superior in some narrowly defined way.)
It is, in fact, possible to be truly superior in spiritual terms, but such people are usually identified by their demeanor and accomplishments more than their claims.
But I disagree with your last sentence, at least as a generalization. There are legitimately talented, accomplished, capable, and arrogant people all over the place! In fact I'd say a slight majority of talented people are arrogant (say, 60%). That said, there are pretenders who are arrogant without talent, and they "poison the well" for the 60%.
I think this is especially a problem in software, because the field is still "pre-paradigmatic science" (in the Kuhn sense) which means, in part, that there is no great way to measure relative developer capability. The best you can do is examine their history of "finishing hard things" or "solving synthetically hard problems." How fast and well do you learn? What is your intuition about design, about code? Do you actually care about the structure of software enough to have opinions about it?
The biggest problem we face is that the really good developers answer yes to the last question, but then are faced with the dilemma of being forced to dwell in an inferior technology space in order to make a living. Presumably a strong paradigm would reduce this error mode!
If you had ideas around defining that paradigm for software applications, somewhere between the too-abstract Turing machine/Lambda Calculus and the too-concrete "everything is just a string of bits" mental models, would that make you narcissistic? Or just too ignorant to realize that "the best paradigm" is too subjective to define, or illusory, or already discovered (and ignored)?
Was Lavoisier, and the other scientists that converted the practice of alchemy into the practice of chemistry narcissists because they competed with each other for recognition and fame?
“And because spiritual matters are generally ‘elusive to external objective standards,’ that makes them a ‘suitable domain for illusory beliefs about one’s superiority.’”
In bodybuilding or science, there are objective standards that you can be measured against. In spirituality, it’s oftentimes too easy to claim superiority without any method of objective measurement. I think that’s what makes it so appealing to some people.
I guess I disagree with this assertion, then. There is a way to objectively measure your spiritual superiority, and that's to examine the person and where they are, and what direction they are going- wrt their behavior. What are their qualities? Patient? Honest? Hard-working? Organized? Reliable? Easy-going? Empathic? Insightful? Generous? Good judgement? I think that you can't be all of those things (all of which require emotional/reactive control) without your spirituality (and physicality, it must be said) being in good order. And this is all observable.
Saying things like this is a good way to indicate that one has not yet reached enlightenment.
>“The question is whether a truly enlightened person would even participate in our studies,” the authors write. “Would such a person be interested in or even capable of answering all these ‘me’ questions?”
I'm not sure why these types of studies are taken seriously. A clever researcher could probably get any result they want.
Are they participating to earn $10/hr or to help science and understanding of meditation?
On the other hand, why can't someone who is confident in their spiritual strength just be poor and actually need the $10/hr?
> Our results illustrate that the self‐enhancement motive is powerful and deeply ingrained so that it can hijack methods intended to transcend the ego and, instead, adopt them to its own service.
[a] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.2721
> The world would be a better place if others too had the insights that I have now.
seem narcissistic, but I think that's kind of just a logical conclusion of thinking meditation is useful? (and that most people don't meditate)
Maybe having that thought come up often, unprompted, is a sign of narcissism. But being presented with the statement, I think most meditators would have to say they agree, unless they didn't find meditation useful.
Spirituality is something you find for yourself, but in order to go deep, most people need guidance. Yes, spirituality is chock full of paradoxes too!
A wonderful self-test of one’s spiritual maturity is precisely the inner struggle of the novice with “accepting another as superior”. I suspect this has been and remains a fairly common experience for those on the spiritual path.
The standing bug to this approach is the authenticity factor of the respective “master” [so shop around].
The guru/disciple setup has led to all sorts of abuses throughout history.
My favorite story of a student meeting his master is the fabled encounter between Shams of Tabriz and the man who became known as Rumi. It seems genuine spiritual “birds of a feather” recognize one another and also recognize the “Fowler’s trap”. Both Shams and Rumi have [extensively discussed] this matter, and give it huge import.
Good little book, but spends way too much time looking down its nose at the Busy Backsoons and like people. There's definitely a spiritual-superiority complex leaking out.
Is that true? And if it is, what does that mean for him? Why would you rule out the possibility that some people experience a reduction in their own pain through hurting others?
Nora Bateson writes beautifully about interdependence of systems and communal wealth in a post called "My Health Is Not My Own".
"Vitality or life, is created through relationships that build relationships that build relationships and so on. Think of soil, and how soil becomes a forest or meadow where birds and insects find their homes, and where lovers walk hand in hand. The most important aspect of a healthy body, or healthy family or a healthy community is not the health of the individuals, but the the relationships between them. A family is several generations of relationships in multiple directions, within a culture, within history. The relationships matter and each communication within them also matter, this relational process is what life is made of.
Beyond the din of people arguing about the binaries of incomplete research around masks, transmission, lockdowns and going back to how things were- beyond all of that mess… there is a meta message that has a nasty bite to it. The deeper disease, the one that many of us have been pointing to for decades, has shown its rash, again.
The meta message is that the era of the 'individual' is going to be hard to get out of. There is something like an addiction taking place, and cold turkey is scary as hell. Going from individuality and personal freedoms to recognition of interdependency is an invitation for all the trickery of the addiction. What is more comfortable is to be selfish. So, the array of justifications not to change that individualistic image of self is fantastic. Have you ever had an addiction and heard yourself make contortions of logic to make it not-wrong to have one more cigarette, or just on the weekends, or to find that shred of research that proves that some people show no signs of illness from smoking? The acrobatics of addictive logistics are spectacular. The human mind has an unmatched capacity to reason that which is unreasonable. There is no lack of imagination, it is just placed toward the project of keeping the addictions in place, rather than living differently. The world of industry, distribution, banking, advertising, consuming — is what feels familiar, and even if it is killing us and the planet, it is what we know. The pull to return is strong.
The meta message is that most of us are not habituated to recognize the health of others as our own health, and therefore to consider this interdependency is an unacceptable course of action. After all, what good will it do me? This is not how the soil builds richness.
My health is not my own. My health is the whole community’s, it belongs to the elderly, the youth, and even to the biome of organisms that live in my body and in the soil. This, is the opposite of everything that the last centuries of manufacturing, education and politics have forged into societal infrastructure and even the making of identity. It is easier to identify myself by my profession, my address or my car than to recognize that I am a living system in relation to other living systems. I am not me, I am a vessel of the past and the future. In this moment what is asked of me is that I recognize the harms the systems of the past have wrought, and make radical changes so that the future is not burdened with the same destructiveness as the past." [1]
Also the term Magical Voluntarism is relevant here:
"The radical therapist David Smail argues that Margaret Thatcher's view that there's no such thing as society, only individuals and their families, finds "an unacknowledged echo in almost all approaches to therapy". Therapies such as cognitive behaviour therapy combine a focus on early life with the self-help doctrine that individuals can become masters of their own destiny. The idea is "with the expert help of your therapist or counsellor, you can change the world you are in the last analysis responsible for, so that it no longer cause you distress" – Smail calls this view "magical voluntarism".
Depression is the shadow side of entrepreneurial culture, what happens when magical voluntarism confronts limited opportunities. As psychologist Oliver James put it in his book The Selfish Capitalist, "in the entrepreneurial fantasy society," we are taught "that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background – if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame." It's high time that the blame was placed elsewhere. We need to reverse the privatisation of stress and recognise that mental health is a political issue." [2]
[1] Nora Bateson, https://archive.is/n6gOj // https://norabateson.medium.com/my-health-is-not-my-own-ec824...
[2] Mark Fisher, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...
Really though, mindfulness the concept is a useful thing IMHO, as opposed to mindfulness the industry. Meditation has scientifically confirmed benefits.
This study makes me wonder if those benefits really come from meditation itself or from being more narcissistic or feeling spiritually superior to others.
If advocates of non-drug interventions want them to be taken seriously, the same standard should apply. That goes for everything from meditation to psychotherapy to exercise. If you refuse to acknowledge the risks, why should you be entitled to recognition of the benefits?
So obviously, Dunning–Kruger effect will be there! An absolute master will in turn show Imposter Syndrome maybe :)
Anyway, let me give you not so brief information about the way I have understood meditation and spiritual enlightenment.Both are different, meditation is a practice, spirituality is an understanding, I call it the feeling of accepting everything but anyway I am young so don't take my word for it.
Coming from Indian background I have always seen this junction of science and technology that is mostly conceptualized in west vs. local culture and traditions.I use reason and logic to understand my surrounding still I get awestruck with the way things have worked around me!!!
Meditation is inherent in our culture.The first method for meditation was mentioned in a book called 'Vigyan Bhairav Tantra' in which lord Adiyogi(the first yogi/ shiva) explains how you can experience god, commenting: god is not a knowledge like most of the religion interprets but rather an experience which we all can have by practicing meditation[*it is never mentioned that that's what meditation is].
A total of 112 ways to meditate, to access the `sushma naari `on your forehead! Apparently, seventh/sixth method was used by Gautama(Buddha) to achieve enlightenment.
Anyway coming back to the point,the one who practices meditation according to that teaching is the real deal, and i am not saying this in a fanatical way, it has mentioned almost all possible way of meditations.
Now, a person who practice smeditation needs to follow some routine [in earlier time they used to], eg. intermittent fasting, early waking up and, few other routine which i am forgetting right now. But one needs to be disciplined while practicing this. Just like martial arts!
If a person becomes narcissist and self centered just by doing it for few months/years is basically suffering from Dunning–Kruger effect!as mentioned earlier... Achieving a true spiritual existence requires a lot of practice and patience!