Comment by denton-scratch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by denton-scratch | Hacker News Reader

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> How do you tell a real Buddhist teacher from a fake one?

This is notoriously difficult. Buddhist teachers are extremely reluctant to criticise one another; you won't get a straight answer if you ask "Should I go on a retreat with teacher X?". Ultimately you have to rely on your own intuition, which makes it a bit of a game of dice.

> What if you are interested in secular meditation and do not believe Buddhism or other religions are truthful?

Good luck finding a secular meditation tradition with more than about 20 years of accumulated knowledge underlying it. Find a real teacher with a lineage; if your inclination is secular, discount the religious elements of the teaching you receive.

A secular mindfulness teacher has no lineage support-structure to support their teaching activity. And generally, they don't have the experience and insight that comes from practising a wide variety of techniques in addition to mindfulness.

Vipassana has been mentioned, in the article, and here in comments. Vipassana is a set of techniques for destroying the belief that you have an independent self. Not believing you have a self is itself a mark of psychosis. Vipassana is a form of mindfulness; but it's a big mistake to think that Vipassana practice can be secular. It's entirely founded on the (religious) view that belief in an independent self is the root of "suffering".

I am not a teacher. I have practiced irregular Soto sitting for many years. I do occasional and informal reading of Buddhist texts.

By inspection (eg. sitting, paying attention, etc!), I discovered that we both do and do not have an independent self, at the very same time. They form a non-dual—-each arises in the combination of both and are mixed together in a way that trying to fix the boundary between them is folly.

I believe it is a major error to practice with the objective or possibility of annihilating the self. The self is an observable phenomenon. To reject it is crazy, as crazy as rejecting non-self.

IMHO a major milestone in practice is to grasp deeply the reality of non-duals, and leave behind the attachment to a dualistic belief in the self. This is nothing like annihilation.

As I became less desperately invested in a simplistic sovereign concept of self, my “self” became more confident, natural and wild. It's not going anywhere!

"Vipassana is a set of techniques for destroying the belief that you have an independent self. Not believing you have a self is itself a mark of psychosis."

This way of looking at it reveals a clash between Buddhism and mainstream "Western" psychology.

If one experiences the self as unreal, the world as unreal, others as unreal, according to some forms of Buddhism you're on your way to enlightenment (if not already there). But according to mainstream Western psychology you're mentally ill.

Which is it?

In Western psychiatry, the loss of a sense of self is dissociation, and is a mark of psychosis (to diagnose psychosis, you'd need some other marks, especially delusions or hallucinations).

I was over-simplifying when I said "destroying the belief that you have an independent self" - the cause of suffering is attachment to the sense of an independent self. Attachment in general is seen as a cause of suffering, but attachment to the sense of self is the hardest attachment to get rid of.

The term "ego" is used in Western discourse about Buddhism, as a cipher for the attachment to the sense of self. That is not what is meant by "ego" in Freudian or Jungian psychiatry (basically, the focus of consciousness). I wish Western Buddhists would stop using that word.

Western psychiatry doesn't pretend to address anything like the state of nirvana. It's mainly concerned with curing pathological conditions. I don't think any reputable psychotherapy traditions propose to take you any further than a condition of being free of the most-obvious kinds of hang-ups (Jung and his followers might be exceptions - I'm not sure - Jung's views were very expansive).

The Abidharma is the closest thing in Buddhism to psychology; it presents a detailed, practical (for meditators) way of thinking about the mind and how it works. It doesn't resemble Western psychology at all.

> The Abidharma is the closest thing in Buddhism to psychology; it presents a detailed, practical (for meditators) way of thinking about the mind and how it works. It doesn't resemble Western psychology at all.

By the way, why does is not? What do you mean under Western psychology at all? Freud and Jung? If so, is it a mere incoincidence the models of the mind they invented are different from that of Abidharma or did they sort of look on the object from different angles?

When trying to model a mind there are obvious elements everybody can note (can they?): the mood, the memories, the focus of the attention, the sense of self, rational logic, computational intelligence, slow and fast decision functions, self-control, compassion, random thoughts popping up and making mental noise, attitude, instincts (like fear, jealousy, arousal, etc), probably some other. Why do different thinkers come up with different models?

Well, Western psychology purports to be "science". That means that results have to be replicable, testable, and observable. The Abhidharma was created by meditators, for meditators. Those people were not constrained by scientific method.

Some of the stuff in the Abhidharma reflects teachings of the Buddha; but most of it was constructed by monks, after the Buddha's death.

I don't know of anyother models of mind, other than Western psychology and Abhidharma. There must be other models; I'd be surprised if Vedanta, for example, didn't incorporate a model of the mind.

I suppose the dominant model of mind in a society reflects the preocccupations of that society.

"Western psychology purports to be "science". That means that results have to be replicable, testable, and observable."

Not to go off on too much of a tangent, but the testability criterion was seen as inadequate and was replaced a while back with falsifiability[1], but even that has its own problems.

String theory's claims are supposedly untestable. Is it not a science?

I'm not a physicist, but I've heard there are cloud chamber experiments for which the only observer is the physicist performing the experiment, and are not reproduceable and yet are published in physics journals all the time.

That's not to mention that while many experiments are in principle reproduceable, in practice they usually don't get reproduced, and even if they were reproduced at one point they're not going to be continuously reproduced over and over again by each researcher (who has not the time, education, budget, or interest to reproduce every experiment they've ever read and not yet read but that is still an accepted part of the overall body of scientific knowledge).

Science, just like pretty much every other human cooperative endeavor, largely runs on trust... trust that what one reads and learns is mostly accurate. As skeptical as they make themselves out to be most scientists just don't run out and try to replicate every experiment under the sun or every a large fraction of them. They just trust the results they read are more or less accurate, or expect someone else to catch them.

Back to Western psychology. Some branches of it (like the Cognitive/Behaviorist branches) do purport to be more "scientific", but others like Freudian, Jungian, Humanistic, and Existential and Transpersonal psychology (not to mention art therapy, dance therapy, drama therapy, somatic therapy, life regression therapy, etc) aren't so big on the "science" bit, and aren't so interested in experiments or the scientific method at all.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

A lil' bit of both actually!

I'd say one should judge by other symptoms: what emotions does the patient experience and how do they behave. If the patient is depressed, apathetic and/or persistently euphoric, walks naked in the middle of a city, ignores his chores or attacks people "because they are illusory and the hand isn't even mine so why not" that's an illness. If he behaves like an reasonable compassionate person and seems happy that's good - a reasonable degree of dissociation can actually make a person better, happier and more stable mentally.

Simplifying I'd conclude that this is not a binary but an spectral phenomenon: there are 2, both undesirable, poles of extremity and a harmonious middle. Naturally/culturally people are more inclined to self-association and a slight shift to the opposite generally is desirable. Dissociate from your mind but don't in a degree when you loose it.

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